by Anna Elliott
Flynn inched a step closer and tossed the chip through the iron fence railing. The dog caught it in mid-air, the huge teeth chomped, and the chip was gone.
Flynn swallowed, trying not to think about what those teeth could do to his ankle or leg. “The good news is we know he’s hungry.”
“If that’s the good news, we’re in serious trouble.” Becky didn’t hate dogs, but even she looked a bit shaken.
Flynn tossed the big animal another chip and took another step closer.
Four chips later and he was standing right next to the fence while the dog eyed the packet in his hands eagerly.
“You go first,” he told Becky. “I’ll keep him busy while you get over.”
Becky nodded, hitching up her skirt and starting to climb.
Flynn broke off a chunk of fried fish.
“Better hurry,” he told Becky.
The fish was disappearing at an alarming rate.
“Oh, do you really think so?” Becky hissed back. She was at the top of the fence, now, wobbling unsteadily as she tried to swing over the spikes at the top. “All right, come on.”
She managed to get over, then dropped down onto the grass on the other side.
The dog bumped his nose against the railing and growled.
Apparently Flynn wasn’t being quick enough with the food, although at least the animal didn’t seem to mind Becky being inside.
“All right, here.” Bundling up the remaining fish and chips, Flynn threw the parcel as hard as he could, far across the square of lawn.
The dog galloped after it—and Flynn swarmed up the fence faster than he’d ever climbed anything in his life.
He tore a gash in his coat as he got over the spikes at the top, but dropped down onto the ground beside Becky, panting.
“Now what?” he whispered.
The dog was tearing open the newspaper-wrapped food, but it wouldn’t keep him busy for long.
“Try to get in the back door?”
The rear entrance where they’d seen the two men drag Selim in was just ahead.
“That won’t work.” Flynn shook his head. “How do we know someone’s not waiting on the other side of the door, ready to grab us the second we step through?”
“Fine.” Becky wiped the melting snow from her eyes. “Look, there aren’t any bars on that window up there.”
She was right, most of the windows had bars over them. But there was one on the second floor just above their heads that didn’t.
It was dark inside, too. Some of the windows had lights on—especially on the ground floor—but this one was just a square of empty black.
Becky looked up at the evergreen that stood next to the house. “Do you think the tree branches will hold us?”
“I think it’s a toss-up between that and being turned into the second course of the dog’s dinner.”
The big animal had finished shredding the newspaper and gulping down the last scraps of food and now it was coming back towards them, growling deep in its throat.
“You’d think it would be grateful to us for feeding it. Prince would have been.”
Becky jumped, caught hold of a low-hanging tree branch, and pulled herself up. Flynn followed, clambering up through the snowy branches until they were perched on one just outside the unbarred window.
Becky tried to pry up the window, then stopped. “It’s stuck—or locked.”
“What?” Flynn was trying not to look down at the dog, which was circling around the bottom of the tree.
Any second now and it would decide to start barking—and then someone would come out to see what all the noise was about.
She gave him a look. “Do you need a dictionary? Locked means it won’t open.”
“Here, let me try.”
Flynn took out his pen knife and wedged it in between the window frame and the glass, fiddling until he felt the lock snap.
He shoved the sash open. He’d meant to have a look inside the room first, to make sure it was safe, but he lost his balance and tumbled head first into the room, landing with a thud on the carpeted floor.
He hadn’t managed to get his breath back before a voice from somewhere in the room’s dark shadows spoke.
“Visitors for Christmas?” the voice said. “How very nice!”
CHAPTER 26: ZOE
Safiya screamed. Zoe had just presence of mind enough to drag her down to the ground where she would be a less easy target. Then she scrambled over to kneel beside Holmes. For a heart-stopping moment, she thought that he’d been killed by the shot.
“Sherlock?” she gasped. “Sherlock, are you—”
He moved, rolling over with a sound that would have been a groan if his tightly compressed lips hadn’t contained it.
“I seem to have underestimated the minimum amount of time … before your escape would be discovered.” It took him two breaths to get the words out.
“Believe it or not, I had actually reached that very same conclusion!” Zoe snapped.
Fear sharpened her voice. She was straining her ears to listen, but she couldn’t hear anything above the thud of her own heart.
At least there were no more shots.
“How badly are you hurt?” she demanded.
She could already see a spreading stain on the sleeve and shoulder of his cotton robe.
Holmes struggled to sit up. “A flesh wound … to the deltoid muscle.” He squinted with the effort of peering down his nose at his bloodied shoulder. “Although it may have nicked the triceps brachii, as well, in which case—”
Zoe interrupted, speaking through gritted teeth. “If you are about to deliver a pedantic, over-educated lecture on anatomy, you will no longer have to worry about our shooter, because I will murder you myself.”
Holmes let out another muffled grunt of pain as he moved again, trying to untie the string that cinched the neckline of the Egyptian robe. “The bullet may have damaged the deltoid branch of the thoracoacromial artery. In which case, stopping the bleeding is a matter of some urgency, since it could lead to loss of consciousness or possibly life.”
Save for the slight raggedness as he struggled to get his breath back, his tone of voice changed not at all.
Zoe didn’t trust herself to answer, since it was even odds that she would either hit him or do something still more irrational, such as start to cry.
So she clamped her lips together and turned, trying to decide where on this barren and rocky island she would find anything to help.
“Here.” Safiya had crept forwards and now handed over the scarf, which she’d just unwrapped from around her head. “You can use this to slow the bleeding.”
“Thank you.”
Zoe pressed it tightly against Holmes’s shoulder, which earned her a harshly indrawn breath, but at least no more anatomy lectures.
“I believe I can manage,” Holmes said after a moment. “If you would—”
He cut off abruptly, and a second later, Zoe heard it, too: the dry crunch of footsteps moving towards them through the dark.
Holmes motioned sharply for silence, but Zoe couldn’t have made a sound even if she had tried. Her heart was lodged firmly up in her throat and her mouth had gone as parched as the Egyptian desert sand.
They were skirting around the edge of a temple courtyard, outlined with vast lotus columns stretching up to the night sky. Zoe would have thought Holmes scarcely capable of moving, but he sprang to his feet, swaying only briefly before he drew back into the shadow of one of the columns.
Zoe started to rise, too, but he motioned sharply for her to stay where she was, and she subsided, biting her lip.
Holmes was maddening and arrogant and insufferably self-sufficient. But she had also never known him to take an unnecessary risk or plunge recklessly into danger. The very thought was laughable, when his every move was calculated almost to the millimetre.
So she stayed motionless, putting a hand on Safiya’s arm in an effort to reassure her—or maybe herself.
The muffled crunch of footsteps was coming nearer.
Mr. Morgan?
Sonnebourne?
The figure that finally moved into view, silvered by the moonlight, was neither of those. It was an Egyptian, a big, swarthy man Zoe thought she recognised as one of the crew on Sonnebourne’s boat, although she hadn’t been out of her cabin enough to get a good look at any of the sailors.
He wore a turban and a dark blue robe with an embroidered over-vest—and he was evidently very proud of the revolver he was holding. He kept tapping it against the open palm of his hand and smiling to himself. Zoe caught the flash of white teeth in the shadow of his face.
Holmes’s tackle caught him completely off-guard; as the Egyptian man moved past, Holmes sprang at him from behind the column.
A smaller man would have been carried to the ground, but the Egyptian was heavyset enough that he only stumbled, off-balance, then swung the gun wildly in Holmes’s direction.
Zoe heard the crack of a shot and the sound of the bullet ricocheting off stone before Holmes dodged, spun, and caught the attacker with an uppercut to the jaw.
The Egyptian man’s head snapped back with the force of the blow, and he staggered, reeling backwards.
Zoe hadn’t fully realised it until this moment, but the two of them were on the brink of a rocky precipice where the ground dropped away sharply to the river below. For an instant that seemed to stretch on and on, the heavyset man teetered on the edge, his arms flailing wildly.
Then he lost his balance and fell.
Zoe heard a sickening thud as his body struck the rocks on the shoreline below.
She ran towards Holmes, but he was already in motion, going to look over the edge.
“Dead,” Holmes pronounced. “His head must have struck the rocks.”
Zoe wouldn’t have needed Holmes’s confirmation; a glance was enough to tell her that the attacker hadn’t survived the fall. He lay with his arms and legs twisted at awkward angles, eyes staring sightlessly up at the clear night sky.
“He is dead?” Safiya had come up to join them and now spoke, her voice high and frightened as she, too, peered down. “You killed him?”
“He would have killed me first, had I given him the chance. Come,” Holmes said. “He appears to have been alone, but we cannot take the chance that there are not more searchers about. We need to move.”
He led the way, cutting across the temple courtyard towards the spot where he must have moored his own boat.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Perfectly. I was mistaken about the possibility of arterial bleeding. It is a flesh wound, nothing more.”
Holmes’s voice was flat with assurance. Beneath the wadded-up cloth that he still held pressed against the bullet wound, his shoulders were rigid, his posture straight. But Zoe could tell his steps were increasingly dragging.
Safiya tugged on her sleeve as Holmes moved to push through the branches of a scraggy acacia bush that blocked their way.
“This friend of yours,” she whispered. Her eyes were wide and frightened in the moonlight. “He killed that man. And yet this does not trouble him at all?”
She had spoken so softly that even Zoe barely heard, but Holmes had ears like a cat’s and always had.
He answered without looking back. “I should be in the wrong profession if such events did occasion me distress,” he said. “Now, the boat is directly ahead. I suggest we row across to the neighbouring island of Bigeh, where we may take stock of our position and either beg or buy what supplies we need to further our escape.”
CHAPTER 27: FLYNN
Flynn jumped up and found himself staring at an elderly woman who was sitting up in the middle of her bed. She had a wrinkled face with white hair that stood up in a kind of halo all around her head, and she was watching him with bright, interested eyes.
“Well, I must say that you look a trifle young to be Saint Nicholas,” she said. “And rather small. Although I suppose he is described as a right jolly old elf, which of course implies that he would be of diminutive stature. How I loved that poem when I was young!” She beamed. “’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house… My papa used to read it to us every Christmas Eve. I believe that this, though, is December the 23rd. Or have I got my dates wrong?”
She put her head on one side in a way that reminded Flynn of a bird eyeing a worm, and gave him a critical stare.
“In any case, I must say you certainly don’t look as though your belly would shake when you laugh like a bowl full of jelly. You’re quite thin!”
“Ah, well …” Flynn couldn’t ever remember a time when he’d had less of an idea of what to say than he had now.
The old woman was talking to him all right, but something in her bright eyes reminded him of Old Margaret, the beggar woman he knew who lived under Southwark Bridge. Mad as a hatter, Old Margaret was.
Becky put her head in through the window. “What are you—”
She stopped, her mouth dropping open at the sight of the old woman in the bed.
“She thinks we might be Saint Nicholas,” Flynn said.
“We’re his assistants,” Becky said. She hopped down from the window sill.
“Are you really?” the old woman gave then another look of bright interest. “Then perhaps you can tell me something that I have always wanted to know about the reindeer—”
Flynn didn’t hear whatever it was she wanted to know. Some thoughts snuck up on you slowly; others hit you all at once, like a ton of bricks—and the one that had just struck him was the second kind, practically slapping him in the face.
“They’re planning to bomb Parliament!” he gasped.
Becky stopped whatever story she’d been making up about reindeer and stared at him. “What?”
“Farooq and the Sons of Ra. They’re going to plant the bomb in Parliament. There’s been an emergency session called, on account of the war in South Africa—it’s all over the papers. And I overheard Farooq say something about Parliament when he was talking to the other man. And the Palace of Westminster—you said Jack had been called out on account of one of the guards there had been murdered. That’s the building where Parliament meets: The Palace of Westminster. They probably killed the guard so that someone else—one of their lot—could take his place.”
Becky’s eyes had gone wide.
He turned to the old woman in the bed. “I don’t suppose you know whether any new patients have been brought in here? Or where their rooms might be?”
From the look Becky shot him, she thought he’d be more likely to find tiny reindeer up on the sanatorium roof than get any helpful information here. But the old woman nodded.
“Oh yes, indeed. Someone was brought in just this evening. I heard them talking out in the hall. Dr. Harrison—such a nice man, he’s the one who looks after me—was speaking to someone else, saying he wasn’t happy about accepting a private patient, especially with whoever it was insisting that the patient would only be seen by their own special doctor, no one else and no one on the staff here. But then the other man said that he would pay Dr. Harrison twice what he usually charged for a patient’s care here, and that it would only be for a day or two. And Dr. Harrison said all right, and they could have room 205. That’s at the end of the hall,” she added. “Near the stair case.”
“Thank you!” Becky said.
“You’re quite welcome.” The elderly woman inclined her head in a regal sort of nod. “I confess that I don’t quite see what bombs and Parliament have to do with Christmas and the reindeer, but I am glad to have been of service. Do come again, if Saint Nicholas will permit it. I have no chimney in here as you see, but you would be quite welcome to come in through the window as you did tonight.”
They peered out into the hall cautiously, but it was empty, probably because at this time of the evening most of the residents who could be up and about were downstairs having dinner.
The place didn’t feel like a hospital to Flynn; it wa
s more like a fancy kind of house, with gas lights in brass sconces along the walls and thick carpets on the floor.
The carpets at least made it easier to move quietly. Together, he and Becky tiptoed to the end of the corridor to a door marked with a brass plaque that was etched with the number 5.
Flynn put his ear close to the wood panel, and then jumped because a voice spoke on the other side.
“Where is your brother? Where is Sherlock Holmes?”
Flynn didn’t recognise the voice, but he’d guess it belonged to the blond-haired man who’d driven the ambulance, the one who’d met with Farooq. He had an accent Flynn thought was German, and he must be talking to Mr. Mycroft.
No one answered, and the German tried again, his voice a deep growl. “There is no point in stalling, we will have the information out of you, eventually. You are quite at our mercy here, and the equipment I was allowed to carry in as a doctor contains several interesting surgical instruments that might loosen your tongue. I will kill you in the end, but I can assure you, I would have no scruples whatsoever in causing you a considerable degree of pain—”
“Stop!” Without thinking, Flynn burst through the door and tumbled into the room.
CHAPTER 28: ZOE
The floor of the hut was nothing but bare, dusty earth, and Zoe strongly suspected that the blanket she had been given was alive with fleas. But she was too exhausted and too chilled to care. She wrapped its folds around her and took a sip from the bowl of some sort of stew that one of the village women—dressed all in black, with her face veiled for modesty—had brought.
She wasn’t sure exactly what story Holmes and Safiya had told between them to the village head man, who had come out to greet them on their arrival. As she might have expected, Holmes’s command of Arabic was excellent, and whatever explanation he gave—or perhaps it was the handful of Egyptian bank notes he held out—had bought them an enthusiastic reception.
With almost dizzying speed, they were ushered into the head man’s own hut—which unlike the other village dwellings had more than one room—and offered food, grass mats and blankets for sleeping, and cups of sweet mint tea.