Young Sherlock Holmes 6: Knife Edge

by Andrew Lane

  Mycroft and Amyus Crowe got out of the carriage, and Sherlock followed with the box of theatrical make-up. While Mycroft strode into the hall and Crowe talked to the carriage driver, Sherlock headed for the stairs.

  He went directly to Ambrose Albano’s room, making sure that he was not observed by any of the servants. Fortunately the corridor was empty when he arrived, and he knocked on the door.

  Albano’s voice came from inside: ‘Go away! I’ve already told you – I don’t intend coming out of this room until I have a police escort that will take me to safety! It’s dangerous out there!’

  ‘It’s Sherlock Holmes. I wanted to ask you a question.’

  A pause, then: ‘You may ask any question you like, as long as the answer doesn’t involve me opening that door.’

  ‘That could be a problem. I wanted to borrow one of your suits, and your hat.’

  ‘On the face of it, that would require me to open the door, so the answer is “No”.’

  Sherlock thought rapidly. ‘What if you were to bundle a suit and your hat up and drop them out of the window? I could go downstairs and catch them when you dropped them.’

  ‘That would work,’ Albano replied. ‘But I would need to know why you wanted them. It sounds as if you intend something suspicious, and I don’t like suspicious things.’

  ‘I can’t tell you what I’m doing,’ Sherlock said patiently, ‘but I can assure you that it’s intended to ensure your safety.’ He paused, then said: ‘It’s misdirection, of a sort. You should appreciate that.’

  Albano seemed to think for a while, then he said: ‘Then the answer is “Yes”. You have a quick mind, agile fingers and a natural ability with magic tricks. I can see you making a fine magician, one day. If your misdirection distracts attention from me then all the better. So, yes, I will lend you a suit and my hat, and I will await with interest the results. You will come back and tell me what you’ve done?’

  ‘I will,’ Sherlock promised. ‘Give me five minutes to get downstairs, then open your window and look for me.’

  It all went perfectly smoothly. Sherlock made his way outside the castle and waiting on the grass until a window opened far above him. He gestured to Albano to wait until he had checked left and right for watchers, and then indicated that the psychic should throw down the bundle. It fell straight into his arms, wrapped in a belt. He waved his thanks and heard the window close above him.

  Part of him had wanted to tell Albano that he had figured out how the trick with the paintings had been done, but he knew that would have been a bad idea. He knew he hadn’t been observed getting the clothes, but there was no knowing who might be listening, and it would have destroyed Mycroft’s plan if it had become common knowledge that the last demonstration of Albano’s powers had been as fake as the first two.

  He headed back into the castle, and up to his room.

  Once there, he locked the door and set to work making himself look like Ambrose Albano. He used a white foundation layer on his skin, and then brushed it with powder to make it even whiter, using the reverse end of the brush to make a series of pockmarks in the make-up. His face was thin enough to match Albano’s, but he did insert a couple of pads between his gums and his cheeks to bring his lips away from his teeth and to emphasize his incisors in the same rather horsey way as Albano, and he put some springy material inside his nostrils to make them flare in a similar fashion. There was a selection of wigs in the box as well; he picked one that more or less approximated the length, straightness and colour of Albano’s hair, greased and brushed his own hair back so that it was flat against his scalp, and slipped the wig on. He examined himself critically in the mirror. It wasn’t a bad likeness, he had to admit. The only problem was that his eyebrows were too dark, so he carefully covered them with fake strips of hair in the same colour as the wig, attached to his own eyebrows by spirit gum. If he was doing this for longer, or if he was going to be observed close up, then he might have cut his own hair short, and perhaps shaved his eyebrows off, so that the illusion would be better, but he only had to look like Albano from a distance.

  He stripped off his own clothes and dressed in Albano’s suit. It was slightly too large, but it wasn’t going to make him look like a child dressing up in his father’s clothes.

  The last thing he did was to take a ball of theatrical putty from the box and mould it into a curve, like a fragment of a hollow sphere. Using a bright white make-up that was usually used for Oriental characters, he coloured the outer surface of the putty. Once he was happy with the result, he closed his left eye and pressed the putty against his eyelid, pushing hard around the edge so that it stuck.

  Now he really did look like Ambrose Albano, fake eye and all. At least, from a distance.

  As he was slipping the hat on to his head there was a knock on the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ he called.

  ‘Amyus Crowe. Your brother an’ I have caused all kinds of ruckus downstairs. He’s now talkin’ about breach of contract an’ all kinds of stuff in the drawin’ room, so we can get down the stairs an’ out without any close observation. You ready?’

  ‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ Sherlock muttered. ‘Yes,’ he called, and headed for the door.

  Crowe looked him up and down critically. ‘Ah’m no judge of the dramatic arts,’ he said, ‘but Ah’d be convinced, if Ah saw you on a stage from a distance, that you were Albano.’

  They went down in the ascending room, as it removed the chance of them meeting someone on the stairs. When they got to the bottom, Crowe hustled Sherlock towards the door. Sherlock saw that the carriage was still waiting outside. As they got to the doorway, Sherlock heard his brother shouting out, ‘There they go! That Yankee rogue is taking Albano away!’

  ‘Get in the carriage.’ Crowe muttered. ‘Fast, before they can see anything more than your back.’

  Sherlock climbed in and settled back into the seat, pulling the hat down over his eyes. Crowe climbed in beside him. From the corner of his eye Sherlock could see a group of people clustering in the doorway of the castle. He thought he could spot Mycroft’s impressive bulk at their head, but he didn’t dare turn his head to look in case they glimpsed his face.

  ‘Go!’ Crowe called to the driver, who cracked the whip over the horse’s head. The carriage set off with a jolt. Sherlock felt himself pushed back into the padded seats. Somewhere behind them he could hear voices shouting, but he was more concerned now with what was ahead of them. Somewhere in the next few minutes, on the way to Galway, there would be an attack on the carriage, with the intention of kidnapping him, and it was up to Rufus Stone and whatever rag-tag band he’d managed to hire in the past two hours to stop them.

  The carriage approached the castle gates. Sherlock braced himself for a sudden right turn as they went through.

  Instead, they turned left.

  Sherlock, braced for a turn in the opposite direction, felt himself sliding to one side. Crowe, similarly braced, fell into Sherlock. As they turned, Sherlock glanced out of the window to his right, looking down the road that they should have taken. He saw another carriage, similar to theirs, that had been hidden by the wall. It started off in the opposite direction.

  ‘Hey!’ Crowe shouted up to the driver. ‘Wrong way!’

  The driver ignored him. The speed of the carriage increased as it cleared the turn.

  Crowe grabbed at the door handle and tried to turn it. He couldn’t. It was fixed in place. Sherlock tried the handle next to him, but that didn’t move either.

  ‘Did you see that other carriage?’ he asked breathlessly.

  ‘We’ve been taken,’ Crowe snapped. ‘They switched carriages on us. Damn it, I should’ve checked out the driver’s face!’

  ‘It might have been the same driver,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘They might have given him so much money that he went along with their plans.’

  ‘No.’ Crowe shook his head firmly. ‘They might well have paid off the driver, but it’s a different carriage. The on
e waitin’ outside the gates was the one we were supposed to get into. That way, when it gets to Galway it’ll look like a real mystery. The driver’ll swear blind that we got in, an’ Stone an’ the kid’ll swear blind that it cantered past them with no problems.’

  ‘Just like the supposed disappearance of Ambrose Albano,’ Sherlock pointed out grimly.

  ‘Whoever’s taken us has a sense of humour.’ Crowe’s face showed that he was anything but amused. ‘They’re turnin’ Quintillan and Albano’s tricks back against them.’ He stood up and gestured to Sherlock to do the same. Sherlock tried to hang on to the ceiling of the carriage to keep himself upright, while Crowe tore at the padding that covered the seats at the back, hoping to find some panels that he could tear out so they could escape through the back. Not that jumping from something travelling at the speed they were going would be a safer option, Sherlock thought. They could well break bones if they misjudged the jump.

  He looked out of the window, but couldn’t see anything apart from bushes and trees rushing past.

  ‘It’s no good!’ Crowe slammed his fist against the carriage door in frustration.

  The carriage came to an abrupt stop, throwing Sherlock and Crowe forward. As they picked themselves up, the door opened. They waited for a long moment, but nobody appeared.

  ‘Well, Ah ain’t one to wait around on a promise,’ Crowe said, and got out of the carriage. Sherlock sighed, and followed.

  The carriage had stopped in a clearing in the middle of undergrowth and trees. Sherlock could smell the salty tang of the ocean nearby, and he could hear waves. There were probably ten men standing around the carriage, but it was the two in front that caught Sherlock’s attention. He felt his mouth fall open in shock.

  ‘Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us,’ the first man said in a thin, whispery voice that made Sherlock’s hair stand on end.

  ‘Do you want to introduce me to your friend?’ Crowe asked.

  ‘Amyus Crowe,’ Sherlock replied, his voice almost as thin and whispery as the man who had spoken. ‘May I introduce Baron Maupertuis? He works for the Paradol Chamber.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Baron Maupertuis was, if possible, even more fragile than he had appeared the last time Sherlock had seen him. That had been two years before, when Maupertuis had been trying to destroy the British Army with killer bees. Then he had been strapped into an elaborate harness of ropes, cords and wires that had enabled his servants to move him around like a puppet. That, however, had been on his own ground, in his own manor house. Now, out in the open and surrounded by bodyguards, he looked like an animated skeleton dressed in military uniform. Sherlock could clearly see the joints of his fingers and his wrists – swellings where the stick-thin bones met and articulated. The gold braid on the front of his black uniform seemed thicker than his fingers. His face was a skull papered over with parchment. Prominent veins wormed their way across his scalp, startlingly purple against the white skin. His eyes were the only things about him that looked alive, and they had enough life for several men. They glared at Sherlock with a maniacal hatred that the boy could feel as a physical force pushing him backwards.

  The men standing with him moved so that they were now surrounding Sherlock and Crowe. They were, with the exception of the giant who was standing directly behind Maupertuis, all armed. They held various medieval weapons – some had swords, some large axes, and some had pikes or halberds. It looked to Sherlock as if the thugs had scavenged the weapons from some storeroom in the cellars of the castle.

  Maupertuis was clearly unable to stand unaided, but there he was, with no visible means of support. Sherlock tried to work out what it was that was keeping him up, and then realized with a shock that Maupertuis was held in some kind of complicated sling attached to the body of the man standing behind him. That man was tall, and wide, and heavily muscled, but he was wearing clothes that were a dull grey in colour, dappled in different shades, while the straps attaching Maupertuis to him were of the same colour as the Baron’s uniform. A hood made out of the same material covered the man’s head, peaking in two horn-like projections above his ears. Two slits had been cut for him to see through. The effect was to make him fade into the background, as if he wasn’t there at all. Maupertuis stood out in sharp relief, his head located at the level of his carrier’s chest.

  Maupertuis’s arms and legs were attached to the arms and legs of the giant behind him. When the man stepped forward, at some hidden command, the Baron’s legs moved as though they were actually propelling him forward. When the man raised his arm it was as if the Baron were pointing at Sherlock.

  ‘You,’ the Baron announced, his voice barely louder than the wind but still coated with venom, ‘are not Ambrose Albano.’

  Now that the trick had failed, Sherlock peeled off his disguise. ‘No,’ he said quietly, ‘but we have met before.’

  ‘Of course.’ Maupertuis’s features twisted in rage. ‘The boy, Sherlock Holmes. I knew you were at the castle, and I knew you had been interfering with Quintillan’s plans and exposing his stupid tricks, but I did not expect you to be here, replacing the psychic. I did not think you would be so foolish!’

  ‘Ah should have guessed that the Paradol Chamber was involved in this . . . farrago of nonsense,’ Crowe announced, trying to attract the Baron’s rage.

  Maupertuis’s thin lips formed a sneer. He didn’t even glance at Crowe as he said: ‘You do not have the wit to understand anything. I know about you, Amyus Thaddeus Crowe. I have studied you, ever since you briefly crossed my path in Farnham two years ago. I always make a point of understanding my enemies. I know your secrets and I know your history, from when you were born to the moment you will die – which will be in a few minutes from now. Your life has not been one of great accomplishment. Few people will mourn your passing, and fewer still will remember it in fifty years, but the name of Baron Maupertuis will resound through the centuries! That is what happens when—’

  Something about the shape that Baron Maupertuis made in conjunction with the giant standing behind him sparked a thought in Sherlock’s brain. He followed the glinting connection until it suddenly sparked against a set of other facts that had been lurking in Sherlock’s memory.

  ‘The Dark Beast!’ he announced, interrupting the Baron’s rant. ‘You are the Dark Beast!’

  It seemed so obvious, now that he was staring at Maupertuis. The bulky, misshapen outline of the two attached men . . . Sherlock didn’t know what it was that people had reported seeing years ago, but he knew now as surely as he knew anything that the recent sightings of the Dark Beast had actually been sightings of Baron Maupertuis strapped to the chest of his massive carrier, glimpsed in darkness, or in mist, or in shadows, moving around the castle and its grounds.

  ‘A stupid legend,’ the Baron said, ‘but one that was useful to me. It kept the local peasants from investigating, and gave me free rein to move around.’

  ‘To what end?’ Crowe asked. ‘What exactly is it that you’ve been doin’ here, at Cloon Ard Castle?’

  Maupertuis moved his fierce gaze from Sherlock to Amyus Crowe, and the big American took a small step back as he felt the force of Maupertuis’s fanatical willpower. That worried Sherlock. He’d once seen Crowe stare down an enraged bear just by the force of his own will.

  ‘You will die without knowing,’ the Baron said. ‘That is the smallest of the pleasures I will gain from your deaths.’

  ‘Actually,’ Sherlock said, ‘it’s obvious. It’s been obvious all along. The Paradol Chamber is the invisible sixth bidder. You have been in discussion with Sir Shadrach Quintillan. What happened? Was he too honourable, in his own way, or did he think that he would get a better price from an open competition?’

  ‘What Ah don’t understand,’ Crowe said conversationally, ‘is why you wanted him in the first place. Ah mean, the man is a fraud. Young Sherlock here proved that quite conclusively.’ He glanced at Sherlock. ‘Do you have any theories about that, son? ’Bout w
hy the Paradol Chamber wanted Albano so badly despite the fact he is a fraud?’

  For some reason the big American seemed to want to waste time, to keep Maupertuis talking. Actually, if that was the alternative to Maupertuis killing them both, then Sherlock was happy with it.

  ‘I think Albano and Quintillan fooled the Paradol Chamber just like they fooled Herr Holtzbrinck and von Webenau.’

  ‘So Count Shuvalov wasn’t fooled?’ Crowe nodded. ‘He’s a smart guy. An’ your brother too – he saw through it from the start.’

  ‘Herr Holtzbrinck and von Webenau wanted to believe,’ Sherlock pointed out. Fear made him want to talk faster, but he suppressed the impulse. Crowe wanted to slow things down for some reason, and he needed to go along with the plan. Whatever the plan was. ‘If I’ve learned one thing about confidence tricks it’s that people who already want to believe are the most easily fooled.’

  ‘Albano’s powers are real,’ Maupertuis hissed. ‘And they will be in the service of the Paradol Chamber when we finally take him! He will serve us, and the dead will tell us their secrets!’

  Crowe laughed. ‘Now that’s just plain stupid. Young Sherlock here showed quite clearly that the séances were just flim-flam!’

  ‘The first two séances, yes.’ Maupertuis’s thin frame shook with the anger he constantly felt. ‘The psychic was weak, and his powers were unreliable. Stupidly, he and Quintillan faked the séances to keep interest going. But the tower and the paintings? How could that have been done, if not through communicating with the dead? How?’

  Sherlock stared at Maupertuis for a moment, and what he saw wasn’t a psychotic criminal, but a painfully thin human being who, like any human, was capable of being fooled – if he wanted to be. In the same way a man could be fooled, then so could a country, if it took the advice of that man. Someone had once described the Paradol Chamber to him as a country without territory or borders, and it seemed they were just as capable of following bad advice as the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires.