Young Sherlock Holmes: Red Leech

by Andrew Lane

  ‘All I know is they paid me to keep an eye out for three travellers – a big man in a white hat and two kids. Maybe with another man – a fat man – maybe not. A third of the money now and two-thirds if they see a report in the papers of three or four passengers vanishing overboard.’

  ‘But how did they know we’d take this ship?’ Sherlock asked. Then he realized. ‘They paid off someone on every ship?’

  Grivens nodded. ‘Every ship leaving for the next few days, anyway. That’s my guess. They found most of us in the same place – a bar where the ships’ stewards hang out between voyages.’

  ‘But how much would that cost them?’

  Grivens shrugged. ‘Not my problem, as long as they have enough left to pay me when I get to New York. They didn’t seem short of cash.’ He reached forward and grabbed Sherlock’s hair. ‘They said they’d pay extra if I could get you to tell me how much you know about their plans. You can do it the easy way, without pain, and I’ll do you the favour of making sure you’re unconscious when I throw you over the side, yes? Or you can do it the difficult way, in which case I’ll have to snip your fingers off with a cigar cutter, one by one, until you tell me, and then throw you overboard still conscious.’

  ‘I’ll shout out!’ Sherlock blustered. ‘People will hear.’

  ‘Didn’t I mention?’ Grivens said. ‘I started off as a ship’s chandler, making sails, before I became a steward. Your fingers never forget the feel of an iron needle going through canvas. I’ll sew your lips shut with thick twine, boy, just for the pleasure of looking into your frightened eyes when I throw you overboard.’ He paused. ‘Now, answer the question. How much do you know about the plans of these Yanks?’

  He leaned forward, reaching for Sherlock’s hair. The iridescent blue tattoo on his wrist seemed to glow in the darkness of the cabin.

  Sherlock lashed out with his booted foot, catching Grivens in the groin. The steward folded nearly double, grunting in pain.

  Sherlock scrambled to his feet. Grabbing Grivens’s shoulder, he pulled him forward. The man fell, and Sherlock scrabbled to get past him and through the doorway.

  The steward’s hand grabbed for Sherlock’s ankle. He pulled hard, dragging Sherlock back into the room. Sherlock twisted, lashing out with his free foot and catching Grivens above the eye. He released Sherlock with a spat curse and fell backwards.

  Sherlock knew that he had to escape, and then he had to get to Amyus Crowe. He launched himself towards the door and pulled it open. The light from the oil lamps hanging on the corridor wall outside streamed into the cabin. He scrambled out, pushing the door closed, and ran off down the corridor. Behind him he heard the crash of the cabin door hitting the inside wall as Grivens pulled it open, and the thudding of feet as the steward chased after him. The corridor ended in a junction; Sherlock went left, heading for the stairs up to the deck and to safety, but he must have gone wrong somewhere because there was no sign of the stairway. Instead the corridors took him deeper and deeper into the bowels of the ship.

  Faced with the choice of a stairway that led down and going back again, he chose to go down. This wasn’t passenger territory any more: the walls were cruder wood, without the ornate panelling of earlier, and the oil lamps were guttering and yellow. There was only bare wood beneath his feet: not soft carpets.

  From somewhere behind him, Sherlock heard footsteps. Grivens was still on his trail. He kept moving.

  The sound of the ship’s engines was closer now, like the thudding of some huge mechanical heart, and the atmosphere was noticeably warmer. Sherlock was sweating, partly because of the chase but partly because of the steam in the atmosphere.

  He went round a corner to find a large door ahead of him. It was shut. He glanced over his shoulder, briefly, but there was no point going back. He could only go onward.

  He opened the door and went through.

  Into Hell.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Heat hit him in the face, nearly knocking him down. It was like walking past the open door of a baker’s oven. He felt the short hairs on his neck curling up and the sweat springing out on his face and neck. The air itself was so thick and so hot that it was hard to catch his breath.

  The doorway opened on a wrought-iron balcony which looked down on a cavernous inferno filled with machinery: pistons, wheels, axles, all moving in different directions at different speeds: side to side, up and down, round and round. It was the Scotia’s engine room, powering the huge paddle wheels on the sides of the ship. Somewhere nearby, Sherlock knew, there would be a separate boiler room, where sailors would be shovelling coal into a massive furnace where it would burn and produce heat, which in turn would turn water in a boiler above into steam and force it through a network of pipes into this room, where pistons and joints and wheels would convert the pressure of the steam into rotary motion which would be fed to the paddle wheels via massive axles. If it was hellishly hot in here then the boiler room would be worse than working inside a volcano. How could men stand it?

  The noise was deafening: a combination of clanging, hissing and thumping that made Sherlock’s head hurt. He could feel the vibration through the doorframe where his hand was holding on and through the air itself. It was like being punched repeatedly in the chest. It would be next to impossible to hold any kind of conversation in conditions like that. The men who worked there would have to communicate by sign language. Deafness would be an occupational hazard.

  Illumination was provided by dirty oil lamps that hung from the walls at various points, and also by gratings in the ceiling that let in a meagre trickle of light from the world above, but the light petered out quickly in the smoky, dusty, steamy atmosphere, and there were great pools of black shadow everywhere Sherlock looked. Air also entered through the gratings, providing a welcome cool breeze for anyone standing underneath. Coal dust and water vapour eddied in the atmosphere; restless spirits uncertain which way to go.

  Sherlock quickly looked around, trying to work out where he could go. The engine room seemed to take up several levels inside the centre of the ship. Walkways were bolted to the walls and crossed from side to side at various levels. Wrought-iron ladders led up to the walkways. Massive iron beams crossed the room, giving it some stability and providing somewhere for the various pipes and wheels to be attached. It all seemed to be designed so that any pipe, any piston, any wheel, any axle could be reached by a man with a spanner in case something broke.

  Some of the smaller pipes terminated in pressure gauges – large instruments about the size of Sherlock’s clenched hands with dials showing the steam pressure in the pipes. Presumably the engineers could check the pressures and tell if the ship’s engine needed more coal or whether the pressure was building up too fast and needed to be vented. Other pipes had large metal wheels attached which probably opened or closed valves, allowing the steam into different pipes at differing rates.

  Looking up, Sherlock could see two large pressure vessels in the ceiling space. A lot of the pipes led towards them. They seemed to open out to the deck level. It took him a moment to work out that they probably led to the Scotia’s two funnels, providing a means of venting the steam that had done its work.

  Everything was made of thick, black metal that was hot to the touch, and everything was fastened together with rivets the size of Sherlock’s thumb. The machinery wavered in the heat-haze caused by the burning coal: the air itself rippling and making it hard to judge distances.

  The smell of the engine room made Sherlock’s nose prickle uncomfortably. Mainly it was a sulphuric smell, like rotten eggs, but there was a tarry odour beneath that, and something else that reminded Sherlock of the taste of blood in his mouth but which was probably hot iron.

  A figure moved out of the shadows. Sherlock flinched, expecting it to be Grivens, but it was another member of the crew, an engineer. He was naked to the waist and massively muscled, and where his skin wasn’t blackened with coal dust it was streaked by sweat, so that his face and body were
covered with a series of black and white stripes, like the engravings of zebras that Sherlock had seen in books about Africa in his father’s library. His moleskin trousers were sodden with sweat, and he carried a shovel over his shoulder. His entire demeanour – the way he carried himself, his expression, everything – spoke of bone-aching weariness. As Sherlock watched he walked along past the pounding engine and vanished through another doorway without looking up, probably heading for a swinging hammock in the dark depths of the ship.

  Aware that Grivens was only moments behind him, Sherlock hurried along the balcony until he got to a ladder that led both upward and downward. Which way to go? Upward would lead him towards the deck, but there might not be a way out up there. He’d certainly never seen any of the engineers or stokers on deck. They were probably forbidden from emerging into the open; condemned to spend the entire voyage in the darkness below. Down, then, and he just had to hope there were other ways out of the engine room.

  He clambered down the iron ladder as fast as he could, his fingers burning on the hot rungs. The vibration of the engines was transmitted through his hands to the point where he could feel his teeth shaking. The heat and the lack of breathable air were making him feel weak; twice his sweat-slicked hands slipped off the rungs and he nearly fell. Eventually he got to the bottom, and rested his forehead gratefully against the ladder before he pushed himself away and moved off.

  Up on the balcony the door smashed open again. Sherlock could hear it striking the wall. Silence for a moment, and then a pair of booted feet clanked on the metal grille flooring.

  Sherlock slipped into an alley running between two large parts of the engine: irregular masses of black iron festooned with pipework. His shoulder brushed against one of them and he flinched back. It was boiling hot.

  The alley ended in a rivet-covered curved metal surface; part of a pressure vessel of some kind. It was a dead end. No way out.

  The shadows between the parts of the engine shielded him. He tried to make himself as small and as quiet as possible.

  Footsteps on the ladder, and then silence as the newcomer reached the floor.

  ‘Kid,’ shouted Grivens’s voice, ‘let’s talk about it. Got off to a bad start, we did. I overreacted. Come out into the light, there’s a good boy, and we can chat it through like old friends. We’ll laugh about this all, one day, I promise we will, yes?’

  Sherlock didn’t trust the man’s words and he didn’t trust the man’s tone of voice. If he came out, he knew he’d be killed.

  ‘All right,’ Grivens went on. ‘All right then.’ It was difficult to hear him above the clanging and thudding of the machinery. ‘You’re scared. I understand that. You think I’m going to do you harm. Well, let’s talk about money, then. I’ve been paid to off you, that much you already know, but I’m a practical man. A businessman, if you’d credit it. I’m sure the big Yank can more than match the money I’m being paid by the blokes who hired me. Let’s you and me go up to see him together and set the situation out, like men of the world. He can write me a cheque, and I’ll forget all about the three of you. How’s that sound?’

  It sounded like a trick, but Sherlock wasn’t stupid enough to say so. Instead he just kept silent.

  Somewhere nearby, a valve snapped open and released a plume of steam with a deafening hisssss.

  ‘Kid? You still there?’ The voice sounded closer this time, as if Grivens had moved. He was looking for Sherlock, not content with just hoping that his reassuring words would persuade him to emerge from hiding. ‘I know we got off on the wrong foot, but I want to make it up to you. Come out and talk.’

  Sherlock realized that his back was pressing against a pipe, or a section of engine, that had steam in it. The heat was spreading through his jacket and his shirt, blistering his back. He tried to edge forward, but that meant moving part of his body into a patch of light. He moved slowly, but the heat was too much and he had to jerk away before he was badly burned. His foot hit a section of pipe. The noise rang out round the engine room like a bell.

  ‘So, you are here.’ Grivens sounded as if he was just a few feet away. ‘Well, that’s a start, anyway’

  A shadow fell across the mouth of the alley in which Sherlock was hiding. In the ash-grey light that shone through the gratings above, Sherlock could make out the silhouette of Grivens’s head and shoulders. He was holding something in his hand, which was raised above his head, ready to strike. It looked like a spanner; a very large, very heavy spanner.

  It occurred to Sherlock that down here, in the bowels of the ship, Grivens didn’t even have to worry about getting Sherlock’s body up to the deck and throwing him overboard. He could just chuck it in the fire and let it burn. All he would have to do was to bribe the stokers with a couple of shillings to look the other way, and Sherlock would be reduced to grit and dust.

  ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ Grivens sang. His body blocked out all the light entering the alley now. He seemed to sense where Sherlock was. Rather than moving on, he turned into the alley.

  Sherlock ducked down, trying to stay in the shadows. Another few seconds and Grivens would see him, and then it would all be over.

  His hand touched the warm floor, and it took him a couple of seconds to realize that it had slipped past where the pipe he was pressed against should have met the floor. He moved his hand around, exploring. It seemed as if the pipe didn’t go all the way down to the floor, but curved around underneath. It was sitting on struts which were bolted to the floor, but there was enough room there for Sherlock to slide underneath. Hopefully there would be a way out on the other side. If not, he would still be as trapped as he was now but considerably more uncomfortable.

  He dropped to his hands and knees, then to his stomach. The floor was uncomfortably hot against his skin. His shirt was wet with sweat, and it stuck to the floor as he tried to slide under the machine. He reached out and grabbed one of the struts supporting it, hoping he could pull himself along, but the strut burned his hand and he cried out in pain.

  ‘Aha!’ Grivens rushed into the alley, his spanner clanking against the pipes. ‘Where are you, you little cur?’

  Sherlock braced himself, and reached out for the strut again. The metal seared against his palm but he endured it, pulling hard, scrabbling with knees and feet, dragging himself under the engine part and away from Grivens. He suddenly sensed space above him, and climbed shakily to his feet. His hand throbbed, but he was in a different part of the engine room. Another alley led away from him, the walls formed by an interlocking series of pipes. He ran down it, looking for a ladder or a door.

  Something went clang behind him. He turned, to find Grivens standing at the other end of the metal-walled alley. He’d just hit his spanner against a metal stanchion.

  ‘All right, kid. End of the line. You’ve had a good run, but it’s time to call it a day. Let old Grivens just put you out of your misery, yes?’

  ‘Is it too late for that deal you mentioned?’ Sherlock prevaricated.

  Grivens smiled. ‘Far too late,’ he said. ‘Sad to say, I’m a man of my word. I shook hands on a deal, and I have to see it through. Couldn’t really break my contract now, could I? What kind of man would that make me?’

  ‘So it was just words.’

  He nodded. ‘Just words. There was always a chance you’d believe them and come out of your own accord, but I didn’t have much faith.’

  He began to walk forward, swinging the spanner.

  Sherlock looked around frantically for something he could use to fight with. It looked like fighting was his only option now.

  Clang! The spanner hit an iron pipe, sending shock waves reverberating around the engine room.

  ‘Just look at me,’ Grivens said in a calm, low voice. ‘Just look at me, kid. Look me in the eye. Don’t look for a means of escape. Accept the inevitable, yes?’

  Sherlock felt the calmness of the voice, the reasonableness of the words and the heat of the engine room lulling him into a
trance. He shook his head abruptly. He couldn’t let himself be hypnotized by the steward.

  He glanced from side to side desperately. Something caught his eye – something leaning against a ladder. A shovel! One of the stokers must have left it there at the end of their shift. Its handle was black with coal dust and its blade was partly melted, as if it had been pushed by accident too far into the flames when it was shovelling coal. Sherlock reached out and grabbed it, holding it across his body with the blade up by his face.

  ‘So the cur’s got some spirit in him, yes?’ Grivens’s face was set into a grim mask. ‘Just means I have to work a bit harder for my cash.’

  He lunged forward and lashed out with the spanner, trying to catch the side of Sherlock’s head. Sherlock ducked back, and the spanner hit the side of an iron tube. Sparks flew across the room. Sherlock felt them burn his face. He brushed at his hair in case any of them had caught in it.

  Grivens snarled, and pulled the spanner back. Raising it over his head, he brought it crashing down towards Sherlock’s scalp.

  Sherlock blocked the blow clumsily with his shovel. The spanner hit the wooden shaft at its halfway point and dented it, nearly knocking Sherlock to his knees. The vibration transferring from the shovel felt like it might tear his arms from their sockets. He managed to bring the shovel around and he caught Grivens’s kneecap with the blade. Grivens screamed and staggered back, mouth open in an ‘O’ of disbelief.

  ‘You little beggar!’ he cursed. Swinging the spanner like a club he lunged at Sherlock again.

  Sherlock brought the blade of the shovel up to meet the spanner. The two connected with a sound like the crack of doom. Grivens bounced backwards, the spanner whirling away from him and disappearing into the darkness of the engine room. Sherlock’s suddenly nerveless fingers dropped the shovel on the floor.

  Grivens was standing in a half-crouch, cradling his right elbow in his left hand. His face was twisted into an animalistic snarl.