by Andrew Lane
He raised the gun and fired.
Sherlock just stood there, frozen in place. He tried to work out where the bullet had hit. He couldn’t feel any impact or pain – he must be in shock, he thought. Any second now the agony would start, and blood would begin to pulse from the wound.
After a few seconds in which nothing happened, apart from the smoke from the gun’s barrel drifting through the room, Sherlock realized that there was no pain, no blood, and no wound. He looked down at himself to check, and saw nothing. Had the newcomer missed? Would he fire again?
He looked up again, but the man was looking over Sherlock’s shoulder. Sherlock followed his gaze, to where the brown snake lay in two halves on the carpet, torn apart by the bullet from the gun.
The newcomer’s gaze moved from the snake to Sherlock and then from Sherlock to Matty. ‘I could shoot you both,’ he said, voice muffled by the leather face mask, ‘or you could help me save George’s life, and then explain yourselves. You have five seconds to decide.’ His voice sounded like rocks grinding together, it was so deep and hoarse.
‘We help,’ Sherlock said quickly, ‘and then we explain.’
‘Good choice.’ The man lowered the gun and slipped it into the waistband of his trousers. ‘You – smaller boy – give me that cobra.’ He turned and quickly shut the snake in a box. ‘You – bigger boy – get me that device and the knife from the mantelpiece.’
Sherlock followed where the man was pointing and saw an object the size of his fist on the mantelpiece. He scooped it up. It was a ball made out of a strange rubbery substance, connected to a metal valve and a nozzle which flared out to a conical opening, again made of that same rubbery substance. He handed it across to the man, who had moved to where the other man – George – was kneeling, moaning and holding his arms across his chest, and bent to kneel beside him.
‘What’s your name, boy?’ the newcomer asked as he took the device.
‘Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes.’ He did think about lying, but decided that honesty was the best policy at the moment.
‘And your little friend?’
‘I ain’t so little!’ Matty muttered.
The newcomer squished the rubber ball in his hand, squeezing the air out with a hiss.
He looked up at Sherlock. ‘My name is Ferny Weston. I own this house. The man with the snake bite is George Squier. He acts as my manservant, cook and general handyman around the house. He’s the only person I trust, and I don’t intend losing him.’ He handed the rubber and metal device to Sherlock. ‘Keep that ball squeezed, for all that your life is worth,’ he said, and took the knife from Sherlock’s other hand. He turned to the bitten man, and before Sherlock could say anything he had put the knife against the skin of George’s cheek and made two quick slashes in the shape of an X where the snake’s teeth had pierced him.
‘What are you doing?’ Sherlock cried.
‘Getting the poison out,’ Weston said. He grabbed the device from Sherlock’s grasp and placed the rubber funnel against the skin where he’d cut the X. He let the ball go, and it expanded slowly, the rubber seal making a sucking sound against the blood on George’s skin. ‘His blood will be pushing out from the wound, taking the poison with it, not going in, but we need to stop the poison diffusing through the tissue. The quicker we suck the poison out, the more chance we have of saving his life.’ He squeezed the rubber ball hard, expelling the air. Sherlock heard something sticky gurgling inside. Again he placed it against the wound and sucked.
As the man worked, Sherlock couldn’t help but notice the pattern of scars around his wrist and his fingers. He could see how anybody in the local area who saw him might have got the idea that he had been constructed from odd body parts. In fact, apart from the sheer implausibility of the idea, Sherlock wasn’t entirely convinced that it wasn’t true.
It took five goes before Weston was satisfied that he had either got all the poison out of George’s cheek or the poison had diffused so far that it was pointless trying any more. As he pulled the rubber ball away for the last time Sherlock could hear liquid squishing inside. Blood and poison, he presumed.
George appeared to have lapsed into unconsciousness. His eyelids flickered. Weston laid him down gently on his back. ‘We need to get him up to his room,’ he said. ‘I think he’ll be all right, but I’ve got some drugs I can give him to help with the shock and the pain, and I need to dress the wound. You two will help.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘Did you invent that device?’ Sherlock asked, indicating the poison-sucking rubber ball.
Weston reached up to scratch his neck, pushing aside the hood so that he could get to the skin underneath. There were scars there too, extending around his neck. Was there anywhere on his body that didn’t have scars? Sherlock wondered.
‘It seemed to be a good idea if I was dealing with snakes,’ Weston said.
‘Why the snakes?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Why the –’ he pointed back to the other room – ‘wax body parts? Why the thefts?’
‘Long story, and I’m not sure I want to tell it to you. Not yet anyway, and I want to hear your story first. Let’s get George here to bed and treat his wound, and then we’ll talk about what happens to the two of you.’
The next hour or so was taken up with the three of them manoeuvring George’s inert body out into the corridor, along the corridor and round the corner into the hall, then up two flights of stairs. George’s room was at the top of the house, and when they laid him on his bed and placed a blanket over him they all breathed a sigh of relief.
Sherlock thought he heard a woman’s voice, calling from downstairs, although he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He turned to look at Weston questioningly. The big man had paused, listening.
‘I need to go downstairs,’ he said. The leather mask turned to face Sherlock. ‘I need to get the first-aid kit and the drugs. You stay here with him. I’ll only be a few minutes.’
Matty and Sherlock stayed there for a while. George slept, his breath whistling heavily through his mouth.
Sherlock crossed to the window and looked out. It was still dark. He thought he was probably looking down on to the canal, although he couldn’t see it in the blackness. Looking down at the point where, little more than a week before, he had been looking up. How things had changed during that time.
Somewhere downstairs he thought he heard Weston’s voice speaking, and then a woman’s voice responding. There had to be someone else in the house that Weston was protecting, otherwise why not mention her?
After ten minutes or so Weston returned with the first-aid kit and a box of glass vials. He treated George’s cheek with an ointment that left an orange stain, then placed a dressing on it and fastened the dressing in place with a bandage that went up across George’s bald scalp, then down across his ear and under his chin. The last thing he did was to inject his servant in the arm with the contents of two different glass vials.
‘He should be all right now. We’ll let him sleep.’ He stood up, his hooded head brushing against the low ceiling. ‘He was lucky he was bitten by the coral snake. If it had been the black mamba then he would have been dead within minutes. And you two were lucky that the other snake was an ordinary cobra, not a spitting cobra. If venom had got into your eyes then you would have died screaming.’
‘What is it with you and poisonous pets?’ Matty asked. ‘Can’t you just keep dogs, or cats?’
The man laughed: a harsh, choking sound. ‘They aren’t pets, son – they’re my work. At least, they were.’ He glanced from Matty to Sherlock. ‘Come on – let’s get downstairs. I need a beer, and I’ve got some lemonade you two can have.’
‘You don’t strike me as a lemonade kind of person,’ Sherlock said, trying to lead Weston on into saying something about the other person in the house. Weston just laughed. ‘I like to have choices,’ he said cryptically. ‘I like to have examples of similar things that I can compare.’
He gestured to the two of them to go ahead down the st
airs. When they got to the floor below Sherlock looked around to see if he could tell where the woman’s voice had come from, but all the doors were closed. They kept on going, down to the ground floor and into a room on the other side of the house to where Sherlock and Matty had broken in.
The room was set up as a sitting room, with chairs and side tables. Weston left them there while he went into the kitchen to fetch the beer and the lemonade. Sherlock assumed that it was a test to see if the two of them would make a run for it – Weston had presumably locked the front door, as well as the doors into any side rooms where they could have got out through the windows, so there was no chance of escape. There was always the window in the sitting room, but when he opened the curtains Sherlock found that it was a French window leading out on to a stone veranda. He checked: it was locked.
After a few minutes Weston returned with a tray containing a bottle, a jug filled with a cloudy liquid, two glasses and a plate containing a pile of biscuits. He took the bottle and fell heavily back into a large armchair. Gesturing to the tray, he said, ‘Help yourselves. You’ve had a busy night.’
Matty just stared at the cloudy liquid. ‘How do we know,’ he asked, ‘that you haven’t put some kind of poison in there? Maybe you dropped a frog in an’ stirred it around with a spoon before scoopin’ it out.’
Weston pulled the gun out of the waistband of his trousers and put it on the table next to him. ‘Interesting though that would be, it would be quicker and more certain just to shoot you. In fact, I still may. Tell me why you’re here, what you’re looking for and who sent you. Don’t lie to me – I will know if you are lying.’
Sherlock took a deep breath. He was taking a chance here that honesty was the best policy, but Weston didn’t strike him as a villain. In fact, Sherlock was beginning to like him – or, at least, respect him. He was decisive, and he seemed to know what he was doing.
‘I heard about the thefts of human body parts from the Oxford mortuary,’ he said calmly. ‘One of my friends was questioned over it, and the man who is tutoring me was also interviewed by the police. I talked to the pathologist, and he gave me enough information so that I could work out when the next theft was going to occur. Matty and I waited, saw the thief, and followed him back to where he lived—’
‘That was me,’ Matty muttered. ‘I followed him.’
Sherlock frowned at Matty. This was his story. ‘We traced the thief to the post office, and then traced the package to London and then back here again, but it was a different package. I realize that now. We followed it here, and saw you pick it up. We broke into the house—’
‘That was me too,’ Matty murmured.
‘. . . and we saw the collections of wax body parts and of poisonous creatures that you’ve put together. It’s all very impressive – and “collection” is the right word, isn’t it?’
Instead of answering, Weston stared at Sherlock through the eyeholes in his leather hood. ‘You know something else,’ he pointed out. ‘Tell me.’
‘How do you know that I know something else?’
‘It’s the direction you were looking when you were talking. You were looking straight ahead during most of your story, but your eyes weren’t focused on anything in particular, which indicates that you were putting together a series of memories into a coherent order, but when you mentioned the pathologist at the Oxford mortuary you looked up and to the left. That indicates you were remembering something specific that he said, something important.’
‘And you can tell all that just from the direction I was looking?’ Sherlock asked, fascinated.
‘To an extent. That’s how I can tell when people are lying to me – their eyes drift to their right rather than their left. That means they’re putting together stories, rather than remembering things. It’s something I’ve observed over many years of having people tell me lies and tell me the truth. So – what is it that you were remembering?’
‘The pathologist – Doctor Lukather – mentioned your name. He said that –’ Sherlock tried to remember the exact words, and was suddenly very conscious that he was looking up and to the left – ‘that you used to go and talk to him, keep him company, and then suddenly you stopped. He thought you’d got too bored of his stories.’
‘Never bored,’ Weston said, turning his head away and looking down. ‘Never that. Something happened, that’s all. Something that meant I couldn’t go back.’
‘An accident?’ Sherlock guessed.
Weston reluctantly nodded. ‘But we’re getting the story out of order,’ he said softly, the softness sounding strange in his grating tone of voice. ‘It’s important to remember that stories have to be told in the right order, and that you are sure of when they start.’
‘What about when they stop?’ Matty asked suddenly. ‘Isn’t that important?’
‘Stories never stop,’ Weston said. ‘They go on forever.’
‘And what about our stories?’ Sherlock caught Weston’s eye. ‘Are they going to go on forever? Do you believe us?’
‘What you said makes sense. All the facts hang together, and you didn’t show any evidence of lying. I’m inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt. Besides – you neither look nor act like burglars.’
‘So – tell us your story,’ Sherlock challenged.
‘What have you already worked out?’ Weston countered.
Sherlock took a breath. ‘You have a collection of poisonous creatures,’ he pointed out. ‘I suspect that it’s the poison that interests you, not the creatures themselves. They are just a means to an end.’
‘Go on.’
‘You are researching the effects of poison – which ones are quick and which ones are slow, which ones leave obvious signs and which leave no trace at all.’ Sherlock thought back to his conversation with Doctor Lukather. ‘It’s all to do with the evidence that substances leave behind, isn’t it? Doctor Lukather was interested in that as well, but you’ve got further. You’re testing the poisons so that you can observe their effects.’
Matty, who had taken a large gulp of lemonade, suddenly lowered the glass. ‘I knew it,’ he said bitterly.
CHAPTER TEN
Weston laughed. ‘I don’t test the poisons on humans,’ he said, ‘although I’ve come across some people in my time who might arguably deserve it. No, I catch rats and I use them. People poison rats all the time – I just vary the poison and I note the effects.’ He paused for a moment. ‘But what about the wax body parts? What am I doing with those?’
Remembering the handwritten labels that were beneath the body parts in the glass cases, Sherlock said, ‘You’re looking at the effects of people’s lives on their bodies. You want to be able to look at a person and tell what they do for a living, where they’ve come from and how they live. You’ve been collecting body parts from a whole set of different people who have done different jobs, and you’ve been analysing them for characteristic traces.’
‘You sound like you already know about this kind of thing.’
A sudden picture of Amyus Crowe’s face flashed across Sherlock’s memory. He caught his breath. He missed the big American. ‘I had a friend who did something similar,’ he said softly, ‘although he wasn’t as . . . organized . . . as you obviously are.’
‘Very good.’ The big, scarred man nodded. ‘Yes, I have been developing a theory for a while now that the occupations people have leave traces on their bodies. Typists have flattened fingertips from the repeated hammering of their fingers against the keys, for instance. Violinists also have flattened fingertips, but only on one hand, from holding the strings down. Tattooists have swollen fingertips from where they have inadvertently pricked themselves while inking the tattoos, and picked up infections. Bookkeepers and clerks have a flattened area of hair running around their heads above their ears where the elastic that keeps their characteristic green eyeshades on has compressed the hair over many years. Whatever we do, whatever we are, leaves its traces on us.’
‘Like photograph
y,’ Sherlock suddenly interrupted. ‘The chemicals make your skin go black!’
‘That’s right.’
‘What can you tell about me?’ Matty challenged.
‘You live on a barge, you have a horse and you steal food for a living. You also go through periods of extreme hunger and periods, like now, where you are eating very well.’
‘How can you tell that?’
‘Your hands have characteristic scratches from rough wood, which means you might be a carpenter’s apprentice, but they are also rough on the inside of the fingers from pulling on thick ropes. Both signs together are a characteristic of sailors, but you haven’t got a sailor’s tan and your eyes aren’t lined from squinting into the sun. That strongly suggests a barge. A barge suggests a horse, and you have straw caught in your shoelaces. Your trousers and shirt are tight on you, but the creases and folds in them suggest that at times they have been looser. There are also indications that the trousers have been taken in at the waist on occasions, and let out on other occasions. This tells me that your weight varies, which means you sometimes eat well and sometimes not so well.’
‘And the thieving of food?’ Matty challenged. ‘That’s personal, that is.’
‘You have scars on your right hand where someone, or several people, have lashed out at your hand with something. Some of the wounds indicate that a sharp object was used, while some suggest a heavy blunt object, implying that a range of weapons was called into play, almost certainly by different people at different times. So – you often reach out to take things with your right hand, which then gets attacked by the owners of the things you are trying to take. The leap to food was a guess on my part, but then what else is likely?’
‘Oh.’ Matty raised his right hand and inspected it. ‘That’s obvious then.’
‘There’s also the evidence of the biscuits.’