Stone Cold

by Andrew Lane

  Sherlock looked again, and suddenly he could see what Matty was talking about. There was a circular patch of grass that was slightly different from the rest. Sherlock wasn’t sure if it was slightly greener, or slightly taller, or what. ‘Some kind of fungus?’ he guessed.

  ‘Or a fairy ring,’ Matty countered. ‘I dunno what it is, but there’s a few of them.’

  Sherlock estimated the size of the ring. It was about as wide as he could stretch his arms. He looked around. Matty was right – there were other rings around, and some of them overlapped.

  ‘All right – that’s a puzzle,’ he said. ‘It might not have anything to do with the house supposedly moving, however.’

  ‘Then what about this?’ Matty asked. He led Sherlock to near the point where the orchard began, where he stopped. ‘Look.’ He pointed at the ground.

  Sherlock bent down. ‘What am I looking at?’ he asked.

  ‘Look sideways,’ Matty urged.

  Sherlock turned his head and moved down until he could feel blades of grass tickling his ear. He stared back towards the house. For a minute all he saw was grass, weeds and the occasional ant, but then, like an optical illusion suddenly resolving itself, he suddenly saw what it was that Matty had noticed. The grass seemed to be bent. Close to the ground it grew straight up, but after a few inches it suddenly but unmistakably veered sideways, pointing towards the orchard. It was almost impossible to see from above, there being so many blades of grass being ruffled in different directions by the breeze, but at ground level there was an obvious kink in the way the grass was growing.

  ‘It looks like it’s been flattened by something heavy,’ he murmured.

  ‘Flattened by something heavy moving towards the orchard,’ Matty said pointedly. He stared at Sherlock and raised an eyebrow. ‘Like, oh, I don’t know, a house perhaps?’

  Sherlock scuttled across the lawn on hands and knees, keeping his head close to the ground. ‘No!’ he exclaimed. ‘Look – the grass here is straight!’

  Matty crouched down to join him. Together they gazed through the grass.

  ‘You’re right,’ Matty breathed. ‘So there’s a line of bent grass, running from the house to the orchard, but then it stops – an’ it’s not wide enough to be the house makin’ it. Not nearly wide enough.’

  Sherlock turned his head and looked the other way. The line of bent grass pointed straight towards one of the aisles that had been left between the apple trees so that the pickers could get to the apples easily.

  He moved on a little bit. Within about six feet he found another line of bent grass, also pointing away from the house towards the orchard. He showed Matty.

  ‘You know what these look like?’ Matty said.

  ‘Wheel tracks,’ Sherlock answered. ‘From some kind of cart.’

  ‘Yeah, but they ain’t deep enough, an’ they’re too wide.’

  Sherlock nodded. ‘But imagine that the cart’s wheels have been wrapped in something really soft.’ He thought for a second. ‘Pillows! Imagine that pillows had been strapped to the wheels of the cart. No – imagine that the edges of the wheels had been built out with wooden extensions, so that they were wider, and then strapped up with pillows. That width would mean that less force would be applied per square inch to the ground, spreading the weight out so that ruts didn’t form. The pillows would help with that. All the weight did was to bend the grass over. The grass sprang back when the cart had gone past, but a mark was left behind. An almost invisible mark.’

  ‘Why would you strap pillows to the wheels of a cart?’ Matty scratched his head. ‘It don’t make any sense.’

  ‘It does if you want to keep the cart quiet,’ Sherlock said, standing. ‘And it also makes sense if the cart is carrying something heavy and you want to spread the load out so that the cart’s wheels don’t leave ruts in the ground.’

  ‘So which is it – quietness or weight?’ Matty stood up too.

  ‘It’s both,’ Sherlock said.

  Matty turned to stare at the house in amazement. ‘So it’s true then – the house is being moved, but it’s being moved on some kind of cart!’

  ‘That,’ Sherlock said quietly, ‘is certainly one explanation. Now – let’s go and have some fish-paste sandwiches, and then you can search inside the house while I search outside in the garden and the orchard.’

  Despite Mortimer Maberley’s crazy appearance and the untidy state of the house, he made some excellent sandwiches – small, neat and with the crusts cut off. While he and the boys ate, he told them stories about his time in the Oxford police force – some funny, some tragic, but all of them entertaining. Sherlock asked about his brother, and Maberley – after an initial amazement that Sherlock and Mycroft were related – told him several stories of tricks that had been played on Mycroft while he was in Oxford. There was tea with the sandwiches as well, and biscuits to follow.

  After lunch, Sherlock spent the next few hours searching outside the house. He quickly found the other ends of the holes that he had already discovered in the various rooms inside. Matty had previously drawn his attention to the rows of bent grass, but Sherlock also found other rows, this time leading towards the house rather than away from it. That would make sense if the house was somehow being moved on a cart, or several carts, towards the orchard – it would have to be brought back, after all – but that wasn’t what Sherlock thought was happening. No, something very different, but equally strange, was going on.

  To check his developing theory, he went deep inside the orchard. The trees were taller than him, with spindly branches that clawed at the sky, but Sherlock had seen orchards before and this one looked stunted, as if the soil had lost its nutrients.

  He knelt down and dug in the dirt around one of the trees. It was loose, as if it had been previously dug over and then left to lie. It certainly wasn’t as dense as he would have expected. He felt around in the soil for a while, looking for something in particular, but he didn’t find it. He would probably need a spade for that, and quite a bit of time.

  Before going back to the house, Sherlock wandered through the trees to the edge of the orchard. There was a stone wall there, and beyond it the ground fell gradually away to a patchwork of fields in the distance. He could see horses grazing, and a herd of cows as well. The road that passed by Mortimer Maberley’s house went down the gentle hillside, winding back and forth to minimize the slope for any carts that used it. It was as bucolic and perfect an English landscape as anyone could want.

  And yet somewhere here there was a great crime being committed, and committed very slowly. He shivered. There was an unseen force here, a guiding hand that he could detect but could not identify. Perhaps tonight would bring answers.

  There would be somewhere nearby for the criminals to base themselves, Sherlock knew. They would need a barn, or several barns, to contain their equipment. They certainly wouldn’t want to bring it all the way from the nearest town or village every time they decided to trespass on Mortimer Maberley’s property. He couldn’t see anything suitable down the slope, but that made sense. They wouldn’t want to bring it uphill each time they used it. No, it would all be stored somewhere back along the road, just off in a shielded area.

  He turned and headed back towards the house, but as he walked along the aisle between the trees his attention was caught. Some of the trees were thinner or thicker than the others, and their bark was slightly different shades. Now that he came to look at the trees specifically, Sherlock could see that they were of several different species. This orchard wasn’t for just one kind of apple – it was growing several. Why would the original planters have done that? If you were going to plant several different types of apple tree, then why not keep them separate, so that you didn’t get them mixed up?

  He shrugged. There were a lot of mysteries here, and he had to concentrate on the important ones or he would get distracted.

  Back at the house, he and Matty compared notes. Matty hadn’t discovered anything that Sherlock hadn�
��t already seen during his search – apart from a surprising number of dried-up cockroaches beneath the floorboards, along with a few dead mice.

  ‘Mr Maberley – would we be able to stay the night so that we can see what happens?’ Sherlock asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he replied.

  ‘And could we perhaps get some sleep now, so that we can be fresh later?’

  ‘I ain’t tired,’ Matty protested, but Sherlock shushed him.

  ‘I have two spare rooms,’ said Maberley. ‘Move the stuff off the beds and you’ll be all right.’

  Sherlock turned to Matty. ‘Do you still have that knife you used to carry around?’

  ‘Course I do.’

  ‘I’ll need to borrow it.’ He turned to Mortimer

  Maberley. ‘And I’ll need a fork, if you would be so kind.’

  ‘A fork?’ Maberley was confused.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Before settling down to sleep, Sherlock went through all three bedrooms – Maberley’s and the two spare rooms – and carefully prised the nails he’d spotted earlier out of the window frames by sliding the blade of Matty’s knife underneath them, levering them partially out and then getting them the rest of the way using Maberley’s fork. He then slid the windows up, opening them a crack so that fresh air could get in and out. He didn’t want them to be open so far that anyone outside would notice, but he did need that fresh air for his idea to work. He closed the curtains so that nobody outside could see in – specifically so that nobody could see him and Matty. After that, he went to sleep.

  It was almost midnight when he awoke. There was no light from outside trickling around the edges of the curtains in his room. The house was quiet.

  He moved to the next room and woke Matty, and then the two of them went to Maberley’s bedroom, where a flickering candle flame was visible through the partially open door. Mortimer Maberley was in the chair, reading a book by the light of a single candle. He glanced up as the two boys entered the room.

  ‘Are you ready for an adventure?’ he asked.

  ‘As ready as we will ever be,’ Sherlock responded.

  Matty asked, ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘We sit and we wait.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For the house to move.’

  Sherlock and Matty took seats near to Maberley. They arranged themselves in comfortable positions, and waited. Sherlock didn’t know what Matty was thinking about, but in his own mind he was going over the chain of evidence and deduction that he had constructed, checking that every link held.

  It turned out that Matty had been doing something similar.

  ‘It’s some kind of gas, innit?’ he whispered after a long while. ‘Somethin’ that makes people go to sleep. I’ve ’eard that they use it for operations now, in ’ospitals, to knock people out so they don’t feel the pain if their leg’s bein’ cut off, or if there’s some surgeon muckin’ around inside their chest.’

  ‘They’re called “anaesthetics”,’ Sherlock whispered back. ‘There’s a couple of different ones that have been known about for a while, but chloroform is the newest, and the safest.’ He paused, and smiled bitterly, although he knew that nobody could see. ‘The Paradol Chamber have something that they use which is based on morphine, but I think that it’s complicated to get hold of, and difficult to use. These criminals will be using something simpler, and chloroform is surprisingly easy to make.’

  ‘An’ you think these blokes are pumpin’ it in through those holes in the walls, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense. That’s why Mr Maberley keeps falling asleep just when they’re beginning their work. It’s not tiredness – they’re drugging him to stop him from interfering.’

  ‘Why don’t they just kill ’im an’ ’ave done wiv it?’ Matty asked.

  ‘Because Ferny Weston and my brother and various other people would realize that he had stopped writing to them, and they would come to investigate. That would completely wreck the crooks’ plans. They need Maberley here, but incapacitated, so they pump the gas in until they’ve finished.’

  ‘An’ you opened the windows so that the gas would be blown out an’ fresh air would get in, so we don’t go to sleep like he did. Very clever.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Sherlock paused. ‘Do you understand that, Mr Maberley? The falling asleep – it’s all part of their plan. They’re doing it to you!’

  The only answer from Malcolm Maberley was a deep snore.

  ‘Sherlock . . .’ Matty said, but his voice sounded slow and distant.

  Sherlock tried to get up, but his hands fumbled on the arms of his chair and he fell backwards. He could smell something medicinal, like the smell of a hospital. He realized it had been there for a while, getting stronger without his noticing. His head was heavy, and his eyes kept closing even though he was trying to force them to stay open. He got one hand on to the arm of the chair and levered himself partially upright, then used his other hand to push himself to completely standing. He could feel himself swaying. His stomach felt nauseous, as if he’d drunk some spoilt milk by mistake.

  With a soft thump, Matty’s head fell back against his headrest.

  Sherlock staggered across to the window and reached out to grasp the curtain, but the cloth slipped through his fingers and he couldn’t get a grip. He forced himself to concentrate, despite his blurry vision, and to close his fingers on the edge. Finally he got a grip, and pulled the curtain open.

  The window had been pulled shut.

  Through the foggy mess of Sherlock’s brain, a single thought glowed. He’d been outwitted! Someone had noticed the partially open windows, despite his best efforts to hide them, and they had simply closed them one by one when nobody was in the rooms. Then they had gone about their normal business, pumping anaesthetic gas into the house through the holes they had drilled previously.

  He staggered back into the room and quenched the candle with his fingertips, then went back to the window. Now that it was dark inside the room, nobody would see what he was doing. He took hold of the window with fingers that felt rubbery and huge, and he pulled upward with all his strength.

  Nothing happened. Surely they hadn’t nailed the windows shut again?

  He pulled again, and heard a squeal of wood rubbing against wood. The window eased up an inch, and then stuck. Sherlock bent down and put his mouth to the gap. Fresh night air coursed into his lungs, and it was like pure water to a man who had spent days in the desert. He breathed it in, gulping it down, and he could actually feel his thoughts becoming clearer and the heaviness trickling away from his muscles.

  Something moved outside the window.

  He ducked further down, still keeping his mouth as close to the crack as possible, and looked over the top of the window’s bottom edge.

  A tree was passing by outside.

  Sherlock could see the tops of the branches clearly. They looked like skeletal hands clawing at the stars. As he watched, they moved slowly past the window. With his fingers resting on the sill, Sherlock could feel a dull rumbling from outside.

  He dropped to the floor and scuttled across to where Matty was slumped in his chair. He pulled the boy out and dragged him across the room to the window, then held his face up to the fresh air until he began to move.

  ‘Wha . . .’

  ‘Sssshh!’

  ‘Okay.’ Matty took a few deep breaths. ‘‘S’all right, mate,’ he slurred. ‘I’m okay.’ He shrugged off Sherlock’s arm and stood up shakily.

  ‘Take a look outside,’ Sherlock said.

  Together the two boys gazed out of the window. For a moment all they could see was the star-spattered sky and the dark bulk of the land below, but then another set of branches slid past the window.

  Matty gasped. ‘So it’s true then?’

  ‘It depends what you mean,’ Sherlock said. ‘Let’s go down and take a look.’

  ‘What about Maberley?’ Matty asked. ‘Shouldn’t we open some more windows
or something?’

  ‘He’s been okay every night so far,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘I think these people know what they’re doing. The chances are, if we wake him up then he’ll charge out of the house with his fowling piece, and then all hell might break loose.’

  ‘Good point.’

  The two of them headed downstairs and made their way towards the front door. Sherlock opened it a crack and looked outside. The front door faced away from the orchard, and there was nobody between them and the low wall that separated the grounds of the house from the road.

  Sherlock nudged Matty, and indicated the wall and the road. ‘Same distance as it was this afternoon,’ he pointed out in a whisper. ‘The house hasn’t moved.’

  ‘But if the house hasn’t moved then what did we see from the window just now?’ Matty asked.

  ‘Well,’ Sherlock said, ‘if the house isn’t moving, then it must be the orchard, mustn’t it? The house moving is physically impossible. The orchard moving is just . . . improbable.’

  They slipped out of the house and into the night. Sherlock led the way along the wall of the house, past the window to the sitting room. That had been closed from the outside as well. Someone was obviously checking carefully before making any move. The brains behind this criminal activity was very clever, and very cautious.

  A little way along the wall was a window into one of the inside rooms – the dining room, Sherlock thought. That window had been closed as well, but more importantly there was a device sitting on the ground nearby. It was like a large milk churn, with a rubber hose leading from the top of it into one of the holes that Matty and Sherlock had observed earlier – the holes drilled from the outside of the house to the inside. There must be some reservoir of liquid chloroform inside that container, Sherlock theorized, and the evaporated vapour was creeping into the house. All of the other holes were presumably being used as well. He cursed himself for his stupidity in thinking that simply opening a few windows was going to stop something so fiendishly clever.

  When they got to the corner of the house, Sherlock stopped and peered around the edge. Matty knelt down and did the same.