by Andrew Lane
He glanced up frantically, trying to work out if he’d been left there alone while they dealt with Matty or whether they were all clustered around the edge of the hole, looking at him and laughing, but all he could see was the rapidly descending lid of the crate as it was thrown in after him. He ducked so that he was completely inside the crate, and the lid banged down on top. It was partially rotated so that it was caught by the corners but there were gaps all around, through which light still trickled in.
Until they put the barrel containing the apple tree back in the hole.
Light vanished, and soil fell inside the crate from the roots of the tree as it slammed down into the hole, sealing Sherlock in.
All he could smell was damp earth. All he could hear was the rasp of his own breathing. He tried again to stand up, and found that his legs were working better now. The paralysis had only been temporary, which meant that his back was all right. That was scant comfort, because the rest of him wasn’t.
Something alive dropped in through one of the gaps from the tree’s roots. He felt it hit his shoulder and run across his neck, hard little legs catching against his skin as it moved. It was a beetle, he thought. Harmless. More frightened of him than he was of it.
He turned his attention back to standing up. His shoulders and the back of his head hit the lid of the crate – and stopped. There was no movement there at all, no leverage. The weight of the entire apple tree above him effectively sealed the crate shut.
He was alone, and he was trapped. Those thoughts kept rotating around in his head. There was no way out. Matty was trapped as well, and Maberley was drugged. Nobody else knew where they were, and the criminals weren’t going to have a last-minute fit of guilt and let them out. This was it. This was the end.
No, this wasn’t it. The thought surfaced in the confusion of his mind like something vast and certain breaking the surface of a choppy sea. This was not it. He would get out. Logic would get him out.
He rested on his haunches as he tried to work through everything he had heard about Royalist hiding places, and everything he had thought about when Ferny Weston had been telling the story. He tried to imagine what the Royalists or the Maberley family would have thought as they were digging the holes and constructing the hiding places. There were so many holes – twenty, thirty, maybe more. Even if only half of them were occupied, then there would be a lot of people trapped underground waiting for the searchers to go away, and that might take hours. Perhaps even days. Some of the people hiding might be claustrophobic and would panic. Some would have problems breathing. Others would get hungry. It would make sense to build some kind of escape route for them, perhaps a set of tunnels underneath the crates, so that if there was an emergency then the hiders could get out, even if it was difficult and took time. Yes, that made perfect sense.
Sherlock started feeling around the edges of the crate, looking for signs of hinges or a catch of some kind. In the back of his mind was the unwelcome thought that he was inventing something that might not – in fact, probably didn’t – exist, but he refused to let that thought get more than a small amount of purchase. He had to stay calm, he had to stay sane and he had to get out. Logic told him that the builders would have put in an escape route, and therefore he would find it. Job done.
Except that he couldn’t feel any hinges or any catch. He had tried the panel in front of him, so he shuffled around to his right and repeated the procedure. Still nothing. He shuffled again, so that he was facing backwards. Still nothing. One more rotation – he had to find the hinges on this side. They had to be there.
But they weren’t.
He felt his breath rasping in his throat. His fingers were raw with the effort of scrabbling at the wood of the crate. He could hear a distant moaning sound, and for a second he thought someone was taking the apple tree away and calling to him, but then he realized that the sound was coming from his own throat. Despite his logic, a part of him was succumbing to panic and despair.
He had tried all four sides, and he knew that the lid above him wouldn’t move.
That still left one direction.
Sherlock’s fingers felt around the bottom of the crate. It was awkward, and he had to keep moving his feet and rotating his body slightly, but he knew that this was his last chance and he had to do it properly.
His fingertips brushed against something metallic, and then moved on. He scrambled back, trying to find it again. Yes, there it was! He tried to work out in the absolute blackness what it was. Rectangular, yes, and metallic. It could be a hinge. If it was, then there would be another one, round about . . . there! Yes, there it was. He felt his heart beginning to calm down now, and before continuing he took several calming breaths. All right, if there was a hinge there and a hinge there, then there would be a catch on the other side, surely. He flattened his right hand and brushed it along the base of the crate. Something squirmed beneath his hand – a worm maybe? He swallowed his sudden nausea and kept going.
Yes! There was a metal fixture in the junction between the bottom and the side of the crate. It seemed to Sherlock that the entire bottom of the crate was hinged so that it would open downward, into another space.
Except that he couldn’t get the fixture to move. It was holding the bottom of the crate shut, but his weight on the wood was jamming it, preventing it from moving. He had a sudden frustrated flash of imagining the initial designers of the hiding places, two hundred or more years ago, looking at their handiwork and congratulating themselves on its impeccable design without actually having tried it to see if it worked in practice.
He had to make it work. He had two hinges, a catch and a base that worked like a trapdoor – that was significantly better than he’d had five minutes before.
Sherlock braced his legs against the sides of the crate, taking his weight off the base, and tried again to move the catch with his fingers. This time there was movement, and he put all of his energy into sliding that bolt sideways. The muscles of his legs felt like they were bathed in acid, and splinters were digging into him all over, but he was going to move that bolt. Despite two centuries of neglect, despite rust and rot and whatever else nature might have thrown at it, that bolt was between him and freedom, and it was going to move!
The bolt slid calmly sideways as if that had been its plan all along. The bottom of the crate dropped away and Sherlock fell into a narrow and damp space.
Feeling around, he appeared to be at a crossroads. Tunnels led off ahead of him, to either side and behind him. The sides of the tunnels were made of earth, with roots and other organic debris growing into them. Every foot or so, wooden planks stopped the tunnels collapsing.
Which way to go? One option was to head for the nearest edge of the orchard, which was likely to have a way to the surface, but that would leave Matty trapped and panicking. No, he had to go and get his friend first.
Which direction? Matty had been off to Sherlock’s right when Sherlock had been thrown into the hole, but Sherlock had made a three-quarters turn inside the crate when he was trying to find a way out. That meant . . . that meant Matty was behind him.
He turned around in the narrow tunnel, soil cascading over him as his shoulders brushed the tunnel sides and his head brushed its top. He tried to estimate how far away the next hole had been. Ten feet maybe? He started to crawl, fingers digging into the earth of the tunnel’s floor. Small beetles and other invertebrates scattered from beneath his fingers as he moved, but he ignored them. His back ached from being crouched over, but he ignored that as well. Everything else was a distraction – he had to get to Matty, and then get them both out of there.
Something made a snorting noise ahead of him.
He stopped dead in the tunnel, listening.
A grunting noise, and a shuffling.
There was something in the tunnel with him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
His mind flashed through the possibilities. It sounded too large to be an insect or a beetle. Far too large. Snakes
and beetles didn’t grunt or snort either. A fox, maybe? Perhaps over the years foxes had taken over the tunnels, using them as their dens rather than dig new ones.
Or maybe it was a badger. A sudden chill washed over him like freezing water. Badgers were notoriously dangerous. They had sharp digging claws, sharp teeth and bad tempers. They had no natural predators – nothing was going to risk going up against a badger. They were vicious.
And he was trapped in a tunnel with one.
He began to edge backwards, very quietly and very calmly.
‘Sherlock – is that you?’ a voice whispered.
‘Matty!’ Relief filled him, making him giddy. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Escapin’. What are you doin’?’
‘The same thing. You found the hatch in the bottom of the crate then?’
‘Actually,’ Matty said, ‘I fell through. The wood was rotten. Knocked myself out for a minute or two. When I came round I thought I’d explore a bit. These are escape tunnels then?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Which way’s out?’
Sherlock considered for a moment. His initial thought was that there would be exits at the end of each tunnel, but he could see now that he’d been wrong about that. Tunnel exits all around the orchard would be easy to spot, and would make the whole cleverness about the apple trees, the barrels and the holes pointless. No, there would be one way out, cleverly disguised; probably only accessible from the inside, and not visible from the outside until it was opened. If there was only one exit, however, but there was a grid of tunnels, then how to find the way? Yes, perhaps the original hiders would have had oil lamps, but maybe they wouldn’t. There had to be some way of indicating to them which way was out in the event of an emergency.
‘Sherlock?’
‘Thinking.’
‘Okay. Don’t take too long.’
Sherlock backed up slightly until he was beneath the crate he had started off in. He was at the crossroads of four tunnels now. He carefully checked each corner where two tunnels met. Somewhere there, he felt sure, there would be a sign, an indication. Yes! Set just inside one tunnel he felt a round, smooth stone, completely different from anything else he could feel on the tunnel walls. It was a marker – or at least, it was the closest thing to a marker he was going to get.
‘I think I’ve got it. Follow me.’
Sherlock made his way along the tunnel to the next junction, with Matty following. It took him a few moments to locate the smooth stone there, but it was to the left. He went that way, making sure that Matty knew which direction he had gone.
Right at the next, then straight on for the next three. The next few turns were strange – left, then right, then right again, and then left, as if they were detouring around something. After that it was straight on again for five junctions. That brought him up against a hard barrier.
Matty crashed into him from behind. ‘Sorry!’
‘I think we’re there.’
He pushed, first tentatively, then harder. Nothing shifted. He examined the barrier with his fingers. It felt like it was constructed of similarly sized rough rocks arranged into a wall. Sherlock settled back and thought for a moment. There would be no point in allowing hidden Cavalier sympathizers to get this far and then frustrating their efforts to escape at the last minute. There had to be an answer to this conundrum, as there had been to the others.
Some kind of tool, perhaps? He gingerly felt around in the soil to his left and to his right, hoping that if there was a tool that it hadn’t been removed by some foraging animal looking for material to build a den with.
Just as he was about to ask Matty to check around where he was crouching, his questing fingers brushed across a hard metal object. It was cold to the touch. He dug it out of the earth and checked it from one end to the other. It felt like a crowbar – a metal shaft with carved metal spikes at one end. Just the kind of thing one might use to lever stones out of a wall.
It took him five minutes, and he was damp with sweat when he had finished, but he made a gap in the stone wall large enough to wriggle through. Beyond the wall was soft earth, which he scooped away until he could feel fresh air on his face. He threw his head back and breathed gratefully, then pushed the last remnants of soil out of the way and crawled through a barrier of moss and leaves out into the open.
The moon was shining down, and it seemed like the brightest light he had ever seen. He blinked, dazzled, as Matty scrambled out beside him.
They were on the far side of the orchard, where he had been earlier in the day. The ground sloped away in front of them to a distant landscape of dark fields and black copses of trees.
Looking back, he could see that the exit would have been completely invisible from the outside – until it was broken through. He quickly spread some moss and branches back across the hole to help disguise it from anyone who happened to look over the orchard wall.
‘That,’ he whispered, ‘was too close.’
‘I knew you’d get us out,’ Matty said quietly. His hand closed on Sherlock’s shoulder. ‘Thanks, mate.’
‘No problem.’
‘What now?’ he asked.
‘Now we go and alert the police. I’m not risking a fight with those guys. I’m exhausted, and there are too many of them and they’re armed.’
‘Amen to that,’ Matty murmured.
Sherlock calculated which way to go. The road that led past Maberley’s house was a black ribbon off to his right. If they went over there then they could make their way back to where their horses were tied up – assuming they were still there.
‘Come on,’ he said.
His legs were wobbly and weak, but standing up was a blessing, and the breeze on his face was a delight. As the two of them walked sideways along the slope he listened out for any sound from the criminals in the orchard, but he could hear nothing. They were, when all was said and done, very professional in their approach.
Sherlock, however, had an advantage. He had already worked out where the treasure was. He had no doubt that if he went back later, in daylight, he could find it.
They made it on to the smoother surface of the road and headed on up the slope to where it crested the ridge. The orchard was visible away to their right, and they kept low and quiet as they moved. They reached the gateway into the grounds of Maberley’s house and halted, looking for any signs of activity.
The lawn was almost completely clear of trees now. The muffled cart that had been used to move them was sitting, abandoned, just outside the house, with the shire horses contentedly munching grass. Sherlock assumed that the criminals were in the orchard, busy putting all the trees back. They obviously hadn’t found the treasure yet, and they were preparing to leave, only to come back again on another night. He was going to lose them unless he did something.
His brain whirled, thinking through all the options.
He had speculated earlier that the gang had access to some kind of empty barn nearby, where they could store the huge modified cart when they weren’t using it. They certainly wouldn’t want to be driving it around the roads during daylight hours. They would be heading off there soon, while it was still dark, and presumably resting there for a little while, getting some sleep maybe, or having a rough meal, before dispersing to their various homes until the next time they were required. Sherlock had to somehow find out where their base was and keep them all there so that the police could apprehend the entire gang.
Something was nagging at his brain. The solution was there, in front of him, if he could only see it.
While nobody was about, he dashed across to the muffled cart and looked inside. It was empty apart from a lot of soil left behind by the trees, some coils of rope and a few tarpaulins. He assumed that the men would just pile into it and be pulled back to their base, so even if he managed to get inside the cart and cover himself with a tarpaulin or something he would be discovered fairly quickly when someone kicked him, or fell across him, or just decided they
were cold and pulled the tarpaulin off him. No, there had to be another way.
Follow them on horseback? They would be watching out for anyone who showed too much interest in them, and if he was riding close enough to keep tabs on the cart then the people inside would undoubtedly see him.
He crouched down and glanced underneath the cart. The axles were reinforced, to take the weight of the trees. Each axle ran through several thick iron hoops, which were riveted to the cart’s wooden underside. The hoops were larger than the axles, which meant there was a space between the bottom of the rotating axle and the inside of the hoop. That gave Sherlock an idea.
He stood up, reached into the back of the cart and grabbed a coil of rope.
‘Quickly,’ he said to Matty, ‘help me string this rope between the axle hoops underneath this thing. I need to build a kind of hammock for myself.’
The expression on Matty’s face indicated that he didn’t understand why Sherlock wanted to do that, but he complied. Quickly, before any of the gang came back – and working on the side of the cart facing away from the orchard so that they wouldn’t be seen by anyone returning – they cut lengths of rope with Matty’s knife and tied them into a rough web that hung beneath the cart, fastened at each axle hoop.
When they had finished, Sherlock patted Matty on the shoulder. ‘Good work. Your job now is to go inside and wake Maberley when the gang have left. They’ll obviously take the chloroform with them, in the cart, rather than leave it behind to be discovered. When Maberley’s awake, explain to him what’s been going on, then the two of you head into the nearest village and rouse as many police and interested citizens as you can. Our horses are here, tied up, and I assume Maberley has a horse. If not, use mine. Get the police back here.’