The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes--Sherlock Holmes and the Crusader's Curse by Stuart Douglas

Author:Stuart Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

* * *

With no official role in the investigation, and the inspector’s admonition not to leave the grounds still fresh in our ears, we decided to walk down to a structure that Buxton had described as “the finest shell grotto north of Margate”.

It was only a five-minute walk from the house, across an area so completely flat that I assumed a lawn must lie underneath the thick blanket of snow. As we walked, we smoked in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. My own, I must admit, were largely taken up with the realisation that the appearance of a corpse had, in a way I did not care to interrogate too closely, actually improved the tenor of our trip. Holmes had demonstrated an absolute lack of interest in the question of the Thorpe Ruby and not much more in the missing art collection, but the possibility of a murder had certainly invigorated him. Even walking across the snowy lawn, his stride was brisk and his face flushed with what I was certain was exercise of both a physical and a mental nature.

As if to prove my supposition, he suddenly stopped in his tracks and turned to me. “Now that we are clear of the house and the inspector’s prying assistants, I have a confession to make, Watson,” he said. “I have not been completely truthful about Mr Reilly.”

He reached into his coat pocket, then apparently thought better of it. He pointed to the grotto, a few hundred yards distant. “I think we had better speak inside,” he said, and trotted towards it, kicking up sprays of snow behind him as he did so. I manoeuvred to one side of him to avoid being soaked and jogged alongside him through the “cave”, which comprised the entrance to the grotto, eager to hear what he had to say.

Once inside, however, I was momentarily distracted from Holmes’s secret by the opulent spectacle that confronted me. To call the elaborately decorated interior a cave seemed absurd, for one thing. Directly in front of us was a curving golden wall, illuminated by natural light streaming through vents in the ceiling, on which were picked out a series of stars and planets, each shining whitely, as if made of the finest china. On closer inspection, the stars and planets, indeed the whole surface of the wall, was made up of tens of thousands of shells of varying sizes and colours, carefully affixed to give the impression of the glittering night sky. The wall curved away from us and vanished into the darkness but where we stood, only a few feet inside, the area was as brightly lit as any room in the house and far more beautiful.

Holmes appeared unmoved by the spectacle, however. He moved inside just far enough to place himself directly beneath one of the shafts of light and impatiently beckoned me to join him.

“We do not have a great deal of time, Watson. I would not put it past Inspector Fisher to have us followed, and there is something I must show you.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.