Young Sherlock Holmes: Red Leech by Andrew Lane

Author:Andrew Lane
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Action & Adventure, General
ISBN: 9780330511995
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2011-01-01T10:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

He slept for a while, even though it was only mid-afternoon: a disturbed sleep, full of images of Matty, tied up and helpless in the dark, crying to himself, wondering where his friends were. When Sherlock awoke he found his cheeks were wet with sympathetic tears, and it took him a few moments to remember where he was and what had happened.

His muscles ached and his lungs burned, and he could feel the bruises on his throat from where Grivens had clutched at it. He tried to find some trace of horror inside him over what he’d done, but there wasn’t anything that strong. Regret, yes. He regretted the fact that a man was dead, but that was about as far as it went.

Lying awake and thinking about Grivens, to distract himself from worrying about Matty, Sherlock found himself thinking about the iridescent blue tattoo on the man’s wrist, the one that had first made Sherlock realize that the man had been watching him. If he’d thought of tattoos at all then he’d thought of them as something decorative, but there was obviously more to them than that. They were a means of recognition, of identification. In this case, they’d led him to identify a man who might be watching him on behalf of the fleeing Americans. And, based on what the steward had said, you could recognize a tattooist by his style, just like you could recognize a painting by Vermeer or Rubens. Or, Sherlock thought, remembering the paintings in the hall at Holmes Manor, by Vernet. His mind was filled with the idea of an encyclopedia of tattoos, cross-referenced back to the places they were done and the artists who did them. Would such a thing even be possible?

After a while he decided that lying in bed wasn’t going to accomplish anything. He got up and went outside.

The sun was shining strongly on the deck of the SS Scotia. All around them the horizon was a flat line. It was as if they were at the centre of an upturned blue china bowl. There was no sign that they were moving at all; even the sea birds hung motionless in the air.

After a few minutes, he realized that he had been hearing a violin playing for some time without noticing. Rufus Stone? Probably – the chances of their being two violinists on board were fairly slim, and he thought he was beginning to be able to detect some elements of Stone’s style – the flourishes he threw in at the end of certain phrases, and the way the fingers of his left hand sometimes struggled with complicated arpeggios.

He went looking for the man, and found him in his usual spot near the bows of the ship. This time there was no crowd around him. Perhaps they’d all got bored.

‘I was beginning to wonder if you’d decided to abandon our lessons like a man throws away a threadbare handkerchief,’ Stone called, still playing.

‘I had . . . a busy afternoon,’ Sherlock responded.

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.