Andrew Lane - Red Leech

Until his sleeve caught in one of the pounding cams. It caught the material and pulled. Grivens screamed — a short, despairing cry of fear and rage — as his body was jerked off the walkway and into the machinery. Sherlock let go of the man’s belt and brought his arms up, knocking the steward’s hands away from his throat and allowing him to take a lifesaving breath as the steward’s body was pulled away wrapping itself around the rotating axle and catching in the cams as they hammered up and down.

The engine didn’t even falter, but Sherlock had to turn away before he saw more than a fraction of what happened to Grivens’s body as it was pulled into the rotating metal.

Sherlock bent over, hands on his knees, trying to pull as much of the hot air into his lungs as possible. For a few moments he thought he was going to suffocate, as his body demanded more oxygen than he could give it, but gradually his breathing subsided. When his vision wasn’t red and blurred any more, and when he could breathe without his chest hurting, he straightened up and looked around.

There was no sign of Grivens. The black grease on the axle and the cams looked redder and shiner than it had before, but that was all.

Eventually Sherlock climbed down the ladder and crossed the engine room, looking for a way out. He wasn’t sure if the door he eventually found was the one he’d entered through or another one, but it didn’t matter. Outside, it was cool and the air was fresh. It was like leaving Hell and entering Heaven.

People stared at him as he eventually emerged on deck, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to get back to his cabin, wash the grime and the grease off his body and change his clothes. He would put the ones he was wearing into the laundry. Maybe the laundresses on board could clean them, maybe they couldn’t. In the end, he just didn’t care any more.

Amyus Crowe was in their cabin when Sherlock pushed the door open. “I think someone’s been in here, searchin’,” he said, then turned and saw the state of Sherlock’s face and clothes. “My God, what happened?”

“The people we’re following to New York — they spread some money around the port,” Sherlock replied wearily. “There’s probably one man on every ship leaving this week who’s been promised money if they kill the three of us.”

“At least one,” Crowe said. “But we can worry ’bout that later. Who was it?”

“One of the stewards.”

“An’ where is he now?”

“Let’s just say they’re going to be one member of staff down at dinner,” Sherlock said.

He told Crowe the whole story while he washed and changed clothes. The big man listened silently the whole time. When Sherlock started repeating himself, Crowe raised his hand.

“I think I understand the full story,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“Tired, dehydrated and sore.”

“That’s understandable, but how do you feel ?”

Sherlock glanced at him in puzzlement. “What do you mean?”

“I mean a man’s died, an’ you were the cause. I’ve seen men spiral into a morass of guilt an’ sadness after an event like that.”

Sherlock thought for a minute. Yes, a man had died, and Sherlock was responsible, but it wasn’t the first. Baron Maupertuis’s thug Clem had almost certainly drowned when he fell off Matthew Arnatt’s boat, but that had happened because Matty had hit him on the back of the head with a metal boathook. Maupertuis’s right-hand man Mr Surd had been stung to death by bees, but that could arguably have been classed as an accident — he’d fallen backwards into the hive. And there were the people who’d been on the Napoleonic fort when it had exploded in flames — they may have burned to death or drowned when they jumped into the sea, but their fates seemed several steps away from anything Sherlock had directly done. Was Crowe right? Was this the first death he’d directly and unequivocally caused?

“I’m not what you’d call 'religious',” he said eventually. “I don’t believe there’s a God-given instruction that 'Thou shalt not kill', but I suppose I believe that society functions better when there are laws and when people can’t just go around killing other people. That’s part of what Plato argues in The Republic, which my brother gave me to read. But the steward was trying to kill me, and if I hadn’t done the same to him then he wouldn’t have stopped. I didn’t choose to kill him. He picked the fight, not me.”

Crowe nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.

“Was that the right answer?”

“There is no right answer, son; least, not as far as I can make out. It’s a dilemma — society works because people follow rules an’ don’t go round murdering each other, but if people choose to live outside those rules, what do you do? Let them get away with their behaviour, or fight them with the same weapons they use to fight you? If you follow the former course, they get to take over society, cos they’re always prepared to fight harder and dirtier than you are. If you follow the latter course then how do you stop yourself becomin’ as bad as them?” He shook his head. “In the end, the only advice I can offer is — if you get to the stage where a man’s life don’t matter to you, then you’ve gone too far. As long as death bothers you, as long as you understand it’s your last resort, not your first, then you’re probably on the right side of the line.”

“Do you think Mycroft knew something like this would happen?” Sherlock asked. “Do you think that’s why he gave me the book?”

“No,” Crowe replied, “but your brother is a wise man. I think he knew that at some stage you’d be askin’ yourself these questions, an’ he wanted to make sure you had the tools to answer them with.”

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.