Andrew Lane - Red Leech

“Look, you’re obviously checking the place out,” Matty said, “and you don’t want the bloke living there to know it. What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Sherlock promised. “I need to get closer to the front door. Any ideas?”

“Walk up the path and knock?”

“Funny.” He glanced around. Nothing immediately suggested itself. “Can you ride back to those kids we saw playing with the ball?” He delved into his pocket and brought out a handful of coins. “Give them a few pennies and ask if we can borrow the ball for a while. Tell them we’ll bring it back.”

Matty looked at him strangely. “We came a long way to play ball games.”

“Just do it — please.”

Matty sighed and took the coins, then trotted off, glancing back over his shoulder and making an audible “tch noise.

Sherlock dismounted and waited patiently, tying up his horse and then moving closer to the edge of the trees and looking at the house. Nobody was moving. Was it Shenandoah, or something else, like Summerisle or Strangeways?

After what seemed an age, Matty returned. He was holding the ball under one arm.

“We were done,” he said, stopping. “This ball is flat.”

“Doesn’t matter. Let’s wander back down the road, throwing the ball to each other. When we get to the house, whoever has the ball throws it but deliberately misses, and gets it as close to the front door as they can.”

“So the other one can run and fetch it. Yeah, OK.”

“So that I can run and fetch it. I need to see what it says on that sign, and you can’t read, remember? Not properly, anyway’

They wandered back down the road, throwing the ball back and forth. Once or twice Matty would drop it to the ground and kick it up in the air towards Sherlock.

When they got to the point on the road nearest the house, where a path led off towards the front door, Matty manoeuvred himself around so that he was at the other side of the road. He bought the ball behind his shoulder and threw it high, over Sherlock’s head. It sailed into the garden and bounced once, floppily, before rolling towards the front door.

Sherlock made a dumbshow of irritation, throwing his hands wide and shrugging, then turned around and scooted up the path towards the front door. Without making it obvious, as he reached the ball and bent down to retrieve it he glanced up at the sign beside the door.

Shenandoah.

It was the right house. Now all he had to do was decide on his next step. Did he want to stay and watch it for a while, so he could describe the occupant to Mycroft and Amyus Crowe, or did he dare sneak in and look around, if the occupant wasn’t home?

The decision was taken away from him as the door was flung wide open and a man appeared out of the darkness. He was thin, with a narrow, pointed beard shot through with grey hairs, but the thing that made Sherlock freeze in shock was the left side of his face. He’d been burned at some stage, badly burned; the skin of his face was red and lumpy, and his eye was just a dark hole, with no eyeball showing.

“You yapping little cur,” he snarled. He grabbed Sherlock’s hair and dragged him inside the house before he could make a sound.

Sherlock’s scalp felt like it was on fire. He grabbed at the man’s arm and let himself be pulled along, trying to lessen the agony of his entire body weight hanging off a handful of hair. He half expected chunks to tear out at the roots, leaving bleeding areas of raw flesh exposed to the air.

“I was just getting my ball back!" he cried.

The man ignored him. He was muttering a stream of profanities and accusations to himself as he pulled Sherlock along.

The hall of the house was light, with the sun shining through a skylight high above. It had an empty, half-furnished feel to it. The man’s footsteps echoed on the tiled floor.

He pushed open a door with his left hand and dragged Sherlock inside. It was a reception room: chintz-covered comfortable chairs with antimacassars on top to stop the hair oil of any gentleman callers from staining the cloth, and some occasional tables sitting around with nothing on them but lace doilies. It had the feel of something half furnished, not something that was lived in. A house, not a home.

Oh, and there was a body on the floor. Sherlock only just caught sight of a pair of boots and the lower half of a body, facing downward against the carpet, as he was pulled past and thrown into a chair.

He quickly reached up to check his hair, feeling for warm blood or raw flesh, or even just for some looseness in his scalp where it might be peeling away from the skull beneath, but it all felt like normal. Except for the pain. That didn’t feel normal at all.

“Please!" he cried, still trying to pretend that he was an innocent victim, just passing by, “just let me go. My ma and pa will be worried about me! They just live down the road!"

The man wouldn’t meet Sherlock’s gaze. Instead, his head kept jerking back and forth like a bird’s, going from window to door, door to window, back and forth.

Sherlock took a moment to look properly at the man. All he had really caught in the doorway was the ruined flesh on the left-hand side of the man’s face, but now he let his gaze roam up and down the man’s body, trying to spot something that might help.

The man’s suit was good cloth, that much Sherlock was sure of. It was black, and quite fine, and the way the jacket and the trousers hung made Sherlock think that it had been made by a tailor who knew what he was doing. It didn’t look like a wool sack with sleeves, which some of the jackets worn around Farnham did. But there was something odd about the cut, something... almost foreign. Sherlock found a part of his mind wondering whether you could identify which tailor had made a suit just by the stitching and the cut; or, at the very least, whether the tailor followed a particular style — German, or English, or American.

The man was thin, and his wrist bones and Adam’s apple stood out prominently. From the right side his face was classically handsome, with a prominent moustache and goatee beard, but from the left side it was a wreck. The skin was red and shiny, and cratered like the surface of the moon. The beard on that side was sparse and sickly, poking through the skin like the charred remains of a forest fire, and the eye-socket was just a red-scarred hole in his face.

“Mister—" Sherlock started, but the man cut him off with an abrupt gesture.

“Quiet!" he commanded. His voice was piercing, but there was a whining tone in it that made Sherlock’s flesh creep. “Quiet, you little whoreson whelp!"

His voice was tinged with an accent that wasn’t English. It sounded more like the way Amyus and Virginia Crowe spoke, but it wasn’t quite the same. Perhaps slightly more cultured. And he spoke as if he expected to be listened to. He projected, as if he was on a stage, performing. Sherlock had seen some interminable Shakespeare plays performed in the open air at his mother and father’s manor house in Reigate, and if it wasn’t for the twitching of his head Sherlock would have put this man down as an actor from the way he stood and the way he spoke.

“How long have we got?” the man asked abruptly. “How long till they’re back?”

“I don’t—" Sherlock started to say, but the man stepped towards him and belted him across the face with the back of his hand. Stars and galaxies burst apart in Sherlock’s head. Shocked, he tasted blood.

“Don’t lie to me, boy. I can smell a lie on the wind. How long have we got?”

“Maybe an hour...” Sherlock replied. He wasn’t sure what the man wanted, but he was sure the man wasn’t stable. The best thing to do was just to play along.