Andrew Lane - Black Ice

‘All right.’

‘Do you want to check?’

‘Why should ah?’ Crowe sounded surprised. ‘You’ve got a good set of eyes, an’ a good mind behind them. What about the carpet?’

‘Looks like it gets cleaned every day, and I can’t see anything that might have dropped on it today.’ ‘So,’ Crowe said grimly ‘there’s nothin’.’ ‘Except…’ Sherlock started. ‘Except what?’

‘Except there’s a damp patch on the carpet just here. And it’s cold.’

Crowe turned and stared at Sherlock. ‘A what?’ A damp patch. Maybe someone spilt a glass of water.’ Crowe raised his eyebrows. ‘Interestin’. We have a case that might have contained a bottle of somethin’, and we have a damp patch where that bottle might have spilt, but what we don’t have is the bottle itself, an’ whatever else was in there with the bottle. It’s an anomaly, and anomalies are what we need right now. Things that just don’t fit.’

Sherlock wasn’t sure. ‘So what does it mean?’ The big man shrugged. Ah don’t know yet, but ah’m filing it away for later consideration, an’ ah suggest you do the same. Now, keep lookin’. Just cos you found one thing, don’t mean there ain’t more things to find.’

Sherlock spent the next ten minutes searching the rest of the room, but when he got back to the corner where he had started, he stopped. Amyus Crowe appeared to have finished with the corpse as well: he was standing back and looking around the room.

‘Did you find anything?’ Sherlock asked. Crowe shrugged. ‘Some minor points of interest. This man wasn’t well, for a start. He’d lost a lot of weight recently, an’ he was under the care of a physician. I found this -’ he said, holding up a small glass bottle with what looked like a spring-loaded button on the top. ‘I think it’s a medicine of some kind, although I’ll need to get it checked out.’

‘May I look?’ Sherlock asked. Crowe handed the bottle across. It was about the size of Sherlock’s thumb. The sprung button on the top looked as if it might be used to pump something out of the bottle in a fine spray through a small nozzle on the side. Sherlock sniffed at the nozzle, and recoiled. There was something familiar about that bitter smell, but he couldn’t quite remember what.

‘His clothes make him look like a gentleman,’ Crowe continued, ‘but the tattoos on his arms suggest he was anything but.’

Sherlock slipped the glass vial into his pocket and crossed to stand beside Crowe. The man was thin, and tiny thread veins were noticeable in his cheeks. His head was thrown back, and he was staring at the ceiling with bulging and bloodshot eyes. His skin was white, but Sherlock wasn’t sure if it was naturally like that or if it was a result of his recent death.

The white front of his shirt was now completely maroon with drying blood. A tear had been made around the level of his heart: the point where the blade had penetrated, Sherlock thought grimly.

But who had wielded the blade?

He leaned closer. There was something about that tear that had caught his attention, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

‘Spotted something?’ Crowe asked.

Sherlock hesitated. ‘I was just trying to remember what the knife looked like – the one in Mycroft’s hand.’

‘Got to confess, I never got a clear look at it,’ Crowe admitted.

‘I did,’ Sherlock said. ‘It was thin, like a letter opener, but the tear in this shirt is quite big. Bigger than the knife that I remember seeing.’

‘Interestin’,’ Crowe mused. ‘I took a quick look at the wound as well. That’s quite a size. Suggested to me that the knife had a broad blade, but if you’re sayin’ the knife that was taken away had a narrow blade… well, that’s another anomaly that needs explainin’.’

‘Could the man have struggled?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Could that have caused the blade to tear a larger hole in his shirt and… and his skin?’

‘Possible.’ Crowe thought for a moment. ‘That’s the kind of thing we might need to conduct an experiment to verify.’

‘What?’ Sherlock exclaimed. ‘You mean stab someone else, and hope they struggle?’

Crowe laughed. ‘No, I mean we get a slaughtered pig from somewhere, dress it in a shirt, an’ then one of us stabs it with a paperknife while the other one wiggles it about a bit. See if we can replicate the tear and the wound on this poor guy. Guessin’ only takes us so far – we need evidence more than anythin’.’ He gestured towards the door. ‘Go an’ see if you can find that footman – Brinnell. Bring him back here. I’ve got some questions I want to put to him.’

Sherlock made his way out to the club room. The occupants glanced up at him with irritation as he passed – they’d seen the police, and they obviously knew that something out of the ordinary was happening, but they seemed determined to pretend that everything was as calm as usual within the club’s precincts. Sherlock tried to make himself as small and as quiet as possible. He had to admit, as he wound his way through the plush green armchairs, he couldn’t work out what it was his brother saw in this club. It was the most boring place he’d ever been in – murder excepted, and he presumed that the Diogenes Club was not in the habit of playing host to murder.

He found Brinnell in the hall. The footman was looking worried. Sherlock was about to ask him to come back to the Strangers Room when Brinnell raised a finger to his lips and shushed him. Sherlock pointed at Brinnell, then back towards the Strangers Room. Brinnell nodded. He walked past Sherlock, past the stairs to a door that probably led back to the servants’ area. Within a few moments he was back with another liveried footman, this one older and balder. Leaving the man in the hall presumably to stand guard and prevent strangers from wandering in and making a noise, Brinnell followed Sherlock back through the club room.

Crowe was standing exactly where Sherlock had left him.

‘Appreciate you makin’ time to talk to us,’ he said to the footman as Sherlock closed the door. ‘I understand you’ve got a lot on right now, what with the murder and all.’

‘It’s a shocking thing,’ Brinnell said. ‘Shocking it is.’ He glanced over at the corpse. ‘And it’s us that’s got to clear it up, as well.’

‘You escorted the gentleman here to the Strangers Room, didn’t you?’

‘I did, sir. That I did.’

‘How did he approach you?’

Brinnell thought for a moment. ‘He came in through the front door, just like you gentlemen did. He handed me a card. On the back of the card he’d written the name of Mister Holmes, and another few words that I didn’t rightly recognize.’

‘What were those words?’

Brinnell frowned, struggling to remember. ‘I think it was the name of another club,’ he said, ‘but I can’t say I remember which one it was. I thought for a moment the gentleman had come to the wrong place, until I saw Mr Holmes’s name written on the back.’

Another club. For some reason the man’s words grabbed Sherlock’s attention. Another club… He filed the thought away until he could consider it in more detail.

‘So he obviously knew the workings of the Diogenes Club,’ Crowe pointed out. ‘He knew enough not to speak.’

‘I suppose he did, sir. I suppose so.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I put the card on a tray and took it to Mister Holmes. He was waiting in here already. He looked irritable, like he wasn’t expecting this man, but someone else. Irritable, that’s how he looked. I think he was about to send the bloke away, but he turned the card over and read what was on the back. He seemed to change his mind and he said: “Bring the fellow in, Brinnell.”’ So I came back, fetched the bloke and brought him through.’