Andrew Lane - Black Ice

Sherlock scrabbled in his pockets for some coins. The toll was just a penny. He paid as he squeezed past the toll-collector and kept going, catching up with his quarry.

The small man just kept on walking, without looking backwards or to left or right.

At the other side of the bridge, he walked towards what Sherlock recognized as Waterloo Station, but instead of going into the station he turned left. Sherlock followed, trying to hide himself behind other people in case the man turned round.

He didn’t turn round, but he did suddenly turn right, into an archway.

When Sherlock got to the archway, he paused, and peered round the edge of the crumbling brickwork. The interior of the arch was in shadow, and he couldn’t see the man.

He took a step forward, then another, until he was half in and half out of the light. Still no sign of the man.

Sherlock turned round, ready to head back to meet Amyus Crowe.

The small man with the long, stringy hair was standing right behind him.

‘You’ve been following me,’ he said. ‘I want to hear you tell me why. And then, just for giggles, I want to hear you scream.’

‘You got a penny, mister?’ Sherlock whined, trying to look smaller than he was. ‘I ain’t eaten for days. Just a penny for a piece of bread.’

‘Don’t come the coney-catcher with me,’ the man snarled. ‘I ain’t buyin’ it.’

‘All right,’ Sherlock said in his normal voice, straightening up. ‘So what is a coney-catcher, then?’

The man grinned. His teeth were black stubs. ‘You want to know what a coney is? A coney is a rabbit that’s been raised for the cooking pot, so it’s tame and won’t run away when you come to break its neck. A coney-catcher is a man who pretends to catch a coney – a man who makes something easy look difficult.’

‘Oh, a con man,’ Sherlock said.

‘Exactly. Now we’ve got that out of the way, why are you following me?’

‘I wasn’t following you!’ Sherlock protested.

The man raised a bushy eyebrow. ‘Remember, I can see through every garment of pretence you care to put on, sonny. You started following me outside the theatre, and you’ve been with me ever since. What I want to know is, why?’ He looked Sherlock up and down. ‘You’re not a flimp.’ He noticed Sherlock’s expression. ‘A pickpocket,’ he clarified. ‘So what is it you’re after?’

‘I’m not after anything.’

‘You followed me through London, across Waterloo Bridge and down here, into the tunnels.’

‘Coincidence,’ Sherlock said.

‘No such thing.’ He shrugged. ‘You don’t have to tell me now, if you don’t want to. I can just as easily beat it out of you. I’d enjoy that. It’s been a while since I did some serious damage to a body. I’ve been following instructions, keeping my head down. I ain’t seen the claret flow for a few weeks now, and I’m nostalgic.’

‘The claret?’ Sherlock asked, knowing that he wasn’t going to like the answer.

‘Blood, sonny. Blood.’ He slipped his hand into his pocket. When it emerged, he was holding two metal objects that clinked together. ‘Best as I can figure it, either you work for one of the local gangs and they want to know what’s going on in the theatre, or you’ve spotted something odd at the theatre and you’re hoping that you can sell a tale to the Peelers for a few coppers.’ He slipped the fingers of his right hand through one of the metal objects. It looked to Sherlock like a collection of rings, fastened together and covered with spikes which pointed outward, rising up from his knuckles. ‘Either way, your curiosity is going to cost you dearly.’ He slipped the other metal object over the fingers of his left hand, and raised his fists so that Sherlock could see. The sparse light gleamed off the metal spikes. His hands had been transformed into deadly weapons that could slice Sherlock’s face apart if they even came close. ‘Now, let’s make a start, shall we? I ain’t got long. Things to do, people to see.’

Sherlock started backing away, heart beating faster. The man was blocking the route out of the arches, but there was bound to be another way, somewhere behind him, in the darkness. Sherlock just had to find it.

The man smiled coldly. He slipped a hand inside his coat pocket, the spikes on his knuckledusters catching on the fabric as he did so. The hand came out again with a bunch of silvery coins held between the fingers.

‘Half a crown for the first person to bring the kid to me!’ he called out. ‘You hear? You can live like a lord for a month on that, if you want. Half a crown, and I don’t even care if anything’s broken. Just as long as he can still answer my questions.’

The air around Sherlock seemed to rustle, as if it had a life of its own. He’d thought that he and the bearded man were alone in the arches underneath Waterloo Station, but the darkness moved, separating itself into five, six, ten small figures. They seemed to step out of the walls and pull themselves out of the squishy ground. They were small – smaller than Sherlock, smaller than his friend Matty – and their skin, where it could be seen through clothes that were more rips than rags, was grey with dirt and grease that had been ground in for so long that it had become a part of them. Children. Tunnel-dwellers, with no families and no way of surviving apart from scavenging in the dirt for things dropped by passing passengers. Their eyes were large and dark, like rats’, and the nails on their fingers and what he could see of their toes were sharp and long and encrusted with dirt. Their mouths were ragged: blistered, split lips stretched tight over diseased gums. What few teeth remained in those mouths were blackened and jagged, like ancient mountains. The children couldn’t even stand up straight: they spent so long scrabbling through narrow tunnels and searching through the mud and slime for dropped coins that they were hunched and bent. Their arms and legs were thin and twisted like branches, but their stomachs were strangely swollen. Straggly hair hung around their faces. He couldn’t even tell which ones were boys and which ones girls: the dirt and the starvation made them look the same. And the smell: dear Lord, the sheer stench of rot and decay that poured off them, so intense that Sherlock could almost see the air rippling around them.

How could people live like this, he asked himself as he backed away. There was nothing in their eyes as they moved towards him apart from a voracious hunger. To them, he was nothing but a way to secure the next meal.

His perception kept shifting. For a second or two they were monsters, creatures of the night ready to swarm over him and take him down, and then suddenly they were children, driven to desperate things by hunger. He felt his emotions swing frantically between horror and sympathy. How could people – how could children – be allowed to live like this? It was wrong.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said, still moving backwards. The feral children cocked their heads at the words, but he wasn’t sure they’d understood. Or, if they’d understood, that they cared. All they knew was that the big man with the beard would pay riches for Sherlock to be bought to him, and if they had to break Sherlock’s arms and legs to stop him getting away then that was just the way it had to be.

Sherlock had a feeling they’d done worse things, there in the darkness.

He turned to run, but there were four – no, five – of the children behind him. They had appeared noiselessly out of the shadows.

A hand caught at his sleeve. He recoiled, pulling the material from the thin fingers and hearing the fabric rip beneath the sharp nails.

He was surrounded.

In the light that spilt in from the street, Sherlock could see the bulky shadow of the bearded man. And he could hear him laughing.