Andrew Lane - Black Ice

‘Drive on past,’ Crowe called to the driver. ‘Drop us off on the corner of the street.’

The cabbie brought his horse to a halt where Crowe had indicated. Crowe paid, and the two of them got down from the cab.

‘Don’t look directly at the building,’ Crowe instructed. ‘Just stand here and talk for a few seconds. Let’s absorb any impressions we get.’

‘Call me stupid,’ Sherlock said, ‘but I get the impression it is a museum. It doesn’t look like it’s a front for anything.’

‘It might just have been a convenient meeting place,’ Crowe mused. ‘Something chosen almost at random, rather than the headquarters of a conspiracy. If so, we’re not going to discover anything here, and we’ve pretty much run out of evidence to follow.’

‘The least we can do is look around,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘We might see something, or hear something, or someone might remember seeing a woman in a veil.’

‘Good point, well made,’ Crowe said.

Crowe led the way towards the front door, to all intents and purposes a father taking his son out for the day.

They entered an empty lobby from which a stairway led up and then split left and right. It could have been the entrance hall of any reasonably large town house, if not for the huge glass case that filled the centre of the tiled floor. Inside the case was a reasonably accurate representation of a section of woodland, and populating it were various stuffed animals: a fox, several stoats, numerous mice, rats and voles, and one rather tatty otter which looked as if it belonged somewhere else entirely. The animals were posed in positions of startled alertness, as if they had been caught in the middle of investigating an unexpected and loud noise. Their glassy black eyes seemed to be staring in all directions.

A man in a blue uniform and a blue peaked cap approached them. ‘Would you like two tickets, sir?’ he said. ‘Just tuppence apiece, and you can stay as long as you want. Very quiet at the moment.’

‘Thank you,’ Crowe said, handing the man a couple of coins. ‘What can you recommend in the way of exhibits?’

The man considered for a moment. ‘The small mammal gallery, up and to your right, is often praised for its veracity. Alternatively, the amphibian gallery up and to your left has a number of unusual specimens which the kids seem to love.’

‘We’ll split up,’ Crowe said as the man moved off. ‘Ah’ll do amphibians, you do mammals. Meet back here in half an hour and if we haven’t discovered anything of interest then we can move on to another gallery.’

‘What counts as something of interest?’

‘Like ah said back at the Diogenes Club – anything that doesn’t fit. Anything that stands out.’

‘In a museum of stuffed animals?’

Crowe had the grace to smile. ‘It’s all to do with context. In the street, a dog walking past isn’t unusual. In a museum of stuffed animals, it is.’

‘All right,’ Sherlock said dubiously.

They climbed the first set of marble steps together, then separated where the stairs went left and right. Sherlock went right, Crowe left.

The stairs led to a balcony that ran around the upper space of the entrance hall. The balcony was edged with a waist-high balustrade of stone. Doors led off to what were presumably different halls of exhibits. A chandelier of cut-glass droplets and candles hung from the centre of the ceiling.

Sherlock headed through the first door. Beyond, he found himself in a long room which was broken up by a series of glass cabinets so that he couldn’t get a view all the way down. A skylight in the roof let in bright sunlight. He could hear voices somewhere in the room, but he couldn’t see anyone else.

He set off towards the far end, walking around the cases where he had to and briefly checking each of them out. As the attendant had said, this was the small mammal gallery. A ferret, poised perkily in an arrangement of dried grasses, was in a case next to a large, tan-coloured cat with tufted ears that was sitting on a flat stretch of desert sand. A badger, vividly striped in black and white, emerged tentatively from a burrow just a few feet away from a fox with absurdly large ears padding forever across a landscape of artificial ice and snow. Presumably it all made sense to someone.

Sherlock stopped beside the badger for a moment. The sight of the animal took him back to Farnham, and the dead badger he had used to distract Baron Maupertuis’s guard dog. At the time that had seemed about as bad as life could get. If only he’d known…

He passed cases of various rats and mice, cats and miniature dogs before he got to the end. Their emotionless eyes seemed to track him as he passed. The doorway at the end led out into a smaller hall with two doors leading off it. He chose one at random, and went through.

A figure loomed over him, arms upraised, vicious spikes emerging from its hands. He jerked backwards, nearly falling, before he realized that the figure was in a case and the spikes on the hands were actually claws. It wasn’t the bearded man from Waterloo Station. Straightening up, he brushed at his jacket self-consciously. It was a bear of some kind, with a tangled brown pelt and a muzzle that had been treated in some way to appear wet. It was bigger than Amyus Crowe, and that was saying something.

The room over which the bear stood guard contained a handful of larger cases. As well as the bear there was an elk with spreading, branch-like antlers, several wild boar with coarse bristles and tusks posed in a family group, and what seemed to be a cow so covered with long brown hair that Sherlock couldn’t even make out its eyes.

The door at the end led into yet another room. Sherlock was beginning to feel as if he was in a maze of some kind. As well as glass cases along the walls, it had cases in the centre. Each held a bird of some kind, and from what Sherlock could see they were all birds of prey.

The nearest case contained a lone eagle, set into a noble pose. Its wooden backdrop had been painted to represent a cloudless blue sky and distant mountains.

Sherlock moved further into the room. He heard something moving – the scrape of a shoe against the floor. Someone was obviously in the room with him, although he couldn’t hear any voices. Maybe it was a lone visitor.

He passed several cases containing owls of various types. They were sitting on branches – possibly real, possibly made of plaster of Paris; Sherlock couldn’t tell. Their claws encircled the branches: sharp killing weapons wrapped in scaled skin, designed to punch into the body of their prey and lift it up so the birds could fly away to their nests and feast.

As he went by, he thought he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He quickly turned to look. The birds were all staring at him. Hadn’t their heads been turned towards the door when he entered? Now they were facing into the centre of the room. Or was it something about owls that made it difficult to tell which way they were looking?

Something fluttered across the other side of the room. Was there a bird, a real bird, trapped in the room? A sparrow, or a pigeon, or something?

The next few cases contained an assortment of birds of prey. Sherlock spotted hawks, falcons, ospreys and several types of bird that he didn’t even recognize.

Even though they were dead and stuffed, there was something eerie about the birds, more so than the small mammals or the larger animals. Maybe feathers just looked more realistic than fur when what was underneath was stuffing rather than flesh and bone. Or maybe there was something about the shape of their skulls and the lack of body fat that meant the process of taxidermy left them looking as if they might at any moment just twist their heads and start preening, or stretch their wings to get the kinks out of their muscles. Even though their eyes were made of glass beads too, Sherlock thought he could detect a coldness in them, a dangerousness. The mice and the voles looked at passers-by as predators; the birds in this room looked at passers-by as prey.