‘If he’s here at all,’ Matty pointed out. ‘After all, you’ve only got a dead rabbit’s head pointing you here. It’s not much to go on. I still reckon we might have gone off in completely the wrong direction.’
‘Despite Rufus vanishing?’ Sherlock asked.
Matty shrugged. ‘You’ve got a point. The clue was probably a good one, but now that it’s got us here, what do we do? Wait for another one to come along?’
‘Matty,’ Sherlock said slowly, ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – you may not be a genius, but you can bring out the genius in those around you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Amyus Crowe left a clue that would bring us to Edinburgh, if we understood it properly. Why did he do that? We’ve not asked ourselves that question yet.’
‘Because he wanted us to follow him,’ Matty replied.
‘Exactly. He wanted us to follow him. He wasn’t just saying “Goodbye – I’m off to Edinburgh!” He wanted us to know exactly where he was heading, and the only reason for that was because he wanted us to come after him. He wants our help. Now we’re here, he’s not going to leave us dangling. He’ll leave another clue around, one that will lead us right to where he is.’
‘Why couldn’t he do that from the start?’ Matty asked.
‘Because all he knew was that he and Virginia were heading to Edinburgh. Once he was here he would find somewhere to settle down in peace – somewhere he wouldn’t be detected. Not a hotel then. More likely a cottage somewhere outside the town that he could rent. Once he knew his address, he would find a way of letting us know.’
‘But he doesn’t know where we are,’ Matty pointed out.
‘So he would leave a message somewhere that we could see it no matter where in the town we ended up.’ He thought back to the newspaper that he had read on the train. In particular he remembered the page of classified advertisements that had so fascinated him: messages from one person to another, or one person to a group of people, either in plain language or in code. ‘He’ll place a classified advertisement in the local newspaper,’ he said with certainty. ‘He knows that’s one of the places I’ll look.’
‘But what if we missed it? What if he put the message in yesterday?’
Sherlock shook his head. ‘He wouldn’t know what day we were going to be here. If I know Amyus Crowe, he would pay for the advert to be in all week.’
Matty nodded. Either what Sherlock had said made perfect sense to him or he was willing to take it on trust. ‘Then let’s get a local newspaper. Let’s get all of them.’
‘How many are there?’ Sherlock asked, wondering if they were going to have to plough their way through ten or twelve newspapers, or whether Amyus Crowe would have put the advertisement in all of them.
‘Three,’ Matty said. He turned to go, then turned back. ‘You’ll have to read ’em,’ he pointed out, ‘cos I can’t read. And I ain’t got any money on me, so you’ll have to buy ’em as well.’
They found a newspaper vendor just outside the park and bought copies of all three Edinburgh newspapers for that day, then went back into the park and sat on a bench where Sherlock could read them. He couldn’t help but notice that the Edinburgh murder story – the one he’d seen in the copy of The Times on the train – was the front-page story on all three papers. The first one – the Edinburgh Herald – was representative of them alclass="underline"
Edinburgh police this morning arrested a suspect in the murder by poison of the eccentric businessman Sir Benedict Ventham. Sources close to the police have told us that the suspect in question is a Miss Aggie Macfarlane, cook to the late Sir Benedict and – this newspaper has discovered – sister to the notorious criminal and leader of the Black Reavers Gang, Gahan Macfarlane. It is believed that she slipped poison into his food, for reasons that only she knows at the moment.
The Black Reavers? The name of the gang struck a chord in Sherlock’s mind. It made them sound dangerous, even sinister. He was about to move on to the classified section of the newspaper when he spotted the name again, this time in a report directly beneath the paragraphs on Sir Benedict Ventham’s poisoning:
FIRE DEVASTATES LOCAL GREENGROCERS
The premises of Messrs MacPherson and Cargill, greengrocers, of Princes Street were burned down last night in a fearsome conflagration of apocalyptic proportions. Bystanders fought the blaze for nearly three hours with buckets of water taken from the nearby river, with little success. No casualties are reported, as the blaze occurred during the hours of darkness. MacPherson and Cargill’s had been a local fixture for over fifty years. Our reporter was informed, by several members of the local populace, who wished to remain anonymous, that the greengrocers had recently become a target of the notorious Black Reavers – a local criminal gang of grim repute who demand money with menaces from local businesses . . .
He moved on to the classified section. It wasn’t as large as the one in The Times – barely half a page. Most of the advertisements seemed to be from households requiring a maid, a cook or a butler (‘references essential’), with a handful advertising lost property (‘Found in King’s Street, a lady’s brooch – emeralds set in gold. Prospective owners must apply in writing with full description of item before collection can be arranged’). Nothing struck him as being the kind of thing that Amyus Crowe would have written.
Just in case, he checked the letters pages as well. These mostly seemed to be complaints about factual inaccuracies in previous editions of the paper, or comments on the lack of manners of the lower classes, but one letter in particular caught his eye, and he read it out to Matty:
SIR,
I write with reference to the spate of sightings recently of men and women within the city limits who can only be described as ‘deceased and yet still moving’. Such events are an affront to God and speak to the perilous moral state of the population of this city. I draw to the attention of your readers the following biblical quotations:
Isaiah 26:19: ‘Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead.’
Revelation 20:13: ‘And the sea gave up the dead that were in it; and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.’
I ask them to consider: does this not indicate that Armageddon is near, and that God will soon judge us all? Repent your sins, before it is too late!
Yours faithfully, Geo. Thribb Esq.
The letter made Sherlock think about the two skeletal figures that he’d seen – the one in the tavern the night before and the one in the street only half an hour ago. Was this what the letter was referring to? Was there a spate of people who looked like dead bodies walking the streets and, if so, what did it mean?
He pushed the thought aside. Interesting though these speculations were, they didn’t help with the immediate task – finding Amyus Crowe and Virginia, or Rufus Stone.
In the Edinburgh Star the classified adverts were skewed more towards notifications of upcoming dances (or ‘cèilidhean’, as they seemed to be known), lost pets and horses for sale. One in particular caught his attention: ‘Parakeet missing, can recite entirety of Hamlet and selected poems of Tennyson. Reward paid for return.’ A parrot that could recite the whole of Hamlet? Sherlock couldn’t believe it.