He thought he could detect a trace of her perfume in the air. Strange a he hadn"t even known she wore perfume, didn"t think she was the kind of girl who would wear perfume, but if he closed his eyes he could imagine she was standing just behind him.
Just as he was about to leave, he caught a flash of colour from her pillow. He turned, and bent towards the bed.
There, on the pillow, was a single strand of her copper-red hair.
Something caught at his heart and squeezed it, hard. He suddenly felt as if he couldn"t breathe.
"Anything?" Matty called from downstairs.
"Nothing," Sherlock called back, feeling the grip on his heart relax. His voice sounded high-pitched to his own ears. "You?"
"Nothing. No food in the kitchen cupboards or the pantry. Washing-up"s all done. That means they took the food wiv "em. In my experience that definitely means they"re not comin" back."
Sherlock descended the staircase, having to duck to avoid hitting his head. As he re-entered the downstairs room his gaze focused again on the pinholes in the plaster of the opposite wall. He hadn"t realized there had been that many things pinned to the wall.
"Not a trace," Matty said. "They"re gone for good. Good riddance to them."
Sherlock shook his head violently. "Amyus Crowe wouldn"t just up and leave without saying goodbye. Even if something urgent happened and he had to go straight away, he would have left a message. And Virginia . . ." He stopped, not wanting to finish the sentence. He still wasn"t sure what feelings Virginia had for him, although he was becoming increasingly aware of his feelings for her. "Well," he finished lamely, "she would have said something as well. We need to keep looking."
Before Sherlock could move, Matty articulated Sherlock"s greatest worry. "Yeah, it must have been those two blokes in the market. They must have come here and taken Mr Crowe and Virginia. Either that or Mr Crowe somehow got wind that they were on their way, and he and Virginia scarpered. But why would someone be after Mr Crowe?"
Sherlock thought for a moment, remembering the little snippets that Amyus Crowe had let slip about his past life in America a hunting down escaped criminals after the War Between the States. "I think Mr Crowe made a lot of enemies in America. That might be why he came here with Virginia. Maybe something in his past has caught up with him."
"Must be something really scary if he ran away rather than face up to it. You know how big and how fierce he is. I can"t imagine Mr Crowe taking fright at anything less than a rampaging elephant."
Sherlock gazed across at him. "When have you ever seen an elephant?"
Matty scowled. "I seen pictures, ain"t I?"
"No, something is definitely wrong." He slammed his balled fist into his thigh angrily. "I just need to work out what it is."
"Maybe outside?" Matty suggested.
"We could take a look," Sherlock agreed. "Let"s restrict ourselves to the walls of the cottage and a couple of feet out, otherwise we"ll end up searching the whole countryside."
They headed out of the door, Sherlock automatically turning right and Matty turning left. Sherlock scanned the brick walls of the cottage and the straw roof, his gaze tracking up, down and up again as he walked. He pa.s.sed two windows and a wisteria vine that was growing out of the ground and up the wall, but he couldn"t see anything that looked out of place. He wondered if anything had been tucked into the straw of the roof, either from inside or outside, but he rejected the idea. If Amyus Crowe had left a message then he would have put it somewhere easier to access, somewhere he knew that Sherlock would look.
About halfway around the building he nearly tripped over something lying on the ground. For a moment he thought it was a snake, and he stepped back hurriedly, but it wasn"t moving, and it was too dusty and brown to be a snake. He bent down to take a look. It was a tube, made of canvas but strengthened with hoops of something inside to stop it from collapsing. It ran from a hole in the cottage wall towards a clump of gra.s.s, and vanished. Some experiment that Amyus Crowe was conducting? It was the only thing he could think of, but it didn"t give him any clues as to where Mr Crowe and Virginia had gone.
He and Matty met again on the far side of the cottage.
"Did you find anything unusual?" he asked.
"Nothing." Matty frowned for a moment. "Apart from a dead rabbit. Well, most of a dead rabbit. The head was missing."
"Where was it? Just lying on the ground?"
Matty shook his head. "It had been buried under a pile of logs. Looked like it was deliberately put there, but I can"t imagine why."
Sherlock let the thought chase itself around his head for a while. "A dead rabbit without its head?" he said eventually. "I have to confess, if it"s a message then it"s a very cryptic one." He sighed. "Come on, let"s keep going. We"ll meet again by the front door."
"But you"ve already done this next bit," Matty complained, "and I"ve already done the bit you"re about to do!"
"Two pairs of eyes are better than one. I might have missed something that you"ll pick up, and vice versa. Come on a it"ll only take a few more minutes."
They separated and recommenced their search. Sherlock found nothing that Matty had missed. He stopped and stared at the dead rabbit for a while, as it lay sprawled on the gra.s.s by a pile of split logs that Amyus Crowe had probably intended for the stove, but it didn"t tell him anything. Apart from the fact that its head was missing, it was just a dead rabbit. The countryside was full of them.
Matty was already waiting for him when he reached the front door. He raised his eyebrow enquiringly. Sherlock shook his head. Matty shrugged, indicating that he hadn"t found anything that Sherlock had missed. "Saw some kind of tube thing," he said, "but that was it."
Disconsolately Sherlock led the way back inside. He looked around the bare room, hands on hips. "I keep getting the feeling that I"m missing something," he said in a frustrated tone.
"If you"re missing something, then there"s no chance I"ll get it," Matty said.
"Don"t belittle yourself. You"ve got a good eye for detail," Sherlock said. He stared once again at the wall with the pinholes in it, trying not to look at the details a the individual holes a but the entire thing. "Matty, I think there"s some kind of message there."
Matty stared at him, then at the wall. "You"re seeing things."
"Yes, I am. Have you got a pen?"
"Do I look like the kind of bloke who goes around with a pen in his pocket?"
Sherlock sighed. "A pencil then?"
"The same."
"A knife?"
"That," Matty said, "I can help you with." He reached into a pocket and brought out the knife he had used on the tanning vat earlier. "Here. Don"t break it."
"I won"t." Sherlock walked over to the wall. He stared at it for a few moments, trying to recreate the things that had been pinned there in his mind. "There was a big map over here, wasn"t there?" He pointed with the blade at part of the wall.
"I s"pose."
"All right." Using the blade like a pen, scratching the surface of the plaster, Sherlock joined up four pinholes in a rectangle that was, as far as he could judge, the right size, shape and position. "That"s the map. There were two bits of paper over here, to the right." Quickly gaining confidence, he selected two sets of four pinholes and joined them up as well. He now had three separate rectangles on the wall. "I remember there being some things up here. Pictures, I think."
"They were at an angle," Matty pointed out. Sherlock picked out four pinholes that seemed to match his memory, but Matty shook his head. ""Bout an inch to the left," he said. "No, not there a down a bit . . . Yeah, that"s it."
Progressively, Sherlock connected up the various pinholes until he had a recreation of everything that had been fastened to the wall. Some items had been attached to the plaster with just one pin rather than four, and in those cases Sherlock put an X to show that he had taken the whole item into account.
He stood back to look at his handiwork. The plaster was now covered with a series of overlapping scratches and Xs.
"You"ve missed some," Matty pointed out.
"No," Sherlock replied, "I haven"t. Those pinholes are new."
"Are you sure?"
"I"m very sure. Look closely at them."
Matty moved towards the wall, squinting.
"No, Sherlock said, "move backwards. Try and look past the wall, and ignore the holes that I"ve marked."
Matty shook his head, but he complied. His eyes suddenly widened in surprise. "It"s an arrow!" he cried.
"Precisely," Sherlock said. He followed Matty"s gaze. There, marked out in pinholes that had no connection with anything that had been pinned to the wall a new pinholes that had presumably been made especially a was an arrow pointing towards the window.
Both boys followed the direction of the arrow and stared through the window at the green landscape outside. "Is that the way they went?" Matty asked dubiously. "If so, I"m not sure it"s much help."
"Closer than that," Sherlock said. "That"s the window leading out to the paddock where Virginia kept Sandia. Mr Crowe is telling us to look out in the paddock. He"s left a message for us there."
Matty shrugged. "Seems a lot of palaver to go to when he could have just left a note pinned the wall."
"Like you said, if he"d left a note, then anyone could have found it," Sherlock pointed out. "He"s left a clue pointing to a note." He held out Matty"s knife. "Here, thanks."
Matty shrugged. "Keep it," he said. "The way things go, you"ll probably need it more than I do."
Together the two boys headed out of the cottage and into the open. Sherlock led the way to the fenced-off area of ground that had been visible through the window. They climbed over the gate.
"Where do we start?" Matty asked, looking around the gra.s.sy area. "I don"t see anything obvious."
"It won"t be obvious," Sherlock pointed out. "Mr Crowe would have hidden it so it wouldn"t be found." He thought for a moment. "If I had some string we could mark off a grid of squares and search each square individually, so we knew we"d covered all the ground. Without that, there"s a risk that we"ll miss something by accident."
"Tell you what," Matty suggested, "let"s you and me start at opposite sides and walk forward, looking at the ground, until we meet. We take a step to the side, turn around and each walk towards the fence again. Then we turn around, take a step to the side, and do it again. That way we"ll work in strips across the field and we won"t miss anything."
"Sounds like a plan." Sherlock nodded. "Let"s do it."
So for the next half hour they progressively moved together and apart across the field, each one meticulously examining the ground as they walked, checking each clump of gra.s.s, each rabbit hole and each pile of manure that Virginia"s horse had left behind. Sherlock"s back began to ache after a few minutes, thanks to the uncomfortable position that he was forced to adopt: bent over and taking small steps. He imagined that from some distant vantage point he and Matty looked like chickens checking the field for corn.
"I"ve got something!" Matty exclaimed.
"What is it?"
Matty lifted something from the ground and held it up. It was made of a grey metal.
"It"s a fork," Sherlock pointed out.
"I know it"s a fork. Could it be important?"
Sherlock shrugged. "Leave it where you found it. We may have to dig if we can"t find anything else."
Five minutes later it was Sherlock"s turn to make a discovery. "Matty a over here!"
Matty stuck the fork into the ground, and then ran over to where Sherlock was crouching. "What is it?"
Sherlock indicated a root-edged hole that led away at an angle into the earth. "I think it"s a rabbit hole."
"Congratulations. I"ve already found five of them."
"But this one has something in it." Sherlock reached into the hole, to the object he"d caught sight of in the shadows. His fingers encountered something that was simultaneously furry and sticky. Taking a grip, he pulled it out.
It was a rabbit"s head, the severed neck covered in blood.
"A rabbit"s head in a rabbit hole," Matty commented drily. "Ain"t that an unexpected turn of events? Are you trying to tell me that a fox took Mr Crowe and Virginia away?"
"You see," Sherlock replied, "but you do not understand. Look at the neck."
Matty considered it, then nodded in understanding. "It"s been sliced off with a sharp blade, not bitten through or ripped off." He thought for a moment. "This must be the head that goes with the body we found back at the cottage. Even so a it could have been taken off a kitchen table by a fox or a stoat and just . . . left here."
"I don"t think so. An animal, if it had stolen this thing, would have eaten some of it. There would be teeth marks. As it is, it looks like someone has just cut it off and put it straight in this hole."
Matty turned his attention from Sherlock back to the rabbit"s head. "Pretty fresh," he admitted. "Probably less than a day old."
"It"s a message," Sherlock said thoughtfully, "but the question is, what kind of message is it?" He paused for a moment. "No," he went on, "the real question is, are there any more messages apart from this one?"
Matty looked around and sighed. "You mean we have to finish searching the field?"
"We do. Just because we find one thing, it doesn"t mean there aren"t other things to find."
"I was afraid you might say that."
Leaving the bloodied head where it was, Sherlock and Matty continued their search, combing through the gra.s.s for anything that might have been left or dropped. It was another three-quarters of an hour before they found themselves searching along the far fence.
"Nothing?" Matty asked as they walked back to the cottage.
"Nothing," Sherlock agreed. "Either it"s the rabbit head, or there"s nothing here."
Matty looked over to where they"d left the head. "I can"t see how there can be a message there, unless Mr Crowe"s written it on a small piece of paper and shoved it in the thing"s mouth. That would just be sick."
"It"s not the head itself," Sherlock replied, "or, at least, I don"t think it is. It"s more likely to be something to do with its placement, or just its existence. I don"t think Mr Crowe had time to do anything complicated, like write a note. He just had time to make some pinholes in the wall pointing out here, and then throw the head into a hole."
"He had time to catch and kill a rabbit," Matty pointed out.
"I think it was already there. I think he probably caught it earlier and was preparing it for a meal a taking the head off, gutting it and skinning it. I think that something happened to make him want to leave, and after clearing out the cottage of everything he and Virginia owned he only had a few moments to come up with a message."
Matty sighed in frustration. "Yeah, but what is it? I think he had more faith in us than was warranted."
"A rabbit"s head in a hole," Sherlock mused, trying to provoke some movement in his head, some sudden revelation that might only occur if he kept on repeating the obvious.
"Burrow," Matty murmured as they entered the cottage.
"Sorry?"
"It"s a burrow, not a hole. Rabbits have burrows, foxes have dens and badgers have setts. You"re normally the one who likes to get words right a you need to learn these things."
"A rabbit"s head in a burrow," Sherlock corrected. That elusive thought in his head finally started running. "A head in a burrow. Matty, you"re a genius!"
"I am?" the boy said, surprised.