Snake Bite (19 page)

Cameron was shaking with suppressed fury, and his face was white. He obviously wanted to take his revenge on the snake, and was feeling cheated. ‘Where
is
it?’ he kept on
asking. ‘Where
is
it?’

‘It’s gone to the same place it went in Wu Chung’s house,’ Sherlock said.

‘Are you
sure
it’s the same snake?’

‘Oh, I’m sure. I just don’t know whether
we
are following
it
around or
it
is following
us
around.’

Cameron glanced at him. ‘How can either of those things be? Snakes are stupid. They can’t think for themselves.’

‘Indeed,’ Sherlock murmured. ‘Strange, isn’t it?’ He glanced up guiltily, aware that he was ignoring the tragedy of Malcolm Mackenzie’s death and
concentrating more on the interesting problem posed by the snake, but Cameron didn’t seem to notice.

The door suddenly opened and Harris appeared. He ushered in a smaller man with a pointed white beard and a ruff of white hair around his otherwise bald head. ‘Ah, young Cameron,’ he
said, spotting Sherlock’s friend. ‘A tragedy. A real tragedy. Your father – good man. Always thought so.’ He cocked his head to one side and stared at Sherlock. ‘I
don’t know you. Do I know you?’

‘Sherlock Holmes – I’m a friend of Cameron.’

‘Ah. Yes. Good.’ He seemed to notice Malcolm Mackenzie for the first time, and he crossed to the body, checking it over carefully. ‘You have, I presume, looked for the serpent?
I would hate to find it lurking down a sleeve or something.’

‘It’s not in the room,’ Sherlock confirmed. In fact, he had examined Cameron’s father’s body quickly while his friend had been distracted. The snake hadn’t
been hiding in his lap, in his clothes or anywhere else around the body.

‘How’s Mother?’ Cameron asked quietly as Dr Forbes took out a stethoscope and listened to Malcolm Mackenzie’s chest for any trace of a heartbeat.

‘Looked in on her briefly,’ the doctor muttered. ‘Strong woman. Needs a barbiturate to help her sleep. Obviously distraught.’ He glanced at Cameron. ‘What about
you, young fellow. How’re you feeling?’

‘Shocked,’ Cameron admitted. ‘Confused. Scared.’

‘All quite normal reactions.’

Sherlock indicated the body. ‘I presume . . . ?’

Forbes shook his head. ‘No trace of life, I’m afraid. Looking at the swelling and the redness around the wounds, I can tell it was a poisonous snake. Probably caused a heart attack
straight away. Poor man.’

‘That’s not what happened to Wu Chung,’ Sherlock mused. When he saw Dr Forbes raise an eyebrow he added, ‘Another man was bitten earlier today – a local Chinese
man. He died as well, but it took a lot longer.’

Forbes frowned. ‘Might have been a different type of snake. Different venom.’

‘On the contrary,’ Sherlock said, ‘we think not only was it the same type of snake, we think it was the same
actual
snake.’

‘Then the venom should have worked in exactly the same way.’

‘That’s a good point,’ Sherlock said. ‘If it
was
the same snake then something changed between then and now. I wonder what it was.’

Dr Forbes stepped back from the desk. ‘I’m afraid there is nothing I can do, young man,’ he said. ‘Your father has been dead for a while now. I will fill in the death
certificate to say that he was bitten by a venomous snake. The local authorities will need to be alerted, and they may wish to make their own investigation . . . I can do that, if you wish.’
He grimaced. ‘So sorry. Tragic. Very tragic. Your father was a good man. I’ll have the servants move the body to a bedroom, where it can lie peacefully until the funeral arrangements
can be made.’

Forbes left the room. Sherlock and Cameron were silent for a few moments.

‘I should be doing something,’ Cameron said. ‘I should be arranging the funeral, or comforting Mother, or organizing the servants. After all, I’m the man of the house
now.’ His face seemed to crumple, and he looked smaller: a vulnerable child. ‘What’s going to happen to us? With Father gone the business is finished.’

‘Perhaps you could go back to America,’ Sherlock suggested lamely. ‘I’m sure your father has built up quite a bit of money from his business. Your mother might want to
move back home, near her own family if she has any. And you’ve always wanted to see America.’

Cameron nodded slowly. ‘Maybe.’ He shook himself. ‘I’ll go and check on Mother, and I’ll make sure that the local authorities know what’s going on. I’ll
send a message to the local Catholic priest as well. I’m sure he can advise on what we need to do about a funeral.’

He walked out, leaving Sherlock behind.

Moments later Harris and two male Chinese servants entered the room. The servants were carrying a stretcher – a length of canvas with a bamboo pole running along each side – and
Harris had a folded sheet in his hand.

Harris nodded his head to Sherlock. ‘We were instructed to . . .’

‘. . . take Mr Mackenzie’s body to his bedroom,’ Sherlock completed when the butler hesitated. ‘That’s all right. Do you need a hand?’

Harris shook his head. ‘I believe we can manage, sir.’ He indicated the stretcher. ‘It’s been in a store cupboard for years. Nobody can remember why it was there. Good
thing we had it.’

As Sherlock watched, Harris and the two servants gently lifted Malcolm Mackenzie’s body from the chair and laid it on the stretcher. Once it had been arranged, hands on chest, Harris
carefully placed the sheet on top of the body, hiding it from view. Harris directed the two servants to take an end each. They picked up the stretcher with some effort, and Harris led the way
out.

Sherlock watched them go, feeling strangely useless. Everyone seemed to be doing something, apart from him.

He glanced around the room, waiting to see if anything caught his eye. He was remembering Amyus Crowe’s dictum about looking for things that stood out, things that were unusual.

Eventually Sherlock wandered across to the window, more out of boredom than for any other reason. He wanted to check that it really was closed, that nothing could have got in or out. He ran his
hands around the edges of the frame, and pressed against the glass experimentally, but there was no looseness, no give. The window was completely sealed.

He looked around the room, letting his eyes flick across things without really taking them in, hoping that something would spring out at him. And something did. He suddenly noticed a smeared
mark on the floor by the door. For a second he thought it was dirt tracked into the room by him, or Cameron, or Dr Forbes, but the smear was to the left of the door frame, close to the wall. He
walked over and knelt down, taking a closer look. Now that he was nearer, he could see that the smear was in the shape of a footprint. He could clearly see the impression of the toes, and the ball
of the foot. He would have assumed that it was a child’s footprint except for some marks in the carpet in front of the toes. The marks looked like they had been left by claws –
something sharp that had dug into the carpet and caught the fibres.

He rocked back on his heels, thinking. A child with claws? An animal of some kind that left footprints like a child? What exactly was he dealing with here?

He remembered the thing he had seen – or almost seen – in the garden and then following Cameron’s father through Shanghai. Had it been in Malcolm Mackenzie’s study? It
seemed likely, but what was it, and what did it want?

He searched around, but there were no other marks that he could see anywhere across the carpet. Just here. There was no way of tracing the creature’s comings and goings.

He straightened up and was about to leave the room when it occurred to him that the papers on the desk were in a mess. The rest of the room was neat, and he didn’t want Cameron or Mrs
Mackenzie to walk in at some later time, see the papers scattered everywhere and be reminded that they were the last thing that Malcolm Mackenzie had touched. If Sherlock just put them into a neat
pile, at least that would be something. At least he would feel that he was contributing towards helping the family at their time of crisis.

He walked back to the desk and scooped up a handful of papers. They were upside down. He turned them over, on the basis that he might be able to put them into some kind of order while he tidied
them. He certainly didn’t want to read them – they were probably something to do with Malcolm Mackenzie’s business arrangements – but they might be numbered or
something.

He glanced at the top sheet, and his heart skipped a beat.

It was one of the sheets that he had seen in Mr Arrhenius’s cabin, on board the
Gloria Scott
– one of the diagrams that had looked like a spider’s web. Quickly he
riffled through the remaining sheets. They were all similar – all diagrams that looked like various combinations of lines and circles crossing and recrossing each other. He spread them out on
the table, fascinated by them. What on earth did they mean?

Sherlock’s keen gaze scanned across the diagrams, looking for common elements, trying to see how they were constructed. The sheets of paper themselves were large but the paper was thin
– almost translucent. If he held one up to the window then it seemed to glow with the light shining through it.

Each sheet had a large number of small circles drawn on it in ink. The circles were about the size of a coin. Each circle had two straight lines coming out of it in different directions, and the
lines criss-crossed their way across the paper, forming triangles, parallelograms, rectangles and other more exotic geometric shapes. Except . . . no: he suddenly saw that two of the circles only
had one line coming out of them, and seeing that made him realize that the lines actually formed a
path.
If he put his forefinger on one of the two circles that only had one line coming out
of it, then he could
follow
that line across the sheet to a second circle, then follow another line to a third circle, and so on until he finally ended up at the other circle that only had
one line coming out of it – or, in this case, going into it. It was a journey, but what did it mean? What was it trying to tell him?

He glanced at all of the pages in turn. He held them up to the light in pairs, trying to see if any of them were the same, or even slightly similar, but they were all different. Although they
all consisted of small circles and long lines, all the circles and lines were in different places.

These were definitely the diagrams that Mr Arrhenius had kept in his cabin – the ones the pirate had been looking for. Sherlock had been right when he’d told Cameron that they were
what the Dutchman had delivered to Cameron’s father the night before. But why? Sherlock racked his brains. Were they some kind of coded message that was meant for Malcolm Mackenzie to see
– something that only he could decode, and that would look like gibberish to anyone who came across them by accident? Was decoding them the work that Malcolm Mackenzie had talked about over
breakfast, when he had got so irritable and angry? If so, it indicated that whatever message was hidden inside the diagrams was important. So important that, when he had decoded it, Mackenzie had
headed straight for the Shanghai Prefect’s Residence to tell him.

And then he had died. By accident? Sherlock was beginning to think not.

‘What are you doing?’ It was Cameron, standing inside the door and staring at Sherlock.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Difficult to tell,’ Cameron said. ‘I feel like I’m just being moved around at the moment, although I’m not sure what’s doing the moving. What about
you?’

‘I think I’ve found some kind of coded message,’ Sherlock explained. He gestured to Cameron to come over, and quickly explained his reasoning.

Cameron gazed at the diagrams, frowning. ‘They don’t mean anything to me,’ he said.

‘Your father never received anything like this before?’

‘Not that I saw.’

‘Hmm.’ Sherlock stared at the diagrams. ‘There must be some kind of key that we could use to decode them.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, there are different types of code that people use. With some codes you substitute something for the letters in the message – replace every letter “a” with a number
“1”, maybe, every letter “b” with a number “2”, and so on – except that would be too simple, because it would be obvious that there were no numbers bigger
than 26, so people would work out pretty quickly what you had done. You could replace every “a” with a “b”, every “b” with a “c” and so on, up to
“z”, which you would replace with “a”. That one’s harder to work out.’ He tapped the top diagram on the pile. ‘But this is different. Here there’s no
substitution. There’re no different sets of symbols, or letters, or pictures.’

‘It looks like it’s some kind of journey,’ Cameron pointed out. ‘You see how the sheets are nearly transparent? If you could lay them over a page from a book, then the
small circles might end up over certain letters. If you started at the beginning circle and then moved along the lines, maybe the letters beneath each circle on the path would spell out a message.
Maybe the person who created the diagrams used a book that he owned, and he told my father which book it was.’

‘That,’ Sherlock said, ‘is a very clever idea. Except for the fact that there aren’t many books large enough for these sheets to fit over, and there’s no guarantee
that your father would have the same book unless they had arranged it all in advance.’ He thought for a moment. ‘What kinds of books could you guarantee people will own? A Bible, I
suppose, and a dictionary. Maybe the Complete Works of Shakespeare. That’s about it.’

‘Bibles are big,’ Cameron pointed out. ‘At least, the ones they read from in church every Sunday. Those things are
huge
.’

Sherlock looked around the room. ‘I suppose we could go through all the shelves and make a pile of all the books big enough for one of these diagrams to cover the page, and then work
through them all, page by page, one after the other . . .’ He felt his fingers contracting into a fist in frustration. ‘And that’s the real problem – even if we knew which
book to use, we don’t know which pages to go to for each of these sheets. There’s nothing on them to tell us.’