Young Sherlock Holmes: Knife Edge Read Online Free PDF Page B

. . . very thoughtful,’ Sherlock said quietly. ‘Thank you.’
    They made their way down to where the carriage was waiting. Within a few minutes they were clattering through the cobbled streetsof Galway, heading north, parallel to the coast. The road
gradually began to slope upward, and Sherlock was soon looking down on the glittering grey ocean.
    Sherlock couldn’t be sure, but based on the size and the number of masts, he had a strong suspicion that a ship he could see at the quayside was the
Gloria Scott
. He felt a sudden
and unaccustomed pang of regret. She had been hard,but she had been home. He would miss her.
    He hoped he would get the opportunity to travel abroad again, at some point in his life.
    It took half an hour for the carriage to make its way from the town of Galway to Cloon Ard Castle. The sky was grey with low clouds, and a fine drizzle washed the landscape. Everything that
Sherlock could see from the window appeared to be coloured in variousshades of green and grey.
    The carriage abruptly turned left, through a stone gateway in an eight-foot-high stone wall that appeared to surround an estate of some kind.
    ‘Say as little as you can when we arrive,’ Mycroft cautioned. ‘But keep your eyes and your ears open. I would be very interested to know what impression you form of the people
and the situation that we are joining.’
    Cloon Ard Castle, when they finally arrived, was smaller than Sherlock had imagined. It was essentially a squat, four-storey tower of grey stone in the middle of one side of a forbidding
three-storey wall. There were windows in the wall – narrow slots that glowered down on to the landscape – indicating that they were thick enough to contain rooms and corridors, and were
not just narrow defensivefeatures. The corner of the wall that faced them as they approached had a similar but smaller tower built into it. Sherlock couldn’t see if there was a matching
tower on the other side. The whole thing was surrounded by a wide moat. A drawbridge crossed the moat to a wide arch set into the wall.
    As the carriage pulled around the side of the castle to get to the drawbridge, Sherlock lookedout of the other window, the one facing away from the castle. He realized that the far side of the
moat was only a few yards from a cliff edge. Over the edge of the cliff, several hundred feet below, were the grey waters of the Atlantic.
    The sound made by the carriage’s wheels changed from wood on earth to wood on wood, as they crossed the drawbridge and entered the castle through the arch.The carriage halted and, seconds
later, the driver jumped down and opened the door for them.
    Sherlock emerged first, and helped his brother down. The air was fresh and cold, and smelt of the sea. The area inside the walls was paved with large slabs of moss-dappled stone. Gulls wheeled
overhead.
    Sherlock looked around at the inside of the castle. It was pretty much as he had imaginedfrom outside: a square formed by the walls, with a large block in the middle of the side facing the
Atlantic – presumably the main accommodation – and a smaller tower on one of the two nearest corners.
    A door set into the main block opened. Sherlock and Mycroft turned to face it. Instead of a set of steps leading up to the door, Sherlock noticed that there was a stone ramp. Odd, he
thought.

    From the darkness of the doorway, a figure emerged – a man in a three-wheeled bath chair being pushed by a severe-faced woman wearing a black jacket, grey waistcoat and, strangely, striped
trousers. Her hair was pulled back into a severe bun. For a horrible moment Sherlock thought it was Mrs Eglantine, his uncle and aunt’s poisonous former housekeeper, but although this woman
was similarin build and features she was not the same. The man she was pushing was in his fifties, handsome, with tightly curled grey hair, but what struck Sherlock particularly was that he was
black.
    He smiled down at Mycroft and Sherlock, and