Chapter Three

Chapter Three

I don't know how long I stood there in the fading light, gawping at the house. I do know that it was nearly dark when a hand on my shoulder sent me leaping out of my skin in shock.

I whirled and found myself face-to-face with a tall, thin, grey-haired gentleman with sharp features and sharper grey eyes. I expelled the breath from my lungs and let my defensive hand fall back to my side.

“Holmes, for goodness' sake, do give a person some warning.”

“Russell, I've been standing behind you clearing my throat noisily for several minutes now. You appeared distracted.”

“You might say that,” I said grimly.

“Am I to assume this is your family's house?”

I turned back to look at what was gradually becoming little more than a blocky outline against the sky. “I couldn't have told you for the life of me where it was, but my feet knew. I looked up and there it was.”

“Do you wish to go in?”

“I don't have a key,” I said absently, then caught myself. “Not that the lack of a key would stop you. But frankly, I don't think your lock-picks would do much good against the rust on those padlocks.”

“The wall, however, is easily scaled. Shall we?” So saying, he bent and hooked his hands together to receive my foot. I eyed the top of the stones, which indeed were scarcely five feet tall, although my memory of them was high—my childhood memory, I reminded myself. The wall was not set with glass or wire, and certainly there would be no watch-dog in that jungly front garden.

I set the toe of my shoe into Holmes' hands, braced my hands on his shoulder and the wall, and scrambled over the top with stockings more or less intact. He followed a moment later, brushing invisible dust from his trousers.

The walkway was buried under a knee-high thicket of weeds; five feet from the gate, the path disappeared entirely behind the press of branches from the shrubs on either side. Still, the drive was open, and we sidled along the wall until we reached it, then picked our way up the weed-buckled cobbles to the house.

The street-lamps had come on, but so thick was the vegetation, their light made it to the house's façade in fits and starts, allowing us a glimpse of downspout here, a patch of peeling trim there, the lining on a set of drapes through a grimy downstairs window.

We followed, initially at any rate, the path of least resistance, and continued along the drive that ran down the side of the house. The windows here were similarly closed and uninformative, the once-trim roses that followed the wall between our house and the neighbours (the . . . Ramseys?) a thicket that reached thorny claws out to our clothing.