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.’

  ‘Maybe there was a separate key that mentioned which book and which pages?’ Cameron said. ‘Maybe that key took a different route, and arrived a few days ago in the post.’

  Something in Sherlock’s brain was telling him that Cameron had said something important. Several important things. Odd phrases kept repeating themselves: ‘It looks like it’s some kind of journey.’ ‘Maybe the letters beneath each circle on the path would spell out a message.’ ‘Maybe that key took a different route.’

  Journey. Path. Route.

  ‘What else do most people have in their possession?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Maps! Every family, every home, has a map of the world! And there are certain maps that are generally regarded as being better than any others – Ordnance Survey maps in England, and Admiralty maps for the world. Where does your father keep his maps?’

  ‘Where did he keep his maps?’ Cameron corrected softly.

  Sherlock winced. ‘Sorry, that was clumsy.’

  Cameron shrugged. ‘It’s going to take time.’ He pointed to a shelf with no books on, but which contained a number of rolled papers. ‘They’re over there.’

  ‘Help me look.’

  Quickly the two of them unrolled the papers, one after the other. They were all maps – some of China, some of the area local to Shanghai, but some of the entire world. Sherlock quickly focused on the most detailed and colourful map – one that also showed current directions and shallow areas of the ocean as well as land masses. The text at the top identified it as an Admiralty map.

  ‘Right, let’s get it on the desk.’

  Sherlock spread the map out on the desk while Cameron retrieved some drawing pins from a drawer and pinned the corners down. Then Sherlock took the first sheet with the spider diagrams on and placed it over the map.

  It was smaller.

  ‘Where does it fit?’ Cameron asked. ‘We could slide it all over the place.’

  Sherlock moved the sheet until its top left corner corresponded with the top left corner of the map. ‘Let’s try the simplest option.’

  He quickly located one of the circles which only had one line coming out of it. ‘Here, let’s start with this one.’

  ‘It’s right over a town in Asia,’ Cameron pointed out. ‘Ulan Bator.’

  ‘All right, let’s follow the line to the next circle.’

  ‘It’s still in Asia.’ Cameron didn’t sound too impressed. ‘It’s another town – Singapore.’

  ‘U-S,’ Sherlock murmured. ‘Difficult to tell if that’s the beginning of a message or just a random pair of letters.’

  ‘Scotland,’ Cameron said, tracing his finger along the line to the third circle.

  ‘U-S-S,’ Sherlock said. ‘I’m beginning to get an idea where this is going. Quick – write down what I say.’ He scooted his finger across the map from circle to circle, reading out the names of the cities, towns, rivers, country names and oceans that were revealed inside the circles. Sometimes they surrounded the initial letters, sometimes they were buried somewhere in the middle of the name.

  ‘Right,’ he said eventually. ‘What have we got?’ Cameron didn’t say anything. His face was grim, and his eyes were scared as he spoke: ‘USS Monocacy to be blown up on Yangtze River!’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s very clear.’

  Sherlock quickly ran his fingers from circle to circle again. Cameron was right. ‘Hand me another sheet.’

  Cameron passed the next one over. Sherlock matched it to the top left-hand corner of the map, but this time the circles only occasionally overlapped with any letters in the place names. He frowned, thought for a moment, then he slid the sheet sideways until the top right-hand corner fitted the top right-hand corner of the map. Quickly he checked the circles. They all had letters inside.

  ‘Clever,’ he said. ‘It’s a way of working out the order of the sheets. Start top left, then top right, then presumably bottom right and bottom left.’

  ‘What does the message say?’

  Sherlock let his finger slide along the lines. Each time he got to a circle he called out the letter. He tried to hold them all in his mind, but after five or six he lost track.

  As he got to the last circle, he called out, ‘Right – what have we got?’

  ‘Nothing that makes any sense.’

  Sherlock considered for a moment. ‘Reverse it,’ he said. ‘Maybe we accidentally started with the last circle, not the first one, this time.’

  Cameron scribbled down a reversed version of the message beneath the one he had already written. ‘Explosion is going to be blamed on innocent Taiping rebels,’ he read breathlessly.

  ‘The Taiping rebels? Aren’t they the Han Chinese? Didn’t your father say that they wanted to overthrow the Manchu rulers?’ Sherlock asked.

  Cameron nodded. ‘That’s right – they make the occasional small attack on a town, or take over a village for a while. They’re more of a nuisance than anything else. They don’t have any real power.’

  ‘But if people think that they have suddenly blown up an American military vessel, they will take them seriously,’ Sherlock pointed out.

  ‘But why would they want to blow up an American military vessel? I mean, why would people believe that they wanted to blow up an American military vessel when everyone knows that their aim is to drive the Manchus from the country?’

  Sherlock shrugged. ‘Maybe they so desperately want China to be for the Chinese that they resent any outside influence whatsoever. Maybe they think that the Manchu rulers are corruptly accepting bribes from the American Government. But the reasons don’t matter – the Taiping rebels are a convenient scapegoat for whoever is behind the attack. The Chinese Emperor would send the army in to hunt them down like dogs. He would have to.’

  ‘Worse than that.’ Cameron looked grim. ‘I can’t see the American Government standing for it. They’d send in the Navy.’

  ‘It could lead to war!’ Sherlock said, appalled.

  ‘And where there’s a war, there are trade opportunities.’

  Sherlock stared at Cameron. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that, as the ruling class, the Manchu officials have currently got a stranglehold on all the trade in China. It all flows through their hands – they can dictate prices, and they get to decide what is bought and sold. It makes my father furious. He wants there to be complete freedom for the Western traders to buy and sell anything, and to undercut each other if they want to, without having to pay bribes to the Manchu officials. A free market. But if there’s a whole American fleet standing off the coast, and if the Emperor is kow-towing to the American ambassador to stop a war starting, then the American traders have got the upper hand. America will end up annexing this whole area and turning it into a thirty-eighth state.’

  ‘Are the trade opportunities that important?’ Sherlock asked, hardly able to believe what he was hearing.

  ‘The silk and the silver that come out of China could make every Western trader a millionaire,’ Cameron said sombrely. ‘And every Chinese peasant is a potential customer for Western goods – you Brits found that out with the opium trade. The US wants as big a part of that as possible.’

 

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