Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(98)

“I’m prepared.” She held out a foot clad in a pink designer wellie.

“I’ll take you down to the Avon in the Land Rover,” Giles said, but he didn’t sound happy about it, and neither was I. “Make certain you’re wearing bright colors. There will be guns out today.”

I met Amanda coming out of the kitchen as I was going in. “Just checking out the picnic basket,” she said with a smile. “Giles says he’ll put it in the Land Rover with the fishing stuff.”

I was blocking her way, but I was feeling contrary, so instead of letting her by I nodded at one of the prints. They were my friends now, those old freckled fish. “Going to land a big one, are you?” More fish guts for me, I thought.

“Mmm, I hope so,” said Amanda. “I adore trout.”

I stepped back and she swept past, wellies squeaking on the tiles.

I followed her out. Stefan waved at me from the Land Rover. He looked like an excited child going on an adventure.

I watched them pull away, all the while thinking furiously. Was I paranoid? Or really and truly mad? But if I was right . . . Going back to the kitchen, I told Morag I had to run an errand. Then, my message duly delivered to the gamekeeper, I tried to concentrate on scrubbing the breakfast things and starting lunch.

A half-hour later, I heard Giles come back. He called to Morag that he was going up the fields to check on the shooting party and a minute later I heard the Land Rover drive off again.

I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Go have a lie down,” I told Morag, who was looking decidedly peaky. “I’ll finish the lunch prep.”

“Right. Thank you, Sherry.” She gave me a quick hug. “You’re a gem.”

I felt guilty for deceiving her, but as soon as I heard the bedroom door close on the upper floor, I was out the front door like a shot. I knew the spot where Giles had left Amanda and Stefan. The river ran wide and shallow over a stone bed, then dropped into a deep pool where the trout liked to lurk, snapping for flies, real or false, on the surface.

I could make it, I thought. I ran across the field and down into the woods, glad now for all the stair-climbing and bed-making and scrubbing. When I came to the river I followed it downstream. It was running high and fast. There was nothing merry about the water rushing over the rocks today.

There was a flash of color through the trees—the bright picnic oilcloth, laid out on the high little ledge of grass above what before the heavy rains had been a pool, but was now just a wider place in the torrent. But where were they?

Then I saw them. Stefan, dutifully dressed in his red anorak and his waders, stood at the water’s edge, rod in hand. He was explaining something to Amanda, but I couldn’t hear him over the rush of the water. She nodded and patted his shoulder, as if encouraging him to demonstrate.

Stefan turned and cast his line over the pool in a beautiful shining arc. Then Amanda gave him a hard shove in the middle of the back.

Stefan twisted as he fell, the rod flying from his hand. His eyes and mouth were round with surprise, then the water closed over his face. He came up sputtering and shouting, but the current was strong and his waders were instantly filled. I could see he was being pulled towards the sharp fall at the end of the pool.

Amanda stood and watched.

I started to shout, then froze. Surprise was the only thing I had on my side. I ran towards her, hoping the rush of the water would cover the sound of my boots, hoping she would stay focused on Stefan and not turn around. Some small part of my brain wondered just how I was going to get him out even if I could knock her in, but there was no time for a better plan.

A deep woof rang out over the sound of the river. On the other side of the pool appeared Trevor, the military bloke, wolfhound at his side. Then, below me, two shadows raced out of the woods. Men, wearing camouflage. I skidded to a stop.

Amanda heard—or sensed—them, spinning round, her hand going to the pocket of her anorak. But the men were on her and in a flash her hands were cuffed behind her back.

Trevor had a rope coiled in his hands and as he reached the pool he spun it out across the water. As Stefan caught it, Trevor wrapped his end round a tree trunk and knotted it. Then Trevor reeled Stefan in, just like a bloody big fish.

There were more shouts as Giles and the gamekeeper came crashing through the woods. But things were all in hand. After a moment of spit and fury, Amanda had gone quiet, but I made certain her captors were keeping a close eye on her.

The gamekeeper gave me a wink. “All sorted, then?” he asked.

“Thanks to you,” I said. I’d caught him just as he was leaving to take the shooting party up on the moor.

He’d listened to me, then given me an assessing glance before nodding and agreeing to take my message. “Why didn’t you think I was bonkers?” I asked.

“Trevor there told me to keep an eye on you,” he answered.

Once we’d convoyed back to the lodge, Amanda bundled off in a military jeep and Stefan sent off for a hot bath, Trevor invited me up to his cottage for a cup of tea. Morag, still looking shocked, had waved me off my kitchen tasks.

“What gave her away?” he asked, when we were settled at his pine table with steaming mugs. He looked younger without the flat cap, but I was still getting used to the fact that his eyes were now brown rather than blue, and that there was something very odd about the shape of his nose and chin.

“Besides the fact that I didn’t like her?” I heard him give an appreciative snort into his tea. “She said she was an angler. But she said fishing stuff instead of tackle. And”—I thought back to my spotted friends—“when I showed her the fish prints in the house, I pointed right at a big old salmon and she said she loved trout. Any real angler would know a salmon from a brown trout.”