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“That’s it. Thirteen Blayton Place.” The cabbie looked at them dubiously. “Are you sure you gents want to be let off here?”
Sherlock was already out the door and bolting for the dilapidated former hotel at top speed. “We’re sure,” John assured the man as he handed him a small stack of notes. “Keep the change,” he added as he darted after Sherlock.
His friend had already found a boarded-over door and was busily inspecting the screws holding it in place. “No obvious sign of forced entry,” he said. Each word sounded as if it had been chipped off a block of ice. “But the clues embedded in the image indicate this door, and… Ah!” He pushed his weight against the door in a particular, twisting way, and the entire “screwed on” board swung outwards on hidden hinges. Behind it, the old door to the hotel stood wide open.
The light from the door revealed a narrow hallway. No other light sources were visible, which in some ways was a blessing. John thought the old carpet might have been green once, and the walls covered with wallpaper; but now everything was mottled with damp and mildew. The smell was incredibly foul.
Sherlock pulled a penlight from one of his coat pockets. John did the same, glad of the powerful little key-chain device Sherlock had given him at Christmas, but still instinctively reluctant to move into the dank depths. “Do we wait on the Yard? They should be here in another ten minutes at most.”
“That’s ten minutes Lestrade might not have, if he’s already here,” Sherlock snapped. “And if Donovan believed us.” He trained his light on the carpet, searching for signs of passage.
Unfortunately, even John could see that the darkened corridor contained too many trampled-down traces, and too few indicators of recent activity to distinguish a specific path. With barely a glance between them, John and Sherlock split up, edging down divergent corridors, searching for any signs of the killer, or his intended next target. They quickly lost sight of each other in the maze of hallways, but it couldn’t be helped.
One doorknob seemed very like another, and John lost track of the number he tried. Empty dark room after empty dark room. And then, despite no visible difference outside of it, one doorknob revealed something else entirely.
The door had been baffled, to keep light from leaking underneath the edges and out into the corridor. John ducked around the hanging cloth and stifled the impulse to shout. He was in a large room, something that must have been a dining room or ballroom at one time. Now it stood echoingly empty, except for the two battery-powered klieg lights trained on a single chair set in the center of the space. And there, blindfolded and bound to its rigid frame, slumped a familiar grey-haired figure.
John pressed the button on his phone that would send the automatic text to Sherlock even as he darted forward. He kept his eyes peeled, but saw nothing. Then again, he couldn’t see much beyond the illuminated circle around the inspector; everything else was in near-total shadow. He felt nervous tension shiver up his spine, but didn’t let that stop him from hurrying to Lestrade’s side.
“Greg? Can you hear me?” he muttered as he reached the other man. He could see blood staining the collar of Lestrade’s shirt, and a dried patch on the back of his head, but no other obvious sign of injury. And the other man’s chest rose and fell reassuringly.
A pause, and then Lestrade lifted his head a few inches and turned blindly in John’s direction. “John?” His voice was a ragged whisper.
John gently pulled the blindfold away. “Fancy meeting you here,” he said lightly, even while continuing to split his attention between his injured, imprisoned friend and the surrounding shadows. “How badly are you hurt?” The handcuffs securing Lestrade to the chair were beyond John’s skill to open, but probably child’s play to Sherlock.
Lestrade squinted against the light, and when he did open them slightly more, his eyes didn’t seem to track. His head jerked spastically once, then again. “John – "
The warning came too late. Something hit John from behind with the force of a freight train.