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Andrew Lane

Snake Bite

DEDICATION

Dedicated to Mike Elliott, Keith Garland, Derek Rothwell, Angus Martin, Lynn Martinez (or Lynn Furby, as she was then), Paula Fountain and (most especially) Sonia Morrish — the people who helped me survive the years 1982 to 1985 with some modicum of sanity. Thanks for being there.

Dedicated also to Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss and Guy Ritchie, for keeping the legend alive on the big and small screens.

And with grateful acknowledgements to the skill and diplomacy of Sally Oliphant, who has worked above and beyond the call of duty to keep me sane and focused through bad times, and Polly Nolan, who managed to cut 12,000 words out of my first draft (including several hundred needless uses of the word ‘just’) and improved it immeasurably.

PROLOGUE

When Amyus Crowe pushed past the footman in the lobby and strode through the club’s maze of corridors and reading rooms to where Mycroft Holmes waited for him, he didn’t say a word, but there was something about him that made everyone look up in disapproval, and then look away suddenly when he met their gaze. Although he was silent, although his clothes barely whispered as he moved, although the leather soles of his boots made little more than a scuffing noise against the floor tiles, he appeared to radiate an energy that crackled fiercely and loudly. He seemed to be broadcasting audible fury from every pore in his body.

He slammed the door of the Strangers’ Room behind him so hard that even the special pneumatic hinges failed to stop the bang!

‘What have you heard?’ he demanded.

Mycroft Holmes was standing to one side of the main table. He winced.

‘My agents have confirmed that Sherlock was kidnapped in Farnham and transported in a drugged state to London. There he was loaded on to a ship named the Gloria Scott. ’

‘An’ what you are doin’ about rescuing your brother and my student?’

‘I am doing all I can,’ Mycroft said. ‘Which is not very much, I am afraid. The ship has sailed for China. I am attempting to track down a manifest so that I can anticipate when and where the ship will dock for supplies along the way, but that is proving problematic. The ship’s voyages are organized at the behest of its captain, who is notoriously eccentric, according to my agents. His starting and finishing points are fixed — London and Shanghai — but he might stop anywhere in between. ’