You don’t understand,” I said to the two men. It was dark outside, had been dark for a while, although I had no idea what time it was. The hours between reading Mycroft’s obituary and walking back into Goodman’s cabin were already lost, a time spent on the fallen tree at the far side of the clearing, watching the sky go from robin’s egg to indigo to black.
It was impossible. Unimaginable. Mycroft was a force of nature, not a man to be killed at whim. Why couldn’t these two grasp that? And why could they not see that I had to be on the first train south in the morning? Alone.
I struggled to gather my thoughts. “Mycroft Holmes is-was-enormously important in the government. In some ways, he has-had-more power than a Prime Minister, who comes and goes at the whim of the voters.”
“But this obituary says he was an accountant,” Javitz protested.
“That’s somewhere between a joke and a figure of speech. He was an accountant in the sense that it was his responsibility to account for-” I broke off: I had no right to divulge what I knew of the nation’s Intelligence machinery, nor could I reveal that one of its key members answered to no authority beneath His Majesty. What Mycroft accounted for went far beyond guineas and pence. And anyway, telling them who I was married to and getting them past their disbelief had already eaten up far too much time.
“It doesn’t matter. Mycroft was powerful and he was family, and I must return to London immediately. I cannot take you and Estelle with me; I am forced to ask you to watch over her; so we have to decide where would be a safe place for you both.”
“I thought you said we wouldn’t be safe until we had that maniac behind bars?”
I felt as if someone fleeing Vesuvius with me had stopped to fret about the carpets. The obituary had buried any lesser consideration: To my mind, the Brothers case was in a box and temporarily closed away. Who would worry about a mere killer when the world was being engulfed?
Still, Javitz was right. In my concern over having freedom of movement once in London, I could not overlook the lesser dangers, such as the one that had brought us from the sky. Even if that had not been Brothers, there was no doubt that, if he could find us, he would attempt to seize the child. I could not overlook the one responsibility in the interest of the other. God, I wanted Holmes by my side!
“Exactly,” I agreed, to simplify things. “Brothers wants the child. One of his passports had her on it.”
“You don’t think it was Brothers who killed your brother-in-law?”
The question stopped me dead. “I don’t-no, I shouldn’t think so. How would he have made any connexion between Damian and Mycroft? No-one knows.” I was thinking aloud. “Except now you two. Plus that, he was wounded just five days ago-could he have made it to London, found Mycroft, and got close enough to kill him with a knife after being shot? No, it wasn’t Brothers.”
“This happened last night?” Javitz said, and reached for the newspaper to re-read the obituary. “Very quick reporting.”
“He was an important man,” I said. Why didn’t they understand that? I wanted to shout at them, except that would have awakened the sleeping child.
“Estelle and Javitz will be safe here,” Goodman said, for the third time.
“No offence,” the pilot said, “but if I stay cooped up here much longer, I’ll go stir-crazy.”
“So where-” I took hold of my irritation, and lowered my voice. “So where can you go?”
“Someplace that no-one would think to look for me, you said? That pretty much rules out old friends and the couple of cousins I have.”
He, too, was thinking out loud, and since we had already been over this ground twice, I did not hold much hope for an answer from him. I was considering two or three places, but that decision would have to wait until I could lay hands on a telephone.
I pushed back my chair and started to stand, but a sharp, urgent hiss cut my motion. Goodman had turned towards the window, half-open to the night; one hand was raised and outstretched. I froze, straining to hear whatever had attracted him. I heard nothing at all.
Our host did, however. He snapped into motion, twisting the controls of the lamp into darkness and bolting across the room to the door.
“What-” I started, but the door closed and there was only stillness.
Javitz whispered, “Have you any idea what is going on?”
“He heard something. You stay here. I’m going to see if I can tell what it was.”
I felt my way towards the faint rectangle that was the doorway, wishing that the moon were more than five days old, and eased my boots down the two stone steps. When I was away from the house a few feet I stopped, head cocked: nothing.
I stood for five minutes, then six, but all I heard were a series of thumps from Javitz’s crutch moving across the floor and the cry of a fox. I was about to turn back when a faraway crackle of brush was joined by a sharp yell.
“What was that?” came Javitz’s voice behind me.
I grinned. “That was Mr Goodman ‘misleading night-wanderers and laughing at their harm.’ One of our host’s booby-traps.” I had to assume there was more than one man, and that they did not mean us well.
“Someone’s coming?” he asked.
“It may be nothing, but I think we should move back among the trees. Can you see without a light?”
“A little,” he said. “You?”
“My night vision is not great,” I admitted, “but I’ll manage. You go around the back of the house. I’ll bring Estelle.”
He started to protest, but immediately realised that a man with a crutch was not the best candidate for carrying a child. Without another word, he felt around for his coat on the rack, and went with caution down the steps.
I, too, retrieved my coat, checking to make sure the revolver was in its pocket, then patted my way inside the bedroom. The child gave a sleepy protest when I lifted her, but I murmured assurances and she nestled into my arms, bringing yet again that peculiar blend of animal pleasure coupled with the dread of responsibility.
I held her in close embrace, through the cabin, down the steps, across the uneven ground. Halfway to the trees, my whispered name drew me towards Javitz. Nearly blind once the depth of the forest sucked up all light, I felt out with each toe before setting down weight; I was first startled, then grateful, when his hand touched the back of my arm.
“Sit down,” I breathed at him.
“Don’t you think we should move back some more?”
Oh, for a man who did not have to discuss everything! “I need to fetch our things and I don’t want to lay Estelle on the ground.”
“I’ll go-”
“Javitz! If she wakes, she’ll cry, and you can’t hold her for long if you’re standing. I know it’s uncomfortable, but-sit!”
Gingerly, radiating humiliation, he sat. I transferred the child into his arms, then took the revolver from my pocket and pressed it into his hand.
I left before he could protest.
Back inside, I stood for a moment, pulling together a memory of where our few things lay. Money; clothing; Estelle’s shoes; and the books I had bought her. In the kitchen, I remembered the wooden creatures Goodman had made for her and gathered them into the rucksack, adding bread, apples, and cheese, slinging it and the now-disgusting fur coat across my shoulder.
Javitz and I sat shoulder to shoulder in the darkness and waited. Only minutes passed before my eyes reported some vague motion, followed by a deliberate scuff of a boot against soil.
I clicked my tongue against my teeth and the woodman was there, panting lightly and smelling of fresh sweat. He’d been running, I thought in astonishment-how could anyone run through a pitch-black forest?
“Who are they?” I murmured.
“Strangers, five or six of them,” he snarled, “with a local boy who knows the woods. They’ll be here in ten minutes. Longer, depending on how many more trees they walk into.” His voice put a twist of vicious pleasure on the last prospect, and it occurred to me that his panting might be due not to exertion, but to fury.
That many strangers at this time of night could only be here for one reason: us. And with Javitz on crutches, and a child as well, this was no place to make a stand.
“We’re ready, let’s get farther back into the woods.”
Goodman did not respond. I put out a hand to his arm, and found it taut and trembling. “Goodman, believe me, I understand how you’re feeling. I really, really want to know who they are. But do we want Estelle in the middle of a potential battleground?”
“T-take her,” he ordered, stammering with fury.
“I wouldn’t make it a mile in these woods.”
He stood, torn between the choices I had given him. It might be nothing. A charabanc of travellers benighted and looking for help. A band of Wordsworth fanatics looking for a host of golden daffodils by moonlight. Even some of Mycroft’s men coming to our assistance-that last made for a lovely thought. But until I knew for certain, we had to treat this as an invasion, and I hated the idea that this damaged man’s generosity of spirit had brought an abrupt loss of his hard-won peace. I felt him wrestle with the decision, then his muscles went slack.
“Very well. I’ll take you out.”
“Thank you,” I said, and let go of him.
But when I bent to take Estelle from Javitz, she woke, and cried aloud at the dark strangeness. I shushed her, pulled her to my chest to muffle her wails, and tried to quiet her with what had worked with this odd child up to now: a rational explanation.
This time, however, she was having none of it. She heard my words but only shook her head at the need to leave, at the arrival of yet another threat, at yet another demand for silence. “No!” she repeated in sleepy fury, until I was forced to contemplate a physical stifling of her noise.
Then she shifted to, “Want my dolly.”
“Your dolly? It’s right-oh.” Books, shoes, the carved menagerie, even the tatty coat she’d become so attached to, but the doll that Goodman had bought for her was left behind in the tangle of bed-clothes.
“I’m so sorry, honey, but-wait, stop-please, just hush!”
“Want Dolly!”
I couldn’t throttle her, couldn’t even threaten her as I might an adult, so what-ah: bribery. “Estelle,” I said in quiet tones, “if I get Dolly for you, do you promise to be quiet? Absolutely quiet?”
Her thumb crept up to her mouth, and she nodded.
I sighed. I doubted Sherlock Holmes had ever faced such a maddening comedy of errors in one of his adventures. “I promise, Estelle, I will get you your dolly.”
“I’ll get it,” Goodman told me.
“Wait,” I said as an idea blossomed. “What if-would you mind awfully taking Estelle and Javitz away now, then coming back for me? It would be enormously helpful to know who these people are.”
“Give me an hour and I’ll hand you their heads.”
It was temporary outrage speaking, not serious proposition-a man who had driven ambulances during the War and who lived in the woods without so much as a shotgun was not about to commit mass homicide.
“Please, Goodman-Robert: Take these two to safety. I will be perfectly safe here until you return.”
Javitz, hearing the decision being made, tried to give me back the revolver. “No,” I said. “You may need it to protect her.”
Putting him in charge of protection may have restored a modicum of his masculine dignity. He put the gun back into his belt, and struggled to his feet.
In thirty seconds, I was alone.
I tripped once on an unseen obstacle in the clearing, and once inside, gave my hip an agonizing gouge on the unexpected corner of a table. Long minutes later my fingers located the texture of firm stuffing amidst the soft bed-clothes; I stuck the doll in my waistband and turned to go.
A brief flash of light shot across the clearing from the east, the direction we’d come from the first night. I leapt into the bedroom, pulled up the window, and dropped to the ground outside.
The smell of fermentation led me to the apple tree, halfway between the house and the out-building and wide enough to conceal me from a casual inspection. From there I could see something of the meadow, where brief flickers of light drove away all thought of friends or poetry fanatics. The approaching men were experienced, using their lights sparingly as they spread out in near-complete silence around the dark buildings. The circle grew tight, and tighter, until a voice called, “The door’s standing open.”
I could not see that side of the house, but I imagined that two of the men entered in a swift rush, because the sounds of banging were followed by a minute of silence. A torch went on inside. Thirty seconds later, a head stuck out of the bedroom window and a beam played through the orchard, not quite reaching my tree. The head pulled back. A voice reported, “They’re gone.”
Three torches immediately went on, one of them barely ten feet from me, and bounced over the ground as the men went to the front. The lamp went on inside. Wary of others lingering in the dark, I crept forward until I was directly underneath the open window. I could hear their words: five men.
“-paper, it’s open at the obituaries,” said a deep London voice.
“The lamp was still warm,” said another.
“Any sign of the girl?”
Did he mean Estelle, or me? Could Brothers have summoned the means to direct five violent men here, to retrieve the child he was determined to keep?
“There’s two chairs pulled out from the table.”
“Could mean nothing.”
“Is this the kind of food a man on his own would have?” a new voice wondered.
I was startled when the next voice came inches from me: “Someone’s been sleeping on the floor in here.”
“This is the place, all right. Where do you suppose they’ve got to?”
“Ten feet away, they’d disappear,” said the first voice.
“Want to sit and wait?”
“No point, I shouldn’t think. Let’s have a look at that out-house. Then we can leave a little thank-you for the hermit.”
I did not at all care for the sound of that. I backed away from the house to consider my options.
Taken one at a time, I might be able to overcome them, and I would very much like to take at least one of them captive for questioning, but five men together? With at least some of them-I had no doubt-armed?
I am, I should say, very good at throwing things-darts, knives, cricket balls, chunks of stone. People tend to over-look the advantages of an accurate throwing arm, when it comes to weaponry.
No doubt if the men before me had witnessed me grubbing around my feet for large rocks, they would have thought it funny.
They made it easier by bunching together and shining all of their torches: I could hardly miss. The phrase shooting fish in a barrel came to mind, as my arm calculated the trajectory required, and let go, launching a couple of the missiles high into the air so as not to betray my position.
Seven fist-sized stones rained down on them; all seven hit flesh. Before they had the sense to shut off their lights and scatter, I saw two of them fall to the ground and one hunch down with his arms around his head. I also saw three handguns, and made haste to step back behind the old apple tree.
In the darkness, I heard groans and curses along with furiously whispered queries and commands. What I did not hear was gunshots. Which told me without a doubt that the men were experienced enough not to blaze into the darkness at an unseen assailant, wasting bullets and giving away their positions.
I’d have been far happier had they been amateurs. Reluctantly, I let go the possibility that I might get one alone.
They fell back to the house with their wounded. There they drew the curtains, closed the front door, and lit the lamp. To my satisfaction, in the muddle of this house-of-many-structures, although they closed the bedroom curtains, the connecting door remained half-open.
I walked silently up to the window and eased the curtain join apart, which allowed me a glimpse of the men gathered around the table.
They were assessing their injuries. One man went past with a white flash of dishtowel in his hand, and I heard a sound of ripping. All of a sudden the bedroom door flew fully open and a man came straight at me. I bolted sideways down the house, but no torch beam shot out of the window, and the tiny thread of light from the crack in the curtains remained as it was. Gingerly, I eased back to the window-sill, then held my eye to the crack again: This time, the bedroom door had been left open far enough to reveal several men, one of whom was ripping a large sheet of fabric-he’d been after the bed-sheet.
They bound wounds, washed bashes, cursed fluently. One man groaned. The others argued. Their faces were not distinct, because of the uncertain light and the number of shadows cast, but the accents told me that they were far from home, and they spoke more like criminals, or hardened soldiers, than police.
One man, the deep-voiced Londoner whom I had first heard speak, was adamant that they needed to stay until morning. The others objected loudly. Back and forth they went, until the voice that had been swearing pointed out that they’d be no safer during the day, once among those trees.
Even the Londoner fell silent at that reminder.
“Fine,” he said after a moment. “We’ll go as soon as Mack here can walk, but we’ll set fire to the place before we go. Pour out the bastard’s lamp on the floor and-”
I did not stop to think, I simply moved. Burning down the household of this poor man whose only sin had been to help a trio of strangers? Absolutely not. My right hand reached forward to yank one of the curtains from its rod, while the other snatched the knife from my boot, snapping it through the air. The sliver of steel left my fingers, passing through two rooms to plant itself in the man’s upper arm. He bellowed and disappeared, and I made haste to vanish, as well-it was not a serious injury, the angle and the limited target had guaranteed that, but it would serve to frighten them. With luck it might also deliver the warning that the woods held a corporeal sylvan who disliked this talk of burning.
Five minutes later, motion in the darkness materialised into the Green Man of the woods. “Come,” he said.
“One moment,” I responded.
He hunkered down beside me. The night was quiet again, and I was braced for the beginning crackle of flames. Instead, the torches appeared at the front of the house, and five shadows limped away, across the clearing to the path down which they had come.
I stood. “I need to see if they left my knife behind,” I told him.
“Why do they have your knife?”
“One of them was talking about torching your house. I wished to discourage him.”
He held my arm back with his hand. In a moment, I heard the same crackle of loosed branches I’d heard before, followed by shouts of pain and outrage.
Robert Goodman, hermit and Robin Goodfellow look-alike, chortled in pleasure. “Wait here,” he said. I heard him trot away. The window gave a dim light for perhaps two seconds, then went dark. Seconds later, I heard a faint squeak-the hen-house door. But why…?
Before he pressed the handle of my knife against my palm, I had worked out the meaning of that squeak: Goodman anticipated being gone long enough that his chickens would starve.
He grasped my hand, and pulled me away into the black expanse of his woods.
Do you wish a motorcar?” Goodman’s enquiry was polite, as if offering me one lump or two in my tea.
“Do you have one?” I asked in astonishment. Puck with a motorcar?
“Theirs is on the road. We could reach it before they do.”
“Mr Goodman,” I said in admiration, “you have a definite aptitude for low trickery.”
He chuckled, then shifted course and sped up.
I was blind. Only the wordless eloquence of his hand in mine kept me from injury, if not coma: His fingers told me when to go left and when right; a slight lift of the hand warned me of uneven footing; a pull down presaged the brush of a bough against my head. In twenty minutes, I sensed the trees retreating and knew that we were on the cleared soil of a forest track.
Now he broke into a fast trot, pulling me along in childish companionship. It was terrifying at first, then strangely exhilarating, to run at darkness, trustingly hand in hand with a wood sprite. I could only pray that his attentive guidance would not waver. In eight or nine minutes, he slowed, and I became aware of the smell of burnt petrol: the crash site.
He stopped to listen to the night, then said, “We have three or four minutes. If I push the motor, there is a slope in half a mile that should be sufficient to start it.”
“Wait-can we risk a light?” I asked.
“Briefly.”
“I may be able to circumvent the ignition lock.” His footsteps went around to the passenger side while I felt my way in behind the wheel-groping first for the keys, but finding them gone-then contorted myself sideways until my head rested against Goodman’s knee, half under the instrument panel. He lit a match, shielding it as best he could with his body, and I saw that the motorcar was my old friend the Austin 7, which must have been a tight fit for five men and their local guide, but made my task easier. If only my mind hadn’t been taken up by the rapid approach of five angry men with guns… I pulled at the wires, followed their leads, and let him light another match when the first one burnt to his fingers. At the third one, I had it: A yank and three quick twists, and the car would be mine.
I touched the wires together: The starter spun into life. I jerked upright, slammed my door, turned on the head-lamps, and slapped it into gear. We jolted forward, and the woods exploded in a fury of gunfire.
Had it not been for the trees, the bullets might have hit us, but we were safely away long before the shooters reached the track. I eased my foot back on the pedal, and let out a nervous laugh. “A bit closer than I’d have wished.”
“Driving like that, we could have used you on the Front,” he said.
“I do hope Javitz and Estelle are in this direction? It might not be a good idea to turn around.”
“Two miles north,” he agreed, “then ten minutes’ walk.”
“Is that all? If those men come after us, they’ll catch us up.”
“Why should they? We could be making for Carlisle, or Newcastle. They’ll turn back to the village.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said uneasily.
“Do you know what they want?”
In truth, I did not. “One of them said something about ‘the girl,’ but I don’t know if that meant Estelle, or me.”
Two miles up the track he had me stop. The head-lamps dimmed, then went dark as I separated the wires; the silence was loud over the tick of cooling metal. Had we come far enough that the men would not notice the sudden cease of motor noise, and renew their pursuit?
Goodman got out, and I quickly whispered, “Don’t slam the door.”
“No,” he said. I was again blind. His feet rounded the motorcar’s bonnet towards me; the door creaked open. “You can’t see?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “If we wait a-”
His hand found mine, to lead me again into rough ground; leaves brushed my legs and arms. It required an intense commitment of trust that this man was not leading me off a cliff or into a tree. The earlier run through the dark had been terrifying, but my brief return to control and capability-to say nothing of vision-brought a strong impulse to freeze. Every step was a decision: to trust, or rebel? In the end, the only way I could continue to follow him was by imagining that the hand in mine belonged to Holmes, whom I had followed blindly into circumstances worse than this.
Once I had half-convinced myself of that, the going became easier.
It was probably not much more than the ten minutes he had suggested before we found Javitz and Estelle, although it seemed like an hour. Judging by the relief in his voice, Javitz had felt the press of time, as well, sitting alone in the darkness-thankfully, Estelle was fast asleep. I relieved him of the bundle of child and fur, and heard him struggle to his feet.
“I’ll support you when I can,” Goodman told Javitz in a low voice, “but the path is narrow. Use the crutch and put your free hand on my shoulder. Miss Russell, you follow. Yes?”
“Let’s go,” Javitz said. I shifted Estelle into my left arm and inched forward until my fingers encountered his shoulder, and we moved off.
We walked like a platoon of gas-blinded soldiers. It might have been easier had we been on flat ground and able to march in step, but between the unevenness of the terrain and our various impediments, we stumbled at a turtle’s pace, and made so much noise I could feel Goodman’s disapproval, even with Javitz between us. An entire night passed, longer, a nightmare of stumbling, cursing, tangling, and growing fear.
Finally, our guide could stand it no longer. He stopped, causing us to pile up into him, and spoke. “I will come back for you.”
Before either of us could speak, he was gone. Gratefully, I sank to the ground and let the weight go off my arms. Javitz stayed upright, propped on his stick. Neither of us spoke.
Five minutes went by; eight. Javitz stirred, and said, “He will come back.”
“Yes.” In truth, I did not much care: I was quite prepared to sit here, warm under the fur and the small body, until light dawned.
But Goodman did return, without so much as a rustle before his voice whispered, “All clear. Just a hundred yards more.”
I struggled upright, hushed Estelle’s sleepy protest, and laid my hand on the pilot’s shoulder.
Never have I been more grateful to feel a rustic track underfoot.
With some effort, we folded Javitz into the back of the motorcar, and I deposited Estelle in his lap. I whispered, “You are all right, holding her?”
“I can’t do the driving,” came his voice in my ear, “so I might as well hang on to her. She’s a good kid,” he added.
“Isn’t she just?” I replied gratefully, and resumed my place behind the wheel.
I went less than a mile, then stopped, leaving the engine running.
“Mr Goodman, I appreciate all you’ve done for us, but there’s no reason to take you any farther. I’d suggest you be very cautious about your house for a time, since there’s no knowing if they mightn’t come back, but I think you could manage that.”
“I will c-come with you.”
“There’s no need for-”
“Go!” he roared.
We went.
With our five pursuers to the south, we were forced to motor north, eventually to circle around. The forest track thinned and nearly died altogether, but eventually grew more confident, giving way to a wider track, which led to a more-or-less metalled stretch, until eventually our tyres hit a surface recognisable as roadway. I was grateful that our villains had thought to fill the petrol tank before they had ventured into the wooded places. Their thoughtfulness meant that we had fuel sufficient to reach civilisation.
Or if not civilisation, at least a crossroads with two buildings. One was a neat stone house, darkened at this hour. The other appeared to have been a smithy from time immemorial, converted now to the Twentieth-Century equivalent: a garage. A shiny petrol pump stood in the forecourt, illuminated from above by a hanging lamp, an altar light over a shrine to modernity.
It was still well before dawn and none of the shrine’s attendants were stirring. However, I for one needed to stretch my legs, step into the bushes, and consider our next move.
I pulled into the station’s forecourt and put on the hand-brake, then fumbled to separate the ignition wires. They spat and the motor died. Instantly, a small sleepy voice piped, “Where are we?”
Good question.
We climbed from the motor and took turns paying visits to the shrubbery. I gave Estelle some biscuits and a cup of water from a tap behind the petrol station, which woke the dog tied behind the dark house, which in turn roused the owner. The man stuck his head out of the upstairs window, shouted the dog to silence, then demanded what we thought we were doing.
I launched into speech before any of my companions could respond, a tumble of apology in a cut-glass accent with words designed to soften the heart of the hardest working man: took a wrong turning came in early, and ill mother and emergency summons and child, followed by desperate and terribly sorry and frightened and hungry, but it wasn’t until I hit plenty of money that the window slammed down and a light went on inside.
“Look hopeless, you two,” I suggested, at which Javitz leant heavily on his stick while Goodman did him one better by stepping away into the night. Clutching Estelle, who by this time was fully awake and curious about it all, I waited beneath the light for the man above to tug on his trousers and come down.
By the breadth of his shoulders, he had been the smith before the petrol engine took over his occupation-his hands were permanently stained with the grease of engines, but they showed signs of regular use of an anvil and hammer as well. The rôle of the smith in the mythic landscape of England required that the man be addressed with considerable respect, and more than a little care: A smith answered only to himself.
However, silver placates the most irascible of gods. A display of our tribute soon had him working the pump, but it was my air of respect and Javitz’s of interest that led to the grudging admission, once the tank was filled, that he generally woke near to now anyway. I glanced at the sky, and noticed the faint fading of stars to the east. I gave him a wide smile and asked brightly, “If you’re about to make yourself some tea, I don’t suppose you’d like to sell us a cup?”
He grimaced, but then went into the house, which I took for agreement.
While he was away, I took advantage of the light over the pumps to go through the motor’s various pockets.
It was, as I’d expected, a hire car, from a garage in Lancaster-the size alone promised they hadn’t come from far away in it. This suggested that the men had come up from the south on a train, having got news of an aeroplane crash followed by the odd purchases made by one of the more colourful local residents. They’d either been remarkably efficient or damnably lucky, to find us so quickly.
The other items in the pockets were uninformative, although the maps would be useful. The most suggestive thing about the motor was its size: With five men already crammed inside, they hadn’t intended to take us prisoner.
I carried two of the maps around the front, spreading them across the bonnet with the three-shilling Lake District sheet on top. Javitz joined me, Goodman reappeared, even Estelle tried to peer between my elbows until I lifted her onto the warm bonnet, where she sat supervising, Dolly in lap and chin in hand. I was eerily visited by the shade of her grandfather, finger on lips as he awaited information.
I tore my gaze from the child to compare the map with the few road-signs I had glimpsed, tracing our location forward. Oddly, the place where we had begun our journey was relatively devoid of the usual signs and markings: It was a vast private estate, which explained the unharvested woods and lack of public footpaths. That part of the map might as well have borne the old cartographic label Here be monsters.
“This is where we are,” I said, laying my finger on a join of thin lines, then exchanged the large-scale sheet for one of the entire country. “I must be in London by Saturday morning, but we need a safe place for you as well. I was thinking that-”
Goodman abruptly thrust his hands in his pockets and half turned away. I raised an eyebrow, but he simply stared at the trees pressing in on the road, caught up in some obvious but unguessable turmoil.
“Did you have a suggestion?” I asked.
He took a step back, running one hand over his bush of hair. Another half-step, as if about to make a break for the woods, then he stopped. “I… he…”
His face seemed to convulse, as if a current had been passed through the muscles. It was an alarming expression, one I had seen before in the shell-shock wards of the hospital during the War: minds broken by the trenches, struggling so hard to produce words, it made the tendons on the men’s throats go rigid.
One’s impulse is to provide words, any words. “We could-”
He held up a hand to stop me, then turned his face towards Estelle, the youthful gargoyle on our bonnet. We waited. He swallowed, and when he spoke again, it was in an oddly thick and methodical voice, as if he were removing each word from his throat and laying it onto a platter. “He… I… have f-family.”
The idea of this man with relatives struck me as even more unlikely than his having a motorcar, and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask if their names included Loki or Artemis. Fortunately, the awareness of his distress stayed my flip remark. I said merely, “Where?”
He turned from Estelle to the map; from his reluctance, the paper might have been made of burning coals. One fingertip tapped lightly at the western edges of London’s sprawl. “D-d.” He stopped, swallowed hard, and began again, with that same palpable deliberation. “Distant family. But they would m-make you… they would make us welcome.”
“Would the men behind us be able to find them?”
“No-one here knows my name.” Monosyllables seemed to present less trouble.
“What about in the house? Is there anything that would lead them to your relatives?” I asked. “Letters, official papers, anything?”
“Some. From a s-s-solicitor. He lives in Italy. It would t-take time.”
I lifted an eyebrow at Javitz, who said, “I was going to suggest an old friend from the RAF, but I haven’t seen him in a couple of years, and his house is not much larger than that cabin.”
My intent had been the country house of friends currently in Ireland, but since our pursuers were not looking for the man of the woods, it would, as Goodman said, take them some time to uncover any link. “Fine,” I decided. “Richmond it is.”
The petrol station owner came with the tea, although he did not offer to return to the house for an additional cup for our party’s fourth member, summoned out of the night. The beverage was hot and strong, and we shared it out gratefully. When the cups, the pot, and the jug of milk were all drained, I placed the tray back in the man’s hand.
When Estelle and Javitz were settled once again in the back of the motorcar, I reached down for the wires. I waved my hand at the smith-turned-garage-owner and put it into gear, roaring up the north road over protests from two of my three passengers.
I continued blithely on my way for three minutes, then slowed and manoeuvred into a many-sided turn before heading back south. Half a mile from the garage, I shut off the head-lamps, leant forward over the wheel, and said to my still-grumbling critics, “Now, everyone keep still, please.”
With the engine turning over at little more than an idle, we rolled, dark and silent past the station. The owner had gone back into his kitchen, and did not look out of his window as we passed. The dog did not bark. I continued down the southward leg of the crossroads for a hundred yards, then pulled on the head-lamps and pushed my foot down on the accelerator.
Two hundred fifty miles takes a lot longer to motor than it does to fly over. On the other hand, when a tyre went flat outside of Wigan, the mechanical difficulty did not result in us falling out of the sky. I found this infinitely reassuring.
Goodman, however, seemed less reassured the farther south we went. While our tyre was being repaired, we made our way to a nearby inn for a lunch. We were so far from our starting place as to be safe, nonetheless, looking at the motley crew unfolding itself from the motorcar, I could not help thinking that we were not the most invisible of travellers.
At the door to the inn, Goodman spoke into my ear: “Order me something.” Before I could protest, he walked away. Estelle was tugging at one hand, the other was holding the door for the pilot. If the hermit did not want to join us, that was his loss.
The inn was a relief to the spirit, dim and quiet but with promising odours in the air. We crept to a table near the fire. Javitz ordered a triple whisky and a pint, and when I looked askance, snarled, “My leg hurts like the devil.”
I gave our hostess a wan smile. “I’ll have a half of the bitter, thanks, and a glass of lemonade for the child. And do you have anything left by way of luncheon?”
Under other circumstances, I might have regarded her offerings as predictable and unenticing, but after the past nine days-much of which had been spent either in the air or in a cabin catered by a vegetarian-the dishes sounded exotic, complex, and mouth-watering. We ordered, and I included an order for our missing companion. When she brought the drinks, Javitz tossed his whisky down his throat and closed his eyes. Gradually, the tension in his face began to relax. He opened his eyes, winked at Estelle, and reached for his beer.
We were nearly finished with our meal when the inn door opened and a clean-shaven, spit-polished young man came through it. He paused, noticed us sitting before the fire, and came in our direction. My fork went still as he approached, until I noticed the green eyes. I dropped the implement in shock.
“Good Lord,” I said.
“Yes, well,” the oddly congested voice replied, “I couldn’t very well greet f-family disguised as a bear.”
“Mr Robert!” Estelle exclaimed. “You cut your beard!”
“And my hair, too, didn’t I?” he said. “You save me some food?”
Javitz and I resumed our meal, but neither of us paid it much attention. The man before us was smooth in more ways than his skin: In removing his hair, he had put on another, less obvious disguise, one that was jarring to a person accustomed to the hermit’s quiet ease. This Robert Goodman would have seemed at home in a London night-club, brash and bold, with quick movements and nervous fingers.
I couldn’t help thinking, he must be little short of frightened of this family we were about to meet.
However, in the end, Goodman’s relatives were not there to greet us, merely the serving staff left behind. We pulled up to a grand three-storey stone building with Sixteenth-Century bones and Eighteenth-Century additions, its windows glittering in the sun that neared the horizon. A boy of about twelve stood in the doorway, his mouth open. After a minute, an elderly man appeared, hastily adjusting the neck-tie he had clearly just that moment put on: a butler, caught off-duty. He was followed by a round, grey-haired woman in her early sixties, emitting the sorts of exclamations usually reserved for a long-lost son of the household. Goodman reached out a finger and laid it gently across her lips; she fell silent, but the pleasure in her eyes was eloquent.
I thought that the trio’s relative dishevelment and the sequence of their appearance suggested that the family was away and the servants were bored silly. And indeed, once the housekeeper was freed to speak by the removal of Goodman’s stifling finger, her rush of words included a lament that the family had left for a wedding in Ireland, and would not return for a fortnight.
Goodman swayed, then walked off a few steps. After a minute, he cleared his throat, then vaguely suggested the provision of rooms and the concealment of our motorcar.
But his voice-that strangled deliberation had gone, leaving his speech as light and humorous as it had been before his home was invaded, before he had been forced out into the world, before he had made the decision to lead us to a family that clearly overwhelmed him with an unbearable apprehension. I wished I had figured it out before this: I might have saved him a day of great distress.
The servants scurried to obey, even the boot-boy. Their boredom, it would seem, was acute.
Although it was well into the dinner hour, tea was hastily summoned to a room glowing with the day’s last sunshine, its furniture hastily cleared of sheets and its French doors flung open to the terrace. Loath to spend more time in the sitting position, we carried our cups out of doors, watching Estelle solemnly explore the sculpture garden in the company of the boy while we stood and sipped and waited for our ears to stop ringing.
“I’ll go into Town first thing in the morning,” I told my two companions.
“I’ll come with you,” they chorused.
I scowled at my cup. Why were men so woefully infected with the urge to chivalry? If I weren’t very firm about this, I would find the entire cohort stuck to me like sap to the shoe, forcing me to march to war in the company of a crippled daredevil, a fey three-year-old, and Puck himself.
And towards war I was going, I could feel it in my bones. Before our woodland idyll had been invaded, even before reading of Mycroft’s death, events had been pressing in on me, a creeping sensation that all was not right in the country I loved.
In the three and a half weeks I had been back-the last two of which, admittedly, spent on the run-English life had struck me as oddly loud and fast. At first, I had thought it was the sharp contrast between London and our peaceful South Downs retreat. Then I told myself that travelling out of the country for eight months had made me forget what England was truly like. And, of course, the Brothers case had been guaranteed to fill me with unease-not only for itself, but for the awareness that throughout history, religious mania had gone hand in hand with dangerous political and social turmoil.
Were five armed men another symptom of unrest?
Or was this simply what modern life would be, a place where a homicidal charlatan is embraced as wise, where children can be shot out of the sky, where a Good Samaritan can be driven from his home by armed intruders?
I wished I had Holmes to talk with about this.
I did not know the face of the enemy. I could not see how a sniper or a group of armed men in the Lake District could be connected with Thomas Brothers. I did not know why Mycroft had died, or at whose hand. I had no way of knowing if Damian and Holmes were still safe. I did not want to abandon Damian’s daughter to her own devices, and I emphatically did not wish to place her in the path of danger; however, she seemed as happy with Javitz, the housekeeper, and the boy as she was with me, and three times now-with a sniper’s bullet, a ’plane crash, and armed men in a motorcar too small for hostages-keeping her at my side had nearly been the death of her.
I prayed this time I might walk away from her without fear. If a child could not be kept safe in a private house, then no place in the British Isles was secure.
Nonetheless, a compromise was in order. I looked over my cup at Javitz. “I shall have to ask you to stay here, and guard the child.”
Holmes huddled on the aft deck, inadequately sheltered against the vaporised ice pouring down the North Sea, and wondered if he’d made the right decision.
It was a damnable choice. Leaving Damian behind had felt remarkably like turning his back on a man holding a knife-why hadn’t he anticipated the problem, and cajoled Gordon into staying on? But trying to take a tall, injured young man and a diminutive red-haired Scots female on what were sure to be closely watched ferries would have required intense tutoring on the arts of disguise, and he simply did not have the time. Nor had he the leisure to find a Dutch replacement for Gordon willing to smuggle three British citizens (only two of whom had passports) during daylight hours.
He’d done the best he could. On disembarking from the train the previous night, he had hired a taxi at the village station and burst into the VanderLowe cottage, going light-headed when he found his son and the doctor sitting peaceably before the fire, reading to each other from The Pickwick Papers.
He’d distributed just enough information to put the fear of God into them, and when the lights were out in the main house, he had borrowed one of the motorcars-well, not to put a fine point on it, he’d stolen the thing-and spirited his mismatched pair away from the artists’ community.
Then he spent the next twelve hours playing a sort of shell game with the two of them, aimed at baffling any pursuit: into Leiden, stashing them in an hotel, leaving the stolen motor near the central train station, and walking through the deserted town to a large hotel where at first light he hired a motorcar, ditching the driver (fortunately with trickery, not violence) and retrieving the young people to transport them in what amounted to a wide circle, ending at a small seaside watering-hole a scant forty miles south of where they had begun the day.
He established their identities as a young French aristocrat and his paid English nurse who were keeping out of his family’s way after a falling-out with an older brother. Drilling them both on the absolute necessity to speak as much French as possible and to keep to their rooms as much as they could bear, he emptied his purse into the doctor’s hands, and left to make his way to the Hook of Holland. There he deposited his second stolen motorcar, in a street where it would not be found until Monday at the earliest, and walked the last two miles to the Harwich steamer.
Even then, his day was not finished, for one who lacks both funds and time must resort to creativity. Reminding himself that there was no virtue like necessity, Holmes performed his third virtuous act in twenty-four hours, stooping to theft of the lowest kind. With twenty minutes to spare before the boat left the dock, he brushed against a banker who was admiring a fat infant in a perambulator, and picked his pocket.
The Fates had the last laugh, however, for the Moroccan leather note-case was worth more than what it contained, and there had been enough to cover the cheapest single ticket to England, but no more. Rather than chance another theft in the tight boundaries of the ship, Holmes spent the journey on the open deck, where the cold wind helped to numb the pangs of hunger.
Nothing, however, would alleviate the gnaw of anxiety, for family both behind and ahead. Oh, things had been so much simpler when the only person whose safety he’d agonised over was John Watson, M.D.
When the ferry at long last bumped against its pier, he joined the off-loading passengers, wan with hunger, red-eyed from a lack of sleep and a surfeit of wind, fighting at every step the impulse to howl and launch himself like a footballer down the gangway and towards London.
A man stood among those waiting, a large man in a warm overcoat. He might have been brother to the watcher in Amsterdam.
Peter James West pushed away the impulse to shout with triumph at the report in his hand. His instincts had been right: The fishing boat Sherlock Holmes had hired in Thurso landed not in England, but in Europe. With the agency’s men still in Scandinavia-sent there, in delicious irony, by Mycroft Holmes-they had been readily re-deployed when the trunk call was placed from Amsterdam. Did Holmes’ brother imagine they would overlook his longtime associate, simply because the two were no longer partners?
It was almost disappointing, how easy this was proving.
And although the men had lost sight of Sherlock Holmes, and their pursuit of the son and that rural lady doctor they’d picked up in Scotland had yet to bear fruit, it did not matter.
Sunday would be the funeral. Neither Holmes nor his wife would miss that.
Late on Friday night, Chief Inspector Lestrade stood up from his desk, his eye drawn yet again to the folded newspaper notice of the funeral for Mycroft Holmes. Hard to comprehend, that larger-than-life, demigod of a man, snuffed out by a blade. Impossible to avoid, that Lestrade’s own actions had somehow led to that death.
He did not believe Mycroft Holmes had been murdered because he had ventured into a wild night-club.
He could not shake the sensation that the death was tied to the unofficial near-orders-an urging, but difficult to overlook-that he bring into line Sherlock Holmes and his wife.
He was quite certain that there was some link between Holmes and the artist Damian Adler: That canny detective would not have stuck his nose into Yolanda Adler’s death merely because her body was found a few miles from his home.
He felt like a man in a whirlwind, with nothing firm to grasp, all his familiar landmarks obscured. Nonetheless, he was more at peace than he had been for some days, because late that afternoon he had withdrawn the arrest warrants for Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell.
If nothing else, it would permit him to keep his head high at Sunday’s funeral.
Goodman was in the breakfast room when I appeared early Saturday morning. I was dressed in clothing the housekeeper had chosen (and hastily altered during the night) from a wardrobe of items left behind by guests. None of them fit me well; none of them, I dared say, had been abandoned by accident.
My stand-in host was freshly shaved and wearing a suit of light grey wool with a public-school tie. His upper lip bore a pencil-trace of moustache; his nails were clean and clipped. The only vestiges of the woodsman were the emerald eyes and the unruly hair which, despite an application of oil, had a barely suppressed energy, as if any moment it would spring wildly upright.
“That’s a handsome suit,” I said.
“My cousin’s sister’s husband’s,” he replied, proudly looking down at the costume. He straightened the handkerchief in his breast pocket, brushed away an invisible crumb, and dropped his table napkin beside his plate. When he rose, it became clear that the gentleman in question was an inch taller in the leg and an inch narrower in the shoulder.
Clothes, however, make the man. Certainly, Goodman moved differently in this garb, his spine straighter, the boundaries of his body tighter, as if braced against the press of crowds and the pounding of pavements. The butler motored us to the train station, and when I stepped away from the ticket window and looked around for my companion, I nearly looked past him. On a weekday he would be almost invisible in a crowd of young businessmen, until one noticed the eyes beneath the light summer hat, and the faint idiosyncrasy of an owl feather in its ribbon. The Green Man had become the Grey Man, the colour of the city around him.
The newsagent was laying out the morning papers, and I paid for a copy of The Times. We took our seats and when I spread the fold open, Holmes’ message reached out like a touch of the hand. I wondered how far from me he was now. If he might be stretched out with his feet to the fire of one or another of his bolt-holes, waiting for me to find him.
“Do you have a plan?” my companion asked.
“Yes. There’s a message here for me, telling me to meet him at the funeral. However, there are one or two places to go first.”
I was feeling rather like Holmes who, when frustrated by lack of progress in a case, was apt to shout, “Data! I require data!” Before I could go much further, I needed information and I needed assistance: For both, I knew where to go.
At Waterloo, Goodman and I disembarked and made our way out of the steamy cacophony towards the exit. Long ago, in his days as an active consulting detective on Baker Street, Holmes had employed an ever-changing tribe of urchins he called his Irregulars. The core member of these troops was a quick, clever, nimble-fingered, unhandsome child with a gin-soaked mother and too many fathers, whose work for Holmes re-shaped his life away from outright crime towards an eventual adult profession of enquiry agent.
Billy had proved quite successful in his work. He would have been even more so-financially speaking-had he not chosen to remain in the district where he had grown up. He now kept an office in a part of the South Bank that did not actually frighten away monied clients, but he still lived two streets from the house where he had been born, and had built his own army of operatives out of cousins, neighbours, and childhood friends, a good number of whom had felony records.
If anyone, Billy could provide both manpower and information.
South of the Thames, the business of empire is less politics and finances than goods and services; consequently, the London sprawl that lies below the busy riverfront is less comprehensively served by modern transport. Half a mile to the north, we might have transferred to the Underground; here, we set off into the familiar by-ways.
Except they felt not entirely familiar. Surely I had not been away for that long? Each step I took, the sensation of wrongness grew, until in the end I murmured to Goodman, “Come,” and stepped into a rather rundown café. He followed me to a table that was sticky with spilt breakfasts, and I ordered coffee from the harried waitress.
The coffee that arrived thirty seconds later had already been doused with cream and sugar. Goodman raised an eyebrow at his cup, but I just leant forward, trying to avoid a puddle of egg yolk, and told him, “There’s something wrong here.”
“Indeed,” he agreed. Then he raised his eyes from the liquid, which was developing an interesting scum of coffee dust and flecks of half-spoilt milk solids, and saw that I was not referring to the drink. He changed his agreement to a query: “Indeed? What?”
Good question. I did not know London as thoroughly as Holmes did, but I had spent many days in the city, and had been in this area any number of times, including eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. “I don’t know what it is, precisely. But the district feels wrong.”
Another man might have looked askance, but this was a man who knew his forest so intimately, he could run among its trees in the dark. “Something you’ve seen? Smelt?”
“Sounds,” I replied slowly. “And things not seen. Two streets back, generally on a Saturday one hears the racket of a piano teacher at one end of the houses and a young man drowning her out with a gramophone at the other; both of them were silent. And not only is the district generally quiet, but people are missing.” I craned to look out of the steamy window, and then indicated the corner opposite. “Every time I’ve been on this street I’ve seen an elderly Italian man perched on a high stool. He’s the lookout for an all-hours gambling racket upstairs.”
“Constabulary tidying?” he suggested.
I pursed my lips. “A police operation would not affect children. Where are they? It’s a Saturday morning, they should be all over.”
I paid for the untouched coffee and we went back out onto the street. As we walked, my senses were heightened: a shop door closed here that I had never before seen shut; the gang of adolescent toughs that normally inhabited an alleyway there, missing; a shopkeeper who hired his upstairs rooms to a couple of the local ladies, watching through his window with a wary expression; the street itself, normally boisterous and carrying an edge of threat, gone still and indoors.
I liked this less and less, until I decided that to go farther into Southwark risked walking into a trap.
Three streets from Billy’s home was a greengrocer’s with a public call-box. I stepped into it, fed in my coin, and listened to the buzz of the ring.
A voice answered, a male on the uncomfortable brink of manhood, whose control slid an octave in the first two syllables of his reply.
“Is that young Randall?” I asked. “This is Mary Russell. Is your father-”
The voice cut in, so tense it warbled. “Pop said to tell you: Run.”
“But I need to see him,” I protested.
“He’s where you first met. Now, run!”
I dropped the telephone, grabbed Goodman’s hand, and ran.
Down the street we flitted, diving into a courtyard slick with moss from a communal well and ducking through the narrow covered walk at the far end. I did not think we had been seen, but as I scuttled through the damp passage, I pulled off my cardigan and yanked the blouse from the skirt’s waistband, letting it fall to my hips. The first ash-can I came to, I snatched up the lid and stuffed inside the cardigan and both our hats. Then I seized the back collar of Goodman’s jacket, stripping it from his back in one sharp yank, and would have added it to the other things had Goodman not grabbed it back and bundled it under his arm, then retrieved as well the feather from his hat. I dropped the lid on the bin, palmed my spectacles, and made for the street, slowing to a brisk but unexceptionable walk as we emerged from the alley. With a convenient piece of choreography, a red omnibus stood at the kerb twenty feet away. I pulled Goodman inside, paid the conductor, and scurried up the curve of stairs.
With a hiss and a judder, the ’bus pulled out. To my great relief, there was no shout raised from the pavement below, no pounding of feet. We took our seats, and when I put my spectacles on, I found that Goodman no longer resembled the successful young office worker he had when we started out: Hatless and in his shirt-sleeves, he looked even younger than he had, and decidedly rakish. He looked… not entirely trustworthy. More a part of our surroundings than I did.
His eyebrows were raised.
I explained. “The person on the telephone was the son of the man I wanted to see. The father runs an enquiry agency, and he’d left a message for me: to run.”
“How far?”
“At the moment, I am to meet Billy-the father-at a park on the other side of the river, although we have a stop to make first. After that, we’ll see. Are you sure you don’t want to-”
“I will stay.”
I nodded, by way of thanks, and kept my head down as we crossed over the bustling river traffic and entered the city proper.
The place where Billy and I had first met was a small green square not far from the theatre district. That was in 1919, when an evening at the opera with Holmes had ended with Billy bashed unconscious and the old-fashioned carriage he was driving left in shreds. After that auspicious beginning, I had met him perhaps a score of times, and although I did not know him well, we had, after all, been trained by the same man. However he and his son were communicating, he would not be surprised if I took an hour to make a two-mile journey, especially not following that urgent warning.
So instead of going directly there, we rode the ’bus through the crowded shopping districts, disembarking two streets away from one of the handful of bolt-holes Holmes still maintained across London. Each of them was well hidden, nearly impregnable, fitted with an alternate escape route, and well equipped with food, clothing, basic weaponry, sophisticated medical supplies, and the means for disguise. Revealing them to strangers was unheard-of, grounds for shutting the place down. This would be the only time I had done so.
This bolt-hole was on the Marylebone Road around the corner from Baker Street, and had originally been wormed into the space between a discreet seller of exotic undergarments and a firm of solicitors. It had been threatened a few years earlier when the merchant of stays and laces had died one day amongst his frothy wares, but to my amusement, the business that opened in its place was a medical firm with a speciality of cosmetic surgery that, as the need for patching together soldiers faded, had turned to tightening sagging skin and removing unsightly bumps on noses. As I’d commented to Holmes, if ever our disguises failed us, we could now pop next door and have our faces altered.
Inside the building vestibule, I let the frosted-glass door shut behind us and told Goodman, “I am not going to make you cover your eyes, since you’d probably find this place blind, but I’d like a promise that you’ll forget where it is, or even that it exists.”
“What place is that?”
“Thank you,” I said, and stretched up to press the triggering brick. On the other side of the vestibule, the wall clicked, and I pulled open the glass-fronted display case to climb through. With his bark of amusement, Goodman followed: up a ladder, sidling down a tight corridor, across a gap, and through the back of a disused broom-cupboard.
I could, I suppose, have left Goodman nearby and returned, supplied with the means of concealment-we would not find much clothing here for a man his size, anyway, although his thick hair might keep the hats in the cupboards from settling over his ears. I was glad he’d kept the jacket. But I brought him… I was not altogether sure why I was bringing him, other than I found his presence strangely reassuring, like a warm stone in a cold pocket.
Reason enough to open this secret place to him.
It was a relief getting into clothing that was not only clean, but fit me: a lightweight skirt and white blouse; a jacket that could be reversed to another colour; shoes so ordinary as to be invisible in a crowd; and two scarfs, orange and eau de Nile, so as to instantly change the appearance of hat, blouse, or jacket. I sat before the big, brightly lit looking-glass to change the shape of my face and the colour of my hair, replaced my spectacles with those of another shape and material, slipped a modern and nearly unreadable wrist-watch onto my left wrist and a row of colourful Bakelite bracelets onto my right, and screwed on a pair of screamingly bright earrings to match.
Then I turned to the man who had watched the entire process (less the actual changing of garments) with the bewitched curiosity of a child. “Shall we go?”
Any other man might have demanded, “Who the devil are you?” This one picked up his straw hat, adjusted the owl feather in the ribbon that matched his new breast handkerchief, and opened the door to the broom-cupboard.
We approached the little park a bit after mid-day, strolling up and down the surrounding district, lingering on a street-corner while I made ostentatious glances at my watch, and finally meandering towards the park, swinging hands like a pair of young lovers.
Being hand in hand with Robert Goodman, even as part of a disguise, ought to have been an uncomfortable sensation-I was, after all, a married woman. Yet I found that the press of his palm and the grip of his fingers possessed not the least scrap of adult, or perhaps masculine, awareness. It was like holding the hand of a taller, more muscular Estelle: companionable, child-like, and providing an ongoing and subtle form of nonverbal communication. His hand told me when he was alert, when he decided a passer-by was harmless, when he was amused by the antics of two children shrieking their way around and around a tree. His palm against mine spoke of trust and ease. And his fingers threaded through mine told me when he spotted Billy, slumped on a bench with a newspaper draped across his face.
I tightened my own fingers briefly, letting him know that I had seen the sleeping figure, and cleared my throat loudly as we passed the bench. The newspaper twitched. Five minutes later, Billy came around the back of the washroom building.
He looked tired, and I thought his unshaven face was more necessity than disguise. He had been living rough for some days; a darkness about one eye testified to recent physical conflict.
“You can’t stay in Town, and you mustn’t go to Mr Mycroft’s funeral,” he blurted out. His voice was pure raw Cockney, which happened only when he was upset.
“It’s nice to see you, too, Billy,” I said calmly.
“I mean it,” he insisted, stepping forward in what I decided was an effort to intimidate me into obeying him-which would have been difficult even if he was not three inches shorter than I. Goodman put his hands into his pockets, looking more interested than alarmed.
“Billy, what is going on? Why did you tell me to run? And why have all the criminals in Southwark gone to ground?”
“You noticed.”
“It was hard to miss. Are they all under arrest?”
“No, just as you say, gone to ground. I told ’em to hike it.”
“But why?”
“There’s something big up. I don’t know what it is, but there’s coppers in the rafters, sniffing under the dustbins, listening in at the windows.”
“You’re sure they’re police?”
“Nah, that lot’re not police, but they’re not honest criminals either. They’re hard men, that’s what they are, and they’re looking for you and Mr ’Olmes.”
“Is that why you had Randall tell me to run? Because someone was listening at your windows?”
“I didn’t want to be the one to lead you to ’em. I’ve been sleeping away from home for three days now because I was afraid they’d follow me to you. I wouldn’t risk that.”
“You’re a good friend, Billy,” I said, which was both the unvarnished truth and an attempt to calm him down. “But tell me about these men. If they’re not police, who are they?”
“They’re working with the police, but they’re sure as sin not local boys, or even the Yard.”
“So, it’s some kind of a criminal gang moving into new territory?”
“No,” he said in an agony of impatience. “They’re not a gang-or they are, but not criminals.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A criminal gang wouldn’t pick me up for questioning and then let me go. But Scotland Yard wouldn’t threaten my family if I didn’t cooperate. Randy’s the only one left at home, and that’s because he’s decided it’s time to play the man.”
I had to agree, this sounded very wrong. “I see what you mean. When did this start?”
“Thursday.”
“The day after Mycroft was…” It was hard to say the word. Billy’s face went even darker.
“I heard about that first thing in the morning, and they were at my door an hour later. They let me go at tea-time and I bundled my family off to-” He glanced at Goodman for the first time, suddenly aware of a new hazard.
“Sorry,” I said, and made the introductions. The two men shook hands, Billy eyeing the owl feather with curiosity. “Well, Billy, I suggest you collect your son and join your family until we get this sorted. Holmes should-”
He cut me off. “I’ve sent the family away, but that doesn’t mean I’m hiding. This is my town, they can’t pull me in and beat me up and expect to get away with it. When I’m finished for Mr Holmes I’ll go home and sit tight.”
Goodman stirred, putting together the bruises on Billy’s face with the situation as a whole.
I smiled at the irate Cockney. “Somehow it doesn’t surprise me to hear that.”
“And I don’t think Mr Holmes knows about it-any rate, he didn’t on Tuesday. I told him that Mr Mycroft hadn’t been seen of late, but that was all I knew.” The H had returned to Holmes.
“You’ve talked to Holmes?”
“Down the telephone,” he said. “And there’s another thing. He was phoning from Amsterdam-”
“Amsterdam?”
“That’s what he said. And I know I’m probably not up on this modern machinery,” Billy admitted, “but the timing’s dead fishy. Mean to say, he rings me Tuesday, there’s hard men in the neighbourhood Wednesday, Mr Mycroft dies late Wednesday, and I’m picked up and questioned Thursday.”
“So you talked with him before Mycroft…”
“Right. And afterwards he could’ve told anyone that he’d talked to me. Or, Southwark could have nothing to do with Mr Mycroft. But like I say, it’s just… fishy.”
“Well, I expect to see Holmes soon. Certainly by tomorrow. But, why did he ring you?”
“To ask me to look into this Brothers bloke. To see if he had any ties to a criminal gang, maybe a new one making a push into London from the East.”
“Does he know Brothers is still alive?”
“He is? Are you sure?”
“Almost certainly.”
“No, he told me Brothers was dead, but that people might not know yet. Mr Holmes wanted me to look for what the man’s ties might’ve been to a gang, and if they’d want to do anything more than cross him off their books.”
“Revenge, yes. And have you found anything?”
“I put out the word, but people were only starting to get back to me when my usual lines of communication got… disrupted. I did find that the bloke what works for Brothers, Marcus Gunderson-he came into steady employment ’bout a year ago. Got himself a nice flat, stopped associatin’ with his usual friends.”
“When was this?”
“Hard to pin down.”
“Might it have been November? He started working for Brothers then.”
“That lot, it could’ve been last week and they’d be hard-pressed to be sure. Do you think this Brothers might have anything to do with Mr Mycroft?”
“Other than the timing being, as you say, fishy, most of the links are pretty feeble. I know you and I were trained by the same man, but you have to allow that events can be simultaneous but unrelated.”
He looked unhappy, but then, so did I.
“I’m thinking of getting my hands on one of them, asking a few questions of my own,” he said abruptly.
I opened my mouth to object, but then closed it. Memories of brutalising information from Brothers’ man Gunderson two weeks earlier were still strong enough to make me queasy, but the fastest way to find out what the devil was going on in London was to ask one of the villains. However, I definitely wanted Holmes there to supervise. “They’re certain to show up at the funeral. We’ll see what we can do about separating one of them from the pack after-”
But he stepped forward with a look of panic, grabbing my arm. “You’re not going! Promise me you’re not going to stick your head up there!”
“Ow, Billy, stop!” He relaxed his grip, but not his urgency. “Look, I can’t not go to Mycroft’s funeral.” Besides which, if Holmes failed to show up at the bolt-hole-always a possibility-I should have to look for him at the funeral.
“They’ll take you. You’ll be dead as he is, and then what will Mr Holmes do?”
I was touched by the worry contorting his face, and amused at Holmes’ concerns being his priority. And although I was very aware that he could be right about the threat, I could think of one way to mitigate the risk.
“You may be right,” I said, and began to smile. “Do you suppose some of your kith and kin would like to attend as well?”
Funeral services, according to the newspaper, would be conducted at graveside, at four on Sunday afternoon, some twenty-seven hours from now. I had no idea if Mycroft’s will had specified the arrangements-frankly, I’d have thought my brother-in-law would prefer the simple disposal of a cremation-but if he had not made them, who had? His grey secretary, Sosa? His housekeeper, Mrs Cowper? Whoever was responsible, they knew Mycroft well enough to leave the Church out of the picture.
The need to see Holmes was an ache in the back of my mind, although I had grown accustomed to Goodman’s presence, and even grateful for it. From a practical standpoint, any police officer looking for a tall young woman in the company of an even taller American with burn scars-and possibly a child, depending on how up-to-date their information was-would not look twice at a tall young woman accompanied by a short, blond, green-eyed Englishman. But more than that, I found Goodman combined the amiability of a retriever with the bounce of a Jack Russell terrier. He was quite mad, of course, but his was a very different kind of lunacy to what had taken Mycroft, this dark madness I could feel growing around me like electricity. If the unseen threat was an approaching thunderstorm that raised one’s hair into prickles, Goodman was a bucket of water atop a half-open door: an unsubtle but refreshing distraction.
Still, I longed for Holmes.
I looked at some boys dashing across the lawn after a football, and made up my mind.
“I need to leave you for a time,” I told him. “Perhaps two hours. Do you want me to return here, or shall I meet you elsewhere?”
He, too, eyed the football. “I shall be here.”
It was both a relief and unexpectedly nerve-wracking to set off across the city on my own. When I reached the first of my destinations, I had to sit for a while and let my jangles dissipate.
Holmes was not here, in the second of his bolt-holes, tucked within the walls of one of London’s grand department stores. The Storage Room, as he called it, had been the first bolt-hole I had seen, in the early years of our acquaintance. Holmes had not been there then, and he was not here now.
Nor was he at any of the other four I checked, although two of them showed signs that he had been there with Damian the previous month.
If Holmes was in London, he was lying very low.
I rode back to the theatre district in a taxi, looking at streets that had gone unfamiliar to my eyes, infected with strange new currents, new and unpredictable and dangerous. Men with rifles sent at an instant’s notice to the farthest reaches of the land. The ability to trace the source of telephone calls. Men who were neither criminals nor police, but both. The brutal murder of one of the king’s most loyal and powerful servants.
These bustling pavements could be hiding any manner of threat; the wires overhead might even as I passed be singing my fate to the ears of a sniper; the helmeted constable on the corner may as well be a “hard man” with a very different view of London from my own.
Brave new world, that has such creatures in it.
In this strange London, I found that I looked forward to seeing Robert Goodman again, a small and cheerful man in whose blood moved the ancient forests of Britain, who rescued three fallen mortals from the hubris of a flaming sky-machine, who took joy in simple, silly things and looked on modernity as a jest, who overcame vicious armed men with the prank of a taut tree branch.
I spotted him sitting cross-legged on the lawn, grass-stains on his cousin-in-law’s knees, coat shed, shirt-sleeves rolled up, playing mumblety-peg with four young girls while their mothers looked on with a peculiar mixture of fondness and dubiety. They were as disappointed as their daughters when I made him fold away his lethally sharp pocket-knife and come away with me.
I was not certain that Goodman’s woods-awareness translated into city streets, but leaving the park, I was wary enough for the both of us, glancing in the reflections of polished windows, stepping into various shops to study autumn fashion or newly published titles while looking out of the windows at passers-by-and even more carefully, at those who did not pass by. I saw three uniformed constables and two private guards in mufti, but try as I might, I could see in the area surrounding Mycroft’s flat no police presence, and no “hard men.”
When we had been in the vicinity for twenty minutes, I stepped into a passage called Angel Court. Three steps to a doorway, and we were gone.
“Stand still,” I whispered into the damp and echoing darkness, feeling along the wall for the box of matches. My fingers found them; light flared, then settled onto the candle in its glass-shielded holder. I lifted it high to light our path through the narrow labyrinth to Mycroft’s flat.
At the far end, I set the candle on its ledge and took up the key from its invisible resting place, sliding the cover from the peep-hole that showed Mycroft’s windowless study. The low light he kept constantly burning showed enough to be certain the room contained no intruders.
I slid the key into its concealed hole and breathed to Goodman, “There’s no one in the room directly inside, but I can’t speak for the rest of the flat.”
“I will go first.”
“No,” I said.
“If they take me, what does it matter? If they take you, others will suffer.”
He meant that Estelle would suffer. I said, “Very well, but don’t turn on any lights.” I turned the key and put my shoulder to the wall. The bookshelf moved, and I stood back to permit him entry. Once inside, he pushed the hidden door nearly shut. Through the crack I watched him walk on silent feet across the carpet and out of the room.
My mind began to count the seconds as I waited, one hand on the door to pull and the other set to turn the key.
And waited.
He made a thorough job of it, and had time to look under beds and inside wardrobes before he reappeared, chewing an apple. I breathed again-disappointed that Holmes was not there, but relieved no one else was. I pushed the door fully open and stepped into the familiar book-lined room.
“What are we looking for?” He was curiously examining the shelves, which were as idiosyncratic as those of Holmes-although where the younger brother’s shelves were devoted to crime and art, Mycroft’s concentrated on crime and politics.
“Mycroft tends to keep his business to himself,” I said. “I know where his office is, more or less, and I’ve met his secretary, but I don’t even know the name of his colleagues. A desk diary or address book would be nice. What I’m hoping for is a hidden safe. Which, being Mycroft, may well be concealed behind a less-hidden safe.”
Goodman flashed me his young-boy’s grin and clasped his hands behind his back, turning to a contemplation of the walls.
Most men conceal personal valuables in a bedroom, professional treasures in a study. Mycroft would only choose those sites if he had decided on a double blind, but trying to outguess Mycroft would set one on the road to madness: One might as well flip a coin.
I knew this study, the guest room, and the sitting room reasonably well, and thought that over the years, I might well have caught some indication of a hidden safe in one of those rooms. Instead, I would begin with Mycroft’s bedroom.
But not before ensuring our security. I walked through the flat to the dining room, intending to jam one of the chairs under the front door-knob, and there saw an envelope with my name on it, propped against the fruit-bowl in the centre of the table. Battling an urge to look around me for a trap, I picked up the envelope and tore it open:
Miss Russell,
I have withdrawn the warrants for you and your husband. Please accept my condolences over the death of Mycroft Holmes. And please, come in to talk with me at your
Yours respectfully,
John Lestrade (Chief Insp.)
My first reaction was less reassurance than a feeling that I had just seen a predator’s spoor: I made haste to take a chair to the front door and work it into place. But with pursuers thus slowed, I read the words again, more slowly. Lestrade had proven himself generally competent and thoroughly tenacious, but he had never evinced the cold cunning needed to lay a trap under these circumstances.
It was the underlining of the words that pushed me towards accepting it at face value: Three words, using a considerable pressure on the pen, suggested a degree of urgency, even desperation.
Earliest possible convenience.
I read it a third time, then folded it away and returned to my search.
In his bedroom, I was unprepared for the powerful sense of Mycroft’s presence that washed over me. For a moment, my large, complicated, terrifyingly intelligent brother-in-law moved at the edge of my vision.
Then memory crashed in, and I found myself on the chair in the corner, blinking furiously, swallowing hard against the lump in my throat.
Mycroft Holmes was not a loveable man, but to know him-to truly know him, every unbending, impatient, haughty, and self-centred inch of the man-was to respect him, and eventually, reluctantly, to love him. I loved him. The thought of him dead in an alley filled me with rage. I wanted to find the man who had done that and rip into him, for making the world a less secure, less blessedly interesting place. But first I wanted to sit and weep.
This was an age of the death of gods.
I stood and brusquely wiped my face. I had no time for the distraction of tears. I forced myself to open drawers and search the backs of shelves, to pull up carpets and quietly shift furniture. I examined the underpinnings of his remarkably stout bed, pawed through the unwashed laundry in his basket, and lifted the lid of his toilet’s cistern. I emptied his bathroom wall-cupboard of medicines and felt the boards, knelt by the bathtub and felt the tiles, stood on a chair and felt the light fixtures.
Then I did the same in the guest room.
In the study, I found Goodman sitting in a chair in the centre of the room, looking at one of the walls. He might have been in a gallery studying an Old Master: Still Life of Odd Books.
“I had a thought,” I said, and took the work-lamp from the desk, transferring it to the plug nearest the bookshelf entrance and carrying it into the dim passageway. I held it up so its beam fell onto the bricks, new on one side, ancient on the other, searching for any anomaly. A moment later, Goodman’s hand came into view and he took the lamp from me, holding it so I could continue my search unencumbered.
Twenty minutes later I had reached the edge of the light’s beam, having found nothing but walls.
I returned the lamp to its place. “Well, it was just a thought.”
“There’s something odd about this shelf,” Goodman said.
I looked at him in surprise. “Very good. Not many people would notice.”
Mycroft had contrived a hidden recess the size of one of the shelf spaces. Now I unloaded the books and felt around for the slightly protruding nail head towards the back, which freed the back to drop forward into my hands.
It held ordinary valuables-money in several currencies; passports in false names that fit the descriptions of Mycroft, his brother, and me; and a piece of paper with a row of numbers on it, which when translated into mathematical base eight gave one the European bank account where he kept his foreign savings. Nothing to suggest his real secrets. Nothing to connect him with the world of Intelligence, either large or small i.
I decided to leave the study to last, on the theory that if an ordinary man keeps his secrets close, an extraordinary man keeps his far from him. Having made this decision, I turned for the sitting room, only to have the stillness of the flat shattered by a jangling telephone. “Don’t answer it,” I said. We both watched the machine, waiting for many rings before it fell silent.
I worked my way down the hallway towards the sitting room, rolling up the carpet runner, groping along the floorboards and skirting, unscrewing the switch plates, peering behind the pictures.
When I got to the end, my clean clothes were no longer and I had broken a fingernail prising at one of the boards.
Sucking at the finger, I kicked my way down the rolled carpet until it was flat, only then realising that I ought not to have started in the bedroom. Mycroft had commanded that Mrs Cowper’s kitchen be renovated, shortly after an enormous dinner for important guests-a goose, all the fixings, two pies, and several dusty basement-stored bottles-had first stuck, then come crashing down four stories in the dumbwaiter. It was the same time at which he had installed his secret entrance, using the dust of one building project to conceal the other.
And, I now saw, it would have been the ideal time to install a well-concealed safe in an unlikely place-why hadn’t I thought to look in the kitchen first and saved myself the knowledge of his laundry and nostrums?
Mycroft occasionally cooked in this kitchen, on Mrs Cowper’s holidays or days off, but for the most part, it had become the housekeeper’s room. Her ruffled apron hung from a hook on the back of one of the swinging doors; a photograph of her grandchildren stood beside the warming oven; an enormous portrait of the king beamed down upon her labours from the wall where the late and unlamented dumbwaiter had once opened-loyal as he was, I doubted the portrait would be Mycroft’s choice of decoration.
The room was tidy, as Mrs Cowper always left it; there was no knowing when she had last been here.
And this, naturally enough, was where I found Mycroft’s stash, in a place both difficult to reach and seemingly inappropriate for treasures: the frame of a notably modern oven. The temperatures alone should have guaranteed that any nearby paperwork would disintegrate in a matter of days; however, appearances were deceiving: What looked solid was not; what looked heated was cooled.
I drew from the narrow panel with the invisible hinges an inch-thick metal box the dimensions of foolscap paper. I settled on the floor with my back to the wall, lest Goodman come upon me without my noticing, and opened the box.
Inside were sixteen sheets of paper, typed or hand-written, none from the same machine or hand. All sixteen were condensed confidential reports, all concerned the behaviour of leaders in colonies or allied countries. I could not avoid a quick perusal, although I did not wish to compromise the Empire’s security by knowing what I should not; even that light survey made it clear that any one of these pages could instigate a revolt, if not outright war.
But that was not the extent of Mycroft’s secrets.
The box’s cover had two layers to it, with some insulating substance such as asbestos between them to protect the contents. However, as I returned the pages in their original order and applied a dish-towel to the metal so my finger-prints would not be on it, the top of the box felt a fraction thicker than the sides and bottom. I put down the cloth and turned the top towards the light, and saw: The top itself had a hidden compartment.
In it was a single sheet of paper, in Mycroft’s hand.
Dear Sherlock,
If you are reading my words, the chances are good that I am dead. I congratulate you on finding this, for I did not wish to make it easy.
Please, I beg you, destroy the outer contents of this box. The international repercussions of their revelation would be terrifying, and without me to oversee what might otherwise be described as blackmail operations, the papers themselves will be of no further use to anyone.
If as I imagine you will be loath to set match to them, please, I beg you, ensure without a fraction of a doubt that they will be destroyed upon your own death. The enormity of reaction should they be revealed would taint our name forever.
Finally, I commend to you two individuals, in hopes that you will care for their future needs. One is my housekeeper, Mrs Cowper, a woman of many hidden talents. The other is mysecretary, whom you met long ago, a person who has helped me Interpret all manner of data over the years.
Wishing you joy on the great hunt of life,
Your own,
M.
It was signed with the initial alone, but my eyes seemed to see his usual signature, in which the cross of his t swirled into an ornate underscore. I set the letter down long enough to examine the box, making certain it contained no further secrets, and return it to its place. The letter I kept.
I was still sitting against the wall, pondering Mycroft’s message, when the swinging doors parted to admit Goodman’s head. I scrambled to my feet, folding away the letter into a pocket.
“Did you discover your safe within a safe?” His gaze wandered along the shelves and pans that I had left every which way.
“More or less,” I answered vaguely. “You didn’t find anything else in the study, then?”
“Only this.” He stepped inside, holding out a key.
I took it with interest. I had not seen it before, an ordinary enough shape but with an engraved Greek sigma on its flat head. “Where did you find it?”
He walked away; I turned off the lights and followed.
Unlike the rest of the house, which I had left speaking eloquently of either a hasty search or a minor tornado, the disruption in the study was confined to two precise spots: the shelf niche with the money and passports, and below and to one side, a place where the wood of the shelf itself had been hollowed out. The thin veneer fit in behind the facing of the shelf, and would have been invisible unless one were lying on the floor, staring upwards, with a powerful light to hand. Even then, a person would have needed to know the hiding place was there.
I for one had not, although I’d spent countless hours in that very chair.
“How on earth did you find that?”
He frowned, then said, “The shelf did not match.”
“What, the wood?”
“No. The contents.” He could see I did not understand, so he tried to explain. “In the forest, a place where there was once a road or a house is betrayed by the varieties of trees that grow there, the shape of the paths cut by animals aware of the difference. Here, a man set out the contents of this shelf with a degree of… distraction, perhaps? As if this shelf had a different history from the others.”
I could recall no particular difference between the books on this segment of shelf and the books on any other, although it did contain a small framed photograph of a thin young man in an Army uniform, all but unrecognisable as Damian Adler. “I hope you have a chance to talk with my husband,” I told him. “You two would have much to say to each other.”
The key was the only object inside this highly concealed compartment. I looked at it under the light, but it was unexceptional, apart from the Greek letter. In the end, I added it to the contents of my pocket, along with the money, the bank account code, and the passports.
Mycroft had no further use for any of them, and with any luck, I could soon hand the collection over to Holmes.
I went to the guest room and changed into some of the clothes I kept there, then went through the other rooms so they bore the same disruption as the rest of the flat. I removed the chair from under the door-knob, noticing with a pang that Mycroft’s walking stick stood in its umbrella stand. He used it mostly for the regimen of afternoon strolls he had begun, following his heart attack; if he’d been carrying his stick that night, would he have had a chance for self-defence?
When we let ourselves out of the secret doorway, the only things left behind were Mycroft’s sixteen political thunderbolts and one considerable mess.
The bobbing light accompanied us along the passageway to Mycroft’s other hidden exit, on St James’s Square. Again, I stowed the candle and peered through a peep-hole to make sure our emergence from a blank wall would not be noticed, then worked the mechanism.
In the outer world, the low sunlight made the autumnal leaves glow; in sympathy, perhaps, a small corner of my mind began to light up, and I fingered the letter in my pocket.
Mycroft Holmes had a Russian doll of a mind. He was a man whose secrets had secrets. Any layer of hidden meaning was apt to have another layer, and one below that.
At opposite ends of the flat, he had left a letter to his brother and an unidentified key. With any other man, one would assume the two were unrelated. With Mycroft, there was the very real possibility that he had left two clues that by themselves were without meaning, that only together-if one persisted in the great hunt of life and found both-created a third message: The key is in the Interpreter. Or a fourth meaning. Or fifth.
There was also the likelihood that I was ascribing to my departed brother-in-law an omniscience he lacked: Even Mycroft Holmes would hesitate to lay out clues that his brother would not think to follow.
I badly wanted to talk to Holmes about this; however, I did have another set of remarkably sharp eyes with me.
“Let’s take supper,” I said, the first words either of us had spoken for at least ten minutes.
Down a side street lay a tiny Italian restaurant where I had once had an adequate meal. They were not yet serving, but were happy to ply us with wine and antipasti. When the waiter was out of earshot, I pulled Mycroft’s letter from my pocket and laid it on the table-cloth before Goodman.
“I found this in a place where not one man in a million would think to look. I’d like you to read it, keeping in mind that its author was the man who designed and arranged those bookshelves. Tell me if anything strikes you.”
He read it, twice, then folded it and handed it back to me. “There is hidden meaning there.”
“Yes,” I said in satisfaction. “I thought so.”
“Something to do with the secretary, I should have said. Who, unlike the housekeeper, goes nameless.”
I unfolded the page, and my eyes were drawn, as they had been each time before, to that unlikely capital I on the verb Interpret.
“Wait here,” I told him, and slipped out of my seat and onto the street outside.
Ten minutes later, I sat down again, finding a laden platter of glistening morsels and a full glass of red wine. I laid my purchase on the table.
A glance at its table of contents gave me the page number, and a review of the story took a few minutes. I gazed into space for a bit, and when the waiter drifted past, I woke and asked, “Have you a London telephone directory?”
“I am sure we do. Which letter were you looking for?”
“K. I think.”
He went away, confused but cheerful about it, and Goodman said, “Not S for sigma?”
By way of answer, I placed the book before him, open at the twenty-year-old short story “The Greek Interpreter.”
Unless the capital I had been a slip of the hand, which I found hard to credit, it was a teasing directional arrow left by Mycroft for his brother. Mycroft’s first appearance in Dr Watson’s tales had been in the adventure of the Greek Interpreter, when Mycroft’s upstairs neighbour, a pathologically naïve freelance interpreter named Melas, was sucked into a case of theft and deception, nearly losing his life in the process.
The Christian name of Mr Melas is not given, but the victim of the would-be theft, who died in the event, was a young man named Kratides. Key to his troubles was a sister named “Sophy.” A name that in Greek begins with the letter sigma.
There was nothing under S, or the name “Sophy” or “Kratides.” But when I hunted through the M listings, there was one Melas. The given name began with an S.
Perhaps Mycroft’s message was to be read: The key is the Interpreter.
The address attributed to S. Melas was a quiet, tidy yellow-brick house in Belgravia, less than a mile from Mycroft’s door. In the swept front area a pot of bronze chrysanthemums flamed. The bricks were scrubbed, the paint was fresh, the brass knocker gleamed.
A maid answered the door. I handed her a card with a name that was not quite my own, apologised for the late hour, and asked if I might speak with Mrs Melas.
Instead of asking us in, she took the card and left us on the front step, looking at a closed door. Caution clearly ruled over societal niceties in this household.
We did not wait long before the maid returned. She led us to an airy, slightly old-fashioned drawing room that smelt of lavender and lemons. In a minute, the lady of the house herself came in.
Sophy Melas was a tall, dignified woman in her late fifties, whose Mediterranean heritage had kept all but a few strands of white from the thick black hair gathered atop her head.
I apologised for our unannounced visit, but beyond that, could see no point in anything but bluntness. “Madam, were you related to a Mr Paul Kratides?”
Her near-black eyes went wary. “Paul was my brother, yes.”
“You married a Greek interpreter named Melas, who some years earlier had attempted to rescue you and your brother from villains?”
“I think you should leave.”
“My brother-in-law was Mycroft Holmes,” I told her.
She swayed a fraction, as if a sharp breeze had passed through the room, but said coolly, “How does this concern me?” Her accent was Greek overlaid with decades of life in England.
“I believe Mycroft may have left some information with you. I’d like to know what it was.”
“Why would you imagine the gentleman left anything with me?”
I sighed, and held out the decorated house key, dropping it into her outstretched palm. “I could have fitted it to your front door, but I thought that ill-mannered. Do I need to do so?”
She rubbed the key’s engraved letter with her thumb, then looked up at me. “It would not do you any good. I had that lock changed years ago. Still, you may as well sit. Would you like something to drink? Coffee?”
I allowed her to offer us hospitality, and when we had before us an elaborate silver coffee setting, she said, “I was sorry to hear of Mr Holmes’ death. The world is a lesser place.” It was a formal declaration, expressing no more emotion than the obituary in The Times had.
“What was your relationship with Mycroft, if I may ask?”
“I was… his friend. Occasionally I acted as his secretary.”
“That must have been a recent appointment.” I had last met the weedy and humourless Richard Sosa in December, when Mycroft was ill and asked us to take his secretary a letter one Sunday afternoon. However, all sorts of changes might have come about while I was out of the country.
“By no means recent. I have worked for him, on and off, for more than twenty years. Since I returned to this country and married Mr Melas,” she added. Then she smiled, unexpectedly. “I did occasionally act as his type-writer, but my primary purpose was to provide eyes and ears. Sometimes this was in the manner of his other… associates, but generally my use was for Mr Holmes himself. Your brother-in-law liked occasionally to discuss his affairs with what he termed ‘a pair of sympathetic and intelligent ears.’”
I looked at her with considerable interest. This woman not only knew of Mycroft’s agents, she was claiming that she had been one of them. Moreover, it sounded as if he utilised her for a sounding board, as Holmes had done with Watson, and later me. Why had it never occurred to me that the brothers might be alike in this way?
If that was the case, it pointed to a degree of trust I would not have expected of Mycroft. This aloof and rather hard-looking woman could know secrets Mycroft shared with no one else.
“Do you know anything about his death?” I asked her. “All I have heard is that he was killed outside of a raucous night-club. The Times obituary made it sound as if he had been a client.”
“Absurd,” she said flatly.
“I agree. But why else would he have been there?”
“I can think of any number of reasons why Mr Holmes would have been in that area. He was apt to meet his associates in the oddest locations.”
My rising hope was cut short by suspicion: Mycroft’s intellect ranged far and wide, but physically, my brother-in-law kept to a rigorously limited circuit-as Holmes put it, his brother could not be bothered to go out of his way to verify a solution. “Interesting,” I said mildly. “I thought Mycroft rarely went out to such meetings.”
“That was certainly true in the past,” she said. “However, when a man looks into the eyes of his own mortality, he confronts many demons. I believe that one of the demons Mr Holmes faced, after his heart attack, was that his disinclination to stir from his common rounds made him dangerously predictable. Either the world had changed, or his own unshakeable habits had created what he termed ‘an eddy in the currents of crime’ around him. In either event, he made an effort to change those habits.”
And I had thought Mycroft’s new régime of taking exercise was merely a weight-loss response to illness. I should have known there would be more than one meaning.
“So, who was he seeing at that club that night?”
“Ah, I’m sorry, you misunderstood my meaning. He occasionally spoke about his personal regrets-knowing that I of all his friends would understand-and even about his colleagues, but I was not privy to his secrets. Certainly not those to do with his work. And you have to realise, his remarks to me were often quite incomprehensible. In the general run of such things, we would be in the middle of some quite ordinary conversation-music or art or a current scandal-when he would drop an utterly unrelated and quite oblique remark. As if he wished to see my unstudied reaction.”
“Er, can you give me an example?”
“Let me think. Yes: Last month we went to the theatre to see a pair of Shaw plays about deception, and as we strolled home, talking about the strictures of drawing-room plays and the life of an actor, he asked me what I thought about the wage demands of coal miners. A topic that was much in the news at the time.”
“I see. And he never happened to mention anything related to this night-club?”
“Not that I remember. Although I believe something has been preying on his mind, of late.”
“What?”
“That I do not know. I only noticed that he seemed mildly distracted the last two or three times I saw him.”
Goodman spoke up from the sofa; I had all but forgotten he was there. “Mr Holmes asked an odd question the last time you talked,” he said in a voice of certainty.
“Did he? Now that you mention it, yes he did. It concerned loyalty. At first I was taken aback, because I thought he was making reference to my loyalty, but it seemed that was not his concern.”
“If not yours, then whose?” I asked her.
“I do not know.”
“The exact words he used were…” Goodman coaxed.
“‘Where does faith part from loyalty?’” she answered. “He had been reading the Greek philosophers, a discussion of the Virtues. He said something about one being legal and the other emotional. I’m sorry, I have little education, and I often did not understand what Mr Holmes was saying.”
Faith, as the Latin fidelis, connotes an unswerving belief; loyalty is linked with lex, a legal commitment. Faith is bone deep and unquestioning, whereas loyalty comes with a sense of threat and the possibility of failure.
I asked, “Did you get the impression that he was talking about himself? Wondering if he should remain loyal, for example? Or someone else?”
She answered slowly. “It sounded-looking back, that is; I can’t be certain what I felt at the time-but I should say it sounded as if he was trying to understand the underpinnings of someone’s concept of loyalty. Not his own.”
“But that’s all he said?”
“It’s all I remember. When I asked him what he meant, he laughed and changed the subject.”
“To what?”
“Oh, just a question about a novel we’d both been reading.”
Mycroft Holmes discussing a novel? For that matter, Mycroft discussing business with a woman he’d first met in the course of a crime? There must be unexplored depths to the woman-although Dr Watson’s story intimated as much.
“When was this-your last conversation with him?”
“The twenty-seventh of August, a Wednesday. He had been very occupied for several days, to the extent of cancelling a musical engagement, but he rang me that morning to say he was free for a few hours.”
That Wednesday, I had been flying to Orkney while Holmes was bobbing about the North Sea: It was, as she said, the first day in many that Mycroft had been free of us. This was also the day before he was taken in by Lestrade for questioning, and then disappeared.
“You said Mycroft occasionally talked about his colleagues. Any of them in particular?”
“Recently?”
“In the past few months.”
“I’m sure he did, but nothing that stands out in my mind. Let me see. His secretary-his work secretary, that is, Mr Sosa-was out for some days with what I gathered was an embarrassing illness, although I couldn’t tell you the details. One of his associates in Germany went missing for a period, in March, I believe it was, and My-Mr Holmes was quite preoccupied.”
“Do you know if this associate reappeared?”
“I think Mr Holmes would have mentioned, had his worries been for nothing. To put my mind at rest.”
A missing agent, I noted: Had Mycroft died in Germany, I should certainly know where to begin enquiries.
“Anyone else?”
“He talked about you and your husband a number of times during the winter,” she replied. “He was relieved when you came away from India without mishap, and concerned later, when you had problems in California.”
I blinked: That Mycroft would talk about business matters to a pair of “sympathetic ears” was surprising enough, but that he talked freely about his family was extraordinary.
“And very recently-that same Wednesday, it would have been-he told me a tale about a young associate who travelled from the Far East in record time. He loved it when one of his young people had a triumph like that. Let’s see, what else? He mentioned Prime Minister MacDonald, once or twice. And there was a colleague, Mr West-Peter James West, he called him, with all three names-who had done something unexpected. Speaking up to his superior, I believe it was, although that was one of those cryptic remarks, nothing detailed like the other young man’s trip from the East. Oh, but he did tell me about a conversation he’d had with the king a few weeks ago, when they both happened to be passing through St James’s Park.”
“Do you remember what that conversation was about?”
Her black eyes, unexpectedly, sparkled with inner amusement. “I believe it was to do with the lèse-majesté of ducks.”
I laughed, joined by Goodman’s shouted Ha! of humour.
I thanked Mrs Melas for her help, and made to rise. She seemed surprised, hesitating as if to ask something, but whatever it was, she changed her mind and got to her feet, holding out the key.
“Do you wish to keep this?”
“No,” I told her. “I think its only purpose was to point towards you.”
“Do you think so? I gave it to Mr Holmes many years ago, when he first helped me set up a household. It’s nice to think he kept it as a memento. Even if I had changed the actual lock.”
This was not at all what I had meant, but I could see no purpose in disabusing the woman of the notion that Mycroft’s keeping the key had an emotional, rather than merely practical, use.
At the door, Mrs Melas asked, “Would-do you think anyone would object, if I came to the funeral?”
“Whyever would they?” I replied. Which rather begged the question of who was going to be there to object?
“Ours was, well, not a liaison he openly acknowledged,” she said.
And only then, with her standing at my elbow, did my mind deliver up the question: Mycroft? Was the woman’s cool exterior in fact a struggle to contain grief? Had she been about to call Mycroft by name, when telling me about his concern for his agent in Germany? Did this mean that my brother-in-law’s diamond-hard mind and ungentle personality had a softer side? That Mycroft… that Mrs Melas…
I thanked her again, and made haste to get out the door.
Down the street, I became aware of Robert Goodman, a shadow at my side. I laughed, a shade uncomfortably. “From the woman’s reaction, one might almost think…”
“One might,” he agreed.
Ridiculous. Quite impossibly ridiculous.
Wasn’t it?
She expected something, there at the end,” Goodman observed some indeterminate time later.
“You mean when she looked as if she was about to ask a question?”
“More as if she was hoping you might ask.”
I paused on the pavement, going over that portion of the conversation, her air of expectancy before she stood. “You may be right. I felt she was telling the truth, so far as it went. But holding something back as well. Was she waiting for me to give some kind of a password?”
“Somewhat melodramatic, that.”
I laughed, both because Goodman was saying it, and because of the woman’s history. “You didn’t read the end of the ‘Interpreter’ story.”
“You took it away before I finished.”
“The two men who kidnapped Sophy Kratides, killed her brother, and assaulted Mr Melas, were later found dead in Buda-Pesht. It looked as if they had stabbed each other in a quarrel; however, a Greek girl travelling with them had vanished.”
“More knives,” Goodman murmured.
“Knives are personal,” I commented. We walked on.
“Have you further plans?” he asked.
“I must speak with Mycroft’s colleagues,” I told him.
“Tonight?”
It was, I was startled to find, nearly ten o’clock. “Perhaps not. In any case, I’m not sure where to find the fellow she mentioned-Peter James West. He may attend the funeral; if not, it will have to wait until Monday. But Mycroft’s secretary-his proper secretary, that is, not…” Whatever rôle Sophy Melas played. “Sosa lives not too far from here; we could at least go past and see if his lights are lit. However, we shall have to approach him with care-he will not talk about anything he regards as an official secret. He knows me-I wonder if we might be able to convince him that you’re a part of the organisation? Can you stay silent and look mysterious?”
The expression Goodman arranged on his features was more dyspeptic than mysterious, but perhaps a bureaucrat would expect no less.
The grey-faced and humourless Richard Sosa was a life-long bureaucrat who for more than twenty years had kept Mycroft’s appointments book and typed his letters. The man lived, with an unexpected note of upper-class levity, in Mayfair, in the basement apartment of his mother’s house, around the corner from Berkeley Square. Sosa mère et fils had long settled into a mutually satisfactory state of bitter argument and disapproval, which occasionally blew up into more active conflict, such as the time his mother bashed him with a fry-pan for being late to a promised dinner.
Perhaps the “embarrassing illness” to which Mrs Melas referred had been another such episode.
At the top of the quiet street, I paused to study the noble doorways. Goodman murmured, “No-one awaits.”
I was sceptical, as he’d spent perhaps thirty seconds in the survey. “How can you be certain?”
He did not answer; it occurred to me that I’d asked an unanswerable question, so I changed it to “Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
Very well; I’d trusted his eyes in the night-time woods, perhaps I should do the same in this night-time city. “All right, let’s see if he is home.”
But he was not: The curtains were drawn, and a piece of advertising had been left against the door, which I had seen in none of the other houses. We went back onto the pavement, so as not to attract the attention of the man walking his dog or the tipsy couple, and kept our heads averted as we strolled down to the end of the street and turned towards the lights of New Bond Street.
“I’ll wait here for a time,” I said. “He may be in later.”
“You plan on breaking in,” my companion noted.
“Er. Perhaps.”
“Do you need me?”
“I was going to suggest you find your way back to the hideaway.”
“I will go and sing to the trees for a while, I think.”
With no further ado, he turned in the direction of Hyde Park. I watched him go, wondering if he could possibly mean that literally. I only hoped he was not arrested for vagrancy. Or lunacy.
I circled corners until I was across from the Sosa door-or doors-and when the street was empty, I chose a low wall and settled down behind it. After ninety minutes that were as tedious and uncomfortable as one might imagine, the surrounding houses had all gone dark (for in Mayfair, no traces survive of the eponymous annual celebration of wild debauchery) and passers-by had ceased.
I waited until the local constable had made his semi-hourly pass. Then I climbed to my feet, brushed off my skirt, and went to break into the house of a spymaster’s assistant.
The locks to the basement flat were impressive, the sorts of devices I could be cursing over for an hour, and the door was a bit too exposed for comfort. However, those who find security in large and impressive locks often neglect other means of entry-and indeed, the adjoining window, although well lifted up from the area tiles, was both wide and inadequately secured. Ten seconds’ work with my knife-blade, and its latch gave.
Being Mayfair, the window-frame was even well maintained, emitting not a squeak as it rose. In moments, I was inside.
I stood, listening: The room was empty, and I thought the house as well. As I turned to pull down the window, something brushed against my toe; when the window was down (unlatched, in case of need for a brisk exit) I bent and switched on my pocket torch. It was a tiny Japanese carving called a netsuke, a frog with an oddly expressive face and perfect details. I left it where it lay, and walked through his flat, making sure the rooms were empty. Which they were, although the missing razor and tooth-brush, the empty hangars, and the valise-sized gap on a bedroom shelf suggested that he had not merely stepped out for the evening.
Richard Sosa’s home was a handsome, self-contained flat made from those portions of the building once given to the servants, although more opulent than one might expect of servants-or of a man with a secretary’s income. Some of its opulence was that of old money-much of the furniture had descended from the house above, receiving fresh upholstery in the process. But those things that reflected Sosa’s personal taste-the delicate Oriental ivory carvings, two new carpets, the paintings on the walls-had not been bought with a governmental salary.
On the table just inside the front door lay a card: Chief Inspector J. Lestrade, New Scotland Yard, with a telephone number and in his writing:
Please telephone at your earliest convenience.
Back in the first room, I checked the remaining curtains to be certain that no light would escape. The first was overlapped, but the second showed a slight gap. As I tugged them together, something fell to the floor: another tiny netsuke, a rabbit, ears flat against its back.
Cautiously, I peered behind the fabric of the remaining window with my hand obscuring the head of the torch, and saw a third carved figure, this one a sparrow, perched on the window’s upper rim. Its balance was precarious, nearly half its circumference protruding past the painted wood. And when I loosened my fist to allow a trace more light to escape, I could see the trigger: a thread, attached to the curtains, looped around the sparrow’s ivory neck. With my other hand, I pushed the fabric away from the window, and the netsuke fell, its weight pulling it out of the loop of thread.
Well, well: The grey little secretary had picked up a few tricks.
I looked over at the window I had come in by. Thick carpet lay underneath the window, but would I have missed the sound of an ivory frog falling to the floor? Possibly.
I returned the rabbit and the sparrow to their perches, but I did not bother to loop the thread back-any man with the foresight to set up a sign of intruders would also know the angle at which he had left his traps.
The creatures were unexpected, in two ways: an indication of considerable care and sophistication, and an inescapable note of whimsy. Mycroft’s secretary was not so grey as he appeared.
I searched the place with a nit-comb, taking my time so as to leave no evidence of my presence. The constable’s footsteps went past four times, every thirty-four to thirty-seven minutes, as I uncovered the secretary’s life. His office suits ran the gamut from pure black to dark charcoal, the neck-ties included those of a minor public school, and his leisure wear leant heavily towards flannel and mildly patterned jumpers. His stocking drawer was occupied by ranks of folded pairs, none of them with holes in them. His undergarments had been ironed.
His bathroom cupboard said that he suffered from angina, for which he had been prescribed nitro-glycerine, as well as dyspepsia, ingrown toenails, migraines, and insomnia. He wore an expensive French pomade, and possessed a curious electrical instrument that looked like a torture device but which I decided was to stimulate the growth of hair follicles.
I found two art books that might at a stretch be termed erotica (on an upper shelf in the library), the playbill for a slightly raunchy revue (three years old and buried in a desk drawer), and some modernist sketches that might, perhaps to the mother living upstairs, be considered risqué. I found no drugs, and no sign of female company (actually, of any company at all).
The desk in his small, tidy study had a telephone and a leather-bound 1924 diary. I went through it closely, copying various times and numbers, but Sosa either was cautious about writing down too much information, or trusted himself to remember the essentials: Appointments were often just an initial and a time, sometimes “Dr H” or “dentist” and the time. Three times he had written down telephone numbers, two of those with an abbreviated exchange. The last of the three was on the Thursday that Mycroft disappeared, with the same exchange Mycroft had, although it was not Mycroft’s number. I could simply ring the numbers, but without knowing what alarms might be set off, it might be best to leave the task of identifying the numbers to Holmes.
I returned the book to its position by the telephone, and turned my attention to his desk drawers. One of them held files, a number of which contained carbon copies of letters from Mycroft, the ornate capital M he used as a signature indicating that these were official duplicates, not mere draughts. They were addressed to the current and the last Prime Ministers, to the owner of a large newspaper, to several Members of Parliament. Reading them, I was reassured that the contents were not particularly inflammatory: Whatever Sosa’s qualities, sheer carelessness was not among them.
In the end, this is what his home revealed:
The notes from his diary
Six new and expensive paintings on the wall
The business card of a very high-class art dealer
Another card, from a house whose reputation I knew, a mile away
An ingeniously concealed wall-safe with a lock that took me nearly two full passes of the constable to circumvent.
Inside the safe I found a velvet pouch with a palmful of large-carat diamonds, three stacks of high-denomination currency (British, French, and American), a number of gold coins, a file with memos and letters signed with Mycroft’s distinctive M, and a bank book dating back to 1920.
The file included a trio of carbon pages requesting information on Thomas Brothers and Marcus Gunderson. They were pinned to a copy of the Brothers photograph that Mycroft’s Shanghai man had brought, and another of a glaring Marcus Gunderson.
The bank book was the most revealing. For years, the entries down the IN column varied little, and seemed to comprise his regular salary and periodic income from stocks and an inheritance fund. Until the past March, at which time round sums began to drop in at untidy intervals: twenty guineas here, thirty-five there. In the middle of June was one for a hundred guineas.
I had to smile sadly at the idiocy of criminals: caution and carelessness; locked doors beside vulnerable windows; scrupulously kept books recording illicit income.
Then I looked at the last page, and the smile died:
Friday 29 August: 500 guineas received.
The day after Mycroft disappeared.
Five hundred pieces of silver.
I left everything where I had found it: I had the name of the bank, the dates of the deposits-along with information on his art dealer, his newsagent, his housekeeper, his solicitor, and his mother. It would be of interest to examine the mother’s account, although I did not imagine it would show those round sums in its OUT column.
It was nearly time for the constable to pass, so I stood at the curtains with my torch off, waiting for the deliberate footsteps.
Sosa was in his fifties, an age when some men looked up and saw not what they had, but what they lacked. This was particularly true when a man was under pressure-and between December and March, when Mycroft came back to work after his heart attack, the pressure on his assistant would have been considerable.
The major question in my mind was, when did Mycroft discover Sosa’s hidden income, his secret life, his-call it what it had to be-treason?
It was hard to picture the grey man working day in, day out under Mycroft’s very nose without giving himself away. But until this past month, I had not seen Mycroft since the early weeks after his attack, at which time he had been both ill and distracted. I could not deny the possibility, however remote, that he could have overlooked his secretary’s treason until very recently.
Ten days ago Mycroft had talked to Sophy Melas about loyalty. Where does faith part from loyalty?
He knew then.
Did that knowledge get him killed?
Or had he known for some time, and done nothing, either because he was testing the limits of his secretary’s betrayal, or-and this I could envision-because he was using Sosa to lay a trap for the man or men behind him? I could well imagine Mycroft keeping an enemy close for half a year in order to tease out the extent of a conspiracy. He might even have embraced the challenge of proving that his illness had not lessened his abilities: to work every day cheek-to-jowl with an enemy, blithely feeding him information, never letting slip once.
A Russian doll of a mind.
Had that hubris got him killed?
And was there any way in which Brothers entered this mix? There was no copy of the man’s bible, Testimony, on Sosa’s shelves, and I had not seen him in the Church of the Light services that I had attended. Was it possible that whoever was backing Thomas Brothers was also responsible for suborning Mycroft’s secretary? As I’d told Billy, simultaneous timing did not prove consequence, but coincidence still bothered me.
The constable approached, then passed. I let myself out of the Sosa apartment, leaving the ivory frog where it lay, and managed to lock the window before I left.
Several late-plying taxis passed me on the walk to Baker Street, but sure knowledge of the conversation a taxi-ride would entail-either the driver would think a young woman out on her own at this time of night was no better than she should be, or he would wish to rescue her and watch over her every move until she disappeared through the doors of a house-forced me to walk, reminding myself at every step that I should dress as a man for every night-time expedition. However, the bolt-hole was not far out of the way from my next destination: I could effect a change there.
Under-slept, over-walked, and distracted is no way to approach a secret hide-out, and I was lucky the only person lying in wait was a blond imp, who dropped light-footed from a first-storey archway and scared me to death. I cursed him and came near to kicking him, and in an ill temper stalked towards the entranceway.
“Why are you out here?” I snapped. “Did you forget how to get in?”
“The city at night is a restful place,” he said, which was no answer and was patently untrue-my own night in this city had hardly been restful. “I am happy to see that you were not arrested.”
I looked up from the locking device, my eyes narrowed with suspicion. “How do you know what I’ve been doing tonight?”
“I don’t. What have you been doing?”
“How-ah.” I turned back to the lock: He was not talking about my house-breaking. “I neglected to tell you what was in that letter in Mycroft’s flat. It would appear that the police have decided my husband and I are no longer of official interest.” I explained what the note had said, and who had sent it.
“So you can come out into the open? You and your husband?”
“Probably not. For one thing, it’s possible that Lestrade might be thinking to lay a trap, either for us, or to lead him to Damian-my stepson, Yolanda’s husband.”
“Estelle’s father,” Goodman said, adding, “Who is too claustrophobic to go to gaol.”
“Are you?” I asked. “Claustrophobic?”
“Not in the least.”
“Good,” I said, and opened the door to Holmes’ bolt-hole, which was so snug and stuffy, a hibernating squirrel might become uncomfortable.
While Goodman set about exploring the nooks and crannies of the space carved into the interstices of the buildings, I did what I should have done on our earlier visit: Review the supplies and check the ventilation shaft, lest some bird had plugged it with a nest.
All was well: food, drink, electrical light, and air, along with entertainment in the form of books, a chess set, and playing cards. There was even a serviceable bathing facility, cramped but equipped with warm water diverted from the neighbouring building.
I showed Goodman where everything was, then told him, “If anything happens to block the entrance, the alternative exit is down here.” He peered with lack of enthusiasm into the duct, but in an emergency, I felt certain, he would manage. “In the winter time it’s a little tricky, because the building’s furnace is at the bottom, but it should be fine for now.”
“You are leaving again,” he asked, although it was not a question.
“I have to speak with Lestrade. He may not be in charge of the investigation, but he’ll have kept a close eye on its progress. I’m going to write a letter to Holmes before I go. If I’m wrong about Lestrade and he has me arrested, everything Holmes needs to know will be in the letter-if you see him, tell him it’s here. But after that, I recommend you make your way as quickly as you can back to Cumbria. With, may I say, my considerable thanks.”
I put him into the bedroom, warning him to turn on a light when he woke-even he might bash his skull by rising incautiously. When I was alone, I changed my clothing, then sat down to record everything that had happened since Estelle and I had parted from Holmes and Damian, eight days before: the suggestive lack of police interest that night in Orkney; the sniper in Thurso; the crash and rescue; five days in the Lake District cut short by men with guns, and how they might have found us; leaving Javitz and Estelle at the house in Richmond; what Billy had said about the “hard men;” what I had found in Mycroft’s flat (this I worded with great care); the interview with Sophy Melas; and what Sosa’s home had told me.
I finished:
I am going now to speak with Lestrade. I believe the sincerity of the note he left at Mycroft’s.
I may, of course, be wrong (yes, even I!) in which case you may need to stand me bail. However, I beg you, wait to do so until you have solved this case and ensured the safety of Damian and Estelle. I understand that one can get a great deal of mental work done in the confines of a cell.
Finally, I commend to you Mr Robert Goodman, whose name might as well be Robin Goodfellow. A singular character whom I have no doubt will entertain you mightily.
Your
Russell
When I had finished, it came to six pages despite my attempt at succinctness. I then set about putting key sections of the thing into code: If the letter was intercepted, Mycroft’s sixteen inflammatory papers would be safe enough, given my wording, but I did not care to give up the location of Estelle Adler to unfriendly eyes. And there was no reason for Goodman to know that his innocent actions had betrayed us to our enemies.
I folded the pages into an envelope, added Lestrade’s note and Mycroft’s letter, wrote Holmes’ name and our Sussex address on the front, and left it-stamped but unsealed-on the table.
Chief Inspector John Lestrade lived in the house where he had been born, some forty-five years before. His father, also a Scotland Yard detective, had died during the War, bequeathing his son the house, a set of unfortunate facial features, a mind rather too quick for a policeman’s desk, and a long-established relationship with that trouble-making amateur, Sherlock Holmes.
I had known for years where Lestrade lived, although I had not yet been inside the house. It was approaching three in the morning when I rounded a corner four streets down, stopping in the shadow of an overgrown lilac to survey the street.
Few watchers can keep still at three a.m. when nothing is happening. Even watchers too clever to light cigarettes still scuff their feet, move up and down, anything to alleviate the boredom of a fruitless watch.
I stood motionless for half an hour before I was certain that the stretch of front-doors and walled areas contained nothing more threatening than an amorous tabby cat atop a wall. Only then did I step into the open pavement, plodding and stooped with tiredness on the chance some insomniac was gazing from their window.
I continued up the rows of houses, then made a pair of right turns to survey the house’s back: no service alley here, and a snuff and a tentative whoof returned my feet to motion-his neighbours had a dog.
Unfortunately, that left me with no choice but the direct approach.
I made another pair of right turns, and when I had reached the next house but two from Lestrade’s, I hopped over the waist-high wall, hastily grabbing a bicycle toppled by the manoeuvre. The next low wall I took with more circumspection, creeping across the pavers to slip onto Lestrade’s property.
The house was dark, as were all the houses save one three streets down. I moved noiselessly across the little forecourt to the door, grateful he did not leave a light burning there all night, and bent to work with my pick-locks.
Like most policemen, Lestrade was convinced of his invulnerability. The lock took me six minutes, working entirely by touch and hearing. When it gave way, I turned the knob and stepped inside, closing the door silently.
And stopped.
If it is difficult for a watcher to stand motionless, it is nearly impossible to remain utterly silent for more than a few seconds: the faint brush of clothing, the pull of breath through tense nostrils, the catch of air in the throat while the person tries to listen.
The hairs on my skin rose with the awareness of someone standing very close.
“Chief Inspector?” I said in a low voice.
A brief shift betrayed the other’s position. I said, “I apologise for the intrusion, but it was important that I speak with you unseen. This is Mary Russell.”
A sharp exhale of breath, the rustle of clothing, then the vestibule light blinded me.
I winced, and saw Lestrade: his thin sandy hair awry, his feet bare, in dressing gown and striped pyjamas, a cricket bat in his grip.
“I nearly took your head off,” he said furiously. His low voice told me that either there were others sleeping in the house, or he too feared discovery. At this point, it did not matter.
“Good evening, Chief Inspector,” I replied.
“Hardly evening. And what’s good about waking to find someone breaking into the house?”
“You said at my earliest possible convenience. Which this is. I didn’t want to wake your family.”
“You triggered an alarm.”
Perhaps I was hasty in judging Lestrade one of those too-confident policemen. “That note you left, at Mycroft’s,” I said. “Were you serious about withdrawing the warrants?”
He stared at me, shook his head in dismay, then leant the bat against the wall and stepped into a pair of beaten-down slippers left to one side. “Come in here, we can talk without disturbing my wife.”
“Here” was the kitchen, two steps down towards the garden. I eyed the window, decided that to worry about his neighbours playing host to villains was to court paranoia, and continued down the steps. He indicated a chair. I sat.
“Have you eaten?” he asked, filling the kettle at the tap.
“Yes.”
“Not been hiding out too badly, then?”
“Merely cautious. Were you serious-”
“Yes.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I didn’t like the idea of arresting you at a funeral. Besides, I wasn’t entirely convinced in the first place that the threat served any purpose. Tea, or coffee?” The gas popped into life under the kettle.
“Uh, tea, thanks.”
“Where’s your husband?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t seen him in a week.”
He dropped into a hard kitchen chair, looking tireder than a night’s interrupted sleep could explain. “And Damian Adler?”
“Last I heard he was out of the country.”
“What about the child?”
“She is safe.”
His weariness snapped off. “You know where she is, then?”
“She’s safe,” I repeated, and before he asked again, I got in a question of my own, even though I was fairly certain of what the answer would be. “You’re not in charge of the investigation around Mycroft?” Extraordinary, how difficult it was to use the words death and murder when it was personal.
“No. I’m sorry, by the way.” He caught himself, and started again. “I mean to say, I was very sorry to hear of your loss. Mycroft Holmes was a fine man. He will be sorely missed. Which makes the whole thing all the harder.”
“What is that? Who’s in charge?”
“No one.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“No one I know. It’s being kept in-house, you might say. Seems that Mycroft Holmes is too important for the grubby likes of Scotland Yard.”
I sat forward sharply. “Would you please explain?”
“I wasn’t on duty, Wednesday night. The man who was got the call at a quarter to midnight: man found dead in an alley. Gets dressed, goes with the car, arrives, and finds a man in a suit there before him, flashing the kind of identity card you can go your entire career without once seeing. This fellow hands over the papers found on the corpse, tells my colleague that Intelligence takes care of its own, and leaves. Taking the body with him. My fellow scratches his head, can’t think what to do about it, and goes back to his bed.”
“‘Intelligence takes care of its own’-that’s what he said?”
“The very words. I didn’t hear about it until the next day. When I did…”
The kettle had begun to boil. He stood and went to the stove, pulling down tea and pot, keeping his back to me. “I had him in for questioning, ten days ago-Mycroft Holmes, that is. The very next morning, his housekeeper is raising a stink because he’s not home. Nobody sees him for a week, until he’s found in an alleyway, then snatched away by someone flashing SIS papers. So I get on the telephone and start hunting down the body. Twenty minutes later, my chief comes in and orders me to stop.”
He finished making the tea in silence, fetched a bottle of milk in silence, brought two mugs to the table in silence.
I blew across the hot surface, thinking. Then: “Why were you at Richard Sosa’s flat?”
“Who?” His face showed a moment of incomprehension, followed by puzzlement, as if he’d recognised the name but couldn’t think why I had brought it up.
“Richard Sosa. In Mayfair? You left your card on the table?”
“I leave my card on a lot of tables. It’s a steady drain on the finances, it is.”
“But why were you there?”
“Oh, for-” He threw up his hands and reached for the sugar pot, flinging in two spoonsful, clearly irritated by a non sequitur. “He’s a government employee with a busybody of a mother who is friends with the sorts of people you might imagine, living in Mayfair as she does. She got all in a tizzy when little Dickie didn’t come home one night, and got onto the PM’s office and he himself rang to me-at home, mind you-the next morning asking if I’d do him a favour and look into this missing-person case. Ridiculous-and to top it off, the son hadn’t even been gone a day! But I went past on my way in, got the key from Mama, who lives upstairs, made sure her darling boy wasn’t lying in a puddle of blood, left my card on his table, and told her she could report him as a missing-person the next day. Friday. Two hours later I’m in my office after one of the most unpleasant meetings I’ve ever had and the telephone rings and it’s the butler-the butler!-ringing to say never mind, the boy’s home. Not even Mama herself, and nothing resembling an apology. Biddies like her cause us a lot of trouble. Now are you going to tell me why you want to know about him, or are we going to go on to another completely unrelated crime?”
“Richard Sosa is Mycroft’s secretary.”
He stared at me. “Mycroft Holmes’ secretary?”
“His right-hand man. Which may be a better explanation of why you were asked to look into his disappearance than a mother’s connexions.”
“Jesus,” he said.
“You’re certain he was home on Thursday?”
“Like I said, the butler rang. I did then ring back the house-Mrs Sosa’s number-to make sure the call actually came from there. When the same voice answered, I let it go. Why, is he still gone?”
“I think someone broke into his house recently, causing him to panic and run.” I described briefly the netsuke I had found, well aware that I was delivering myself up to yet more charges. How many books was one permitted in a gaol cell? I wondered.
“He’s not staying there, and you say his mother has not seen him. Without going into too many of the sorts of details you might prefer not to hear, I can say that Sosa has information about Brothers in his safe, and his bank book records some hefty payments of nice round sums. Including one for five hundred guineas dated the day after Mycroft disappeared. One must ask oneself what the man knows.”
He sat back in his chair, frowning. “That’s a considerable sum.”
“Mycroft was a considerable man.”
“You think the secretary was paid to give him up?”
“I think you might like to talk to Sosa. And although the mother obviously frets when he doesn’t come home, and one might ask if she made occasional gifts to her son, something Mycroft once said about Sosa indicated that he and his mother don’t get on very well.”
He looked thoughtful, rather than convinced. However, I had another question for him. “Chief Inspector, can you tell me if you’ve had news of a death in Orkney? Specifically, at the Stones of Stenness.”
“A death? When?”
“A week ago Friday.”
“No. Although there was an odd report from up there. What was it? A prank? That’s right, some boys set a fire that sounded like gunfire, but when the local constable arrived he found only scorch-marks. Why? Who did you think had died?”
It was confirmation of what I had feared: The lack of police interest at the Stones that night was because there was no body. Which meant that, unless someone had retrieved his dead body almost instantaneously, Brothers remained an active threat. Perhaps more than active: Having his intentions for Transformation crushed would surely add a thirst for revenge to his murderous plans.
I did not answer directly. Instead I asked, “Do you still think Damian Adler murdered his wife?”
“What is the interest you two have in that young man?” he demanded.
I was glad to hear the question, since it meant he did not know who Damian was. “As you are aware, Chief Inspector, Holmes attracts a wide variety of clients, including bohemian artists. Do you-”
“I need to question Adler. You need to tell him he’s not helping himself any by avoiding us.”
“I swear to you, Chief Inspector, that Damian Adler is not the man you are looking for in his wife’s death.”
“Well, he’s certainly not the only one I’m looking for.” He picked up the tea-pot to refill his cup. “I don’t suppose you know where I might find this Brothers maniac either?”
“So you are looking for Brothers now?”
He slammed the tea-pot onto the table so hard liquid spurted from its spout, and snarled, “He’s connected with two people dead of knife wounds and a third from gunshot, so yes, you might say I’m looking for him.”
I protested, “Chief Inspector, we tried to tell you about Brothers and his church weeks ago. Don’t-”
“Yes, and now everywhere I go, I’m tripping over you two. You’re in Brothers’ church; your finger-prints are all over his house, including a knife left stabbed through the desk blotter; you have the police in York ring me up to ask if I might shed some light on one of their deaths; and you bundle a villain like Marcus Gunderson into a carpet and have me come pick him up.”
“A villain whom you then let go.”
“What did I have to hold Gunderson on? He was the victim of assault in that house.”
“Do you know anything about the man?”
“He’s a thug. Spent some time in the Scrubs for robbery-bashed his upstairs neighbour and stole his cash retirement fund. Gunderson was lucky the old man had an iron skull, or it would’ve been a murder charge-but since then, he’s been clean, as far as I can see.”
“Do you know if he’s familiar with guns? Not just revolvers, but rifles?”
“He wasn’t in the Army. And hunting? Not likely for a city boy. Why?”
“Someone took a shot at me, a few days ago. Someone either very lucky or well trained with a rifle.”
“And you think it was Gunderson? What, at the orders of Brothers?”
“Brothers looks to be behind everything else we’ve faced since we returned to the country.” Precisely twenty-seven days ago-had I ever had a more hectic four weeks?
“Yes, and you keep saying that Adler has nothing to do with it, but then I find that he’s done artwork for Brothers’ book, and his wife was a devout follower of Brothers’ crank religion-” (So he did not know that Yolanda had actually been married to the man.) “-and I’ve seen at least three paintings he did of Brothers-one that his wife had on her wall, another in Brothers’ house, and a third in the gallery that’s selling his paintings. So you can’t tell me there isn’t some kind of link between Adler and Brothers.”
“Of course there’s a link-Brothers is trying to kill him!”
“So help me stop it.”
“Chief Inspector, I do not know where Damian Adler is, and the last I saw of Brothers was in Orkney last Friday, when he tried to murder Damian and was injured in the attempt.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I kicked myself for giving away more than I absolutely had to. Lestrade leant slowly back in his chair, eyes narrowing; his expression had me reviewing the exits, for when he made a grab for my wrist.
“You want to tell me how you know that?”
“You want to tell me why you took Mycroft in for questioning?”
His expression shifted, from a hunter with his prey in sight to a guilty schoolboy. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“It has everything to do with it, Chief Inspector. You’re Scotland Yard. Mycroft was… Well, he was Mycroft. What on earth drove you to make a move against Mycroft Holmes, of all people?”
“He was standing in the way of a police investigation,” Lestrade said stubbornly.
I wished my eyes when they glared went grey and cold like Holmes’ instead of light blue, bloodshot, and concealed by spectacles. “Your going after him was not only unlikely, it was uncharacteristic. Add to that my growing suspicion that Brothers has been receiving help from high places, and…” I waved a hand. “That’s why I picked your lock at three in the morning rather than walking into your office.”
Lestrade’s face changed. “Are you accusing me of being a corrupt officer?”
“I would not be sitting here if I thought that. But it is clear that Brothers had help, and from someone other than Gunderson. Some person helped him set up a new identity in this country, back in November. Someone helped him cover up his deeds. I began to suspect it even though I’ve been on the run for the past two weeks. What I am asking is, did that person reach out to you as well, and influence you to intercept Mycroft’s wires and invade his home?”
He stood abruptly and went to rummage through a drawer, coming out with a mashed-looking packet of cigarettes. He got one lit, and stood looking out the dark window. The stove clicked as it cooled; somewhere in the house, a clock chimed four.
“It’s possible,” he said finally. He came back to the table, his face closed. “I don’t take bribes.
“But you want to know if someone got at me, if I gave in to pressure against my better thoughts. The answer is yes.
“Look,” he continued, “I follow orders. The nature of my job gives me a great deal of independence, but when orders are given, I follow them. And something very near to being a command came down to put some pressure on Mycroft Holmes.”
“Down from where?”
“Doesn’t matter. It didn’t originate with the man who gave it, which means it was high enough that it might have come from outside the Yard entirely. And frankly, I didn’t ask too closely about it. Society only works if the police are given a free hand to investigate where they will. No one should be above the rule of law. Even him. You and Mr Holmes have walked the edge any number of times, but always managed to keep close enough inside the bounds that I could tell the difference between personal affront and official wrongdoing.”
“Is that why you issued warrants for Holmes and me as well?”
“Not directly, but it helped move me in that direction. Truth to tell,” he said, “it wasn’t the first time I’d wanted to put handcuffs on your husband.”
“I know the feeling,” I said. He blinked, and laughed.
“This time, it was Mycroft Holmes walking the edge, and over. It didn’t take much to convince me that it was time to snap him back into line. Your brother-in-law is not God, you know.”
“A week ago, I might have disagreed,” I said sadly-and indeed, his use of the present tense testified that Lestrade himself was not altogether willing to quit his belief in Mycroft’s omniscience.
“However, I’ve come to wonder if I may have been wrong,” he said.
“About his divinity?”
“About treating him as the object of an investigation.” He clawed his fingers through his thinning hair. “Mycroft Holmes asked me to meet him privately, that same day he came into my office. He left at one o’clock. Twenty minutes later, I was handed a note that he’d left for me, telling me to meet him at the Natural History Museum, the statue of Charles Darwin, just before closing. He told me to keep it entirely to myself, and to come alone.”
“But you didn’t go?”
“In fact I did, although I’d put it off to the last possible instant. He wasn’t there. The next I heard of him, he was dead.”
The thud of that word, dead. Inconceivable, inescapable, dead: Mycroft.
I shook away the memory of his prodigious appetite and more prodigious memory, and-
Tell no one.
Come alone.
Where does faith part from loyalty?
I looked at Lestrade, thinking, Russell, you need some sleep, before you forget how to think. “Did you, in the end, keep the meeting to yourself?”
“I did.”
“Surely being instructed to come to a meeting alone must raise a policeman’s suspicions? You weren’t concerned that it might be some kind of a trap?”
“Had it been another man, I’d have been a fool not to tell someone where I was going. But this was Mycroft Holmes-I did check, and it was he who left the message. And although in theory I know nothing about him, in truth I know enough to be sure that if the man wanted to dispose of me, he hardly needed me to come to him. No, I figured the reason for the meeting was the same reason he couldn’t tell me in my office.”
“That being…?”
“One possibility was, he wanted to test me, either to see if I’d do as he asked, or because he wished to propose something so illegal it could bring down his career or mine, and didn’t want to risk being overheard. Or, he suspected a traitor in the ranks.”
I mentally apologised to the man in front of me, for Holmes’ disparaging remarks over the years.
“Your ranks, or his?”
“I thought at the time he meant mine. Why else did he want to get me away from the Yard? And although I have considerable faith in the trustworthiness of my officers, the bald truth is, there’s always an apple in any barrel ripe for spoiling. Bribery or threat-a determined man can usually find a police officer to corrupt.”
“Do you still think it’s one of yours?”
He raised an eyebrow at me, a look that would have been pure Holmes had his features not resembled those of a sleep-ruffled ferret. “I’m not the one going into the ground tomorrow,” he pointed out brutally.
I blew out a slow breath. “It does make one rather wonder.”
“About what?”
“Who could have got close enough to Mycroft for him to let down his guard.”
“You think his organisation-whatever that might be-could have a traitor? Is that why you asked about Sosa?”
“Mycroft was talking to a friend recently, and out of the blue, brought up the topic of loyalty. Who better to betray a man than his secretary? And what more painful treason?”
“What friend was that?”
I shook my head. “Mycroft passed on no information, merely indicated that the idea of loyalty had been on his mind.”
“I need to know who he was talking to,” he said sharply.
“I’m sorry, Chief Inspector, I am not going to tell you. You’ll simply have to trust that if there had been anything more substantial to learn, I’d give it to you.”
He mashed out the cigarette stub with unwonted violence, and snapped, “Tying my hands like this, we might as well turn the country over to the SIS and let us all go back to being rural bobbies.”
“I think we’ll find there’re ways around it. You were asked to investigate Sosa’s disappearance. Surely you would be expected to follow that up, until you can speak with the man himself?”
He looked at me. “I could lose my job.” It was less objection than observation.
“I hope that’s all you could lose.”
He snorted in disbelief. “I’m Scotland Yard-they come after me with paperwork, not weapons.”
“And Mycroft?”
After a moment, his eyes involuntarily flicked upwards, towards his sleeping family.
“Yes,” I said.
“But Sosa is a secretary!”
“I was not thinking directly of Sosa. But it may be that someone has control over Sosa. Someone who has his hand on Scotland Yard as well.”
“But who? And why Mycroft Holmes?”
I could think of any number of nations who would pay to end Mycroft’s meddling. Sixteen of whom had written explosive letters currently resting beside Mycroft’s oven. But without facts, I might as well throw darts at a spinning globe.
“That’s what I need to find out. First off, can you find out more about Sosa?”
“I can try.”
“And beyond that?”
“I’ll be locked out of anything with international significance.”
“Which is interesting, considering Reverend Brothers spent so many years in Shanghai.”
Lestrade rolled his eyes. “Brothers again.”
“If Mycroft’s death and Sosa’s disappearance are not somehow tied in with the machinations of Reverend Brothers, I may be forced to believe in coincidence. I’ll never be able to look my husband in the face again.”
Lestrade picked up his empty cup, and put it down again. “Do you want a drink? Hard drink, I mean?”
“No thanks. You have one, though.”
“If I went to church with whisky on my breath, my wife would leave me. Look, maybe you’re right. I’ll see how far I can get before someone pushes back. That should tell us something.”
“But about Mycroft. If I don’t have to worry about being arrested, there’s nothing to stop me from going to his superiors and asking what they know about Sosa, is there?” Nothing other than sharpshooters and hard men.
“God knows I’ve never been able to stop you from asking questions. I’m not sure how they would like it.”
“What, a bereaved private citizen, broken-hearted over her brother-in-law’s death, concerned that his assistant-to whom Mycroft was very close-might be even more troubled?”
He came very near to laughing, and said in admiration, “It’s not a track I’d have thought of, but I wish you luck with it.”
I glanced at the window, wondering if the darkness was less profound than it had been. Should I ask him to trace the telephone numbers? No: If he decided to search Sosa’s flat, he would find the numbers himself. “One last thing. I know that, theoretically speaking, you have no knowledge of Mycroft’s work. However, have you any idea how I might get into touch with a colleague of his by the name of Peter West? I think he may work for the SIS, and he may be more willing to talk than Admiral Sinclair would be.”
“I’ve heard of him, haven’t met him.”
“I’d like to reach him before Monday.”
“It might take some doing to hunt down an Intelligence fellow on a weekend.”
“If you can locate West without having anyone take notice, it would be good if I could talk with him before the funeral. However, don’t draw any more attention to yourself than you must.” I drained my cup and stood, but he remained stubbornly in his chair.
“Miss Russell, I really need to speak with Damian Adler.”
“I swear to you, Chief Inspector, I do not know where he is.”
“And his daughter?”
“I am keeping her safe.”
I looked at his tired face, feeling badly for having robbed him of what little sleep he might have expected this night. However, giving him talkative little Estelle would be giving him the information that Damian was Holmes’ son. And until Damian was safe, until he was no longer regarded as a suspect, I could not risk that.
I put out my hand. “Thank you, Chief Inspector.”
He looked at it, then stood and took it. “Ring me later. I’ll see if I can come up with an address for Mr West.”
“Thank you.”
“And, Miss Russell? Watch yourself. Brothers and Gunderson are still out there, to say nothing of Sosa’s lot. All in all, a number of people you don’t want to be meeting in a dark place.”
“I rarely want to meet anyone in a dark place, Chief Inspector,” I replied. At the door, I let him open it for me, then paused. “Will you be at the funeral this afternoon?”
“I will.”
“Thank you,” I said. And astonished us both by leaning forward to kiss his unshaved cheek.
New experiences were salutary, Holmes reflected. In four decades of creeping through the back-streets and by-ways of London, he had never had quite such an unrelenting series of setbacks, and although his body might protest at being folded up into its narrow recess a dozen feet above the paving-stones, no doubt it was good for him to be challenged. He wished that, in exchange, he might learn a bit more about his pursuers than he had so far.
Take the man who had been waiting on the pier at Harwich.
The man had been standing among those waiting to greet the boat, but it would have taken a larger crowd than that to conceal his presence: large, alert, and armed.
Holmes saw him, and kicked himself for not having anticipated the problem. Short of an hour with make-up (neither of which he possessed) and a change of clothing (almost as difficult) there was no way of getting down the gangway without being seen. Which left him with two options: Stay on board and return to Holland, or use another exit.
The steamer’s lavatories were conveniently near the exit, and its attendant had gone to assist with the disembarking process. When the last gentleman had finished, it was the work of moments to set a fire blazing in the waste bin (placing it by itself amidst the tiles, since he had no wish to burn the ship to the water-line) and slip away.
When the alarm was raised, every crew member within shouting distance responded at the run, leaving several tills unguarded. Holmes helped himself and made for the lower decks.
A sad story to a likely face (about a bill collector waiting on the docks, to a man whose nose bloomed with the veins of strong drink) and one of his stolen bills into a meaty palm, and Holmes became an honorary member of the crew off-loading Dutch goods and passenger rubbish.
He pulled on his newly acquired jacket and a cap he fervently hoped was not inhabited, then set a large bag of post onto his shoulder and joined the trail of laden men, trudging along the gangway, down the pier, and past the watcher. Few passengers trickled off the steamer now, and the feet beneath the tan coat-which were all Holmes could see of him around the burden-moved restlessly. Holmes moved down the boards to deliver his sack to His Majesty’s waiting lorry, then kept walking, along the front to a warehouse. There he found a place where he could watch the watcher.
The man waited long after the last passenger came off, but he did not, Holmes was interested to see, then go on board and conduct a search. This could mean he had no authority to do so, or that he had been told not to draw attention to himself. On the other hand, it could indicate an excess of confidence in his own invisibility and his quarry’s lack of skill.
Eventually, the man abandoned his position and strode down the pier. Holmes eyed the few remaining taxis, but the man did not turn towards them, nor towards the nearby parked motorcars. Instead, he went into the hotel directly across the way.
Checking out? Having a meal? Reluctantly, Holmes settled into his corner, but in the end, the man was back out on the street in four minutes, and walked directly to a car parked on the front. Holmes readied himself for a sprint to the taxis, but to his surprise, the man walked around to the passenger side, tossed in his hat and coat, and got in. There was a flash of white: a newspaper.
He was waiting for the next steamer.
Holmes stayed in the shadows.
Half an hour later, a boat drew in, but the man merely leant forward to see where it was docking, then went back to his paper.
He was not waiting for just any steamer, but specifically the next one from Holland. Which would be the boat from Amsterdam, arriving in-Holmes checked his pocket-watch-approximately two and a half hours. Adding the forty minutes the man had waited before abandoning his watch the last time, that gave a tired and hungry detective nearly three hours in which to assemble the materials he required.
Holmes turned and went into the town.
He returned two and a quarter hours later, stomach filled, beard trimmed, wearing a clean shirt, carrying the tools he needed to break into the watcher’s motorcar.
The motorcar was gone.
The old man in the tea stand informed him that the big man in the tan great-coat had gone into the hotel, then come out and left in a hurry, less than half an hour before. A telephone call, Holmes thought.
Another trail lost.
The delay in Harwich cost him five hours, and his residual wariness drove him to take a most indirect path to London. An eleven-hour trip from the Hook of Holland to Liverpool Street took nearer to twenty-four, landing him in town well after dark on Saturday at London Bridge station, which he judged to be nearly as unexpected for a traveller out of Holland as it was inconvenient. And to prove it, there were no large men lurking near the exits.
Nonetheless, things soon became very interesting, which was how he found himself in a walled-up window, twelve feet above the ground.
Because of the question about the safety of telephones-any organisation capable of manipulating Scotland Yard would have no trouble buying the services of telephone exchange operators-he had not tried to reach Billy beforehand. He set off from the London Bridge station on foot, keeping to the darker streets.
Even with all his senses at the alert, they nearly had him.
He was standing across the street from Billy’s house, wondering if the darkness of its windows and the lack of sound from within were possible on a Saturday night, when the blast of a constable’s whistle broke from a window over his head. One glance at the men who emerged from both ends of the street told him that, whistle or no, these were not the police-and then he was running.
Sherlock Holmes was unaccustomed to having difficulties making his way around London. He once knew intimately all the patterns and sensations of the city (although he had never much cared for the image of a spider web that the great romanticist Conan Doyle insisted on using) and in any neighbourhood within miles of the Palace, he knew the doors left ajar, the passageways that led nowhere, the stairways that gave onto rooftops, the opium dens full of men who would be blind for a trace of silver across their palms.
Then came the War, and the aerial bombing, and the inexorable changes in the city during the years since. He’d been retired for two decades now, and loath as he was to admit it, the speed with which life changed was growing ever faster. Added to eight months of absence from his home, it was making him feel like a man resuming a language once spoken fluently, whose nuances had grown rusty.
He did not care for the sensation, not in the least. And although the older parts of Southwark were little changed, even here his urban geography proved to be ever-so-slightly out of date, gracing a long-disused alleyway with builder’s rubbish, filling an easily prised window with brick. He was grateful the builders had taken the short-cut of bricking the hole in from within, which left just enough of a sill outside for a precarious perch.
Perhaps it was time to acknowledge that his city had passed to other hands.
A figure appeared at the end of the passageway; a torch-beam snapped on. The man saw the scaffolding and came to give it closer consideration, not thinking to do the same to the walls on the opposite side. Holmes kept absolutely still, willing the man to come closer, to stand below him-but then a second torch approached, and this man went to join his partner.
When the passageway was empty again, Holmes cautiously shifted until he was sitting on the ledge, his long legs dangling free. When his circulation was restored, he eyed the ghostly lines of the scaffold. Instead, he wormed his way around and climbed sideways, following a route that he had practiced under the tutelage of a cat-burglar, twenty-three years before. In five minutes, he was on the roof; in forty, when the first faint light of Sunday’s dawn was rising in the east, he was crossing Waterloo Bridge.
Not altogether shabby for a man of his years, working under outdated information.
Still, the day had proved sobering. He’d told Dr Henning that he had resources in London, were he only able to reach them, but with all else that had changed in this city, he was beginning to wonder if that was true. Lestrade bought off, Mycroft under arrest, even Billy driven from his house and his neighbourhood taken over. Would this new Prime Minister-a Socialist, after all-see Sherlock Holmes as a living fossil? If he could make it through the guards at the Palace…
No, he would not play that card unless he had no other.
He was free, fit, and on home ground. He paused at the end of the bridge, looking upstream. As the light strengthened, he could see the Embankment path, and in the farther distance, Ben’s tower riding over the bulk of the Houses of Parliament and the brick monstrosity of New Scotland Yard. However, his eyes looked not at those centres of authority, but at the Underground entrance that stood, waiting.
Four stops up the Metropolitan Rail line to Baker Street. Half an hour to reassure himself that Russell had made it to Town, that she and the child were safe.
And if he did not appear? She would remain where she was as long as possible; when she did emerge, she would be even more cautious than usual.
He turned his back on the Metropolitan line. There was much to do before the funeral.
Back at the bolt-hole, I found Goodman reading in front of a low-burning fire. He rose, stretching like a young whippet, and dropped the book onto the chaise longue.
“You look tired,” he observed.
“Very.”
“I, on the other hand, am rested and in need of air. I shall return.”
I started to protest, then decided against it. Even two or three hours of sleep would make all the difference to the day. And after all, no one in the city was looking for Robert Goodman: He was the one person among us who could walk with impunity among police constables and hard men alike, invisible in his innocence. If he had wanted to give Estelle and Javitz to the police, he’d have done so long before this; as for leading the police back here-deliberately or inadvertently-I was safe, as he could have no idea where the back exit debouched.
I changed my protest to a nod, and reminded him to check his surroundings with care before he stepped into or out of the hidden entrance.
As I curled up on the sofa with the travelling rug, I wondered where in this almighty city Holmes might be hiding. I noticed my certainty, and smiled: I had not even questioned that he would be here.
Then the smile faded. If Mycroft lay cold in his coffin, who among us was safe?
When I woke, the coals were grey, the building was silent, and there was no sign of Goodman. I glanced at the clock, and saw to my surprise that it was nearly ten: I had slept almost five hours.
I took a cursory bath and dressed, and still no Goodman. As I took up the pen to write a note, telling him that I would be back shortly, I saw that the letter I had written to Holmes was not on the table. I had not been so heavily unconscious that I would not have heard him pass through, which meant that Goodman had taken it with him when he left.
Why?
I could think of no reason that did not make me uneasy. On the other hand, I could think of nothing Goodman had done or said to threaten betrayal. Perhaps he’d decided to deliver it himself-he knew where the funeral was. I shook off my apprehension, then walked the exit route nearly to its end before diverting into the adjoining building.
The surgeon’s offices might well shut down their telephones with close of business on Friday, but on the other side was a firm of solicitors, some of whom had been known to come in on a weekend. Fortunately, none of the desks were filled with a hard-working junior partner; equally fortunately, the telephone earpiece emitted a lively buzz. So I helped myself to a desk in one of the more impressive offices, dragged a London telephone directory onto the blotter, and phoned Lestrade.
I’d caught him going out, he said, but before I could apologise, he told me to wait a minute. Footsteps crossed the floor, and I heard his voice and those of two females, one older and one young. I heard him say that they were to go ahead, he’d join them as soon as he’d finished this telephone conversation.
The voices retreated, a door closed. The footsteps came back.
“That’s better,” he said.
“I’m sorry to keep you from church,” I said. “I was only wondering if you’d found a telephone number or an address for Mr West?”
“It took some time, the gentleman doesn’t appear to want casual callers. The telephone number’s more difficult, that has to wait until tomorrow.”
“Whom did you have to ask?”
“Don’t worry,” he said, “my wife has an old friend who works with the voters’ registration lists, she popped into the office for me and looked him up. She’ll say nothing.”
He gave me an address across the river from Westminster. I wrote it down, and remarked, “That doesn’t seem very likely.”
“I know, there’s not many houses down there, but you’ll always find one or two residences even in that sort of district.”
“I’ll try it,” I said, and told him I hoped he enjoyed the sermon. A glance at the solicitor’s clock told me I had plenty of time to stop at West’s address before the funeral.
But first, another telephone call, this one to Richmond.
The butler answered. After a minute or two of silence, Javitz’s loud American accents were assaulting my ear.
“Yeah? Is that Mary Russell?”
“Hello, Captain Javitz, I thought-”
“You gotta get us out of here,” he said sharply. “Like, now.”
Cold air seemed to blast through the stuffy office, and I found I was on my feet. “Why? What’s happened?”
“You know who your crazy hermit Goodman is?”
“I know whose house that is, but-”
“But you don’t know who he is?”
“No, who is he?”
“I’d have thought-oh, look, I really can’t go into it here. Just, how soon can you come get us?”
“Hours. I don’t know the train schedule.”
“Then the kid and I are setting off now, we’ll be at Waterloo when we can.”
“Wait! You can’t set off on crutches, you’ll hurt yourself.”
“I’m not staying here. Get a car and come.”
“For heaven’s sake, what is going on?”
“One hour, we leave.” The instrument went dead.
I swore, and looked at my wrist-watch: It had to be twenty-five miles, even if I left this instant… But first, one last call.
“The Travellers’ Club,” the voice answered.
“I’m looking for Captain Lofte.” Lofte was my last hope, this fleet-footed traveller from Shanghai, Mycroft’s man who had given us key information about Brothers. No one working with Brothers would have given us what Lofte did.
“I’m sorry,” the smooth voice said, “Captain Lofte is no longer with us.”
For a horrible moment, I thought the man meant-but he went on. “I do not think he will be returning for some time.”
“Has he gone back to Shanghai?”
“I am sorry, Madam, but The Travellers’ does not divulge the destination of its members.”
“This is terribly important,” I begged.
Something in my voice must have taken him aback, because after a moment’s silence, he said, “He left a week past. I believe the gentleman had a message on the Friday, directing him to return to the East.”
Rats, I thought; Lofte would have made a resourceful colleague. Billy was beyond reach, Holmes was gone, none of Mycroft’s other agents were beyond taint. I should have to make do with what I had. Namely, myself.
I thanked the person at the club, put up the earpiece, and scurried back into the bolt-hole to cram a valise with everything I thought I might need.
Goodman had not returned. I thought of leaving him another note, but couldn’t decide what that should say. So I shut off the lights and stepped into the corridor-and then I stopped.
My hand went to the pocket in which I was collecting all the bits concerning the case, and thumbed through the scraps until I found the notes I’d made in Richard Sosa’s flat.
A number jumped out at me, because I’d just rung it. Sosa had written down the number of The Travellers’ Club on Thursday, on the diary page beside the telephone. And, I thought, he rang the number, either then or on the Friday, to send out of the country the only person apart from Holmes and me who could link Mycroft to the investigation of Thomas Brothers.
I hoped to God he’d only sent Lofte away. I did not want that valiant individual on my conscience as well.
Somewhere in the building, a clock chimed the quarter. I woke with a start, and hurried down to the street to hail a taxicab.
Javitz was standing outside the gates of the house on the quiet and dignified road, a large, bruised man looking very out of place with a small girl on one side and a white-haired housekeeper on the other. He leant heavily on his crutch, the child kicked her heels from the top of the low wall, the woman was wringing her hands. He had acquired an elderly carpet-bag, now lying at his feet; his hand was on the taxicab’s door-handle before the hand-brake was set.
“Come on, ’Stella-my-heart,” he said, sounding more like a father than a man on whom a stray had been pressed. She hopped down and scrambled into the taxi, Dolly in hand, to stand at my knees and demand, “Where is Mr Robert?”
“I don’t really know,” I told her. “Mr Jav-”
She cut me short. “But he was with you. When will he come back?”
“He didn’t tell me,” I said. “Mr Javitz, do you need a hand?”
By way of answer he threw his bag and crutch inside and hopped against the door frame to manoeuvre himself within.
“I want to see him,” Estelle persisted.
“But sir,” the housekeeper was saying.
“I’ll do what I can,” I said to Estelle. “Here, let’s pull the seat down for you.”
“Terribly good of you to put up with us,” Javitz was saying to the woman. “We have to be away, see you around.”
And then both his legs were inside and he was shutting the door in her face.
The driver slid down the window to ask where we wanted to go, and I merely told him to head back towards London while we decided. He slid up the window. I turned to Javitz.
“What on earth was all that about?”
He cast an eloquent look at Estelle, who blinked her limpid eyes at me and said, “That means he doesn’t want to talk in front of me. Papa looks like that sometimes.”
“I imagine he does,” I said. “Does your Papa also tell you that you’re too bright for your own good?”
“Sometimes. I don’t think a person can be too bright, do you?”
“Certainly too bright for the convenience of others,” I said, then told Javitz, “I’m not sure where to take you. They could be watching my friends’ houses. For sure they’ll be keeping an eye on the local hotels. I even tried to reach Mr Lofte, who struck me as a valuable ally in any circumstances, but he’s gone back to Shanghai.”
“Do you know yet who this mysterious ‘they’ is?” he asked.
It was my turn to cast a significant “not in front of the children” glance at the small person on the seat across from us. She rolled her eyes in disgust and looked out of the window.
“What about a park?” Javitz suggested in desperation.
A park it would have to be. It had the advantage of being one of the last places any enemy of Mary Russell’s would expect to find her on a Sunday morning.
I paid the driver, unloaded my crew, and we set off slowly across the manicured paths on what was surely one of the last sunny week-ends of this lingering summer. Estelle tipped her head up at us and asked in a long-suffering voice, “You probably want me to go away, don’t you?”
“Not too far,” I agreed.
She turned away with a soft sigh, but I dropped the carpet-bag and said, “Estelle?”
She turned, and I knelt down and, cautiously, put my arms around her.
She flung hers around me and held on for a long time, the only sign she’d given of being frightened or lonely. I murmured in her little ear, telling her that I hoped we’d see her Papa soon, and that she’d meet her Grandpapa. That she was a very brave and clever girl, and her parents would be as proud of her as I was. That she’d have to be patient, but I was working hard to straighten everything out. When she finally let go of me, there was a bounce in her step.
Javitz had settled gingerly onto a bench.
“How is the leg?” I asked him, sitting down beside him.
He stretched it out with a grimace, which he denied by saying, “Not too bad,” then modified by adding, “Getting better, anyway.”
“I am so sorry about all of this.”
“Hey, not to worry. The War didn’t stop altogether with Armistice.”
“Yes, but you were hired for a piloting job, not as nurse-maid to a small child.”
“Yeah, well, you did hire me to help you save the kid and her father,” he pointed out cheerfully. “That’s more or less what I’m doing.” Why was he sounding so hearty, I wondered? Over the telephone he’d been in a state of agitation.
“This whole thing is taking rather longer than I’d anticipated.”
“I have nothing else on at the moment. Couldn’t fly for a while, now, anyway.”
“Again, sorry.”
“You didn’t crash the crate, I did.”
“After someone took a shot-” I stopped; this was getting us nowhere. “What did you need to tell me about Robert Goodman?”
“That’s not his name.”
“I never imagined it was.”
“Then you know who he is?”
I shook my head, since the family whose house we had motored away from was one I did not know personally and Holmes had neither investigated, nor investigated for. “I’d have to look him up in Debrett’s.”
“The Honourable Winfred Stanley Moreton. His father’s an earl.”
“Should I know him?”
“His name was all over the newspapers this spring.”
“I’ve been out of the country. What did he do?”
“He’s nuts!”
“That, too, is fairly self-evident.”
“I don’t mean just cheerfully fruitcake, I mean loony-bin nuts. Straight-jacket and locked doors nuts. And, he’s a fairy.”
Since for days now I’d been thinking of Goodman as Puck, this assessment hardly surprised me. However, it appeared that was not what Javitz meant.
“And, he was involved in a murder, with one of his fairy friends.”
That word got my attention.
“Murder? Goodman?”
“His name is-”
“Yes, yes. He was tried for murder?”
“This spring. Well, no, not him, but a friend of his-Johnny McAlpin-was tried for murder, and everyone seemed to think that Goodman-Moreton-knew more about it than he was saying.”
“Mr Javitz, you really need to explain this to me.”
He tried, but the legal details were rather fuzzy in his mind. The sensational details, however, were quite clear.
The death itself had occurred in the summer of 1917, in Edinburgh. The victim was a middle-aged man well known as an habitué of the sorts of clubs where the singers are boys dressed up as girls. The murder went unsolved all those years, until this past January, when the newly jilted boyfriend of Johnny McAlpin started telling his friends how McAlpin had once drunkenly bragged about killing the man and getting away with it.
The police heard, and arrested McAlpin. He, in an attempt to spread the blame as thinly as possible, named every friend he could think of-including Win Moreton, who was among those dragged in to testify.
Bearded and wild-haired and sounding more than a little unbalanced, Goodman made quite a splash on the stand. He refused to acknowledge the name “Moreton,” would say only that McAlpin had once been his friend, and was narrowly saved from being gaoled for contempt of court when his sister brought to light a file concerning her brother’s history: Moreton had indeed known McAlpin, the two men having both drunk at the same pub during April and May, 1917, but Moreton had left Edinburgh in June, three weeks before the murder, and there was no evidence that he had been back.
Moreton was a decorated hero, in Edinburgh for treatment of shell shock that spring, but had never been violent even at his most disturbed.
McAlpin alone was convicted. However, the trial of the Honorable Winfred Moreton in the court of public opinion, had been both loud and unequivocal: He had to be guilty of something, and murder would do as well as any other charge.
The story itself sounded more colourful than factual, so I finally interrupted Javitz to ask how he’d heard all this.
He bent down and pulled an oversized envelope from the carpet-bag, thrusting it into my hands. I unlooped the fastener and looked in at a mess of pages, newspaper clippings, letters, and pocket diaries. I eased a few out of the pile, and read enough to catch the drift of their meaning.
Meanwhile, Javitz was explaining how he had come across this, after the boy in the house had told him who “Goodman” was: He’d gone to the butler who took him to the housekeeper who showed him a clipping she kept in one of her ledgers and then, when he demanded to know more, led him to the butler’s pantry and the collection in the envelope.
“You stole this?” I asked.
“Borrowed it-send it back to them if you want. But I needed you to see, and understand.” The earlier heartiness had gone; he shifted, his leg troubling him.
I closed the envelope, trying to follow the currents. I felt that Javitz was honestly concerned at the idea of permitting a madman and accused murderer near Estelle. I also thought that he was more than a little worried at letting a man with dubious relationships near to his own person. I couldn’t imagine what threat the five-and-a-half-foot-tall Goodman might be to a strapping six-footer, but sex and sensibility do not always go hand in hand.
Beyond his concern, however, I thought I detected traces of embarrassment, which I had seen in him before. He was a captain in the RAF, a hero and man of action, who had permitted me to shove him to the back with the children. That he had uncomplainingly set aside his personal dignity for the sake of a child-and moreover, continued to do so-was a sign of his true valiant nature. Reasoned argument would be no help, since his mind was already delivering that. I needed a means of permitting the man to retain his self-respect.
I let his story and his explanation fade away, watching Estelle solemnly constructing a Dolly-sized hut out of some twigs and dry grasses. Then I sat back.
“I can’t tell you whether these newspaper charges are substantiated, although I’ll find out. However, we still need to decide where to put you-and, if you honestly don’t mind, Estelle. It shouldn’t be for more than a day, at the most two.”
He settled a bit, which allowed his embarrassment to come closer to the surface. When he realised I was not about to accuse him of cowardice or point out his irrational fear of a man who had never so much as looked at him sideways, he relaxed. Suddenly he sat up and dug out his watch. “You have to be at the funeral in, what, three hours?”
“A little more than that.”
“Then you don’t have time to spend on me and the kid,” he said.
I exhaled in relief: If assuaging his guilt drove him to volunteer for nanny duty, who was I to argue? I hastened to assure him, “Three hours is plenty. Tell me, how do you feel about Kent?”
It took me half an hour to locate a taxi with a driver who was not only taciturn, but willing to take a fare all the way to Tunbridge Wells. I put on an American accent and explained that my injured brother was shy of conversation but willing to pay generously for silence, and that he and his daughter needed to go to the largest hotel in the town. Tunbridge Wells was a watering hole and tourist destination busy enough to render even this unusual pair-large American male and tiny Eurasian child-slightly less than instantaneously the centre of attention.
I told Javitz to explain to the concierge that the luggage had gone astray on the ship, and gave him enough cash to clothe and feed himself and the child for two days, as well as distribute the sorts of tips that guarantee happy, hence silent, hotel staff.
But I admit, it was with a great deal of trepidation that I watched the taxicab pull away.
Forty minutes later and dressed in my funeral clothes, I walked up the steps to the unlikely address for Peter James West. To my surprise, the warehouse showed signs of an inner transformation, with added windows and doors geared for humans rather than lorry-loads of goods. I grasped the polished brass of the lion’s head knocker and let it fall sharply against its brass plate. The sound echoed through the building within, and I waited for footsteps.
Walking to church in the company of his wife and daughter was the high point of Chief Inspector Lestrade’s week. He tried hard to ensure that his work did not stand in the way of accompanying his family every Sunday. Once there, he participated with gusto in the hymns and prayers. He had many of the collects committed to memory. He got to his knees with humility and concentration-particularly following a week such as the past one, which left him much to pray about.
He even enjoyed the sermons. This new pastor, who had replaced the old one when senile dementia began to make services rather more creative than comfortable, was one of the new generation of enthusiasts, and Lestrade wasn’t yet sure how he felt about this. One of the things he liked best about church was the abiding knowledge that all over the world-San Francisco and Sydney, Calcutta and Cairo-men and women were gathered for the same words, the same sentiments, and more or less the same sermon.
Progress was fine, but modernisation?
He might need to have a word with the lad in the pulpit, to suggest that certain topics were better suited for a discussion over the tea-pot than for a Sunday morning sermon. Such as-yes, there he went: The man probably thought he was being delicate, but his advocacy of universal suffrage was sometimes a little heavy-handed.
No doubt Miss Russell would appreciate these new-fangled sermons. Imagine, picking the lock of a Scotland Yard officer in order to have a chat at three in the morning! Sooner or later, that young woman was going to find herself in a trouble that the joint efforts of Scotland Yard and Sherlock Holmes weren’t going to get her out of. Still, one had to appreciate her enthusiasms, compared to the pleasure-seeking light-headedness of many of her generation.
Thank goodness for Maudie. His wife had been something of an enthusiast herself when they’d first met, but look how nicely she’d settled down into motherhood. He couldn’t see Miss Russell going quite so far, but still, there had to be interests that were not quite so extreme and… masculine.
(A gentle stir ran through the congregation, the ecclesiastic equivalent of “Hear, hear!” Lestrade cleared his throat to show agreement with the point, listened intently for a few minutes, then allowed his thoughts to wander again.)
Still, the poor girl had to be upset over the death of her brother-in-law. How shocking that idea was, even days later. Almost as bad as the death of a king. He looked forward to seeing who showed up for the funeral. Because the man’s authority was, as it were, sub rosa, it wouldn’t be a Westminster Abbey sort of affair, but he wouldn’t be surprised if representatives of the Prime Minister and the Royal Family were dispatched.
His mind played over the possible diplomatic representatives of both those governmental bodies, men who were low-key, but important enough to indicate that Mycroft had been valued by those in the know. He, Lestrade, would of course represent Scotland Yard. Which suit should he wear? The new one might best assert the competence and authority of the Yard, in pursuit of the man’s killer. On the other hand, its faint modernity (Maude’s choice, about which he was still uncertain) might add a dubious thread of frivolity. Perhaps the older, blacker one, stolid and-
The congregation stirred again, and again Lestrade shifted and gave a nod. However, this time, the stir did not die down. Rather, the ripple of movement grew, and after a moment, the minister fell silent, a look of confusion and incipient outrage on his youthful face.
No, Lestrade thought: Surely the Russell girl wouldn’t interrupt-
But it was not Mary Russell. It was one of his own Yard officers, so new one could see the ghost of a constable’s helmet above the soft hat he wore. Lestrade turned to his wife to mouth, “Sorry,” then rose to push his way past the other knees in the pew, mouthing the same apology to the scandalised priest in the pulpit.
The man in the aisle leant forward to give a loud whisper. “They think they found Brothers, up in Saint Al-”
But Lestrade reached out to seize the plain-clothes man’s arm with such force that the words cut off in a squeak. As Lestrade frog-marched him up the aisle, he hissed, “For pity’s sake, man, remove your hat in church.”
This younger generation simply had no concept of proper behaviour.
Peter James West sat at his desk, idly picking a design into the blotter with the wicked point of Reverend Brothers’ knife. The curve of its blade was a satisfying touch of the exotic East; the sheen of the steel made him hope the metal had in truth begun as a meteor.
So, they’d found Brothers-not that they’d identified him yet, but they would before long. He’d hoped to be given a few more days. Still, he couldn’t see that it mattered much. There was nothing to tie him to the mad religious leader from Shanghai. Nothing but the knife. West held it up to the light, admiring it again. He wondered if Brothers’ last moments had included a brief appreciation of the symmetry of his death, being caused by an artefact that had been present at the moment of his birth.
He’d even been tempted to send the knife with Gunderson on Wednesday, for the sheer pleasure of owning an instrument that had killed not only Thomas Brothers but Mycroft Holmes, as well, but in the end decided that was too much like something Brothers would have thought. Instead, he’d merely told Gunderson to keep the killing silent, and sent him on his way.
West himself appreciated symmetry, in death or in life. The arrangement of items on his desk was balanced: IN tray here, OUT tray there, pens beside the one, a framed photograph next to the other (small, showing himself shaking hands with Prime Minister Baldwin at a garden party). The furniture in his sitting room was similarly balanced: a settee bracketed by two chairs, a mirror facing a framed watercolour, two carved figures on the left side of the mantel balancing two porcelain vases on the right. His tie always complemented his suit; his shoes matched his belt; his overcoat, his hat.
In life, too, symmetry was both the means and the end. One presence removed, another takes its place.
Human beings were happiest when the shapes around them were familiar. This was as true for the men on the ground-the troops, if you will-as it was for those in command. Revolutions failed not when the change ushered in was too minor, but when the new social order became too grossly unfamiliar for comfort.
The current radical shift in deployment-men who were generally scattered in low-visibility positions around the globe, brought home for the effort-would be permissible only if it quickly faded. He had needed men-unusually large numbers of men-and his position had allowed him to summon them without question. But questions there would be, if the situation went on.
However, it should not be necessary. After this evening, those elements of change that did not fit would be quietly packed away. Tomorrow, or by Tuesday at the latest, Gunderson would return from his second trip to the Orkneys-this one a tidying operation-and the men who’d been quietly summoned from Paris and Istanbul and New York would be just as circumspectly returned to their places. Before the men above West could draw up their list of questions, the situation would have stabilised again, the turmoil smoothed over, the reins of authority-so much authority!-resting in new, more competent hands.
Mycroft Holmes would be mourned. Ruffled feathers would subside. The work of Government would go on.
A sharp knock came from the door. West raised his head: Who would come here on a Sunday afternoon? Even if Gunderson finished quickly, he knew not to come here. He slipped the knife into the closely worked Moroccan leather scabbard that he, like its previous owner, wore over his heart (another touch of symmetry), then stood. As he adjusted his clothing over the knife, he studied the perfect spiral its tip had picked into the green blotter, closing inexorably in on the centre. As his men would do at the funeral.
Peter James West went to answer the door.