The file concerning the Honourable Winfred Stanley Moreton, also known as Robert Goodman.
Letter from “Robert Goodman” to Sir Henry Moreton, Moreton House, Richmond, Berkshire:
3 April 1917
Craiglockhart, Edinburgh
Dear H,
Sorry. Sorry, sorry, letting the side down and all that. A disappointment to all.
No, that’s not fair to you, not after you spent half your leave travelling the length of Britain to see your dodgy brother. Really you should’ve stayed at home with the children. Children are all that matter. Give yours their uncle’s love. Sal too, of course, although she won’t want it.
I was thinking of spending time in Cumbria, once they give me permission for a few days away. The house is closed, but I’d sleep rough in any event. Not sure when.
Sorry, again, to disappoint. Sorry my handwriting’s so bad. At least I can hold a pen now, more than I could when I got here. Sorry too you didn’t like my friends down the local, they’re not altogether a bad lot.
– me
Letter from “Robert Goodman” to Lady Phoenicia Moreton Browne, Moreton House:
15 May 1917
Craiglockhart
Dear Pin,
They told me today about Harry. I am sorry for Sal and the children, but I cannot say I am surprised. All the good men are dying over there. I hope you thank the Powers every day for James’ foot, or he’d be dying over there too.
Sorry, not a great day here.
Anyway, I don’t know what to write to Sal, but could you tell her I’m thinking of her? I think I’d better not come to the funeral, I’m not exactly at my most presentable.
And since you two will be wondering, leave me out of any discussion of the future. I’d like use of the Cumbria place, if Father doesn’t mind, but the only time I intend to pass through Berks or London again is when they’re dragging my corpse to the family vault. Everything else belongs to the children, so do with it as you like. Any papers that need signing will reach me here.
Although that may not be long. To everyone’s surprise including my own, I’m making something they seem to regard as a recovery. My medical board is scheduled for mid-June. They’d have to be pretty desperate to want me back, but even if they do, I’ll have some leave first, and will spend it in Cumbria. It’s the only place I want to be. The thought of the woods keeps me alive.
Kiss the baby for me.
Yr brother
Report from W.H.R. Rivers, Craiglockhart Hospital for Officers, Edinburgh.
“Robert Goodman”/Winfred Stanley Moreton
9 June 1917
Generally the reports I write concerning a patient under review for release begin with that patient’s name. However, in the case of this patient, I shall use “Captain Moreton” when referring to his life previous to November 1916, and “Robert Goodman” to describe the period afterwards, for reasons that shall become evident.
Robert Goodman arrived at Craiglockhart in early March 1917 with a severe case of war neurosis. The previous November, “Captain Moreton’s” position near Beaumont Hamel was shelled and overrun, his entire company was either killed outright or evacuated, and Moreton was declared missing. His family was informed of his death and his possessions returned to them.
Two months later, in mid-January, an ambulance disappeared from a field hospital twenty miles down the line. Five days later, it and the missing driver, Robert Goodman, turned up in the French lines near Champagne, some sixty miles away. Goodman was arrested for theft and desertion and returned to the BEF for court martial. However, there was some confusion as to his actual identity.
As I understand it, Goodman had simply appeared at the British casualty clearing station in late November, driving an ambulance full of wounded, himself in a muddy and mildly concussed state. His ambulance had been shelled and his identity papers and half his uniform were missing, but after a rest he appeared well and declared himself ready to work. Drivers were short at that point and the hospital desperate for help, so the irregularity of his papers was temporarily set aside.
In January, Goodman disappeared as abruptly as he had come, only this time he took with him his ambulance. Although details are unclear, it would seem that he had gone south into French lines. As before, he simply was there one day amongst the French ambulances, delivering wounded to the French tents. When questioned, he claimed to have been seconded there from the BEF. The unlikeliness of the claim took several days to be researched, during which time Goodman continued to drive, and also to make urgent and increasingly incomprehensible enquiries about a missing child.
It was at about this time that a rumour of an unattached ambulance driver had begun to circulate along the Front, when one of the many trench newspapers had a small piece about the so-called Angel of Albert, who rescued wounded men when all seemed lost. In fact, an officer new toCraiglockhart two weeks ago happened to tell me of the Angel, so it would appear that the mythic tale is still active.
In any event, “Goodman” was eventually arrested, and he and his stolen ambulance returned up the line to the British forces. Upon closer enquiry, he was identified as the long-missing Captain Moreton. Men have been shot for less, even officers. However, during his time as a driver, for the British and particularly for the French, he had performed admirably, including an heroic rescue of several French officers and soldiers. During his court martial, three high-ranking French officials and one from the British forces spoke for leniency. (I understand that, since then, Goodman-Moreton has been given a medal by the French government.)
Under these circumstances, his court martial chose to attribute his desertion and subsequent crimes to shell shock, and he was sent to Craiglockhart.
When he arrived, although until the previous month he had been performing efficiently as a driver, he was unresponsive and physically incapable, prey to uncontrollable tremors, and with a severe stammer that rendered speech nearly incomprehensible. (It should be noted that many of the officers arrive here with stammers, which can be interpreted as the body’s rebellion against giving orders, or the result of shattered nerves. In either case, treatment is the same: rest, and talk.)
By the end of March, he had improved to the extent that he could walk and feed himself without mishap, and speech was slow but comprehensible.
However, we had found that to address him by his proper name led to a state of quivering incapacity characterised by uncontrollable but silent weeping. In a staff meeting two weeks after his arrival, it was decided that he would not be so addressed until such time as it seemed therapeutically desirable. I informed him of the decision, and asked him by what name he wished to be called.
He replied with the name of the driver, Robert Goodman, and although the choice is a telling combination of strength (particularly here in Scotland) and virtue (“good man”), here is not the place to go into an analysis.
Under this nom de fou, his progress continued. His stammer became less pronounced except under periods of tiredness or particular stress (such as a visit by his older brother at the end of March). His manual dexterityimproved to the point that he could control buttons, table implements, and a pen, and he undertook short visits into the town. In mid-April, however, an attempt to reintroduce his name stimulated an attack of nerves that set him back for days.
With improved speech, talk therapy became more effective. After some weeks, Goodman revealed to me that a wartime incident with a child had sent him south into the French lines; however, he was unwilling to give further details concerning the incident. Questions made him weep.
By early June, it was our judgement that he was ready for his medical board. It should be noted that it is not the task of this hospital to “cure” a man, but either to ready him for a return to duty, or to speak for his inability to perform his duties and thus require discharge. In the case of “Robert Goodman,” his lasting opinion appears to be that “the Other” (i.e., Moreton) had dropped the world into a state of war in the first place, and he, Goodman, wished nothing to do with the man. I do not believe he meant this literally-that his individual family was in some way personally responsible for the War-but that the country’s ingrained system of aristocracy and privilege had made for a situation in which war was the only option.
If this officer is permitted to retain his identity of “Robert Goodman,” I believe he can eventually become a functioning member of society. He has no wish to resume his place in his birth family or in his regiment, and I would strongly recommend that he not be forced into doing so. He has an abhorrence of violence that would make the duties of a front-line officer impossible. He is more than willing to serve as an ambulance driver, although he understands how unlikely that would be.
If the board certifies that he is to return to duty, my strong recommendation is that he be permitted quietly to enter the ranks rather than resume his status of officer: The responsibility of giving orders is what he fears most, to the extent that the friendships he has made here, amongst patients or the community, are men who are dominant to the point of bullying. Were he to resume his rank and his command, it would not surprise me to hear that he arranged to do himself harm.
The changes evinced in this patient’s life are profound and, to all appearances, permanent. His family (I find myself tempted to write, “his former family”) describes Moreton as methodical, tidy, and of a scientificbent; however, as Goodman he embraces spontaneity, spends his time with drawing pencils and clay (or knives and wood, once he was permitted them), and appears ill at ease when confronted by symmetrical array: A ready chess set, for example, gives him a mental itch until he has shifted a piece into an unlikely position. He sings, as apparently he has not done since adolescence, in a light but pleasant voice. He prefers simple songs and nursery rhymes over more complex melodies or hymns.
If the Board is taken aback by the seemingly light-hearted attitude of “Robert Goodman” when he comes before it, I beg that they keep in mind his twenty-seven months of unflinching service on the Front followed by two months of heroic driving to the rescue of his fellows (“The Angel of Albert”). If I may be permitted an anthropological remark beyond the scope of this patient report, I might point out that a society often reacts to trauma by turning its collective back on responsibility and embracing the frivolous. It should be no surprise that an individual might choose the same means of self-preservation.
I recommend a medical discharge for the patient, and until such time as his family becomes available to him again, a full pension.
As a last note, I recommend that the Board be made aware of the distress that will ensue if they choose to address the patient by his birth name.
Respectfully,
W.H.R. Rivers
The file also included seventeen newspaper clippings concerning the trial of “Johnny” McAlpin in Edinburgh, during which accusations were made concerning the history and mental stability of Moreton, who had met McAlpin in a pub near Craiglockhart Hospital during April and May of 1917. No charges were filed against Moreton, and he was thanked by the judge and permitted to return to his home in Cumbria.
Robert Goodman had only been to two funerals in his life. As The Other Man, no doubt he had attended any number, in calm green cemeteries or in the filth and shattering chaos of the battlefield, but that was The Other Man and he, Goodman, didn’t have to think about that.
So he was mildly curious about this one. It would not be in a small village church as the other two had been, both of them for neighbours who had reached the ends of their long lives and been ushered into the grave with as much relief as sorrow. This one would be for a man who had, he gathered, still been strong and hale, and whose sudden death had been a terrible shock for everyone who knew him.
He liked this young woman Mary Russell. If there were more like her in circulation, he might not have chosen to live quite so far out of the world. And such was his respect for her as a person, he thought that anyone she loved as much as she evidently had Mycroft Holmes might have been someone he, Robert Goodman, would have enjoyed.
So he was sympathetic, and sad for opportunities missed, but mostly he was curious. All sorts of currents swirled around the man’s death, each of them promising to wash in some interesting artefacts to the funeral.
His life had become far too simple. It had taken an aeroplane falling out of the sky to make him aware of his lapse into tedium. But now, everything had become exciting and vital and unpredictable, in ways that made him itch to contribute.
And now that he thought of it, he probably could come up with one or two ways to add his own touch to the afternoon’s obsequies.
Yes indeed; why not make the event something to remember, for all concerned? After all, who commanded that a funeral had to be funereal?
It was the least he could do for Miss Russell.
Russell had been here, in this bolt-hole, Holmes could see that.
But she had brought another person with her. To the bolt-hole. A man.
The clothing she had given the guest indicated he was small; the traces of hair in the razor said he was blond; his choices of reading material suggested either eclectic interests or easy boredom: Russell’s feminist Bible translation by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a picture-book on the Venetian Mardi Gras, and a biography of Benjamin Franklin lay on the floor beside the chaise.
It was also clear that the man had spent some considerable time here on his own-or if not alone, he had felt free to paw through every corner of the place under Russell’s gaze. The man had even discovered the hidden cabinet, although he had not taken anything, merely re-stacking the gold coins into one teetering pile, and rearranging the eight valuable diamonds into what was perhaps meant to be an R.
Holmes very much looked forward to making the acquaintance of this small, blond, inquisitive man whom his wife trusted enough to leave unattended. Or, he corrected himself, whom his wife had brought here before she fell unconscious. And if that was the case, he looked forward to meeting the man all the more.
He returned the books to the shelf, locked the cabinet and restored the concealing volumes in front of it, scrupulously rinsed and dried the razor, and then began to dress in clothing suitable for the funeral of one’s only brother.
A song thrush sat atop a tree growing at the corner of a cemetery. It was a large tree, and an old cemetery. Generation upon generation of Londoners had been laid here, their bones dug up and re-buried, their lichen-spangled stones lifted and placed to one side like substantial ghosts lined up to bear witness.
The thrush had fed well that morning; the weak sun was welcome; its young were long gone from the year’s nest. He was happy to perch and cock a bright eye at the curious comings and goings below.
Earlier in the day, the grave-diggers had come with their spades, making their casual way across the lawns to the scheduled resting place of this newest graveyard resident. Their orders were for a larger hole than usual: Having an oversized coffin stuck halfway down was humiliating to professional pride, and affected the generosity of the families.
So their shovels scraped longer than usual in the heavy London soil, and the hole they dug was as outsized as the man it was to contain.
At last, they were finished. The man in the hole tossed out his spade and raised a hand for the others to pull him up. They arranged the cloth over the raw soil mound, gentling reality for the mourners, then propped their tools across their shoulders and went to seek out their luncheons.
Two hours passed, in silence but for the bells of nearby churches. The thrush came and went, came and went and returned. Clouds gathered, then cleared. Three families came to lay flowers on gravestones; a courting couple lingered under the trees; a pack of neighbouring children ran through, their raucous joy not, oddly, entirely out of place.
Then silence.
When the sun was halfway to the horizon, a man came, dressed in formal black, though wearing a soft hat. He stood for a time at the edge of the hole, then turned to survey the surrounding trees, stones, and marble tombs. He walked up and down, taking up a position behind a large granite cross, then beneath the song thrush’s tree, and finally stepped into the shadows beneath a grand family vault. The toes of his polished shoes caught the light, then they, too, retreated into the gloom. The man might not have been there at all.
The hearse that eventually came was the old-fashioned sort: high, black, and pulled by black horses with black feathered top-knots. The priest walked before, his black cassock peeping out from under a lace-trimmed white surplice, head bent beneath a Canterbury cap, prayer book in hand.
The coffin, both large and heavy, was taken from the hearse by six men. They settled it cautiously upon their shoulders, then stepped into an even pace, transferring the body to its eternal home.
Step; pause. Step; pause. Step.
Clouds grew across the sun, and the afternoon went dull. The mourners glanced upwards and fingered their umbrellas. A person looking on, from the high branches, perhaps, or a family vault, might have noticed how the people deferred to two or three of their fellows: Clearly these were important men, at a solemn occasion. Too solemn, too important for the jostling, bumptious press to have been notified.
The bird, back now, noticed primarily that there was no sign of a picnic luncheon.
The coffin approached, paused in the air, was lowered, and came to rest beside the hole. The six men stepped back, surreptitiously easing their shoulders. The priest stepped forward.
“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord.” The ancient words of grief and comfort rose up from the circle. One woman, tall and buxom, raised a handkerchief underneath her black veil. One man, his hair sandy and thin, his black suit slightly out of date, swayed infinitesimally, then regained control. Another man, this one with the nose of a boxer and a tie too gaudy for the occasion, looked intently around the neighbouring area, seemed not to find what he was searching for, and then raised his arm to pass his hand slowly over his greased hair, a gesture so deliberate it might almost have been intended to convey meaning.
The thrush atop the overlooking tree noticed motion at a distance. Men, perhaps a dozen in all, had taken up positions in a wide circle around the oblivious mourners. Now they began to move forward. These were large, hard-looking men; two of them had bruised faces, as if they had recently walked into a tree, or a rock; one limped. Several sparrows flew out from another tree, but the song thrush remained.
Then came another wave of motion. This, too, came from all over, but it had many more than a dozen sources. Along the cemetery’s paths, over the low hill, from under the scattering of ancient trees, small groups of men and women converged on the hole and its coffin. The men wore dark suits, some ill-fitting; the women wore dresses appropriate to mourning. The women’s hair was of all colours and lengths; two of the men were bald beneath their hats. All the men were at least six feet tall, all were thin, all were at least forty years of age; the women were uniformly tall, all were slim, none was over forty.
And all of the women wore spectacles.
Quiet and to all appearances solemn, the men and women closed in to insinuate themselves among the twenty-three mourners already gathered at the grave-side. The original group looked at the oddly similar newcomers with expressions ranging from surprise to outrage, but the men and women were polite, quiet, and patient.
The congregation now numbered almost ninety. The priest stared open-mouthed at the proceedings, then stirred back to his responsibilities. He found his place, and resumed. The shadow beneath the ornate vault remained still.
The narrowing circle of hard-looking men had stopped abruptly when the odd cohort of late-comers appeared, to let the men and women flow around them towards the grave. They consulted silently with their fellows, glanced at the burly man with the boxer’s nose, then gave mental shrugs and settled back where they were.
Again, the words of the psalm rose up. Again, the tall, buxom woman raised the scrap of white cloth to her veil. The sparrows returned to their tree.
And again, came an interruption. This time it was music, riding thinly on the fitful breeze: a brass band. The mourners shifted and glanced at one another, disapproving of this thoughtless levity. The priest glanced up briefly, then pushed on.
However, the band did not go away. In fact, the raucous music seemed to be growing, as if some horribly inappropriate Salvation Army band had chosen this place of dignity and sorrow to practice its thumping tunes. Closer it came, and closer, until the tune became clear: “Rock of Ages,” quickened to marching time. The priest raised his voice and speeded up a fraction. Some of the mourners exchanged glances, others hunched into themselves, determinedly oblivious. The sandy-haired man in the old-fashioned suit spoke to the younger man at his side, who put on his hat and stalked in the direction of the disturbance.
But before he had disappeared from view, those mourners unable to keep their eyes from following saw him jerk to a halt. He put out both hands, in a manner strongly reminiscent of a constable directing traffic, but his authority was insufficient: The music came nearer, and louder.
And then it was upon them, a marching band of all the loudest, most discordant instruments in an orchestra: tubas, trombones, and French horns (all of them ever-so-slightly out of tune) tootled along with not one, but two large drums (beat nearly in rhythm), a phalanx of flutes, clarinets, and piccolos, and a short pot-bellied man dwarfed by an enormous pair of brass cymbals.
At the front, marching high-kneed with an enormous, sparkly, bulbous red baton, was a wiry blond man wearing Victorian mourning clothes, an oversized fedora with a feather, and an expression of devout religiosity more suited to a cathedral choir. But even the trappings could not hide the sparkle of mischief that shone out from the green eyes, brighter than the flashes of sunlight off his oversized baton.
Those around the graveside panicked. The men clapped their hats on their heads; the women drew together. The priest, thinking to hurry matters along, raised his voice to declare, “Man, that is born of woman,” but quickly realised the futility of his effort. He snapped shut his book and stepped forward to protest.
Without effect. The band finished their tune and immediately launched into the next-rather, they launched into two different tunes. It took several bars before the players of one melody dropped out, scrambling to find their place in the dominant one. The blond man stood with his back at the brink of the hole and pumped his baton with great enthusiasm and no sense of tempo whatsoever. The young man who had been sent to stop them returned to the man with the sandy hair and spoke-shouted-into his ear. The man bent to listen, then threw up his hands and strode over to address the blond conductor, with no result.
The threescore similarly dressed latecomers looked around at each other, at the original mourners, and at the musical invaders. They seemed mightily confused.
The heavily veiled woman broke first. With the handkerchief to her face, she turned and ran, stumbling in her heels over the close-cropped grass until she reached a path, when her gait settled into a brisk march, head down. She had made it as far as the nearest tree when a hard-faced man stepped out and ripped off her veil. She struggled, got one arm free, and swung the hand at her assailant’s already bruised face with a resounding slap. He retaliated by shoving her face-first against the tree-trunk, grabbing her wrist, and fumbling with a pair of handcuffs.
The sandy-haired man saw what was happening and broke into a run to interfere; his young companion followed on his heels; the band, responding to the increased gesturings of the blond man, enthusiastically notched up its tempo and its volume.
As if a switch had been thrown, half a dozen of the original mourners were infected with the urge for rapid retreat. Five others followed on their heels. The look-alike men and women glanced at each other, at the coffin, and at the band before they, too, shifted away from the proceedings, slowly at first, then more quickly, until eighty-some people were fleeing the epicentre of the disturbance, like ants from a stirred nest.
The priest, torn between his congregation and his corpse, chose the living, abandoning the coffin to the brass band, its blond director, and the burly man who had ostentatiously smoothed his hair.
In a wide circle around the gravesite, the twelve hard-faced men had their hands full. A few of them managed to handcuff some of the look-alikes and were drawing them towards the grave. The band played on, loud and joyous and discordant. The burly man scowled at the bandleader, then turned on his heel, noticing the approach of several of his fellows dragging or shoving their protesting mourners. In the distance, the other two men had caught up the first assailant and his prisoner, whose luxurious black hair was spilling down around her shoulders. The younger man bent over the woman’s bound wrists while the older one directed a wrathful tirade at the man with the bruised nose and freshly reddened cheek.
It seemed that, in moments, these two would break into open violence. But before that happened, the man with the bruises cast a glance down at the sole remaining mourner. This time, the burly man’s hand was not smoothing his hair, but stretched over his head, open-palmed, waving sharply in a clear message to cease and desist.
The inward movement of the hard men and their prisoners slowed, then stopped. One at a time, the men bent to struggle with the handcuff mechanisms. The freed men and women, looking frightened, hurried to join their untouched fellows who had gathered at a safe distance. The larger group took them in, patting and touching their reassurance. Several of the women pulled off wigs that had been knocked awry; several of the men yanked at the ties in their stiff collars. When all their original members were reunited, they moved as one down the paths and out of the cemetery’s main entrance, where the original twenty-three mourners had long since fled.
When the band came to an end of the present song, it briskly launched into the first tune it had played on arrival. Now, green eyes blazing with the triumph of his rout, the blond Lord of Misrule brandished his baton in the air, stepped away from the gaping hole, and marched, high-kneed as before, across the grass in the direction they had come. The band jerked and trailed into his wake, motion making them play even more out of tune and off the beat. Some of the hard-looking men, now drawn together around the boxer, made as if to stop them, but the man made a cutting motion with his hand, then turned and walked away, stiff-spined with fury. The twelve looked at each other, then at the band, before turning to follow.
The band marched off. The woman with the handkerchief, weeping in earnest now, stumbled after all the others with her veil in her hand, a sad and solitary figure crossing a nearly deserted graveyard.
The two men who had loosed her from her captor came back down the rise, standing for a time beside the bare hole and its abandoned coffin, before even they turned to make their way towards the entrance.
The cemetery subsided into its state of calm Sunday afternoon peace.
The thrush on the high branch was moved to song, although the season for singing had been over for many weeks. His music spilled over the deserted cemetery for a long time before the approach of evening made itself felt, and he flew off in search of a resting place.
It was full dusk when the figure slipped away from the grand family vault.
I found Holmes by the time-honoured method of strolling up the street and waiting for him to pounce on me. The familiar hsst came from the doorway of an antiquarian bookstore. It was not open for business, it being Sunday, but the proprietor was at work, his door propped open to counteract the drowsy effects of his accumulated centuries of wood pulp and printer’s ink.
Holmes had removed his cassock and lacy surplice, and set aside his piety along with the Book of Common Prayer. He physically jerked me inside and frowned at my funeral disguise, which was that of a dowdy young woman indistinguishable from any of Billy’s relatives. He commented on the effectiveness of the disguise, examined me for sign of injuries, berated me for driving away our foes before they could reveal their leader, and chided me for reducing the obsequies to a shambles-all of which were his way of expressing his pleasure in seeing me. The last of the accusations, however, I felt I should deny.
“That was not I, Holmes,” I protested.
He stopped. “It was not?”
“Well, not all of it.”
“Are you saying that Billy himself came up with the idea of having every one of his friends and relations who possessed vaguely the correct physique show up in identical dress?”
“Oh no, that was mine. The brass band was something else entirely.”
“Ha! The small blond man whom you introduced into the bolt-hole near Baker Street.”
“He spent more time there than I did, but yes. Was that disapproval I heard?”
He summoned a look of surprise. “Why should I disapprove? Clearly you had reason to permit a stranger access.”
Before I could respond, he turned to the antique antiquarian perched behind the counter and thanked him for the temporary use of his shop, then took me by the arm again to drag me towards the back. I shook off his grip-shook off, too, the fleeting memory of running hand in hand with Goodman through a dark forest.
“His musical interlude was, I will admit, remarkably effective,” he remarked over his shoulder. “I had not anticipated quite such a number of opponents, lying in wait for us.”
“Nor I. Holmes, where have you been?”
“First Wick, then Amsterdam,” he said succinctly.
“Yes, Billy told me you were there, although he did not know why. Rather a long detour to London, was it not?”
“Damian was more comfortable when we ran before the wind.”
“Is he all right?”
“His shoulder is healing. I left him in the tender hands of a lady doctor.”
“You found a lady doctor in Amsterdam?”
“We abducted one from Wick.”
“Abducted? Oh, Holmes, do you think-”
“Needs must, Russell. Can you climb in that frock?”
I sighed. “Needs must, Holmes.”
The external ladder led to a flat above the bookshop, which by all evidence belonged to the bookseller himself. Holmes moved to the gas ring and put on a kettle, tossing my way a few details of the trip he and Damian had made, along with this doctor lady.
When I had unearthed a chair from a dozen ancient volumes and settled with my cup of tea, I returned to my question.
“When I asked where you were, I meant more recently. I expected to see you at the bolt-hole.”
“Life became rather more complex than I had anticipated.”
“You went down to Southwark,” I suggested.
“Either they are good or I am getting old, because I nearly handed myself to them twice.”
“If they got the better of Billy in his own home ground, they know what they’re doing.”
“And you?” he said. “Any problems on the way down from Scotland?”
“Ah. Goodman didn’t give you the letter?”
“Goodman is your blond friend? No, I received no letter.”
Of course not: Even I had needed a moment to see behind the priest’s disguise. I took another revivifying swallow of tea and began my report on the past eight days. Thirty seconds in, he interrupted.
“Brothers is alive?”
“The book, Holmes. Brothers had his death journal with him, probably in his breast pocket where the bullet hit. I thought it odd that the Orcadian police seemed only marginally interested in the site, but Lestrade confirmed it when I went to his house this morning-news had reached him of a fire and loud noise like a gunshot, but since there was no body, that was all he’d heard.”
“That does rather change things.”
“But I can’t see-” I jolted to a halt: I had not seen Holmes since Mycroft’s death, and his brief description of the week’s activities had skipped over that central event. I put down my cup and laid my hand over his. “I’m so sorry, Holmes. I read of it in The Times, on Wednesday. It was… couldn’t believe it.”
“Nor could I,” he said flatly. “And I’ve now wasted a week.”
“Holmes, I can’t see any relation between Brothers alive and Mycroft…”
“Dead? Brothers had help from within the government, either directly or purchased for him by others. I was operating under the theory that he came here under the auspices of a Shanghai crime cartel, who then lost control over him at the same time he lost control of his reason. If he is alive, it throws another light on our target, but in either case, we are facing a group with considerable resources: men in Holland and in Harwich, an insider in the passport office, twelve men this afternoon. Mycr-”
“A sharpshooter in Thurso,” I added to his list.
He raised an eyebrow, and fell silent. I told him all: Javitz; aeroplane; sniper; crash; wild man of the woods; telegrams and newspaper notices; five armed invaders, two of whom had been at the cemetery this afternoon; our trip to London; Javitz and Estelle. I told him what I had found in the apartment of the absent Richard Sosa, and what I had uncovered in Mycroft’s flat: a note from Lestrade; sixteen documents that could change the world; a key; and one letter with an anomalous capital I.
“Sophy Melas,” he said, when I told him the last.
“You know her? I mean to say, you know her from before, but recently?”
“We’ve met. And I knew that Mycroft had continued dealings with her, after she returned to this country. That was she at the funeral, in the veil.”
“The only one in tears,” I said. Then, distracted from my train of thought, I asked, “I saw the Prime Minister there, but who was the grey-haired man with the entourage?”
He gave the name of a high-ranking but painfully introverted Royal, commenting that Mycroft had assisted the man some years before. Other mourners had included Sinclair, head of the SIS, and Vernon Kell, the man in charge of the domestic Secret Service. Not, apparently, Peter James West, nor Richard Sosa.
“And of course Lestrade was there,” I added.
“You went to his house, you say?”
“I let myself in during the wee hours, and found him waiting.”
“I imagine he was well pleased.”
“Well, I didn’t want to wake his family. And he ought to have a better latch.”
“Did his note alone lead you to believe a visit to his house would not be a trap?”
“It didn’t strike me as his kind of ruse. Besides which,” I added, “it was three in the morning and I’m a lot quicker than he is. I thought it a reasonable risk.”
“As, too, breaking into Richard Sosa’s flat.”
“The only indication that I was there was a small ivory carving I knocked to the floor when I moved the curtains. I put it back, but I can’t be sure I had the precise place. If there was one-Sosa seemed an odd mixture of great caution with slips of carelessness.”
“Which might make one wonder, were not most criminals apprehended because of a moment’s carelessness.”
“So, Holmes. What next?”
“This pilot of yours: Will he keep the child-will he keep Estelle safe for another day or two?” I was glad he’d finally come around to his granddaughter.
“Captain Javitz is a determined and honourable man, and he and Estelle get along like a house afire. And he’s a bit embarrassed at one or two recent displays of weakness, which means he’ll be scrupulous about guarding her. As for Goodman, I’m not sure what he’ll do. The last I saw of him-other than at the head of that awful band-was at the bolt-hole this morning. He’s like a jack-in-the-box, always popping in and out. Later I saw that he’d taken the letter I’d written to you, giving details about this past week-I thought I should set it all down in case Lestrade decided to arrest me. I put the Sussex address on the front, and stamps. I hope he remembers to put it into the post.” And to seal it first.
“You have doubts?”
“It is beyond me to predict what the man will do. He’s an extraordinary creature, like something from another world.” Time enough later to tell him what I knew of the man’s history. “Perhaps we’d best go back to Baker Street, just to be sure. I’ll need a change of clothes, in any case; it might as well be from there.”
“A man who cannot be trusted to post a letter is someone you trusted with the bolt-hole?” He did not sound angry, merely curious.
I could not explain my confidence in this odd man, not even to myself.
“I had to do something with him, Holmes. Billy was out of the equation, most of our friends are known, Mycroft’s flat felt exposed, and I didn’t want to risk an hotel. When you meet him, you can decide if I’ve compromised the place too badly.” And you have five other bolt-holes, I thought but did not say.
“Very well, let us go now. There will be rough garments there, I believe.” He picked up the tea-pot and cups, returning them to the sink.
“Rough?” I repeated to his back. I did not care for the sound of that word. “Why do we need rough garments, Holmes?”
He turned in surprise. “Oh, if you wish to retain the frock, by all means, do so, Russell. I merely assumed you would prefer more practical garb for the purpose of grave-digging.”
Holmes, no,” I protested, trotting after him down a passageway that would have been dark even were it not coming on to evening. “You can’t be serious. Grave-digging?”
“How else are we to know who lies there?”
“Why would you imagine it is anyone other than your brother?”
“I tried to get into the mortuary yesterday night and was told the coffin was already sealed. When I pressed the man, I learned that they had received the coffin in that state on the Thursday morning.”
“Is that unusual, when embalming is not required?”
“I…” He could not answer: Either he did not know, or it was not unusual.
“I’m surprised you didn’t break in then and there.”
“I would have, but there was never a time when the building was empty. Who would have imagined mortuaries were so incessantly busy?”
“Holmes, I think you’re being unreasonable.”
“You said yourself, you couldn’t believe Mycroft was dead.”
“That was a figure of speech!”
“Well, mine was not. When I see his corpse with my own eyes, I will believe, but not before then.”
I had found it difficult to use the words death and murder when talking to Lestrade that morning, but this went far beyond any mere aversion to hard truth. In another man, I would have assumed that brother-worship had taken an alarming turn and required physical intervention and a long period of quiet conversation. But this was Holmes, after all: Despite his age, I doubted I could tackle him successfully.
So I kept silent and did my best to keep up with him.
The streets behind Marylebone Road appeared deserted-these were, after all, office blocks, and it was a Sunday evening-but Holmes paused for several minutes at the top of the street so we could survey all of the doorways and windows. When he was satisfied, we made a swift detour through a service entry, came out next to the bolt-hole’s entrance, and in moments, we were inside and invisible.
But not before I had spotted something odd on the ground just outside the entrance. “Wait, is that-” I reached for it and said, “Holmes.”
“Quiet,” he shot back, standing rigid inside. I drew breath, and discovered what had attracted his attention: the odours of cooking, highly unlikely here.
“It’ll be Goodman,” I said. “He left this outside, stuck to the paving stones. An owl feather. His favourite bird, and not often seen in London.”
His eyes gleamed as he studied me in the faint light, then he turned and went on.
When we stepped into the tiny apartment, the first thing to greet our eyes were Robert Goodman’s stockinged feet against the wall. He was standing on his head.
“Hello, Robert,” I said, waiting for him to resume an upright position before I attempted introductions. But he stayed as he was, merely pointing a toe at the table and saying, “Sir, I believe there is an epistle I was instructed to deliver.”
Holmes looked at the table, then back at Goodman, and said, “It is, I agree, a topsy-turvy world.”
Instantly, Goodman let his legs fall to the floor and jumped upright, face pink and hair flattened. He shook his clothing back into place, rescued the neck-tie he had tucked between the buttons of his shirt, ran his hands over his hair, and stuck out his right hand.
“Mine host,” he said.
“Mr Goodman, I presume,” Holmes replied. “I understand it is you I have to thank for the musical interlude during the services for my brother.”
“You needn’t thank me,” Goodman protested, although that was not what Holmes had meant.
“Nonetheless. My brother would have been most… entertained.”
Goodman’s face relaxed into happiness. “I’m sorry your granddaughter couldn’t have been there.”
Holmes’ eyes came to me in silent reproach for the amount this stranger knew of us. “You think the child would have enjoyed it?”
“Heavens no. She’d have had to cover her ears.”
Holmes said dryly, “You think the child a natural music critic?”
“Ah, that’s right-you have not met the poppet. Perhaps you don’t know? Estelle has perfect pitch. She’d have found the discord physically painful.”
Now, Holmes simply looked at him. Goodman nodded as if he’d replied, and said, “She looks forward to meeting you.” He went into the minuscule kitchen, which was more a matter of putting his head into the cubicle.
“Mr Goodman, I believe you have something on the stove for us?”
“I do,” our guest replied. “Although I have to say it was a challenge, coming up with something edible out of that pantry. Perhaps the tins are intended as weapons, rather than comestibles?” he added politely, his head appearing around the door.
Holmes retreated with the letter to the inner room while I took out plates and silver. I was rinsing the dust from some glasses when I heard Holmes say my name, sharply. I looked in at where he sat on the bed.
“Why did you not tell me how Mycroft signed his name?” he demanded.
“How did he sign his name?”
“With the letter M.”
“Is there significance in that?”
“Have you ever seen my brother sign a letter with only the initial?”
“He does all the time,” I protested. I could see it in front of my eyes, that copperplate M curving around a dot.
“In a letter to me?” he persisted.
Now that he’d mentioned it, I had to agree, it was generally Mycroft’s full name, even in telegrams. But I had seen that M as well, and recently. Then I had it: “The letters from Mycroft that Sosa had in his desk. Those were signed with just the initial.”
“Precisely: his business communications. The initial began as his mark to indicate that he had seen a document, and evolved into a substitute formal signature. I believe Smith-Cumming adopted the technique with his letter C on documents, until that letter took on a life of its own and was taken to mean Chief-his successor, Hugh Sinclair, signs with the C.”
“So, what? This letter to you is a business communication?”
“I should say he meant us to understand that he was writing in an official, rather than a fraternal, capacity.”
I could not see that it made any particular difference. “If you say so, Holmes,” I said, and went back to laying the table.
When he came out, he had changed his formal suit for a pair of frayed trousers and an equally working-man’s shirt of a dark colour, which he was rolling up to the elbows. He set an ancient dark-lantern on the floor beside the door: He had not by some miracle let go the idea of digging up Mycroft’s grave.
Goodman had created a kind of bean ragoût that he poured over a mound of rice-remarkable, considering the raw materials to hand. Holmes chewed the first bite with careful consideration, then gave a small moue, as if the taste had proved some inner theory. Goodman tucked in with gusto, and launched into the story of how he’d come to locate and hire a band with such absurdly woeful skills, weaving in a great deal of entertaining but questionable detail, aware of, but ignoring, the grey eyes that never left him.
When the plates were empty, I abandoned the men to the washing-up and dug through the stores for a costume appropriate for grave-robbing: trousers and a dark shirt similar to those Holmes had donned, ancient brogues, and the gloves Holmes used when he was driving a carriage. I chose another shirt and took it into the other room. The cook was scrubbing a pot. Holmes was drying the plates and putting them on the shelf. One of them had made coffee.
“Mr Goodman chooses to join us,” Holmes told me.
“I didn’t imagine he could resist.” I held out the shirt. “That white shirt will be too visible at night, if we’re caught. This one should fit you well enough.”
Goodman laid the pot upside-down next to the sink and reached for his neck-tie, undressing with no more self-consciousness than a child. I turned my back. Holmes looked on, bemused.
I had rather hoped that, considering the circumstances, we might find the coffin sitting at the edge of the hole, the interrupted burial having been delayed until the morrow. However, the mound of earth had been filled in, the sod returned to its place. The height of the mound suggested the addition of a substantial volume.
We rolled away the turf and Holmes pulled on his driving gloves, then set to with a spade he had stolen from the workman’s shed. I guided him with the dark-lantern, keeping it low and sheltering it behind my body.
After a quarter hour, Goodman dropped down from his perch on top of a grandiose vault and took the spade. A quarter hour after that, I returned from a wide survey of the surrounds and assumed the gloves and spade.
A faint rain began to drift across us, a mist rising from the ground to meet it. A faint half-moon occasionally looked through the clouds, catching on Goodman’s pale hair, the gleam of his teeth, the glitter of Holmes’ eyes.
The advantage of overturning a fresh grave is obvious, and this one was as fresh as they get. Halfway through our second circuit of diggers, with Goodman in the hole, the spade hit wood. To my surprise, he dropped the handle and scrabbled his way out of the hole as if he’d felt a hand on his leg.
Holmes let himself down and began uncovering the coffin.
It emerged quickly, its former polish somewhat scraped and dented. Holmes tossed out the spade and pulled a screw-driver from the back pocket of his trousers. When he had worked his way around and the fastenings were loose, he traded the screw-driver for a length of light-weight rope, knotting it around the handle. He picked it up; Goodman interrupted.
“Allow me,” he said with exaggerated politeness, holding out a hand. Holmes laid the rope’s end across his palm. Goodman wrapped it around his fist, waited until Holmes and I were standing across the grave from him with the lamp shining down at the wood. Then he pulled, working against the weight and the press of remaining soil against the hinges. The wood came up; the air went heavy with the stench of corruption; the light wavered and went still; and we looked down into the silk-lined coffin.
The face below us was nestled into a pale satin pillow.
The face was that of a large man, his dead features slack and beginning to swell.
Not Mycroft.
Holmes could not quite stifle his grunt of relief; however, his only words were to tell Goodman to hold the lid. He let his long legs down until his shoes rested on the edges of the coffin, and I shone the light on the corpse’s upper body as Holmes tilted it, but as I’d thought, the coffin was not deep enough to contain two.
He had been killed, not by a knife as the newspaper had reported, but by gunshot: three shots, in fact, one of which had stopped his heart and brought an end to his bleeding. He had not been embalmed; no autopsy had been performed; he had been dead for several days.
Holmes pulled himself back onto the grass, his legs dangling, while I continued to direct the light over the man’s face. Death obscures the features and drains away the personality, but the fresh pink scar along his left eyebrow tugged at my memory: I had put it there myself two weeks earlier.
“You know him,” Holmes said.
“Marcus Gunderson.”
Silence held for a solid minute, before he murmured, “Curioser and curioser.”
“Our opponent is clearing the field,” I said. “Removing anyone who can tie him to this whole business. He’ll find Sosa next.”
“Perhaps Sosa is in hiding with Mycroft.”
The blithe illogic of this was so startling, I could feel even Goodman’s scepticism from the darkness. Just because Mycroft wasn’t here didn’t mean he wasn’t dead elsewhere.
“If Mycroft is hiding, why did he not get into touch with us?”
“Have you finished?” asked a voice from across the grave. Holmes hastily retracted his legs. The coffin lid came down; the rope sagged loose; Holmes screwed down the lid again, then reached for the spade. The air grew sweeter.
“Is there any information you have not given me?” Holmes asked as he began to fling soil back into place.
“Nothing that comes to mind,” I said.
“Why, then, is Gunderson here in place of my brother?”
“He sounds irritated.” Goodman’s voice from the darkness was amused.
“Not that it doesn’t please me immensely,” I said, “that he isn’t here, but honestly, what does this mean?”
“Think, Russell. Who would be capable of this? Who could trace you to Scotland and have a sniper waiting for you overnight in Thurso? Who could learn from the telephone exchange where a trunk call had originated, and two days later have armed men in Amsterdam? Who would have the authority to remove a body from the purview of Scotland Yard, produce a false identity and falsified autopsy results, and package it for burial with no trace of official protest?”
Goodman’s arm came out of the dark and appropriated the spade, which Holmes had been leaning on during this speech. Holmes moved to one side, and the hole continued to fill.
“Mycroft could have done all of that,” I pointed out.
“Granted. Although my brother might hesitate to send a sniper after his sister-in-law.”
I ignored the levity, although Goodman made a quiet Ha! “Anything Mycroft was in a position to effect, I imagine his secretary could have duplicated with forged orders. Certainly until Wednesday, when Mycroft was found. Or, not found,” I added.
“Either side could have done this. But it was definitely intended to be taken as Mycroft.”
“But Holmes, if Mycroft was alive, surely he’d have got us a message?”
“Perhaps he’s in Kent with your Mr Javitz and-”
He caught my sharp gesture even in the near-dark, but too late. The sound of digging stopped.
“You moved them?” came the voice from the grave.
With a wrench, my brain shifted direction: Our preoccupation with governmental misdeeds and assassinations meant nothing to Robert Goodman compared with the welfare of a child. “I did. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I talked to Captain Javitz after you left this morning and he had… concerns, so it seemed best to send the two of them away. They’ll be safe.”
“What concerns?”
How to answer him? By saying that his family’s servants had betrayed him to the American? That the pilot now suspected our eccentric rescuer was not only truly insane, but friends with a homosexual murderer as well? That I had to depend on Javitz to watch Estelle, and had no choice but to do as he asked?
“It’s complicated.”
“He knows,” Goodman said flatly.
I felt Holmes’ gaze bore into me, but I dropped onto my heels, stretching a hand out to the small man’s shoulder. “Robert, I owe you so much. May I ask one more favour of you? That we not have this discussion just now?”
For the longest time, the glitter of his eyes in the faint light did not shift. Then he said, “Does she know?”
“No.”
“Do not tell her.”
“I won’t.”
And without another word, he returned to his shovelling.
I could feel the question yearning from the man at my side: Know what? Another would have asked. Holmes said merely, “That my brother is not in his coffin suggests that this entire episode could have been in service of his needs. That he wished to appear dead.”
“For the third time, why not leave a message?”
“I could think of a hundred reasons,” he snapped. “He is held captive. His post to The Times was intercepted. He decided that a message was either inadvisable or unnecessary.”
“Unnecessary? How were we to guess the newspaper report was false?” I used the word guess deliberately, knowing it would raise his ire.
“I knew there was something wrong the moment I read his obituary.”
“Well, yes!”
“Wrong with the report, that is. The general public does not know Mycroft Holmes from Adam, so why should The Times print a formal obituary? And in any event, even if a man has been old and ill, how often does his obituary appear the very next day?”
I started to protest, then stopped: Javitz had noted just that thing, and I had dismissed it. Still: “And you think Mycroft would have expected us to make a whopping great leap of ratiocination based on a too-quick obituary?”
“I think when we find him, he will be amused that we had to dig up his coffin to be certain.”
“‘Amused,’” I repeated darkly, looking at my filthy clothing and blistered hands. “Will he also be amused when his misplaced confidence in our deductive abilities gets us arrested for grave-robbing?”
“We have not actually stolen anything,” Holmes pointed out mildly.
“Tell that to the arresting constable. Are you ready for the turf, Goodman?”
We tamped down the soil as best we could and shifted the turf back over the grave. In a day or two it would look much as it had, particularly if the rain continued, but even if the grave-diggers noticed that it was not as they left it, what would they do? Dig it up and find precisely what they had left there?
We darkened the light, left the spade in the shed, and crept unnoticed from the silent graveyard, taking our filthy selves through the wet streets to the bolt-hole.
Peter James West returned the telephone to its cradle and walked across the room to stretch his reflection across the dark, rain-swept city. And only an hour ago, he’d been ready to call an end to it and see what he could salvage from the rubble of his carefully constructed plans.
The knock on his office door that afternoon had summoned him half an hour early to the taxi, which had meant an extra half hour sheltering in the damp recesses of the vault, waiting for the mourners to arrive. And there he had stood, growing ever colder, as his plans melted away like the mud at the edges of Mycroft Holmes’ grave. Now, hours later, he could acknowledge a grudging respect for the two-pronged attack on his careful plan. Buckner hadn’t a chance-although he couldn’t see that Gunderson would have done any better.
The blond man in charge of the band must have been Moreton, the mad woodsman of Cumbria. The question was, had the woman only met him last week, or had she deliberately sought him out? He’d thought the man a pet she’d picked up along the way, as she had picked up (or so it appeared) the pilot and the child. If so, it showed a degree of sentimentality he’d not have expected of the young wife of Sherlock Holmes. If not-if the band-leader’s inclusion had been planned-it indicated a degree of forethought that could prove dangerous.
Could that even be where Sosa had got to, as well, sheltering beneath her wing? And if not with her, where was he? Had his employer’s death brought him face to face with the consequences of treason, and driven him to flee the country? If so, he hadn’t taken his ill-gotten gains with him. And if the man tried to gain access to his accounts, West would hear about it. In any event, Sosa would surely be picked up soon-he lacked the nerve or the skill to go to ground for long.
But all the gloom and despair faded with the telephone call. There was a move in chess (idiotic game, a pale imitation of reality) where a lowly pawn could be made into a queen, and turned against the opponent with devastating consequences.
The telephone conversation had been to say that his pawn had been queened. He now had the tool with which to prise out the last remaining remnants of the old age, and make it new.
Painstaking, untiring, scientific method backed by modern technology: This was the new age of Intelligence. The age of Peter James West.
It was fortunate that the building was empty at night, because during the work-day, someone would surely have noticed the volume of water running through unseen pipes. I claimed the first bath, which meant that Holmes’ water ran cold. I felt no regret for his discomfort.
My hair was dry by the time he came out, his skin resembling a fish’s pale belly. Goodman placed a steaming bowl of soup before him along with the plate of fresh-cooked scones he had apparently summoned from the air, and I let Holmes finish his meal before raising my questions.
“So, if Mycroft could have orchestrated this entire affair, but did not, who else is there? Who is in a similar position?”
“As you said, Sosa comes to mind. He has always been more an assistant than a mere secretary. And, he might well expect to inherit some portion of Mycroft’s authority.”
“What about West-what’s his name, Peter James? I went to see him, but he was not at the address Lestrade gave me. I thought he might come to the funeral.”
“West is one of the young men Smith-Cumming brought in after the War, and I’d have thought him of too low a rank to possess that degree of ambition. In another twenty years, perhaps. His boss, Sinclair, would be more likely: Sinclair and Mycroft have never seen eye to eye on what constitutes the greatest threat to the empire, and he’s more than once expressed his disapproval of Mycroft’s parallel and, as Sinclair regards it, amateur Intelligence firm.
“I was rather surprised to see him at the funeral-and, looking less relieved than saddened. Sinclair has taken the widespread conviction that Germany was the ultimate evil and transferred it onto Russia. He maintains the Bolsheviks have to be crushed, instantly and forever, lest they penetrate to our very soul. Mycroft agrees to an extent, but refuses to permit the limitation of interests. Thus far, the powers-that-be have agreed that Mycroft possesses a balanced view, but this has only convinced Sinclair that Mycroft is deluded and obstructive.”
He stretched out an arm for a sterling cigarette case and gaudy glass ash-tray from Blackpool. When the stale cigarette was lit, he slid the case towards Goodman, who did not take it. We sat for a time, meditating on the ramifications of in-fighting among the branches of Intelligence.
“I have to agree,” I said at last, “this entire scheme is convoluted enough to be something Mycroft cooked up.”
“That would be a pleasant dream: my brother and his assistant, smoking cigars and moving pieces around a chessboard whilst his machinery turns.”
“We need to find him,” I said, stating the obvious.
“We need to find all of the missing pieces,” Holmes corrected me. “We need to have a word with Sosa’s mother, to see if he had a favourite refuge. And Brothers, who might be with one of the church’s Inner Circle.”
“I’d suggest we look for Mycroft first.”
“Agreed,” Holmes said. He put out his cigarette and fixed an eye on our guest. “Mr Goodman, where might you look for my brother?”
“At home,” the small man said promptly.
I winced, recalling the state in which I’d left Mycroft’s flat, but objected, “He wasn’t there yesterday.”
“All the more reason for him to be there today,” Holmes said.
Goodman came with us, of course. I could not see that he would either cause, or come to, harm, and although I thought for a moment that Holmes would request him to stay behind, he did not.
We went in through the St James’s Square entrance and followed Holmes’ bobbing candle in single-file through the narrow labyrinth. The faint cracks around the doorway indicated that the light was still on in the study, and Holmes slid the peep-hole aside that I might examine the room, comparing it with how we had left it.
I took my time, then stood back.
“I don’t see his gold pen on the desk-top. I’m pretty certain it was there Saturday.”
Goodman reached for the latch, but Holmes grabbed his wrist. I had to agree. “Robert, he’s right. Last time it only seemed to be a matter of arrest, but now there may be something more dangerous in there.”
“All the more reason,” he said, and before either of us could stop him, his other hand had worked the latch and he was putting his shoulder to the hidden door.
This time, I put my hand on Holmes’ arm.
We waited for this peculiar man to make a second leisurely survey of Mycroft’s flat. No shouts came, no gunshots. In a minute he was back, again holding an apple with a bite missing.
“Someone’s been here,” he commented indistinctly, then dropped into a chair, picking up an abandoned book from the nearby table.
Holmes shoved the door open, and I followed him inside.
At first, I could see no evidence of intrusion past the disorder I had myself left. Then: The chair I had used to prop under the door-handle was not as I remembered leaving it. Lestrade’s note, which I had left in case Holmes came here, lay at a different angle. And the bowl of fruit-surely there was more than one apple missing?
The sitting-room window made it imprudent to turn on those lights, but the kitchen had doors. I made my way there, let the doors swing shut, and switched on a small light.
Yes: Someone had been here since I searched the room the previous afternoon.
In a few minutes, Holmes’ voice came from without. “Was the revolver still in his bedside table when you were here yesterday?”
“Yes-is it missing now? Here-hold on a moment,” I said. I dimmed the light to let him in, then turned it on again. “The tea caddy is empty, an assortment of foodstuffs are missing, and the chair Mrs Cowper sits in has been moved a few inches. Also, the pills she puts on his tea-tray every morning? The bottles had more in them yesterday.”
He stared at me, then through me, a look I knew well. “What did you tell me about the key?”
“That Robert found? I merely speculated that the hiding of both key and letter-with the capital I on Interpreter-were intended to combine into a message that the key is in the interpreter. Or as it turned out, the key is the interpreter. Rather, his wife.”
The expression that dawned across Holmes’ face gave lie to his assertions of optimism. His face was transformed, and his eyes rose to the ceiling, as if thanking God. With an almost child-like glee, he rubbed his hands together as his gaze darted around the room, coming to rest on the royal portrait behind the housekeeper’s misplaced chair.
The dumbwaiter, the height of modern amenities when it was installed a generation ago, had proved more trouble than benefit for most of the building’s residents. Mycroft’s renovations this past year had included a panel screwed to the wall over its opening, but he had not blocked the hole entirely, merely hung over it Mrs Cowper’s portrait of His Majesty King George V.
Holmes jerked open the cutlery drawer for a knife, then crossed the room in three broad strides to attack the panel’s screws. Two turns of the wrist and a screw fell away. He bent to retrieve it, holding it out on his palm: The full-sized head was attached to a mere half-inch of shaft. The screw had been sawed off until it was no thicker than the panel.
All six screws had received the same treatment, and none of them had any function but appearance, but when he jabbed the silver blade under the edge of the panel, it did not give. And not, as I first thought, because it had been painted shut: The panel was held in place from the back.
At home, we could instantly lay our hands on a wide variety of tools suitable for burglary or architectural destruction, but Mycroft had never gone in for the practical side of his profession. Still, Mrs Cowper kept a well-equipped kitchen: I hoped I never had to explain to her what we had done to her meat mallet and butcher-knife.
Dish-towels and pot-holders helped muffle the sound of splintering wood, but we had to shut off the lights once to fetch a large pillow from the sitting room, and a second time when the inquisitive Goodman requested entrance.
Finally, the panel’s inner latches came free. Picking away the more vicious splinters, Holmes drew the torch from his pocket and put his head into the dark hole, twisting about to examine all angles.
When he stepped away, he looked as proud as ever a brother could be. He held out the torch, and I took his place.
Where there once would have dangled sturdy ropes joining the box to its pulley device at the top, there was now nothing but a dusty square shaft that reminded me of the emergency exits of some of the bolt-holes. Its roominess surprised me until I called to mind the box that travelled up and down: It had thick, insulated walls, and even then was big enough for…
I twisted about, as Holmes had done, and saw them: narrow boards, some ten inches apart, bolted to the wall beside the entrance and disappearing upwards into the gloom. It looked almost like-
“A ladder!” I withdrew my head and met Holmes’ dancing grey eyes. “Oh, surely not. Mycroft couldn’t climb those.”
“Last year’s Mycroft, no. But this year’s model?”
“Good heavens. You don’t imagine…”
“That my brother decided to shed weight in order to use this? It would require considerable determination and foresight.”
Mycroft’s Russian-doll of a mind, renovating a kitchen to conceal the noise and dust of building one secret entrance, at the same time creating another, even more closely hidden one.
Goodman had nudged me aside to look at our find. His height made it difficult to see, so he dragged Mrs Cowper’s chair over to climb on. He thrust his torso inside. In a moment, his hand came back, holding a wide metal strip with a small hook at one end.
Holmes examined it, then bent to fit the hook into the wire mounted on the portrait. “It’s a means of replacing the king before the door is fully shut,” he said.
“Where does the shaft come out?” I asked Holmes, keeping my voice low. “Is the basement kitchen still in use?”
“I believe he was interested less in the depths than what lies above.”
“What is that?”
“The Melas flat,” Holmes replied with satisfaction. Then his face changed as he lunged past me, too late for the second time in minutes.
“Goodman, stop!” he hissed, his hand locked on the Green Man’s ankle. Goodman did not retreat, nor did he reply, he merely waited, giving Holmes no choice but to let go. He thumbed the torch on and climbed through on the small man’s heels, with me bringing up the rear and praying that the boards had in fact held Mycroft’s weight, and could thus be trusted to hold a series of lesser bodies. It was at least forty feet to the ground, and I had two men above me.
The torch in Holmes’ hand bounced madly, illuminating nothing so much as the soles of Goodman’s shoes. I had only gone up a few feet when everything came to a halt. Trying simultaneously to cling to the wall and peer around Holmes, I saw Goodman’s left hand exploring the wall beside the ladder, a storey above Mycroft’s kitchen. Holmes stretched his arm back so the light fell on the wall; I heard a faint click.
Sudden light flooded the shaft, and Goodman leant forward to place his hand on the lower edge of the entrance.
Then he froze, his weight braced on one hand, suspended above our heads.
Holmes shifted, and said in a low voice, “Mycroft? If that is you, kindly put away your gun and allow Mr Goodman to enter.”
The light dimmed somewhat as a figure appeared through the hole in the shaft wall. “My dear Sherlock. And Mary, too, I see. Yes, reports of my demise were somewhat exaggerated. I trust you brought dinner?”
Mycroft looked bizarrely thin, as if his features had been grafted onto another man’s body. However, he moved with ease around his borrowed kitchen, playing the host and making coffee despite the sticking plasters on two fingertips of his right hand. The revolver lay on the work-table beside an equally gaunt packet of biscuits.
“Am I to understand that Mrs Melas told you about this flat?”
“She did not,” I answered.
Goodman said to me, “That’s what she was waiting for you to ask.” Mycroft had been more dubious about Goodman even than Holmes, eyeing him as one might a small child in a roomful of delicate knickknacks.
“Yes, I should have known that you would not overlook the usefulness of an adjoining flat.” That I had missed the significance of the renovations might have been humiliating, had Holmes not also failed to see them.
“I was beginning to wonder if I should have to sneak out at night and raid my neighbours’ cupboards.”
“I did make it as far as your own flat on Saturday,” I told him.
He turned with a look of surprise. “That was you, Mary? Thumping about for hours?”
“Hardly hours. And yes, it was I.”
“You left an unholy mess.”
“I know. Sorry.”
“I thought it was the police again-I expect they are the source of the ringing telephone downstairs that has been plaguing me all week-end. Although thank heavens, the ringing seems at last to have ceased. In any event, I kept anticipating that they would find their way up the dumbwaiter shaft.”
“It was well concealed.”
“By that portrait?” he said in astonishment. “How could anyone who ever met Mrs Cowper take her for a devoted Royalist?”
Another failure for which I had no answer.
The coffee was ready, the meagre edibles arranged on a fine plate. Mycroft led us to the Melas sitting room, a dark place furnished when Victoria set the fashion, with maroon velvet curtains so thick we had no worry of escaping light, and laid out eggshell cups and saucers that might have been a wedding gift to Sophy Melas and her Greek-interpreter husband. The coffee was pitifully weak, the milk tinned, the few biscuits stale. Goodman ignored the refreshment in favour of a thorough circuit of the flat, listening over his shoulder as Holmes told Mycroft about Damian’s injuries and the threats he had encountered in Holland and Harwich. I then gave a quick synopsis of my own adventures, during which Goodman lost interest and kicked off his shoes to curl onto a divan in the corner. By the time I finished, a light snore came from his corner of the room.
Then it was Mycroft’s turn.
“I think,” Mycroft began, “this all began in June, fifteen months ago, when Cumming died.” He took in the uncomprehending looks on half his audience, and explained. “Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming was the head of the foreign division of the SIS. In 1909, Intelligence was divided into domestic and foreign divisions-although the Navy and Army still had their own Intelligence services, of course. Cumming did some good work during the War, but afterwards the combination of his ill health and questionable decisions shook the service badly. In November 1920, you will recall, the IRA executed fourteen of his men. A catastrophic blow-and one which may have contributed to the next year’s decision to reduce drastically the SIS budget.
“After Cumming’s death, Hugh Sinclair took over, and although I find him somewhat single-minded on the dangers of Bolshevism, he is a competent man, who does what he can with limited funds.”
He cleared his throat, and dribbled another dose of coffee-flavoured water into his cup. “However, economics is not the point-or not the particular point I have in mind. Intelligence in this country-the gathering of information on potential enemies-has a tumultuous history. In general, spying is seen as an ungentlemanly pursuit that becomes an unfortunate necessity in times of war. Each time conflict starts up, the country scrambles to generate spies and procure traitors, ending up with information that is incomplete or even wrong, and some highly questionable employees. Without method and forethought, we are left dangerously exposed.
“After the War, the various Intelligence divisions combined, shrank, or in a few cases, split off entirely. Vestigial elements remained, rather as my own department does. Military and civilian forces were thrown together: Names changed, power was grabbed, and the only thing the government could agree upon was, as I said, that the Intelligence budget wanted cutting. And cuts were made, insofar as the public record was concerned.
“In point of fact, several of the military and civilian bureaux, instead of being absorbed into the overall SIS, have continued blithely along their own lines. When Sinclair took over last year, he had a devil of a time finding which of those wartime groups had actually disbanded. Cumming had been willing to put up with these ‘Intelligence Irregulars,’ one might say-little more than private clubs or Old-Boys networks, really-because their information was occasionally useful. Sinclair, however, wanted them disbanded.”
I frowned and was about to ask how these various groups were funded if the central agencies were being cut back, when Holmes spoke up.
“You’ll have to tell her, Mycroft.”
My brother-in-law shifted as if his chair had become uncomfortable; I would have missed the giveaway gesture had I not been looking directly at him. Goodman’s rhythmic breathing continued without interruption; Mycroft lowered his voice, and began.
“Some thirty years ago, I found myself in a position to change this… impermanent nature of the empire’s Intelligence service. It was towards the end of the war between Japan and China, in 1895. A considerable amount of money had been… circumspectly allotted to influence the war in favour of China. There is no need to go into the series of events first delaying the funds and then obscuring their presence, but suffice it to say that when war had ended, much of the money was still there, in limbo, threatening to become something of an embarrassment were Japan to discover it.
“Those responsible for committing the funds assumed they had been spent, either during the war or as a portion of the indemnities. I was one of the few capable of tracing them precisely. To ask for their return would have opened up a can of worms that the Prime Minister did not wish to see opened. So I… removed the potential source of international chagrin by making the money disappear.”
“What? Wait-you stole government funds? You?”
“I stole nothing. I merely relocated them. With the Prime Minister’s full knowledge, I may add, although nothing was put to paper. The amount was considerable, and I invested it sensibly. The annual return keeps my operations running.”
I looked at Holmes, who was diligently studying the end of his cigarette, then back at his brother. I couldn’t believe it. Embezzlement? Mycroft?
My brother-in-law went on, as if he had confessed to taking home the office dictionary. “As I said, in the months since Cumming’s death, power has shifted in several directions. My own rôle in the Intelligence world has always been primarily that of observer, and although I do have direct employees, generally speaking I commandeer men from elsewhere when I require them.
“My illness came at a bad time. Decisions were being made with great rapidity last December, after the election but before Labour took over. One might even describe the mood as ‘panicked.’ The outgoing Prime Minister together with Admiral Sinclair set a number of Intelligence elements into stone, then brushed away the dust and presented the incoming Labour party with a fait accompli. And since Labour had been on the outside of policy, they could not know that this was not how things had always appeared.
“I lost two key months to illness. When I was fit enough to resume work in February, I thought at first the changes around me were due to the new régime. And as you no doubt heard even in foreign parts, there was consternation and loud doom-saying on all sides: The Socialists were expected to bring the end of the monarchy, the establishment of rubles as the coin of the realm, a destruction of marriage and family, and dangerously intimate political and economic ties with the Bolsheviks. Eight months later, the worst of the country’s fears have yet to be realised, and MacDonald has surprised everyone by being less of a firebrand than the village greengrocer.
“I expect you followed these issues to some degree during your travels. But when I returned to my office, it was nearly impossible to sift rumour from fact and policy from gossip. I felt there was something awry, I sensed a leak and a degree of manipulation, but everything had been overturned all around me, and in any case, the interference was very subtly done.
“Then in April, someone blackmailed my secretary.”
“Ah,” I said. So he did know about Sosa.
“Now, over the years I have collected nearly as varied a list of enemies as you, Sherlock. The immediate threat was from within, but whether it came out of the central SIS or one of the vestigial organisations was remarkably difficult to determine.
“So I set up a trap. And because my opponent had at least one finger inside my camp, it was possible he had more. I moved with caution, and attempted to appear oblivious.
“Which is terribly difficult! How do you manage it, Sherlock? Playing the idiot, I mean?”
“It helps to wear dark lenses,” Holmes remarked. “To conceal the intelligence.”
“Metaphorical dark glasses, in my case,” Mycroft said. “I have found the appearance of age and infirmity quite helpful in maintaining the façade of oblivion. And I might have managed to complete my trap and bait it, had it not been for the abrupt arrival of my nephew on the scene.”
“Because of Brothers?”
“The Brothers case proved both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, that wretch’s acts drove a cart and horses through my tidy ambush. All of a sudden, the police were underfoot, with an all-out hunt for Damian, then for the two of you.
“However, once I began to look into the situation for you, I realised that it might be another in the series of incidents where I suspected my invisible opponent’s hand at work. It had become clear that Brothers had a guardian within the government, someone who greased official rails. One might think that there are a limited number of men who can establish new identities and arrange bank accounts, but in practice, a person who holds authority in one department can generally manipulate the machinery of another. And it can work informally, as well, or even indirectly: informally, in that when one knows the right people, one need only drop a word in a fellow club-man’s ear to have a protégé’s application speeded, his request granted. And indirectly, because a tightly knit group of school- and ’varsity-chums will grant one another favours without asking where the request originated.
“I was in the process of narrowing down the candidates when five uniformed constables came to the office to demand that I accompany them to New Scotland Yard. I have to say, I did not know whether to laugh or to take out my revolver.”
“Why did you not telephone the PM?” Holmes asked.
“Because I thought this might be the additional factor that brought my list of candidates down to one. I knew Lestrade had to be acting under orders-why else not simply come and talk to me?-but I wanted to know whose.
“Unfortunately, I do not think he knew himself. During our interview, he seemed almost sheepish, as if he’d been asked to take part in a play with rather too much melodrama for his taste. Still, it gave me a pathway to investigate, since there are a limited number of ways in which Scotland Yard can be reached.
“And I might have found it by now had it not been for the motorcar that pulled to the kerb thirty feet from the Yard’s entrance. In the back sat a large man with a scar across his left eyebrow and a gun in his hand.”
“Gunderson,” I supplied.
I became aware of an odd, breathy noise; it took me a moment to identify it as Goodman’s snores.
“And the driver?” Holmes asked.
“Another criminal type. Certainly no public-school boy.”
“They masked you?”
“A sack over my head. He then made me get on the floor, and we drove back and forth for twenty minutes or so before ending up very close to where we had begun, at a warehouse in Lambeth-an old warehouse, no doubt slated for development and therefore quite deserted. I could hear Ben’s chimes and smell the river, but I was well and truly trapped, and any noise would go unheard.
“I was minimally fed every eight hours, the water often lightly drugged. Until this past Wednesday, when the three o’clock meal was not only brought me by a new set of feet, it was so heavily drugged, I could see the powder residue in the cup. So I poured it on the floor, and waited.
“Two hours later, Richard Sosa arrived.”
I jerked upright in disbelief. “They sent your secretary to kill you?”
Mycroft returned my look of disbelief. “Kill me? What are you on about? Mr Sosa came to rescue me.”
Mycroft’s three o’clock meal-Wednesday? He was almost certain it was Wednesday-sat in the corner of the room, taunting him. He had seen the foreign matter in the cup, tasting it gingerly before pouring it onto the floor, and decided not to risk the solid food.
If death was finally coming for him, he wanted to meet it on his feet.
Ninety minutes later, he heard a noise, but it was not the noise he expected. It sounded like glass breaking.
After five minutes, it happened again, only closer. This time he moved to the far corner of the room, raising his eyes to the square of light overhead.
The next repetition came two minutes after the second; after another two-minute pause, his window proved to be the fourth. It began when the square developed a dark patch-ah, Mycroft thought: The breaker of windows had discovered that glass splashes back, and spent three minutes improvising a guard before his second attempt.
A sharp rap in the centre of the shadow split the glass. Palm-sized shards of glass rained down; the shadow was removed, and glass fell as the pipe jabbed at the widening hole. When the hole reached the window’s edge, the pipe withdrew. Seconds later, a torch beam hit the floor, searching the corners until it froze on Mycroft.
“Mr Holmes!” said a welcome voice that wavered upwards to a squeak.
“Mr Sosa,” Mycroft said in astonishment. “An unexpected pleasure.”
“Oh, sir, I am so glad to see you. I hope you are well?”
Mycroft’s lips quirked. “Much the better for seeing you, Blondel.”
“Er, quite. I am glad,” the secretary repeated, fervent with relief. “Shall I, that is, if you wish, I could go and fetch a locksmith?”
“Either that or a heavy sledge. The door is solid.”
“I do have… that is, I wasn’t certain if you… I have a ladder.”
“A ladder?” Mycroft had judged his prison on the top of a sizeable building: Summoning a ladder the height of the room would be a considerable project.
“Not a ladder as such, it’s rope. A rope-ladder. If you feel up to such a thing.”
“Is there sufficient anchor up there? I’d not care to get nearly to the top and have it come loose.”
“Oh no, no no, that wouldn’t do at all. Yes, there is a metal pipe nearby, and I have a rope as well. To fasten around the pipe, that is, and tie to the ladder.”
“Mr Sosa, I don’t know that I’ve ever had opportunity to enquire, but-your knowledge of knots. How comprehensive is it?”
“Quite sufficient, I assure you, sir,” he answered earnestly. “As a boy, I taught myself a full two dozen styles and their chief purposes. I propose a sheet bend rather than a reef knot. And to fasten it to the pipe, a double half-hitch should be quite sufficient. No, sir; my knots will hold.”
“Very well, let us make haste.”
“If you would just-”
“Stand back-I know. The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth down as the gentle glass from heaven. Bash away, Mr Sosa.”
Sosa bashed, until the frame was cleared of glass. He then disappeared, for a disarmingly long period, while Mycroft stood below, his hands working hard against each other.
A young eternity later, an object little smaller than the window leapt through the hole and plunged downwards. Mycroft stumbled back, seeing it as Sosa being thrown inside by the returned gaoler-but then the large darkness caught and rapidly unfurled, dancing its way all the way down to the floor: the ladder.
Mycroft rested his hand against his pounding heart for a moment. The torch-light hit him and he heard his name. He dropped his hand and picked his way over the glass to the ladder, tugging it with little conviction. It seemed sturdy.
He gave a last glance to his prison, and the formula scratched into the wall, then committed his stockinged foot to the first rung.
Five rungs up, the ladder dipped alarmingly, and he clung to the insecure rope as if it would do an iota of good. He waited, feeling motion on the line. Then came two sharp tremors, as if its tautness was being slapped.
“Mr Sosa, may I take it that the two raps were to indicate the rope is secure?”
Two tremors came down again; reluctantly, Mycroft inched up another rung, then another.
At the top, he saw the problem: The knots had held admirably; the pipe had been less secure. He gave up on gentle motions and threw himself over the frame onto the roof.
Sosa, red-faced and trembling from the effort of keeping the metal pipe from bending catastrophically, sank to the roof and put his head in his hands.
After a minute, not far from open tears, the secretary staggered to his feet and came over to pat his employer on the shoulder, back, and arm. Mycroft began to feel like a prize dog, and feared that in another minute, the man would embrace him.
“Remind me to increase your salary,” he said.
This distracted Sosa. “Sir, I did not do this for the salary,” he protested.
Mycroft laughed. He laughed for quite a while, finding it oddly difficult to regain control of his face, but eventually he forced levity to arm’s length and stood up.
“My afternoon meal was heavily drugged, with what appeared to be Veronal.”
“Did you eat it?” Sosa asked in alarm.
“Of course not. But my captor will assume I did, and will return before long so as to catch me unconscious. I believe, Mr Sosa, you have come only just in time.”
“Oh, dear. Perhaps not.”
Mycroft looked up in alarm, hearing the dread in his secretary’s voice, then moved over quickly to see what had attracted the man’s attention.
Down on the empty street below, a large figure got out from behind the wheel of a van that looked remarkably like those used by a mortuary to transport bodies.
“Fast, man,” Mycroft urged. “If we can get down the stairs and take him by surprise, I can use this stout pipe you most thoughtfully-sorry, what was that?”
“I said, wouldn’t you rather use your gun?” The revolver looked incongruous balanced in the secretary’s thin palm, but most welcome.
“Mr Sosa, you are a gem among men.”
They were an unlikely pair of avengers, a thin balding man in a high collar with dust on his knees and a look of resolute terror on his sweating face, following a shoeless, unshaven, once-fat man in a filthy suit belted by an aged Eton tie, rapidly tip-toeing down a rickety metal stairway and through a derelict hallway.
The muffled gunshots that followed, heard by two waking prostitutes, a nurse snatching a quick cigarette outside St Thomas’ hospital, six ex-Army madmen in Bedlam, and three members of the House of Lords in solemn conclave with a glass of sherry on the Terrace, were dismissed as a back-firing lorry.
Heavens, Sosa has been at my right hand for twenty-six years,” Mycroft told us indignantly. “I’m surprised that you imagine me such a poor judge of character.”
“I, well,” I said, biting my tongue to keep from saying, Nor had I imagined you an embezzler.
“The hypothesis was, Mr Sosa wished to inherit your position,” Holmes said. Mycroft looked at me askance, and did not deign to acknowledge such a ridiculous suspicion.
“Sosa came to me immediately the blackmailer approached him. He’d been ordered to turn over certain minor pieces of information, thus saving himself from scandal and earning a small sum as well. The photographs were of his sister and, shall we say, politically rather than socially embarrassing, while the information requested was indeed of little importance. The sort of thing that could be learnt elsewhere with a bit of digging.”
“It was a toe in the door,” Holmes remarked.
“Precisely. A thing that might tempt a man to succumb without preying on his conscience over-much. I naturally gave Sosa permission to pass on the information.”
“Thus setting a trap.”
“The first faint preparation for a trap. More like a thread to grasp. A delicate and convoluted thread, little better than the mere suspicion I’d had to that point, but I seized it, and I have spent the past five months trying to follow it to its source.”
“A twenty-pound trout on five-pound test line,” Goodman’s sleepy voice murmured from the corner.
Mycroft looked around in surprise. “Yes, a telling analogy. Attempting to reel my opponent in.
“And then, as I said, you two arrived back in the country, and we were instantly overtaken by Damian’s problems.”
“Why keep you alive?” Holmes asked.
Another man might have been taken aback by the callous question, but Mycroft merely said, “I spent much of my captivity meditating on that question, and eventually decided that I was being kept, as it were, on ice, until my death could serve a function.”
“How did your secretary find you?” I asked.
“I keep Sosa apprised of the general outlines of any of my projects, including this one. He became uneasy on the Thursday I disappeared, when I failed to return to work in the afternoon. Then in the evening he had a telephone call from his blackmailer instructing him to send Captain Lofte back to Shanghai. When Friday not only found me absent, but saw the deposit of a sizeable sum into his bank account, he grew alarmed, and began to work his way down the dramatis personae of our recent portfolios. Brothers was still missing, but now his general factotum, Gunderson, was as well.
“Mr Sosa may be a mere secretary, but he has not worked with me all these years for nothing. He placed the telephone call to Captain Lofte, but he also made arrangements with the neighbours at Gunderson’s and Brothers’ homes, to send word if either man returned. He applied himself wholeheartedly to the hunt, with little result. I fear the poor fellow was worn quite thin by the time he heard of activity in Gunderson’s rooms on Tuesday night. The moment he received the news, Wednesday morning, he took up a position across the street from Gunderson’s lodgings house, in an agony of trepidation lest his quarry had already left, or he would miss him when he did.
“Five hours later, at two-thirty in the afternoon, Gunderson came out carrying a small bag, and headed for the river.
“Gunderson never looked behind him. Although if he had, what would he have seen? One drab clerk among a thousand others, harried and indistinguishable.
“Yes, I am quite pleased with Mr Sosa.
“Gunderson went straight to the warehouse. And since the route to my prison led up a stair-well with many broken windows, Sosa could follow the man’s progress to the top storey. He waited for Gunderson to leave again, which was almost immediately-he had been dispatched to bring me my final, heavily drugged afternoon meal. Sosa watched him go, then summoned his courage and crossed over to the warehouse.
“There, his skills failed him-he had absorbed quite a bit of theory over the years, but little of the practicum. An oversight I shall have to remedy, in the future: It would have simplified matters had he been able to pick locks.
“But he could not. However, upon circling the building, he saw a set of fire-stairs, precariously attached and missing some of their treads, but for the most part sound.
“It took him two hours to round up what he needed, and he came near to breaking his neck getting up the metal steps in his office shoes, but he persisted, and made it to the roof, where he went along the row of skylights with a length of pipe. On the fourth such window, he found me.”
He described how Sosa, terrified by his own audacity, had rescued him. “I then told him to keep back when I went to confront Gunderson, but the poor fellow seemed to think he was Allen Quatermain and would not leave me. When Gunderson turned and saw us, an old man and a milksop, of course he pulled his gun. I had little choice but to shoot him. And to my irritation, he was inconsiderate enough to die before he could tell me who had sent him.
“But with him he had a parcel, the contents of which were most intriguing. My shoes and belt were there, and a clean shirt-not one of mine, but in my size. Also a clothes’ brush, razor, and bottle of water, indicating that he intended to render me more or less presentable. But the contents of a large envelope were the most suggestive of all: my note-case, into which a photograph of a rather attractive and scantily clad female had been inserted; a card for a night-club called The Pink Pagoda; a torn-off section of the London map showing the area about The Pink Pagoda, with an X drawn across a nearby alley; the forms necessary for a London mortuary to conduct a burial; and the autopsy for a man matching my size and general description, signed by an out-of-town pathologist, and dated the following day.
“Poor Mr Sosa, the events of that afternoon nearly did him in. Flying bullets and the presence of a dead man were bad enough, but then I made him wait there with me until dark-hoping that Gunderson’s boss, or at least a colleague, might come looking for him, which they did not-because in my weakened condition I could not manhandle Gunderson’s body down to the mortuary van by myself. And after that, he had to drive, then help me dump the body. I think by this time his mind had gone numb, because he did not even protest when I told him we needed to wait until the police had showed up, before carrying out the charade that Gunderson’s employer had intended for me.
“I had found a flask of gin in the glove compartment of the van, and made my secretary take a swallow to steady his nerves. And when the time came, he flashed his identity at the police with what appeared to be bored panache, but was, in fact, sheer terror. Then we snatched the body from out of their hands and delivered it, with the papers, to the funeral home.
“After that, I had Sosa drop me at the Angel Court entrance, and I ordered him to go to an hotel I knew near Maidenhead, and check in under an assumed name. I also ordered him to drink the remainder of the gin and go immediately to bed-he is a teetotaller, but I expected it might be a choice between alcohol and a complete breakdown, and thought the effect of drink would be simpler to deal with.”
With that, Mycroft picked up the final biscuit and sat back, as if his tale was at its end.
“So you’ve been here since Wednesday?” I prompted.
“I have a long-standing arrangement with Mrs Melas, that I might use her upstairs flat if ever I needed a retreat. She even came to see if I might be here, while I was in my prison-she left a note on the desk for me, asking that I get into touch. Fortunately, she hasn’t been back since.”
“She believed the reports of your death, as we did. I did,” I corrected myself, although Holmes’ claims to the contrary were not entirely convincing.
Mycroft winced. “Yes, I feared the report would trouble you. There was little I could do. Any public message-board such as the agony column was sure to be watched. As I said, my opponent has a remarkably subtle mind.”
That gave me pause, to think that the messages Holmes and I had posted to each other might have been not only noticed, but understood. However, one would also have had to know where the bolt-holes were to trace us to them, and there this faceless opponent had met his limits.
“I knew you would return to London, once you had dealt with Brothers. With luck, you would even find me before I began to eat Mrs Melas’ leather chair. But you say that Brothers is not dead. How do you intend to find him?”
Brothers be damned, I thought, and interrupted. “Did you send Mr Sosa away?”
“On Thursday, it must have been,” Holmes noted. “Once he’d brought you the morning papers.”
“And food. Yes, I sent him to the country with his mother, and had him get into touch with your Mrs Hudson and my own Mrs Cowper. We have a wide number of acquaintances at the moment who are taking in distant scenery.”
Poor Mrs Hudson, banished yet again for her own good. At least Dr Watson was out of it this time.
“We cannot afford any more hostages to fortune,” Holmes agreed.
“That was my thought. However, I had not suspected that Mr Sosa was made of such stern stuff. He returned to St James’s Square at mid-day on Thursday, where I had agreed to be available to him, were he to want me, and brought me a pair of Gladstone bags stuffed with edibles and the news. However, he was badly shaken: That morning he had decided that he could scarcely spend the day in the same shirt he had worn the day previous, and went home to pack a valise. There he found signs of a most expert break-in and the insinuation of several pieces of incriminating evidence amongst his things. He gathered his mother and fled; the two of them were in the mortuary van with her cat and canary. I gave him strict orders to abandon the stolen motor and take her away for at least two weeks. After the invasion of his home, I believe he will obey me. I only hope I can talk him into returning to my employ, once this is over.”
“Good,” Holmes said to his brother. “Tell me, what do you propose to do about your faceless opponent?”
“Now that I have you, I’d thought-”
“Wait,” I said. Damian was lodged in Holland somewhere and Javitz was protecting Estelle-but if our opponent was all-knowing, there remained one member of our party to consider: “Goodman.”
The man attached to that name gave a snort and sat upright on the divan, blinking against the light. I said, “That is your family’s estate, in Cumbria, where you live?”
“My… yes.”
“You could be traced from there?”
He shrugged, to indicate its remote possibility. I turned to Holmes.
“If our opponent has figured out who Goodman is, and if he’s desperate enough, he could use them-the family is away, fortunately, but the servants are there, and vulnerable.”
Goodman snorted again, this time a sound of derision. “That family? Were he sane, a threat to a mere servant would not bend a son of the family. But mad? One cannot manipulate a madman. No sensible man would try.”
With that, he turned over on the divan and went back to sleep.
We three looked at each other, and admitted the wisdom of the fool’s pronouncement.
“You were saying, Mycroft?” Holmes asked.
“I was saying, with your assistance, I believe we might revive the trap I had been constructing before Mr Brothers stumbled into our lives. There may be fewer of us than I had anticipated. However, I believe we can adapt it to our reduced numbers.”
The conversation that followed led us nearly to dawn, and the plan Mycroft laid and Holmes and I amended was a good one: simple, solid, and requiring little luck to succeed. Our opponent might not realise yet that Mycroft was alive, but he must be aware that Gunderson was missing. It was unfortunate that Mycroft had lacked the personal stamina, or the reliable manpower, to set watch over the warehouse. Nonetheless, the combination of blood on the floor, bullets in the walls, and a broken sky-light would surely put the most phlegmatic of villains in a state of panic.
Mycroft need only walk in the door of his Whitehall office to send any rats scurrying for their holes. With me at the building’s telephone board and Holmes at its exit, one or the other would lead us to their source.
Before the sun rose behind the curtains that Monday morning, our plans were laid.
Mycroft stood, moving like an old man. Holmes and I were little better. I looked at the mantelpiece clock: nearly six.
“You will leave soon?” I asked Mycroft.
Holmes was frowning at his brother’s stiffness and spoke first. “The afternoon will suffice.”
“Really?” I dreaded to hear what other activity he had in mind. “So what now?”
“A few hours of sleep might be for the best.”
“Sleep, Holmes?” I exclaimed. “Do we do that?”
“As best we might, given the age of Mrs Melas’ beds.”
When we began to stir, Goodman woke and stretched full-length on the striped divan, looking remarkably like Estelle. Then he jumped to his feet.
“Unless you need me to guard the door or repel boarders, I’ll be gone for a bit. Shall I hang the picture back over the hole downstairs, on the chance someone wanders in?”
Holmes started to object, but I was more accustomed to Goodman’s habit of popping in and out of view, and told my long-time partner, “He knows the back entrance, he knows to take care that no one sees him use the hidden doors, he’ll be careful.”
“And I’ll bring a pint of milk,” Goodman said.
“But not an entire arm-load of groceries,” I ordered. “Nothing you can’t slip unseen into your pockets. We don’t want you to look like a delivery boy.”
He put on his straw hat and marched with jaunty steps to the kitchen. I had a sudden pang of doubt-we could be trapped here-but stifled it, and went to find a bed. It wanted airing, but a slight mustiness would not keep me from sleep.
I felt I had scarcely closed my eyes when a presence woke me. I forced an eye open, and saw green; blinked, and the green became an eye; pulled back my head, and Goodman came into view, his face inches from mine.
I sat sharply upright, glanced over, and found Holmes, incredibly, still asleep-who would have thought Goodman could enter this place without waking either of the brothers? When I turned back to my human alarum clock, my vision was obscured by an object that, when I had pushed it away sufficient to focus, proved to be a folded newspaper.
His other hand came around the side of the page, one finger pointing at the print. “Is this for you?”
I took the paper, and read:
THE BEEKEEPER wished in trade for the object of his affection central Bensbridge, alone, 2:30 am, reply acceptance in evening standard.
Robert Goodman sat on the rooftop, watching London rush to and fro between his dangling toes. The view was omniscient-in the theatre of the streets, his seat was in the gods. Which was only appropriate, considering the Person on whom he was meditating.
Are you frightened of anything?
Suffer the little children, to come unto me, because they will speak the truths only fools know. Oh, the Son of Man knew what he was talking about, that was for certain.
And the Son of Man did his own sitting on the heights, thinking on the morrow, wondering if he might not simply slip away and leave his friends to sort it out.
A simple child that lightly draws its breath / And feels its life in every limb; what should it know of death? Interesting, that the Bard of Avon had so few children in his writing while Wordsworth had so many. If Wordsworth had been a playwright forced to deal with actors, would he, too, have replaced children with sprites and fairies?
A simple child should know nothing of death, or fear, or hunger. But children did, all the time. Estelle Adler certainly did, poor mite-mother murdered, father hunted. But what was that to him?
An ambulance driver had responsibilities, but they were not those of an officer. A driver’s demands were immediate, clear-cut, and rode light upon the conscience: Men died, but if one had done one’s job, those deaths could be laid at the foot of someone else. Some officer.
Even then, even Before, his very soul-that Other whom he once was-had cringed from an officer’s relationship with the men in his command. Not through cowardice: He would risk life and limb to bring a man home, even one who was not going to reach the field hospital alive. But he would not lead them. He would not love them and comfort them and cajole them into the path of flying metal. He’d have put a lump of metal into his own brain first.
Are you frightened of anything, Mr Robert?
An omnibus paused between his toes, sucking up a row of tiny figures, evacuating others. The Son of Man could walk among those figures and go unnoticed, for to their minds, they were the gods. Modern gods, whose mighty commands rang down the telephone wires; who parted the waters with steamers and digging machines; who rained fire from the heavens over the poor cowering wretches in the trenches; who thundered rage in the engines of their trains and the blare of their motorcar klaxons.
Take away this cup, for I am afraid. If the Son of Man couldn’t talk his way out of what was coming for him, how could any other son of man?
A tiny dot of brilliant blue caught his eye, and he bent forward to watch it: a woman’s hat, a spot of defiant joie de vivre sailing the drab sea before it was swallowed by a shop.
With the bright spot gone, he became aware of the pull of the street, far below. Mad world, mad kings, mad composition! There was earth beneath the tarmac and tile, real earth, and its call was, ultimately, not to be denied. Who was to say it would not be today?
Without a doubt, the time had passed for men like him. The city below him was a machine, its people mere moving parts generating goods and money. Cold rationality had spread across this fair land: Its nobility were those who stole for good purpose. Which he could understand-gods made their own rules-but these took no joy in life. The gods of this England were film stars and dispensers of tawdry advice, and they embraced brittle frivolity rather than the deep and supple exuberance of woodland creatures. In this England, Ariel would wear a straight-jacket, Hamlet would be fodder for the gossip columns. Hadn’t he seen Oberon and Titania this very morning, aged and worn as the feather in his borrowed hat: a man and a woman, older than their years, sitting on a park bench in their cast-off overcoats and sharing a scrap of ill-cooked food? The king and queen of the fairy world, eking out their days amongst the wind-blown biscuit wrappers.
Goodman pulled the feather from his hat band. This primary flight-feather of Strix aluco had greeted him one morning outside his front door, a gift from the tawny lady whose home was in the old oak, whose voice often called to him at night. His fingers smoothed the barbs to order, but there remained a gap. One barb was missing. When had that happened? He worked at it with his fingertips, as if his flight from the roof-top depended on the feather’s perfection, but even with the barbules linked, there remained a hole near the shaft.
Are you frightened of anything, Mr Robert?
The hole in the owl’s feather was the shape of an elongated tear-drop. Turned slightly, it reminded him of the shape of a child’s eye. A half-Chinese child’s eye.
He shuddered, and let go the feather, leaning forward, forward until a gust of wind caught it, whipping it around the corner and out of sight.
A child’s eye.
Late November, in the depths of an eternal war, a war with no beginning, no end, only stink and muck and death. One rainy day all his men had been taken from him, and in exchange he had been given an ambulance filled with groaning bodies and a dead driver. And so he became Goodman and no longer had to be The Other who ordered his men into the bullets, and he drove like a demon to claw the bleeding away from Death.
Then in December, The Powers Above had decreed that a particular piece of ground must be won, a tiny hillock of no more importance than any other hillock won or lost over the past twenty-eight months. It was to be a surprise push. It was certainly a surprise to the citizens of a much-shelled village, trying to scrape a few potatoes from the liquid ground.
And a child. God only knew where her parents were-under a collapsed building, leaking into a field. But the child was there, a grubby thing in a too-short dress and a too-large hat who had climbed-or been placed-on a bit of surviving wall, where she kicked her heels and watched the parade of passing motors and horses; soldiers marching in one direction, soldiers staggering or being carried in the other.
No fear, no curiosity, just sitting and watching, hands in her lap, as if she’d been sitting and watching the whole of her young life.
One glance, and the passing soldiers and ambulance drivers could tell she was not right. A closer look, and Goodman had seen the almond curve to her eyes, the protruding tongue-tip that imparted a look of great concentration. She was what they call Mongoloid, what his mother-what The Other’s mother-had called one of God’s innocents. The child had sat there like a talisman for three trips to the Front, and then she was gone. The wall was gone. He drove two more trips before he stopped to see. The hat was there; she was not. She was not there all the way until dark, but that night she was back, her epicanthic eyes watching him, that night and a string of other nights. Once the battle had moved on a few miles, he returned to the village and found an old woman who knew of the child, who confirmed that the mother had died and the father was gone to war. The old woman did not know where the child was. He asked soldiers. He haunted the hospital tents. In the end he drove off in his ambulance, far down the line to where the French uniforms began, in pursuit of a rumour of troops who had adopted a mute orphan as their mascot. But it was not she.
Then he was arrested, and it was discovered that Goodman had been born on a battlefield when The Other had died. He expected to be lined up and shot, but word came of a medal, and as a favour to the French, they sent him to Craiglockhart instead. There he met Rivers, and told him, just a little, about the girl on the wall.
Only after, when he’d crawled off to Cumbria and found the old woodsman’s hut and let the land remake him, had she gone away, for good.
Until an aeroplane came at him out of the sky and gave birth to a very different child with the same almond-shaped eyes.
And now below him lay the child’s nest, her hive, the loud, confusing, cold-hearted world into which she had been born. She might appear a being that could not feel the touch of earthly years-Wordsworth’s children, again-yet in no time at all the shades of the prison-house would close in on her and she would grow up. There was nothing he could do to stop it. She could not live in a Cumbrian estate among the owls and the hedgehogs. Her people lay below him. In his pocket was the drawing her father had done, the child become a woman: That was her world.
Her world, not his: He had no place here. But because of a child with a certain shape to her eyes, he must try to see the life in the machine, to see the sweetness in what they produced. He must do what he could to make it a place worthy of her.
He wished he’d had time to talk to Mary Russell’s man about bees. The books in his bolt-hole suggested an interest in the creatures, yet this was a man who’d spent his life with the darkest side of the human race. Would he look between his feet at a city landscape and see a hive, or a machine? Would he behold the labours of his fellow man and see the sweetness of intellectual honey, or yet more machines in which they would enmesh themselves? The man’s eagerness to support his brother’s preoccupation with Intelligence-what a misnomer!-suggested the latter. Nonetheless, he was Estelle’s grandfather, and therefore worthy of assistance.
Are you afraid of anything, Mr Robert?
Oh, dear child, I most certainly am. I am afraid of fear, so afraid. I am terrified of the bonds that tie a man down, the weight of other lives on his shoulders, the responsibility for stopping unnatural acts.
He was grateful to have made the acquaintance of Mary Russell: A perfect woman, nobly planned / To warn, to comfort, and command.
Command me, dear lady, he thought. Warn me and comfort me and give me orders, for I am in need of a clear-cut task. I have long cast off my officer’s class. I need to know that someone else is in charge.
Still, the music to the funeral had gone well, and that was all his own doing. Perhaps he needed to venture his own contribution to the current problem.
What could he bring to this next act in the play?
He got to his feet and stretched out one arm in a gesture unseen by those on the street below. “Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens,” he shouted at them, then laughed aloud.
Having thus granted London his god-like permission to continue its scurrying life, he put on his hat and turned for the stairway.
He had, he recalled, promised a pint of milk. And his pockets were capacious, his coat large enough to conceal a beltful of sustenance-cheese and biscuits from the shop on the ground floor of this very building, apples from the man on the corner, a packet of coffee, a small loaf of bread. That Mycroft fellow looked as if he’d appreciate a slab of bacon.
Oh, he thought, and a newspaper. Mary’s husband seemed particularly taken by the things.
Bensbridge’ I assume to be Westminster Bridge, and he wants a reply in the Evening Standard, but what the devil does he mean by ‘the object of your affection’?” I demanded. Goodman, newspaper delivered, had washed his hands of the matter and retired to the kitchen. He was humming to himself and exploring the cupboards.
“I do not know. Although addressing himself to Sherlock suggests that he believes me dead.”
Holmes and I rose at the same instant.
“There’s a public telephone down the street. Do you want to go, or shall I?” I asked.
“Take a taxicab to the offices of the Evening Standard,” Mycroft said. “There will be a telephone near there.”
“You’re not thinking of agreeing to his demands?” I protested.
Holmes’ face was a study in storm clouds. He made a circle of the room, then snatched up Mycroft’s gold pen and a piece of paper. “If we do not place a reply-by noon-we remove the option of choice. One of us needs to stay here, and… you are the less immediately visible.” He held out the page, on which he had written three words:
The beekeeper agrees.
I hesitated, but the revelations of the night before, which I had pushed from my mind under the urgent need for rationality, washed back with a vengeance. Suddenly, the thought of being locked up with my brother-in-law filled me with revulsion. Without further argument, I thrust the page into a pocket and made for the kitchen. As I climbed through the dumbwaiter hole, I heard Holmes say to Mycroft that he needed some things from downstairs.
I went fast down the shaft and through Mycroft’s flat to the guest room, noticing in passing that Goodman had cleaned up the débris from the panel. Holmes found me ripping garments from the wardrobe.
“Russell.”
“Theft,” I spat. “Embezzlement for the good of the nation! Oh, Holmes, how could you?”
“It was necessary.”
“The ends justifying the means? The tawdry excuse of every tyrant through history.”
“Mycroft is no tyrant, Russell.”
“Isn’t he? Stealing money from his government to set up his own little monarchy. What is he doing with all that money, that can’t be done openly? Bribes? Assassinations? I know there’s blackmail-blackmail, Holmes! Those letters of his that ‘would taint our name forever.’ You detest blackmailers, yet you permitted it!”
“The ‘noble lie’ has to convince the rulers themselves.”
I rejected the sadness in his voice by making mine louder. “I think I prefer the sentiments of Phaedo to those of The Republic: ‘False words are not only themselves evil, but they infect the soul with evil.’”
“Do you not imagine that my brother is well aware of that? Do you not see that thirty years ago, he consciously chose to shape a life of virtue on top of that one act?”
“What I’d imagined was that Mycroft was above such things. What I’d hoped was that he did his best to counteract the slimy deeds that Intelligence spawns, the bribes and blackmail and God knows what death and misery. What I’d hoped-” I broke off and slammed the drawer. What I’d hoped was that Mycroft was better than that.
“Good men may be driven to unethical decisions. I have been, myself.”
I grabbed a comb and began to drag it through my hair, trying to ignore the figure in the edge of the looking-glass.
“Are you and I arguing,” Holmes asked eventually, “or are you arguing with yourself?”
I threw the comb into its drawer, kicked my shed garments into the corner, and jammed one of the wider cloches over my head. I looked at my reflection, but after a time, I had to look away.
Mycroft had always been a bigger-than-life presence, even before I met him; to find… this at the man’s core shook me. When it came to Mycroft, I had somehow decided that he managed to undertake the business of Intelligence without the unsavoury aspects of the craft, even though I myself was regularly driven to house-breaking, lying to the police, assault… Holmes was right, I was being simplistic. Childish.
Fortunately, he had the sense not to say so.
“All right,” I said. “Yes, he pays. That doesn’t make it right, but it’s a brutal world and the work he does is necessary. I am disappointed. Profoundly disappointed. But I will help.” I picked up my purse.
“I left Damian at the Hotel Delft in Bleumenschoten,” Holmes said. “And Dr Henning, of course. Under the name Daniel de Fontaine.”
I flagged down a cab on Piccadilly, went to the Standard’s offices to leave the advert, then walked down the street to a quiet public call-box.
It took ten minutes to achieve a connexion with the hotel in Tunbridge Wells. The man who answered was friendly and sounded intelligent, but he assured me that no one by the name of Javitz had checked in the previous day. My heart instantly tried to climb up my throat.
“Not-” I forced myself under control: Shouting at the man would not help me. I took a deep breath, and changed what I had been about to say, and the way in which I said it. “Oh dear, perhaps they were forced to use another hotel. Were you full up, yesterday?”
“No, madam, we were not.”
“Well, perhaps-” Perhaps what? They didn’t like the looks of the place? Estelle threw a tantrum and demanded to be returned to Goodman’s family home? They’d had a mechanical breakdown on the road to Tunbridge Wells, a flat tyre, a deadly crash?
They’d been picked up by Mycroft’s foe?
Do not panic. Do not. “Perhaps if I describe them, you can tell me if you’ve seen them. He’s tall, American, has an injured leg, and the child-”
“Ah yes, you mean Mr Russell.”
I found I was leaning against the wall, and the box was full of a rushing sound.
“Madam? Hello, Exchange, have we been cut off?”
“No,” I said. “Yes, I’m here, sorry. Yes, Mr Russell. He came in yesterday?”
“With the child, yes, charming little thing. What was the name you used?”
“Oh, nothing, it’s just one-he occasionally uses another name so his step-father doesn’t find him. The step-father doesn’t, er… doesn’t care for the child.”
It was the best I could do at the moment, but the voice over the telephone line was as indignant as I could have asked. “I see. Well, I shall take care to forget the other name.”
“Whatever it was,” I added.
“Indeed.”
“May I speak to Mr Russell, then?”
“I am sorry, madam, they are not in the hotel at present.”
“When did they leave?” I asked sharply.
“Not ten minutes ago,” he answered, to my relief. “I believe the little girl expressed a desire to paddle in the sea, so he arranged a car and driver until the afternoon.”
“Very good,” I said. “May I leave a message for him? To say that his cousin Mary will ring again at tea-time?”
“I shall let him know the moment he returns,” the man assured me. I thanked him and rang off, resting my forehead against the telephone’s black body. Had the hotel man been in front of me, I would have rested it against him.
The “object of our affection” to be traded on Westminster Bridge was not Estelle, at any rate. Was it Damian?
I waited for an hour before the exchange put my call through, only to be cut off not once, but twice, each time having to begin the process anew. Then when I reached the Hotel Delft, the woman who answered the telephone spoke only Dutch; she broke the connexion a third time. On the fourth attempt I used French instead of English, which delayed her long enough that I could try German, as well, and although she seemed to speak neither with any fluency, she did recognise words of both languages, and I could guess from her voice if not her words what answers she was giving.
Yes, she knew M de Fontaine and his something companion. (Redheaded, perhaps? Did Dr Henning have red hair?) They were there for two nights and then not. Friday and Saturday? I asked-vendredi et samedi? Mais pas le dimanche?
There followed a rattle of Dutch, which I took to be the affirmative but linked to a question of-I pressed the telephone into my ear as if it might aid comprehension. Then I heard a word in the torrent that sounded familiar in several languages.
“Valise?” I asked. “Did you say ‘valise’?”
Thirty seconds of something that meant: yes.
“What about his valise?”
The voice paused, then came out with six laborious and heavily accented syllables. “Sa valise sont ici.”
“Whose valises are still there?” I demanded. “His, or hers? Or both?”
But precision was beyond her abilities, or even agreement in case and gender. She rattled on, her voice climbing, and then the telephone went dead.
I did not have the heart to attempt a fifth connexion.
I made two more calls. The first was to Sophy Melas, who was at home and sounded puzzled but unworried when I asked her if she’d had any unexpected callers other than Goodman and me the other night. The answer was no; I rang off before she could question why I called. The other was to my own house in Sussex. Its buzz continued in my ear, although there was no knowing if that was because Mrs Hudson had gone, as she’d been told, or because she’d stayed and been abducted.
I put the earpiece into its rest, and tried to think what else I could do, what other hostages to fortune lay out there.
I could think of none.
I bought eggs, cheese, and a loaf of bread on my way back to Pall Mall, retraced my laborious path through Mycroft’s flat and into the dumbwaiter shaft, hanging the portrait over the hole as I came. In the Melas kitchen, I left my contribution on the table.
I found Mycroft in a dressing room whose furniture testified to Mrs Melas’ taste. He was standing at the window, hands clasped behind his back, staring intently at the narrow crack between the two halves of the curtain. I cleared my throat, and he turned, startled.
“Ah, Mary. Good. What news?”
“Is there something out there?” I asked.
He gave an uncomfortable laugh and brushed past me. “Merely the air. I find myself longing for a glimpse of the sky, having exchanged one prison for another.”
“It won’t be long,” I said, an attempt at reassurance.
Holmes and Goodman were missing, although the smoke in the air told me Holmes had been there until recently.
Mycroft pointed at the morning’s paper, sprawled across the table, with headlines about the attempt on Mussolini’s life.
“Brothers is dead,” he said. “In St Albans.”
The news jerked me out of the stilted conversation in my mind (… what might otherwise be described as blackmail operations). “St Albans? How on earth did he get there?”
“I do not know,” he said, his frustration under thin rein: Mycroft Holmes was not a man who waited to receive his information from the daily papers. “Sherlock decided it was worth the risk of venturing out, to see what he can learn.”
“To St Albans?”
“I believe he will make do with a telephone call to Lestrade. And before you ask, yes, he collected a disguise from downstairs.”
I picked up the newspaper that Goodman had brought us, and found it open to a brief note, little more than two column inches, concerning the identity of a man found dead of knife wounds in St Albans on Saturday.
Knife wounds. I read the sparse information with care, but it was only given space on the page because of the irresistible juxtaposition of an oddball religious leader and a brutal attack. The piquant touch of it being in St Albans rather than London or Manchester helped explain its appearance in a national newspaper.
Mycroft was in the kitchen, carving bread, cheese, and sausage into meticulous slices. “Did Holmes take Goodman with him?” I asked.
“I am not certain when Mr Goodman left, or where he was going.”
That sounded like Robert Goodman. I began to tell Mycroft what I had learnt, or failed to learn, over the telephone, when I was interrupted by a small noise from below. In a minute, Holmes threaded himself through the dumbwaiter hole. He was wearing a stiff collar with a pair of pince-nez on a ribbon around his neck, and had no doubt left the bowler hat downstairs: He’d been dressed as a solicitor’s clerk.
With an addition: He pulled from his pocket a bottle of Bass Ale and set it beside the sink.
Without comment, Mycroft added more bread to the platter and carried it through to the sitting room. I fetched three glasses, holding one under the froth that boiled up when Holmes opened the bottle.
“Estelle and Javitz are at the sea-shore,” I told him. “Damian, I’m not so sure about, partly because of language difficulties. I’m to telephone back to Tunbridge Wells at tea-time, and I’ll try the Dutch hotel again then as well.” I gave him the details of both conversations as he finished pouring and we took the glasses in to where Mycroft sat. Then it was Holmes’ turn.
“Brothers died of a single knife-wound in a nearly empty house in St Albans,” he said. “The police identified him by the distinctive scar beside his eye, although they are puzzled by the presence of both gunshot and knife-wounds on one man, particularly as the bullet wound had been treated and was in the process of healing. The fire had been left on in the room, which accelerated decomposition, but the coroner believes the man died on Tuesday or Wednesday. A neighbour saw two men get out of a taxi at the house on Tuesday afternoon. One of them had his left arm in a sling, which is how Brothers was found. She did not notice when they left.
“That’s Brothers out of the way-and, as far as our opponent is concerned, you as well, Mycroft. He’ll be aiming at Sosa, and I suppose me and Russell, before he can feel quite secure. I wonder how far he will go before he judges that he is free from threat? Will he remove Brothers’ assistant in Orkney? Perhaps a few key members of the church’s Inner Circle?”
“Surely he must at least suspect that you’re alive and Gunderson is dead?” I asked Mycroft. “Gunderson has been missing for five days, and you said yourself that evidence at the warehouse testifies to things having gone awry.”
“Short of digging up the grave, he can’t be certain that Gunderson didn’t deliver my corpse to the mortuary, then lose his nerve and flee. And without knowing what ‘precious object’ he possesses-or claims to possess-Sherlock and I decided it was best not to push our opponent too far. The last thing we want him to do is cut his losses and go invisible.”
“So you’ve changed your mind about going to the office this afternoon?”
“We have,” Holmes answered for his brother. “Russell, about your friend Goodman.”
“Yes, I’d have expected him to return before this.”
“He is a concern.”
“No,” I said flatly. I could tell from his tone what he was suggesting, and I would have none of it. “Robert Goodman would not give us away.”
“How can you know that?”
I turned my face to him. “Because you are Estelle Adler’s grandfather. There is some tie between those two, I can’t begin to explain it. But he would do nothing that would make her lot any worse. Nothing.”
“Then where is he?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s gone to see her.” It was a spur of the moment suggestion, but once it had come to mind, I had to say that it would be very like him, to turn his back on matters of monumental political import to go and play tea-party with Estelle. Had I mentioned Tunbridge Wells in his hearing? I might easily have done.
“Well, if he does return in time, how do you suggest we deploy the man? He is quite effective at the head of a marching band, but would he be of use in a tight place?”
“He would stand up for us, yes. But if you’re asking, would he use a gun?” I thought about the contents of the envelope Javitz had given me. In the end, I had to say, “I shouldn’t want to ask him. And I really wouldn’t want my life to depend on it.”
We had little more than twelve hours to assemble a foolproof plan to save a life, and an empire. We resolutely turned our minds to the maps and drawings Holmes retrieved from Mycroft’s study downstairs, doing our best to ignore hunger, mistrust, and anxiety.
At four o’clock, I left the building to seek out another telephone. The powerful sense of release brought by hearing Javitz’s voice coming down the line was only somewhat countered by Estelle’s querulous demands that I produce Mr Robert. I assured her-several times-that I was doing the best I could, then distracted her with a question about how Dolly had enjoyed her visit to the sea-shore, and eventually convinced her to return Javitz to the conversation.
“This should be over tomorrow,” I told him. One way or the other.
“It would help if you could get Goodman to ring here,” he said, although I was relieved to hear him sounding resigned rather than desperate.
“I’ve, well, I don’t know where he is. In fact,” I hurried to say, “he may turn up down there. If he does, make sure you don’t let him talk you into coming back to Town before I’ve spoken with you.”
When I had rung off from Tunbridge Wells, it was time to try Holland again. This time, I was at the phone for nearly two hours, achieving two actual if short-lived connexions. A man came onto the line, and we quickly located a common language in French. Our first conversation, which lasted approximately forty-five seconds, determined that “Daniel de Fontaine” and his nurse were still registered at the hotel, although he wasn’t entirely certain where the two were at this time. However, they had placed a series of telephone calls to England for which he very much hoped M de Fontaine’s friends would guarantee payment since-
And we were cut off. I fear I shouted at the exchange operator, which never helps one’s cause, but eventually I was again speaking with the Dutch hotelier. I began by hastily assuring him that all his costs would be reimbursed, and more, by the young gentleman’s generous friends, but that I had to know where he was.
And at that, we reached an impasse. The man wasted a couple of minutes with a delicate description of how unfortunately short of funds these two guests appeared to be running, and was only slowly reassured by my increasingly desperate assertions that money was no problem. Finally, he permitted himself to be steered back into the matter at hand, namely, that the young gentleman had gone out walking on the Sunday afternoon-the two of them often went out walking, M de Fontaine seemed a great lover of the open air, although on this occasion the lady appeared to have chosen-
“Please!” I shouted. “Where is he?”
Taken aback, the hotelier admitted he was not certain. The lady had come down in the afternoon and enquired as to her companion’s whereabouts, and became increasingly agitated when the hotel was unable to produce him. Although a handsome young man like that, perhaps he was not taken with a woman with hair that colour-and the temper! Ooh la la! Such a temper, it would be entirely understandable if he were to have chosen to go elsewhere for a day or two. And truth to tell, the hotel staff was keeping a close eye on the possessions in those two rooms, since it was not unheard-of for guests to lay a false trail and quietly slip away, leaving their bills unpaid…
“I will pay the cost. Do not throw them out. Permit them whatever it takes to make them comfortable.”
Why a voice over the telephone should be considered a substantial guarantee I could not think, but the man seemed reassured. However, that was about all he had to tell me. The red-haired woman had stayed the previous night, but she had left the hotel early and not been seen in the hours since. Yes, he would make her welcome-and M de Fontaine, as well-whenever they returned. Yes, he would tell them that I would telephone again tomorrow, and that they were to stay at the hotel until they heard from me.
I put up the earpiece; dread lay heavy in my bones.
I made one last telephone call, to Billy’s home number. As I had hoped, he answered, sounding belligerent. I spoke five clear words and rang off.
Back in the Melas flat, Goodman was still missing. Holmes listened to my news with no expression on his face, but when I attempted to reassure him that perhaps Damian had merely needed some time to himself, he waved away the possibility with a sharp gesture.
“Mycroft’s telephone rang, from Saturday until Sunday and not since then. The local exchange would know where those calls were coming from.”
Neither Mycroft nor I argued with him. In any case, we would know before long just who the “object of affection” was.
Mycroft set about producing a supper of remarkably heavy scones (lacking butter, they more closely resembled the flat breads eaten by the Bedouin), saving the eggs for a last meal before we left.
The prime question was, how far could we trust Lestrade? I felt he would come down on our side in a pinch; Holmes suspected he might come down on our heads. Mycroft cast the deciding vote, for compromise: We would telephone to Lestrade at home, letting him know that we badly needed a police sharpshooter, but we would wait to tell when and where to appear. We could not risk an all-out police presence, with roadblocks and desperate shooting, so we would keep him in the dark until the last moment.
One had to feel sorry for Lestrade’s wife: He was not going to be sanguine about the arrangement.
Westminster Bridge crosses the Thames on its northward turn, with the Victoria Embankment meeting the Houses of Parliament on the west and the County Hall, St Thomas’ Hospital, and Lambeth Palace gathering on the east bank. It was a sixty-two-year-old iron bridge some 1200 feet long and 85 wide, with generous footways and a pair of decorative street-lamps atop each of its seven piers. There was seldom a time when the entire length of it was deserted, but half past two in the morning would find it as empty as it got.
Across the street from the Houses of Parliament was the St Stephen’s Club, and behind it the ornate building that housed the London Metropolitan Police department, known as New Scotland Yard. Five years earlier, deep in mid-winter and in a case as frightening as any we had known, Holmes and I had been shot at in the office of one Inspector John Lestrade. It was a small office, several long stairways from the ground, but despite the plane trees, it had a marvellous view of Westminster Bridge.
Mycroft would be at the west end of that bridge, sheltering on the precincts of Parliament itself, where he was known to the guards. A telephone call to Lestrade at two a.m. would give the chief inspector enough time to bring his marksman to the Yard, but insufficient preparation to rally numbers of troops that might get in our way.
I, in the meantime, would wait on the bridge’s eastern side, taking shelter on the steps leading down to the Albert Embankment. Behind me would be the assistance I had conjured up with five words to Billy: “Eleven at your wife’s sister.” His wife’s sister was a seamstress: The reference was a code he and Holmes had used before, and this time it brought him to Cleopatra’s Needle on the Embankment at eleven o’clock. Between us, Billy and I summoned a pair of motorcycles (motorcycling was an exhilarating new skill I had picked up in Los Angeles, a few months earlier). Our opponent would almost certainly be in a motorcar: On two wheels, Billy and I could stick to him like tacks. Even if the plan went as we intended and our foe drove away alone and unharmed, we could not take a chance that he might escape us entirely.
At half past ten, when I was getting ready to leave and meet Billy, Goodman was still missing. Standing in Mycroft’s kitchen, I reluctantly admitted to Holmes that I was worried.
“What, you think he walked into a trap? Does anyone know who he is?”
“It would be difficult to unearth his identity, but not impossible.”
“And you say he would not readily give us away.”
I grimaced at the thought of what an unscrupulous man might do to Robert Goodman. “Perhaps he’s gone to Tunbridge Wells. Or home to Cumbria.”
“Is that likely?”
“Without taking his leave of Estelle? I’m afraid not.”
At one o’clock, with Billy set and the motorcycles in place, I made my way back to the flat to see that all was as had been planned, and to report that Billy and the motorcycles would be in place. Holmes had already left, but Mycroft would wait for an hour before setting off.
I wished him luck, and moved towards the kitchen.
“Mary?”
I don’t know what I expected. An apology, perhaps, or thanks. Instead, Mycroft said, “Remember, it’s essential that the man not be harmed. I have to know what he knows.”
I nodded, and turned away, wondering if I would ever again feel comfortable with him, knowing about him what I did.
Of course, I reminded myself as I climbed down the ladder, that assumed we all survived the night.
A family can be a burden, at half past two in the morning. Peter James West was counting on that.
He could have chosen a different time and place. It would have been simple enough to draw Sherlock Holmes into the countryside at noontime, to do the deed-he would have come. But laying this final element of his long-worked plan at the feet of Parliament set a seal on the transfer: No one but he might ever know, but that was enough.
He only wished Gunderson were there. He knew Gunderson as a carpenter knows his hammer, and would have no hesitation to order the man to shoot. Or, to shoot Gunderson himself, for that matter. Had he known for certain that his assistant would not be back from Orkney today, West would have re-scheduled this meeting-he’d considered moving it, but in the end, he’d gone ahead, putting Buckner behind the wheel instead. The man was a dunce, but he could handle a motorcar. And how complicated could it be, trading one man for another at gunpoint?
He’d be glad when this entire operation was over; working with criminals threatened to infect even Peter James West with stupidity.
He and Buckner went down the cellar steps. In front of the padlocked door, he pulled down the long silken cap with the holes in it, which was uncomfortable and made him feel ridiculous, but which could be a last line of defence if things went wrong.
Buckner looked at him. “D’you want me to wear one a’ them?”
“It won’t be necessary.”
“Why not?”
Because I’m going to dispose of you, anyway, you idiot. “You won’t be getting out of the motor, but I may have to. The streak in my hair is a little too recognisable.” And if we are forced by some mishap actually to go through with the trade, rather than take both men, I should prefer that Adler not know who took him. That way, the only stray out there was the young wife. And Sosa, although he hardly counted.
“Gotcher.”
“Open the door.”
Buckner found the key, worked the lock, and stood back. Nothing moved from within. Adler had not been very comfortable the previous evening, when he was dragged from the back of the lorry that had brought him from Holland (telephone calls, again-when would people learn that a string of trunk calls to a number under surveillance could lead back to the source?) but he’d been well. Food, drink, and a night’s rest should have restored him somewhat.
“Mr Adler, I have come to take you to your family,” West called.
No motion. West sighed. “Buckner, kindly bring our guest out-alive and conscious, if you please. Wait: Give me your gun first.”
Buckner dug out the weapon and handed it to West, then hunched his shoulders and barrelled into the dim space. Damian Adler was waiting for him, but with no weapons and a bad arm, he was no match. Buckner bounced him against the wall and shoved him out of the door to sprawl at West’s feet.
West held out a set of police-issue handcuffs, which Buckner slapped on with a relish that could only come from a man who was more accustomed to being the recipient of the treatment.
By the time they got Adler cuffed and on his feet, the younger man was sweating-with pain, not fear. He glared furiously at his masked captor. “Who the hell are you, and what have you done with Dr Henning?”
“I have done nothing with your companion, Mr Adler. And you do not need to know who I am. Up the stairs, if you please.”
The prisoner backed away and Buckner grabbed his arms, which brought a grunt of pain. “Mr Adler, please cooperate. I am giving you back to your family.” Most of it. Albeit temporarily. “Now, up the stairs.”
They got him up the stairs, into the yard, and seated in the front of the motor. West had Buckner loop a rope around Adler to keep him from making some kind of heroic attempt at the controls, then drop a sack over the man’s head-the selfsame one Adler’s late uncle had worn, twelve days before.
Symmetry.
West tugged at his mask, wishing it weren’t quite so suffocating, and climbed into the back behind the driver. He stretched his hand forward with Buckner’s gun. “I’d suggest you put this in the door pocket instead of about your person. You don’t want it to go off by accident.”
“Righto,” Buckner said, and pushed the starter.
It was ten minutes past two in the morning. He had given Buckner the first stages of directions earlier: Wind through the streets of Southwark and cross the river on the Vauxhall Bridge before circling back east. At twenty minutes after the hour, he began to give the next set of directions that would take them onto Westminster Bridge.
The fourteen-foot minute hand of the great clock stood just before the half hour when the motorcar went under the tower.
“Stop here for a moment,” West said. He opened the door and stepped onto the roadway to study the bridge.
At this hour of the night, little stirred on London’s pavements. Mist hung over the Thames, and the smell of decay neared its turn. The Houses of Parliament stood beside him, toes in the water; at his back lay all the machinery of empire. Somewhere, a horse-cart clopped, sounding tired.
The roadway was deserted, the pools of light along its noble length pushing back the darkness. West started to get back into the motor, then stopped. What was that at the far end, half-hidden by the almost imperceptible curve in the roadway? Rubbish? Or-a child, at this time of night? No, it had to be a man, but even from a distance he could see the figure was too small to be the Holmes brother, or even the American wife.
“Is that someone sitting on the footway?” Buckner asked.
“It is.”
“What’s he doing?”
The figure was hunched over, looking at something on the ground. No, not just looking: He was doing something, his hunched shoulders moving. He was in his shirt-sleeves and wore a summer hat that should have been retired a week ago.
“Should I turn around?” Buckner asked.
West stepped up onto the running-board. With the added height, he could see that the figure’s back was turned.
“Hey,” Buckner said, “maybe he’s doing a drawing? There was this kid down the Embankment a couple months past, did a chalk drawing of the Mona Lisa before the police moved him away. The wife and I watched him for a while-he was pretty good.”
Buckner was married? West studied the figure, and gave another close survey of the surrounding buildings. No motion at all.
The minute hand three hundred feet overhead moved to the half hour; so quiet was the night, West heard the shift of machinery before the strike of bells.
Eight notes rang over the bridge, and faded.
West folded back inside the motor. “Go halfway out and stop in the centre of the bridge. Leave the motor running. Be prepared to leave rapidly.”
“Gotcher.”
Repressing a strong impulse to slap his driver on the skull with his gun, West closed the door. The motor purred forward and stopped, precisely in the centre of the bridge.
West pulled out the knife that he had taken from Thomas Brothers. With it in his hand and the gun in his overcoat pocket, he slid across the leather seat and opened the passenger-side door. He stepped out, letting the door swing back but not latch, then pulled open the front door and used the knife to slice through the rope holding his prisoner in place. The knife that had killed the prisoner’s wife, three and a half weeks before.
“Get out,” he said.
The blind and handcuffed artist blundered his way around and upright. West pulled him away from the motor, then moved up behind him and pressed the knife against the loose portion of the flour sack. Adler went still.
“Too close,” Lestrade said. Three hundred fifty yards away, the marksman was glued to his sights, his finger ready. He did not move, but Lestrade could feel disapproval radiating off the man’s shoulders at the interruption. “Sorry,” he said, and took a step away from the open window.
The man kneeling in the window had his sights not on the standing figures, but on the roof of the motor, on a line drawn with the driver. Holmes had been adamant: The man in charge must be taken alive. It was a matter of the empire’s security, that this villain give up his secrets.
And as if Holmes had heard Lestrade voice his doubts, had known that Lestrade intended to tell the marksman to fire wherever needed, a quarter of an hour later the telephone had rung again. This time, it was the Palace.
The standing figure was free to murder everyone in sight, and unless Lestrade’s shooter could absolutely, positively guarantee a shot that merely wounded the man, the villain would be free to run.
All Lestrade could do was curse and pray, with equal vehemence. But in silence.
I could not see either Holmes, standing near Boadicea, or Mycroft, inside the Parliamentary garden across the roadway from him. Nor could I see Billy, tucked into the street behind me, ready to pounce. But I saw the motorcar, creeping slowly onto the bridge. And a minute later I saw the two figures, pressed in close embrace on the passenger side.
And I could see Robert Goodman all too well, thirty yards away and playing, of all things, jackstones beneath one of the lamp standards on Westminster Bridge. What the hell was he up to?
Holmes tore his eyes away from the tableau in the centre of the span-Damian, it had to be-and looked across Bridge Street to where Mycroft stood, hidden by shadows. There was no signal-no need for one, in truth-but when the clock hand touched the next minute mark, the darkness shifted like the workings of the mighty clock, and Mycroft walked out into the light.
He stood facing the motorcar.
The two figures moved-for an instant Holmes could not breathe, thinking they were struggling-but they were merely moving, away from the pools of light and into the dimmest reaches between them. When they were but a doubled outline, a voice came down the roadway. “Mr Holmes?”
“One of them,” Mycroft answered, and removed his hat.
That would do for a signal, Holmes decided, and walked out from his own darkness, to stand, also hatless, in the pool of light opposite Mycroft.
The shocked silence was broken by Mycroft’s voice.
“I’m afraid your Mr Gunderson won’t be returning to your service. He is lying in a mis-marked grave, not far from here.”
Longer silence, then: “It matters not. Our agreement stands.”
The two brothers exchanged a look from their opposite lamp-posts, and Holmes walked onto the bridge.
I had my field glasses trained on the other end of the bridge, shifting back and forth across the roadway. I could hear faint voices, but not what they were saying. However, I could see Holmes start forward. I reached into my pocket to finger the keys of the motorcycle, parked and waiting in the lee of the hospital.
Holmes had closed half the distance between him and the motorcar when he heard a voice from ahead, and saw motion where the doubled figures stood-saw, too, what had caused it.
The blond figure that had come onto the bridge a minute before the motorcar appeared was gathering something from the pavement and getting to its feet. Goodman-it had to be he-turned towards the centre and began to walk in his quick, easy stride. His hands were free and seemed to be empty, and at each step his right hand reached out to slap the handrail in a cheery gesture. He was singing in a low voice, an old and half-familiar tune, wrapped up in his own world, to all appearances utterly unaware that there were others on the bridge.
Holmes could only keep moving, and hope the man holding Damian had steady nerves.
“Stop, there,” the man called, aimed at the small oncoming figure, who kept singing, kept patting, kept walking.
Holmes was a stone’s throw from the two figures when the man ordered him, too, to stop. He did so, hands outstretched.
He was close enough now to see that both men were masked, Damian entirely, the other man with a head-covering cut away to reveal eyes and mouth. The mask glanced over his shoulder at the oncoming figure, still oblivious and still close to the railing, then came around again to demand of Holmes, “Is this something of yours?”
“Nothing of mine,” Holmes replied, which was the absolute truth.
“Watch him,” he called over his shoulder to the driver, then to Holmes, “If he makes a move for his pockets, I’ll cut your son’s throat.”
Holmes fought to keep his voice reasonable. “Look at the fellow-he’s either drunk or a lunatic, and apt to do anything,” he protested, then added more mildly, “You really ought to climb back in your motor and get away while you can. You’ve seen that my brother is alive and well. If you’re as clever as I think you are, you could be across the Channel before the police can lay their blocks.”
“Oh, I don’t think this is entirely over.”
Holmes did not recognise the voice, which in any case was not only muffled by the mask, but had an artificial sound to it, both in timbre and in accent. If he had long enough to study the sound, he might trace its true origins. He doubted he’d be given the chance.
“Get into the motor, Mr Holmes,” the disguised voice said.
“I need to see the prisoner first.”
“You don’t recognise him without his face? Very well.”
The man dropped the knife just long enough to tug the sack off his prisoner’s head.
Blinking against the dust, Damian saw his father, standing to his left with the bridge stretching out behind him and the mass of Parliament’s houses rearing up behind: Despite everything, his fingers twitched as if to reach for a sketching pencil. However, with the bite of the blade again at his throat, he did not move further.
Now, out of the side of his other eye, he saw motion: a small man in worn trousers, a pale hat, and shirt-sleeves, marching happily across the bridge as if all alone on a woodland path. The man with the knife at Damian’s throat was watching him, too-Damian would have bet that any nearby eyes would be drawn to him. The figure’s self-absorption was so marked, it even penetrated the apprehension of the prisoner.
Then the man stopped, causing a shudder to run out in all directions. He was standing directly beneath the bridge’s central light, looking now at the two figures held together by a razor-sharp piece of worked meteor. Deliberately, he removed his hat and set it atop the handrail. His hair was a tumble of straw, his eyes green even in lamp-light, and in his left hand was a small rubber ball.
He bounced it once, caught it without looking, and spoke. “Are you the father?”
I could not believe what I was seeing: Goodman was walking openly down the length of the bridge, simply asking to be shot. I took a step out of the shadows, feeling the careful clockwork of Mycroft’s plan stutter and grind.
No, oh Goodman, no, please don’t.
What were they saying?
“You want me to shoot him?” said the voice from the motorcar.
“No,” said the man with the knife. “Let us avoid gunfire if we can.”
His question unanswered, the green eyes shifted to look farther down the roadway. The small man raised his voice to ask, “Is he the father?”
When Holmes, too, gave no reply, the figure stepped away from the railing. Three others reacted instantaneously.
“Stop!” West snapped, over Buckner’s voice asking, “You sure you don’t want me to shoot?”
“He’s a poor bloody simpleton, for heaven’s sake,” Holmes shouted.
The blond man stepped down from the wide footway, and stopped. He bounced and caught the ball a couple of times, looking intently at the prisoner. “You’re the father. Estelle’s father.”
Damian jerked, oblivious to the knife cutting into his skin. Estelle-who was this man?
“Yes,” he said. It came out half-strangled, but it came out.
The green eyes beamed at him as if the word were a gold trophy. The eyes were young and fearless and full of mischief; the eyes were older than the hills.
“I really think you should let me shoot-”
“Enough!” West barked. He recognised the small man now: the bandleader, the wife’s pet woodsman, caretaker of the estate in Cumbria. “Buckner, get out and keep these two in place while I get rid of this.”
The motorcar door opened and the driver stepped out, turning his gun on the two tall men, prisoner and soon-to-be prisoner. His boss rapidly crossed the roadway until he was standing face to face with the bothersome drunkard. “You,” he said. “Be gone.”
“Ha!” Goodman’s response was a laugh. “Yes, I am gone, and I return. But you?”
West moved before the last word had left Goodman’s mouth.
Goodman made a sound, and looked down at the blood spilling across the front of his shirt.
The moment the masked figure moved towards Goodman, I began to run, knowing I would be too late, knowing I had to try. I sprinted down the impossibly long bridge, and saw the Green Man stagger back, his shirt-front going instantly dark. He tripped on the footway, going to one knee then recovering to move, doubled over, towards the railing. He laid his chest across the metal (for an instant, the image of Estelle flashed through my mind, draped across the tree-round foot-stool before Mr Robert’s fireplace). One leg rose, painfully slow, and a heel crawled its way across the railing, to hook onto the far side. His arms embraced the wide iron, and then he rolled, and vanished into the darkness beyond.
He was gone.
Four men watched the blond man stagger back. They heard the small cry when his belly touched the iron railing, but he kept moving, onto the wide rail, moving like a wounded animal crawling to its hole.
The blond man rolled over, and disappeared.
There was no splash. West, knife in his hand, waited. He swivelled, making certain that the two men stood where they were and that his man was on guard, then walked over to the side, sticking his head over the railing to look.
And a hand came up, as if born of the bridge, or the night. A hand that had led lost souls through the woods and drunk tea with a child and loaded men onto the bed of an ambulance. A hand that raised up and wrapped around the back of Peter James West’s head.
Holmes took one step forward, thinking only of Mycroft’s need for the man, but froze when the driver shouted a warning.
Then behind came a figure he knew well, sprinting down the horribly exposed bridge. In a moment, the driver would hear, and would turn-and now he was turning, his gun moving towards her and Holmes was in motion, shoving Damian in the direction of the struggling figures and shouting, “Keep that man from going over-Mycroft needs him!” then “Russell!” he was shouting, and running for all he was worth.
The Yard marksman, with a clear line on his target, eased down the trigger a split instant before the man turned around.
Damian’s hands were tied-literally-but his father had spoken, and he would do all he could to obey. Six long leaps took him to where his abductor was fighting against the pulling hands, heels free of the pavement now, and he slammed into the man, throwing his weight across the sprawled body, pinning him against the bridge. Damian’s shoulder screamed at the blow, but he lay hard against the rigid back, locking the man to the railing, staring past his shoulder into a pair of brilliant green eyes.
The expression in them, oddly, was one of disappointment.
I closed on the struggle, which had been joined by Damian, coming out of nowhere to throw himself onto the man in the mask. A zzip flew alarmingly close past my head, followed instantly by a pair of gunshots, one close and one farther away. I ducked, tearing my attention from the railing in time to see Holmes crash into the driver and wrench the revolver from his hand.
I leapt up and ran again, reaching the knot of legs and torsos before any of them went over. The black mask had slipped, and now drifted into the dark, although all I could see of our opponent was a flash of white against his otherwise dark hair. He jerked another half inch towards the edge; Damian grunted with pain but redoubled his efforts.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Robert, stop, let me help you, I can’t-”
“Let me have him,” said the voice from below.
“No, Robert, please, take my hand, I’ll get you to-”
“Please,” his voice asked. Such a reasonable request. “Please.”
Time stretched out while I gazed down into those eyes. I could see Death there-I had worked in hospitals; I knew what Death looked like-but Robert Goodman was there as well, the Green Man, Estelle’s champion, speaking to me without words. His hands were shaking with effort, his toes were jammed precariously into the base of the railing. I could see what it was costing him to hang on.
Voices reached me, from a distance:
Damian, into my left ear: “I’m to stop him from going over. Father said. Mycroft needs him.”
Holmes, from somewhere behind me: “I’m coming, Russell!”
From farther away, Mycroft shouting: “Hang on to that man!”
And Goodman, saying without words, Please. Please.
My eyes filled with tears before I put my hands on Damian’s shoulders and peeled him away.
Two men vanished off the side of the bridge, with a single splash.
Holmes brushed me aside, gun in hand, to crane over into the river. Mycroft followed, cold with fury, incapable of speaking to me. Soon the bridge was swarming with uniformed constables who ran down the banks with torches, waiting for the bodies to surface on the outgoing tide.
I picked up the hat from the rail, noticing that it was missing its feather, and dropped it over the side. The pale straw was visible for an instant, then it passed out of the lamp-light and was gone.
At the far end of the bridge, where I headed to tell Billy that we would not need his skills, another object caught my eye: a small rubber ball that had rolled down the lip of the footway until it came to rest against some dry leaves. That, I put in my pocket.
The mortal remains of Peter James West were discovered a week later, among the debris at the side of the river near Tilbury. Of Robert Goodman, there was no trace.