by Anna Elliott
Zoe had watched the younger woman counting over the coins in her reticule—and had seen her late at night, stroking the gold handle of Mr. Morgan’s shaving brush, which was now safely hidden at the bottom of her own trunk.
Mrs. Orles liked money. She liked it a good deal.
Now her eyes met Zoe’s for a long moment. Zoe held her breath while remaining outwardly calm, and finally the housekeeper’s eyelashes fluttered and she dropped her gaze.
“Well.” Mrs. Orles ripped the paper with Zoe’s message in half, crossed the two halves, and ripped them all in half again before throwing them into the fire that burned in the grate. “Well,” she said again. She sniffed and drew herself up, clearly attempting to regain the authority she had just lost. “Since the message is now destroyed, I do not believe there is any need to inform either of the gentlemen. But I shall be watching you, and you had better be sure that nothing of this kind happens again!”
Zoe bowed her head without a word and sat down on the edge of the bed opposite Safiya’s. The scraps of her message caught fire, turned black, and shrivelled into nothing but a few wisps of ash.
Mrs. Orles watched her for what felt like an eternity, then with a final sniff, turned on her heel and went out. Zoe heard the key scrape in the lock on the door, then the sounds of Mrs. Orles entering her own small bedchamber next door and making ready to go to bed.
She shut her eyes for a moment and lay back, a wash of relief so intense it was almost painful sweeping through her. Mrs. Orles had come in at precisely the right moment to catch her in the act of making that rather obvious attempt to get a message through to Sherlock.
Now all Zoe had to do was get through the next eight hours or so until they left the inn—and pray with every scrap of faith left in her that it wouldn’t occur to Mrs. Orles to look for another message, the real message, which she had already hidden under the bed for Valentina to find when she swept out the room in the morning.
CHAPTER 7: WATSON
Holmes and I were staying in the country cottage safe house. Returning to Baker Street was not possible at the time, since it would reveal to Farooq and thus Sonnebourne that Holmes was, in fact, still alive. Jack and Lucy had taken Becky back home with them. Flynn had stayed behind to make his report.
“And you overheard nothing of the conversation between Farooq and the other man?” Holmes asked.
Flynn shook his head. “They talked Arabic the whole time. I heard Farooq say something about”—he screwed up his forehead in an effort of remembrance, pronouncing the unfamiliar words carefully—“alshahr alqadim? He said that a couple of times.”
“Next month, in Arabic,” Holmes murmured. He was seated by the hearth, his fingers steepled. “Although it begs the question of whether our friend Farooq was referring to the Gregorian or the Rumi calendar, used by the Ottoman Turks.”
“And he said mayit a couple of times, too,” Flynn added. “That means, dead, doesn’t it?”
“It does.” A fleeting smile traced the corners of Holmes’ mouth. “It is gratifying to hear that our ruse this afternoon was successful. Assuming that he was speaking of me as the individual who had shuffled off this mortal coil. You can recall nothing else?”
Flynn frowned again, but finally shook his head. “’Fraid not. Sorry, Mr. Holmes.”
“You are not to blame. You did well to overhear as much as you did—and to successfully follow Farooq to his cache of weapons.”
“I got a look at the fellow, too,” Flynn offered. “The one who met with Farooq, I mean. Since I couldn’t understand what they were saying anyhow, I climbed back out through the window and hung around the front of the building till they came out again.”
To judge by Holmes’ expression, he was aware that Flynn had taken a risk, but was forbearing to mention it. “And you saw the man’s face? Well enough that you would recognise him again?”
Flynn’s brow furrowed. “It was dark, and I couldn’t get too close a look at him. But I reckon I’d know him if I saw him again. He wasn’t Egyptian, that much I can tell you.”
“Not Egyptian?” Holmes eyebrows edged up. “Turkish, then?”
“I don’t think so,” Flynn said. “He was a big chap, and he had blond hair. That much I can tell you. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and I could see the colour of his hair in the street lights. Looked like maybe he’d been a fighter sometime, I’d say. Got his nose broken a time or two, from the looks of him.”
“A German, do you suppose?” I asked Holmes. “We know that Farooq and his fellows have connections to the Kaiser.”
Holmes’ expression was particularly enigmatic. “Time will tell. Here you are, Flynn.” Holmes dug in his pocket and produced a half sovereign coin, which he handed over to the boy. “I hope you will buy a hot meal and find a bed for the night.”
Like myself, Holmes knew that it would be useless to offer to let Flynn stay the night here, whether on the sofa or in one of the spare bedrooms upstairs. Unless the weather was truly frigid, Flynn much preferred the open air to sleeping indoors, and abhorred all suggestions that he might accept any kind of settled domestic arrangement.
I sometimes suspected Holmes of having a sneaking sympathy with the lad’s feelings on the matter. Certainly Mrs. Hudson would agree that Holmes—with his bullets in the wall, his slipper full of shag tobacco, and his mountains of papers everywhere—had a distinctly odd sense of what constituted a proper home.
“Right you are, Mr. Holmes.” Flynn touched the brim of his cap, pocketed the coin, and went out.
“What are we to do about the cache of weapons?” I asked, when Flynn had gone. “Shall we inform the police, so that the weapons may be confiscated?”
Holmes was staring into the fire, his gaze abstracted, his mouth etched with a grim look. Slowly, he shook his head. “Not yet. If we—or rather the police—confiscate the weapons belonging to the Sons of Ra, their loss will be discovered by Farooq. And inevitably, word will be passed on to Lord Sonnebourne that his plans have been disrupted.”
“Which would put Zoe in danger,” I said. “You believe that Sonnebourne accompanied her and Morgan on the boat that left England?”
“I find it the most likely scenario. Wherever he is, Sonnebourne is assuredly not in England. Mycroft’s intelligence networks would have heard by now if he were still on British soil, no matter how well hidden.”
“And if Sonnebourne discovers that you have already interfered with whatever he plans to accomplish with Farooq and the others’ aid, he may decide that Zoe is no longer of value to him as a hostage.”
Or he might—God forbid—decide that Zoe’s death was a fitting punishment for Holmes’ interference. I did not voice the thought aloud, but I had no doubt that Holmes’ agile mind had already leapt to foresee that possible outcome.
“It is not merely Zoe’s safety which concerns me,” Holmes said. I thought his tone altered, slightly, at the mention of her name, but I knew better than to expect that he would voice his fears for her aloud. I had in the past seen Holmes drive himself to a similar state—not eating, scarcely sleeping, bent on his quest to bring a criminal to justice. The stakes in the past had never been quite so high as they were now. But now, as then, my role was to offer what friendship and support I could.
“Sonnebourne is planning something,” Holmes went on. “Some larger scheme, of which the Sons of Ra are only a part.”
“If what Flynn overheard about the mention of next month is true, then the plans would seem likely to come to fruition sometime in the New Year,” I said. “Although that is disturbingly vague.”
“As you say. We must hope that Selim—having proved his worth by successfully running me down—may be admitted to Farooq’s confidences and learn something more concrete of what is planned. But that unfortunately will take time.” Holmes’s long, mobile fingers beat an impatient tattoo on the arm of his chair. “If we could only know of a certainty where Sonnebourne has gone—”
He broke off at the shrill ring of the te
lephone’s bell from the hall outside our sitting room. I knew that Holmes had chosen this location for our enforced period of hiding in part because of its ready means of communication with the outside world.
Only Mycroft, though, had been informed of the telephone number here.
It seemed a long time indeed that I waited for Holmes’ return, anxious as to whether Mycroft’s call portended good news or bad.
When he returned, Holmes’ expression was still grim, but his gray eyes were alight with a focused intensity I had not seen in some time. It was the look of a hound who has at long last caught the scent of prey.
“How do you fancy a Christmas spent on the Nile, Watson?”
Accustomed though I was to Holmes’ ways, I still felt my jaw go slightly slack. “The Nile? Do you mean—”
“That telephone call was from Mycroft,” Holmes said. “He received a communication from Zoe, which she succeeded in getting past her captors. They are currently in Brindisi, about to board a ship which will take them to Alexandria.”
“And Lord Sonnebourne?”
“Is present, as well.”
“Then Sonnebourne’s future plans involve Egypt.”
“And are intricate and important enough to require his own presence in that country.” Holmes’ gaze unfocused, as though he were speculating on what those plans might be, then sharpened again. “We are limited in what we can accomplish here in London, since any active role I play in our investigation risks Farooq and his fellows discovering that my death was nothing but a sham. In Egypt, however, I will have a freer hand. And—” Holmes’s tone hardened in a way that I fancied would have laid a cold hand on even Sonnebourne’s heart, had he heard it. “I confess that I would very much enjoy taking a personal hand in Lord Sonnebourne’s capture.”
CHAPTER 8: WATSON
The time was just before noon, shortly after we arrived in Cairo. Our carriage was stopping in line with several others at the front entrance of Shepheard’s Hotel. The warm, clear daylight would normally have been welcome, but it made the three of us very visible, and the steps leading up to the hotel lobby went directly through Shepheard’s famous front terrace.
“I’ll keep my gaze down, and look as weary as I can,” Lucy said, as she stepped down from the carriage.
At the terrace tables on either side of the steps, hundreds of hotel guests were taking their lunch or their late breakfasts, amusing themselves by observing the passers-by on the pavement below, and paying special attention to those who might be entering the hotel.
Holmes, being officially deceased, was not travelling with us, nor did I know whether he had arrived in Egypt already or had taken a later train than ours. With characteristic unwillingness to disclose any but the bare minimum of information, he had said merely that he would make his own travel arrangements, and would find a way to communicate with us once we had arrived in Cairo.
Lucy and I were travelling under our own names, but presenting the appearance of a middle-aged English gentleman with his young ward, fleeing London to escape the winter weather which now held London in its chilly grasp, and coming to Egypt for a journey up the Nile. Hundreds of Britishers and Americans did just that every year, and we hoped to blend in as merely two more ordinary pleasure travellers arriving at the beginning of the high season.
At least that was our plan.
It had been a dictum of my time in her Majesty’s army that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The past twenty-odd years had taught me that the aphorism applied equally well to life in association with Sherlock Holmes.
Lucy and I were moving quickly across the lobby in Shepheard’s—for many of the leisure-seeking guests had nothing better with which to occupy themselves than to observe their fellow travellers and gossip about them—when I heard a familiar voice calling to me.
“Watson, old fellow! And Miss Lucy! Or should I say, Mrs. Kelly! What brings you to Cairo?”
My heart sank as I turned and recognised Paul Archer, an old school friend who was conducting medical research at the London Zoo when we had last seen him.
Though shy and withdrawn by nature, Paul always attracted attention, simply by his wobbly gait, the effect of a childhood case of rickets. When last we met, he had also been sickly and nerve-wracked, due to poison being slowly administered by his wife.
Now, his features framed by his rumpled straw-coloured hair, he looked tanned and fit and happy—a fact which under any other circumstances than these I would have been delighted to observe.
As it was, however, Paul had just shouted out my name and was walking briskly across the lobby towards Lucy and me, at the precise moment when I had needed our arrival to pass unnoticed.
There was no choice. I advanced towards him and shook his hand, easing him away from the registry desk and keeping my voice low, in the hopes that he would not call out my name again. “Old friend, you are looking quite well indeed,” I said.
Then in a lower voice, I said, “Actually, Lucy and I are travelling incognito. We are on a case.”
His eyes widened. “Terribly sorry—”
“It’s fine,” I said, steering him towards a quiet spot. “I don’t think any harm’s come of it. And of course, you had no way of knowing.”
Lucy joined us. “What brings you here, Mr. Archer?”
“Oh, I’m still riding my usual hobbyhorse. Travelling alone these days. I’m here collecting specimens. Did you know Egypt has forty-seven different poisonous—”
“Thanks, old fellow,” I said. “You must tell me all about it after Lucy and I have settled in to our rooms. As you can see, we’ve only just arrived.”
Archer, though, kept speaking as though he had not heard me—as very likely he had not. He seldom had any attention to spare when engaged in conversation about his pet topic.
“It was the most extraordinary opportunity!” he went on. “About two months ago, a German chap—a doctor—named Olfrig—read one of my papers on the production of antivenin and wrote to me—”
My further attempt to cut off the flow of Archer’s words died in my throat, and Lucy stared.
“Do you mean Dr. Clovis Olfrig? Of Bad Homburg, Germany?” I finally asked.
“Yes,” Archer beamed. “Of course, I ought to have realised that you might know him. Fellow medicos and all of that.”
A qualm that all was perhaps not as it should be appeared to be creeping in on Archer, for he gave me an anxious look.
“Is something wrong?”
I gathered my wits about me once again. “Not at all. What exactly about your research was of interest to Dr. Olfrig?”
“It concerned the varieties of Egyptian vipers. Olfrig had heard the rumours that rebellion was likely to occur in Egypt. He surmised that British troops might be subjected to poison-tipped arrows or spear points from the Egyptian rebels, and that an antivenin would be in great demand were that to occur. He wished to fund the project and share equally in the profits. If the research is successful and the British government purchases whatever antivenin is produced as a result, those profits could be considerable.”
“And he brought you all this way to Egypt?” Lucy asked. “Why not simply order the snakes and have them shipped to London?”
“It is necessary for the snakes to be properly authenticated in order that the research be convincing enough to attract support from the military. And of course”—Archer gave me a half-shamed, half-boyish smile—“I could not resist the opportunity for adventure that such a trip presented! Egypt! The land of the pharaohs!”
My agreement rang somewhat hollow in my own ears, but Archer appeared not to suspect anything amiss.
“Perhaps we might have tea later?” he asked.
“Certainly. And,” I added, “I should enjoy meeting with Dr. Olfrig, as well, if that is possible.”
Lucy gave me a swift, worried look, and seemed to be on the verge of speaking.
But Archer beamed once again. “Nothing easier, my dear fellow. He will be attending
a fundraiser at the Cairo Museum this afternoon. We can attend together and take tea together after.”
“Splendid.”
We bid Archer farewell and he moved off, threading his way through the potted palm trees that ornamented the lobby.
“Are you certain this is wise?” Lucy asked when he had gone.
“I am certain, at least, that this cannot be a coincidence.”
“No,” Lucy agreed. “Meeting with Mr. Archer might—possibly—have been mere happenstance. But that he should have been brought here by Dr. Olfrig of all people—”
“Precisely.”
I was endeavouring not to recall the time I had spent in Bad Homburg as Dr. Olfrig’s prisoner.
“We must inform Holmes of this,” I said. “Wherever he may be, and whenever he finds it possible to get in touch.”
“I think he has done that already,” Lucy said.
In response to my startled look, she tapped the open book of the hotel register, indicating a name a few lines up from the last entry: Captain Basil. And instead of one of the far-flung foreign locations common to the other entries, the address given was a street in Cairo: a place in the Khan Khaleel, which according to my Baedeker’s guidebook was the gold and silversmith’s bazaar.
“Captain Basil was the name Holmes used in the Black Peter affair,” Lucy said.
I remembered the case well, though it was not one of which I had yet made a written account. In the year 1895, a former whale fisher nicknamed “Black Peter” by his crew because of his dark moods, had been murdered in his garden shed, stabbed through the chest by a harpoon.
Holmes had taken on the persona of Captain Basil in order to trap the murderer into a confession.
“Apparently Holmes wishes us to proceed to the Khan Khaleel,” I said.
“Yes.” Lucy was still looking in the direction that Archer had gone, a frown marring the smoothness of her brow. “Do you think it possible that Mr. Archer has turned traitor? Joined forces with Sonnebourne and through him the Kaiser?”