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.
Chapter 65
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 pa
ddle 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.”
“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.”
Chapter 66
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.
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