by Andrew Lane
A thought suddenly occurred to him, and he hesitated.
Maybe he could climb the bank here and wait for his pursuer to go by. As he passed beneath the next manhole cover, he edged across to the side of the river again, where the bank rose up, so that he wouldn’t be seen. He reached up and grabbed a clump of pale grass that he could use to pull himself up.
Out of the shadows, something stepped forward and growled.
It walked on four short legs and its head was triangular, with a pointed muzzle and a skull that flared backwards to two large ears. Its eyes were small and dark, hardly eyes at all, but its lips were pulled back as far as they would go and its mouth seemed overly full of teeth like shards of broken glass. The brown and black hair that covered its body was matted and patchy.
Behind it, three other similar creatures moved forward. Sherlock realized they were dogs, but they were nothing like any dogs he’d ever come across before. They must live down here, he realized, in the dark, generation upon generation, descended from some strays that had found their way into the buried river and living on rats and maybe fish. With nothing to see, their eyes had closed up and ceased to function, but their ears had grown large to replace them. Sherlock suspected that, to them, sound was everything.
For a moment his mind snapped back to the tunnels beneath Waterloo Station and the feral children there. He felt a rush of pity for them, something that he had been too busy to feel when he was trying to escape them. They had been forced to live like wild animals, but at least the dogs here in Moscow had the claws and the teeth to survive. The children had nothing, apart from their intelligence, and Sherlock had a feeling they were fast losing that.
The lead dog wrinkled its nose. It looked like it might be trying to sniff the air, but the smell of decay that rose up like a gas from the river would have made that almost impossible. Its ears twitched as it vainly tried to work out where Sherlock had gone. He was right in front of it, hand extended, but if he didn’t move then it couldn’t hear him.
That, at least, was the theory.
Sherlock’s hand was so cold that he had to clench his fist to keep from shivering, but the numbness was too much to bear and his fingers suddenly twitched. The sound of skin moving against skin, just a whisper to Sherlock, must have been like an explosion to the dogs. The lead one jumped forward. Sherlock pulled his hand away, and the dog’s teeth snapped shut on nothing. Its head jerked back and it began to bark. The other three dogs joined it. The sound echoed and re-echoed through the tunnel.
Sherlock backed off, but the noise he made splashing through the water made his position easy to fix for the dogs.
The lead dog took a few steps and leaped towards Sherlock, jaws agape.
An arm looped round Sherlock’s neck and clenched hard, twisting him around in the water. His pursuer just had time to gloat ‘Gotcha!’ before the lead dog hit him like a cannonball, fastening its jaws on his arm. It wasn’t the target the dog had wanted, but it wasn’t fussy. It bit down, hard.
Sherlock’s pursuer screamed: a high-pitched sound for a man with such a gruff voice. His grip on Sherlock’s throat loosened and Sherlock tore himself free.
In the light that drizzled down from the manhole cover, Sherlock could see his pursuer thrashing back and forth in the water, trying to dislodge the dog. Two of the three others on the bank also leaped. One of them hit the water and dived for the man’s leg, while the other landed on his chest and fastened its jaws around his throat. He fell backwards into the scummy river, arms thrashing wildly.
Sherlock backed away quietly through the water as the remaining wild dog dived in and vanished. For a second he thought about climbing out on to the bank, but there might be more dogs there in hiding. Reluctantly, he pressed on through the water.
Behind him he could hear splashing and grunting, and then just splashing, and then nothing.
Far ahead he could make out a glimmer of light, like an oil lamp hanging in a doorway on a dark night. He pressed forward, water churning in front of him as he hurried along. The light grew brighter, hurting his eyes. It took the form of an arch – an arch through which he could see the grey-blue waters of a greater river crossing the one through which he was wading.
His eyes had grown accustomed to the daylight by the time he reached the arch. It wasn’t barred and there was no grille across the entrance. The Neglinnaya River just poured into the Moscow River from an opening in the banks that ended about a foot above the surface, causing the Neglinnaya to form a small waterfall.
Sherlock edged forward. Holding on to the brickwork with one hand, he leaned out and looked sideways, along the banks of the Moscow River.
It ran between stone walls. If there was any soil, any sand, any ground at all there then it was hidden beneath the surface of the water. Looking up, Sherlock could see that the top of the opening through which the Neglinnaya poured was perhaps six feet below the level of the streets. An iron ladder, flakes of red rust breaking through black paint, led up from just beside the opening. The trouble was, Sherlock knew, that if he went up that ladder he might just end up in the arms of the policeman and the man who had accused him of stealing his wallet.
He looked along the line of the river again, and noticed something that he had missed before: a line where the stones were set back by a foot or so. It seemed to happen every six feet in height: probably an attempt by the architect to ensure that the space above the river got wider the higher it went, maybe to avoid flooding. Whatever the reason, it meant that Sherlock had a way out. All he had to do was edge his way along that line of stones like a man walking a tightrope.
It took him half an hour of careful manoeuvring, during which he almost fell three times into the waters of the Moscow River as it flowed beneath him. He started off wet and cold and ended up dry and frozen, although he wasn’t sure whether that was because the wind channelled by the stone-clad riverbanks had dried him or because the water soaking his clothes had frozen into ice. When he finally found another rusted iron ladder to take him up to the surface he was fortunate enough to see a brazier just a few yards away, full of burning coals. A local Russian man was roasting chestnuts over the coals. For a few kopeks he let Sherlock warm himself beside the brazier.
After half an hour, and two bags of roasted chestnuts, Sherlock felt human enough to head back to the hotel. He was fairly sure that he was safe doing so: nobody had come in that direction along the riverbank looking for him, and as far as he could tell the thugs had discovered him by accident, the way the ones in London had. He waved a grateful thanks to the chestnut vendor and walked off. His legs were sore, he had a headache and his clothes were stiff in a way they hadn’t been earlier, but at least he was relatively warm and dry.
The walk back only took twenty minutes, and by the time he got to within sight of the main doors of the Slavyansky Bazaar Hotel he was sweating with the exertion. The cold Moscow wind pulled the heat from the dampness on his forehead and froze it within moments.
Some kind of altercation was going on at the front of the hotel. A black horse-drawn carriage with no obvious markings or crests had drawn up outside. Instead of being at the sides, the doors were at the back. The driver was wearing nondescript grey clothes and a fur hat, as were the two men who were emerging from the hotel and walking towards the carriage, but the difference between them was that the two men emerging from the hotel were pulling a third man with them. This man was dressed in a well-cut black suit and waistcoat.
It was Mycroft.
He was protesting loudly, and struggling, but Sherlock couldn’t hear what he was saying.
The driver climbed down from his perch and helped the two men push Mycroft into the back of the carriage. The two men climbed in with him and shut the door. It looked as if the driver threw a bolt, locking the door from the outside.
He climbed back and flicked his whip over the horses’ heads. They trotted off, pulling the carriage away from Sherlock.
Sherlock felt his spirits plummet. A
ll he’d been through in the past couple of hours, in the past weeks – it had all led to this: standing alone on the street of a foreign city with his brother being taken away by the secret police. Sherlock tried to find some thread of a plan, some small seed that could be grown into a way of getting Mycroft back, but there was nothing. He literally had no idea what to do next.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘If you value your life and your freedom, don’t look!’
Sherlock glanced round. A man was standing beside him, threadbare coat drawn tightly up to his neck and fur hat pulled down low over his eyes. Sherlock couldn’t even see his mouth.
‘Why not?’
‘Because the Third Section are invisible. They come and they take people, and nobody sees. Nobody sees because nobody is looking.’
‘What are they going to do with him?’
‘If he is lucky,’ the man said, ‘then perhaps a quick execution. If he is unlucky, then it is the knout or the pleti.’
‘What are they?’ Sherlock asked, horrified.
The man shuddered. ‘They are like whips, only worse. Much worse.’
Sherlock suddenly realized that the man was speaking in French, not Russian. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Robert Wormersley.’
‘You’re Mycroft’s –’ he was going to say ‘agent’, but switched the word at the last moment, ‘–friend’
‘Indeed.’ Wormersley’s face was bright and alert beneath the fur hat as he scanned Sherlock’s face. ‘And you’re his brother. His only brother. You have the same eyes. He used to talk about you.’
Sherlock’s gaze was drawn back to where the carriage was pulling around a corner. ‘He’s gone. What do we do?’
‘I’ll tell you what we don’t do – we don’t go back into that hotel. We don’t go back into that hotel because they’ll have left someone behind to wait for you.’ Wormersley looked around. ‘There is a decent cafe not too far away. Let’s get some hot liquid inside you – you look like you could use it, and I certainly need somewhere to sit down and rest for a while. We can work out a battle plan there.’
‘All right.’ Sherlock was so tired that he just wanted all this to go away. He wanted someone else to take charge. ‘Let’s go.’
The cafe was ten minutes’ walk away. It was located in the basement of an office building, down an outside flight of iron stairs. At the bottom was a tiny patio area and a glass frontage behind which was the cafe.
Wormersley led the way in and directed Sherlock towards a rough table. He went across to the tiny counter and bought two cups of tea, poured from a large urn.
Sherlock looked around at the other patrons. There were men, women and children sitting in pairs or alone, all wearing too many clothes. Most of the men were reading, either newspapers or books. Nobody was looking in their direction.
Sherlock focused on one man in particular, wrapped up in a heavy overcoat and eating some kind of pancake. His face was lumpy, like a potato, and flushed. Sherlock had never seen him before, but there was something about him that was familiar.
‘Pirozkhi,’ Wormersley said, putting the plate on the table between them. ‘Russian pastries: some meat, some vegetable, all spiced.’ He removed his coat and hat and put them on a spare chair. He was a thin man, in his twenties, Sherlock estimated, with sparse blond hair, large sideburns, a thin curve of moustache that looked like it had been drawn on with a fine-nibbed pen and a neat little goatee beard.
Sherlock took a grateful sip of the black tea. He glanced again at the man at the next table, trying to work out why he looked familiar, but the man was a complete stranger. Sherlock realized that his hand was shaking. He was under a lot of stress. ‘Mycroft thought you might have been arrested,’ he said.
‘And he came all the way to Russia to check? Mycroft came all the way to Russia to check?’ Wormersley smiled. ‘I should be honoured.’
‘So what happened?’ Sherlock put his cup down and took a bite from one of the pastries. The savoury filling was hot – minced beef and mushrooms. Steam burned his lips.
‘I came back one day to find the Third Section turning my place over. I knew they were the Third Section because of the cheap suits. I turned and walked away before they realized I was there. I’ve been moving around ever since, going from one bad hotel to the next, never staying too long in one place. I tried to get word out to Mycroft, but all the telegraph offices are under the control of the Tsar’s officials.’ He shook his head. ‘Who’d have thought it – old Mycroft, levering himself out of his comfy armchair in London and coming all the way here, just to see if I was all right.’
‘It’s more than just you,’ Sherlock said. Quickly he told Wormersley what had happened in London and in Moscow.
Wormersley leaned back in his chair and sipped his tea. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Interesting and bizarre.’
‘It’s like having a partial set of broken china fragments,’ Sherlock said. ‘I have no idea what kind of object they would make if you put them together.’ Catching the words as he was saying them, he wondered why the simile of a broken china object had come suddenly to mind.
‘It all depends on why Mycroft was arrested,’ Wormersley mused. ‘Is he here under his own name or an assumed name?’
‘He’s here as Mr Sigerson,’ Sherlock replied. ‘He’s part of a theatrical company who are putting on a performance at the invitation of a Russian Prince. Yusupov, I think his name was.’
Wormersley nodded. ‘Good cover. Did he go to my apartment?’
‘We both did.’
‘That’s probably why he was arrested. They were watching the apartment, and arrested Mycroft on the basis that he might know where I was hiding.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense.’ The tea and the pastries were helping Sherlock’s brain to break out of its paralysis. ‘If that was true, they would have arrested him – arrested both of us – at the apartment instead of waiting until we got back to the hotel. And it doesn’t explain why they tried to frame me for pickpocketing.’ He paused for a moment, trying to collect his thoughts and then examine them in the way that Amyus Crowe had taught him. Regard them as traces left in soil and vegetation by some animal – which way did the animal go and how big was it?
And how many animals were there?
He drew a sudden breath in realization. ‘It’s almost as if there are two separate organizations at work – one secretive, that works by framing people for stuff they didn’t do, and one that arrests people in the open and throws them into carriages. One unofficial and one official.’
Wormersley nodded cautiously. ‘I’m with you so far. Go on.’
‘The official organization – the Third Section, I suppose – had no reason that I know of to arrest Mr Sigerson, the innocent manager of a theatrical company. On the other hand, if they knew that Mr Sigerson was actually Mycroft Holmes, a British Government official, in Moscow on an undercover mission, then they would have every reason to detain him.’
‘Indeed they would, but who would tell them?’ Wormersley nodded. ‘This shadowy, secretive second organization of yours, presumably. But why would they want Mycroft arrested?’
‘To get him out of the way?’ Sherlock thought for a moment. ‘No, that doesn’t make any sense. There are easier ways to get someone out of the way. No, they must have wanted him to be arrested.’ He paused for a moment, grasping at thoughts. ‘They must have wanted him to be arrested by the Third Section – which is under the control of a man Mycroft said he knew: Count Pyotr Andreyevich Shuvalov. They met in France a few years ago.’
Wormersley gestured to Sherlock to keep his voice down. ‘Best not to mention that name in public,’ he cautioned. ‘The Third Section has ears everywhere. Even mentioning their name is enough to attract their attention.’
Sherlock was too excited to stop. It was as if he was looking at a set of jigsaw pieces and mentally moving them around until he could work out what the picture was. Or, his brain said again, like a collecti
on of china fragments which he was reassembling in his mind into a porcelain figure. It was clear to him now that this second organization – the secretive one – actually wanted Mycroft to be arrested because they knew that Count Shuvalov would question him in person. His brother was an important diplomat, and Shuvalov knew him. It was unlikely, Sherlock thought, that Shuvalov would trust the interrogation of an important diplomat to an underling, and he probably wouldn’t want anybody else to be there in case any diplomatic secrets were revealed. It would be a polite chat between two men who were acquainted at some stage in the past – held in Shuvalov’s office, because that was where he would feel most comfortable, most at home. And because Mycroft was an important man, and deserved some measure of respect.
The truth came crashing in on Sherlock suddenly, so obvious, so monumental that he was momentarily breathless with surprise that he hadn’t already seen it. This had all been arranged from the start! Everything that had happened in London was designed to get Mycroft to Moscow! Framing him for murder in the Diogenes Club wasn’t an attempt to stop him from seeing those reports in his office – it was a way of making sure that he would see them. If he thought those reports were important enough that someone would frame him for murder to stop him reading them, then he would definitely pay them serious attention once he got back to his office! They were the lure at the end of a fishing line that reached all the way to Moscow!
Wormersley was staring at Sherlock intently, but Sherlock’s thoughts were whirling too quickly for him to speak. The china pieces were coming together in his mind now. The details were getting clearer by the moment.
The theatrical company itself was a sham, Sherlock realized in shock. It had to be. It was another report on Mycroft’s desk – he’d assumed it was a coincidence, but it hadn’t been. This secret organization, whoever they were, wanted him in Moscow so that he could be arrested, and so they gave him a reason to go to Moscow and a way of getting to Moscow, all packaged up and ready to go!