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.”
Chapter 62
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 sled
ge. 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.
Chapter 63
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.
The God of the Hive: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Page 29