by Andrew Lane
Something that had been wound up tightly inside Sherlock’s chest for several days seemed to loosen slightly. Not completely, but slightly.
‘Now,’ Mycroft said, ‘let us sample the delights of Russian gastronomy. I am led to believe that Russian chefs are almost as good as French ones.’
They walked into the restaurant, which had a high, arched ceiling. Its walls were lined with paintings showing soldiers in brightly coloured uniforms – blue, green and red – riding horses and slashing at each other with sabres.
Mycroft noticed the direction of Sherlock’s gaze. ‘Ah, the Crimean War,’ he said. ‘Fought with Britain, France and Turkey on one side and Russia on the other. A curious and rather pointless conflict. And here we are, barely a dozen years later, having dinner in the capital city of our enemies. Diplomacy makes strange bedfellows.’ He paused, and a shudder ran through his large body. ‘Sherlock, I think this will be the last time I leave England. It may well be the last time that I leave London. Travel may broaden the mind, but so do newspapers and books of reference, and they can be experienced from the comfort of an armchair and in the presence of a bottle of fine brandy. I shall, in future, allow things to come to me, rather than me going to them.’
‘You must badly want to know what happened to your agent, for you to be here,’ Sherlock said quietly.
The maitre d’hotel looked up from his book of reservations as they approached. ‘A table for you, gentlemen?’ he asked in perfect French.
‘If you please,’ Mycroft replied. As the maitre d’ led them across the restaurant, Mycroft said quietly: ‘His name is Wormersley: Robert Wormersley We were at Oxford together. We shared digs, and we would talk long into the night about our hopes and dreams for the future. When we left Oxford we went our separate ways: while I went into the Foreign Office, he travelled the world adventuring and writing well thought out pieces of travel journalism, but we would still write letters to each other. Eventually our orbits intersected again, and he became my most trusted agent abroad.’ He paused. ‘We were friends, Sherlock. We were the best of friends. Acquaintances are ten a penny, but one does not get the chance to make friends like that very often in one’s life. When they come along, they should be cherished. That is why I need to be here. I owe it to him.’
‘I understand,’ Sherlock said as they sat down. ‘Or, at least, I think I do.’
‘Of course you do. You went all the way to New York to rescue young Matthew Arnatt. Now,’ he said, taking the menu from the maitre d’, ‘what do you wish to eat this evening? I understand the seafood in this city is particularly fine.’
The meal was excellent – good enough to please even Mycroft – and Sherlock’s brother allowed him to have a glass of wine with the meal. They talked of inconsequentialities – the different types of grape that could be used to make wine, the way brandy, sherry and port were made either by distilling or by fortifying wine, and the fact that sparkling wine was first made by Benedictine monks in the sixteenth century.
Sherlock sensed his feelings towards his brother easing as the meal went on. He still felt angry that Mycroft – and Rufus Stone – had gone behind his back, but he realized that part of that anger was directed against himself for not working it out.
He resolved to learn a lesson, though: never take anything on face value ever again.
At the end of the meal, while Mycroft was relaxing with a glass of brandy and a cigar, Sherlock said, ‘I’m going to bed. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Mycroft nodded. ‘Sleep well. Tomorrow will be a difficult day.’ He frowned. ‘I have a feeling I am missing something obvious. It is not a comfortable feeling. If I was back in London, safe in the Diogenes Club, I am certain I would work it out in an instant, but here, with all these distractions…?’ He sighed. ‘Perhaps a good night’s sleep in a comfortable bed will help. Goodnight, Sherlock.’
Sherlock’s room was small, and on an upper floor, but it didn’t matter. It was more comfortable than his room back at Holmes Manor, and he was asleep within moments of undressing. If he dreamed at all then he did not remember what his dreams were.
The next morning was bright and crisp. Snow still lay on the ground, but the sun shone from a clear blue sky. Sherlock washed and dressed and then headed down to the same restaurant where he and Mycroft had eaten dinner.
Mycroft was sitting with Mr Kyte. He nodded at Sherlock as he entered the restaurant, then went back to his conversation.
Sherlock looked around. Mr Malvin and Miss Dimmock were eating together, while Mrs Loran was sitting by herself. She caught Sherlock’s eye and smiled at him. He smiled back. He liked her: she seemed to be treating Sherlock more and more like a surrogate son. He wondered about the missing and unmentioned Mr Loran. Had he died, or run off with another woman, or was he waiting at home for her?
The four stagehands – Rhydian, Judah, Pauly and Henry – were sharing a table and bickering. The musicians were scattered across three different tables, segregated by instruments: strings on one, brass on another and woodwind on a third. The conductor, Mr Eves, was sitting alone.
Despite the fact that he was in the string section, Rufus Stone was also sitting by himself. He waved as Sherlock caught sight of him, and indicated the spare chair at his table. For a long moment Sherlock debated whether to find a table by himself, but in the end he walked across and joined Stone.
‘Sleep well?’ Stone asked.
‘Not too badly,’ Sherlock replied.
‘The hotel is very impressive. Speaking as a man who is more used to hay as his quilt and the night sky as his ceiling, the bed was far too comfortable for my liking. When I woke up I found I was marooned in the centre of a mattress that was so soft it would have given a marshmallow a run for its money. It took me five minutes of exertion to struggle to the edge. I swear that if I’d slept for a half hour longer I would have sunk without trace.’
Sherlock didn’t reply.
There was silence for a few moments, then Stone continued quietly: ‘You said back in England that you had bought yourself a violin.’
‘Yes, I did.’ Sherlock felt as if he should add something, but he couldn’t think what to say.
‘I presume that your purchase of such an instrument indicates that you still wish to wrestle the muse of music to the ground?’
Sherlock shrugged.
‘Sherlock,’ Stone said, ‘I understand your feelings. I wish things were otherwise. Life being the way it is, bad things happen more often than good. The trick is to see the sunshine behind the dark clouds.’ He paused. ‘Sherlock, if you believe only one thing that I say, believe this: I enjoy your company, and if your brother were to tell me tomorrow that my services are no longer required then I would still wish to continue to teach you.’
Sherlock felt an unaccustomed tightness in his throat. He looked away, then back at Stone. ‘I’d like that,’ he said hesitantly.
‘Of course,’ Stone said, ‘that will have to wait until this particular mission is over. If I am not careful, playing down to the level of these fiddlers and blowers will seriously compromise my skills.’ He looked around, then lowered his voice. ‘I have a bad feeling about all this,’ he said. ‘I can’t quite work out why, but something is wrong here. Something is very wrong.’ He glanced at Sherlock. ‘Be careful this morning. Be very careful.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
After breakfast, Sherlock watched from the hotel lobby as the rest of the theatre party, minus Mycroft, left in horse-drawn cabs for the Maly Theatre. Once they had vanished around a corner, Mycroft said: ‘Come on then. Let us go.’
He hailed a cab – a proper cab, not one of the thin boards on which people sat astride – and gave a junction of two streets as the address. Leaning over to Sherlock, he said, ‘We can walk the last hundred yards or so. Uncomfortable, but necessary. I always make it a rule not to reveal my ultimate destination to people I do not know, if I can help it. Half the cab drivers in this city are in the pay of the Third Section.’
When they arrived, Mycroft handed the driver a coin and waited until he had driven away before he indicated to Sherlock that they were going to cross the road and walk back a little way.
The building that Mycroft stopped outside was three storeys high, and made of a reddish-brown stone. A main entrance was situated in the centre of the ground floor, three steps up from the pavement.
Mycroft and Sherlock entered through the doors. Stairs led up from the lobby. As if he’d been there a thousand times before, Mycroft walked straight across to the stairs and put his hand on the banister. He turned to Sherlock. ‘They say that in the Winter Palace, here in Moscow, the Tsar has a small room that ascends from one floor to another, moved by some kind of steam-driven screw mechanism. The time when all buildings have such rooms cannot come too quickly for me.’ Puffing, he started to climb the stairs. Sherlock followed, smiling.
The first-floor landing gave on to a long, dark corridor that ran the length of the building. Sherlock could smell vague odours of food: boiled ham, boiled cabbage, bread. Mycroft walked confidently down the corridor until he came to a particular door. Glancing in both directions, checking that nobody was watching, he pushed against it.
The door moved.
‘The wood around the lock is splintered,’ Mycroft said. ‘This is decidedly not good.’
He opened the door and entered the hallway, pulling Sherlock after him. With a movement that was surprisingly quick for such a large man, he moved sideways, to the wall, and pushed Sherlock in the other direction. Sherlock realized that Mycroft was trying to minimize the time they were silhouetted in the doorway, just in case there was somebody in the apartment with a gun. Good thinking.
They waited for a few moments, listening. There was no sound from inside. Eventually Mycroft moved forward, down the hall to a half-open door.
The room inside was a mess. It was, or had been, a living area, but the chairs were smashed and the tables knocked over. Paintings on the walls were disarranged. Shards of pottery and glass lay on the floor: the detritus of smashed decorative figurines, teacups and wine glasses. There was nobody there, living or dead.
Mycroft’s eyes scanned the room quickly. He turned and walked back into the hall to check the other rooms. Looking over his shoulder, Sherlock could see that one was a bedroom, the other a bathroom. They were empty of people as well, but they had been comprehensively wrecked in the same way as the main room.
‘Someone was searching for something,’ Mycroft murmured, standing in the entrance hall and looking around.
‘They didn’t find it,’ Sherlock said.
‘You are correct, but how did you come to that conclusion?’
‘Because if they had, there would have been areas where nothing was smashed or overturned – the areas that they would have got around to if they hadn’t found what they were looking for.’
‘Unless…?’ Mycroft prompted.
Sherlock thought for a moment. ‘Unless whatever it was they were looking for was actually in the last place they looked.’
‘Or, more likely…?’
‘Or they weren’t sure how many things they were looking for, so they had to search everywhere.’
Sherlock’s brother nodded. ‘Correct. What else can you deduce from the state of this place?’
‘Whoever searched it didn’t care if anybody knew they had searched, otherwise they would have made an effort to be tidier.’
‘You are again correct.’ Mycroft’s face was bleak. ‘I fear for Robert Wormersley’s life. Either he was here at the time, in which case he has been taken away by whoever smashed the door down and ransacked the apartment, or he was absent, in which case he would have turned tail and run as soon as he saw the damaged door. Either way, his fate is still uncertain.’
‘He wasn’t here at the time,’ Sherlock said with certainty.
‘And you deduce that how?’
Sherlock indicated the front door. ‘The door was locked, but not bolted. You can see the bolts still intact on the back of the door. If your friend was in the apartment and had locked the door then he would certainly have bolted it as well. The fact that it was locked but not bolted indicates that he had left, and locked the door behind him.’
‘Good work,’ Mycroft said approvingly.
Sherlock moved back into the main room and looked it over again. There was something about it that bothered him, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Something out of place. Or something in place where everything else was out of place. It nagged at him like something caught between his teeth.
‘I’m not seeing something,’ he said. ‘Or I’m seeing something but not understanding it.’
‘It will come to you,’ Mycroft said, ‘if you let it. Let your mind mull the problem over while you think about something else.’ He looked around. ‘I fear there is nothing else to see here. We should leave.’
Outside, in the street, Mycroft hailed a passing carriage. Sherlock tugged his sleeve. ‘I think I can remember the way back to the hotel. I was taking note of the streets as we came here. Is it all right if I walk back? I want to see some of the city.’
‘Very well,’ Mycroft said. He passed Sherlock a handful of money. ‘The principal currency in Russia is the rouble. The rouble is divided into exactly one hundred kopeks.’ He clapped Sherlock on the shoulder. ‘Now, you go and take a look around. I believe I will return to the hotel and think about our next move.’
As Mycroft’s carriage vanished round a corner, Sherlock began to walk. Moscow looked, sounded and, more importantly, smelt different from the places he was used to. The snow, for instance, muffled a lot of the noise, so that the clamour he’d been used to in London was largely absent. Moscow seemed like a quiet city. Although, he considered, it might also have been quiet through fear of the Tsar’s secret police and what they might do to people who said the wrong things.
The route was fixed firmly in his mind, and as Sherlock walked he found himself admiring the solid, impressive architecture of the city. As he got closer to their hotel he found himself turning into an open square so large that it almost seemed to bend with the curvature of the Earth. Ahead of him a cathedral rose up like some fantastic creation made out of strawberry ice cream and spun sugar. He had never seen anything like it in his life. It seemed to be a series of towers of different heights and apparently different diameters, each one randomly topped with a pointed spire or an onion-shaped dome which was painted or tiled in different colours: red, green, blue, yellow and white, all intermixed in various combinations of chequerboard patterns or swirls. Each spire or dome was topped with a large crucifix. As Sherlock walked slowly around the cathedral, staring all the time, he noticed that it kept changing its appearance. There was no obvious symmetry about it. Whichever angle he examined it from, it was a different shape. Like many things he’d seen in Russia since they had arrived, it looked like a collision between a complete accident and a deliberate creation.
On his right, just across a moat of partly frozen water, he could see the tall, red-brick walls of what he thought was the Kremlin – the palace and grounds where Tsar Alexander II lived, and from where he ruled over his immense domain. In between the cathedral and the Kremlin walls, and extending off to Sherlock’s right, was Red Square.
Several straight, wide thoroughfares led away from Red Square. Sherlock chose the one that he thought would lead to the Slavyansky Bazaar Hotel and began to walk down it. A sign attached to a nearby wall told him that this was Neglinnaya Street. As well as being lined with shops on both sides it had a long row of stalls running down the middle. The shops seemed to be mainly selling fur coats, hats, boots or pastries of various sorts. Each shop had a brightly painted sign outside showing in pictorial form exactly what was on sale. The stalls were more plebeian, dealing as they did in all sorts of knick-knacks from knives to tobacco, from bags to old clothes, buttons and fragments of cloth. A few stalls were selling religious items: crosses, paintings on wooden plaques of saints and the like. Russia
, it appeared to Sherlock, was a much more openly religious society than England.
Tea sellers wandered along the street between the shops and the stalls, pushing handcarts on which heated urns of tea were precariously balanced. They also sold snacks: strings hung around their necks from which rings of bread dangled like huge beads.
At each junction Sherlock noticed wooden booths occupied by men in grey uniforms and black helmets. They had swords strapped to their sides. The ones that weren’t actually asleep at their post just looked bored and cold.
Checking his watch, Sherlock decided that it was time he headed back. As he drew level with a side street, he stopped. Someone walking close behind him collided with him. He turned, already apologizing, but the man pushed past him with a muffled curse. At the same time he noticed an animated conversation happening at one of the wooden booths. A man in a heavy coat and a hat with fur earflaps was talking to the policeman in the booth, gesturing wildly with both hands. Sherlock was about to turn away when the man in the furs turned and pointed towards him. The policeman stared darkly at Sherlock.
A shiver ran through Sherlock’s body.
The man in furs appeared to be saying that something had been taken from him. He was gesturing to a pocket on his coat, sliding his hand in and out as if miming the fact that he had been pickpocketed. He pointed at Sherlock again. Sherlock glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone else was around, anyone that the man could have been pointing at, but there was nobody within ten yards.