Dreaming Spies (34 page)

“That’s not necessary,” Haruki protested.

“It is, actually. We need to see what condition you are in.”

“I told you, I am fine.”

“Haruki, unless you plan on dismissing us from the case, your health is a prime consideration. You’re free to walk out of here and stumble through unfamiliar ground, as you did when you first got here. You may have more success this time.”

She was not pleased, but if she didn’t want medical treatment, she shouldn’t have introduced her arm to a wrought iron spear. She gave a brusque nod. I rolled up her sleeve and slipped the scissors between gauze and arm.

Holmes set a steaming bowl down beside me on the table. The dressings had stuck, but not too badly, and when I eased them away, I thought that, despite my amateur efforts, she was indeed healing.

“This will probably be all right if you rest it,” I said. Holmes grunted at the likelihood of her resting. “But there’s one part of it looks nasty. Holmes, what happened to that—ah, that’s the stuff.”

The pot he unearthed from the lower reaches of the medical box might have come from an Egyptian burial chamber, so encrusted with dark substances was it. The pot contained a remarkably disgusting yet equally remarkably effective poultice. Haruki winced back as the smell hit her.

“I know, it’s pretty rank,” I told her. “But it is the best thing in the world for drawing infection. Holmes gets it from the gipsies, or maybe from the lascars down at the docks. It may even be a recipe from our local witch—all I know is that if you can bear the stench, it works.”

I often suspected that Holmes actively preferred his nostrums disgusting, in a childlike belief that when it came to medicines, the nastier, the stronger. But I could not argue with the result.

The stitches themselves were holding, and most of the holes were only pink, not red and weeping. There was no sign of blood poisoning, no indication that the infected areas would make for the heart. I slopped on the gipsy goo and loosely wrapped her arm in a clean towel, and then dug out a hot-water bottle and filled it, propping it against the poulticed arm.

Later that afternoon, I renewed the poultice, re-heated the rubber bottle, and led her, only mildly protesting, to the bed in the next room. Even a ninja had to admit that rest was restorative.

She did make me promise on my very life that we would not leave without consulting her, before permitting me to shut the sturdy door.

Holmes had cleaned away the detritus of both meal and medical procedures, and replaced the tea pot with a jug of coffee. I described in more detail what I had learnt at the restorer’s workshop, including the painting on his wall.

Holmes sat back in his chair and resumed his pipe. I stretched out an arm to open the window.

“You are thinking we need to look at the son,” he said after a while.

“Aren’t you?”

“It would simplify matters if we could ask Lestrade about the man’s criminal records.”

Chief Inspector Lestrade was one of the cleverer members of New Scotland Yard. This quality was ideal in a partnership, but could be a liability when one merely wanted to use the Inspector as a source of information.

“We can’t risk it,” I decided.

“Of course, there’s Mycroft.”

“No.”

“Russell—”

“Absolutely not. Once Mycroft gets his hands on a piece of information, it’s his forever.”

“I would trust Mycroft with my life.”

“As would I. But would you trust him not to make use of an Emperor’s secret, if the day came when he needed to manipulate Japan?”

He scowled into his pipe, and prodded it a few times. A year ago, I would not have hesitated to bring his brother into the matter. Since then, I had witnessed the scope of Mycroft’s actions, and the troubling questions they raised.

“I trust my brother’s decisions,” he reiterated, but there was a thread of too much protest in his voice, and no further insistence on bringing Mycroft in.

“We’ll have to take a more direct approach,” I said.

“You said you thought your Misters Bourke lived over their shop?”

I smiled.

Buoyant spring flowers

In the winter of a life:

Vincent’s geisha smiles
.

That evening, Haruki’s face was more flushed than ever, and I thought we would have to shackle her to the bed. Not that any locks would hold a woman with her skills, but they might delay her long enough to let us escape.

In the end, we made an exchange of promises: she would remain here with her hot poultices, and we would come back before acting on whatever we discovered.

And she vowed, if we were not back in four hours, she would come looking for us.

Holmes and I might have lacked the mythic passing-through-walls invisibility of the classic shinobi warrior, but our skills were adequate for Oxford. And as the ninja costume is simply that of an everyday worker and the weapons variations on farming implements, in the same way did Holmes and I dress in the modern English equivalent: old, dark suits, dark overcoats and hats, our pockets full of everyday tools. Well, the everyday tools of some professions—and in Oxford, what would be considered odd, anyway?

At the entrance to the mews, Holmes paused on the pavement while I turned inside, edging along the walls to a pile of crates beneath the only overhead light. I waited, cobblestone hunk in hand, for the grumble of a passing lorry to echo through the enclosed yard. The tinkle of breaking glass went unnoticed, and I moved to Mr Bourke’s door.

Holmes came up a minute later, and stood in growing impatience as I worked with my steel picks at the lock. It was not a complicated mechanism, and should have been easy, but with dripping rain and Holmes’ breath down the back of my neck—then I had it.

He reached up as the door drifted open, but the bell was still missing. Inside, we stood, counting off ninety seconds, letting our eyes adjust and our ears listen for any surreptitious presence: few people can remain motionless and unbreathing for ninety seconds while their home is being invaded.

I took out my tiny pen-light with the red cloth around the end, and led Holmes back to the workshop. There were windows along the back, so we should have to take care with our lights.

I turned the glow on the wall where I had seen the Prussian-blue lake—and saw only plaster.

Correction: plaster and a nail, with a fragment of paper fibre, as if someone had jerked the watercolour off the wall. Interesting. I told Holmes what was not there, and felt him nod. He flicked on his own light, and we turned our attention to the workshop itself.

In half an hour, we were satisfied that no forgery was done here.

However, nor was watercolour painting done in this room—none but the minimal application of pigments necessary to the restorer. We left Mr Bourke’s workshop, and made for the stairs.

The northern end of the mews had been rebuilt, its roofline raised for another level of flats, but this end still had three storeys, and looked much as it had since the days of George III. The inner stairs suggested that the upper levels were a part of the Bourke realm, not those of a different business or residence.

We had seen no lights from the upper windows, but there was a risk that Bourke and his son were asleep on the next floor up.

I went first, being both lighter and—if a door came open—faster down the stairs. I crept my way upwards, trying each step before committing my weight to it. The wood was stouter than it appeared, and the squeaks were minimal.

The landing at the top of the first flight of stairs had a locked door on one side, but the carpet on the stairs going up was just as worn as that on the first section, indicating that the living quarters were over our heads, not on this middle level. I gave Holmes a small hiss, and as he climbed the stairs, I bent again to my picklocks.

This latch, interestingly, was a lot sturdier than that on the front door. After sweating over it for a while, I deferred to the more experienced Holmes. He, too, had problems, but at last the final pin slid aside and the cylinder turned. The door began to creak when its edge was ten inches from the jamb. Holmes held it while I squeezed inside. I ran my light quickly around the space, an odd and dusty foyer, then worked spittle into the hinges to allow Holmes inside as well. When the latch had clicked shut again, I pulled the red cloth off my light and studied our surroundings.

It looked like an unused sitting room, with a thin layer of dust on the side-table, the armchair, and even on the book that lay face-down on an ancient leather ottoman before the chair. As if someone had walked away from their evening read, weeks before.

The room was the same size as the shop downstairs, but where the door to Mr Bourke’s workshop was, here stood a bookshelf. A ceiling-to-floor bookshelf with a narrow track of disturbance in the floorboard dust. Either the reader habitually fetched volumes from just one section, or the reader was not interested in the books.

The latch for the hidden door was attached to an old Balzac novel I’d never heard of, but clearly Holmes recognised. The moment he spotted
Pierre Grassou
, he gave a grunt of amusement and reached for the upper edge of the spine. A click came from deep within the shelves. We shoved, and opened the door to gold—better still: gilt.

The artist’s current project was a series of oil paintings. Pinned up to a wall were a dozen or so reproductions of landscapes by the Dutchman
van Gogh, whose odd perspective and lively technique had, since his death a generation ago, been of growing interest to collectors. It was the ideal situation for a dealer in fakes: when an artist’s work had gone unsold and uncollected during his life, who was to say how many versions of a wheat field or cypress tree he had actually produced?

Coincidentally, the piece was appropriate to our own search: a blossoming cherry tree with a geisha looking coyly out from under its branches. Three large colour photographs lay on the table beside his easel, with what I assumed were actual van Goghs: a flowering tree with Fuji in the background; a geisha with a frog; and a bearded man with a hat, seated in front of various Japanese scenes. A strong light hung overhead, and a large magnifying glass distorted the frog on the geisha scene.

Leaning against the wall were two other very fresh-looking oil paintings, signed “Vincent.”

A brief search gave us the evidence we had come for: a file-box on one of the shelves with sketches, colour swatches, close-up photographs of every section of the Kisokaido illustrations and calligraphy, including three incomplete but full-sized versions of the book itself, discarded for various reasons including a large black drop of ink in the middle of one. There was even a trial version of the cover boards.

“He’s very skilled,” I murmured.

“A wonder Mycroft hasn’t adopted him.” Holmes was looking at the contents of its neighbouring box, which contained treated pages and sketches for a very old-looking will.

The one thing we did not locate was, who hired Bourke?

We spent an hour looking through every box, every file, prodding for hidden corners, but came away with nothing but dust and sore knees. Finally, we migrated back to where we had begun, and stood contemplating Vincent’s geisha.

“Do you think this could be a one-man operation, from beginning to end?” I asked. “That he comes up with ideas, constructs the forgeries, and sells them?”

“That might be so for the forgeries themselves, but the blackmail?”

It was true: the son almost certainly came across the Kisokaido book
in his father’s workshop, awaiting restoration. From there, he might have chosen it as a candidate for a lucrative forgery—but how did one go from forgery to international blackmail? A restoration might have uncovered the hidden document, but once found, how would a forger have guessed at its meaning?

“We need to speak with him,” I said.

“You have your revolver?” he asked.

“The ladies’ accessory,” I said, pulling it from my pocket.

He chose a precarious stack of paint-stained tin bowls, and prodded it with a forefinger.

The clatter was satisfying. Even more so the sudden squeak of bedsprings overhead, followed by the thump of feet hitting the floor. We left the studio, closed the hidden bookcase entrance, and took up positions at the doorway.

That the man came through the door armed with nothing more deadly than a torch and a metal poker was both reassuring and informative: this was not a person who thought in terms of £100,000 extortion demands. Indeed, considering the podgy, middle-aged figure’s sleep-rumpled hair and down-at-the-heels carpet slippers, he appeared at first glance someone whom £100 might impress.

Holmes flipped the light switch; at the same instant, I said in a firm whisper, “I have a gun.”

The forger’s reaction was not quite what I had expected. He took a step back, poker clattering onto the dirty carpet, and stared at me with the blood draining from his face. I spoke again before he could pass out, keeping my voice low so as not to wake the elder Bourke.

“We’ve been in your workshop, we see what you do. We’re not the police, but if you want to avoid having us call them in, you need to talk to us about a piece of forgery you did two years ago.”