The Curse Of The Diogenes Club (28 page)

She felt guilty for suspecting
Major Nash of anything underhand. He was probably checking to make
sure Mycroft had a weapon close to hand, or possibly placing it
there in case things turned deadly during the night. She was about
to return to the great hall when she decided to check the other two
drawers.

The top drawer was empty and
she expected the same of the bottom one but she found several pairs
of socks including a pair of thick walking socks folded as men do.
There seemed to be a large bulge as if something might be hidden
inside. She hesitated a moment, wondering if she should invade his
privacy; he was her uncle after all, but something - call it
curiosity or the instinct of a detective - made her look. It was a
Matryoshka doll.

In a state of shock, she
dropped it as if it were a red-hot coal. It bounced on the bare oak
boards and snapped apart. Normally the dolls fitted snugly
together, top half to bottom half, but for some reason these were
looser, slightly warped, as if bent out of shape. The smallest doll
rolled under the four poster bed.

A frenzy of thoughts scattered,
like the dolls, in several different directions. What was Mycroft
doing with a Matryoshka doll in his possession? Did Major Nash
plant it there? Was he about to implicate Mycroft in the death of
the princess? Or was he searching for the doll? Did that mean
Mycroft was one of the princess’s lovers?

She was on her knees, reaching
under the bed, when Fedir signalled that someone was coming. With
no time to flee back to her bedroom, she crawled under the bed and
tucked her voluminous skirt around her as much as possible.

When Mycroft entered, Fedir
pretended to be tending to the fire in the grate.

“Leave that,” said Mycroft. “Go
and get yourself some supper.” He picked up the silver and
crocodile skin travelling cigar case - since receiving it from the
Countess for Christmas, he never went anywhere without it - and
noticed the bottom drawer of his bedside table sitting slightly
out. “Have you been sorting my socks?”

“No”, said Fedir, feigning
ignorance, “Major Nash, he sort.”

She waited for the all clear
then crawled out gingerly, giving thanks to the diligence of her
servants who swept under the bed as thoroughly as they did
elsewhere.

Her brain was still in shock
when she attempted to put the doll back into the socks exactly as
she found it. She couldn’t quite remember how the socks were
folded. Was the doll in the top sock or the bottom sock? Was the
sock angled at two o’clock from the right hand corner of the drawer
or was it a forty-five degree angle? She cursed herself for not
paying attention as she hurried back to the great hall via her own
bedroom in time to be escorted into the dining room by Sir James
Damery who was at the tail end of diners.

The Countess barely listened to
the conversation during dinner which mostly revolved around the
Tudor tennis court. Her mind was unable to move beyond the
Matryoshka doll. How had Major Nash put it?

“Apparently the princess gave
one to each of her lovers…”

‘Apparently’ implied something
unverified, an account from a second source.

Who told him? Who planted the
idea in his head?

The only way to find out would
be to ask him but that would be admitting she had found the doll in
the drawer. He would then know she suspected him of planting it, or
suspected Mycroft of killing the princess. Was Major Nash
protecting Mycroft? Or was he setting him up?

She realized someone was
addressing her. “I beg your pardon?”

“Can we count you in?” repeated
Mrs Klein testily.

“Count me in?”

Colonel Moriarty came to her
rescue. “A game of tennis tomorrow morning straight after
breakfast,” he explained.

“Oh, yes, certainly. Sounds
jolly fun!”

“Did you pack some sporting
attire?” checked Miss Blague eagerly. “I will have to wear a
promenade dress. It’s the only thing that doesn’t have a
train.”

“Yes, I packed a golf ensemble
and a riding habit. I shall wear the golf skirt and the cropped
jacket. A riding habit is really just a skirt with a train on the
side. Are we playing in teams?”

“Yes,” said Prince Sergei. “We
will play in pairs; two to a side, the lowest scoring team is
eliminated until we have a clear winner. We can draw names out of a
hat after dinner.”

Straight after dinner a pencil
and some paper were procured by Ponsonby.

“Count me out,” begged off
Mycroft, “too strenuous for me.”

“Me too,” said Mr Blague,
grimacing with pain. “I have an old battle scar that plays up when
I over-stretch and lunge.”

“And me too,” said Damery,
noting that they would have an odd man out if he played, “I haven’t
been sleeping well lately and I feel a bit sluggish.”

“That leaves eight,” reasoned
the colonel. “Why not just write the names of the four men on
pieces of paper and the four ladies can choose a name.”

Major Nash followed that
suggestion and placed the four names in a large silver punch
bowl.

Miss Blague, flushed with
excitement and feeling lucky, drew first. When she read the name it
was clear her luck was all bad. It was as if she had a quail bone
stuck in her throat. “C…C…Colonel M…M…Moriarty.”

Miss de Merville drew next. “Dr
Watson,” she said not unhappily.

Mrs Klein had a turn. “Prince
Sergei,” she announced triumphantly, making it sound as if they had
already won.

Major Nash looked pleased.
“That leaves me and Countess Volodymyrovna.”

“In the interest of fair play I
will draw the last name,” she insisted, plucking the last paper out
of the punch bowl. “Oh, there seems to be some error! I have drawn
Colonel Moriarty too!”

“What!” blurted Major Nash.
“That can’t be right!”

“You must have written my name
twice,” asserted the colonel.

“I’ve seen that done before,”
added the prince. “I was in St Petersburg. It was an archery
competition. An easy mistake to make.”

“I don’t make mistakes of that
nature,” insisted Major Nash. “Let me see that paper.”

“This one?” said the Countess
as she tossed it into the fire.

“You’ll have to write out the
two names again,” suggested Dr Watson, mindful of the nature of
fair play.

Major Nash gritted his teeth
and wrote out the two names again, folded them several times and
tossed them into the punch bowl. The Countess insisted on going
first because she had gone last the other time. She fished around
for an undue length of time and plucked out ‘Colonel Moriarty’.

Miss Blague, fingers crossed,
checked her paper just to be sure, and breathed a huge sigh of
relief when she read out ‘Major Nash’.

That was settled and the men
returned to the dining room to pass around the port.

“I thought we were invited here
for the weekend to discuss the bombs?” said Sir Damery, as he
lighted up a Havana.

“Yes,” agreed Mycroft, “but de
Merville needs to be in on the discussion. It will keep until
tomorrow after lunch. There’s no hurry. No one is planning to leave
until Monday.”

“Well, I can’t see what you
hope to learn,” said Mr Blague flatly.

“A collective thrashing out of
what everyone witnessed,” explained Mycroft calmly. “It may help us
to piece together some vital clues.”

“But you already have the bomb
man,” pointed out the American, puffing on one of his own cigars.
“He was fished out of the lake.”

“Yes,” replied Mycroft blandly.
“But we are interested in the person who put him in the lake.”

“You’ll never catch him,”
predicted Sir James Damery. “It is a sad fact of life that some
people just don’t like the monarchy. Such people have been with us
from day one. Security needs to be stepped up around the Prince
Regent, especially now that Queen Victoria is growing frail.
Prevention is better than cure.”

“Well put,” praised Mr Blague.
“Look forward, not back. That’s my motto.”

Major Nash slipped out of the
dining room when he spotted the Countess going early to bed. He
caught up to her on the upper landing in a dimly lit spot between
the minstrel’s gallery and a rood screen.

“Don’t think I didn’t notice,”
he hissed. “You threw that paper on the fire deliberately because
you didn’t want to partner me.”

Denial was pointless. “In case
it has slipped your notice, I’m helping you co-host this weekend. A
good host ensures their guests are happy. It was obvious Miss
Blague did not want to partner Colonel Moriarty. I was merely
making sure she was not unhappy.”

Blond brows drew down in a
skeptical frown. “She was all over him like a rash yesterday.”

“Something must have happened
to put her off.”

“Was that your doing?”

She managed to sound indignant.
“Certainly not! The colonel must have behaved inappropriately.”

He rolled his eyes and grunted.
“I wouldn’t put it past Jim. On another note, I’ve got the only key
to the master suite. I’m going to lock Mycroft in after he goes to
bed tonight. If anyone wants to get to his room the only way they
can go is through your room. That puts you in danger but your
manservant doesn’t need to sit with de Merville. He can guard you
instead.”

“What about you? Where will you
be?”

He was about to answer then
changed his mind. “I’ll be around.”

“And Colonel Moriarty?”

“I’ve got him covered, don’t
worry.”

Worried she was. If Major Nash
had the only key to the master suite he could easily enter in the
night, kill Mycroft, and concoct an alibi. That’s when she decided
it was much safer for Mycroft to sleep in her bed. She could sleep
in the boudoir on the day bed. She wasn’t planning to get much
sleep anyway.

Wearing a filmy peignoir, she
was sitting by the fire in her room, waiting for Mycroft to come
upstairs, when a soft rap on the door brought a visitor. It was
Colonel Moriarty and he was grinning as if he’d just been crowned
king of Ireland.

“I like the way you arranged
that swap. You watched Nash fold the papers before he put them in
the bowl and you knew which one to choose.”

“I did it to save Miss Blague,”
she retorted.

He gave a careless shrug. “I
don’t know what happened between lunch and dinner but it was as if
I had suddenly caught the plague. All evening she looked terrified
every time I came near her.”

“It must be that Irish charm,”
she quipped.

“I’d rather partner you anyway.
Will Fedir be on duty in here tonight?”

“Yes,” she said firmly, “where
will you be?”

“Now that I don’t have to hide
from Miss Blague, I might just get some shut-eye in that big four
poster bed. No one’s going to assassinate Mycroft during the
night.”

Now, if anyone else had said
that she would have dismissed it as bravado or bluff, but he had
excellent instincts about what assassins did and didn’t do. She sat
up and paid attention. “What makes you say that?”

“An assassin would have put a
bullet into Mycroft Holmes long before now. Mycroft would have to
be one of the easiest targets in London – a man of unchanging
habit. But that’s not what the killer wants. This killer is after a
certain effect. It’s about the type of death, rather than the death
itself.”

“I’ve underestimated you,” she
said, head reeling at the elegance of a simple truth compared to
the messiness of everything else.

“I wondered when you’d finally
see the light,” he returned glibly.

“Goodnight,” she said, pushing
him to the door. “I need to think.”

His arms caught her in a tender
embrace while his lips delivered a playful demonstration of the
other way she had underestimated him. “Happy birthday,” he
whispered. “I love you.”

But she wasn’t listening. Her
head and heart were miles apart.

Of course! The killer was after
a certain
effect
!

She stared at the fire as if
seeing the flames for the first time. The first attempt was a near
miss with a runaway barrel. The second attempt was the three bombs.
The third attempt was the rabid dog. What was the link?

Think! Think! Think!

There was now no need to make
Mycroft transfer to her bed since it was highly unlikely anything
would happen during the night, so she crawled between the sheets
and fell asleep.

At first light inspiration
struck like a bolt from the blue.

Diogenes!

Diogenes was a philosopher of
ancient Greece, a doggish student of the ascetic Antisthenes. He
became a Cynic, a dogged inspiration to Crato and Zeno, the first
Stoics. Exiled from his homeland for debasing the currency
(prompted by the Oracle at Delphi; his father was a banker; he
claimed to have confused real currency with political currency!) he
became a citizen of the world, the first person to coin the term
cosmopolitan.
He considered dogs better than people because
they had no shame, no self-delusion, were not interested in
abstract philosophy, and could tell their enemies from their
friends. He lived in a barrel and spent his life exposing the
hypocrisy of men.

Hypocrites call those who
tell the truth Cynics
.

Who coined that phrase?

Never mind, there were too many
parallels: Bankers, currency, politics, dogs, friends,
barrel…death.

How did Diogenes die?

There was no definitive
account. Several theories: he held his breath (unlikely unless
smothered), he was bitten by an infected dog (attempt number
three), he ate raw octopus (not likely to be on the menu at
Longchamps).

He asked to be thrown to wild
animals after his death.

She was overthinking
things.

The elegance of a simple truth;
the elegance of a simple truth.

First thing she did was check
that Mycroft had not been smothered with a pillow but the snores
coming from under the covers indicated he was still breathing.
Bathing and dressing quickly, she made her way to the stable to
speak to Sherlock. He and Mr Dixie had taken turns keeping watch
during the night and reported that all had been strangely
quiet.