The God of the Hive (17 page)

However, these two were actively looking for him, searching for his face among the crowd. If Mycroft had wished to throw his brother a link, wouldn’t he have instructed his men simply to take a stand in some prominent location and wait for Holmes to approach them?

This pair was not offering themselves to Holmes: They were hunting him.

Ten seconds had gone by since he’d seen the first man, and although he wanted nothing better than to sit and explore the meaning of it, he had to move. He discarded the day’s paper and made a number of small adjustments to hat, collar, and tie that changed their personality, then moved smoothly to the door, where an ancient hunched dowager hesitated to commit her ivory-handled cane to the descent.
“Kan ik u helpen?”
he asked politely. The old woman peered up at him with suspicion, adjusting her fur collar with a diamond-studded hand. In the end, she either decided that she knew him, or that he was better than nothing, and tucked one gnarled hand through his arm. He helped her down from the car, bending his ear (and thus his spine) to her querulous and incomprehensible monologue, punctuating his nods with the occasional
Ja!
or
Het is niet waar?
as they went. They tottered down the platform, adding a finishing touch to the picture of an elderly couple, shrunk by age and forced by reduced circumstances to make their own way into an inhospitable city. Not at all what the two English agents had been told to watch for.

At the taxi rank, Holmes handed the woman into a cab and let it pull away.

He was sorely tempted to double back and turn the tables on the man
with the gun. All it needed was a moment’s distraction for him to slip a hand inside the coat and make the weapon his. A short walk to a quiet place, and he could ask who had sent the two men.

But there
were
two. And Holmes did not know the city intimately, nor did he speak the language with anything approaching fluency. If it weren’t for Damian … but no, getting himself arrested would leave the lad dangerously exposed. Discretion never felt less a part of valour; on the other hand, walking away permitted the formulation of a plan.

What he required was a place to ruminate. Were he at home, he would settle into a nest of cushions with some shag tobacco and stare into nothingness, letting his mind chew its way through the facts and inferences. Here he had neither cushions nor shag, nor even a violin. He could, however, achieve the nothingness.

The cinema house was only half full, its patrons caught up in a romantic farce that would have been every bit as impenetrable in English. He threaded his way to a seat in the back, slid down against the upholstery, and lit his first cigarette.

The lights rose and faded twice while he sat, motionless but for the act of smoking.

The sight of the Englishman in the train station had hit his mind like the reagent in a chemical experiment: When the fizz of reaction subsided, what remained was not the same substance.

Two days ago, he had been investigating the Brothers case (albeit at a remove of some 200 miles across the North Sea) only to be confronted with a new puzzle: Why should Scotland Yard move against Mycroft Holmes? But, intriguing as his brother’s problems might be, his son’s welfare came first. Once he had evidence sufficient to convince Lestrade that Damian was innocent—or, at any rate, guilty of nothing more than extreme naïveté in his choice of wife—then he could risk approaching Lestrade.

But the Brothers case had abruptly become something much larger.

It was a rare investigation that achieved one hundred percent solution. Human beings are untidy, and the evidence they leave behind is equally complex: One of the main tasks of an investigator is to know which small facts are incidental and which are revealing.

The Brothers case, like many others, had minor points that had thus far escaped explanation. Holmes had no doubt that, once he was given the leisure to pursue the investigation unhindered by arrest warrants and emergency surgery, he would come to a solution that would prove satisfactory even to the official police.

It was one of those apparently peripheral gaps that he had asked Billy to look into for him: how it was that Brothers so readily slipped into a world of fairly sophisticated criminal activity. False identities and thuggish assistants are not everyday needs for the majority of individuals, and yet, before coming to England, the only obvious criminal tendency Brothers had evinced was the methodical fleecing of his flock of believers. Before coming to England, the man’s beliefs seemed to have been entirely theoretical; as far as anyone knew (and by
anyone
he meant Mycroft’s gifted agent in Shanghai, Captain Nicholas Lofte) only when he came to England did Brothers flower into homicidal mania.

Which came first, the criminality or the belief?

In fairness, Holmes would leave his mind open to the possibility of coincidence. It was unlikely, but within the realm of possibility, that there were two separate cases here, one involving Brothers, the other the shark moving through the waters, all but unseen until a swirl of motion—Mycroft’s arrest—gave him away.

Mycroft: arrested. Nearly as unthinkable, the warrants issued for himself and Russell. The ease with which James Harmony Hayden had slipped into the skin of Thomas Brothers, and the ease with which Thomas Brothers had found a man to be his bulldog. Finally, two armed and hard-eyed Englishmen in the Amsterdam station. All points that a lesser mind might dismiss as coincidence, but made Holmes reflect that a man capable of issuing a command to Scotland Yard might also send agents to Holland.

And what of Mary Russell?

If it hadn’t been for her message in the paper, he’d have begun to feel uneasy.

Was Thomas Brothers the shark whose fin stuck above the moon-dark sea? Had his true self been concealed beneath the façade of a religious
nut-case? Was the speed with which he slipped into England related to the speed with which the two men had located Holmes?

Had Holmes, all unknowing, been trailing blood in the waters for the shark to follow, from Scotland to Amsterdam? A shark who was both incredibly fast—deploying men to Amsterdam at the drop of a hat—and powerful—having the men to deploy in the first place.

How long before they thought to search the private docks along the Dutch coast?

He dropped his cigarette on the floor, pressed past the knees of the cinema-goers, and turned towards the town centre, away from the train station. Let those two watch the mouse-hole until their feet wore off; it was more urgent to get Damian away than to question one of them. As for ’phone calls, well, any further information he might obtain from Billy would have to wait.

He found a copy of Thursday’s
Times
at a news stand near the tram stop, and tucked it under his arm as he trotted towards the approaching tram.

Forty minutes later, much jostled and aware that he was on edge, he forced himself to pause on the steps of the latest in a series of tram-cars and survey the street. There appeared to be no-one watching—no-one even standing still, at this time of day. Pedestrians and bicyclists wove along the streets and pavements, intent on their evening meal; the only stationary person in sight was a small boy hawking paper twists of warm peanuts.

Since the two men at the central station possessed three times the peanut-seller’s bulk and had shown no inclination for disguise, Holmes thought he was safe enough.

He made his way up the street to the train station, several stops from the town centre. A cautious survey of the platform was similarly reassuring: Either they (whoever
they
might be) were sanguine that he would appear in central Amsterdam, or their numbers were too limited to cover the outer reaches of the town.

Which might have been reassuring had it not been for the inner voice that whispered,
They’re searching the coastland instead
.

He bought a ticket for the next southerly train’s final stop; unfortunately,
the train would not be here for an hour. An inn directly across the street had a promising-looking restaurant, but he would not sit in a well-lit room a stone’s throw from a station; instead, he walked back the way he had come, to a tiny hotel as neat as anything else he’d seen in this country. This place, unlike the larger hotels, required that he pay before he was given the key, although they, too, accepted without question his statement that his luggage would catch him up later that evening.

He was given a quiet room overlooking a row of gardens and clotheslines. He laid his hat and coat on the bed and dropped into a soft chair, stretching out his tired legs. After a time, he opened the paper.

During his tram-journeys, he’d scanned the agony columns and seen that his own message was there—“BEES
may thrive in foreign lands
…” He’d also noted the repetition of Russell’s, but that was as far as he’d got. Now, he went over the columns more closely, on the unlikely chance that he had missed a message placed by Mycroft at his most diabolically subtle. But there was nothing.

He let the paper collapse onto his knees, glowering down at the serried gardens. Mycroft was the cleverest man he knew, but it was stretching the bounds of credibility to think that his brother could have found him by deduction alone. He’d have had to know not only that they’d been in Wick, but why; then extrapolate that they would choose the path of least resistance because of Damian’s wounds; and after that, make a close enough analysis of winds and tides to plot a likely course over the waters to Holland. His brother was a genius, but he was not god-like. And for someone other than Mycroft to have done the calculations? Even Russell couldn’t have done it.

Ergo, whoever was responsible for those men had known where he was.

And none of his companions could have given his location away. Had it been Gordon or the doctor, the big Englishmen would have knocked on the VanderLowe front door, not stood for hours in a draughty train station.

No, the betrayal had been his own. And his only points of contact with the world had been the trunk call to Billy—whom he’d as soon mistrust as he would Russell—and the telegrams to Thurso and Wick.

It was true that the men had the look of Mycroft’s agents. Was it possible
that he had mistaken their aggressive attitude? That their scrutiny was not due to hostile intent, but, in fact, desperation? Were they trying to keep him from some unseen threat?

Holmes stared at the darkening window, trying to construct an hypothesis to explain Mycroft’s having sent the pair, but it was only wishful thinking: His data were insufficient to fill in the too-large gaps in his model. Until he could reach London, he had to assume that an unknown enemy lay out there. Someone who swam in the murky depths beneath Thomas Brothers. Someone with authority over both Scotland Yard and the SIS. Someone who had decided the time was ripe to sink his teeth into Mycroft Holmes.

Whatever had driven Lestrade to issue the warrants and make the arrest, it had not been bribery: Of that Holmes was sure. But any man with family was vulnerable—as he was learning—and it would not take much to nudge Lestrade’s self-righteousness into outright action.

A criminal gang who could not only intercept telegrams or telephone calls (perhaps both) but also move a man like Lestrade to their whims was a dangerous thing indeed.

He could only pray he was a step ahead of them.

First he would make Damian safe. Then he would set his face to London, where all desires are known, from whom no secrets are hid.

He took out his pocket-watch: twenty-three minutes to waste before leaving for the station. He got up to twitch the curtains shut, then turned on the light and picked up the paper.

He read with care every mention of criminal activity, but he could discern no pattern, and found none of the expected indications of a powerful gang pushing for dominance.

Again he took out his pocket-watch to check the time: four minutes. He put it away, turned the next page, and felt his heart stop:

Mycroft Holmes, OBE

Chapter 30

I
nspector Lestrade turned the page, hiding the obituaries. He felt sick, as if the king himself had died. Worse, died on Lestrade’s watch.

It was not his fault—of course it was not. He’d been more than fair to both Holmes brothers all his career, but just because he’d respected the two men did not mean that he should change the law of the land for their convenience.

When Mycroft Holmes had vanished last week, he’d given the man until Monday, because any man had the right to a week-end away. But when Lestrade had telephoned to Whitehall again early Monday morning and been told Holmes was still missing, he’d put out a bulletin about the disappearance.

Now the man was dead, and Lestrade did not know why. Or even how. Nor would he—or apparently any other member of the Metropolitan Police—be permitted to find out: When the body was discovered, His Majesty had ordered it seized before it could undergo the usual examinations. Word was, the petty meddling of one of the Yard’s detectives was the reason.

Thursday had been the most hellish day in his career. It had begun with a ridiculous incident involving a missing person in Mayfair, some middle-aged Mama’s boy who hadn’t come home, and Mama knew the sorts of high-ranking officials who could demand that a chief inspector of New Scotland Yard turn out to do a constable’s job. Then the minute
he’d walked into his office—ten minutes late because he’d had to stop in Mayfair—Lestrade had been called upstairs. There, he’d been unofficially reprimanded for searching Mycroft’s flat the week before and taking the man—albeit briefly—into custody. His protests that it had not been an arrest, and that he had been more or less ordered to carry through with it, had fallen on deaf ears. Mycroft Holmes had held a high position in the shadowy world of Intelligence, far above the reach of a lowly Scotland Yard inspector, and Lestrade was lucky the victim’s employers might be willing to forgo an official enquiry into the matter.

The underlying message being: Your job would be at risk if Whitehall didn’t want to avoid drawing further attention to the matter.