The God of the Hive (21 page)

I thought that the trio’s relative dishevelment and the sequence of their appearance suggested that the family was away and the servants were bored silly. And indeed, once the housekeeper was freed to speak by the removal of Goodman’s stifling finger, her rush of words included a lament that the family had left for a wedding in Ireland, and would not return for a fortnight.

Goodman swayed, then walked off a few steps. After a minute, he cleared his throat, then vaguely suggested the provision of rooms and the concealment of our motorcar.

But his voice—that strangled deliberation had gone, leaving his speech as light and humorous as it had been before his home was invaded, before he had been forced out into the world, before he had made the decision to lead us to a family that clearly overwhelmed him with an unbearable apprehension. I wished I had figured it out before this: I might have saved him a day of great distress.

The servants scurried to obey, even the boot-boy. Their boredom, it would seem, was acute.

Although it was well into the dinner hour, tea was hastily summoned to a room glowing with the day’s last sunshine, its furniture hastily cleared of sheets and its French doors flung open to the terrace. Loath to spend more time in the sitting position, we carried our cups out of doors, watching Estelle solemnly explore the sculpture garden in the company of the boy while we stood and sipped and waited for our ears to stop ringing.

“I’ll go into Town first thing in the morning,” I told my two companions.

“I’ll come with you,” they chorused.

I scowled at my cup. Why were men so woefully infected with the urge to chivalry? If I weren’t very firm about this, I would find the entire cohort stuck to me like sap to the shoe, forcing me to march to war in the company of a crippled daredevil, a fey three-year-old, and Puck himself.

And towards war I was going, I could feel it in my bones. Before our woodland idyll had been invaded, even before reading of Mycroft’s
death, events had been pressing in on me, a creeping sensation that all was not right in the country I loved.

In the three and a half weeks I had been back—the last two of which, admittedly, spent on the run—English life had struck me as oddly loud and fast. At first, I had thought it was the sharp contrast between London and our peaceful South Downs retreat. Then I told myself that travelling out of the country for eight months had made me forget what England was truly like. And, of course, the Brothers case had been guaranteed to fill me with unease—not only for itself, but for the awareness that throughout history, religious mania had gone hand in hand with dangerous political and social turmoil.

Were five armed men another symptom of unrest?

Or was this simply what modern life would be, a place where a homicidal charlatan is embraced as wise, where children can be shot out of the sky, where a Good Samaritan can be driven from his home by armed intruders?

I wished I had Holmes to talk with about this.

I did not know the face of the enemy. I could not see how a sniper or a group of armed men in the Lake District could be connected with Thomas Brothers. I did not know why Mycroft had died, or at whose hand. I had no way of knowing if Damian and Holmes were still safe. I did not want to abandon Damian’s daughter to her own devices, and I emphatically did not wish to place her in the path of danger; however, she seemed as happy with Javitz, the housekeeper, and the boy as she was with me, and three times now—with a sniper’s bullet, a ’plane crash, and armed men in a motorcar too small for hostages—keeping her at my side had nearly been the death of her.

I prayed this time I might walk away from her without fear. If a child could not be kept safe in a private house, then no place in the British Isles was secure.

Nonetheless, a compromise was in order. I looked over my cup at Javitz. “I shall have to ask you to stay here, and guard the child.”

Chapter 36

H
olmes huddled on the aft deck, inadequately sheltered against the vaporised ice pouring down the North Sea, and wondered if he’d made the right decision.

It was a damnable choice. Leaving Damian behind had felt remarkably like turning his back on a man holding a knife—why hadn’t he anticipated the problem, and cajoled Gordon into staying on? But trying to take a tall, injured young man and a diminutive red-haired Scots female on what were sure to be closely watched ferries would have required intense tutoring on the arts of disguise, and he simply did not have the time. Nor had he the leisure to find a Dutch replacement for Gordon willing to smuggle three British citizens (only two of whom had passports) during daylight hours.

He’d done the best he could. On disembarking from the train the previous night, he had hired a taxi at the village station and burst into the VanderLowe cottage, going light-headed when he found his son and the doctor sitting peaceably before the fire, reading to each other from
The Pickwick Papers
.

He’d distributed just enough information to put the fear of God into them, and when the lights were out in the main house, he had borrowed one of the motorcars—well, not to put a fine point on it, he’d stolen the thing—and spirited his mismatched pair away from the artists’ community.

Then he spent the next twelve hours playing a sort of shell game with the two of them, aimed at baffling any pursuit: into Leiden, stashing them in an hotel, leaving the stolen motor near the central train station, and walking through the deserted town to a large hotel where at first light he hired a motorcar, ditching the driver (fortunately with trickery, not violence) and retrieving the young people to transport them in what amounted to a wide circle, ending at a small seaside watering-hole a scant forty miles south of where they had begun the day.

He established their identities as a young French aristocrat and his paid English nurse who were keeping out of his family’s way after a falling-out with an older brother. Drilling them both on the absolute necessity to speak as much French as possible and to keep to their rooms as much as they could bear, he emptied his purse into the doctor’s hands, and left to make his way to the Hook of Holland. There he deposited his second stolen motorcar, in a street where it would not be found until Monday at the earliest, and walked the last two miles to the Harwich steamer.

Even then, his day was not finished, for one who lacks both funds and time must resort to creativity. Reminding himself that there was no virtue like necessity, Holmes performed his third virtuous act in twenty-four hours, stooping to theft of the lowest kind. With twenty minutes to spare before the boat left the dock, he brushed against a banker who was admiring a fat infant in a perambulator, and picked his pocket.

The Fates had the last laugh, however, for the Moroccan leather note-case was worth more than what it contained, and there had been enough to cover the cheapest single ticket to England, but no more. Rather than chance another theft in the tight boundaries of the ship, Holmes spent the journey on the open deck, where the cold wind helped to numb the pangs of hunger.

Nothing, however, would alleviate the gnaw of anxiety, for family both behind and ahead. Oh, things had been so much simpler when the only person whose safety he’d agonised over was John Watson, M.D.

When the ferry at long last bumped against its pier, he joined the
off-loading passengers, wan with hunger, red-eyed from a lack of sleep and a surfeit of wind, fighting at every step the impulse to howl and launch himself like a footballer down the gangway and towards London.

A man stood among those waiting, a large man in a warm overcoat. He might have been brother to the watcher in Amsterdam.

Chapter 37

P
eter James West pushed away the impulse to shout with triumph at the report in his hand. His instincts had been right: The fishing boat Sherlock Holmes had hired in Thurso landed not in England, but in Europe. With the agency’s men still in Scandinavia—sent there, in delicious irony, by Mycroft Holmes—they had been readily re-deployed when the trunk call was placed from Amsterdam. Did Holmes’ brother imagine they would overlook his longtime associate, simply because the two were no longer partners?

It was almost disappointing, how easy this was proving.

And although the men had lost sight of Sherlock Holmes, and their pursuit of the son and that rural lady doctor they’d picked up in Scotland had yet to bear fruit, it did not matter.

Sunday would be the funeral. Neither Holmes nor his wife would miss that.

Chapter 38

L
ate on Friday night, Chief Inspector Lestrade stood up from his desk, his eye drawn yet again to the folded newspaper notice of the funeral for Mycroft Holmes. Hard to comprehend, that larger-than-life, demigod of a man, snuffed out by a blade. Impossible to avoid, that Lestrade’s own actions had somehow led to that death.

He did not believe Mycroft Holmes had been murdered because he had ventured into a wild night-club.

He could not shake the sensation that the death was tied to the unofficial near-orders—an urging, but difficult to overlook—that he bring into line Sherlock Holmes and his wife.

He was quite certain that there was some link between Holmes and the artist Damian Adler: That canny detective would not have stuck his nose into Yolanda Adler’s death merely because her body was found a few miles from his home.

He felt like a man in a whirlwind, with nothing firm to grasp, all his familiar landmarks obscured. Nonetheless, he was more at peace than he had been for some days, because late that afternoon he had withdrawn the arrest warrants for Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell.

If nothing else, it would permit him to keep his head high at Sunday’s funeral.

Chapter 39

G
oodman was in the breakfast room when I appeared early Saturday morning. I was dressed in clothing the housekeeper had chosen (and hastily altered during the night) from a wardrobe of items left behind by guests. None of them fit me well; none of them, I dared say, had been abandoned by accident.

My stand-in host was freshly shaved and wearing a suit of light grey wool with a public-school tie. His upper lip bore a pencil-trace of moustache; his nails were clean and clipped. The only vestiges of the woodsman were the emerald eyes and the unruly hair which, despite an application of oil, had a barely suppressed energy, as if any moment it would spring wildly upright.

“That’s a handsome suit,” I said.

“My cousin’s sister’s husband’s,” he replied, proudly looking down at the costume. He straightened the handkerchief in his breast pocket, brushed away an invisible crumb, and dropped his table napkin beside his plate. When he rose, it became clear that the gentleman in question was an inch taller in the leg and an inch narrower in the shoulder.

Clothes, however, make the man. Certainly, Goodman moved differently in this garb, his spine straighter, the boundaries of his body tighter, as if braced against the press of crowds and the pounding of pavements. The butler motored us to the train station, and when I stepped away from the ticket window and looked around for my companion, I nearly
looked past him. On a weekday he would be almost invisible in a crowd of young businessmen, until one noticed the eyes beneath the light summer hat, and the faint idiosyncrasy of an owl feather in its ribbon. The Green Man had become the Grey Man, the colour of the city around him.

The newsagent was laying out the morning papers, and I paid for a copy of
The Times
. We took our seats and when I spread the fold open, Holmes’ message reached out like a touch of the hand. I wondered how far from me he was now. If he might be stretched out with his feet to the fire of one or another of his bolt-holes, waiting for me to find him.

“Do you have a plan?” my companion asked.

“Yes. There’s a message here for me, telling me to meet him at the funeral. However, there are one or two places to go first.”

I was feeling rather like Holmes who, when frustrated by lack of progress in a case, was apt to shout, “Data! I require
data!”
Before I could go much further, I needed information and I needed assistance: For both, I knew where to go.

At Waterloo, Goodman and I disembarked and made our way out of the steamy cacophony towards the exit. Long ago, in his days as an active consulting detective on Baker Street, Holmes had employed an ever-changing tribe of urchins he called his Irregulars. The core member of these troops was a quick, clever, nimble-fingered, unhandsome child with a gin-soaked mother and too many fathers, whose work for Holmes re-shaped his life away from outright crime towards an eventual adult profession of enquiry agent.

Billy had proved quite successful in his work. He would have been even more so—financially speaking—had he not chosen to remain in the district where he had grown up. He now kept an office in a part of the South Bank that did not actually frighten away monied clients, but he still lived two streets from the house where he had been born, and had built his own army of operatives out of cousins, neighbours, and childhood friends, a good number of whom had felony records.

If anyone, Billy could provide both manpower and information.

South of the Thames, the business of empire is less politics and finances than goods and services; consequently, the London sprawl that
lies below the busy riverfront is less comprehensively served by modern transport. Half a mile to the north, we might have transferred to the Underground; here, we set off into the familiar by-ways.

Except they felt not entirely familiar. Surely I had not been away for that long? Each step I took, the sensation of wrongness grew, until in the end I murmured to Goodman, “Come,” and stepped into a rather rundown café. He followed me to a table that was sticky with spilt breakfasts, and I ordered coffee from the harried waitress.

The coffee that arrived thirty seconds later had already been doused with cream and sugar. Goodman raised an eyebrow at his cup, but I just leant forward, trying to avoid a puddle of egg yolk, and told him, “There’s something wrong here.”