The God of the Hive (24 page)

I decided to leave the study to last, on the theory that if an ordinary man keeps his secrets close, an extraordinary man keeps his far from him. Having made this decision, I turned for the sitting room, only to
have the stillness of the flat shattered by a jangling telephone. “Don’t answer it,” I said. We both watched the machine, waiting for many rings before it fell silent.

I worked my way down the hallway towards the sitting room, rolling up the carpet runner, groping along the floorboards and skirting, unscrewing the switch plates, peering behind the pictures.

When I got to the end, my clean clothes were no longer and I had broken a fingernail prising at one of the boards.

Sucking at the finger, I kicked my way down the rolled carpet until it was flat, only then realising that I ought not to have started in the bedroom. Mycroft had commanded that Mrs Cowper’s kitchen be renovated, shortly after an enormous dinner for important guests—a goose, all the fixings, two pies, and several dusty basement-stored bottles—had first stuck, then come crashing down four stories in the dumbwaiter. It was the same time at which he had installed his secret entrance, using the dust of one building project to conceal the other.

And, I now saw, it would have been the ideal time to install a well-concealed safe in an unlikely place—why hadn’t I thought to look in the kitchen first and saved myself the knowledge of his laundry and nostrums?

Chapter 42

M
ycroft occasionally cooked in this kitchen, on Mrs Cowper’s holidays or days off, but for the most part, it had become the housekeeper’s room. Her ruffled apron hung from a hook on the back of one of the swinging doors; a photograph of her grandchildren stood beside the warming oven; an enormous portrait of the king beamed down upon her labours from the wall where the late and unlamented dumbwaiter had once opened—loyal as he was, I doubted the portrait would be Mycroft’s choice of decoration.

The room was tidy, as Mrs Cowper always left it; there was no knowing when she had last been here.

And this, naturally enough, was where I found Mycroft’s stash, in a place both difficult to reach and seemingly inappropriate for treasures: the frame of a notably modern oven. The temperatures alone should have guaranteed that any nearby paperwork would disintegrate in a matter of days; however, appearances were deceiving: What looked solid was not; what looked heated was cooled.

I drew from the narrow panel with the invisible hinges an inch-thick metal box the dimensions of foolscap paper. I settled on the floor with my back to the wall, lest Goodman come upon me without my noticing, and opened the box.

Inside were sixteen sheets of paper, typed or hand-written, none from
the same machine or hand. All sixteen were condensed confidential reports, all concerned the behaviour of leaders in colonies or allied countries. I could not avoid a quick perusal, although I did not wish to compromise the Empire’s security by knowing what I should not; even that light survey made it clear that any one of these pages could instigate a revolt, if not outright war.

But that was not the extent of Mycroft’s secrets.

The box’s cover had two layers to it, with some insulating substance such as asbestos between them to protect the contents. However, as I returned the pages in their original order and applied a dish-towel to the metal so my finger-prints would not be on it, the top of the box felt a fraction thicker than the sides and bottom. I put down the cloth and turned the top towards the light, and saw: The top itself had a hidden compartment.

In it was a single sheet of paper, in Mycroft’s hand.

Dear Sherlock
,

   
If you are reading my words, the chances are good that I am dead. I congratulate you on finding this, for I did not wish to make it easy
.

Please, I beg you, destroy the outer contents of this box. The international repercussions of their revelation would be terrifying, and without me to oversee what might otherwise be described as blackmail operations, the papers themselves will be of no further use to anyone
.

If as I imagine you will be loath to set match to them, please, I beg you, ensure without a fraction of a doubt that they will be destroyed upon your own death. The enormity of reaction should they be revealed would taint our name forever
.

Finally, I commend to you two individuals, in hopes that you will care for their future needs. One is my housekeeper, Mrs Cowper, a woman of many hidden talents. The other is my
secretary, whom you met long ago, a person who has helped me Interpret all manner of data over the years.

Wishing you joy on the great hunt of life
,

Your own,       
M
.           

It was signed with the initial alone, but my eyes seemed to see his usual signature, in which the cross of his
t
swirled into an ornate underscore. I set the letter down long enough to examine the box, making certain it contained no further secrets, and return it to its place. The letter I kept.

I was still sitting against the wall, pondering Mycroft’s message, when the swinging doors parted to admit Goodman’s head. I scrambled to my feet, folding away the letter into a pocket.

“Did you discover your safe within a safe?” His gaze wandered along the shelves and pans that I had left every which way.

“More or less,” I answered vaguely. “You didn’t find anything else in the study, then?”

“Only this.” He stepped inside, holding out a key.

I took it with interest. I had not seen it before, an ordinary enough shape but with an engraved Greek
sigma
on its flat head. “Where did you find it?”

He walked away; I turned off the lights and followed.

Unlike the rest of the house, which I had left speaking eloquently of either a hasty search or a minor tornado, the disruption in the study was confined to two precise spots: the shelf niche with the money and passports, and below and to one side, a place where the wood of the shelf itself had been hollowed out. The thin veneer fit in behind the facing of the shelf, and would have been invisible unless one were lying on the floor, staring upwards, with a powerful light to hand. Even then, a person would have needed to know the hiding place was there.

I for one had not, although I’d spent countless hours in that very chair.

“How on earth did you find that?”

He frowned, then said, “The shelf did not match.”

“What, the wood?”

“No. The contents.” He could see I did not understand, so he tried to explain. “In the forest, a place where there was once a road or a house is betrayed by the varieties of trees that grow there, the shape of the paths cut by animals aware of the difference. Here, a man set out the contents of this shelf with a degree of … distraction, perhaps? As if this shelf had a different history from the others.”

I could recall no particular difference between the books on this segment of shelf and the books on any other, although it did contain a small framed photograph of a thin young man in an Army uniform, all but unrecognisable as Damian Adler. “I hope you have a chance to talk with my husband,” I told him. “You two would have much to say to each other.”

The key was the only object inside this highly concealed compartment. I looked at it under the light, but it was unexceptional, apart from the Greek letter. In the end, I added it to the contents of my pocket, along with the money, the bank account code, and the passports.

Mycroft had no further use for any of them, and with any luck, I could soon hand the collection over to Holmes.

I went to the guest room and changed into some of the clothes I kept there, then went through the other rooms so they bore the same disruption as the rest of the flat. I removed the chair from under the door-knob, noticing with a pang that Mycroft’s walking stick stood in its umbrella stand. He used it mostly for the regimen of afternoon strolls he had begun, following his heart attack; if he’d been carrying his stick that night, would he have had a chance for self-defence?

When we let ourselves out of the secret doorway, the only things left behind were Mycroft’s sixteen political thunderbolts and one considerable mess.

The bobbing light accompanied us along the passageway to Mycroft’s other hidden exit, on St James’s Square. Again, I stowed the candle and peered through a peep-hole to make sure our emergence from a blank wall would not be noticed, then worked the mechanism.

In the outer world, the low sunlight made the autumnal leaves glow;
in sympathy, perhaps, a small corner of my mind began to light up, and I fingered the letter in my pocket.

Mycroft Holmes had a Russian doll of a mind. He was a man whose secrets had secrets. Any layer of hidden meaning was apt to have another layer, and one below that.

At opposite ends of the flat, he had left a letter to his brother and an unidentified key. With any other man, one would assume the two were unrelated. With Mycroft, there was the very real possibility that he had left two clues that by themselves were without meaning, that only together—if one persisted in
the great hunt of life
and found both—created a third message:
The key is in the Interpreter
. Or a fourth meaning. Or fifth.

There was also the likelihood that I was ascribing to my departed brother-in-law an omniscience he lacked: Even Mycroft Holmes would hesitate to lay out clues that his brother would not think to follow.

I badly wanted to talk to Holmes about this; however, I did have another set of remarkably sharp eyes with me.

“Let’s take supper,” I said, the first words either of us had spoken for at least ten minutes.

Down a side street lay a tiny Italian restaurant where I had once had an adequate meal. They were not yet serving, but were happy to ply us with wine and
antipasti
. When the waiter was out of earshot, I pulled Mycroft’s letter from my pocket and laid it on the table-cloth before Goodman.

“I found this in a place where not one man in a million would think to look. I’d like you to read it, keeping in mind that its author was the man who designed and arranged those bookshelves. Tell me if anything strikes you.”

He read it, twice, then folded it and handed it back to me. “There is hidden meaning there.”

“Yes,” I said in satisfaction. “I thought so.”

“Something to do with the secretary, I should have said. Who, unlike the housekeeper, goes nameless.”

I unfolded the page, and my eyes were drawn, as they had been each time before, to that unlikely capital
I
on the verb
Interpret
.

“Wait here,” I told him, and slipped out of my seat and onto the street outside.

Ten minutes later, I sat down again, finding a laden platter of glistening morsels and a full glass of red wine. I laid my purchase on the table.

A glance at its table of contents gave me the page number, and a review of the story took a few minutes. I gazed into space for a bit, and when the waiter drifted past, I woke and asked, “Have you a London telephone directory?”

“I am sure we do. Which letter were you looking for?”

“K
. I think.”

He went away, confused but cheerful about it, and Goodman said, “Not
S
for
sigma?”

By way of answer, I placed the book before him, open at the twenty-year-old short story “The Greek Interpreter.”

Unless the capital
I
had been a slip of the hand, which I found hard to credit, it was a teasing directional arrow left by Mycroft for his brother. Mycroft’s first appearance in Dr Watson’s tales had been in the adventure of the Greek Interpreter, when Mycroft’s upstairs neighbour, a pathologically naïve freelance interpreter named Melas, was sucked into a case of theft and deception, nearly losing his life in the process.

The Christian name of Mr Melas is not given, but the victim of the would-be theft, who died in the event, was a young man named Kratides. Key to his troubles was a sister named “Sophy.” A name that in Greek begins with the letter
sigma
.

There was nothing under
S
, or the name “Sophy” or “Kratides.” But when I hunted through the
M
listings, there was one Melas. The given name began with an
S
.

Perhaps Mycroft’s message was to be read:
The key
is
the Interpreter
.

Chapter 43

T
he address attributed to S. Melas was a quiet, tidy yellow-brick house in Belgravia, less than a mile from Mycroft’s door. In the swept front area a pot of bronze chrysanthemums flamed. The bricks were scrubbed, the paint was fresh, the brass knocker gleamed.

A maid answered the door. I handed her a card with a name that was not quite my own, apologised for the late hour, and asked if I might speak with Mrs Melas.

Instead of asking us in, she took the card and left us on the front step, looking at a closed door. Caution clearly ruled over societal niceties in this household.

We did not wait long before the maid returned. She led us to an airy, slightly old-fashioned drawing room that smelt of lavender and lemons. In a minute, the lady of the house herself came in.

Sophy Melas was a tall, dignified woman in her late fifties, whose Mediterranean heritage had kept all but a few strands of white from the thick black hair gathered atop her head.

I apologised for our unannounced visit, but beyond that, could see no point in anything but bluntness. “Madam, were you related to a Mr Paul Kratides?”

Her near-black eyes went wary. “Paul was my brother, yes.”

“You married a Greek interpreter named Melas, who some years earlier had attempted to rescue you and your brother from villains?”