The God of the Hive (29 page)

“It might take some doing to hunt down an Intelligence fellow on a weekend.”

“If you can locate West without having anyone take notice, it would be good if I could talk with him before the funeral. However, don’t draw any more attention to yourself than you must.” I drained my cup and stood, but he remained stubbornly in his chair.

“Miss Russell, I really need to speak with Damian Adler.”

“I swear to you, Chief Inspector, I do not know where he is.”

“And his daughter?”

“I am keeping her safe.”

I looked at his tired face, feeling badly for having robbed him of what
little sleep he might have expected this night. However, giving him talkative little Estelle would be giving him the information that Damian was Holmes’ son. And until Damian was safe, until he was no longer regarded as a suspect, I could not risk that.

I put out my hand. “Thank you, Chief Inspector.”

He looked at it, then stood and took it. “Ring me later. I’ll see if I can come up with an address for Mr West.”

“Thank you.”

“And, Miss Russell? Watch yourself. Brothers and Gunderson are still out there, to say nothing of Sosa’s lot. All in all, a number of people you don’t want to be meeting in a dark place.”

“I rarely want to meet anyone in a dark place, Chief Inspector,” I replied. At the door, I let him open it for me, then paused. “Will you be at the funeral this afternoon?”

“I will.”

“Thank you,” I said. And astonished us both by leaning forward to kiss his unshaved cheek.

Chapter 47

N
ew experiences were salutary, Holmes reflected. In four decades of creeping through the back-streets and by-ways of London, he had never had quite such an unrelenting series of setbacks, and although his body might protest at being folded up into its narrow recess a dozen feet above the paving-stones, no doubt it was good for him to be challenged. He wished that, in exchange, he might learn a bit more about his pursuers than he had so far.

Take the man who had been waiting on the pier at Harwich.

The man had been standing among those waiting to greet the boat, but it would have taken a larger crowd than that to conceal his presence: large, alert, and armed.

Holmes saw him, and kicked himself for not having anticipated the problem. Short of an hour with make-up (neither of which he possessed) and a change of clothing (almost as difficult) there was no way of getting down the gangway without being seen. Which left him with two options: Stay on board and return to Holland, or use another exit.

The steamer’s lavatories were conveniently near the exit, and its attendant had gone to assist with the disembarking process. When the last gentleman had finished, it was the work of moments to set a fire blazing in the waste bin (placing it by itself amidst the tiles, since he had no wish to burn the ship to the water-line) and slip away.

When the alarm was raised, every crew member within shouting
distance responded at the run, leaving several tills unguarded. Holmes helped himself and made for the lower decks.

A sad story to a likely face (about a bill collector waiting on the docks, to a man whose nose bloomed with the veins of strong drink) and one of his stolen bills into a meaty palm, and Holmes became an honorary member of the crew off-loading Dutch goods and passenger rubbish.

He pulled on his newly acquired jacket and a cap he fervently hoped was not inhabited, then set a large bag of post onto his shoulder and joined the trail of laden men, trudging along the gangway, down the pier, and past the watcher. Few passengers trickled off the steamer now, and the feet beneath the tan coat—which were all Holmes could see of him around the burden—moved restlessly. Holmes moved down the boards to deliver his sack to His Majesty’s waiting lorry, then kept walking, along the front to a warehouse. There he found a place where he could watch the watcher.

The man waited long after the last passenger came off, but he did not, Holmes was interested to see, then go on board and conduct a search. This could mean he had no authority to do so, or that he had been told not to draw attention to himself. On the other hand, it could indicate an excess of confidence in his own invisibility and his quarry’s lack of skill.

Eventually, the man abandoned his position and strode down the pier. Holmes eyed the few remaining taxis, but the man did not turn towards them, nor towards the nearby parked motorcars. Instead, he went into the hotel directly across the way.

Checking out? Having a meal? Reluctantly, Holmes settled into his corner, but in the end, the man was back out on the street in four minutes, and walked directly to a car parked on the front. Holmes readied himself for a sprint to the taxis, but to his surprise, the man walked around to the passenger side, tossed in his hat and coat, and got in. There was a flash of white: a newspaper.

He was waiting for the next steamer.

Holmes stayed in the shadows.

Half an hour later, a boat drew in, but the man merely leant forward to see where it was docking, then went back to his paper.

He was not waiting for just any steamer, but specifically the next one
from Holland. Which would be the boat from Amsterdam, arriving in—Holmes checked his pocket-watch—approximately two and a half hours. Adding the forty minutes the man had waited before abandoning his watch the last time, that gave a tired and hungry detective nearly three hours in which to assemble the materials he required.

Holmes turned and went into the town.

He returned two and a quarter hours later, stomach filled, beard trimmed, wearing a clean shirt, carrying the tools he needed to break into the watcher’s motorcar.

The motorcar was gone.

The old man in the tea stand informed him that the big man in the tan great-coat had gone into the hotel, then come out and left in a hurry, less than half an hour before. A telephone call, Holmes thought.

Another trail lost.

The delay in Harwich cost him five hours, and his residual wariness drove him to take a most indirect path to London. An eleven-hour trip from the Hook of Holland to Liverpool Street took nearer to twenty-four, landing him in town well after dark on Saturday at London Bridge station, which he judged to be nearly as unexpected for a traveller out of Holland as it was inconvenient. And to prove it, there were no large men lurking near the exits.

Nonetheless, things soon became very interesting, which was how he found himself in a walled-up window, twelve feet above the ground.

Because of the question about the safety of telephones—any organisation capable of manipulating Scotland Yard would have no trouble buying the services of telephone exchange operators—he had not tried to reach Billy beforehand. He set off from the London Bridge station on foot, keeping to the darker streets.

Even with all his senses at the alert, they nearly had him.

He was standing across the street from Billy’s house, wondering if the darkness of its windows and the lack of sound from within were possible on a Saturday night, when the blast of a constable’s whistle broke from a window over his head. One glance at the men who emerged from both
ends of the street told him that, whistle or no, these were not the police—and then he was running.

Sherlock Holmes was unaccustomed to having difficulties making his way around London. He once knew intimately all the patterns and sensations of the city (although he had never much cared for the image of a spider web that the great romanticist Conan Doyle insisted on using) and in any neighbourhood within miles of the Palace, he knew the doors left ajar, the passageways that led nowhere, the stairways that gave onto rooftops, the opium dens full of men who would be blind for a trace of silver across their palms.

Then came the War, and the aerial bombing, and the inexorable changes in the city during the years since. He’d been retired for two decades now, and loath as he was to admit it, the speed with which life changed was growing ever faster. Added to eight months of absence from his home, it was making him feel like a man resuming a language once spoken fluently, whose nuances had grown rusty.

He did not care for the sensation, not in the least. And although the older parts of Southwark were little changed, even here his urban geography proved to be ever-so-slightly out of date, gracing a long-disused alleyway with builder’s rubbish, filling an easily prised window with brick. He was grateful the builders had taken the short-cut of bricking the hole in from within, which left just enough of a sill outside for a precarious perch.

Perhaps it was time to acknowledge that his city had passed to other hands.

A figure appeared at the end of the passageway; a torch-beam snapped on. The man saw the scaffolding and came to give it closer consideration, not thinking to do the same to the walls on the opposite side. Holmes kept absolutely still, willing the man to come closer, to stand below him—but then a second torch approached, and this man went to join his partner.

When the passageway was empty again, Holmes cautiously shifted until he was sitting on the ledge, his long legs dangling free. When his circulation was restored, he eyed the ghostly lines of the scaffold. Instead, he wormed his way around and climbed sideways, following a route that
he had practiced under the tutelage of a cat-burglar, twenty-three years before. In five minutes, he was on the roof; in forty, when the first faint light of Sunday’s dawn was rising in the east, he was crossing Waterloo Bridge.

Not altogether shabby for a man of his years, working under outdated information.

Still, the day had proved sobering. He’d told Dr Henning that he had resources in London, were he only able to reach them, but with all else that had changed in this city, he was beginning to wonder if that was true. Lestrade bought off, Mycroft under arrest, even Billy driven from his house and his neighbourhood taken over. Would this new Prime Minister—a Socialist, after all—see Sherlock Holmes as a living fossil? If he could make it through the guards at the Palace …

No, he would not play that card unless he had no other.

He was free, fit, and on home ground. He paused at the end of the bridge, looking upstream. As the light strengthened, he could see the Embankment path, and in the farther distance, Ben’s tower riding over the bulk of the Houses of Parliament and the brick monstrosity of New Scotland Yard. However, his eyes looked not at those centres of authority, but at the Underground entrance that stood, waiting.

Four stops up the Metropolitan Rail line to Baker Street. Half an hour to reassure himself that Russell had made it to Town, that she and the child were safe.

And if he did not appear? She would remain where she was as long as possible; when she did emerge, she would be even more cautious than usual.

He turned his back on the Metropolitan line. There was much to do before the funeral.

Chapter 48

B
ack at the bolt-hole, I found Goodman reading in front of a low-burning fire. He rose, stretching like a young whippet, and dropped the book onto the chaise longue.

“You look tired,” he observed.

“Very.”

“I, on the other hand, am rested and in need of air. I shall return.”

I started to protest, then decided against it. Even two or three hours of sleep would make all the difference to the day. And after all, no one in the city was looking for Robert Goodman: He was the one person among us who could walk with impunity among police constables and hard men alike, invisible in his innocence. If he had wanted to give Estelle and Javitz to the police, he’d have done so long before this; as for leading the police back here—deliberately or inadvertently—I was safe, as he could have no idea where the back exit debouched.

I changed my protest to a nod, and reminded him to check his surroundings with care before he stepped into or out of the hidden entrance.

As I curled up on the sofa with the travelling rug, I wondered where in this almighty city Holmes might be hiding. I noticed my certainty, and smiled: I had not even questioned that he would be here.

Then the smile faded. If Mycroft lay cold in his coffin, who among us was safe?

*   *   *

When I woke, the coals were grey, the building was silent, and there was no sign of Goodman. I glanced at the clock, and saw to my surprise that it was nearly ten: I had slept almost five hours.

I took a cursory bath and dressed, and still no Goodman. As I took up the pen to write a note, telling him that I would be back shortly, I saw that the letter I had written to Holmes was not on the table. I had not been so heavily unconscious that I would not have heard him pass through, which meant that Goodman had taken it with him when he left.

Why?

I could think of no reason that did not make me uneasy. On the other hand, I could think of nothing Goodman had done or said to threaten betrayal. Perhaps he’d decided to deliver it himself—he knew where the funeral was. I shook off my apprehension, then walked the exit route nearly to its end before diverting into the adjoining building.

The surgeon’s offices might well shut down their telephones with close of business on Friday, but on the other side was a firm of solicitors, some of whom had been known to come in on a weekend. Fortunately, none of the desks were filled with a hard-working junior partner; equally fortunately, the telephone earpiece emitted a lively buzz. So I helped myself to a desk in one of the more impressive offices, dragged a London telephone directory onto the blotter, and phoned Lestrade.

I’d caught him going out, he said, but before I could apologise, he told me to wait a minute. Footsteps crossed the floor, and I heard his voice and those of two females, one older and one young. I heard him say that they were to go ahead, he’d join them as soon as he’d finished this telephone conversation.

The voices retreated, a door closed. The footsteps came back.

“That’s better,” he said.

“I’m sorry to keep you from church,” I said. “I was only wondering if you’d found a telephone number or an address for Mr West?”

“It took some time, the gentleman doesn’t appear to want casual callers. The telephone number’s more difficult, that has to wait until tomorrow.”