woodwind on a third. The conductor, Mr Eves, was sitting alone.
Despite the fact that he was in the string section, Rufus Stone was also sitting by himself. He waved as Sherlock caught sight of him, and indicated the spare chair at his table. For a long moment Sherlock debated whether to find a table by himself, but in the end he walked across and joined Stone.
‘Sleep well?’ Stone asked.
‘Not too badly,’ Sherlock replied.
‘The hotel is very impressive. Speaking as a man who is more used to hay as his quilt and the night sky as his ceiling, the bed was far too comfortable for my liking. When I woke up I found I was marooned in the centre of a mattress that was so soft it would have given a marshmallow a run for its money. It took me five minutes of exertion to struggle to the edge. I swear that if I’d slept for a half hour longer I would have sunk without trace.’
Sherlock didn’t reply.
There was silence for a few moments, then Stone continued quietly: ‘You said back in England that you had bought yourself a violin.’
‘Yes, I did.’ Sherlock felt as if he should add something, but he couldn’t think what to say.
‘I presume that your purchase of such an instrument indicates that you still wish to wrestle the muse of music to the ground?’
Sherlock shrugged.
‘Sherlock,’ Stone said, ‘I understand your feelings. I wish things were otherwise. Life being the way it is, bad things happen more often than good. The trick is to see the sunshine behind the dark clouds.’ He paused. ‘Sherlock, if you believe only one thing that I say, believe this: I enjoy your company, and if your brother were to tell me tomorrow that my services are no longer required then I would still wish to continue to teach you.’
Sherlock felt an unaccustomed tightness in his throat. He looked away, then back at Stone. ‘I’d like that,’ he said hesitantly.
‘Of course,’ Stone said, ‘that will have to wait until this particular mission is over. If I am not careful, playing down to the level of these fiddlers and blowers will seriously compromise my skills.’ He looked around, then lowered his voice. ‘I have a bad feeling about all this,’ he said. ‘I can’t quite work out why, but something is wrong here. Something is very wrong.’ He glanced at Sherlock. ‘Be careful this morning. Be very careful.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
After breakfast, Sherlock watched from the hotel lobby as the rest of the theatre party, minus Mycroft, left in horse-drawn cabs for the Maly Theatre. Once they had vanished around a corner, Mycroft said: ‘Come on then. Let us go.’
He hailed a cab – a proper cab, not one of the thin boards on which people sat astride – and gave a junction of two streets as the address. Leaning over to Sherlock, he said, ‘We can walk the last hundred yards or so. Uncomfortable, but necessary. I always make it a rule not to reveal my ultimate destination to people I do not know, if I can help it. Half the cab drivers in this city are in the pay of the Third Section.’
When they arrived, Mycroft handed the driver a coin and waited until he had driven away before he indicated to Sherlock that they were going to cross the road and walk back a little way.
The building that Mycroft stopped outside was three storeys high, and made of a reddish-brown stone. A main entrance was situated in the centre of the ground floor, three steps up from the pavement.
Mycroft and Sherlock entered through the doors. Stairs led up from the lobby. As if he’d been there a thousand times before, Mycroft walked straight across to the stairs and put his hand on the banister. He turned to Sherlock. ‘They say that in the Winter Palace, here in Moscow, the Tsar has a small room that ascends from one floor to another, moved by some kind of steam-driven screw mechanism. The time when all buildings have such rooms cannot come too quickly for me.’ Puffing, he started to climb the stairs. Sherlock followed, smiling.
The first-floor landing gave on to a long, dark corridor that ran the length of the building. Sherlock could smell vague odours of food: boiled ham, boiled cabbage, bread. Mycroft walked confidently down the corridor until he came to a particular door. Glancing in both directions, checking that nobody was watching, he pushed against it.
The door moved.
‘The wood around the lock is splintered,’ Mycroft said. ‘This is decidedly not good.’
He opened the door and entered the hallway, pulling Sherlock after him. With a movement that was surprisingly quick for such a large man, he moved sideways, to the wall, and pushed Sherlock in the other direction. Sherlock realized that Mycroft was trying to minimize the time they were silhouetted in the doorway, just in case there was somebody in the apartment with a gun. Good thinking.
They waited for a few moments, listening. There was no sound from inside. Eventually Mycroft moved forward, down the hall to a half-open door.
The room inside was a mess. It was, or had been, a living area, but the chairs were smashed and the tables knocked over. Paintings on the walls were disarranged. Shards of pottery and glass lay on the floor: the detritus of smashed decorative figurines, teacups and wine glasses. There was nobody there, living or dead.
Mycroft’s eyes scanned the room quickly. He turned and walked back into the hall to check the other rooms. Looking over his shoulder, Sherlock could see that one was a bedroom, the other a bathroom. They were empty of people as well, but they had been comprehensively wrecked in the same way as the main room.
‘Someone was searching for something,’ Mycroft murmured, standing in the entrance hall and looking around.
‘They didn’t find it,’ Sherlock said.
‘You are correct, but how did you come to that conclusion?’
‘Because if they had, there would have been areas where nothing was smashed or overturned – the areas that they would have got around to if they hadn’t found what they were looking for.’
‘Unless…?’ Mycroft prompted.
Sherlock thought for a moment. ‘Unless whatever it was they were looking for was actually in the last place they looked.’
‘Or, more likely…?’
‘Or they weren’t sure how many things they were looking for, so they had to search everywhere.’
Sherlock’s brother nodded. ‘Correct. What else can you deduce from the state of this place?’
‘Whoever searched it didn’t care if anybody knew they had searched, otherwise they would have made an effort to be tidier.’
‘You are again correct.’ Mycroft’s face was bleak. ‘I fear for Robert Wormersley’s life. Either he was here at the time, in which case he has been taken away by whoever smashed the door down and ransacked the apartment, or he was absent, in which case he would have turned tail and run as soon as he saw the damaged door. Either way, his fate is still uncertain.’
‘He wasn’t here at the time,’ Sherlock said with certainty.
‘And you deduce that how?’
Sherlock indicated the front door. ‘The door was locked, but not bolted. You can see the bolts still intact on the back of the door. If your friend was in the apartment and had locked the door then he would certainly have bolted it as well. The fact that it was locked but not bolted indicates that he had left, and locked the door behind him.’
‘Good work,’ Mycroft said approvingly.
Sherlock moved back into the main room and looked it over again. There was something about it that bothered him, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Something out of place. Or something in place where everything else was out of place. It nagged at him like something caught between his teeth.
‘I’m not seeing something,’ he said. ‘Or I’m seeing something but not understanding it.’
‘It will come to you,’ Mycroft said, ‘if you let it. Let your mind mull the problem over while you think about something else.’ He looked around. ‘I fear there is nothing else to see here. We should leave.’
Outside, in the street, Mycroft hailed a passing carriage. Sherlock tugged his sleeve. ‘I think I can remember
