“Perhaps it is not, but earlier there was a watcher at the hospital. He followed Miles Fitzwarren’s taxi—don’t drop the paper, for pity’s sake!—so we shall have to move him, as well.” Holmes’ voice was slurred—from wearing a set of toothcaps, no doubt—and then became more so as he bit into a sandwich (bacon, from the smell of it—how could he chew bacon with false teeth?). “Miss Beaconsfield will be safe for a few days, but Fitzwarren and I shall go to her parents and convince them that she needs to be put into private care. That ought to clear the decks for action.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go back to the Temple. The answer is there.”
“What about the police?”
“What about them?”
“Shouldn’t they be notified?”
“What an admirable citizen you can be,” remarked the filthy, unshaven man beside me, around a mouthful of sandwich. “By all means, do go visit your friend Inspector Lestrade. He’d be terribly interested.”
“For goodness sake, Holmes, be serious.”
“You may be right,” he said, to my astonishment. “Miss Beaconsfield cannot be moved for at least three or four days, and Watson will be wearing a bit thin by then. May as well put the official force at her bedside. One could only wish the Met weren’t so confoundedly possessive about their crimes. They’ll be very uncooperative when we refuse to divulge where we’ve spirited her away to. Still, it’s no crime to aid a victim or investigate a church, not yet.”
“What about Miles—” I started to ask, but was interrupted by a loud, meaty voice standing over us.
“Awlright, you,” said the constable, “these benches aren’t put here for you to eat your breakfast on. If you’re not goin’ in to buy a ticket, move along.” Holmes obediently dropped the remainder of his sandwich into an unspeakable pocket, turned and lifted his hat to me (although I was still wearing my mud-encrusted walking gear), and shambled off to his cart. The PC turned his attention on me, and I hastily folded my newspaper around the thick envelope Holmes had slipped onto the bench, put it into my pocket, and joined the queue of early-morning workgoers to buy my ticket.
THIRTEEN
Friday, 14 January
—John Chrysostom
At the cost of an apologetic smile and some feeble explanations, I achieved a room at the Vicissitude, and immediately the door was locked behind me, I took out the envelope Holmes had slipped me and spread it out across the bed. To my astonishment, it proved to contain a positive wealth of disparate information concerning the Temple, with snippets about finances interspersed with histories, some of them quite detailed, of a number of members, including Margery Childe.
As I read through it, and decided that Holmes could not possibly have assembled the documents himself, I gradually realised that the most interesting thing of all was not the information itself, but the way it was presented: The writing was that of one individual, distinctly a professional clerk; the ink and the paper were both uniform and fresh; the method behind the collection, although at first glance nonexistent, revealed a devious style of investigation I thought I recognised; and the sorts of information—interviews with chairwomen, the revealing contents of a dustbin, lengthy periods of following key members about—smelt of an investigator with machinations more subtle, and more extensive, than those of the official police.
It appeared that for some reason Holmes’ brother Mycroft, whose title of “accountant” for an unspecified governmental agency referred to more than fiscal matters, had become mildly interested in Margery Childe’s church several months earlier. He had begun to account for her movements, her resources, and the people she came into contact with, and when his brother had appealed for information, it was simply a matter of having a clerk copy the file. It would have taken Holmes and me weeks to duplicate the work here, and inevitably we should have missed things.
My diagnosis of a mild curiosity came not so much from the desultory nature of the information as from the actual gaps, which would never have happened had Mycroft turned his full attention to the question. There was a report of Iris Fitzwarren’s death, for example, but not the details. The full report of the inquest held on Delia Laird’s drowning the previous summer was included, but it only confirmed in greater detail what I had already learned from Veronica. The file contained various unimportant items, such as a mention of Veronica’s flirtation with Socialism her final term at Oxford, but for the most part the information was thought-provoking, even in its incomplete state.
It was in the collection of financial data that Mycroft had dug deepest, and with the most disturbing results.
Delia Laird’s “good family” that Ronnie had referred to was also a wealthy one. They were long-established manufacturers from the Midlands, and Delia herself had inherited a sizeable part of her father’s estate when both her brothers were killed in France. She had left all her money to Margery. There was a great deal of money.
Iris had left less, a matter of ten thousand pounds. And there was a third woman, whose name I had not heard before: Lilian McCarthy. She too was moderately wealthy, she too had died—in a road accident, without witnesses, back in October. It seemed to have been her death that sparked Mycroft’s interest. And she too had left a major part of her possessions to the New Temple in God.
Aside from that trio of suspicious deaths, however, Mycroft had found nothing concrete. There were rumours, for the most part about Margery herself, but none were substantiated and many were absurd, the sorts of wild accusations a figure like Margery Childe would tend to attract. Even Mycroft, who had never met the woman and who possessed an endless depth of suspicion, particularly when it came to females, had clearly discounted the tales of black rituals and witchcraft. She had no criminal record, she was generally well regarded even by people who detested her message, and she seemed to have solid alibis for the days all three women had died. I was interested to see that Ronnie’s information had been correct, that Margery had indeed been married and widowed. In fact, this was the most devious thing Mycroft had been able to find about her: that she did not talk about having had a husband.
The Vicissitude had gone silent as my fellow club members dressed and ate and left for the day. With difficulty, I inserted the sheaf of papers back into the envelope and took it with me down the hall to the bath. I didn’t actually think about what I had read, not with the top of my mind, at any rate. Instead I found myself thinking about Holmes as he had given me his brother’s information, about his mania for privacy and his penchant for disguise. I lay in the bath and visualised him scuttling into one of his bolt-holes as an elderly newsboy and popping out dressed as a nun, into another with a street pedlar’s tray of pencils and stationery and out again with mops and buckets, and I wondered, not for the first time, how one went about establishing even a single bolt-hole, where one might come and go, at odd hours and in odd attire, without exciting comment. One could hardly place an advertisement. In addition, a bolt-hole would lack a cook, and one could not expect to receive mail. The number of guests one could take in were also limited.
My mind wandered through the various and sundry drawbacks of the surreptitious life and, drowsing chin-high in the warm water, I became more and more bogged down in speculation about minor details: What if one needed a garment that was in another bolt-hole? If the building changed hands, did one arrive one evening like a rabbit finding its burrow dug up? And was there any way of rigging a telephone, and what if builders came through the
