alley to Mycroft’s building on Pall Mall.
I trotted up the steps, shunned the lift in favour of the stairway, and pounded on Mycroft’s door, slightly breathless. I felt his presence arrive on the other side, where he paused to look through the secret peep-hole in the centre of the knocker, and then the bolt slid. I slipped past him, shedding rain-coat and hat as I went, not needing to ask where Holmes was because I could see his stockinged feet sticking out from the end of the comfortable sofa.
The six-foot-plus man laid out on Mycroft’s long settee had at some point since the morning changed into a Frenchman. From his silk-stockinged feet to the sleek part of his hair, his trousers, shirt-front, and even the still- attached moustaches were unmistakably French. He’d even, I noticed from a glance at the suit’s coat that lay over the arm of a nearby chair, dug out his Legion d’Honneur. It was honestly come by—Holmes avoided a display of unearned ribbons when he could, even as disguise. The most English things about him at the moment were the squat crystal glass balanced on his chest and the India-rubber ice-bag from the Army and Navy Stores that rested on his head.
A good deal of my apprehension deflated abruptly, leaving me dizzy with relief. Just bruises, then, and perhaps a cracked rib, judging by the care with which he drew breath. And a splint on one finger.
Mycroft placed a glass of brandy in my hand and pushed me gently into a chair. I put the glass aside and sat on the edge of the upholstery.
“You needn’t look so mother-hennish, Russell,” Holmes said crossly. “There’s nothing here that some strapping won’t take care of.”
“What did they use?” A length of pipe, unless the cut on his jaw came by a fall.
“Brass knuckles and boots, for the most part. One of them picked up a cobble-stone.” He gestured at the jaw. “But the other ordered him to drop it. They weren’t aiming to murder me, just to render me
“Not robbery?”
“If so, it was secondary to the pleasure of knocking me about.” He shifted in the pillows, and winced. “If you are not going to drink that excellent brandy, Russell, I shall happily offer it a home.”
His speech and his eyes seemed clear, and the head wounds minor. I handed him the glass. He took a mouthful and made a face; since I was certain that any brandy kept by Mycroft would not make him grimace, I added a loosened tooth to my mental list.
The brandy settled him. After a minute, he went on without prompting.
“Two men, one of them a gentleman or something very near—and yes, I am fully cognisant of the absurdity of that statement, but his voice through its muffling mask had the accents of authority and education, and he commanded the other to drop the stone with the bark of an officer. Unfortunately, that phrase, ‘Drop it,’ were the pair’s only words—not sufficient to identify the speaker’s origins or identity.” He paused to take another swallow, reducing the glass to half its original level, then resumed. “The authoritative individual was a fit man of around five feet ten or eleven inches—I fear the alley was too dimly lit to allow for any more detail. He had done a certain amount of boxing, I should say, but like most amateur pugilists, he was not entirely familiar with the sensation of hitting with a set of brass knuckles.
“The other man, the muscles of the team, was more street fighter than pugilist. Certainly he was no respecter of the Queensberry rules. He was more than comfortable with a brass weight wrapped between his fingers. Shorter, heavy-set as a stevedore, smelling of beer and bad teeth, wearing a working man’s boots.”
Even the sharpest and most disciplined of minds tends to wander somewhat under the influence of a pummelling followed by several ounces of alcohol. Holmes, I thought, could use a gentle firming-up.
“Was the muscle local talent, from London? Or a country boy?”
That made him focus. The confusion at the back of his eyes dissipated as he concentrated on the memories, reaching through the tumult of attack to retrieve the more subtle sensations.
“There must have been three of them in all, with the third in charge of transport. They were waiting down the street from the door I’d gone through an hour earlier.”
“How did they find you?”
“They may have ears within the War Offices. I had been interviewing there all day, in my guise of a retired French colonel seeking candidates for posthumous awards, and at least three clerks had the opportunity of overhearing the conversation I had with Alistair at Justice Hall regarding our progress, during which I chanced to mention my destination for the evening. I shall give you their names, Mycroft; see if you can turn up any past wrongdoing among them. In any case, my attackers waited up the street, saw which way I was going, and drove past me. As I walked, I noticed two men, their heads ducked against the rain, dash from a private car into a doorway. When I had gone past, they came back onto the street and one of them—the muscles—literally tackled me from behind and ran me into an alley-way. We ended up in the entrance to a yard, with fisticuffs among the dust bins.
“Mycroft,” he interrupted his narrative to say. “Do you think you might ring down for that light supper you offered me earlier? Soup or a boiled egg for me, although Russell no doubt could do with something more substantial, having had dinner at Simpson’s snatched out from under her nose. Where was I? The dust bins, yes.
“The muscular individual was quite aware that a blow to the head induces sufficient disorientation to allow for a more leisurely treatment to the rest of the victim’s anatomy. And so it proved. Against him alone I might have stood; the two of them soon had me down and were, as they say, putting the boots in.
“The muscles was at the most seven inches over five feet, but solid. Wearing an Army greatcoat, newer boots with stiffened toes, steel perhaps—but no, his smell was of city streets and the docks, not of manure and grass. A city tough. He’ll have a black eye, but no obvious marks on his hands—he wore gloves.
“The other: not, perhaps, a gentleman in the strict sense, but a man of education. A schoolmaster or high- ranking clerk, perhaps a gentleman’s gentleman. Homburg type rather than cloth cap, although they’d abandoned the actual head-gear and pulled on stocking caps, or balaclavas, when they came out of the doorway. His overcoat was good, heavy wool, dark colour but not I think actually black. Neck scarf, also dark, gloves that gleamed in the light, polished lace-up boots. A city suit, I’d say, under the overcoat. No facial hair that I could tell, but I’d have missed a trimmed beard or a small moustache. The gentleman will have a limp: I gave his left knee a good one when I was down. And his overcoat is missing a button.”
With a smile of satisfaction, he worked a cautious hand beneath Mycroft’s borrowed dressing gown to the pocket of the shirt, and brought out a silk handkerchief, which he held out to me. I knelt down at the low table with it, and allowed it to unroll. A round of horn dropped out. Wordlessly, Mycroft brought me a small leather kit containing powders, brushes, and insufflator. I raised three partial prints from the surface, and allowed Mycroft to put the object in a safe place, away from the attentions of his housekeeper.
A rattle in the service lift heralded our much-delayed evening meal, with its mixture of invalid food and hearty labourer’s fare (for Mycroft, whose brain sweated mightily for king and country). Mycroft grumbled that the roast beef was dry, but as it was close on to midnight I privately reckoned we were fortunate not to be served shoe leather and yesterday’s sprouts.
Holmes looked more substantial after his soup and boiled egg, and I decided not to press for putting him to bed. Not that I would have succeeded; the most I could have hoped for was that he would occupy the sofa while Mycroft and I retreated to our beds. However, I judged that he would stand up to further conversation, so I told him how far I’d got in tracking down the green-eyed Helene. Which admittedly was not far, so that with the social aspects of my hours with Gwyn left out, my narrative was brief.
“And you, Holmes? Did your crawl through the War Offices records bring you anything? Apart from a beating, that is?”
“Sidney Darling was a staff officer in France, although when I telephoned to Justice this afternoon, neither Alistair nor Marsh could say that Darling and Gabriel ever came into contact over there.”
“I have to say, neither of your attackers resembles Darling in the slightest.”
“Another name did come up,” Holmes continued. “Also a staff major, also posted to that section of France. Ivo Hughenfort.”
“Alistair’s cousin?”
