Mycroft answered, “As you say, it takes some doing to imagine O’Hara in custody for more than a few days. He was—how did you put it to me? ‘Wily as a mongoose, slippery as a cobra, more deadly than either.’?”
“If not in custody, then what?”
“The Bear is awakening.”
“‘The Bear,’?” I said. “You mean Russia? But I thought our relations with them had settled down—don’t we even have a trade agreement now with the Bolsheviks?”
“Oh, yes, they’ve played on our attachment to India by accepting industrial supplies in exchange for little more than a verbal guarantee that they would cease their intrigue in the sub-continent. But then last May, Curzon had to threaten to withdraw trade unless they took their agents out. And, oh the surprise, they have not.”
“And you imagine the Bolsheviks might have laid hands on O’Hara,” Holmes asked, sounding dubious, “or got him in their sights, where the Tsar’s agents could not?”
“Not precisely,” Mycroft replied.
Holmes frowned. “A native agent, then, who worked his way inside O’Hara’s guard?” He seemed only a shade less doubtful about this possibility, but still Mycroft shook his head.
“Sherlock, I am not convinced the man is dead.”
“What, then? Not dead, not held, then—No,” Holmes said sharply as Mycroft’s meaning fell into place. “Kimball O’Hara would never side with the Russians against the Crown. Never.”
“Perhaps not side with them, necessarily, but use them? As a tool for India herself? The move towards self- rule—Gandhi’s
“Sensibilities, yes, but not in his loyalties. He would not turn coat against His Majesty.”
“Then perhaps he is truly imprisoned. Or dead.”
Holmes did not answer. Instead, he took up the much-folded papers from the table, holding them to the light, one by one, for a long and close study. He found no marks, no pinpricks, nothing to indicate a secret message to the outside world. He even turned the leather case outside-in, as if the stitches of closure might have been embroidered into a code, but there was nothing. And as I knew that Mycroft would have given the objects the same scrutiny, I did not bother doing the same: If neither Holmes brother had found a hidden message, it was unlikely that I should do so.
“Has Kipling been questioned?” Holmes asked.
“The last he heard of O’Hara was in 1916. A letter of condolence arrived some months after Kipling’s son was killed.”
“Who was O’Hara’s contact within the Survey?”
“O’Hara hasn’t worked with the Ethnological Survey for nearly three years, but at the time it was Nesbit, and before that, Apfield. You knew him, I think?”
“We met,” Holmes said, not apparently enchanted with the memory. He turned to me to explain. “The Survey of India is responsible for producing accurate maps of the country, but it is also the home of the Ethnological department, wherein lies Intelligence. Under cover of survey and census, the British government assembles the subtler kinds of information concerning secret conversations and illicit trade among the border states. When I was there, Colonel Creighton headed the Survey. A good man.” He finished packing the documents into their leather amulet case and slid the object back across the table to Mycroft. “You need me to go?”
“I don’t want to ask,” Mycroft said, which was answer enough.
“We’re off to India, then?” I said. Ah well; we’d had a pleasant holiday for nearly an entire week. And at least it wasn’t Russia: India was the tropics, which meant that my chilblains, begun in Dartmoor in October and not improved by two months in an underheated Berkshire country house broken by a cross-Atlantic trip for a missing ducal relative, might have a chance to heal. Still, I thought of the newspaper headlines I had read on the train, “Hindu-Moslem Bitterness—Riot in Calcutta Suburb,” and suppressed a sigh. “Do we have time to pack a bag?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Holmes said absently.
“Holmes!” I protested, but to my surprise, Mycroft came down on my side.
“The Special Express leaves Victoria at one-forty tomorrow afternoon. The P. & O. steamer meets it in Marseilles at midnight Friday. Plenty of time.”
Not precisely what I would term
We were even allowed to finish our coffee before having to race for a cab.
The late train for Eastbourne was standing at the platform when we reached Victoria, but for some reason it proved unusually popular, with the result that we did not have a compartment to ourselves. This meant that the tale of Kimball O’Hara had to wait until after the car had deposited us at our door, and we had retrieved our trunks from the attic, and we had begun to pack them. Mrs Hudson, although we insisted we could manage, wrenched the clothes from our hands and took out her copious supply of tissue-paper. I admitted defeat and, leaving her bemoaning the lack of time to repair and tidy the summer-weight garments retrieved from the back of the cupboards, I followed Holmes down the hall-way and into the laboratory, where I cornered him.
“Very well, Holmes, you may proceed.”
“About young O’Hara? Yes, an intriguing lad. You know his history, you said?”
“Born in India to Irish parents; mother died early; father drank himself to death, leaving Kim in the charge of a native nurse, who let him run wild so that he grew up in the bazaar.”
“Save that it was opium that killed O’Hara, not alcohol, the rest is correct.”
“As I remember it, when the boy was twelve or thirteen he finally came to the attention of the authorities, particularly the man who was in charge of the spy network operating along the Northwest Frontier. That was Creighton. He sent the boy to school for a while to learn his letters and numbers, before reclaiming him for the Intelligence service. Kim and some other agents foiled a Russian plot, something about treason among a group of hill rajas, and that’s where the book ends.”
“It was immediately after that tale’s conclusion that I met him. He was only seventeen, but already a full operative of the Survey. He had befriended an old Tibetan lama, and was returning him to his home when our paths coincided, and I joined them.”
“You mean you actually got to Tibet? I assumed that was one of Conan Doyle’s romanticisms. Wasn’t Tibet closed to outsiders until Younghusband’s expedition in, what was it, 1904?”
“That set off in the final weeks of 1903, and yes, all that time Tibet was closed tighter than a miser’s purse- string,” he said with satisfaction. “Which is why I needed to accompany the lama.”
“And you wanted to go to Tibet because . . . ?”
“Mycroft, of course.”
“Of course,” I muttered.
“This was 1892, when the Russian threat was at its height. The Tsar wanted India, the Viceroy wanted to know which pass the Cossacks would come pouring through, and I happened to be on hand. As was young Kimball O’Hara. I had joined with a group of explorers, calling myself Sigerson, and made a lot of careful notes and maps. O’Hara came to our camp one black night, begging food for his lama, this grubby dark-skinned lad with eyes that saw everything. As he was leaving, he allowed his shirt to fall open and reveal a certain charm around his neck which, combined with an exchange of phrases, told me that he, too, was engaged in the ‘Great Game’ of border espionage. He crept back to my tent at midnight and we had a long talk, and ended up travelling together for a time. Most of what we did is no doubt still under lock and key in some ministry office, but after the Bolshevik revolution, I had assumed that the need for guarding India’s passes had faded. However, it would seem that in Mycroft’s eyes, The Game persists, albeit against different players.”
He made to leave the room, but I had to protest, for his tale had been in no way adequate.
“But what was he like?” I persisted.
By way of answer, Holmes paused with his hand in a trouser pocket, then drew it out and dashed the contents onto the table nearest the door. A handful of small, disparate objects danced and rolled and threatened to fall to the floor, but no sooner had they come to a rest than he scooped them up again, and turned a questioning
