instead of taking a nap, as I used to do, but I shall happily delay that pleasure.”
“No, no, I'm just off the train, I'd appreciate a breath of air.”
With a grimace at the disappearance of an excuse for lethargy, Mycroft caught up his stick and straw hat and we descended onto Pall Mall, to turn in the direction of St James's Park.
“Have you seen your brother?” I asked.
“I have not seen him since January, although I spoke with him across the telephone twice, on Wednesday afternoon and again last night.”
“Was he in London?”
“I believe so. In any case, Wednesday's call was from Paddington, although that can mean anything.”
“Or nothing.” Paddington Station sent trains in all directions north of London, but it was also a main connecting stop on the city's Underground. “What did he want?”
“The earlier call was to request my assistance with an overseas element of an investigation.”
Mycroft's oddly unfamiliar face-it now had bones in it, and the skin had gone slack with the loss of padding-was held in an expression I nonetheless knew well: noncommittal innocence. The quick mind inside the slow body was waiting to see if I knew what Holmes was up to before he revealed any more.
“Let me guess: Shanghai.”
Inside Britain, Holmes' sources of information were without peer, but once an investigation stretched past Europe or certain parts of America, his web of knowledge developed gaps. Mycroft, however, had spent his life as a conduit of Intelligence that covered the globe: When Holmes had need of information beyond his ken, he turned to Mycroft.
Shanghai had not been a guess, and Mycroft saw that.
“Yes, I was given to understand that young Damian had come to Sussex.”
“Damian was there when we got in on Monday, then both of them were gone when I woke up Tuesday. I don't know where they were going, but last night I found Holmes' file on Damian, and I was… concerned.”
“Concerned,” he mused, nodding at the ground.
“Damian killed a man in 1918,” I blurted. “Not the same man he was accused of killing in 1919.”
“In neither was he charged.”
“You knew, about both of them?”
“I did.”
“Why…” I stopped: He hadn't told Holmes for the same reason he hadn't told him of Damian's existence in the first place. “Have you seen his paintings-Damian's?”
“A few of them. I hear he has a small show at a gallery off Regent Street, I'd planned on going to that.”
“He paints madness.”
“I'd have thought that a common enough theme amongst modern artists.”
“With more or less deliberation. But there's something profoundly unsettling about his work.”
“Hmm,” Mycroft said.
“What about last night's phone call?”
“My brother was enquiring whether or not I had seen Damian.”
“He's lost him?”
“I don't know if ‘lost’ is the correct term, but Damian left the hotel where they were staying early on Friday morning, and as of eleven o'clock last night he had not returned. I believe Sherlock would have got a message to me, had the boy reappeared.”
“I see. Well, in any case, I should talk with Holmes before I go up to Oxford, just to let him know where I am and see if he needs my assistance. Do you have any idea where he might be?”
Mycroft reached into his breast pocket and took out a business card, crisply engraved on a startling bright red stock with an address on one of the lanes that connected with Regent Street. On its reverse, in Mycroft's handwriting, was another address: 7 Burton Place, in Chelsea.
“I do not know where my brother is, but those are the addresses of Damian's gallery and his home. Either of those might be a good place to start.”
I looked at him in surprise. “You've simply been carrying this around?”
“When I heard that you were not with my brother, I knew it would not be long before you came looking.”
I grinned and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, then reversed my direction.
“What shall I do with your valise?” he called after me.
I waved a hand in the air and broke into a trot.
To my surprise, the gallery that sold Damian Adler's paintings was not some narrow and dingy upper-storey hole several streets “off” Regent Street, but a prosperous, glass-fronted shop a stone's throw from the Royal Academy. A bell dinged at my entrance. Voices came from behind a partition at the back and a sleek woman in her early forties poked her head around the wall, giving me a brief but penetrating once-over. I did not think that I impressed her overmuch, since I had not intended to enact a patron of the arts when I left Sussex. “I shall be with you momentarily,” she said in a French accent.
“I'm happy to look,” I told her. She went back to her conversation, which had to do with the delivery of a painting.
The gallery had two rooms. The first displayed paintings, and a few small bronze sculptures, that would have been considered dangerously
I spotted the first of Damian's paintings immediately I came into the room. It was an enormously tall, narrow canvas, twelve feet by two, and appeared at first glance to have been sliced from a larger, more complete image: branches and leaves at the top, giving way to a length of marvellously realistic bark and, at the bottom, the clipped grass out of which the tree was growing.
The centre of the image was a confusion of colours and shapes: a hand outstretched, a leg and foot dangling above the grass, and most troubling, a piece of a man's face with a staring, dead-looking eye. With a shock, I realised that I was looking at a strip, as it were, of a larger image, showing a man hanging from a tree-but if the eye was dead, that tensely extended hand was definitely not.
In a lesser craftsman, I would have thought he had painted the eye badly; in a lesser mind, I might have assumed the artist did not know how a dead hand would hang. But this was Damian Adler, so I looked at the card on which the title had been typed:
Woden in the World Tree
If I remembered my Norse mythology, the god Woden-or Odin-had hanged himself for nine days in the tree that supported the world, so as to gain knowledge. Woden was blind in one eye.
I nodded in appreciation, and moved to the next painting, that of a hand shaking itself in a mirror-clever, but nothing more. The one after that appeared to be a solid wall of leaves, meticulously detailed, until one noticed that the twin points of gleam to one side were eyes: The hidden image gradually resolved into the ancient pagan figure of the Green Man.
Next time I walked through the woods, the back of my neck was going to crawl.
The room's far wall at first glance seemed to have a window in it, but did not.
What it had was a
The painting reminded me of something: I walked forward to see if I could figure out what.
Up close, everything changed. The bricks began to glisten and take on the texture of living matter, as if skin had been flayed from a muscle wall. Closer still, the cracks and mortar grew alive with tiny creatures, squirming and baring sharp, minuscule teeth; the pale shape in the upper corner suggested less a daylit moon than it did a mouth,
