She peered at the sky, opened her umbrella, and scurried off. My original thought had been to share a taxi and accompany her home, but the face at the window had put an end to that idea. I waited until she was securely across the street, then stepped out to greet the man in the hat.
“You were looking for me?” I asked him. Had he been more obviously a policeman, I should have left through a back door.
“Mr Mycroft Holmes sent me to find you.”
“And the skinny little bureaucrat wants to drag me clear across town?” I responded.
The man looked at me oddly, then realised what I was doing. He reached up to tip his hat in acknowledgment. “I'd hardly call Mr Holmes skinny, even now,” he replied, “and Pall Mall is no distance at all.”
He knew Mycroft; it was safe to climb into the car with him.
I glanced down the street, found Millicent Dunworthy gone, and got into the passenger seat of the car belonging to Mycroft's operative.
34
to discern the subtle patterns of the heavens, freeing
sources of Power to fuel the divine spark.
The manipulation of the Elements is a life-time's work.
Testimony, III:7
WHAT DOES HE WANT?” I ASKED.
“Mr Holmes is not in the habit of sharing that sort of information with his employees,” the man said, putting the motor into gear. “However, it may have to do with an arrival from Shanghai.”
At last!
We were on the street near Mycroft's back door in no time at all. I got out, then looked back at the driver. “You're not coming in?”
“I was only sent to find you. Good evening, Miss Russell.”
“Good night, Mr…?”
“Jones.”
“Another Jones brother,” I noted. “Good night then, Mr Jones.”
As way of proof that watched plots never come to a boil, my absence from Mycroft's home had opened the way for furious activity. For one thing, Holmes was back, looking sunburnt, footsore, and stiff, no doubt from sleeping on the ground. Also hungry, to judge by the ravaged platter of sandwiches on the table before him. He'd been there long enough to bath, and therefore long enough to be brought up to date by Mycroft-the files and papers relating to the investigation had been moved; Damian's redirected letter lay on the top.
I greeted him, with more reticence than I might have were Mycroft our only witness to affection. He nodded at me and returned his attention to the fourth person in the room.
Apart from his lack of sunburn, the newcomer looked even more worn than Holmes. The small man's now-damp linen suit was as wrinkled as a centenarian's face, and bore signs of any number of meals and at least one close acquaintance with oily machinery. He had not only slept in his clothing, he had lived in them for days, and for many, many miles.
The arrival from Shanghai was not a document.
“You have been in Shanghai, I perceive,” I blurted idiotically.
The three men stared at me as if I had pronounced on the state of cheese in the moon, so I smiled weakly and stepped forward, my hand out. The small man started to rise.
“Don't stand,” I ordered. “Mary Russell.”
He subsided obediently, clutching his plate with one hand; the other one took mine with a dapper formality that sat oddly with his state of disrepair.
“This is Mr Nicholas Lofte,” Mycroft said. “Recently, as you say, of Shanghai.”
“Pleased to meet you,” he said smoothly, with an accent as much American as his native Swiss.
One whiff of the air in his vicinity explained why Mycroft had left a space between himself and Lofte; it also meant that I retreated to Holmes' side rather than take the chair between them.
Mycroft circled the table with a bottle, playing host to the wine in the glasses as he told me, “From time to time, Mr Lofte takes commissions for me in the Eastern countries. He happened to be on hand in Shanghai, so my request for information was passed to him.”
Which did not explain why Mr Lofte himself occupied a chair in Mycroft's sitting room: Was the information he had compiled too inflammatory to be committed to print? As if I had voiced the speculation aloud, Mycroft said, “His dossier of information was rather lengthy for telegrams, and writing it up and presenting it to the Royal Mail would have delayed its arrival until the middle of the week.”
“As I had my passport in my pocket, I merely presented myself at the air field instead and, as it were, affixed the stamp to my own forehead,” the man said. “Sat among the mail sacks across Asia and Europe, which doesn't leave one fresh as a daisy, if you'll forgive me, ma'am.”
My distaste had not passed him by, but he seemed more amused than offended by it, his eyes betraying a thread of humour that, in a man less stretched by exhaustion, might have been a twinkle.
“No need for apology, Mr Lofte, I have been in similar circumstances myself.”
“So I understand,” he said, which rather surprised me. Before I could ask him how he knew, he had turned back to Mycroft. “It cost me a few hours to get free of my prior commitments after I'd got your orders, but Shanghai's a small town for its size, if you get my meaning. It didn't take me long to find your man.”
He paused to add in the direction of Holmes and me, “My brief was to find what I could about an Englishman named Damian Adler, and about his wife Yolanda, previous name unknown. Adler's name came with a physical description and a date and place of birth, his mother's name, and the fact that he might be a painter. And that was all.
“I got lucky early, because he'd been in and out of the British Embassy a number of times last year, first to replace his lost passport, then to add his wife and young daughter to it. You hadn't said anything about a daughter, but I figured it had to be he, so I started from there.
“Before I go any further, do you want this in the order of how I came upon the information, or re-arranged chronologically? They're more or less reversed.”
Mycroft answered before Holmes could. “You've had time to consider your findings; feel free to tell it as you wish.”
Holmes shot him a glance, having no doubt been on the edge of demanding the bare facts as Lofte dug them out, and leaving the synthesis to his audience. But Mycroft knew his man, and the Swiss mind was more comfortable with an ordered sequence of events. Lofte picked up another sandwich, downed another swallow of wine, and began.
“Very well. My sources were the Embassy, several police departments, and the Adlers' circle of friends and business acquaintances. I wanted to speak with Mrs Adler's family, but their home was a day's travel away, and I judged that time was of greater import than complete thoroughness.
“The earliest sign of Damian Adler in Shanghai was June 1920. One man I spoke with thought Adler had been there for several weeks before that, but June was the time he took up rooms in a bro-er,” he said, shooting me a glance, “in a pleasure house. The owner of the house had got in the habit of having one or two large and relatively sober young men living on the premises, at a low rent, to help keep the guests in line. I asked him if this wasn't like putting a fat boy in charge of a chocolate shop, and he told me that yes, there was a certain tendency to, er, indulge in the goods at first, but he had found that having one or two dependable neighbours gave the girls a sense of family, and someone to go to if a client became rowdy.”
I did not look at Holmes to see how this version of Damian's tale was hitting him, but I had felt him wince at
