impertinence. Am I to call for my servant or will you now leave?’
‘I am delighted to have met you, Lord Ravenshaw.’
‘I am grateful to you for returning my watch, Mr Holmes.’
I was glad to be out of that room, for I had felt almost trapped in the midst of so much wealth and privilege. As we stepped onto the path and began to walk back down to the gate, Holmes chuckled. ‘Well there’s another mystery for you, Watson.’
‘He seemed unusually hostile, Holmes.’
‘I refer to the theft of the watch. If it was taken in June, Ross could not have been responsible for, as far as we know, he was at the Chorley Grange School for Boys at that time. According to Jones, it was pawned a few weeks ago, in October. So what had happened to it in the four months in-between? If it was Ross who stole it, why did he hold on to it for so long?’
We had almost reached the gate when a black bird flew overhead, not a raven but a crow. I followed it with my eye and as I did so, something made me turn and glance back at the hall. And there was Lord Ravenshaw, standing at the window, watching us leave. His hands were on his hips and his round, bulging eyes were fixed on us. And although I could have been mistaken for we were some distance away, his face, it seemed to me, was filled with hate.
NINE
The Warning
‘There is no helping it,’ Holmes said with a sigh of irritation. ‘We are going to have to call upon Mycroft.’
I had first met Mycroft Holmes when he had asked for help on the behalf of a neighbour of his, a Greek interpreter who had fallen in with a vicious pair of criminals. Until that moment, I had not the remotest idea that Holmes had a brother seven years older than himself. Indeed, I had never thought of him as having any family at all. It may seem strange that a man whom I could quite reasonably call my closest friend and one in whose company I had spent many hundreds of hours had never once mentioned his childhood, his parents, the place where he was born or anything else relating to his life before Baker Street. But, of course, that was his nature. He never celebrated his birthday and I only discovered the date when I read it in his obituaries. He once mentioned to me that his ancestors had been country squires and that one of his relations was a quite well-known artist but in general he preferred almost to pretend that his family had never existed, as if a prodigy such as himself had sprung unaided onto the world stage.
When I first heard that Holmes had a brother, it humanised him — or at least, it did until I met the brother. Mycroft was, in many ways, as peculiar as he: unmarried, unconnected, existing in a small world of his own creation. This was largely defined by the Diogenes Club in Pall Mall where he was to be found every day from a quarter to five until eight o’clock. I believe he had an apartment somewhere close by. The Diogenes Club, as is well known, catered to the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. Nobody ever spoke to each other. In fact, talking was not allowed at all, except in the Stranger’s Room, and even there the conversation hardly flowed. I remember reading in a newspaper that the hall porter had once wished a member good evening and had been promptly dismissed. The dining room had all the warmth and conviviality of a Trappist monastery, although the food was at least superior as the club employed a French chef of some renown. That Mycroft enjoyed his food was evident from his frame, which was quite excessively corpulent. I can still see him wedged into a chair with a brandy on one side and a cigar on the other. It was always disconcerting to meet him, for I would glimpse in him, just for a moment, some of the features of my friend: the light grey eyes, the same sharpness of expression, but they would seem strangely out of place, translated, as it were, to this animated mountain of flesh. Then Mycroft would turn his head and he would be a complete stranger to me, the sort of man who somehow warned you to keep your distance. I did sometimes wonder what the two of them might have been like as boys. Had they ever fought together, read together, kicked a ball between them? It was impossible to imagine, for they had grown up to become the sort of men who would like you to think that they had never been boys at all.
When Holmes first described Mycroft to me, he had said that he was an auditor, working for a number of government departments. But actually this was only half the truth and I later learned that his brother was much more important and influential. I refer, of course, to the adventure of the Bruce-Partington plans when the blueprints for a top secret submarine were stolen from the Admiralty. It was Mycroft who was charged with getting them back, and that was when Holmes admitted to me that he was a vital figure in government circles, a human repository of arcane facts, the man that every department consulted when something needed to be known. It was Holmes’s opinion that, had he chosen to be a detective he might have been his equal or even, I was astonished to hear him admit, his superior. But Mycroft Holmes suffered from a singular character flaw. He had a streak of indolence so ingrained that it would have rendered him unable to solve any crime, for the simple reason that he would have been unable to interest himself in it. He is still alive, by the way. When I last heard, he had been knighted and was the chancellor of a well-known university, but he has since retired.
‘Is he in London?’ I asked.
‘He is seldom anywhere else. I will inform him that we intend to visit the club.’
The Diogenes was one of the smaller clubs on Pall Mall, designed rather like a Venetian palazzo in the Gothic style, with highly ornate, arched windows and small balustrades. This had the effect of making the interior rather gloomy. The front door led to an atrium which rose the full length of the building with a domed window high above but the architect had cluttered the place with too many galleries, columns and staircases and the result was that very little light was able to disseminate its way through. Visitors were permitted only on the ground floor. According to the rules, there were two days of the week when they could accompany a member to the dining room above, but in the seventy years since the club had been founded, this had never yet occurred. Mycroft received us, as always, in the Stranger’s Room, with its oak bookshelves bowing under the weight of so many books, its various marble busts, its bow window with views across Pall Mall. There was a portrait of the Queen above the fireplace, painted, it was said, by a member of the club who had insulted her by including a stray dog and a potato, although I was never able to grasp the significance of either.
‘My dear Sherlock!’ Mycroft exclaimed as he waddled in. ‘How are you? You have recently lost weight, I notice. But I’m glad to see you restored to your old self.’
‘And you have recovered from influenza.’
‘A very mild bout. I enjoyed your monograph on tattoos. Written during the hours of the night, evidently. Have you been troubled by insomnia?’
‘The summer was unpleasantly warm. You did not tell me you had acquired a parrot.’
‘Not acquired, Sherlock. Borrowed. Dr Watson, a pleasure. Although it has been almost a week since you saw your wife, I trust she is well. You have just returned from Gloucestershire.’
‘And you from France.’
‘Mrs Hudson has been away?’
‘She returned last week. You have a new cook.’
‘The last one resigned.’
‘On account of the parrot.’
‘She always was highly strung.’
This exchange took place with such rapidity that I felt myself to be a spectator at a tennis tournament, my head swivelling from one to the other.
Mycroft waved us to the sofa and settled his own bulk on a chaise longue. ‘I was very sorry to hear of the death of the boy, Ross,’ he said, suddenly more serious. ‘You know, I have advised you against the use of these street children, Sherlock. I hope you didn’t place him in harm’s way.’
‘It is too early to say with any certainty. You read the newspaper reports?’
‘Of course. Lestrade is handling the investigation. He’s not such a bad man. This business of the white ribbon, though. I find that most disturbing. I would say that, allied with the extremely painful and protracted manner of the death, it was placed there as a warning. The principal question you should be asking yourself is whether that warning was a general one, or whether it was directed towards you.’
