Chapter 24

The train to Amsterdam was small and antique. In a country more tolerant of dilapidation, this rural transport would have devolved into a threadbare state, but here it was so scrubbed it could only be considered worn.

Two other passengers boarded at the tiny station, a long-married couple (two wedding rings, worn thin) that Holmes would have dubbed “elderly” had he not suspected they were younger than he. They waited for him to enter, he gestured for them to go first, and all three might have stood on the platform being polite until the train pulled away had the conductor’s whistle not broken the old woman’s nerve. They took seats at one end of the car, and Holmes walked to the other, settling behind his newspaper.

It was a Dutch paper, bought as much for camouflage as to provide him with distraction during the journey, but the reaction of the old couple was telling: They had known him for a foreigner without him opening his mouth.

Three stops up, Holmes folded the paper and joined the disembarking throng of two office workers (one had the chronic stains of an accountant’s ink on his cuffs, the other’s fingers betrayed long hours on a typing machine). He followed the two as far as the station’s news stand, saw at a glance that the offerings here were no more sophisticated than the station at which he had begun, and returned to the train. At the last minute, he changed direction to fall in behind a louche young poet (the scrap of paper sticking from his pocket betrayed a sonnet) ambling towards the next car up, and boarded that one instead: not that he expected anyone to trace his movements, but Holmes had not lived to grow grey by neglecting to lay false trails.

He shook open the paper, making an effort to damp down his simmering impatience. There was no point in leaping from his seat at every stop to search for a copy of The Times. No point whatsoever. He would soon be in Amsterdam, and given a wide choice of international newspapers.

They would, he knew, contain nothing of interest. It was, after all, only Tuesday. Taking into account the presence of a child, and the sparse provisions of transportation out of Orkney, Russell might well still be working her way down from the northern reaches of Scotland.

The probability of finding a message from her in The Times agony column was decidedly thin.

On the other hand, there was Mycroft to account for. Holmes still found Russell’s report of a Scotland Yard raid on his brother’s flat hard to credit. Could it have been a false rumour? Chief Inspector Lestrade was obdurate, but the man had never before displayed signs of outright insanity.

This, thought Holmes, half ripping a page as he turned it, this was why he’d avoided family ties for so much of his career: It made matters so much more difficult. He felt a bit like the boat whose hull he’d attacked the previous afternoon, thick with barnacles and sea-washed debris. If he didn’t have Damian on his hands; if Russell didn’t have the child-

He grimaced, and violently folded away the newspaper. One might as well say that Russell was a drag on his progress. Or Mycroft. Which was not the case. Or, rarely the case.

He spent the rest of the journey listening to accents, accustoming his ears to the peculiarities of the language and rehearsing the shape of a few key phrases.

When the train pulled into central Amsterdam, Holmes made his way, with deliberate Dutch politeness, down from the train and towards the news stand. As he suspected, the only Times the man possessed was Monday’s. Still, he bought that and a copy of a Paris newspaper, enquired when the Tuesday editions of both would arrive, and walked down the street until he found a clothier with a French name.

One does not need to be invisible, merely explicable.

He left with his English clothing in a parcel under his arm, looking for the barber the salesman had recommended. When he had finished there, he carried his purchases down the street to a small cafe, requesting een kopje koffie en een broodje, alstublieft in a thick French accent. He lit a French cigarette, passed a manicured hand over his newly trimmed hair (both hair and beard trimmed into the latest Parisian mode), and sat in his new Parisian collar and Lyonnaise neck-tie, the very picture of a monsieur in Amsterdam. Only when the tiny cup and roll were placed before him did he open the English paper.

He’d been deciphering the grumbles and whispers of the agony column for more than a half century; his eyes knew its texture the way a sculptor’s hands knew a lump of stone. One glance told him that there was nothing of interest among the close-packed print. Still, he read his methodical way down each column before he permitted himself to be certain: Neither Russell nor Mycroft had left their mark there.

He dropped some coins and both newspapers on the linen cloth and set about the day’s tasks.

His first stop was a post office. There he mailed the letter to The Times that he had prepared early that morning: a notice for the agony column that began, “Bees may thrive in foreign lands.”

However, the untoward actions of Scotland Yard made him question the wisdom of depending on the Royal post. Letters were too easy to open. What he required was a private and less easily breached means of communication: a telephone. And there was, on the surface of it, no particular reason why he could not go into a public telephone office to make his trunk call.

But why should that phrase, on the surface of it, make him think of an incident that had taken place this past spring, late one evening in the midst of the Pacific Ocean? He’d been at the rails in conversation with Russell, idly tracking a bit of flotsam off the bow, paying no conscious attention to the object except that the back of his mind kept nudging his eyes towards it. Only when the insistent pressure reached forward, making him aware of the unlikelihood of a floating object keeping pace with a ship, did his eyes suddenly give the thing a shape and an identity: the dorsal fin of a disturbingly large shark.

He needed to concentrate on the Brothers case, but Lestrade’s uncharacteristic audacity kept protruding from his thoughts like that bit of flotsam from a moonlit sea.

It might be that a trap was being laid. Granted, it was equally plausible that Lestrade had lost first his mind and then his job, and that Mycroft was even now settled at his desk in that anonymous governmental office, savouring a morning coffee and considering the state of the world.

He shook his head: one matter at a time. Once Damian was free from danger, there would be time enough to focus on Mycroft. Still, there was no harm in being cautious. Without data, he might be jumping in for a swim beside a shark the size of a motorcar.

He found what he wanted twenty minutes from the station, a grand hotel that showed signs of renovations aimed at a modern traveller. He asked for, and received, a suite of rooms that was not the most expensive the hotel offered, but close to that, and informed the manager that his bags would follow by evening. To be certain, he enquired after their facilities for international telephone calls, and was assured that they had installed the most up- to-date equipment, and that if the exchange could handle the call, the hotel could support it.

Satisfied, he allowed himself to be escorted to the room, high up in the east wing, giving the bellman a tip that compensated for the lack of bags. He took off his hat, sat at the desk before an elaborate arrangement of fresh flowers, and lifted the earpiece.

A trunk call from this address did, as he’d expected, receive priority treatment. Within a quarter hour he was speaking with a familiar Cockney voice, the line crackling and occasionally dropping words, but tolerably clear as these things went.

The two men had known each other more than thirty years, since the eight-year-old Billy had introduced himself by attempting to pick Holmes’ pocket. On being caught, the young thief’s cheeky intelligence led Holmes to hire him on the spot, eventually to appoint him the most unlikely page-boy ever to grace Mrs Hudson’s kitchen. More importantly, Billy had become Holmes’ liaison with the street-boys he had dubbed his “Irregulars.” Now, the two men exchanged the sorts of greetings designed to communicate that they were both alone, and as secure as might be expected. Then Holmes got down to business, avoiding as always the unambiguous meaning and the personal name-one could never tell when a bored exchange operator might be listening in.

“I need you to get into touch with my brother,” Holmes began.

“You know he’s been arrested?”

“Arrested? My-” He bit back the name before he could finish it; the Bakelite earpiece creaked in his grip.

“You didn’t know?”

“I’d heard there was a raid, but an arrest? For what?”

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