“Thursday.”
“The day after Mycroft was…” It was hard to say the word. Billy’s face went even darker.
“I heard about that first thing in the morning, and they were at my door an hour later. They let me go at tea- time and I bundled my family off to-” He glanced at Goodman for the first time, suddenly aware of a new hazard.
“Sorry,” I said, and made the introductions. The two men shook hands, Billy eyeing the owl feather with curiosity. “Well, Billy, I suggest you collect your son and join your family until we get this sorted. Holmes should-”
He cut me off. “I’ve sent the family away, but that doesn’t mean I’m hiding. This is my town, they can’t pull me in and beat me up and expect to get away with it. When I’m finished for Mr Holmes I’ll go home and sit tight.”
Goodman stirred, putting together the bruises on Billy’s face with the situation as a whole.
I smiled at the irate Cockney. “Somehow it doesn’t surprise me to hear that.”
“And I don’t think Mr Holmes knows about it-any rate, he didn’t on Tuesday. I told him that Mr Mycroft hadn’t been seen of late, but that was all I knew.” The
“You’ve talked to Holmes?”
“Down the telephone,” he said. “And there’s another thing. He was phoning from Amsterdam-”
“
“That’s what he said. And I know I’m probably not up on this modern machinery,” Billy admitted, “but the timing’s dead fishy. Mean to say, he rings me Tuesday, there’s hard men in the neighbourhood Wednesday, Mr Mycroft dies late Wednesday, and I’m picked up and questioned Thursday.”
“So you talked with him before Mycroft…”
“Right. And afterwards he could’ve told anyone that he’d talked to me. Or, Southwark could have nothing to do with Mr Mycroft. But like I say, it’s just… fishy.”
“Well, I expect to see Holmes soon. Certainly by tomorrow. But, why did he ring you?”
“To ask me to look into this Brothers bloke. To see if he had any ties to a criminal gang, maybe a new one making a push into London from the East.”
“Does he know Brothers is still alive?”
“He is? Are you sure?”
“Almost certainly.”
“No, he told me Brothers was dead, but that people might not know yet. Mr Holmes wanted me to look for what the man’s ties might’ve been to a gang, and if they’d want to do anything more than cross him off their books.”
“Revenge, yes. And have you found anything?”
“I put out the word, but people were only starting to get back to me when my usual lines of communication got… disrupted. I did find that the bloke what works for Brothers, Marcus Gunderson-he came into steady employment ’bout a year ago. Got himself a nice flat, stopped associatin’ with his usual friends.”
“When was this?”
“Hard to pin down.”
“Might it have been November? He started working for Brothers then.”
“That lot, it could’ve been last week and they’d be hard-pressed to be sure. Do you think this Brothers might have anything to do with Mr Mycroft?”
“Other than the timing being, as you say, fishy, most of the links are pretty feeble. I know you and I were trained by the same man, but you have to allow that events can be simultaneous but unrelated.”
He looked unhappy, but then, so did I.
“I’m thinking of getting my hands on one of them, asking a few questions of my own,” he said abruptly.
I opened my mouth to object, but then closed it. Memories of brutalising information from Brothers’ man Gunderson two weeks earlier were still strong enough to make me queasy, but the fastest way to find out what the devil was going on in London was to ask one of the villains. However, I definitely wanted Holmes there to supervise. “They’re certain to show up at the funeral. We’ll see what we can do about separating one of them from the pack after-”
But he stepped forward with a look of panic, grabbing my arm. “You’re not going! Promise me you’re not going to stick your head up there!”
“Ow, Billy, stop!” He relaxed his grip, but not his urgency. “Look, I can’t not go to Mycroft’s funeral.” Besides which, if Holmes failed to show up at the bolt-hole-always a possibility-I should have to look for him at the funeral.
“They’ll take you. You’ll be dead as he is, and then what will Mr Holmes do?”
I was touched by the worry contorting his face, and amused at Holmes’ concerns being his priority. And although I was very aware that he could be right about the threat, I could think of one way to mitigate the risk.
“You may be right,” I said, and began to smile. “Do you suppose some of your kith and kin would like to attend as well?”
Chapter 41
Funeral services, according to the newspaper, would be conducted at graveside, at four on Sunday afternoon, some twenty-seven hours from now. I had no idea if Mycroft’s will had specified the arrangements-frankly, I’d have thought my brother-in-law would prefer the simple disposal of a cremation-but if he had not made them, who had? His grey secretary, Sosa? His housekeeper, Mrs Cowper? Whoever was responsible, they knew Mycroft well enough to leave the Church out of the picture.
The need to see Holmes was an ache in the back of my mind, although I had grown accustomed to Goodman’s presence, and even grateful for it. From a practical standpoint, any police officer looking for a tall young woman in the company of an even taller American with burn scars-and possibly a child, depending on how up-to-date their information was-would not look twice at a tall young woman accompanied by a short, blond, green-eyed Englishman. But more than that, I found Goodman combined the amiability of a retriever with the bounce of a Jack Russell terrier. He was quite mad, of course, but his was a very different kind of lunacy to what had taken Mycroft, this dark madness I could feel growing around me like electricity. If the unseen threat was an approaching thunderstorm that raised one’s hair into prickles, Goodman was a bucket of water atop a half-open door: an unsubtle but refreshing distraction.
Still, I longed for Holmes.
I looked at some boys dashing across the lawn after a football, and made up my mind.
“I need to leave you for a time,” I told him. “Perhaps two hours. Do you want me to return here, or shall I meet you elsewhere?”
He, too, eyed the football. “I shall be here.”
It was both a relief and unexpectedly nerve-wracking to set off across the city on my own. When I reached the first of my destinations, I had to sit for a while and let my jangles dissipate.
Holmes was not here, in the second of his bolt-holes, tucked within the walls of one of London’s grand department stores. The Storage Room, as he called it, had been the first bolt-hole I had seen, in the early years of our acquaintance. Holmes had not been there then, and he was not here now.
Nor was he at any of the other four I checked, although two of them showed signs that he had been there with Damian the previous month.
If Holmes was in London, he was lying very low.
I rode back to the theatre district in a taxi, looking at streets that had gone unfamiliar to my eyes, infected with strange new currents, new and unpredictable and dangerous. Men with rifles sent at an instant’s notice to the farthest reaches of the land. The ability to trace the source of telephone calls. Men who were neither criminals nor police, but both. The brutal murder of one of the king’s most loyal and powerful servants.
These bustling pavements could be hiding any manner of threat; the wires overhead might even as I passed be
