The God of the Hive

Holmes.

I went to the guest room and changed into some of the clothes I kept there, then went through the other rooms so they bore the same disruption as the rest of the flat. I removed the chair from under the door-knob, noticing with a pang that Mycroft’s walking stick stood in its umbrella stand. He used it mostly for the regimen of afternoon strolls he had begun, following his heart attack; if he’d been carrying his stick that night, would he have had a chance for self-defence?

When we let ourselves out of the secret doorway, the only things left behind were Mycroft’s sixteen political thunderbolts and one considerable mess.

The bobbing light accompanied us along the passageway to Mycroft’s other hidden exit, on St James’s Square. Again, I stowed the candle and peered through a peep-hole to make sure our emergence from a blank wall would not be noticed, then worked the mechanism.

In the outer world, the low sunlight made the autumnal leaves glow; in sympathy, perhaps, a small corner of my mind began to light up, and I fingered the letter in my pocket.

Mycroft Holmes had a Russian doll of a mind. He was a man whose secrets had secrets. Any layer of hidden meaning was apt to have another layer, and one below that.

At opposite ends of the flat, he had left a letter to his brother and an unidentified key. With any other man, one would assume the two were unrelated. With Mycroft, there was the very real possibility that he had left two clues that by themselves were without meaning, that only together-if one persisted in the great hunt of life and found both-created a third message: The key is in the Interpreter. Or a fourth meaning. Or fifth.

There was also the likelihood that I was ascribing to my departed brother-in-law an omniscience he lacked: Even Mycroft Holmes would hesitate to lay out clues that his brother would not think to follow.

I badly wanted to talk to Holmes about this; however, I did have another set of remarkably sharp eyes with me.

“Let’s take supper,” I said, the first words either of us had spoken for at least ten minutes.

Down a side street lay a tiny Italian restaurant where I had once had an adequate meal. They were not yet serving, but were happy to ply us with wine and antipasti. When the waiter was out of earshot, I pulled Mycroft’s letter from my pocket and laid it on the table-cloth before Goodman.

“I found this in a place where not one man in a million would think to look. I’d like you to read it, keeping in mind that its author was the man who designed and arranged those bookshelves. Tell me if anything strikes you.”

He read it, twice, then folded it and handed it back to me. “There is hidden meaning there.”

“Yes,” I said in satisfaction. “I thought so.”

“Something to do with the secretary, I should have said. Who, unlike the housekeeper, goes nameless.”

I unfolded the page, and my eyes were drawn, as they had been each time before, to that unlikely capital I on the verb Interpret.

“Wait here,” I told him, and slipped out of my seat and onto the street outside.

Ten minutes later, I sat down again, finding a laden platter of glistening morsels and a full glass of red wine. I laid my purchase on the table.

A glance at its table of contents gave me the page number, and a review of the story took a few minutes. I gazed into space for a bit, and when the waiter drifted past, I woke and asked, “Have you a London telephone directory?”

“I am sure we do. Which letter were you looking for?”

“K. I think.”

He went away, confused but cheerful about it, and Goodman said, “Not S for sigma?”

By way of answer, I placed the book before him, open at the twenty-year-old short story “The Greek Interpreter.”

Unless the capital I had been a slip of the hand, which I found hard to credit, it was a teasing directional arrow left by Mycroft for his brother. Mycroft’s first appearance in Dr Watson’s tales had been in the adventure of the Greek Interpreter, when Mycroft’s upstairs neighbour, a pathologically naive freelance interpreter named Melas, was sucked into a case of theft and deception, nearly losing his life in the process.

The Christian name of Mr Melas is not given, but the victim of the would-be theft, who died in the event, was a young man named Kratides. Key to his troubles was a sister named “Sophy.” A name that in Greek begins with the letter sigma.

There was nothing under S, or the name “Sophy” or “Kratides.” But when I hunted through the M listings, there was one Melas. The given name began with an S.

Perhaps Mycroft’s message was to be read: The key is the Interpreter.

Chapter 43

The address attributed to S. Melas was a quiet, tidy yellow-brick house in Belgravia, less than a mile from Mycroft’s door. In the swept front area a pot of bronze chrysanthemums flamed. The bricks were scrubbed, the paint was fresh, the brass knocker gleamed.

A maid answered the door. I handed her a card with a name that was not quite my own, apologised for the late hour, and asked if I might speak with Mrs Melas.

Instead of asking us in, she took the card and left us on the front step, looking at a closed door. Caution clearly ruled over societal niceties in this household.

We did not wait long before the maid returned. She led us to an airy, slightly old-fashioned drawing room that smelt of lavender and lemons. In a minute, the lady of the house herself came in.

Sophy Melas was a tall, dignified woman in her late fifties, whose Mediterranean heritage had kept all but a few strands of white from the thick black hair gathered atop her head.

I apologised for our unannounced visit, but beyond that, could see no point in anything but bluntness. “Madam, were you related to a Mr Paul Kratides?”

Her near-black eyes went wary. “Paul was my brother, yes.”

“You married a Greek interpreter named Melas, who some years earlier had attempted to rescue you and your brother from villains?”

“I think you should leave.”

“My brother-in-law was Mycroft Holmes,” I told her.

She swayed a fraction, as if a sharp breeze had passed through the room, but said coolly, “How does this concern me?” Her accent was Greek overlaid with decades of life in England.

“I believe Mycroft may have left some information with you. I’d like to know what it was.”

“Why would you imagine the gentleman left anything with me?”

I sighed, and held out the decorated house key, dropping it into her outstretched palm. “I could have fitted it to your front door, but I thought that ill-mannered. Do I need to do so?”

She rubbed the key’s engraved letter with her thumb, then looked up at me. “It would not do you any good. I had that lock changed years ago. Still, you may as well sit. Would you like something to drink? Coffee?”

I allowed her to offer us hospitality, and when we had before us an elaborate silver coffee setting, she said, “I was sorry to hear of Mr Holmes’ death. The world is a lesser place.” It was a formal declaration, expressing no more emotion than the obituary in The Times had.

“What was your relationship with Mycroft, if I may ask?”

“I was… his friend. Occasionally I acted as his secretary.”

“That must have been a recent appointment.” I had last met the weedy and humourless Richard Sosa in December, when Mycroft was ill and asked us to take his secretary a letter one Sunday afternoon. However, all sorts of changes might have come about while I was out of the country.