The God of the Hive

“By no means recent. I have worked for him, on and off, for more than twenty years. Since I returned to this country and married Mr Melas,” she added. Then she smiled, unexpectedly. “I did occasionally act as his type- writer, but my primary purpose was to provide eyes and ears. Sometimes this was in the manner of his other… associates, but generally my use was for Mr Holmes himself. Your brother-in-law liked occasionally to discuss his affairs with what he termed ‘a pair of sympathetic and intelligent ears.’”

I looked at her with considerable interest. This woman not only knew of Mycroft’s agents, she was claiming that she had been one of them. Moreover, it sounded as if he utilised her for a sounding board, as Holmes had done with Watson, and later me. Why had it never occurred to me that the brothers might be alike in this way?

If that was the case, it pointed to a degree of trust I would not have expected of Mycroft. This aloof and rather hard-looking woman could know secrets Mycroft shared with no one else.

“Do you know anything about his death?” I asked her. “All I have heard is that he was killed outside of a raucous night-club. The Times obituary made it sound as if he had been a client.”

“Absurd,” she said flatly.

“I agree. But why else would he have been there?”

“I can think of any number of reasons why Mr Holmes would have been in that area. He was apt to meet his associates in the oddest locations.”

My rising hope was cut short by suspicion: Mycroft’s intellect ranged far and wide, but physically, my brother- in-law kept to a rigorously limited circuit-as Holmes put it, his brother could not be bothered to go out of his way to verify a solution. “Interesting,” I said mildly. “I thought Mycroft rarely went out to such meetings.”

“That was certainly true in the past,” she said. “However, when a man looks into the eyes of his own mortality, he confronts many demons. I believe that one of the demons Mr Holmes faced, after his heart attack, was that his disinclination to stir from his common rounds made him dangerously predictable. Either the world had changed, or his own unshakeable habits had created what he termed ‘an eddy in the currents of crime’ around him. In either event, he made an effort to change those habits.”

And I had thought Mycroft’s new regime of taking exercise was merely a weight-loss response to illness. I should have known there would be more than one meaning.

“So, who was he seeing at that club that night?”

“Ah, I’m sorry, you misunderstood my meaning. He occasionally spoke about his personal regrets-knowing that I of all his friends would understand-and even about his colleagues, but I was not privy to his secrets. Certainly not those to do with his work. And you have to realise, his remarks to me were often quite incomprehensible. In the general run of such things, we would be in the middle of some quite ordinary conversation-music or art or a current scandal-when he would drop an utterly unrelated and quite oblique remark. As if he wished to see my unstudied reaction.”

“Er, can you give me an example?”

“Let me think. Yes: Last month we went to the theatre to see a pair of Shaw plays about deception, and as we strolled home, talking about the strictures of drawing-room plays and the life of an actor, he asked me what I thought about the wage demands of coal miners. A topic that was much in the news at the time.”

“I see. And he never happened to mention anything related to this night-club?”

“Not that I remember. Although I believe something has been preying on his mind, of late.”

“What?”

“That I do not know. I only noticed that he seemed mildly distracted the last two or three times I saw him.”

Goodman spoke up from the sofa; I had all but forgotten he was there. “Mr Holmes asked an odd question the last time you talked,” he said in a voice of certainty.

“Did he? Now that you mention it, yes he did. It concerned loyalty. At first I was taken aback, because I thought he was making reference to my loyalty, but it seemed that was not his concern.”

“If not yours, then whose?” I asked her.

“I do not know.”

“The exact words he used were…” Goodman coaxed.

“‘Where does faith part from loyalty?’” she answered. “He had been reading the Greek philosophers, a discussion of the Virtues. He said something about one being legal and the other emotional. I’m sorry, I have little education, and I often did not understand what Mr Holmes was saying.”

Faith, as the Latin fidelis, connotes an unswerving belief; loyalty is linked with lex, a legal commitment. Faith is bone deep and unquestioning, whereas loyalty comes with a sense of threat and the possibility of failure.

I asked, “Did you get the impression that he was talking about himself? Wondering if he should remain loyal, for example? Or someone else?”

She answered slowly. “It sounded-looking back, that is; I can’t be certain what I felt at the time-but I should say it sounded as if he was trying to understand the underpinnings of someone’s concept of loyalty. Not his own.”

“But that’s all he said?”

“It’s all I remember. When I asked him what he meant, he laughed and changed the subject.”

“To what?”

“Oh, just a question about a novel we’d both been reading.”

Mycroft Holmes discussing a novel? For that matter, Mycroft discussing business with a woman he’d first met in the course of a crime? There must be unexplored depths to the woman-although Dr Watson’s story intimated as much.

“When was this-your last conversation with him?”

“The twenty-seventh of August, a Wednesday. He had been very occupied for several days, to the extent of cancelling a musical engagement, but he rang me that morning to say he was free for a few hours.”

That Wednesday, I had been flying to Orkney while Holmes was bobbing about the North Sea: It was, as she said, the first day in many that Mycroft had been free of us. This was also the day before he was taken in by Lestrade for questioning, and then disappeared.

“You said Mycroft occasionally talked about his colleagues. Any of them in particular?”

“Recently?”

“In the past few months.”

“I’m sure he did, but nothing that stands out in my mind. Let me see. His secretary-his work secretary, that is, Mr Sosa-was out for some days with what I gathered was an embarrassing illness, although I couldn’t tell you the details. One of his associates in Germany went missing for a period, in March, I believe it was, and My-Mr Holmes was quite preoccupied.”

“Do you know if this associate reappeared?”

“I think Mr Holmes would have mentioned, had his worries been for nothing. To put my mind at rest.”

A missing agent, I noted: Had Mycroft died in Germany, I should certainly know where to begin enquiries.

“Anyone else?”

“He talked about you and your husband a number of times during the winter,” she replied. “He was relieved when you came away from India without mishap, and concerned later, when you had problems in California.”

I blinked: That Mycroft would talk about business matters to a pair of “sympathetic ears” was surprising enough, but that he talked freely about his family was extraordinary.

“And very recently-that same Wednesday, it would have been-he told me a tale about a young associate who travelled from the Far East in record time. He loved it when one of his young people had a triumph like that. Let’s see, what else? He mentioned Prime Minister MacDonald, once or twice. And there was a colleague, Mr West-Peter James West, he called him, with all three names-who had done something unexpected. Speaking up to his superior, I believe it was, although that was one of those cryptic remarks, nothing detailed like the other young man’s trip from the East. Oh, but he did tell me about a conversation he’d had with the king a few weeks ago, when they both happened to be passing through St James’s Park.”

“Do you remember what that conversation was about?”

Her black eyes, unexpectedly, sparkled with inner amusement. “I believe it was to do with the lese-majeste of ducks.”