The God of the Hive

I laughed, joined by Goodman’s shouted Ha! of humour.

I thanked Mrs Melas for her help, and made to rise. She seemed surprised, hesitating as if to ask something, but whatever it was, she changed her mind and got to her feet, holding out the key.

“Do you wish to keep this?”

“No,” I told her. “I think its only purpose was to point towards you.”

“Do you think so? I gave it to Mr Holmes many years ago, when he first helped me set up a household. It’s nice to think he kept it as a memento. Even if I had changed the actual lock.”

This was not at all what I had meant, but I could see no purpose in disabusing the woman of the notion that Mycroft’s keeping the key had an emotional, rather than merely practical, use.

At the door, Mrs Melas asked, “Would-do you think anyone would object, if I came to the funeral?”

“Whyever would they?” I replied. Which rather begged the question of who was going to be there to object?

“Ours was, well, not a liaison he openly acknowledged,” she said.

And only then, with her standing at my elbow, did my mind deliver up the question: Mycroft? Was the woman’s cool exterior in fact a struggle to contain grief? Had she been about to call Mycroft by name, when telling me about his concern for his agent in Germany? Did this mean that my brother-in-law’s diamond-hard mind and ungentle personality had a softer side? That Mycroft… that Mrs Melas…

I thanked her again, and made haste to get out the door.

Down the street, I became aware of Robert Goodman, a shadow at my side. I laughed, a shade uncomfortably. “From the woman’s reaction, one might almost think…”

“One might,” he agreed.

Ridiculous. Quite impossibly ridiculous.

Wasn’t it?

Chapter 44

She expected something, there at the end,” Goodman observed some indeterminate time later.

“You mean when she looked as if she was about to ask a question?”

“More as if she was hoping you might ask.”

I paused on the pavement, going over that portion of the conversation, her air of expectancy before she stood. “You may be right. I felt she was telling the truth, so far as it went. But holding something back as well. Was she waiting for me to give some kind of a password?”

“Somewhat melodramatic, that.”

I laughed, both because Goodman was saying it, and because of the woman’s history. “You didn’t read the end of the ‘Interpreter’ story.”

“You took it away before I finished.”

“The two men who kidnapped Sophy Kratides, killed her brother, and assaulted Mr Melas, were later found dead in Buda-Pesht. It looked as if they had stabbed each other in a quarrel; however, a Greek girl travelling with them had vanished.”

“More knives,” Goodman murmured.

“Knives are personal,” I commented. We walked on.

“Have you further plans?” he asked.

“I must speak with Mycroft’s colleagues,” I told him.

“Tonight?”

It was, I was startled to find, nearly ten o’clock. “Perhaps not. In any case, I’m not sure where to find the fellow she mentioned-Peter James West. He may attend the funeral; if not, it will have to wait until Monday. But Mycroft’s secretary-his proper secretary, that is, not…” Whatever role Sophy Melas played. “Sosa lives not too far from here; we could at least go past and see if his lights are lit. However, we shall have to approach him with care-he will not talk about anything he regards as an official secret. He knows me-I wonder if we might be able to convince him that you’re a part of the organisation? Can you stay silent and look mysterious?”

The expression Goodman arranged on his features was more dyspeptic than mysterious, but perhaps a bureaucrat would expect no less.

The grey-faced and humourless Richard Sosa was a life-long bureaucrat who for more than twenty years had kept Mycroft’s appointments book and typed his letters. The man lived, with an unexpected note of upper-class levity, in Mayfair, in the basement apartment of his mother’s house, around the corner from Berkeley Square. Sosa mere et fils had long settled into a mutually satisfactory state of bitter argument and disapproval, which occasionally blew up into more active conflict, such as the time his mother bashed him with a fry-pan for being late to a promised dinner.

Perhaps the “embarrassing illness” to which Mrs Melas referred had been another such episode.

At the top of the quiet street, I paused to study the noble doorways. Goodman murmured, “No-one awaits.”

I was sceptical, as he’d spent perhaps thirty seconds in the survey. “How can you be certain?”

He did not answer; it occurred to me that I’d asked an unanswerable question, so I changed it to “Are you certain?”

“Yes.”

Very well; I’d trusted his eyes in the night-time woods, perhaps I should do the same in this night-time city. “All right, let’s see if he is home.”

But he was not: The curtains were drawn, and a piece of advertising had been left against the door, which I had seen in none of the other houses. We went back onto the pavement, so as not to attract the attention of the man walking his dog or the tipsy couple, and kept our heads averted as we strolled down to the end of the street and turned towards the lights of New Bond Street.

“I’ll wait here for a time,” I said. “He may be in later.”

“You plan on breaking in,” my companion noted.

“Er. Perhaps.”

“Do you need me?”

“I was going to suggest you find your way back to the hideaway.”

“I will go and sing to the trees for a while, I think.”

With no further ado, he turned in the direction of Hyde Park. I watched him go, wondering if he could possibly mean that literally. I only hoped he was not arrested for vagrancy. Or lunacy.

I circled corners until I was across from the Sosa door-or doors-and when the street was empty, I chose a low wall and settled down behind it. After ninety minutes that were as tedious and uncomfortable as one might imagine, the surrounding houses had all gone dark (for in Mayfair, no traces survive of the eponymous annual celebration of wild debauchery) and passers-by had ceased.

I waited until the local constable had made his semi-hourly pass. Then I climbed to my feet, brushed off my skirt, and went to break into the house of a spymaster’s assistant.

The locks to the basement flat were impressive, the sorts of devices I could be cursing over for an hour, and the door was a bit too exposed for comfort. However, those who find security in large and impressive locks often neglect other means of entry-and indeed, the adjoining window, although well lifted up from the area tiles, was both wide and inadequately secured. Ten seconds’ work with my knife-blade, and its latch gave.

Being Mayfair, the window-frame was even well maintained, emitting not a squeak as it rose. In moments, I was inside.

I stood, listening: The room was empty, and I thought the house as well. As I turned to pull down the window, something brushed against my toe; when the window was down (unlatched, in case of need for a brisk exit) I bent and switched on my pocket torch. It was a tiny Japanese carving called a netsuke, a frog with an oddly expressive face and perfect details. I left it where it lay, and walked through his flat, making sure the rooms were empty. Which they were, although the missing razor and tooth-brush, the empty hangars, and the valise-sized gap on a bedroom shelf suggested that he had not merely stepped out for the evening.