Richard Sosa’s home was a handsome, self-contained flat made from those portions of the building once given to the servants, although more opulent than one might expect of servants-or of a man with a secretary’s income. Some of its opulence was that of old money-much of the furniture had descended from the house above, receiving fresh upholstery in the process. But those things that reflected Sosa’s personal taste-the delicate Oriental ivory carvings, two new carpets, the paintings on the walls-had not been bought with a governmental salary.
On the table just inside the front door lay a card: Chief Inspector J. Lestrade, New Scotland Yard, with a telephone number and in his writing:
Back in the first room, I checked the remaining curtains to be certain that no light would escape. The first was overlapped, but the second showed a slight gap. As I tugged them together, something fell to the floor: another tiny
Cautiously, I peered behind the fabric of the remaining window with my hand obscuring the head of the torch, and saw a third carved figure, this one a sparrow, perched on the window’s upper rim. Its balance was precarious, nearly half its circumference protruding past the painted wood. And when I loosened my fist to allow a trace more light to escape, I could see the trigger: a thread, attached to the curtains, looped around the sparrow’s ivory neck. With my other hand, I pushed the fabric away from the window, and the
Well, well: The grey little secretary had picked up a few tricks.
I looked over at the window I had come in by. Thick carpet lay underneath the window, but would I have missed the sound of an ivory frog falling to the floor? Possibly.
I returned the rabbit and the sparrow to their perches, but I did not bother to loop the thread back-any man with the foresight to set up a sign of intruders would also know the angle at which he had left his traps.
The creatures were unexpected, in two ways: an indication of considerable care and sophistication, and an inescapable note of whimsy. Mycroft’s secretary was not so grey as he appeared.
I searched the place with a nit-comb, taking my time so as to leave no evidence of my presence. The constable’s footsteps went past four times, every thirty-four to thirty-seven minutes, as I uncovered the secretary’s life. His office suits ran the gamut from pure black to dark charcoal, the neck-ties included those of a minor public school, and his leisure wear leant heavily towards flannel and mildly patterned jumpers. His stocking drawer was occupied by ranks of folded pairs, none of them with holes in them. His undergarments had been ironed.
His bathroom cupboard said that he suffered from angina, for which he had been prescribed nitro-glycerine, as well as dyspepsia, ingrown toenails, migraines, and insomnia. He wore an expensive French pomade, and possessed a curious electrical instrument that looked like a torture device but which I decided was to stimulate the growth of hair follicles.
I found two art books that might at a stretch be termed erotica (on an upper shelf in the library), the playbill for a slightly raunchy revue (three years old and buried in a desk drawer), and some modernist sketches that might, perhaps to the mother living upstairs, be considered risque. I found no drugs, and no sign of female company (actually, of any company at all).
The desk in his small, tidy study had a telephone and a leather-bound 1924 diary. I went through it closely, copying various times and numbers, but Sosa either was cautious about writing down too much information, or trusted himself to remember the essentials: Appointments were often just an initial and a time, sometimes “Dr H” or “dentist” and the time. Three times he had written down telephone numbers, two of those with an abbreviated exchange. The last of the three was on the Thursday that Mycroft disappeared, with the same exchange Mycroft had, although it was not Mycroft’s number. I could simply ring the numbers, but without knowing what alarms might be set off, it might be best to leave the task of identifying the numbers to Holmes.
I returned the book to its position by the telephone, and turned my attention to his desk drawers. One of them held files, a number of which contained carbon copies of letters from Mycroft, the ornate capital
In the end, this is what his home revealed:
The notes from his diary
Six new and expensive paintings on the wall
The business card of a very high-class art dealer
Another card, from a house whose reputation I knew, a mile away
An ingeniously concealed wall-safe with a lock that took me nearly two full passes of the constable to circumvent.
Inside the safe I found a velvet pouch with a palmful of large-carat diamonds, three stacks of high- denomination currency (British, French, and American), a number of gold coins, a file with memos and letters signed with Mycroft’s distinctive
The file included a trio of carbon pages requesting information on Thomas Brothers and Marcus Gunderson. They were pinned to a copy of the Brothers photograph that Mycroft’s Shanghai man had brought, and another of a glaring Marcus Gunderson.
The bank book was the most revealing. For years, the entries down the IN column varied little, and seemed to comprise his regular salary and periodic income from stocks and an inheritance fund. Until the past March, at which time round sums began to drop in at untidy intervals: twenty guineas here, thirty-five there. In the middle of June was one for a hundred guineas.
I had to smile sadly at the idiocy of criminals: caution and carelessness; locked doors beside vulnerable windows; scrupulously kept books recording illicit income.
Then I looked at the last page, and the smile died:
The day after Mycroft disappeared.
Five hundred pieces of silver.
I left everything where I had found it: I had the name of the bank, the dates of the deposits-along with information on his art dealer, his newsagent, his housekeeper, his solicitor, and his mother. It would be of interest to examine the mother’s account, although I did not imagine it would show those round sums in its OUT column.
It was nearly time for the constable to pass, so I stood at the curtains with my torch off, waiting for the deliberate footsteps.
Sosa was in his fifties, an age when some men looked up and saw not what they had, but what they lacked. This was particularly true when a man was under pressure-and between December and March, when Mycroft came back to work after his heart attack, the pressure on his assistant would have been considerable.
The major question in my mind was, when did Mycroft discover Sosa’s hidden income, his secret life, his-call it what it had to be-treason?
It was hard to picture the grey man working day in, day out under Mycroft’s very nose without giving himself away. But until this past month, I had not seen Mycroft since the early weeks after his attack, at which time he had been both ill and distracted. I could not deny the possibility, however remote, that he could have overlooked his secretary’s treason until very recently.
Ten days ago Mycroft had talked to Sophy Melas about loyalty.
He knew then.
Did that knowledge get him killed?
Or had he known for some time, and done nothing, either because he was testing the limits of his secretary’s betrayal, or-and this I could envision-because he was using Sosa to lay a trap for the man or men behind him? I could well imagine Mycroft keeping an enemy close for half a year in order to tease out the extent of a conspiracy. He might even have embraced the challenge of proving that his illness had not lessened his abilities: to work every day cheek-to-jowl with an enemy, blithely feeding him information, never letting slip once.
A Russian doll of a mind.
Had that hubris got him killed?
