The God of the Hive

by Laurie R. King

  If you are reading my words, the chances are good that I am dead. I congratulate you on finding this, for I did not wish to make it easy.

  Please, I beg you, destroy the outer contents of this box. The international repercussions of their revelation would be terrifying, and without me to oversee what might otherwise be described as blackmail operations, the papers themselves will be of no further use to anyone.

  If as I imagine you will be loath to set match to them, please, I beg you, ensure without a fraction of a doubt that they will be destroyed upon your own death. The enormity of reaction should they be revealed would taint our name forever.

  Finally, I commend to you two individuals, in hopes that you will care for their future needs. One is my housekeeper, Mrs Cowper, a woman of many hidden talents. The other is my secretary, whom you met long ago, a person who has helped me Interpret all manner of data over the years.

  Wishing you joy on the great hunt of life,

  Your own,

  M.

  It was signed with the initial alone, but my eyes seemed to see his usual signature, in which the cross of his t swirled into an ornate underscore. I set the letter down long enough to examine the box, making certain it contained no further secrets, and return it to its place. The letter I kept.

  I was still sitting against the wall, pondering Mycroft’s message, when the swinging doors parted to admit Goodman’s head. I scrambled to my feet, folding away the letter into a pocket.

  “Did you discover your safe within a safe?” His gaze wandered along the shelves and pans that I had left every which way.

  “More or less,” I answered vaguely. “You didn’t find anything else in the study, then?”

  “Only this.” He stepped inside, holding out a key.

  I took it with interest. I had not seen it before, an ordinary enough shape but with an engraved Greek sigma on its flat head. “Where did you find it?”

  He walked away; I turned off the lights and followed.

  Unlike the rest of the house, which I had left speaking eloquently of either a hasty search or a minor tornado, the disruption in the study was confined to two precise spots: the shelf niche with the money and passports, and below and to one side, a place where the wood of the shelf itself had been hollowed out. The thin veneer fit in behind the facing of the shelf, and would have been invisible unless one were lying on the floor, staring upwards, with a powerful light to hand. Even then, a person would have needed to know the hiding place was there.

  I for one had not, although I’d spent countless hours in that very chair.

  “How on earth did you find that?”

  He frowned, then said, “The shelf did not match.”

  “What, the wood?”

  “No. The contents.” He could see I did not understand, so he tried to explain. “In the forest, a place where there was once a road or a house is betrayed by the varieties of trees that grow there, the shape of the paths cut by animals aware of the difference. Here, a man set out the contents of this shelf with a degree of … distraction, perhaps? As if this shelf had a different history from the others.”

  I could recall no particular difference between the books on this segment of shelf and the books on any other, although it did contain a small framed photograph of a thin young man in an Army uniform, all but unrecognisable as Damian Adler. “I hope you have a chance to talk with my husband,” I told him. “You two would have much to say to each other.”

  The key was the only object inside this highly concealed compartment. I looked at it under the light, but it was unexceptional, apart from the Greek letter. In the end, I added it to the contents of my pocket, along with the money, the bank account code, and the passports.

  Mycroft had no further use for any of them, and with any luck, I could soon hand the collection over to 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 naïve 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, bu
t 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.

  “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 régime 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.