The God of the Hive: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

by King, Laurie R.

  “So you talked with him before Mycroft …”

  “Right. And afterwards he could’ve told anyone that he’d talked to me. Or, Southwark could have nothing to do with Mr Mycroft. But like I say, it’s just … fishy.”

  “Well, I expect to see Holmes soon. Certainly by tomorrow. But, why did he ring you?”

  “To ask me to look into this Brothers bloke. To see if he had any ties to a criminal gang, maybe a new one making a push into London from the East.”

  “Does he know Brothers is still alive?”

  “He is? Are you sure?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “No, he told me Brothers was dead, but that people might not know yet. Mr Holmes wanted me to look for what the man’s ties might’ve been to a gang, and if they’d want to do anything more than cross him off their books.”

  “Revenge, yes. And have you found anything?”

  “I put out the word, but people were only starting to get back to me when my usual lines of communication got … disrupted. I did find that the bloke what works for Brothers, Marcus Gunderson—he came into steady employment ’bout a year ago. Got himself a nice flat, stopped associatin’ with his usual friends.”

  “When was this?”

  “Hard to pin down.”

  “Might it have been November? He started working for Brothers then.”

  “That lot, it could’ve been last week and they’d be hard-pressed to be sure. Do you think this Brothers might have anything to do with Mr Mycroft?”

  “Other than the timing being, as you say, fishy, most of the links are pretty feeble. I know you and I were trained by the same man, but you have to allow that events can be simultaneous but unrelated.”

  He looked unhappy, but then, so did I.

  “I’m thinking of getting my hands on one of them, asking a few questions of my own,” he said abruptly.

  I opened my mouth to object, but then closed it. Memories of brutalising information from Brothers’ man Gunderson two weeks earlier were still strong enough to make me queasy, but the fastest way to find out what the devil was going on in London was to ask one of the villains. However, I definitely wanted Holmes there to supervise. “They’re certain to show up at the funeral. We’ll see what we can do about separating one of them from the pack after—”

  But he stepped forward with a look of panic, grabbing my arm. “You’re not going! Promise me you’re not going to stick your head up there!”

  “Ow, Billy, stop!” He relaxed his grip, but not his urgency. “Look, I can’t not go to Mycroft’s funeral.” Besides which, if Holmes failed to show up at the bolt-hole—always a possibility—I should have to look for him at the funeral.

  “They’ll take you. You’ll be dead as he is, and then what will Mr Holmes do?”

  I was touched by the worry contorting his face, and amused at Holmes’ concerns being his priority. And although I was very aware that he could be right about the threat, I could think of one way to mitigate the risk.

  “You may be right,” I said, and began to smile. “Do you suppose some of your kith and kin would like to attend as well?”

  Chapter 41

  Funeral services, according to the newspaper, would be conducted at graveside, at four on Sunday afternoon, some twenty-seven hours from now. I had no idea if Mycroft’s will had specified the arrangements—frankly, I’d have thought my brother-in-law would prefer the simple disposal of a cremation—but if he had not made them, who had? His grey secretary, Sosa? His housekeeper, Mrs Cowper? Whoever was responsible, they knew Mycroft well enough to leave the Church out of the picture.

  The need to see Holmes was an ache in the back of my mind, although I had grown accustomed to Goodman’s presence, and even grateful for it. From a practical standpoint, any police officer looking for a tall young woman in the company of an even taller American with burn scars—and possibly a child, depending on how up-to-date their information was—would not look twice at a tall young woman accompanied by a short, blond, green-eyed Englishman. But more than that, I found Goodman combined the amiability of a retriever with the bounce of a Jack Russell terrier. He was quite mad, of course, but his was a very different kind of lunacy to what had taken Mycroft, this dark madness I could feel growing around me like electricity. If the unseen threat was an approaching thunderstorm that raised one’s hair into prickles, Goodman was a bucket of water atop a half-open door: an unsubtle but refreshing distraction.

  Still, I longed for Holmes.

  I looked at some boys dashing across the lawn after a football, and made up my mind.

  “I need to leave you for a time,” I told him. “Perhaps two hours. Do you want me to return here, or shall I meet you elsewhere?”

  He, too, eyed the football. “I shall be here.”

  It was both a relief and unexpectedly nerve-wracking to set off across the city on my own. When I reached the first of my destinations, I had to sit for a while and let my jangles dissipate.

  Holmes was not here, in the second of his bolt-holes, tucked within the walls of one of London’s grand department stores. The Storage Room, as he called it, had been the first bolt-hole I had seen, in the early years of our acquaintance. Holmes had not been there then, and he was not here now.

  Nor was he at any of the other four I checked, although two of them showed signs that he had been there with Damian the previous month.

  If Holmes was in London, he was lying very low.

  I rode back to the theatre district in a taxi, looking at streets that had gone unfamiliar to my eyes, infected with strange new currents, new and unpredictable and dangerous. Men with rifles sent at an instant’s notice to the farthest reaches of the land. The ability to trace the source of telephone calls. Men who were neither criminals nor police, but both. The brutal murder of one of the king’s most loyal and powerful servants.

  These bustling pavements could be hiding any manner of threat; the wires overhead might even as I passed be singing my fate to the ears of a sniper; the helmeted constable on the corner may as well be a “hard man” with a very different view of London from my own.

  Brave new world, that has such creatures in it.

  In this strange London, I found that I looked forward to seeing Robert Goodman again, a small and cheerful man in whose blood moved the ancient forests of Britain, who rescued three fallen mortals from the hubris of a flaming sky-machine, who took joy in simple, silly things and looked on modernity as a jest, who overcame vicious armed men with the prank of a taut tree branch.

  I spotted him sitting cross-legged on the lawn, grass-stains on his cousin-in-law’s knees, coat shed, shirt-sleeves rolled up, playing mumblety-peg with four young girls while their mothers looked on with a peculiar mixture of fondness and dubiety. They were as disappointed as their daughters when I made him fold away his lethally sharp pocket-knife and come away with me.

  I was not certain that Goodman’s woods-awareness translated into city streets, but leaving the park, I was wary enough for the both of us, glancing in the reflections of polished windows, stepping into various shops to study autumn fashion or newly published titles while looking out of the windows at passers-by—and even more carefully, at those who did not pass by. I saw three uniformed constables and two private guards in mufti, but try as I might, I could see in the area surrounding Mycroft’s flat no police presence, and no “hard men.”

  When we had been in the vicinity for twenty minutes, I stepped into a passage called Angel Court. Three steps to a doorway, and we were gone.

  “Stand still,” I whispered into the damp and echoing darkness, feeling along the wall for the box of matches. My fingers found them; light flared, then settled onto the candle in its glass-shielded holder. I lifted it high to light our path through the narrow labyrinth to Mycroft’s flat.

  At the far end, I set the candle on its ledge and took up the key from its invisible resting place, sliding the cover from the peep-hole that showed Mycroft’s windowless study. The low light
he kept constantly burning showed enough to be certain the room contained no intruders.

  I slid the key into its concealed hole and breathed to Goodman, “There’s no one in the room directly inside, but I can’t speak for the rest of the flat.”

  “I will go first.”

  “No,” I said.

  “If they take me, what does it matter? If they take you, others will suffer.”

  He meant that Estelle would suffer. I said, “Very well, but don’t turn on any lights.” I turned the key and put my shoulder to the wall. The bookshelf moved, and I stood back to permit him entry. Once inside, he pushed the hidden door nearly shut. Through the crack I watched him walk on silent feet across the carpet and out of the room.

  My mind began to count the seconds as I waited, one hand on the door to pull and the other set to turn the key.

  And waited.

  He made a thorough job of it, and had time to look under beds and inside wardrobes before he reappeared, chewing an apple. I breathed again—disappointed that Holmes was not there, but relieved no one else was. I pushed the door fully open and stepped into the familiar book-lined room.

  “What are we looking for?” He was curiously examining the shelves, which were as idiosyncratic as those of Holmes—although where the younger brother’s shelves were devoted to crime and art, Mycroft’s concentrated on crime and politics.

  “Mycroft tends to keep his business to himself,” I said. “I know where his office is, more or less, and I’ve met his secretary, but I don’t even know the name of his colleagues. A desk diary or address book would be nice. What I’m hoping for is a hidden safe. Which, being Mycroft, may well be concealed behind a less-hidden safe.”

  Goodman flashed me his young-boy’s grin and clasped his hands behind his back, turning to a contemplation of the walls.

  Most men conceal personal valuables in a bedroom, professional treasures in a study. Mycroft would only choose those sites if he had decided on a double blind, but trying to outguess Mycroft would set one on the road to madness: One might as well flip a coin.

  I knew this study, the guest room, and the sitting room reasonably well, and thought that over the years, I might well have caught some indication of a hidden safe in one of those rooms. Instead, I would begin with Mycroft’s bedroom.

  But not before ensuring our security. I walked through the flat to the dining room, intending to jam one of the chairs under the front door-knob, and there saw an envelope with my name on it, propped against the fruit-bowl in the centre of the table. Battling an urge to look around me for a trap, I picked up the envelope and tore it open:

  Miss Russell,

  I have withdrawn the warrants for you and your husband. Please accept my condolences over the death of Mycroft Holmes. And please, come in to talk with me at your earliest possible convenience.

  Yours respectfully,

  John Lestrade (Chief Insp.)

  My first reaction was less reassurance than a feeling that I had just seen a predator’s spoor: I made haste to take a chair to the front door and work it into place. But with pursuers thus slowed, I read the words again, more slowly. Lestrade had proven himself generally competent and thoroughly tenacious, but he had never evinced the cold cunning needed to lay a trap under these circumstances.

  It was the underlining of the words that pushed me towards accepting it at face value: Three words, using a considerable pressure on the pen, suggested a degree of urgency, even desperation.

  Earliest possible convenience.

  I read it a third time, then folded it away and returned to my search.

  In his bedroom, I was unprepared for the powerful sense of Mycroft’s presence that washed over me. For a moment, my large, complicated, terrifyingly intelligent brother-in-law moved at the edge of my vision.

  Then memory crashed in, and I found myself on the chair in the corner, blinking furiously, swallowing hard against the lump in my throat.

  Mycroft Holmes was not a loveable man, but to know him—to truly know him, every unbending, impatient, haughty, and self-centred inch of the man—was to respect him, and eventually, reluctantly, to love him. I loved him. The thought of him dead in an alley filled me with rage. I wanted to find the man who had done that and rip into him, for making the world a less secure, less blessedly interesting place. But first I wanted to sit and weep.

  This was an age of the death of gods.

  I stood and brusquely wiped my face. I had no time for the distraction of tears. I forced myself to open drawers and search the backs of shelves, to pull up carpets and quietly shift furniture. I examined the underpinnings of his remarkably stout bed, pawed through the unwashed laundry in his basket, and lifted the lid of his toilet’s cistern. I emptied his bathroom wall-cupboard of medicines and felt the boards, knelt by the bathtub and felt the tiles, stood on a chair and felt the light fixtures.

  Then I did the same in the guest room.

  In the study, I found Goodman sitting in a chair in the centre of the room, looking at one of the walls. He might have been in a gallery studying an Old Master: Still Life of Odd Books.

  “I had a thought,” I said, and took the work-lamp from the desk, transferring it to the plug nearest the bookshelf entrance and carrying it into the dim passageway. I held it up so its beam fell onto the bricks, new on one side, ancient on the other, searching for any anomaly. A moment later, Goodman’s hand came into view and he took the lamp from me, holding it so I could continue my search unencumbered.

  Twenty minutes later I had reached the edge of the light’s beam, having found nothing but walls.

  I returned the lamp to its place. “Well, it was just a thought.”

  “There’s something odd about this shelf,” Goodman said.

  I looked at him in surprise. “Very good. Not many people would notice.”

  Mycroft had contrived a hidden recess the size of one of the shelf spaces. Now I unloaded the books and felt around for the slightly protruding nail head towards the back, which freed the back to drop forward into my hands.

  It held ordinary valuables—money in several currencies; passports in false names that fit the descriptions of Mycroft, his brother, and me; and a piece of paper with a row of numbers on it, which when translated into mathematical base eight gave one the European bank account where he kept his foreign savings. Nothing to suggest his real secrets. Nothing to connect him with the world of Intelligence, either large or small i.

  I decided to leave the study to last, on the theory that if an ordinary man keeps his secrets close, an extraordinary man keeps his far from him. Having made this decision, I turned for the sitting room, only to have the stillness of the flat shattered by a jangling telephone. “Don’t answer it,” I said. We both watched the machine, waiting for many rings before it fell silent.

  I worked my way down the hallway towards the sitting room, rolling up the carpet runner, groping along the floorboards and skirting, unscrewing the switch plates, peering behind the pictures.

  When I got to the end, my clean clothes were no longer and I had broken a fingernail prising at one of the boards.

  Sucking at the finger, I kicked my way down the rolled carpet until it was flat, only then realising that I ought not to have started in the bedroom. Mycroft had commanded that Mrs Cowper’s kitchen be renovated, shortly after an enormous dinner for important guests—a goose, all the fixings, two pies, and several dusty basement-stored bottles—had first stuck, then come crashing down four stories in the dumbwaiter. It was the same time at which he had installed his secret entrance, using the dust of one building project to conceal the other.

  And, I now saw, it would have been the ideal time to install a well-concealed safe in an unlikely place—why hadn’t I thought to look in the kitchen first and saved myself the knowledge of his laundry and nostrums?

  Chapter 42

  Mycroft occasionally cooked in this kitchen, on Mrs Cowper’s holidays or days off, but for the most part, it had become the housekeeper�
�s room. Her ruffled apron hung from a hook on the back of one of the swinging doors; a photograph of her grandchildren stood beside the warming oven; an enormous portrait of the king beamed down upon her labours from the wall where the late and unlamented dumbwaiter had once opened—loyal as he was, I doubted the portrait would be Mycroft’s choice of decoration.

  The room was tidy, as Mrs Cowper always left it; there was no knowing when she had last been here.

  And this, naturally enough, was where I found Mycroft’s stash, in a place both difficult to reach and seemingly inappropriate for treasures: the frame of a notably modern oven. The temperatures alone should have guaranteed that any nearby paperwork would disintegrate in a matter of days; however, appearances were deceiving: What looked solid was not; what looked heated was cooled.

  I drew from the narrow panel with the invisible hinges an inch-thick metal box the dimensions of foolscap paper. I settled on the floor with my back to the wall, lest Goodman come upon me without my noticing, and opened the box.

  Inside were sixteen sheets of paper, typed or hand-written, none from the same machine or hand. All sixteen were condensed confidential reports, all concerned the behaviour of leaders in colonies or allied countries. I could not avoid a quick perusal, although I did not wish to compromise the Empire’s security by knowing what I should not; even that light survey made it clear that any one of these pages could instigate a revolt, if not outright war.

  But that was not the extent of Mycroft’s secrets.

  The box’s cover had two layers to it, with some insulating substance such as asbestos between them to protect the contents. However, as I returned the pages in their original order and applied a dish-towel to the metal so my finger-prints would not be on it, the top of the box felt a fraction thicker than the sides and bottom. I put down the cloth and turned the top towards the light, and saw: The top itself had a hidden compartment.