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

by King, Laurie R.

  So I kept silent and did my best to keep up with him.

  The streets behind Marylebone Road appeared deserted—these were, after all, office blocks, and it was a Sunday evening—but Holmes paused for several minutes at the top of the street so we could survey all of the doorways and windows. When he was satisfied, we made a swift detour through a service entry, came out next to the bolt-hole’s entrance, and in moments, we were inside and invisible.

  But not before I had spotted something odd on the ground just outside the entrance. “Wait, is that—” I reached for it and said, “Holmes.”

  “Quiet,” he shot back, standing rigid inside. I drew breath, and discovered what had attracted his attention: the odours of cooking, highly unlikely here.

  “It’ll be Goodman,” I said. “He left this outside, stuck to the paving stones. An owl feather. His favourite bird, and not often seen in London.”

  His eyes gleamed as he studied me in the faint light, then he turned and went on.

  When we stepped into the tiny apartment, the first thing to greet our eyes were Robert Goodman’s stockinged feet against the wall. He was standing on his head.

  “Hello, Robert,” I said, waiting for him to resume an upright position before I attempted introductions. But he stayed as he was, merely pointing a toe at the table and saying, “Sir, I believe there is an epistle I was instructed to deliver.”

  Holmes looked at the table, then back at Goodman, and said, “It is, I agree, a topsy-turvy world.”

  Instantly, Goodman let his legs fall to the floor and jumped upright, face pink and hair flattened. He shook his clothing back into place, rescued the neck-tie he had tucked between the buttons of his shirt, ran his hands over his hair, and stuck out his right hand.

  “Mine host,” he said.

  “Mr Goodman, I presume,” Holmes replied. “I understand it is you I have to thank for the musical interlude during the services for my brother.”

  “You needn’t thank me,” Goodman protested, although that was not what Holmes had meant.

  “Nonetheless. My brother would have been most … entertained.”

  Goodman’s face relaxed into happiness. “I’m sorry your granddaughter couldn’t have been there.”

  Holmes’ eyes came to me in silent reproach for the amount this stranger knew of us. “You think the child would have enjoyed it?”

  “Heavens no. She’d have had to cover her ears.”

  Holmes said dryly, “You think the child a natural music critic?”

  “Ah, that’s right—you have not met the poppet. Perhaps you don’t know? Estelle has perfect pitch. She’d have found the discord physically painful.”

  Now, Holmes simply looked at him. Goodman nodded as if he’d replied, and said, “She looks forward to meeting you.” He went into the minuscule kitchen, which was more a matter of putting his head into the cubicle.

  “Mr Goodman, I believe you have something on the stove for us?”

  “I do,” our guest replied. “Although I have to say it was a challenge, coming up with something edible out of that pantry. Perhaps the tins are intended as weapons, rather than comestibles?” he added politely, his head appearing around the door.

  Holmes retreated with the letter to the inner room while I took out plates and silver. I was rinsing the dust from some glasses when I heard Holmes say my name, sharply. I looked in at where he sat on the bed.

  “Why did you not tell me how Mycroft signed his name?” he demanded.

  “How did he sign his name?”

  “With the letter M.”

  “Is there significance in that?”

  “Have you ever seen my brother sign a letter with only the initial?”

  “He does all the time,” I protested. I could see it in front of my eyes, that copperplate M curving around a dot.

  “In a letter to me?” he persisted.

  Now that he’d mentioned it, I had to agree, it was generally Mycroft’s full name, even in telegrams. But I had seen that M as well, and recently. Then I had it: “The letters from Mycroft that Sosa had in his desk. Those were signed with just the initial.”

  “Precisely: his business communications. The initial began as his mark to indicate that he had seen a document, and evolved into a substitute formal signature. I believe Smith-Cumming adopted the technique with his letter C on documents, until that letter took on a life of its own and was taken to mean Chief—his successor, Hugh Sinclair, signs with the C.”

  “So, what? This letter to you is a business communication?”

  “I should say he meant us to understand that he was writing in an official, rather than a fraternal, capacity.”

  I could not see that it made any particular difference. “If you say so, Holmes,” I said, and went back to laying the table.

  When he came out, he had changed his formal suit for a pair of frayed trousers and an equally working-man’s shirt of a dark colour, which he was rolling up to the elbows. He set an ancient dark-lantern on the floor beside the door: He had not by some miracle let go the idea of digging up Mycroft’s grave.

  Goodman had created a kind of bean ragoût that he poured over a mound of rice—remarkable, considering the raw materials to hand. Holmes chewed the first bite with careful consideration, then gave a small moue, as if the taste had proved some inner theory. Goodman tucked in with gusto, and launched into the story of how he’d come to locate and hire a band with such absurdly woeful skills, weaving in a great deal of entertaining but questionable detail, aware of, but ignoring, the grey eyes that never left him.

  When the plates were empty, I abandoned the men to the washing-up and dug through the stores for a costume appropriate for grave-robbing: trousers and a dark shirt similar to those Holmes had donned, ancient brogues, and the gloves Holmes used when he was driving a carriage. I chose another shirt and took it into the other room. The cook was scrubbing a pot. Holmes was drying the plates and putting them on the shelf. One of them had made coffee.

  “Mr Goodman chooses to join us,” Holmes told me.

  “I didn’t imagine he could resist.” I held out the shirt. “That white shirt will be too visible at night, if we’re caught. This one should fit you well enough.”

  Goodman laid the pot upside-down next to the sink and reached for his neck-tie, undressing with no more self-consciousness than a child. I turned my back. Holmes looked on, bemused.

  I had rather hoped that, considering the circumstances, we might find the coffin sitting at the edge of the hole, the interrupted burial having been delayed until the morrow. However, the mound of earth had been filled in, the sod returned to its place. The height of the mound suggested the addition of a substantial volume.

  We rolled away the turf and Holmes pulled on his driving gloves, then set to with a spade he had stolen from the workman’s shed. I guided him with the dark-lantern, keeping it low and sheltering it behind my body.

  After a quarter hour, Goodman dropped down from his perch on top of a grandiose vault and took the spade. A quarter hour after that, I returned from a wide survey of the surrounds and assumed the gloves and spade.

  A faint rain began to drift across us, a mist rising from the ground to meet it. A faint half-moon occasionally looked through the clouds, catching on Goodman’s pale hair, the gleam of his teeth, the glitter of Holmes’ eyes.

  The advantage of overturning a fresh grave is obvious, and this one was as fresh as they get. Halfway through our second circuit of diggers, with Goodman in the hole, the spade hit wood. To my surprise, he dropped the handle and scrabbled his way out of the hole as if he’d felt a hand on his leg.

  Holmes let himself down and began uncovering the coffin.

  It emerged quickly, its former polish somewhat scraped and dented. Holmes tossed out the spade and pulled a screw-driver from the back pocket of his trousers. When he had worked his way around and the fastenings were loose, he traded the screw-driver for a length of light-weight rope, knotting it around the handle. He picked
it up; Goodman interrupted.

  “Allow me,” he said with exaggerated politeness, holding out a hand. Holmes laid the rope’s end across his palm. Goodman wrapped it around his fist, waited until Holmes and I were standing across the grave from him with the lamp shining down at the wood. Then he pulled, working against the weight and the press of remaining soil against the hinges. The wood came up; the air went heavy with the stench of corruption; the light wavered and went still; and we looked down into the silk-lined coffin.

  The face below us was nestled into a pale satin pillow.

  The face was that of a large man, his dead features slack and beginning to swell.

  Not Mycroft.

  Chapter 58

  Holmes could not quite stifle his grunt of relief; however, his only words were to tell Goodman to hold the lid. He let his long legs down until his shoes rested on the edges of the coffin, and I shone the light on the corpse’s upper body as Holmes tilted it, but as I’d thought, the coffin was not deep enough to contain two.

  He had been killed, not by a knife as the newspaper had reported, but by gunshot: three shots, in fact, one of which had stopped his heart and brought an end to his bleeding. He had not been embalmed; no autopsy had been performed; he had been dead for several days.

  Holmes pulled himself back onto the grass, his legs dangling, while I continued to direct the light over the man’s face. Death obscures the features and drains away the personality, but the fresh pink scar along his left eyebrow tugged at my memory: I had put it there myself two weeks earlier.

  “You know him,” Holmes said.

  “Marcus Gunderson.”

  Silence held for a solid minute, before he murmured, “Curioser and curioser.”

  “Our opponent is clearing the field,” I said. “Removing anyone who can tie him to this whole business. He’ll find Sosa next.”

  “Perhaps Sosa is in hiding with Mycroft.”

  The blithe illogic of this was so startling, I could feel even Goodman’s scepticism from the darkness. Just because Mycroft wasn’t here didn’t mean he wasn’t dead elsewhere.

  “If Mycroft is hiding, why did he not get into touch with us?”

  “Have you finished?” asked a voice from across the grave. Holmes hastily retracted his legs. The coffin lid came down; the rope sagged loose; Holmes screwed down the lid again, then reached for the spade. The air grew sweeter.

  “Is there any information you have not given me?” Holmes asked as he began to fling soil back into place.

  “Nothing that comes to mind,” I said.

  “Why, then, is Gunderson here in place of my brother?”

  “He sounds irritated.” Goodman’s voice from the darkness was amused.

  “Not that it doesn’t please me immensely,” I said, “that he isn’t here, but honestly, what does this mean?”

  “Think, Russell. Who would be capable of this? Who could trace you to Scotland and have a sniper waiting for you overnight in Thurso? Who could learn from the telephone exchange where a trunk call had originated, and two days later have armed men in Amsterdam? Who would have the authority to remove a body from the purview of Scotland Yard, produce a false identity and falsified autopsy results, and package it for burial with no trace of official protest?”

  Goodman’s arm came out of the dark and appropriated the spade, which Holmes had been leaning on during this speech. Holmes moved to one side, and the hole continued to fill.

  “Mycroft could have done all of that,” I pointed out.

  “Granted. Although my brother might hesitate to send a sniper after his sister-in-law.”

  I ignored the levity, although Goodman made a quiet Ha! “Anything Mycroft was in a position to effect, I imagine his secretary could have duplicated with forged orders. Certainly until Wednesday, when Mycroft was found. Or, not found,” I added.

  “Either side could have done this. But it was definitely intended to be taken as Mycroft.”

  “But Holmes, if Mycroft was alive, surely he’d have got us a message?”

  “Perhaps he’s in Kent with your Mr Javitz and—”

  He caught my sharp gesture even in the near-dark, but too late. The sound of digging stopped.

  “You moved them?” came the voice from the grave.

  With a wrench, my brain shifted direction: Our preoccupation with governmental misdeeds and assassinations meant nothing to Robert Goodman compared with the welfare of a child. “I did. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I talked to Captain Javitz after you left this morning and he had … concerns, so it seemed best to send the two of them away. They’ll be safe.”

  “What concerns?”

  How to answer him? By saying that his family’s servants had betrayed him to the American? That the pilot now suspected our eccentric rescuer was not only truly insane, but friends with a homosexual murderer as well? That I had to depend on Javitz to watch Estelle, and had no choice but to do as he asked?

  “It’s complicated.”

  “He knows,” Goodman said flatly.

  I felt Holmes’ gaze bore into me, but I dropped onto my heels, stretching a hand out to the small man’s shoulder. “Robert, I owe you so much. May I ask one more favour of you? That we not have this discussion just now?”

  For the longest time, the glitter of his eyes in the faint light did not shift. Then he said, “Does she know?”

  “No.”

  “Do not tell her.”

  “I won’t.”

  And without another word, he returned to his shovelling.

  I could feel the question yearning from the man at my side: Know what? Another would have asked. Holmes said merely, “That my brother is not in his coffin suggests that this entire episode could have been in service of his needs. That he wished to appear dead.”

  “For the third time, why not leave a message?”

  “I could think of a hundred reasons,” he snapped. “He is held captive. His post to The Times was intercepted. He decided that a message was either inadvisable or unnecessary.”

  “Unnecessary? How were we to guess the newspaper report was false?” I used the word guess deliberately, knowing it would raise his ire.

  “I knew there was something wrong the moment I read his obituary.”

  “Well, yes!”

  “Wrong with the report, that is. The general public does not know Mycroft Holmes from Adam, so why should The Times print a formal obituary? And in any event, even if a man has been old and ill, how often does his obituary appear the very next day?”

  I started to protest, then stopped: Javitz had noted just that thing, and I had dismissed it. Still: “And you think Mycroft would have expected us to make a whopping great leap of ratiocination based on a too-quick obituary?”

  “I think when we find him, he will be amused that we had to dig up his coffin to be certain.”

  “‘Amused,’” I repeated darkly, looking at my filthy clothing and blistered hands. “Will he also be amused when his misplaced confidence in our deductive abilities gets us arrested for grave-robbing?”

  “We have not actually stolen anything,” Holmes pointed out mildly.

  “Tell that to the arresting constable. Are you ready for the turf, Goodman?”

  We tamped down the soil as best we could and shifted the turf back over the grave. In a day or two it would look much as it had, particularly if the rain continued, but even if the grave-diggers noticed that it was not as they left it, what would they do? Dig it up and find precisely what they had left there?

  We darkened the light, left the spade in the shed, and crept unnoticed from the silent graveyard, taking our filthy selves through the wet streets to the bolt-hole.

  Chapter 59

  Peter James West returned the telephone to its cradle and walked across the room to stretch his reflection across the dark, rain-swept city. And only an hour ago, he’d been ready to call an end to it and see what he could salvage from the rubble of his carefully constructed plans.

  The kn
ock on his office door that afternoon had summoned him half an hour early to the taxi, which had meant an extra half hour sheltering in the damp recesses of the vault, waiting for the mourners to arrive. And there he had stood, growing ever colder, as his plans melted away like the mud at the edges of Mycroft Holmes’ grave. Now, hours later, he could acknowledge a grudging respect for the two-pronged attack on his careful plan. Buckner hadn’t a chance—although he couldn’t see that Gunderson would have done any better.

  The blond man in charge of the band must have been Moreton, the mad woodsman of Cumbria. The question was, had the woman only met him last week, or had she deliberately sought him out? He’d thought the man a pet she’d picked up along the way, as she had picked up (or so it appeared) the pilot and the child. If so, it showed a degree of sentimentality he’d not have expected of the young wife of Sherlock Holmes. If not—if the band-leader’s inclusion had been planned—it indicated a degree of forethought that could prove dangerous.

  Could that even be where Sosa had got to, as well, sheltering beneath her wing? And if not with her, where was he? Had his employer’s death brought him face to face with the consequences of treason, and driven him to flee the country? If so, he hadn’t taken his ill-gotten gains with him. And if the man tried to gain access to his accounts, West would hear about it. In any event, Sosa would surely be picked up soon—he lacked the nerve or the skill to go to ground for long.

  But all the gloom and despair faded with the telephone call. There was a move in chess (idiotic game, a pale imitation of reality) where a lowly pawn could be made into a queen, and turned against the opponent with devastating consequences.

  The telephone conversation had been to say that his pawn had been queened. He now had the tool with which to prise out the last remaining remnants of the old age, and make it new.

  Painstaking, untiring, scientific method backed by modern technology: This was the new age of Intelligence. The age of Peter James West.