“Five, six, seven.”
Lestrade stared at her.
“Nine, ten, eleven…”
It took him some tine to realise that the old lady was counting the number of policemen.
“Tobias,” said Mycroft, “did you remember to bring any Turkish Delights with you?
“I did, sir.”
“Thank you so much,” said Mycroft, helping himself to two at the same time, “I have to tell you that I am feeling more unsettled and ill with every minute that passes. I fear that I shall be confined to bed with the Consolidated Treasury Accounts and the Customs and Excise Depositions for days, if not weeks, on our return. However, I feel we should interpose ourselves on the action closer to the house. We shall hear news quicker that way. Come, Tobias. Let us advance upon the finale.”
One slim and young, one stout and old figure moved slowly up the drive towards the house. One hundred yards from the gate lodge Mycroft stopped suddenly and stared at Tobias.
“Of course, of course,” he said quietly, as if speaking to himself. “It all fits in. How stupid of me not to see it before. You remember telling me at the beginning of the investigation, Tobias, that the figures for armed robbery had dropped all over the country?”
“I do, sir,” said Tobias, wondering if the changed routine was affecting his master’s wits.
“It’s perfectly obvious once you know what we know now. The criminals don’t need to rob any more. They’ve got, or bought, however they managed it, more money from the Count and his forgeries than they could have ever obtained from robbing banks and breaking into people’s houses to steal their valuables. Speaking in my role as Auditor of all Government Departments I still think it is a bad bargain. A stable currency is more useful to a country than a falling crime rate, however welcome that might be in the short term. Goodness me, the villains must have thought every day was Christmas!”
Mycroft and Tobias set off again. They could see a great sentry guard of silver birch trees all around the house. Soon they heard great shoutings and whistlings. As Mycroft and Tobias grew close to the main entrance, they saw a number of men being handcuffed and thrown into the police vehicles that would lead them to the cells of London.
“Mr Holmes,” said Lestrade, panting after his exertions, “congratulations on finding the house! A masterstroke! It has been a triumph for your detecting skills! How I prefer action to speculation! At last! They were outnumbered, my friend. Our forces entered the basement from three different doors, opened for us by the old lady with the scarves. Four criminals were apprehended supervising the workings of the great printing press, turning out ten pound notes at incredible speed. Two of them were the people who had vanished earlier, Roach and Fettiplace Jones. Others were packing the notes into cardboard boxes. We have arrested the lot!”
“But what of the Graf, Lestrade?” said Mycroft, “Has he been apprehended?”
“Roach said he was there, Mr Holmes. But we have found nobody matching the description you gave us.”
“Has he got away? Has the house a tunnel, Lestrade? Many of these places have underground passages linking the stable block with the kitchens in the basement so that goods could be brought into the house without the owners seeing what was going on. God help England if Graf von Stoltenburg has got away!”
“I shall send men to find out, Mr Holmes!” Lestrade paused to issue instructions to a couple of his officers.
“But tell me, Mr Holmes, how did you find out about the location of this house?”
“Why, Lestrade, you sent me a note. I have it in my pocket. Let me ask you, pray, how you found about it?”
“Why, you sent me a note about it, Mr Holmes.”
“I did not send you a note, Lestrade. Certainly not. Do you have it on your person?”
Lestrade fiddled about it his pockets. “There we are, Mr Holmes. That is the note you sent me.”
Mycroft snorted. “I did not send this. You did not send a message to me. I do not do the typing on these ridiculous machines. Tobias does all that for me. Both notes were written on the same typewriting machine, with a damaged capital ‘r’, a ‘k’ with one leg missing and an irregular return on the space bar. There is only one possible explanation!”
Tobias had wandered off, away from the house, and returned with a bundle of crumpled clothes.
“Forgive me,” he said, “but surely these are the woollen dress and the innumerable scarves, worn by the old crone who took you to the house? And look!”
Tobias pointed dramatically towards the little hill that lay between the house and the river. A tall, slim figure was standing at the highest point. A thick blast of pipe smoke arose to meet the early evening mist that rose from the river at this time. The figure performed an elaborate bow.
“Holmes?” said Inspector Lestrade. “Holmes?”
“Holmes?” said Mycroft, smiling at the memory of the old crone’s hands that had also been his brother’s hands which had worked the violin when they combined in their music duets all those years before, “Sherlock Holmes! It must have been he who found the house! Elementary, my dear Lestrade, elementary!”
Mycroft Holmes and The Adventure of the Naval Engineer
The strange thing about the curious incident of the corpse by the fire in Mycroft Holmes's rooms in Pall Mall was that Mrs Hudson the housekeeper didn't scream when she found the body at seven thirty five in the morning.
The man was lying on the ground by the fireguard. His face had virtually disappeared. There were burn marks still visible on the cheeks and forehead. It looked, Mrs Hudson decided, as if the victim had been battered to death with a very hot poker. There was, she thought, something odd about the body. The suit and the shirt were of an expensive make. But the hands were not those of a professional man. They were rough and calloused, as if the man had been a manual labourer of some kind. Mrs Hudson sat down on Mr Holmes’s chair and said two Hail Marys and an Our Father. This was not so much a question of piety, as of the reflexes and patterns of childhood taking over in moments of crisis. Then she went to her linen cupboard in the hallway and covered the body with two sheets. She doubted very much if the man by the fire had been a good man – very few who came to consult Mr Mycroft, or his brother Sherlock before him, were good men in her view – but death demands its own discretion.
She was no stranger to violent death, Mrs Hudson. She had worked for a year and a half as a nursing sister at a military hospital in the First Boer War and thought she had seen most of the terrible ways man could mutilate man in times of warfare.
Shortly after the affair of the Silver Birches, when it became apparent that Mycroft Holmes’s greatest adversary, the German Count or Graf von der Stoltenberg was still at large, her employer had given her a list of people to be contacted in case of emergency. “I do not believe anything untoward is likely to happen,” she remembered him saying, “but this list might prove useful if it should.”
Top of the list was Doctor Freeman who lived a couple of streets away. He arrived a few minutes after Mrs Hudson’s call. She showed him into the living room with the corpse and retired to her own quarters, where she made her way through the list, Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard who had worked closely with Mycroft on previous cases, the Treasury Solicitor, Thomas Montague Smith, Head of the Government’s legal department, his brother Sherlock and Mycroft’s young assistant Tobias.
The doctor pulled back the sheet and examined the body carefully, realising that the presence of the fire would have changed the normal arrival of rigor mortis and thus make an accurate estimate of the time of death very difficult. It was when he opened the door of Mycroft’s bedroom that the doctor got his biggest surprise of the morning.
The room smelt very strongly of drink, with another subtler smell that the doctor could not quite place. Lying on the bed, fully clothed, with blood all over his shirt and his waistcoat was the portly figure of Mycroft Holmes. Beside him on the bedspread was a bloodied poker. On the bedside table was a glass with
a little liquid left, a liquid of a dark brown colour. The doctor shook Mycroft, gently at first, then very vigorously. He listened to his breathing and smelt his breath very carefully. There was no response. The man might be asleep, he might still be drunk, the doctor said to himself, but he was definitely alive. He went to the window and pulled back the curtains on another drab day in the capital city. Doctor Freeman stood by the fireplace and looked at the scene. He thought there was something wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe the whole thing was too obvious, he thought. Almost as a matter of routine, he picked up the glass with the brown liquid by the bedside and smelt it for a minute or so. Then he made a note in a small pocket book.
Doctor Freeman took a last look at the body by the fire in the living room and said his farewells to Mrs Hudson. As he walked down the stairs to return to his breakfast, he reflected that there was one thing he could be sure of. Whoever had killed the body by the fire had also drugged Mycroft Holmes with a dose so strong that the doctor thought he would not wake up before midday at the earliest.
*
There had been changes at Scotland Yard. A new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had brought a couple of new Inspectors onto the division to strengthen Gregson and Lestrade who were, in the Commissioner’s opinion, though he never said it to their faces, too old and set in their ways to serve in the new force he wanted to build for a new century. The foremost new recruit was Inspector Robinson, imported from the Brighton Force. He was a great bull of a man and a bully to boot, just under six feet tall, with a heavily waxed moustache and angry eyes, much given to shouting at subordinates when things were not going well. The case of the corpse by the fire in 68b Pall Mall came his way because he was the Inspector on Duty when Mrs Hudson’s call came through. He had swapped the day as Duty Inspector for the following Tuesday with Inspector Gregson. Inspector Robinson was an ambitious officer. He had been heard boasting to one of his Sergeants that he intended to be Commissioner by the time he was fifty-five. Speed in identifying villains had been the trademark of his success. While Gregson and Lestrade were always concerned to discover the truth, Robinson’s guiding principle was what would play well with the gentlemen of the jury.
His knock at the front door was loud and peremptory.
“Mrs Hudson?” he asked in a loud voice, looking her up and down as if she might be the principal suspect, “Robinson is my name. Inspector Robinson, brought up from Brighton to improve Scotland Yard. Please wait in your rooms while I survey the situation.” With that he virtually ran up the stairs and into the living room, his Constable, an elderly man approaching retirement, wheezing along behind.
“Great God!” he said, looking at the body by the fire, “there has been murder afoot here!” He knelt down and examined the corpse briefly.
“See if he’s got anything in his pockets that would tell us who he is, and look sharp about it,” Robinson said to his Constable, striding off towards the bedrooms. There followed a shout of triumph. It all seemed so clear to Inspector Robinson. There was the corpse. Here was the man who lived here, still in his suit and waistcoat with blood all over his clothes and a blood stained poker by his side. The fact that the room smelt so strongly of drink only added to his suspicions. And the man in front of him was the Auditor of all Government Departments! One of the foremost civil servants in the kingdom! What a catch! A word in the ear of one or two sympathetic newspaper correspondents he cultivated might lead to a paragraph or two in the Press about the prompt actions of one Inspector Robinson. Maybe this case would make him famous! He could be Commissioner by the time he was fifty.
Inspector Robinson strode back to the living room. The Constable was waving a piece of paper at him. “Jobson, that was his name, our friend here,” he said, “Cornelius Jobson, naval engineer by profession, resident of Bishop Stortford. And if you look at the diary here on this table, he had an appointment with the resident here, man by the name of Holmes, Mycroft Holmes, at seven thirty last night.”
“Good,” said the Inspector, “bring that housekeeper woman in, Mrs Hobbes or whatever she’s called.”
Mrs Hudson was brought in by the Constable. The Inspector had his notebook out.
“You are Mrs Hudson, housekeeper to Mr Mycroft Holmes, who lives here? Is that so?”
“Yes, Inspector,” Mrs Hudson had seen too many police Inspectors from Scotland Yard in her time to be intimidated by the likes of Robinson.
“Have you ever seen this man before?” The Inspector pointed at the body by the fire.
“No, sir, I have not.”
“You did not admit him to the apartment yesterday evening when he called shortly before seven thirty?”
“I did not, sir.”
“In that case, could you tell us how he gained admittance? You are meant to be the housekeeper, are you not? Housekeepers let people in and out, do they not? That is part of their job, surely.”
“I am well aware of my responsibilities, Inspector. I was called away for half an hour or so to deal with a neighbour’s sick child just after seven fifteen. Mr Holmes must have let the gentleman in himself.”
Mrs Hudson did not choose to tell the policeman that time would probably run backwards before Mycroft Holmes gathered himself out of his chair, walked down the stairs and let a visitor in through his front door. That was a job for other people, certainly not one for himself.
“I see,” said Robinson, striding over to the window. “Did Holmes give you any details about the man he was expecting? Did he say anything about him?”
Mrs Hudson had a sudden fear that her employer might be about to lose his liberty. He seemed to have already lost his honorific Mister.
“Mr Holmes was not in the habit of confiding to me about his visitors, sir.”
“I see,” said Robinson. “That will be all. You can clear off now. Constable, wake that man up and bring him here. Throw cold water over his face if you have to.”
The Mycroft Holmes who was helped into his living room by the Constable did not look like the Auditor of all Government Departments, a man in receipt of the princely wage of four hundred and fifty pounds a year. He looked like a tramp or a drug fiend recently expelled from of London’s more sordid dens of vice. He still smelt very strongly of drink.
Inspector Robinson drew himself up to his full height. What a moment! “Mycroft Holmes,” he said portentously, “I am arresting you in connection with the murder of Cornelius Jobson. You are not obliged to say anything but anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence. Put him in handcuffs and take him downstairs, Constable.”
Mrs Hudson watched, appalled, as her employer was led past her like a common criminal. She thought she heard the Constable mention Wormwood Scrubs, du Cane Road, Hammersmith, as he reached the front door, Mycroft Holmes staggering along behind him, bumping into the wall from time to time. Even for Inspector Robinson it had been a remarkably quick arrest. It was a quarter past nine in the morning. Mycroft Holmes’s troubles were only just beginning.
*
As the clock struck ten another visitor arrived in Pall Mall. The Treasury Solicitor, in charge of Government legal business, was a dapper man in his early forties who still looked like the Westminster Abbey choirboy he had once been, though he now had a series of lines running outwards from the corners of his eyes. Many had been deceived by his angelic appearance into thinking he must be a gentle and harmless soul. They were wrong. Thomas Montague Smith, the Treasury Solicitor, in Mycroft Holmes’s own words, had a mind like a steel trap, poised and ready to swallow his enemies whole. He had recently been made a widower and there were three small children at home. Montague Smith shook Mrs Hudson’s hand for a fraction longer than might have been thought proper. He sat in Mycroft’s favourite chair and listened to her account of events.
“This is a bad business, Mrs Hudson. God knows what has been going on here. But the Prime Minister must be told immediately. It is hard to see how the Government can proceed without its Auditor. Som
ething must be done, and done quickly before Mycroft is entangled in the thickets of the law. I shall proceed to Number Ten at once. I shall return here at six thirty this evening to report back on developments. A very good morning to you Mrs Hudson.” Montague Smith smiled at the housekeeper. “I wish,” he went on, “that we could have met in happier circumstances.”
*
Tobias, Mycroft Holmes’s young assistant, heard the news from the Treasury Solicitor on his way to Number Ten Downing Street. Tobias’s great mathematical ability had been fostered in his youth when his parents read him the multiplication tables rather than bedtime stories last thing at night. When he heard that his master was on his way to jail, if not already in chains, he was close to tears. It was strange, he reminded himself, that he should have become so attached to the man called Mycroft who must have been one of least emotional people in the country. Tobias stared at Mycroft’s enormous desk for some time, the chaotic papers sprawled across it, his eye resting for a while on the two bowls of Turkish delight he had replenished only that morning.
Who had done this? Who was responsible for Mycroft’s difficulties? Tobias remembered the afternoon three or four months before when the villains trying to debase England’s currency had been exposed in the basement of a grand house by the Thames, the gangsters sent off in handcuffs to the cells of London in police vans. But the chief villain had evaded arrest. Tobias recalled Mycroft’s anguished cry on discovering the escape, “God help England if Graf von Stoltenburg has got away!”
Well, the Count had got away, and this debacle, in Tobias’s mind, was his reply. The Count must have spent weeks, if not months, planning his campaign of revenge.
As he sat there on his own, staring at Mycroft’s empty chair, Tobias realised something rather important. Mycroft never opened letters. He never answered the telephone. Tobias would have agreed with Mrs Hudson that it would have been inconceivable for Mycroft to get out of his chair, pad down the stairs at his rooms and let somebody in at his front door. It was Tobias who wrote most of Mycroft’s messages and signed them in his name. Mycroft’s fellow auditors across the Governments of Europe would not yet have heard of his arrest and incarceration. Tobias could, for a while, at any rate, keep Mycroft alive across the telegraph wires of the Continent. He reached for his pen and began composing messages in the manner of his master. He went next door to the special telegraph office reserved by a grateful Government for Mycroft’s use. The messages began to click out across the wires of Europe. They went to Vienna and St Petersburg, to Rome and Berlin, to Madrid and Paris. All asked the same question: where was the Count? What was known of his latest activities? The extraordinary network of knowledge known as the Underground Library was being pressed into service for a man being fitted out for his prison uniform in Wormwood Scrubs.
The Mycroft Holmes Omnibus Page 5
