The most important address came from Thomas Montague Smith. “Before we all have too much champagne, I think there are two things to be said. The first is to congratulate Mycroft on organising the means of his release. It was masterful, his powers at work at full strength. The second is this. Nobody must ever tell the true facts of his release. Nobody must ever say that the Auditor General of all Government Departments connived with a man serving fifteen years for armed robbery in Wormwood Scrubs to have a bank in West London broken into and to have some particular papers removed. Think of what the press might say. There would be questions in the House. We all know how the ledgers got here. A friendly bank cashier or other bank employee sent them down to us here with the compliments of the London County and Commercial Bank. That is all anybody needs to know.”
Inspector Robinson was indeed dismissed from the service. But of the details of his contacts with the Graf, he had given no information at all. Nobody, apart from Mycroft himself, realised the significance of that failure. The Count was still at large. And nobody knew where he was.
Mycroft proposed taking Inspector Lestrade with him to the Diogenes Club as his guest, a reward for his loyalty. The celebrations began to break up. Finally only the Treasury Solicitor and Mrs Hudson were left.
“I feel, Mrs Hudson, that we have been allies in a great campaign where the necessities of war mean that we have rarely seen each other" said Thomas Montague Smith. "Rather like Wellington and Blucher in the Waterloo Campaign, snatched encounters on the corner of some bloody battlefield."
"If you say so, Mr Montague Smith," Mrs Hudson smiled, thinking that she might have seen more of the scenes of combat in her time at the First Boer War than the Treasury Solicitor.
"But I digress, Mrs Hudson, please forgive me. There is a delightful French restaurant just opened at the bottom of Regent Street. Would you allow me the great pleasure of escorting you there for dinner this evening? Could we say seven thirty?"
"Of course, of course, Mr Montague Smith. I shall be honoured to accompany you."
“Please call me Thomas,” said the Treasury Solicitor. “And how might I be permitted to address you, Mrs Hudson?”
“Mary Muriel would be fine,” Mrs Hudson replied with a demure smile. “Or just Mary if you prefer.”
As the Treasury Solicitor left Pall Mall, Mrs Hudson repeated to herself a mantra she had heard all too often in her years with the Holmes brothers.
"Elementary, my dear Mr Montague Smith, elementary."
Mycroft Holmes and The Case of the Missing Popes
I have seen Dr Watson’s library. In particular I have stared in wonder at the special section where his black notebooks, marked by their year of origin, march in order across the shelves. In these, he recorded the many and various cases of his friend Sherlock Holmes, the greatest consulting detective the world has ever seen. They reminded me, those notebooks, in their order and precision, of the five lines of battle presented by the one hundred and sixty three warships of the Home Fleet on parade at Spithead for Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897. Even now, the details of some of the more singular memoirs described on those pages cannot be told. The potential embarrassment for the men of this country once thought great and for the Governments of Europe remains formidable in scope and impossible of execution. Time must yet run its measure and its tread.
My own accounts of the activities of Sherlock Holmes’s elder brother Mycroft are smaller. These records are not organised like the casebooks of Dr Watson, faithfully annotated as if he were describing a patient’s symptoms for posterity. My notes are scanty and scattered, scribbled on the sheets of half-finished notebooks, in the blank pages of unread novels, across the white spaces left in the newspapers and magazines. Mrs Hudson, if she were to see them, would not rest until order had been established.
But, in one respect, the two histories have this in common. Dr Watson was fond of observing that it was not always the most spectacular cases, dramatic murders, civilisation itself in peril, vast hounds with dripping fangs at large on the moors, that showed the powers of Sherlock Holmes at their most creative and their most original. Often it was simpler affairs where the crimes were minor but the circumstances bizarre and the characters unusual where his talents showed to their best advantage.
So it was with Mycroft Holmes and the adventure I am about to relate. It was a warm June morning in the Government Offices in Great George Street. There was a series of measured steps in the corridor outside. A tall, distinguished looking man strode into the room.
“Good morning, Mycroft.”
“Good morning to you, Foreign Secretary,” the Government auditor waved his visitor to a chair. Sir Edward Granville was clean shaven and wearing a suit that would have been fashionable a generation before. He had about him the air of an ascetic, a thoughtful bishop perhaps, or an Oxford philosophy don. He had been a close ally of Mycroft Holmes all his life, often siding with him in Cabinet arguments where Mycroft had good sense on his side but no regard for political popularity in the country.
“I have come to ask a great favour of you, Mycroft. I know how little you care for your routine to be disturbed. I know how little you care for the more commonplace aspects of detection. But I have a great problem this morning and I would like to ask for your assistance, and the exercise of your powers.”
Mycroft Holmes’s routine hardly ever changed. His apartments were in Pall Mall. His employment as Auditor of all Government Departments was close by in Great George Street. His club, the Diogenes, was but yards from his home, a remarkable institution where members were only allowed to speak in the Strangers Room. Between these three locations he processed every day, rather like a monarch of old, a stately and corpulent figure patrolling the environs of Pall Mall and Horse Guards Parade. Disturbance was abhorrent to him. He helped himself to a Turkish Delight.
“What is your trouble, pray? The Government is sound upon its foundations, is it not? The markets are a little nervous today but without any good reason. I have heard of no great crisis in the affairs of the Great Powers of Europe.”
“It’s our colleague, Lord Melrose, Mr Auditor. There has been a terrible break in at his house in Derbyshire. He is most cut up about it. He is talking about resigning his post as Home Secretary. You know as well as I do how that would weaken the Ministry. We would all like you to look into it.”
“We?”
“Sorry, by we I mean the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Home Secretary, obviously, and all the Government law officers.”
“What was taken? Was anybody hurt?”
“I have the Melrose son Lord Kingsbridge waiting without in a brougham. He could give you the particulars more reliably than I.”
“Then I suggest you bring him up,” said Mycroft. When his visitor strode off down the corridor Mycroft glared balefully at his young assistant.
“I don’t like it, Tobias. I don’t like it one little bit. They’re trying to turn us into a couple of country policemen. What use am I for burglaries or burglaries for me?”
Clattering along the passage Mycroft and Tobias heard a young man virtually running up the corridor ahead of the Foreign Secretary to Mycroft’s office.
Lord Kingsbridge flung himself into a chair. His hair was wild and his handsome face was showing signs of worry and nervous anxiety. His fingers began strumming furiously on the arm of his chair.
“My father’s lost his Popes,” he began.
“I beg your pardon,” said Mycroft, studying the young man with great care.
“I tell you, my father’s lost his Popes.”
“His Popes?”
“He had two of them.”
“You can’t have two of them. They tried that once at Avignon in the early fifteenth century and it didn’t work,” said Mycroft.
“They were in red, both of them,” the young man’s expression was growing wilder all the time, “and they were in Derbyshire, not in France.”
“I don’t understand,” s
aid Mycroft. “I was not aware that a religious headquarters, similar to the one in Rome, had been established on the shores of these islands. News of the matter has not yet reached the Ministers of the Crown. Perhaps you could enlighten us, Foreign Secretary. Maybe this singular piece of intelligence has penetrated the Foreign Office.”
Sir Edward managed a slight smile. “Our young friend is overwrought. I can indeed throw some light on the matter. The Popes to which refers are paintings, both by Raphael, both of great beauty and both worth a Pope’s ransom, if you could imagine the Vicar of Rome being held hostage. They were on display on opposite walls of the drawing room at Melrose Hall.”
“How were they stolen? Were they insured?”
“They were taken the night before last, Mr Holmes,” Lord Kingsbridge looked as though some small element of sanity might be returning. “I do not know if they were insured. This is the curious thing. There are no signs of anybody breaking into the Hall, none at all. The police examined every inch of the house and the doors and windows yesterday afternoon. As far as I know, they haven’t found anything yet. The place is quite large.”
“I see,” said Mycroft. “Do you happen to know who was in the house at the time?”
“I do, as it happens,” cried the young man, running an elegant hand through the wild forest of his hair, “my parents, my twin brothers Edward and William and a very aged aunt on my mother’s side called Aunt Winifred. She can hardly get across a room, poor old thing, so I don’t think she’s likely to have been displaying any criminal tendencies.”
“And the servants? How many of them would there have been?”
Lord Kingsbridge paused and stared at Mycroft. “Do you know, I’ve no idea. I’ve never counted them. Quite a lot, when you think about it. Butler, housekeeper, cooks, under chefs, footmen, kitchen maids, all sorts of other maids, some of them very pretty, chauffeur, gardeners. Twelve? Fifteen?”
“And the twin brothers? Are they identical?”
Mycroft, like his brother, had always been fascinated by identical twins and the possibilities for alibis they presented.
“They are. Sometimes even I still have difficulty telling them apart. My mother can always get it right, mind you, but she is their mother. William is in his final year at the Royal Military College in Sandhurst and Edward says he is studying at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Mostly, he goes to parties.”
“There’s another thing, Mycroft,” the Foreign Secretary had been listening carefully to the exchanges, “I have been thinking about your means of travel to Derbyshire to look into things personally, and I think I have the answer.”
“Who said I was going to Derbyshire?” said Mycroft crossly.
“Well, I very much hope you will when you have heard what I have to say!”
“And what, pray, might that be?”
“Why, a special train, Mycroft. One reserved exclusively for your use and that of Tobias here. There would be no other passengers. There is a living carriage, a dining carriage, a sleeping carriage, a private secretary’s carriage and extra sleeping carriages, as required. They say the sleeping quarters were originally designed to the specifications of the Prince of Wales at the turn of the century.”
“But he rejected them? On what grounds?”
“He said they were too small.”
“The carriage was too small?”
“No, Mycroft, he claimed the exact sleeping provisions were too small.”
“You mean the bed was not big enough? Well,” Mycroft continued, peering down at the considerable scope of his own stomach, “he was a pretty large Prince by that stage of his life, wasn’t he? All those seventeen course dinners.”
“That wasn’t the reason he rejected the sleeping carriage.”
“You’re talking in riddles, Foreign Secretary. Please come to the point.”
“The prince said the bed was too small for himself and Mrs Keppel.”
“I suppose that would earn the compartment a certain notoriety, possibly even fascination, in the more raffish quarters,” said Mycroft haughtily. “It has little appeal in my case. Princes only interest me to the extent that their vast expenditure of taxpayer’s money can be curtailed.”
“There is another thing about the special train, Mycroft.” The Foreign Secretary had drawn a very long slim cigarette from a silver case and lit it very delicately as if it might have been a bomb about to go off.
“It’s the chef.” Lord Melrose spoke the words with great reverence as if the chef were a Head of State or the Master of an Oxbridge College.
“First we have sleeping carriages that were too small for purpose. Now we have a chef. Of course the dining car has to have a chef, for God’s sake!”
“The Duchess recently secured the services of this man. He was previously employed as senior chef at the Hotel Meurice.”
“The Hotel Meurice in Paris? That paradise on earth for European gourmets?” Now it was Mycroft’s turn to speak as if the subject was of especial importance.
“Indeed so. He actually enjoys cooking in the special train. He says it is a challenge for him in the limited space available and the paucity of the equipment.”
“That puts things in a different dimension,” said Mycroft, his mind turning to delicacies of sweetbreads and oysters, rare cuts of beef so cooked that they fell apart in your mouth, puddings delicately flavoured with the more obscure liqueurs.
“So you’ll come then,” said the Foreign Secretary. “I am so pleased. You can name the hour of your departure.”
“I cannot possibly come today,” said Mycroft, returning to culinary earth with a couple of Turkish Delights, “I have a vital meeting late this afternoon with the Chancellor and senior Treasury officials about taxation rates. It may go on all night. Tomorrow lunchtime would suit. Perhaps the chef could rustle something up for Tobias and myself?”
When the visitors had departed Mycroft turned to his young assistant. “What did you make of our guests, Tobias?”
“That young man has a bad reputation, sir. There were a lot of rumours about him recently, gambling debts, unpaid bills, large obligations to the moneylenders.”
“Were there indeed,” said Mycroft, leaning back in his chair and staring up at the ceiling. “I feel we must take this disagreeable case on. I need the continuing support of the Foreign Secretary. This is what I would like you to do, Tobias. Write a note to Langdale Pike. You will find him in the bow window of the Hypocrites Club round the corner. You are to ask him for all relevant gossip about the financial affairs of the Duke of Melrose and his family.”
“Who is Langdale Pike, sir?”
“He is the foremost master of gossip in our great metropolis, Tobias. My brother consulted him on occasion. Dr Watson,” Mycroft paused as if his mind was searching through his enormous filing system, “Dr Watson had this to say about him:
‘This strange, languid creature spent his waking hours in the bow window of his club and was the receiving-station as well as the transmitter for all the gossip of the capital. He made, it was said, a four-figure income by the paragraphs which he contributed every week to the garbage papers which cater to an inquisitive public. If ever, far down in the turbid depths of London life, there was some strange swirl or eddy, it was marked with automatic exactness by this human dial upon the surface.’
“And another thing, Tobias. Could you pop in to the National Gallery and ask the Director to come round at, say, five o’clock this afternoon? Tell him it concerns some stolen Raphaels at Melrose Hall. He owes me a favour for rescuing his gallery when some fool in acquisitions spent two million pounds over budget in a single month. The place was virtually bankrupt when I was called in.”
Tobias wrote a note and headed for the door. “Are you interested in paintings, sir?” asked Tobias, who harboured a lust for French Impressionists that he was reluctant to admit to in company, so unpopular were they with the British public. Privately Tobias referred to his passion as the love that dares not speak its name.
“I had an uncle who used to take me to the National Gallery as a young man.”
“But you did not care for it, sir, the paintings, the Old Masters?”
“Have you been to that place, Tobias? There are more staircases than in a Chicago skyscraper and more corridors than in Buckingham Palace. I was exhausted by all that effort. It was like climbing mountains in Trafalgar Square. Just a couple of other things before you go. Pop into Hatchards and pick up a couple of books about this fellow Raphael. And is Jaikie on duty today?”
Jaikie was a ragamuffin street urchin who had been involved in The Adventure of the Naval Engineer. He was now employed by Tobias two days a week in the hope that some form of redemption might be performed on the boy, who was a member of a gang of juvenile criminals called The Du Cane Road Irregulars, named after the road where they were based, principally famous or notorious as the site of Wormwood Scrubs prison. The boys were employed by the gangland boss of the jail, a convict called Chalky The Shotgun White to run errands and deliver messages across the capital. But Tobias’s early hopes of progress in spelling, or fewer pockets being picked each day, were not being fulfilled.
“Not another bloody club!” Jaikie protested when handed the missive for delivery to Langdale Pike, “I’ve been to dozens of them now. Travellers, that’s for them gypsy people, Beefclub where they have to eat meat all the time, Diogenes where they can’t speak, Carlton, Hypocrites, White’s, Bungles, Socrates where they have to argue all day and all night. The Chief says the posh people go because they’ve been locked up with other blokes all their lives, them boarder schools they can’t get out of, those universities founded by monks or bloody clergymen, regiments in the army. After all this, the geezers can’t cope with wives and children so they rush off to another all male place to complain about their families. The Chief says he’s heard the food’s terrible, just like in them boarder schools.”
The Mycroft Holmes Omnibus Page 10
