“‘Get in among the first class when they’re leaving the carriage if you can,’ that’s what he said. ‘There’s a lot of milling about.’ I picked up a couple of good watches on the way up here when the toffs got off at Kettering. One of them paid the fare up here. And the fare back to the station.”
Jaikie waved cheerfully as his cab took him down the drive, back to the sins of London.
Mycroft was staring out of the window, his hands gently caressing his stomach when Tobias returned to the Steward’s room.
“It’s from Langdale Pike, sir, this letter. Jaikie delivered it in person.”
“Jaikie?” Mycroft cried. “How and why did he get here, in heaven’s name?”
“He came on a train, sir. Mrs Hudson gave him the money. The letter is only to be opened by you or me, sir. Mr Pike was adamant that no butler or footman or maid was to see it.”
“You’d better read it, Tobias.”
There was a pause while Tobias put on his glasses. The Inspector was still holding the document about the loan secured on the paintings.
“‘Dear Mr Holmes,” the missive began, “I have grave intelligence to impart. The Duke is indeed in debt, he probably has more debts than anybody else in the kingdom. I am reluctant to commit any figures to paper, as I am sure you will understand, but, believe me, his liabilities are enormous. He has recently installed a new mistress, a young American widow of considerable wealth from her late husband who sold soap in great quantities to the citizens of North America, in grand style in Eaton Square. One of my informants believes the Duchess knows of this matter. This informant also tells me that the Raphaels are not insured. The eldest son, Lord Kingsland, is one of the most notorious wastrels of the capital, but he inherited great wealth from his grandfather on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday. He is working his way through it at a rapid pace.
I trust this information is helpful. My lines of inquiry are still open. If anything of value emerges I shall communicate the news at once.
Yours sincerely,
Langdale Pike’”
Tobias folded the letter and placed it carefully in the inner pocket of his jacket.
“Keep that close,” said Mycroft. “We’d better destroy it before the day is out.” He shuffled slowly to the window and stared out at the park. A couple of large brown cows were munching happily on the grass.
“It is time for action,” he announced after a pause of a minute or two in contemplation. “Tobias, can you speak to the butler person. Tell him we shall be leaving the Hall today, probably in the next couple of hours. Ask him to reserve rooms for us in the finest hotel nearby. After what may be about to unfold, I do not think we shall be welcome guests in this establishment. And inform him that we would like the special train to be ready to depart from eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. That chef fellow could prepare us lunch. Inspector, can you summon your men to a meeting in the library as soon as possible, all of them. We, or rather they, are going to mount a search party.”
“Very good, Mr Holmes. What shall I say we are going to look for?”
“Why, the paintings, of course. I do not believe they have left the Hall. They must be found before we can conclude our business here.”
“Very good,” said Inspector Hopkins and strode from the room in search of his forces.
Ten minutes later a party of eight, six policemen, Tobias and Mycroft assembled in the library. Mycroft placed himself by a Renaissance painting of a pink Madonna holding a tiny Jesus in her arms.
“Gentlemen,” he began, “I am asking you to search this house for the two missing paintings by Raphael. One of them is of an elderly Pope dressed in red and white with a long beard. The other one shows a different Pope, also clad in red, sitting down with a couple of shifty scarlet cardinals behind him. The clue, I believe, lies in the frames. Look carefully at this painting here.” Mycroft leant down and peered closely at a name on the bottom. “It purports to be by one Perugino, who was, as a matter of fact, Raphael’s master in his youth. But the painting is not important. You will note how incredibly complicated the woodwork on the frame is, the carvings, the lines of dots, the different mouldings and so on. The Raphael frames will be of similar complexity. Nobody would paint a work commissioned by a Pope without giving it the most elaborate frame imaginable.”
Mycroft crossed the room and paused in front of another painting, showing a couple of peasants praying in a field.
“If you look closely at this one, of a much later date, called The Angelus, it has a simpler frame. I believe that you will find the Renaissance Popes by the frame. Of course there will be another painting inside it, not the Raphael. The people who moved the paintings are not professional thieves. I think they will have placed a layer of cardboard or something similar on top of the originals and they then superimposed a different painting on top to conceal what was underneath. I believe they will be found in the central block here, or in a room in the Family Wing. I do not think you need to bother with the Servants Wing and the Kitchens. Good luck.”
The policemen set off, looking slightly bemused. “Tobias,” said Mycroft, “I would like you to perform another task for me. Could you send word to the Duke and Duchess and the twins that I would like to speak to them in the drawing room in about three quarters of an hour? And, Tobias, did you by any chance bring some Turkish delight with you? You did? Excellent.”
Mycroft popped a sweet in his mouth and began looking at a first edition of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The Derbyshire Constabulary began a long march through the Hall, spending a long time in the attics of the Family Wing where a vast array of Melrose junk, unwanted furniture, unloved heirlooms, spare beds, discarded paintings and limbless statues awaited their inspection. After twenty minutes or so Tobias heard running footsteps coming towards the library. Mycroft padded off to meet Inspector Hopkins in the corridor Tobias could not hear what was said, but the policeman hurried back to his post.
I should like to make a brief digression at the point, if the reader will forgive me. There has been a great deal of nonsense talked over the years about the Holmes brothers and their emotional development or lack of it. I have even heard them described in one ridiculous essay as emotional cripples. Certainly neither of them ever fell in love in the conventional sense. Neither of them ever married. In Sherlock’s case his devotion to the one he always referred to as ‘the woman’, related by the good doctor in A Scandal in Bohemia, was hero worship rather than love for Irene Adler. Both Sherlock and Mycroft could persuade women to talk to them easily. That was never a problem. It is probably fair to say that they were famous for their analytical rather than their emotional powers. Dr Watson gave me his own explanation after the Memorial Service for Sherlock Holmes in Westminster Abbey. This was a memorable occasion, graced by European royalty, members of the Government, a sprinkling of Sherlock’s Illustrious Clients, a strange collection of burglars and other miscreants helped in their time by the great detective, and, in the back row, the full complement of the Baker Street Irregulars, hands, clothes and faces all washed under the stern supervision of Mrs Hudson. The doctor, as principal speaker and executor of Holmes’s will, was much moved and initially reluctant to join the throng of mourners in the drawing room of the Athenaeum. We spoke in a little room off the main lobby.
“My analogy is entirely unscientific and has no medical value at all but I always think it has merit,” he began. “Think of the development of a child from birth through conception to youth as a train journey with various stations along the way. After one particular stop there is a fork in the road. There are points on the line. One section goes to the station called emotional development. The other goes to greater analytic powers. You can only stop at one or the other, not both. So both Holmes vehicles took the line to greater analytic abilities and never visited emotional development at all.”
I am inclined to agree with Dr Watson but I would contend that Mycroft’s powers in the affair of the missing popes showed more than analytic abilit
ies.
*
The Duke of Melrose, Home Secretary and pillar of the Government, was standing by the fireplace, sucking furiously on a cigarette as if it were the last he would ever enjoy. The Duchess was sitting some distance away, flicking through the pages of Country Life as though she was thinking of moving house. Edward, the twin from the V&A sat close to his mother, inspecting an art magazine with a dramatic picture on the front cover. William, the twin from Sandhurst sat, as if to attention, on the sofa close to his father, waiting for orders. The evening sunlight was pouring through the tall windows at the back of the room. The birds were holding an impromptu concert in the gardens outside. Initially nobody spoke when Mycroft, Tobias and the Inspector came into the room. Nobody invited them to sit down either. Mycroft led the way to the great gap on the wall where one of the popes had lived and there they stood. After a couple of minutes the Duke managed to speak.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said, “you asked for this meeting, Mycroft. What do you have to say for yourself? I may say that I find your behaviour in my house quite appalling. You force your way into the Steward’s Room. You then instruct these policemen to go searching all over my house, upsetting the servants and generally causing trouble. What do you have to say for yourself? Your behaviour here is unworthy of a gentleman!”
“I was not asked here to behave in a gentlemanly manner,” Mycroft replied, sounding totally unmoved by the criticism, “you asked me to come and help find the Raphaels.”
Mycroft nodded to Inspector Hopkins. The policeman walked to the door and called out, “bring them in now, if you please.” It took four officers, two for each one, to bring their booty into the drawing room. They stood the paintings against the sofa nearest to the fireplace. “Very good, men, dismiss,” said the Inspector and the police departed. The Duke stared hard at the peasant scenes in the paintings, rural scenes, little cottages, cows and sheep and geese, all done in the Barbizon style of late nineteenth century France.
“Is this your idea of a joke?” said the Duke crossly, lighting another cigarette.
“No, it is not,” Mycroft said, “you see, unless I am very much mistaken, these are the Raphaels. Up in the attics there are two large frames of roughly the same size as these. They are empty. You will have noticed how elaborate and ornate these frames are. They are fit for a Pope. Indeed, each of them was commissioned by a Pope. The people who painted these rural scenes would never have placed them in such a sophisticated setting. You can see how out of place they look.”
“I don’t understand,” said the Duke, frowning at the paintings in his drawing room as if they had misbehaved.
“It’s quite simple, I’m afraid. The people who moved the paintings have placed a protective cover over the Raphael, maybe a piece of cardboard or a stiff piece of cloth or paper. Then they have secured the replacement painting to the cover. The person who performed that operation is in this room. Maybe he would like to undo his work for us and let us see that the Raphaels are still here.”
There was a pause. Tobias thought the Duke looked like a man who had temporarily lost the power of speech. The Duchess stared very hard at a Palladian villa near Newbury with eight bedrooms and modern central heating. The twin from the V&A had turned a pale shade of pink. The Sandhurst cadet was staring at his father. Mycroft did not speak. He brushed some more flakes from his shoulders and the lapels of his jacket. Tobias kept his counsel. The Inspector coughed a meaningful sort of cough.
At last Edward from the V&A cleared his throat. “Alright,” he said, “it was me. I’ll see if I can bring the popes back.” Tobias, an altar boy in his younger days, wondered if the young man would receive absolution and forgiveness of all his sins if he brought two Pontiffs back to life. He knelt down and drew a very slim device, like a miniature paper knife, from his pocket and began probing very gently at the top right hand corner of the painting. After a minute or so he had pulled back a foot or so of the Barbizon and he proceeded to work his way round the picture, kneeling in supplication as he made his way along the bottom. Mycroft popped another Turkish Delight. Tobias and the Inspector were both kneeling on the carpet, spellbound as the painting began to turn from a French late nineteenth century one into an earlier mode from three hundred years before.
After little more than five minutes Edward had completed the circuit of the picture. The rural scene was still intact but almost totally pulled out from the brown cardboard on which it rested. “Don’t want to damage this picture,” said the young man, “It might be worth some money some day.” Not a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand pounds, Tobias said to himself. The twin now began to pull at the last central section of the Barbizon scene. Very slowly a flock of geese began to move. The rustic vista was placed carefully on the sofa and the cardboard was pulled away. An old and thoughtful Pope Julius the second, the man who ordered Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel, stared sadly out of the closing days of his life towards the Adam fireplace. Five minutes later the other Raphael of Pope Leo the Tenth with his two shifty cardinals joined his fellow prelate, returned to his position if not yet his wall in the Drawing Room of Melrose Hall.
“Thank you,” said Mycroft to the twin, “thank you very much. Of course you were not acting on your own initiative, were you? You were merely carrying out orders, is that not so?”
Edward made no reply. The Duke looked like a man who has been lost in a Maze for some hours. The Sandhurst cadet was lighting a pipe. Tobias and the Inspector were both on their feet again, the Inspector looking carefully at the shifty cardinals. Nobody spoke. A blackbird was singing a love song in the trees outside. Mycroft waited for somebody to crack. Tobias wondered who it would be.
“Would somebody explain to me what has been going on in my house?” The Duke broke the silence, pulling heavily on another cigarette. Tobias reckoned it was the fifth one in succession since they entered the room. There was no reply. The Inspector began clearing his throat as if he were going to speak or to arrest somebody. Then the pages of Country Life were slammed shut. The Duchess rose to her feet and stared hard at her visitors.
“I am not going to stay here any longer to be attacked and assaulted in my own drawing room! Yes, it was I who asked Edward to change the paintings.” She paused to glare at her husband with another look of hatred. “You know why I did it, Richard! You know perfectly well! I do not wish you a Good Evening, Mr Holmes. Why you have to travel round the country being fed by our chef to ruin peoples lives I cannot imagine. I hope you rot in hell!”
With that she strode from the room with as much dignity as she could muster. Lady Glencora Palliser, Tobias reflected, had never matched this level of behaviour. It was Mycroft who spoke first after the dramatic departure.
“I do so dislike these unseemly displays of emotion. They reveal a mind where the power of reason has been totally subsumed to the whirlpools of feeling. Twins, I think you should leave us for the moment. There are matters I can only discuss with your father.” As the two young men left for their own quarters, the Duke tottered into a well-padded armchair.
“For God’s sake, Mycroft, tell me what’s afoot. Just tell me the truth!”
“Very well, I fear there is little comfort for you in all this. In that dispatch box in the steward’s room there was a great pile of insurance receipts for all sorts of things. But there was no receipt for insurance on the Raphaels, only a letter from the insurance company telling you that because of a lack of proper security here, they were going to quadruple the premiums to an enormous figure. I could not find any reply. When you told us that they were insured, you were right in the sense that they had been insured in the past but they were not now.”
“I knew I should never have let you in there,” said the Duke sadly.
“I now turn to the central paradox of this affair. It was admirably expressed by my young assistant Tobias earlier today: ‘If we believe Constable Foreman that there were no outside thieves breaking in to steal the Raphaels, it must ha
ve been an inside job, one way or another. But once the insurance company realises that the paintings have been stolen, they’re going to want their ninety thousand pounds back. They may not have that money, the people here. It is, I would say, from we have learnt so far, unlikely. But why would somebody in this house want to commit a crime that could push the family over the edge into the bankruptcy court?’ Why indeed. Can you answer that question, Duke?”
The Duke shook his head. “I have no idea.”
“I would not claim,” said Mycroft in a rare display of modesty, “to have the same powers relating to affairs between men and women as I have in more analytical matters. But I would say this. I have an informant in London, Duke, who is an expert, a master of all the gossip of society in the capital. His name need not concern us here. But he told me that you had recently installed a lady who is not your wife in Eaton Square and that word of this development may have reached the Duchess up here in Melrose Hall. I pass no judgement, Duke. I am not a priest or a moralist. Peoples’ private lives are their own affair. But a visitor here would have to be blind not to see the way the Duchess looked at you, or even spoke to you. Tobias very properly drew it to my attention as a fact that might prove relevant. I do not believe people overcome by jealousy are rational any more. The Duchess’ behaviour was certainly not rational. I think she hated you so much that she wanted to destroy you. She would probably have written to the insurance company herself to tell them the paintings had been stolen. Your loan of ninety thousand pounds would have to be repaid. She knew how much debt you had run up with the banks and insurance companies. She would probably have thought it unlikely that you would be able to find anybody, even at the furthest and murkiest corner of Queer Street, to advance you that much money. You would have been ruined. Your political career would have been finished. Do I make myself clear?”
There was a long pause, then a whisper. “Yes, you do, I am very much afraid you do.” And the Duke put his head in his hands.
The Mycroft Holmes Omnibus Page 13
