The Mycroft Holmes Omnibus

by David Dickinson

  “I do believe there are a few positives to be gleaned from the matter.”

  “They seem rather distant to me, your positives,” groaned the Duke. “What a fool I’ve been,” he went on, “what a fool. We politicians are always lecturing the electorate on how well we look after the public finances when some of us cannot even look after our own. To keep one woman with expensive tastes is folly, to keep two women with expensive tastes is madness. When I was young, Mycroft, I remember my grandfather telling me that after coal was discovered in great quantities on his land he could live on the interest on the interest on his income. I’ve travelled in the opposite direction. I have to borrow money to pay the interest on the loan I took to pay the interest on my first loan. What a fool!”

  “Well, nobody need know what happened here, Home Secretary. The paintings are back. The police need make no arrests.” Inspector Hopkins nodded sagely at this point. “And there is another thing, Duke. Have you heard of the Lazarus Club?”

  “I have not. A club for those recently come back from the dead? There must be precious few members.”

  “I am the Chairman for this year. It is very secret, the Lazarus. It consists of myself, a senior official from the Bank of England, the Deputy Permanent Secretary at The Treasury, representatives from leading banks and accountancy firms. The purpose of the Club is to sort out the money problems of important public men whose finances have run into difficulty. The work is slow, but steady. Loans can be arranged at favourable terms. After four or five years the clients are able to pick up their beds and walk, as it were. I am inviting you to become a member, Duke.”

  “Mycroft, I accept with pleasure. I look forward to coming back from the dead. When is the next meeting?” The Duke stood up and shook Mycroft firmly by the hand.

  “In The Lazarus,” said Mycroft, “we don’t have meetings, we have risings. The next one is a week tomorrow in the Strangers Room of the Diogenes Club at six thirty.”

  The Duke waved them off as their brougham bore them away to their hotel. An hour and a half later Mycroft and Tobias were having their evening meal in the dining room of The Melrose Arms. Mycroft shook his head sadly, prodding disdainfully at his plate.

  “Think of it Tobias, bread rolls so hard you could fire them out of a cannon and they would land intact, soup so watered down that even those fed by The Salvation Army would refuse it, and now this!” He gave what might have been a rump steak another prod. “This is rubber, Tobias, specially imported rubber. It has nothing to do with a cow at all. It has never seen a cow. It has never been near a cow. Do you suppose the Duchess sent word on that they were to serve us truly horrible food?”

  “I doubt it. The woman has troubles enough of her own. But tell me, sir, what made you think she had organised the disappearance of the paintings?”

  “It’s quite simple. As my brother said ‘when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however the improbable must be the truth.’ I did not think there had been any insiders breaking in to steal the Raphaels. I did not think the Duke could have done it, since, as you neatly pointed out, he would have been conniving at his own entrance into the bankruptcy courts. Nor could the twins have done it, they had no need. Only the Duchess remained. Once we had the second letter from Langdale Pike, the position was clear in my mind.”

  Mycroft eyed a section of cabbage on his fork with great suspicion. “As I thought, Tobias, the cooking here is beyond redemption. They must have started boiling this first thing yesterday morning. No life, no taste, no flavour.”

  “Never mind, sir,” Tobias regularly tried to cheer his master up. He regarded it as a tax on the young for the benefit of the old. “We’ll have a good lunch on the train tomorrow with that chef.”

  Mycroft brightened suddenly. “The man from the Meurice in Paris? I wonder what he’ll give us. How good it will be to be in the presence of somebody who understands fully the true function of a chef.”

  “And what would that function be, sir?”

  “Why, young man, it’s perfectly obvious. The true function of the chef is alimentary, my dear Tobias, alimentary!”

  If you enjoyed reading The Mycroft Holmes Omnibus you might be interested in Mycroft Holmes and the Case of the Bankers Conclave by David Dickinson, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Mycroft Holmes and the Case of the Bankers Conclave by David Dickinson

  “Tobias! I say, Tobias!”

  Under normal circumstances Mycroft Holmes spoke very quietly in a pleasant baritone. This request for his young assistant was couched in a shout that was almost a yell. Mycroft Holmes was the elder brother of the great consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. He played a vital role in the Government of the United Kingdom in his role as Auditor of all Government Departments, the one man in Whitehall who could see how the policies of different departments would relate to each other and to the broader purposes of the administration.

  This particular request did not relate to great matters of state as his young assistant Tobias discovered when he returned to his desk from the telegraph office next door to Mycroft’s room.

  “What is the matter, sir? Is there some great problem with the Government accounts? The customs receipts down again?”

  “None of those, Tobias,” said Mycroft crossly. “Look at this! Just look at what’s happened to my Turkish Delight!” Every day Tobias filled two bowls with the delicacies from Istanbul for his master. Mycroft was holding up what must have once been a small cube of the stuff, dusted with icing sugar. Now it was less than half the normal size, with irregular patterns and small marks weaving their way across the surface.

  “It makes me feel quite ill, just looking at its deformed shape. Do you think the cleaners have been helping themselves to my Delights, Tobias?”

  “I can’t see that they would, sir. They’ve never done that before and it’s the same Irish lady who always does the work. She’s not changed at all.”

  “Well, what do you think the explanation is?”

  Nothing in Tobias’s sophisticated education, grammar school in Stratford upon Avon, King’s College Cambridge, top mark in his year for mathematics, had prepared him for this. But he could see that his master would be in a bad mood all day unless some action was taken.

  “I tell you what, sir. I’ll refill that bowl with fresh stuff and take those ruined ones round to the shop where I buy them. It’s only in Jermyn Street round the corner. The chap there will know what’s going on, I’m sure he will.”

  Mycroft popped a fresh, undamaged, Turkish Delight into his mouth and leant back in his chair. His enormous desk, covered everywhere with papers, documents, annual reports, audited accounts was twelve feet long. On the wall behind it a further selection of files marched along the wall. This was one third of Mycroft’s world. The other two thirds were provided by his apartment in Pall Mall and the silent quarters of the Diogenes Club close by where you were only allowed to speak in the Stranger’s Room. Even Mycroft, with all his powers, did not know the extent to which his routine was about to be disturbed and his peace destroyed. His brother Sherlock conducted a general consulting detective practise ranging from murder to missing persons. Mycroft was always reluctant to exercise his powers and, on the rare occasions when he did exert himself, it was frequently on Government business to do with money and high finance. And there was a crucial difference between the great majority of Sherlock Holmes’s cases, as narrated by Dr Watson, and this Mycroft adventure. Sherlock’s affairs always began after a crime had been committed. Solving the mystery became a matter of deduction and the use of analytical powers. This current matter, however, turned on Mycroft’s ability to prevent something happening, to head off a disaster that could have had a severe impact on the state of the nation. It was, indeed, his work on this case that led to Mycroft being recommended for a knighthood, an honour he is believed to have said he would turn down, not wishing to be brought forth into the limelight and the fickle touch of fame.

  Tob
ias returned, slipping into his seat with a couple of boxes heavily bound with string. “I’ve brought some fresh supplies, sir,” he announced, “but I’m afraid the news is not good. The news from Jermyn Street, that is.”

  “Tell me the worst,” said Mycroft, with the air of a man waiting to learn of bereavement at the very least.

  “It’s mice, the man said, those marks on the Turkish Delight. He said he’d seen this before, sir. But he thought our ones might be bigger than normal, with slightly larger teeth. Half way to a rat, that was his opinion.”

  “My God, Tobias,” cried Mycroft, “I’ve had a horror of rodents of every description since I was a small child. Sherlock used to tease me about it. He once put a dead rat in my bed, I’ll never forget it. You’d better send for the porters. They can sort the matter out.”

  Ten minutes later two men were crawling along the sides of the room, pulling up the occasional floorboard and muttering to each other as they went about their work. There was a sound of rushing feet in the corridor outside. Another porter handed a message to Tobias.

  “Well?” said Mycroft. He never opened letters or messages.

  “This is very strange, sir. It’s from the Governor of the Bank of England. He’s coming to see you on a matter of great urgency. He should be here in a moment. But this is the strange thing. He says that his staff have been trying to ring us up for hours. They’ve tried the telegraph too. They can’t get through.”

  “My God,” said Mycroft. “You don’t suppose the vermin have been eating the cables as well as the Turkish Delight? You may depend on it, Tobias, our channels of communication with the wider world will have been ruined by a set of smelly rats with long tails and sharp teeth. We may need the services of the Pied Piper of Hamelin soon. You’d better go and check.”

  Tobias passed the Governor in the corridor. When he checked the cables, everything looked normal. But there was no line to be heard on the telephone and the telegraph connection had also gone dead. He got down on his hands and knees and traced the two cables back to the point where they came out of the wall. The mice must have eaten through them somewhere in the cavities and the area underneath the floorboards. When he checked with his colleagues in The Treasury on the two floors below, the story was the same. Total silence to and from the outside world. One of the younger Treasury men told Tobias with great glee that this was the best thing that happened for years.

  “Just think of it, Tobias,” he cried, “we couldn’t have done it better ourselves! No more bloody Government Departments endlessly bombarding us by phone and telegraph about how they need more money immediately for projects of great national importance that turn out to be digging a hole in the road in Wolverhampton!”

  The Governor was still pacing up and down Mycroft’s office when Tobias returned, his eyes staring ahead, wringing his hands. Mycroft, a large and portly figure, waited quietly in his chair, his right hand twirling a gold pen round and round.

  “The nation is in peril, Mr Auditor. I feel as our forebears must have felt when Philip of Spain’s Armada was on the High Seas, or in the dark days when Napoleon was mobilising his vast army across the Channel in Boulogne. And here am I, a tea merchant, six weeks in post, right in the firing line.”

  “Come, Governor, things cannot be quite that bad. Nobody is threatening to invade us, are they? Tell me what the problem is. And do take a seat, Governor, you’re making me feel seasick walking up and down all the time.”

  The Governor sat down. He put his head in his hands. Then he blew his nose very vigorously. Some reserve of strength seemed to come to him.

  “You can sum up our problem in one word,” he said. “Gorings, that’s what our trouble is.”

  “But they’re one of the oldest and most reputable houses in the City! What on earth has been going on?”

  “One word can explain what’s been going on. When I die, Mr Auditor, which may be soon, they will find Argentina written on my heart!”

  Tobias remembered that they didn’t grow tea in Argentina. The Governor must have known little of the place. “There has been a lot of imprudent business going on in that Gorings Temple in Bishopsgate,” he continued. “Let me just give you the general picture, Mr Auditor. Gorings have been lending money to Argentina for years. It appeared likely that the Latin Americans would be able to service their loans. In recent years they have lent heavily to the central and regional governments. Gorings have also lent heavily on mortgages secured on distressed land where nothing will ever grow, no profits will be made and the borrowers will be forced to default. Now there has been a general collapse of confidence in Argentina, blended with political instability.”

  Tobias was delighted at the usage of the word blended from the tea merchant Governor of the Bank of England, but he held his peace.

  “Four months ago Gorings agreed to buy up a gas and electricity company in Buenos Aires for an enormous sum of over ten million pounds, the money to be made over in three tranches. The second and largest instalment is due in the next seventy two hours. Gorings are unable to pay it. They only came to me this morning with the news.”

  The Governor paused. Mycroft passed him a Turkish Delight and lit one of his pungent cigarettes of strong Virginia.

  “Well, Governor, this is a pretty pass indeed. I have been involved in similar problems, not in this country but in Europe and beyond. We Government Auditors like to stick together in bad times as well as good. Would you like my advice, sir?”

  “There is nothing I would like more,” replied the Governor, chewing vigorously on his Turkish Delight.