by Andrew Lane
‘I will tell you what I can,’ Mycroft said mysteriously. He moved his gaze to Sherlock. ‘I need you to convey a message to Rufus Stone. Get him here with a carriage. Bring young Matty – I think we will need all the help we can get.’
Sherlock was confused. ‘You’re not intending to take these men back to Holmes Lodge, are you?’ he asked.
Mycroft nodded. ‘They can better be controlled there,’ he said decisively.
‘But –’ Sherlock started.
‘No.’ Mycroft slammed his hand on the kitchen table. ‘There will be no discussion, Sherlock,’ he said angrily. ‘These men are coming back with us!’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sherlock stared at his brother in shock. He wasn’t used to being told what to do by Mycroft, and he wasn’t used to his brother shouting at him.
‘Now go!’ Mycroft snapped. ‘Get Rufus Stone and a carriage here as soon as you can.’
‘All right! I will!’
Sherlock backed out of the kitchen. The last thing that he heard was Mycroft saying to Phillimore: ‘Now you will need to tie these men up. Do you have any strong rope around?’
‘You want me to tie these men up!’ Phillimore asked incredulously.
‘Well I certainly can’t do it,’ Mycroft said, turning away.
Sherlock left them there, and walked out of the house. He was angry at Mycroft’s peremptory giving of orders. Obviously Mycroft was his elder brother, and he was standing in for their father, but even so there were limits. After all, the two of them had grown up together!
Mycroft had sent the carriage home earlier, so Sherlock walked down to the town square and hailed a cab even though he wasn’t sure he had the money to cover it.
‘Can you put this on the account for Holmes Lodge?’ he asked the cabbie. The man nodded.
Well, that was settled then. Mycroft would eventually be paying for it.
The journey to Holmes Lodge took fifteen minutes or so. Sherlock ordered the cabbie to wait, then went and located Rufus Stone and Matty. Without telling them why, he told them that they had to get a cart and go to James Phillimore’s house. As they set about organizing the cart Sherlock went back to where the cab was waiting. He knew that he should really have dismissed the cab and gone back in the cart, with Rufus and Matty, but he rebelled against the implicit instructions.
‘Take me back to the town square,’ he said to the cabbie. ‘Put it on the same account.’
By the time he had walked from the town square back to James Phillimore’s house, Rufus and Matty had arrived with the cart.
‘What’s the urgency?’ Rufus called from the driver’s seat.
‘Ask my brother,’ Sherlock called back darkly.
Rufus, Matty and Sherlock walked into the house together. Sherlock led the way to the kitchen, where the three decorators were still asleep. They were now tied up: hands behind their backs and ankles fastened together. Mycroft was sitting at the same table tucking into a pie, while James Phillimore was nowhere to be seen.
‘Ah, Mr Stone,’ Mycroft said, crumbs on his shirt front. ‘Please take these gentlemen back to Holmes Lodge. Secure them in the stables, please.’
Rufus Stone stared at the three men, paying particular attention, Sherlock noticed, to their various injuries. ‘Are these the men who broke into your house?’ he asked.
Mycroft shrugged. ‘That has yet to be established,’ he said, ‘but rest assured that they are villains and they deserve to be tied up.’
‘You drugged ’em,’ Matty observed.
‘Actually, the owner of this house and the cook jointly drugged them. It was merely my idea. Now, please, can we get them on the cart, covered up and taken back to the stables at Holmes Lodge?’
The journey took perhaps half an hour. The horses were slower than the one pulling the cab that Sherlock had taken, and Mycroft seemed anxious not to raise any suspicions. Sherlock, Rufus and Matty were forced to sit uncomfortably at the front of the cart while Rufus steered the horses. Mycroft sat hunched beside him like a black crow. Once they arrived, Mycroft supervised the moving of the three unconscious bodies into the stables.
‘Well,’ he said after it was all done, ‘that was an interesting and unexpected coda to the day. I believe dinner will be served soon; I would suggest that we all go and clean ourselves up in readiness.’
‘And the men in there?’ Sherlock asked, indicating the stables.
‘Oh, they won’t be dining with us.’
‘You know what I mean. What happens to them now?’
Mycroft stared at Sherlock. ‘They will be questioned,’ he said eventually. ‘You need not worry about that any more.’
‘But I do worry,’ Sherlock said. He knew he was pushing his brother, but he had the distinct feeling that something was being hidden from him, that he was being excluded. ‘They broke into our house. They attacked me. They attacked Mr Phillimore – Emma’s fiancé. Do you just expect us to put all that aside and let you deal with it?’
‘Yes,’ Mycroft said simply, ‘I do.’
‘This has something to do with the telegram you got, doesn’t it?’
Mycroft’s face was as expressionless as a stone statue. ‘You have an active imagination, Sherlock,’ he said. ‘You should try to curb that imagination.’
‘Your superiors told you to take these men and segregate them,’ Sherlock continued. ‘What happens now – do you question them yourself, while nobody is around?’
‘Sherlock, I am warning you . . .’
‘Is this anything to do with Jonathan Phillimore’s concerns about the canal they are building in Suez? It is, isn’t it?’
‘Please, desist.’ Mycroft’s face was still stony, but Sherlock detected a degree of distress beneath the mask. ‘There are things I cannot talk about.’
‘I’ve never known you to act like this before, Mycroft,’ Sherlock said quietly.
‘I have never had to act like this before,’ Mycroft replied. ‘My work life and my home life rarely overlap.’
Dinner was a quiet affair. Rufus Stone joined Sherlock, Mycroft, Matty, Emma and Aunt Anna. Given the presence of the rest of the family, Sherlock didn’t feel comfortable raising the subject of what had transpired that afternoon, and nobody else raised the subject. Instead, Sherlock told Emma that they had seen her fiancé, and that he seemed like a pleasant enough man. She was pleased, but then a lot of things seemed to please Emma.
After dinner Sherlock caught Mycroft’s arm as he was leaving the dining room.
‘What are we going to do about questioning those men?’ he asked. ‘They’ll probably have woken up by now. It’s not that I have any great concern for their welfare, but we can’t leave them there all night.’
‘The matter is in hand,’ Mycroft said, not looking at Sherlock. He attempted to leave, but Sherlock added: ‘You’re going to get Rufus Stone to question them, aren’t you? You know that he would be prepared to hit them, or hurt them, to get them to talk, while I wouldn’t. Mycroft, that’s wrong.’
This time his brother turned to stare Sherlock in the eye. ‘I have not asked Mr Stone to question them,’ he said, ‘but if I had, then that would be entirely appropriate behaviour. They broke into this house. More importantly, they tried to kill you, and they were in Emma’s bedroom. These things are unconscionable, and cannot be allowed to stand. I will take whatever action I deem necessary to discover what these men wanted.’
Sherlock gazed into his brother’s eyes. He could usually tell what Mycroft was thinking, but his expression on this occasion was utterly unreadable.
‘What was in the telegram, Mycroft?’ he asked simply.
His brother stared at him for a long moment, then turned and walked away, towards their father’s library.
Sherlock had wanted to spend a little time in the comfort of the library himself, but he had a feeling that Mycroft didn’t want him around. Besides, with the two of them in the library the atmosphere would be tense. Instead, Sherlock went for a walk out in the
darkness of the Holmes Lodge grounds. Intellectually he knew that the men had only broken in to find the letter from Jonathan Phillimore – which wasn’t there – but part of him still wanted to patrol the grounds to check that the family was safe.
The moon shone down upon the house, illuminating the front in bright light but casting a dark shadow from the back. As Sherlock walked, an owl left its hidden perch on one of the trees and swooped down towards him, passing like an unquiet spirit only a few feet above his head before flapping its wings and gaining altitude. He turned to watch it go, but lost sight of it when it entered the shadow of the house.
Eventually, as he knew he would, he turned and walked towards the stables at the back of the house.
He wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he got there. Part of him wanted to ask the men who were tied up there some questions, even though he knew they probably wouldn’t answer him, but part of him just wanted to make sure they were still there, and hadn’t either escaped or choked on their gags and died.
He had the sense that something was going on that he didn’t know about: something monolithic and uncaring. He didn’t like it.
He got to the corner of the house and was about to pass into the shadow cast by the moon when he heard quiet voices. He stopped, pressed himself against the stone of the house and peered around the corner.
The stables were a hundred yards or so beyond the house. In front of them, a carriage stood. Two men stood by the horses, holding their heads to make sure they didn’t make any noise. These weren’t Holmes family horses, this wasn’t a Holmes family carriage and these weren’t Holmes family servants. Someone had quietly come on to their property and was doing something underhand.
As Sherlock watched, another two men carried a struggling bundle from the stables and threw it into the carriage. The carriage’s springs rocked as the bundle hit the floor, and Sherlock heard a muffled groan. It was one of the three men that they had drugged and removed from James Phillimore’s house earlier. Someone was rescuing them!
No, that didn’t make sense. If they were being rescued then the ropes tying them would have been cut, and their gags removed. This wasn’t a rescue – this was a removal . . .
His brain raced, trying to work out what to do. He could start shouting, raise the alarm and mobilize the servants, or he could sneak back into the house and get Rufus Stone.
He had just decided to start shouting for help when a figure walked out of the stables and stood in the moonlight, watching as a second bound figure was carried to the carriage.
It was Mycroft.
Sherlock moved further back, feeling his heart sink. What on earth did Mycroft want with these men so late at night, and why hadn’t he told Sherlock anything about it?
Another figure moved out of the stables. This time it was Rufus Stone.
‘Are you ready to go?’ Rufus asked Mycroft.
‘I think so. The journey back to London will be uncomfortable, I fear.’
Rufus glanced into the carriage. ‘It certainly will,’ he said. ‘They’re stacked up like logs in there.’
‘I didn’t mean uncomfortable for them,’ Mycroft snapped, ‘I meant uncomfortable for me.’
‘What are you going to tell Sherlock?’
Mycroft sighed. ‘I shall tell him nothing. I will need you to write a note to Sherlock as if from me, telling him that I was urgently recalled to London due to some diplomatic emergency or other. You have, I know, an amazing ability to forge other people’s handwriting – you have seen enough of mine to do a decent job. Suggest to him that he returns to Oxford as soon as possible rather than stay here at Holmes Lodge. Once you have done that, leave some rope lying around here, and make sure that the ends are cut through. He will assume that the men have been rescued by their friends. He will want to search for them, of course. You can let him do that safely – he will not find them, but it will keep him occupied for a while and stop him from thinking too deeply about what might have occurred. He will probably write to me, or send me a telegram. I shall delay in replying. If fortune is on our side then other things will catch his attention and he will forget about this mystery. The wonderful thing about Sherlock is that he is so easily distracted.’
Sherlock felt a slow burn of anger within his chest. His brother was not only keeping things from him, but was actively intending to lie to him! What was going on? There must have been something in the telegram from Mycroft’s superiors that had prompted him to take this action, but why? What was it about the seemingly innocent letter from James Phillimore’s brother that had provoked such an immediate reaction?
‘And me?’ Rufus asked. ‘Once I have written the letter and arranged the scene here, what do you want me to do?’
‘Follow me back to London. I will need your assistance in questioning these men further.’
Mycroft nodded to Rufus Stone, and started clambering into the carriage. ‘Look after Sherlock,’ he said as he disappeared. Two of the men – the ones who had been holding the horses’ heads – climbed up to the driver’s board. One of them took up the reins while the other two men walked away, keeping to the shadows but heading for the gates to the road outside. Rufus Stone watched as the carriage pulled away. He didn’t seem happy.
The carriage slewed around and headed for the corner of the building where Sherlock was hidden. He sprinted back to the porch, and hid himself inside just as the carriage quietly came past, heading for the gates. Within a few seconds it had vanished.
Sherlock felt betrayed. He felt . . . abandoned. His own brother was keeping things from him.
For a few minutes, as silence fell again across the house and its grounds, he stood there. He didn’t know what to do. In a situation like that he would normally seek out either his brother or Rufus Stone for advice, but that wasn’t going to work now. He was on his own.
No, he wasn’t. He had Matty.
He slipped up the stairs and along the corridor to Matty’s room. For the second night in a row he woke his friend up with a finger against his lips to keep him quiet. For the next half-hour he told an incredulous Matty what had happened at James Phillimore’s house, and then more recently outside Holmes Lodge.
‘I always said your brother was a dark ’orse.’ Matty scratched his head. ‘What do you think we can do?’ he asked. ‘What can we do?’
As always, Sherlock was grateful for his friend’s immediate and wholehearted desire to help, and to do something.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he whispered. ‘That letter is the key to the whole thing. There wasn’t any information in the letter itself that could have provoked this kind of reaction from Mycroft’s superiors, and I couldn’t see any sign of a code in what Mr Phillimore’s brother had said. I’ve seen codes hidden in messages before, and usually there’s something strange about the message itself that gives it away – something clumsy or unusual because particular words have been chosen so that every fifth word, for instance, spells out a secret message, or because sentences have been made to start with certain letters so that if you take all of these initial letters then they spell out a secret message. There was nothing in the message that made me think there was something hidden there, though.’
‘Are there any other ways of hiding messages?’ Matty asked.
Sherlock thought. ‘I suppose there might have been something hidden under the stamp, but it would have had to be a very small message. Or –’ He slapped his forehead. ‘Of course!’
‘What?’ Matty asked.
‘Invisible ink! I’ve been so stupid! You can use lemon juice, or various other things, to write messages on paper. They fade to invisibility when they dry, but if you hold them over a candle then the message appears.’ A thought struck him. ‘It was staring us in the face all along – Mr Phillimore’s brother actually said: “I have never been able to hold a candle to you when it comes to providing assistance to those in need.” That was a message to Mr Phillimore to hold a candle to the letter and look for invisible ink.’ Sher
lock strained to remember the contents of the message. ‘He also said: “When we were children together I recall that we were inseparable, and got up to all kinds of tricks.” I bet he and his brother used to send messages to each other using invisible ink when they were children. What else did he say? “I regret the fact that things changed, and that some kind of invisible wall appeared between us.” So, he actually mentioned “invisible”, “candle” and “tricks”. It was all there!’
‘And this Mr Phillimore didn’t work it out ’imself?’ Matty sniffed. ‘’E needs to pull ’is socks up if ’e wants to marry into this family.’
‘More to the point, I’m surprised that Mycroft didn’t work it out. He must be slipping.’ As he said the words, Sherlock remembered how Mycroft had sniffed at the envelope. Had his sensitive nose detected a trace of lemon juice? Had he worked out from the mere odour of lemons that there was a secret message in the letter?
Sherlock shook his head. ‘We need to take another look at that letter,’ he said. ‘We need to check for invisible ink so we can find out what the message is, because Mycroft isn’t going to tell us.’
‘Shall we go now?’ Matty asked. ‘Or after breakfast?’
They ended up waiting for breakfast for the simple reason that they didn’t want to wake Mr Phillimore up before sunrise to ask if they could take another look at his letter. There was also the fact that Matty didn’t want to travel on an empty stomach to take into account.
Emma was there at breakfast. That stopped Sherlock and Matty talking about what they were going to do, because Emma would almost certainly have asked if she could accompany them to Mr Phillimore’s house. Instead they made innocuous conversation, bursting to say something more important but unable to.
Rufus Stone wasn’t present, fortunately. That way Sherlock didn’t have to pretend to be surprised at Mycroft’s absence and to try and look like he believed any lies that Rufus was telling him.
