Laurie King - The God of the Hive

“It was a toe in the door,” Holmes remarked.

“Precisely. A thing that might tempt a man to succumb without preying on his conscience over-much. I naturally gave Sosa permission to pass on the information.”

“Thus setting a trap.”

“The first faint preparation for a trap. More like a thread to grasp. A delicate and convoluted thread, little better than the mere suspicion I’d had to that point, but I seized it, and I have spent the past five months trying to follow it to its source.”

“A twenty-pound trout on five-pound test line,” Goodman’s sleepy voice murmured from the corner.

Mycroft looked around in surprise. “Yes, a telling analogy. Attempting to reel my opponent in.

“And then, as I said, you two arrived back in the country, and we were instantly overtaken by Damian’s problems.”

“Why keep you alive?” Holmes asked.

Another man might have been taken aback by the callous question, but Mycroft merely said, “I spent much of my captivity meditating on that question, and eventually decided that I was being kept, as it were, on ice, until my death could serve a function.”

“How did your secretary find you?” I asked.

“I keep Sosa apprised of the general outlines of any of my projects, including this one. He became uneasy on the Thursday I disappeared, when I failed to return to work in the afternoon. Then in the evening he had a telephone call from his blackmailer instructing him to send Captain Lofte back to Shanghai. When Friday not only found me absent, but saw the deposit of a sizeable sum into his bank account, he grew alarmed, and began to work his way down the dramatis personae of our recent portfolios. Brothers was still missing, but now his general factotum, Gunderson, was as well.

“Mr Sosa may be a mere secretary, but he has not worked with me all these years for nothing. He placed the telephone call to Captain Lofte, but he also made arrangements with the neighbours at Gunderson’s and Brothers’ homes, to send word if either man returned. He applied himself wholeheartedly to the hunt, with little result. I fear the poor fellow was worn quite thin by the time he heard of activity in Gunderson’s rooms on Tuesday night. The moment he received the news, Wednesday morning, he took up a position across the street from Gunderson’s lodgings house, in an agony of trepidation lest his quarry had already left, or he would miss him when he did.

“Five hours later, at two-thirty in the afternoon, Gunderson came out carrying a small bag, and headed for the river.

“Gunderson never looked behind him. Although if he had, what would he have seen? One drab clerk among a thousand others, harried and indistinguishable.

“Yes, I am quite pleased with Mr Sosa.

“Gunderson went straight to the warehouse. And since the route to my prison led up a stair-well with many broken windows, Sosa could follow the man’s progress to the top storey. He waited for Gunderson to leave again, which was almost immediately-he had been dispatched to bring me my final, heavily drugged afternoon meal. Sosa watched him go, then summoned his courage and crossed over to the warehouse.

“There, his skills failed him-he had absorbed quite a bit of theory over the years, but little of the practicum. An oversight I shall have to remedy, in the future: It would have simplified matters had he been able to pick locks.

“But he could not. However, upon circling the building, he saw a set of fire-stairs, precariously attached and missing some of their treads, but for the most part sound.

“It took him two hours to round up what he needed, and he came near to breaking his neck getting up the metal steps in his office shoes, but he persisted, and made it to the roof, where he went along the row of skylights with a length of pipe. On the fourth such window, he found me.”

He described how Sosa, terrified by his own audacity, had rescued him. “I then told him to keep back when I went to confront Gunderson, but the poor fellow seemed to think he was Allen Quatermain and would not leave me. When Gunderson turned and saw us, an old man and a milksop, of course he pulled his gun. I had little choice but to shoot him. And to my irritation, he was inconsiderate enough to die before he could tell me who had sent him.

“But with him he had a parcel, the contents of which were most intriguing. My shoes and belt were there, and a clean shirt-not one of mine, but in my size. Also a clothes’ brush, razor, and bottle of water, indicating that he intended to render me more or less presentable. But the contents of a large envelope were the most suggestive of all: my note-case, into which a photograph of a rather attractive and scantily clad female had been inserted; a card for a night-club called The Pink Pagoda; a torn-off section of the London map showing the area about The Pink Pagoda, with an X drawn across a nearby alley; the forms necessary for a London mortuary to conduct a burial; and the autopsy for a man matching my size and general description, signed by an out-of-town pathologist, and dated the following day.

“Poor Mr Sosa, the events of that afternoon nearly did him in. Flying bullets and the presence of a dead man were bad enough, but then I made him wait there with me until dark-hoping that Gunderson’s boss, or at least a colleague, might come looking for him, which they did not-because in my weakened condition I could not manhandle Gunderson’s body down to the mortuary van by myself. And after that, he had to drive, then help me dump the body. I think by this time his mind had gone numb, because he did not even protest when I told him we needed to wait until the police had showed up, before carrying out the charade that Gunderson’s employer had intended for me.

“I had found a flask of gin in the glove compartment of the van, and made my secretary take a swallow to steady his nerves. And when the time came, he flashed his identity at the police with what appeared to be bored panache, but was, in fact, sheer terror. Then we snatched the body from out of their hands and delivered it, with the papers, to the funeral home.

“After that, I had Sosa drop me at the Angel Court entrance, and I ordered him to go to an hotel I knew near Maidenhead, and check in under an assumed name. I also ordered him to drink the remainder of the gin and go immediately to bed-he is a teetotaller, but I expected it might be a choice between alcohol and a complete breakdown, and thought the effect of drink would be simpler to deal with.”

With that, Mycroft picked up the final biscuit and sat back, as if his tale was at its end.

“So you’ve been here since Wednesday?” I prompted.

“I have a long-standing arrangement with Mrs Melas, that I might use her upstairs flat if ever I needed a retreat. She even came to see if I might be here, while I was in my prison-she left a note on the desk for me, asking that I get into touch. Fortunately, she hasn’t been back since.”

“She believed the reports of your death, as we did. I did,” I corrected myself, although Holmes’ claims to the contrary were not entirely convincing.

Mycroft winced. “Yes, I feared the report would trouble you. There was little I could do. Any public message-board such as the agony column was sure to be watched. As I said, my opponent has a remarkably subtle mind.”

That gave me pause, to think that the messages Holmes and I had posted to each other might have been not only noticed, but understood. However, one would also have had to know where the bolt-holes were to trace us to them, and there this faceless opponent had met his limits.

“I knew you would return to London, once you had dealt with Brothers. With luck, you would even find me before I began to eat Mrs Melas’ leather chair. But you say that Brothers is not dead. How do you intend to find him?”