Laurie King - The God of the Hive

Are you afraid of anything, Mr Robert?

Oh, dear child, I most certainly am. I am afraid of fear, so afraid. I am terrified of the bonds that tie a man down, the weight of other lives on his shoulders, the responsibility for stopping unnatural acts.

He was grateful to have made the acquaintance of Mary Russell: A perfect woman, nobly planned / To warn, to comfort, and command .

Command me, dear lady , he thought. Warn me and comfort me and give me orders, for I am in need of a clear-cut task. I have long cast off my officer’s class. I need to know that someone else is in charge .

Still, the music to the funeral had gone well, and that was all his own doing. Perhaps he needed to venture his own contribution to the current problem.

What could he bring to this next act in the play?

He got to his feet and stretched out one arm in a gesture unseen by those on the street below. “Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens,” he shouted at them, then laughed aloud.

Having thus granted London his god-like permission to continue its scurrying life, he put on his hat and turned for the stairway.

He had, he recalled, promised a pint of milk. And his pockets were capacious, his coat large enough to conceal a beltful of sustenance-cheese and biscuits from the shop on the ground floor of this very building, apples from the man on the corner, a packet of coffee, a small loaf of bread. That Mycroft fellow looked as if he’d appreciate a slab of bacon.

Oh, he thought, and a newspaper. Mary’s husband seemed particularly taken by the things.

Bensbridge’ I assume to be Westminster Bridge, and he wants a reply in the Evening Standard , but what the devil does he mean by ‘the object of your affection’?” I demanded. Goodman, newspaper delivered, had washed his hands of the matter and retired to the kitchen. He was humming to himself and exploring the cupboards.

“I do not know. Although addressing himself to Sherlock suggests that he believes me dead.”

Holmes and I rose at the same instant.

“There’s a public telephone down the street. Do you want to go, or shall I?” I asked.

“Take a taxicab to the offices of the Evening Standard,” Mycroft said. “There will be a telephone near there.”

“You’re not thinking of agreeing to his demands?” I protested.

Holmes’ face was a study in storm clouds. He made a circle of the room, then snatched up Mycroft’s gold pen and a piece of paper. “If we do not place a reply-by noon-we remove the option of choice. One of us needs to stay here, and… you are the less immediately visible.” He held out the page, on which he had written three words:

The beekeeper agrees.

I hesitated, but the revelations of the night before, which I had pushed from my mind under the urgent need for rationality, washed back with a vengeance. Suddenly, the thought of being locked up with my brother-in-law filled me with revulsion. Without further argument, I thrust the page into a pocket and made for the kitchen. As I climbed through the dumbwaiter hole, I heard Holmes say to Mycroft that he needed some things from downstairs.

I went fast down the shaft and through Mycroft’s flat to the guest room, noticing in passing that Goodman had cleaned up the débris from the panel. Holmes found me ripping garments from the wardrobe.

“Russell.”

“Theft,” I spat. “Embezzlement for the good of the nation! Oh, Holmes, how could you?”

“It was necessary.”

“The ends justifying the means? The tawdry excuse of every tyrant through history.”

“Mycroft is no tyrant, Russell.”

“Isn’t he? Stealing money from his government to set up his own little monarchy. What is he doing with all that money, that can’t be done openly? Bribes? Assassinations? I know there’s blackmail -blackmail , Holmes! Those letters of his that ‘would taint our name forever.’ You detest blackmailers, yet you permitted it!”

“The ‘noble lie’ has to convince the rulers themselves.”

I rejected the sadness in his voice by making mine louder. “I think I prefer the sentiments of Phaedo to those of The Republic: ‘False words are not only themselves evil, but they infect the soul with evil.’”

“Do you not imagine that my brother is well aware of that? Do you not see that thirty years ago, he consciously chose to shape a life of virtue on top of that one act?”

“What I’d imagined was that Mycroft was above such things. What I’d hoped was that he did his best to counteract the slimy deeds that Intelligence spawns, the bribes and blackmail and God knows what death and misery. What I’d hoped-” I broke off and slammed the drawer. What I’d hoped was that Mycroft was better than that.

“Good men may be driven to unethical decisions. I have been, myself.”

I grabbed a comb and began to drag it through my hair, trying to ignore the figure in the edge of the looking-glass.

“Are you and I arguing,” Holmes asked eventually, “or are you arguing with yourself?”

I threw the comb into its drawer, kicked my shed garments into the corner, and jammed one of the wider cloches over my head. I looked at my reflection, but after a time, I had to look away.

Mycroft had always been a bigger-than-life presence, even before I met him; to find… this at the man’s core shook me. When it came to Mycroft, I had somehow decided that he managed to undertake the business of Intelligence without the unsavoury aspects of the craft, even though I myself was regularly driven to house-breaking, lying to the police, assault… Holmes was right, I was being simplistic. Childish.

Fortunately, he had the sense not to say so.

“All right,” I said. “Yes, he pays. That doesn’t make it right, but it’s a brutal world and the work he does is necessary. I am disappointed. Profoundly disappointed. But I will help.” I picked up my purse.

“I left Damian at the Hotel Delft in Bleumenschoten,” Holmes said. “And Dr Henning, of course. Under the name Daniel de Fontaine.”

I flagged down a cab on Piccadilly, went to the Standard’s offices to leave the advert, then walked down the street to a quiet public call-box.

It took ten minutes to achieve a connexion with the hotel in Tunbridge Wells. The man who answered was friendly and sounded intelligent, but he assured me that no one by the name of Javitz had checked in the previous day. My heart instantly tried to climb up my throat.

“Not -” I forced myself under control: Shouting at the man would not help me. I took a deep breath, and changed what I had been about to say, and the way in which I said it. “Oh dear, perhaps they were forced to use another hotel. Were you full up, yesterday?”

“No, madam, we were not.”

“Well, perhaps-” Perhaps what? They didn’t like the looks of the place? Estelle threw a tantrum and demanded to be returned to Goodman’s family home? They’d had a mechanical breakdown on the road to Tunbridge Wells, a flat tyre, a deadly crash?

They’d been picked up by Mycroft’s foe?

Do not panic. Do not . “Perhaps if I describe them, you can tell me if you’ve seen them. He’s tall, American, has an injured leg, and the child-”

“Ah yes, you mean Mr Russell.”

I found I was leaning against the wall, and the box was full of a rushing sound.

“Madam? Hello, Exchange, have we been cut off?”

“No,” I said. “Yes, I’m here, sorry. Yes, Mr Russell. He came in yesterday?”

“With the child, yes, charming little thing. What was the name you used?”

“Oh, nothing, it’s just one-he occasionally uses another name so his step-father doesn’t find him. The step-father doesn’t, er… doesn’t care for the child.”