The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [121]
Goodman had nudged me aside to look at our find. His height made it difficult to see, so he dragged Mrs Cowper’s chair over to climb on. He thrust his torso inside. In a moment, his hand came back, holding a wide metal strip with a small hook at one end.
Holmes examined it, then bent to fit the hook into the wire mounted on the portrait. “It’s a means of replacing the king before the door is fully shut,” he said.
“Where does the shaft come out?” I asked Holmes, keeping my voice low. “Is the basement kitchen still in use?”
“I believe he was interested less in the depths than what lies above.”
“What is that?”
“The Melas flat,” Holmes replied with satisfaction. Then his face changed as he lunged past me, too late for the second time in minutes.
“Goodman, stop!” he hissed, his hand locked on the Green Man’s ankle. Goodman did not retreat, nor did he reply, he merely waited, giving Holmes no choice but to let go. He thumbed the torch on and climbed through on the small man’s heels, with me bringing up the rear and praying that the boards had in fact held Mycroft’s weight, and could thus be trusted to hold a series of lesser bodies. It was at least forty feet to the ground, and I had two men above me.
The torch in Holmes’ hand bounced madly, illuminating nothing so much as the soles of Goodman’s shoes. I had only gone up a few feet when everything came to a halt. Trying simultaneously to cling to the wall and peer around Holmes, I saw Goodman’s left hand exploring the wall beside the ladder, a storey above Mycroft’s kitchen. Holmes stretched his arm back so the light fell on the wall; I heard a faint click.
Sudden light flooded the shaft, and Goodman leant forward to place his hand on the lower edge of the entrance.
Then he froze, his weight braced on one hand, suspended above our heads.
Holmes shifted, and said in a low voice, “Mycroft? If that is you, kindly put away your gun and allow Mr Goodman to enter.”
The light dimmed somewhat as a figure appeared through the hole in the shaft wall. “My dear Sherlock. And Mary, too, I see. Yes, reports of my demise were somewhat exaggerated. I trust you brought dinner?”
Chapter 61
Mycroft looked bizarrely thin, as if his features had been grafted onto another man’s body. However, he moved with ease around his borrowed kitchen, playing the host and making coffee despite the sticking plasters on two fingertips of his right hand. The revolver lay on the work-table beside an equally gaunt packet of biscuits.
“Am I to understand that Mrs Melas told you about this flat?”
“She did not,” I answered.
Goodman said to me, “That’s what she was waiting for you to ask.” Mycroft had been more dubious about Goodman even than Holmes, eyeing him as one might a small child in a roomful of delicate knickknacks.
“Yes, I should have known that you would not overlook the usefulness of an adjoining flat.” That I had missed the significance of the renovations might have been humiliating, had Holmes not also failed to see them.
“I was beginning to wonder if I should have to sneak out at night and raid my neighbours’ cupboards.”
“I did make it as far as your own flat on Saturday,” I told him.
He turned with a look of surprise. “That was you, Mary? Thumping about for hours?”
“Hardly hours. And yes, it was I.”
“You left an unholy mess.”
“I know. Sorry.”
“I thought it was the police again—I expect they are the source of the ringing telephone downstairs that has been plaguing me all week-end. Although thank heavens, the ringing seems at last to have ceased. In any event, I kept anticipating that they would find their way up the dumbwaiter shaft.”
“It was well concealed.”
“By that portrait?” he said in astonishment. “How could anyone who ever met Mrs Cowper take her for a devoted Royalist?”
Another failure for which I had no answer.
The coffee was ready, the meagre edibles arranged on a fine plate. Mycroft led us to the Melas sitting room, a dark place furnished when Victoria set the fashion, with maroon velvet curtains so thick we had no worry of escaping