The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [126]
“Oh, dear. Perhaps not.”
Mycroft looked up in alarm, hearing the dread in his secretary’s voice, then moved over quickly to see what had attracted the man’s attention.
Down on the empty street below, a large figure got out from behind the wheel of a van that looked remarkably like those used by a mortuary to transport bodies.
“Fast, man,” Mycroft urged. “If we can get down the stairs and take him by surprise, I can use this stout pipe you most thoughtfully—sorry, what was that?”
“I said, wouldn’t you rather use your gun?” The revolver looked incongruous balanced in the secretary’s thin palm, but most welcome.
“Mr Sosa, you are a gem among men.”
They were an unlikely pair of avengers, a thin balding man in a high collar with dust on his knees and a look of resolute terror on his sweating face, following a shoeless, unshaven, once-fat man in a filthy suit belted by an aged Eton tie, rapidly tip-toeing down a rickety metal stairway and through a derelict hallway.
The muffled gunshots that followed, heard by two waking prostitutes, a nurse snatching a quick cigarette outside St Thomas’ hospital, six ex-Army madmen in Bedlam, and three members of the House of Lords in solemn conclave with a glass of sherry on the Terrace, were dismissed as a back-firing lorry.
Chapter 63
Heavens, Sosa has been at my right hand for twenty-six years,” Mycroft told us indignantly. “I’m surprised that you imagine me such a poor judge of character.”
“I, well,” I said, biting my tongue to keep from saying, Nor had I imagined you an embezzler.
“The hypothesis was, Mr Sosa wished to inherit your position,” Holmes said. Mycroft looked at me askance, and did not deign to acknowledge such a ridiculous suspicion.
“Sosa came to me immediately the blackmailer approached him. He’d been ordered to turn over certain minor pieces of information, thus saving himself from scandal and earning a small sum as well. The photographs were of his sister and, shall we say, politically rather than socially embarrassing, while the information requested was indeed of little importance. The sort of thing that could be learnt elsewhere with a bit of digging.”
“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.