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“It won’t be long,” I said, an attempt at reassurance.

Holmes and Goodman were missing, although the smoke in the air told me Holmes had been there until recently.

Mycroft pointed at the morning’s paper, sprawled across the table, with headlines about the attempt on Mussolini’s life.

“Brothers is dead,” he said. “In St Albans.”

The news jerked me out of the stilted conversation in my mind (… what might otherwise be described as blackmail operations). “St Albans? How on earth did he get there?”

“I do not know,” he said, his frustration under thin rein: Mycroft Holmes was not a man who waited to receive his information from the daily papers. “Sherlock decided it was worth the risk of venturing out, to see what he can learn.”

“To St Albans?”

“I believe he will make do with a telephone call to Lestrade. And before you ask, yes, he collected a disguise from downstairs.”

I picked up the newspaper that Goodman had brought us, and found it open to a brief note, little more than two column inches, concerning the identity of a man found dead of knife wounds in St Albans on Saturday.

Knife wounds. I read the sparse information with care, but it was only given space on the page because of the irresistible juxtaposition of an oddball religious leader and a brutal attack. The piquant touch of it being in St Albans rather than London or Manchester helped explain its appearance in a national newspaper.

Mycroft was in the kitchen, carving bread, cheese, and sausage into meticulous slices. “Did Holmes take Goodman with him?” I asked.

“I am not certain when Mr Goodman left, or where he was going.”

That sounded like Robert Goodman. I began to tell Mycroft what I had learnt, or failed to learn, over the telephone, when I was interrupted by a small noise from below. In a minute, Holmes threaded himself through the dumbwaiter hole. He was wearing a stiff collar with a pair of pince-nez on a ribbon around his neck, and had no doubt left the bowler hat downstairs: He’d been dressed as a solicitor’s clerk.

With an addition: He pulled from his pocket a bottle of Bass Ale and set it beside the sink.

Without comment, Mycroft added more bread to the platter and carried it through to the sitting room. I fetched three glasses, holding one under the froth that boiled up when Holmes opened the bottle.

“Estelle and Javitz are at the sea-shore,” I told him. “Damian, I’m not so sure about, partly because of language difficulties. I’m to telephone back to Tunbridge Wells at tea-time, and I’ll try the Dutch hotel again then as well.” I gave him the details of both conversations as he finished pouring and we took the glasses in to where Mycroft sat. Then it was Holmes’ turn.

“Brothers died of a single knife-wound in a nearly empty house in St Albans,” he said. “The police identified him by the distinctive scar beside his eye, although they are puzzled by the presence of both gunshot and knife-wounds on one man, particularly as the bullet wound had been treated and was in the process of healing. The fire had been left on in the room, which accelerated decomposition, but the coroner believes the man died on Tuesday or Wednesday. A neighbour saw two men get out of a taxi at the house on Tuesday afternoon. One of them had his left arm in a sling, which is how Brothers was found. She did not notice when they left.

“That’s Brothers out of the way—and, as far as our opponent is concerned, you as well, Mycroft. He’ll be aiming at Sosa, and I suppose me and Russell, before he can feel quite secure. I wonder how far he will go before he judges that he is free from threat? Will he remove Brothers’ assistant in Orkney? Perhaps a few key members of the church’s Inner Circle?”

“Surely he must at least suspect that you’re alive and Gunderson is dead?” I asked Mycroft. “Gunderson has been missing for five days, and you said yourself that evidence at the warehouse testifies to things having gone awry.”

“Short of digging up the grave, he can’t be certain that Gunderson