The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [78]
Then I did the same in the guest room.
In the study, I found Goodman sitting in a chair in the centre of the room, looking at one of the walls. He might have been in a gallery studying an Old Master: Still Life of Odd Books.
“I had a thought,” I said, and took the work-lamp from the desk, transferring it to the plug nearest the bookshelf entrance and carrying it into the dim passageway. I held it up so its beam fell onto the bricks, new on one side, ancient on the other, searching for any anomaly. A moment later, Goodman’s hand came into view and he took the lamp from me, holding it so I could continue my search unencumbered.
Twenty minutes later I had reached the edge of the light’s beam, having found nothing but walls.
I returned the lamp to its place. “Well, it was just a thought.”
“There’s something odd about this shelf,” Goodman said.
I looked at him in surprise. “Very good. Not many people would notice.”
Mycroft had contrived a hidden recess the size of one of the shelf spaces. Now I unloaded the books and felt around for the slightly protruding nail head towards the back, which freed the back to drop forward into my hands.
It held ordinary valuables—money in several currencies; passports in false names that fit the descriptions of Mycroft, his brother, and me; and a piece of paper with a row of numbers on it, which when translated into mathematical base eight gave one the European bank account where he kept his foreign savings. Nothing to suggest his real secrets. Nothing to connect him with the world of Intelligence, either large or small i.
I decided to leave the study to last, on the theory that if an ordinary man keeps his secrets close, an extraordinary man keeps his far from him. Having made this decision, I turned for the sitting room, only to have the stillness of the flat shattered by a jangling telephone. “Don’t answer it,” I said. We both watched the machine, waiting for many rings before it fell silent.
I worked my way down the hallway towards the sitting room, rolling up the carpet runner, groping along the floorboards and skirting, unscrewing the switch plates, peering behind the pictures.
When I got to the end, my clean clothes were no longer and I had broken a fingernail prising at one of the boards.
Sucking at the finger, I kicked my way down the rolled carpet until it was flat, only then realising that I ought not to have started in the bedroom. Mycroft had commanded that Mrs Cowper’s kitchen be renovated, shortly after an enormous dinner for important guests—a goose, all the fixings, two pies, and several dusty basement-stored bottles—had first stuck, then come crashing down four stories in the dumbwaiter. It was the same time at which he had installed his secret entrance, using the dust of one building project to conceal the other.
And, I now saw, it would have been the ideal time to install a well-concealed safe in an unlikely place—why hadn’t I thought to look in the kitchen first and saved myself the knowledge of his laundry and nostrums?
Chapter 42
Mycroft occasionally cooked in this kitchen, on Mrs Cowper’s holidays or days off, but for the most part, it had become the housekeeper’s room. Her ruffled apron hung from a hook on the back of one of the swinging doors; a photograph of her grandchildren stood beside the warming oven; an enormous portrait of the king beamed down upon her labours from the wall where the late and unlamented dumbwaiter had once opened—loyal as he was, I doubted the portrait would be Mycroft’s choice of decoration.
The room was tidy, as Mrs Cowper always left it; there was no knowing when she had last been here.
And this, naturally enough, was where I found Mycroft’s stash, in a place both difficult