The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [82]
“What was your relationship with Mycroft, if I may ask?”
“I was … his friend. Occasionally I acted as his secretary.”
“That must have been a recent appointment.” I had last met the weedy and humourless Richard Sosa in December, when Mycroft was ill and asked us to take his secretary a letter one Sunday afternoon. However, all sorts of changes might have come about while I was out of the country.
“By no means recent. I have worked for him, on and off, for more than twenty years. Since I returned to this country and married Mr Melas,” she added. Then she smiled, unexpectedly. “I did occasionally act as his type-writer, but my primary purpose was to provide eyes and ears. Sometimes this was in the manner of his other … associates, but generally my use was for Mr Holmes himself. Your brother-in-law liked occasionally to discuss his affairs with what he termed ‘a pair of sympathetic and intelligent ears.’”
I looked at her with considerable interest. This woman not only knew of Mycroft’s agents, she was claiming that she had been one of them. Moreover, it sounded as if he utilised her for a sounding board, as Holmes had done with Watson, and later me. Why had it never occurred to me that the brothers might be alike in this way?
If that was the case, it pointed to a degree of trust I would not have expected of Mycroft. This aloof and rather hard-looking woman could know secrets Mycroft shared with no one else.
“Do you know anything about his death?” I asked her. “All I have heard is that he was killed outside of a raucous night-club. The Times obituary made it sound as if he had been a client.”
“Absurd,” she said flatly.
“I agree. But why else would he have been there?”
“I can think of any number of reasons why Mr Holmes would have been in that area. He was apt to meet his associates in the oddest locations.”
My rising hope was cut short by suspicion: Mycroft’s intellect ranged far and wide, but physically, my brother-in-law kept to a rigorously limited circuit—as Holmes put it, his brother could not be bothered to go out of his way to verify a solution. “Interesting,” I said mildly. “I thought Mycroft rarely went out to such meetings.”
“That was certainly true in the past,” she said. “However, when a man looks into the eyes of his own mortality, he confronts many demons. I believe that one of the demons Mr Holmes faced, after his heart attack, was that his disinclination to stir from his common rounds made him dangerously predictable. Either the world had changed, or his own unshakeable habits had created what he termed ‘an eddy in the currents of crime’ around him. In either event, he made an effort to change those habits.”
And I had thought Mycroft’s new régime of taking exercise was merely a weight-loss response to illness. I should have known there would be more than one meaning.
“So, who was he seeing at that club that night?”
“Ah, I’m sorry, you misunderstood my meaning. He occasionally spoke about his personal regrets—knowing that I of all his friends would understand—and even about his colleagues, but I was not privy to his secrets. Certainly not those to do with his work. And you have to realise, his remarks to me were often quite incomprehensible. In the general run of such things, we would be in the middle of some quite ordinary conversation—music or art or a current scandal—when he would drop an utterly unrelated and quite oblique remark. As if he wished to see my unstudied reaction.”
“Er, can you give me an example?”
“Let me think. Yes: Last month we went to the theatre to see a pair of Shaw plays about deception, and as we strolled home, talking about the strictures of drawing-room plays and the life of an actor, he asked me what I thought about the wage demands of coal miners. A topic that was much in the news at the time.”
“I see. And he never happened to mention anything related to this night-club?”
“Not that I remember. Although I believe something has been preying on his mind, of