The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [83]
“What?”
“That I do not know. I only noticed that he seemed mildly distracted the last two or three times I saw him.”
Goodman spoke up from the sofa; I had all but forgotten he was there. “Mr Holmes asked an odd question the last time you talked,” he said in a voice of certainty.
“Did he? Now that you mention it, yes he did. It concerned loyalty. At first I was taken aback, because I thought he was making reference to my loyalty, but it seemed that was not his concern.”
“If not yours, then whose?” I asked her.
“I do not know.”
“The exact words he used were …” Goodman coaxed.
“‘Where does faith part from loyalty?’” she answered. “He had been reading the Greek philosophers, a discussion of the Virtues. He said something about one being legal and the other emotional. I’m sorry, I have little education, and I often did not understand what Mr Holmes was saying.”
Faith, as the Latin fidelis, connotes an unswerving belief; loyalty is linked with lex, a legal commitment. Faith is bone deep and unquestioning, whereas loyalty comes with a sense of threat and the possibility of failure.
I asked, “Did you get the impression that he was talking about himself? Wondering if he should remain loyal, for example? Or someone else?”
She answered slowly. “It sounded—looking back, that is; I can’t be certain what I felt at the time—but I should say it sounded as if he was trying to understand the underpinnings of someone’s concept of loyalty. Not his own.”
“But that’s all he said?”
“It’s all I remember. When I asked him what he meant, he laughed and changed the subject.”
“To what?”
“Oh, just a question about a novel we’d both been reading.”
Mycroft Holmes discussing a novel? For that matter, Mycroft discussing business with a woman he’d first met in the course of a crime? There must be unexplored depths to the woman—although Dr Watson’s story intimated as much.
“When was this—your last conversation with him?”
“The twenty-seventh of August, a Wednesday. He had been very occupied for several days, to the extent of cancelling a musical engagement, but he rang me that morning to say he was free for a few hours.”
That Wednesday, I had been flying to Orkney while Holmes was bobbing about the North Sea: It was, as she said, the first day in many that Mycroft had been free of us. This was also the day before he was taken in by Lestrade for questioning, and then disappeared.
“You said Mycroft occasionally talked about his colleagues. Any of them in particular?”
“Recently?”
“In the past few months.”
“I’m sure he did, but nothing that stands out in my mind. Let me see. His secretary—his work secretary, that is, Mr Sosa—was out for some days with what I gathered was an embarrassing illness, although I couldn’t tell you the details. One of his associates in Germany went missing for a period, in March, I believe it was, and My—Mr Holmes was quite preoccupied.”
“Do you know if this associate reappeared?”
“I think Mr Holmes would have mentioned, had his worries been for nothing. To put my mind at rest.”
A missing agent, I noted: Had Mycroft died in Germany, I should certainly know where to begin enquiries.
“Anyone else?”
“He talked about you and your husband a number of times during the winter,” she replied. “He was relieved when you came away from India without mishap, and concerned later, when you had problems in California.”
I blinked: That Mycroft would talk about business matters to a pair of “sympathetic ears” was surprising enough, but that he talked freely about his family was extraordinary.
“And very recently—that same Wednesday, it would have been—he told me a tale about a young associate who travelled from the Far East in record time. He loved it when one of his young people had a triumph like that. Let’s see, what else? He mentioned Prime Minister MacDonald, once or twice. And there was a colleague, Mr West—Peter James West, he called him, with all three names—who had done something unexpected. Speaking up to his superior, I believe it was, although that was one of those cryptic remarks, nothing detailed like the