The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [84]
“Do you remember what that conversation was about?”
Her black eyes, unexpectedly, sparkled with inner amusement. “I believe it was to do with the lèse-majesté of ducks.”
I laughed, joined by Goodman’s shouted Ha! of humour.
I thanked Mrs Melas for her help, and made to rise. She seemed surprised, hesitating as if to ask something, but whatever it was, she changed her mind and got to her feet, holding out the key.
“Do you wish to keep this?”
“No,” I told her. “I think its only purpose was to point towards you.”
“Do you think so? I gave it to Mr Holmes many years ago, when he first helped me set up a household. It’s nice to think he kept it as a memento. Even if I had changed the actual lock.”
This was not at all what I had meant, but I could see no purpose in disabusing the woman of the notion that Mycroft’s keeping the key had an emotional, rather than merely practical, use.
At the door, Mrs Melas asked, “Would—do you think anyone would object, if I came to the funeral?”
“Whyever would they?” I replied. Which rather begged the question of who was going to be there to object?
“Ours was, well, not a liaison he openly acknowledged,” she said.
And only then, with her standing at my elbow, did my mind deliver up the question: Mycroft? Was the woman’s cool exterior in fact a struggle to contain grief? Had she been about to call Mycroft by name, when telling me about his concern for his agent in Germany? Did this mean that my brother-in-law’s diamond-hard mind and ungentle personality had a softer side? That Mycroft … that Mrs Melas …
I thanked her again, and made haste to get out the door.
Down the street, I became aware of Robert Goodman, a shadow at my side. I laughed, a shade uncomfortably. “From the woman’s reaction, one might almost think …”
“One might,” he agreed.
Ridiculous. Quite impossibly ridiculous.
Wasn’t it?
Chapter 44
She expected something, there at the end,” Goodman observed some indeterminate time later.
“You mean when she looked as if she was about to ask a question?”
“More as if she was hoping you might ask.”
I paused on the pavement, going over that portion of the conversation, her air of expectancy before she stood. “You may be right. I felt she was telling the truth, so far as it went. But holding something back as well. Was she waiting for me to give some kind of a password?”
“Somewhat melodramatic, that.”
I laughed, both because Goodman was saying it, and because of the woman’s history. “You didn’t read the end of the ‘Interpreter’ story.”
“You took it away before I finished.”
“The two men who kidnapped Sophy Kratides, killed her brother, and assaulted Mr Melas, were later found dead in Buda-Pesht. It looked as if they had stabbed each other in a quarrel; however, a Greek girl travelling with them had vanished.”
“More knives,” Goodman murmured.
“Knives are personal,” I commented. We walked on.
“Have you further plans?” he asked.
“I must speak with Mycroft’s colleagues,” I told him.
“Tonight?”
It was, I was startled to find, nearly ten o’clock. “Perhaps not. In any case, I’m not sure where to find the fellow she mentioned—Peter James West. He may attend the funeral; if not, it will have to wait until Monday. But Mycroft’s secretary—his proper secretary, that is, not …” Whatever rôle Sophy Melas played. “Sosa lives not too far from here; we could at least go past and see if his lights are lit. However, we shall have to approach him with care—he will not talk about anything he regards as an official secret. He knows me—I wonder if we might be able to convince him that you’re a part of the organisation? Can you stay silent and look mysterious?”
The expression Goodman arranged on his features was more dyspeptic than mysterious, but perhaps a bureaucrat would expect no less.
The grey-faced and humourless Richard Sosa was a life-long bureaucrat who for more than twenty years had kept Mycroft