The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [87]
In the end, this is what his home revealed:
The notes from his diary
Six new and expensive paintings on the wall
The business card of a very high-class art dealer
Another card, from a house whose reputation I knew, a mile away
An ingeniously concealed wall-safe with a lock that took me nearly two full passes of the constable to circumvent.
Inside the safe I found a velvet pouch with a palmful of large-carat diamonds, three stacks of high-denomination currency (British, French, and American), a number of gold coins, a file with memos and letters signed with Mycroft’s distinctive M, and a bank book dating back to 1920.
The file included a trio of carbon pages requesting information on Thomas Brothers and Marcus Gunderson. They were pinned to a copy of the Brothers photograph that Mycroft’s Shanghai man had brought, and another of a glaring Marcus Gunderson.
The bank book was the most revealing. For years, the entries down the IN column varied little, and seemed to comprise his regular salary and periodic income from stocks and an inheritance fund. Until the past March, at which time round sums began to drop in at untidy intervals: twenty guineas here, thirty-five there. In the middle of June was one for a hundred guineas.
I had to smile sadly at the idiocy of criminals: caution and carelessness; locked doors beside vulnerable windows; scrupulously kept books recording illicit income.
Then I looked at the last page, and the smile died:
Friday 29 August: 500 guineas received.
The day after Mycroft disappeared.
Five hundred pieces of silver.
I left everything where I had found it: I had the name of the bank, the dates of the deposits—along with information on his art dealer, his newsagent, his housekeeper, his solicitor, and his mother. It would be of interest to examine the mother’s account, although I did not imagine it would show those round sums in its OUT column.
It was nearly time for the constable to pass, so I stood at the curtains with my torch off, waiting for the deliberate footsteps.
Sosa was in his fifties, an age when some men looked up and saw not what they had, but what they lacked. This was particularly true when a man was under pressure—and between December and March, when Mycroft came back to work after his heart attack, the pressure on his assistant would have been considerable.
The major question in my mind was, when did Mycroft discover Sosa’s hidden income, his secret life, his—call it what it had to be—treason?
It was hard to picture the grey man working day in, day out under Mycroft’s very nose without giving himself away. But until this past month, I had not seen Mycroft since the early weeks after his attack, at which time he had been both ill and distracted. I could not deny the possibility, however remote, that he could have overlooked his secretary’s treason until very recently.
Ten days ago Mycroft had talked to Sophy Melas about loyalty. Where does faith part from loyalty?
He knew then.
Did that knowledge get him killed?
Or had he known for some time, and done nothing, either because he was testing the limits of his secretary’s betrayal, or—and this I could envision—because he was using Sosa to lay a trap for the man or men behind him? I could well imagine Mycroft keeping an enemy close for half a year in order to tease out the extent of a conspiracy. He might even have embraced the challenge of proving that his illness had not lessened his abilities: to work every day cheek-to-jowl with an enemy, blithely feeding him information, never letting slip once.
A Russian doll of a mind.
Had that hubris got him killed?
And was there any way in which Brothers entered this mix? There was no copy of the man’s bible, Testimony, on Sosa’s shelves, and I had not seen him in the Church of