The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [47]
He brushed aside my compliments, admitted to a loss of “three or four stone” although it had to have been nearly five, then grumbled that bodily exercise was a tedium beyond measure, and commented that he had heard I joined the short-haired league.
My hand went to my hair, removed when we were in India. “Yes, I needed to dress as a man. Holmes nearly passed out with the shock.”
“I can imagine. Still, I never thought the Gibson Girl look suited you.”
“Thank you. I guess. Were you going out?” I asked, taking in his brown lightweight suit.
“It is of no importance,” he said. “After luncheon I have developed the habit of going for a turn around the park instead of taking a nap, as I used to do, but I shall happily delay that pleasure.”
“No, no, I'm just off the train, I'd appreciate a breath of air.”
With a grimace at the disappearance of an excuse for lethargy, Mycroft caught up his stick and straw hat and we descended onto Pall Mall, to turn in the direction of St James's Park.
“Have you seen your brother?” I asked.
“I have not seen him since January, although I spoke with him across the telephone twice, on Wednesday afternoon and again last night.”
“Was he in London?”
“I believe so. In any case, Wednesday's call was from Paddington, although that can mean anything.”
“Or nothing.” Paddington Station sent trains in all directions north of London, but it was also a main connecting stop on the city's Underground. “What did he want?”
“The earlier call was to request my assistance with an overseas element of an investigation.”
Mycroft's oddly unfamiliar face—it now had bones in it, and the skin had gone slack with the loss of padding—was held in an expression I nonetheless knew well: noncommittal innocence. The quick mind inside the slow body was waiting to see if I knew what Holmes was up to before he revealed any more.
“Let me guess: Shanghai.”
Inside Britain, Holmes' sources of information were without peer, but once an investigation stretched past Europe or certain parts of America, his web of knowledge developed gaps. Mycroft, however, had spent his life as a conduit of Intelligence that covered the globe: When Holmes had need of information beyond his ken, he turned to Mycroft.
Shanghai had not been a guess, and Mycroft saw that.
“Yes, I was given to understand that young Damian had come to Sussex.”
“Damian was there when we got in on Monday, then both of them were gone when I woke up Tuesday. I don't know where they were going, but last night I found Holmes' file on Damian, and I was … concerned.”
“Concerned,” he mused, nodding at the ground.
“Damian killed a man in 1918,” I blurted. “Not the same man he was accused of killing in 1919.”
“In neither was he charged.”
“You knew, about both of them?”
“I did.”
“Why …” I stopped: He hadn't told Holmes for the same reason he hadn't told him of Damian's existence in the first place. “Have you seen his paintings—Damian's?”
“A few of them. I hear he has a small show at a gallery off Regent Street, I'd planned on going to that.”
“He paints madness.”
“I'd have thought that a common enough theme amongst modern artists.”
“With more or less deliberation. But there's something profoundly unsettling about his work.”
“Hmm,” Mycroft said.
“What about last night's phone call?”
“My brother was enquiring whether or not I had seen Damian.”
“He's lost him?”
“I don't know if ‘lost’ is the correct term, but Damian left the hotel where they were staying early on Friday morning, and as of eleven o'clock last night he had not returned. I believe Sherlock would have got a message to me, had the boy reappeared.”
“I see. Well, in any case, I should talk with Holmes before I go up to Oxford, just to let him know where I am and see if he needs my assistance. Do you have any idea where he might be?”
Mycroft reached into his breast pocket and took out a business card, crisply engraved on a startling bright red stock