The God of the Hive (3 page)

“Mycroft will take care of it.” Which Holmes hoped was true—surely his brother’s inexplicable tangle with Scotland Yard would be a temporary state of affairs?

“Would you,” Damian said, his left arm working under the cloth mound. “—my pocket?”

Holmes pulled away the covers and felt Damian’s pockets, coming out with a leather note-case.

“There’s a picture,” Damian explained.

Not a photograph, but an ink drawing he had done of his wife and small daughter, intricate as the shadings of a lithograph. There were headless nails in the rough wall near Damian’s head; Holmes impaled the small page on one that lay in Damian’s line of sight. A woman with Oriental features and a cap of black hair sat with a not-so-Oriental child with equally black hair: Damian had captured a look of wicked mischief on both faces.

Holmes stood.

“I’m sorry,” Damian said. “About … everything.”

The apology covered a far wider span than the preceeding three weeks, but Holmes kept his response light. “Hardly your doing. It’s a nuisance, having the police after us, but it’s not the first time. Once we patch you up, I’ll deal with it.”

“Hope so.”

“Rest easy,” Holmes said, and went up the ladder.

Twelve minutes later, a final hard pull on the oars ran the dinghy up on a sandy patch at the edge of the harbour. Holmes tied the painter to a time-softened tree trunk above the reach of the tide, then tugged at his cap and set off for the town, walking with the gait of the sailors around
him. When he saw a police constable strolling in his direction, he raised his pipe and a cloud of concealing smoke, giving the PC a brief nod as he passed.

At the first chemist’s shop, a bell tinkled when Holmes stepped inside, but the customers took little notice: Stray fishermen were a commonplace. On reaching the counter, Holmes asked for sticking plasters, a box of throat lozenges, and a tube of ointment for Persistent Rashes and Skin Conditions. Picking the coins from his palm, he then said, “M’lad on the boat picked up a baddish slice, mebbe should have a coupla’ stitches. There a doctor in the town?”

“There was, he took ill. Got a locum, though. His cousin.”

“He’ll do,” Holmes grunted, and asked for directions. The chemist grinned as he gave them, but it wasn’t until the door to the surgery opened that Holmes realised why. The doctor’s
locum tenans
was a she: a short woman in her late twenties with hair the red of new copper and the colouration that went with it: pale and freckled, with eyes halfway between green and blue set into features that might have been pretty had they not been pinched with the anticipation of his response.

“Yes,” she said tiredly, “I’m a girl, but yes, I’m a qualified doctor, and no, my cousin won’t return for two weeks or more, so unless you want to take your problem to Golspie or Inverness, I’m your man.” Her accent was Scots, but not local. St Andrews, he decided, or Kirkcaldy—although she’d spent time in London and much of her youth in … Nottingham?

The analysis ran through his mind in the time it took him to draw breath. “Can you stitch a cut?”

She cocked her head at him, considering his matter-of-fact tone. “I said I was a doctor, didn’t I? Of course I can stitch a cut. And deliver a bairn or set a leg or remove an appendix, for that matter.”

“Well, I dinna require obstetrical care or major surgery, but I’ve a lad needing attention, if you’d like to bring your bag.”

Her surprise made him wonder how many times she’d watched would-be patients turn away. “Amazing,” she said. “And he hasn’t been bleeding quietly for a week before you decided I’d have to do?”

“Just since midnight.”

She shook her head, donned her hat, picked up her bag, and followed him out onto the street.

“Where is the cut?” she asked, half-trotting to compensate for his longer stride.

“Over the ribs.”

“How did he come by it?”

“Oh, I think you’ll see when you get there.”

“And where is ‘there’?”

“Fishing boat. Moving him starts up the bleeding, I thought it best to have you look at it where he lies.”

“If there’s much motion, we’ll have to bring him to shore.”

“We’ll face that if we have to. Come, the dinghy’s along there.”

“Can’t you bring the boat up to the docks?”

“Not worth hauling anchor, it’s nobbut two minutes out.”

He led the doctor down an alleyway, around the back of a herring shed, and through mountains of precisely stacked whisky barrels, which was hardly a direct route but he’d spotted the PC down the lane, and didn’t want to risk a second encounter. By the time they hit the small beach, the doctor was scurrying to keep up, and Holmes had become aware of a helmeted presence behind them.

He strode ahead of the diminutive doctor and had the boat untied and floating free before she caught him up. “Are we—” she started to say, but he seized her shoulders to lift her bodily in over the last bit of mucky sand, letting go before she was fully balanced. She plopped onto the seat with a squeak of protest; he stepped one foot inside and shoved off with the other, nearly toppling her backwards as the small craft shot away from the land and rotated 160 degrees. Two quick pulls of the oars completed the turn-about, and they were soon beyond shouting distance, leaving a puzzled PC on the shore, scratching the head beneath his helmet.

The doctor, with her back to the town, noticed nothing apart from her escort’s haste. She straightened her hat, tucked her black bag underneath the seat, and scowled at the man working the oars. “As I was about to ask, are we in a hurry?”

“Tide’s about to turn. I didn’t want to risk losing the dinghy, but we’re all right now. I hope you’ll be having a scalpel in that bag of yours?”

“Of course. But why should I require a scalpel to stitch a cut?”

“Ah, about that. There is a hole in the lad’s epidermis, all right. Unfortunately, there’s a small lump of lead as well.”

“A lump of—do you mean a
bullet?”

“That’s right.”

“What have you dragged me into?” At last, she sounded uneasy. High time, thought Holmes sourly, and allowed the Scots to leave his diction.

“In fact, you’re walking on the side of the angels, although I’d recommend in the future that a person who barely clears five feet might do well to ask a few more questions before she goes off with a strange man. Our situation here is … complicated, but all I need is for you to cut out the bullet and patch up the entrance hole, and we’ll set you back safe and sound on firm land.”
Although I fear
, he added to himself,
some distance from where you began
.

She gaped at him, then turned about as if to see how far she might have to swim to reach safety. The constable was still visible, but his back was turned, and she’d have needed a megaphone against the sharp breeze. When she faced Holmes again, she was angry beyond measure, and the flush in her fair skin made her eyes blaze blue.

“I don’t know what you’re about, but kidnapping is a felony.”

“You’re merely making a house call. Or, boat call,” he amended. “I intend to pay you, generously. I swear to you, neither I nor the wounded man have done anything remotely illegal.” Yet.

She studied his face, and the anger in her own subsided with her fear. “If you’ve done nothing illegal and yet he’s been shot, why not go to the police?”

“As I said, the situation is delicate at present. A misunderstanding. And being far from home, difficult to clear up.”

“Where is home?”

“Manchester,” he said promptly, and then they were at the boat, and Gordon was reaching down to help the doctor aboard.

“Captain,” Holmes said before the fisherman could speak, “this is
Doctor Henning. However, I think it may be best for everyone if we leave our names out of this. If she does not know our names, she need not worry about the consequences of speaking freely.”

Gordon stared at the petite figure at the other end of his arm. “This is a
doctor?”

Chapter 6

T
he Reverend Thomas Brothers, seated before the peat fire in the Orkney cottage, smiled freely at the wording of the telegram MacAuliffe had brought him:

IF HEALTH PERMITS MEET ME TUESDAY ST ALBANS GUNDERSON HAS DETAILS.

Health did not permit, not really. But with Gunderson at his side, he might be able to make it—and the chance to actually meet The Friend after all this time made it worth the effort. Besides which, as any leader knew, it was never a good idea to reveal weakness to one’s lessers, not if one might need them for whatever the future held.

Three days, to make his way down the length of the country; three days to reconsider what failure meant.

If failure it was. One thing Brothers knew was that the Fates took a mysterious hand in all human acts. If his long and laboriously constructed Great Work had fallen apart, if the blood on the Stenness altar stone had failed to unite with the timing of the solar eclipse, if an accumulation of blood and Energies had spilt out for naught, then either the Fates were cruel, or he had not understood the demands of the Work.

He wished he had someone to talk this over with. MacAuliffe had as much sense as one of the sheep bleating outside the door, and Gunderson
was little more than a useful tool. Yolanda would be the ideal ear, willing, if uncomprehending, but his one-time wife was dead now, in what he had thought would be a key element of his Work.

Which brought him in a circle again: What had happened?

Brothers shifted in the chair in front of the smoke-blackened stones, wincing as the sharp pain grabbed at his breast. The powerful homebrew in the glass helped take the edge off it, but the prospect of travel was not a happy one.

Gunderson would help. With all kinds of problems.

Chapter 7

T
he clever young man stood at the wide window with a glass in his hand, looking through his reflection at midnight London. Standing as he was, his head’s shadow engulfed most of the houses of Parliament, the white streak over his temple overlaid the face of its famous clock, his chest engulfed Westminster Bridge and the hungry, flat, greasy River Thames, while his raised right elbow rested on the palace of the archbishop.

God of all he surveyed.

His presence in this place was a quirk, an anomaly that would have surprised all who knew him, were they ever to be invited here. Grey and invisible minions of government did not live among the warehouses of London’s South Bank, no more than did men whose ambitions encompassed government as his reflection encompassed Whitehall. Not that any of his colleagues knew of his ambitions, any more than they knew of his home.

The building had belonged to his grandfather, who had lost it—or, from whom it had been stolen—along with the rest of the family inheritance. The grandson was on medical leave in 1917, following the bullet that left him with a streak of white in his hair, when his restless wanderings brought him here, to an empty and derelict warehouse, part of its roof taken off by a zeppelin attack. He had made a surreptitious and scandalously low offer for it—a steal, one might say—and in his first
deliberate act of self-concealment, become its owner. After the Paris talks he had returned to London and a new position, and now he stood at the big north-facing window in the modern flat raised up from the top floor, his outline a frame over the powers of the empire.

So appropriate, that dim outline. Nothing overt, no splashes of the politician’s mark or estate magnate’s hammer. Merely a shadow, colouring all it overlay.

He’d found it every bit as easy to construct a hidden life as it was to construct a charismatic façade or the reputation for front-line fortitude. Men liked him, women, too, and beguiled by the wit and easy charm, none of them noticed that they knew nothing about the man underneath.

Even Whitehall scarcely knew he was here. Few so much as suspected a presence among the anonymous halls.

Mycroft Holmes was one. He thought that, in recent months, Holmes had caught a faint trace of someone at his heels: Why slim down and take up with a lady, unless in a pointless drive to reclaim youth? However, he’d been looking over Holmes’ shoulder since 1921 without giving himself away—how else would he have known about the letter from Shanghai?

The few in this vast hive below who could put his face and a name to an act were all career criminals, who mattered less than nothing. Criminals could be bought or disposed of; as for Mr Holmes, well, it was all in the works now.

His current situation reminded him of a Vaudeville act he’d once gone to see at the urging of, oddly enough, Churchill. On the stage, a dapper gent juggled an increasing number of ever more disparate objects—a cricket ball, a roast leg of goose, a lit candle, a yelping puppy. The key element of the act had been the insouciance, even boredom, with which the fellow had caught each additional oddity thrown his way, incorporating it casually into his motions. The whole was intended to be madly humorous, as indeed the low-brow audience found it, but he thought it more effective as a paradigm: One’s raw material matters less than one’s confidence.

Take the telegram from the primitive reaches of the British Isles.
Brothers had been—predictably—shocked at his failure to achieve the immortality of Divine Transformation up in Orkney, yet he overlooked the real question: How could a man, armed with knife, gun, and heavy narcotics, not only fail at murder, but manage to get himself wounded as well?

Another ill-matched object to keep up in the air.

Ah, well. That was what one got from depending on elaborate plots with many moving parts. It had all been far too beautiful, too gorgeously complex and inexorable—until an artist had inexplicably failed to die, and dropped a spanner into the clockworks.

Still, it wasn’t a total loss. Parts of the machine were still turning nicely, and since they were dependent only on his own actions, they would continue to run. From here on out, he would abandon the complex, and keep things simple, and brutal.

The clock across the way told him it was time for sleep: He had a seven o’clock appointment, a full day of meetings, and a trip to St Albans to arrange. He drained his glass and went to bed, where he slept without dreams.