The God of the Hive

Wishing you joy on the great hunt of life,

Your own,

M.

It was signed with the initial alone, but my eyes seemed to see his usual signature, in which the cross of his t swirled into an ornate underscore. I set the letter down long enough to examine the box, making certain it contained no further secrets, and return it to its place. The letter I kept.

I was still sitting against the wall, pondering Mycroft’s message, when the swinging doors parted to admit Goodman’s head. I scrambled to my feet, folding away the letter into a pocket.

“Did you discover your safe within a safe?” His gaze wandered along the shelves and pans that I had left every which way.

“More or less,” I answered vaguely. “You didn’t find anything else in the study, then?”

“Only this.” He stepped inside, holding out a key.

I took it with interest. I had not seen it before, an ordinary enough shape but with an engraved Greek sigma on its flat head. “Where did you find it?”

He walked away; I turned off the lights and followed.

Unlike the rest of the house, which I had left speaking eloquently of either a hasty search or a minor tornado, the disruption in the study was confined to two precise spots: the shelf niche with the money and passports, and below and to one side, a place where the wood of the shelf itself had been hollowed out. The thin veneer fit in behind the facing of the shelf, and would have been invisible unless one were lying on the floor, staring upwards, with a powerful light to hand. Even then, a person would have needed to know the hiding place was there.

I for one had not, although I’d spent countless hours in that very chair.

“How on earth did you find that?”

He frowned, then said, “The shelf did not match.”

“What, the wood?”

“No. The contents.” He could see I did not understand, so he tried to explain. “In the forest, a place where there was once a road or a house is betrayed by the varieties of trees that grow there, the shape of the paths cut by animals aware of the difference. Here, a man set out the contents of this shelf with a degree of… distraction, perhaps? As if this shelf had a different history from the others.”

I could recall no particular difference between the books on this segment of shelf and the books on any other, although it did contain a small framed photograph of a thin young man in an Army uniform, all but unrecognisable as Damian Adler. “I hope you have a chance to talk with my husband,” I told him. “You two would have much to say to each other.”

The key was the only object inside this highly concealed compartment. I looked at it under the light, but it was unexceptional, apart from the Greek letter. In the end, I added it to the contents of my pocket, along with the money, the bank account code, and the passports.

Mycroft had no further use for any of them, and with any luck, I could soon hand the collection over to Holmes.

I went to the guest room and changed into some of the clothes I kept there, then went through the other rooms so they bore the same disruption as the rest of the flat. I removed the chair from under the door-knob, noticing with a pang that Mycroft’s walking stick stood in its umbrella stand. He used it mostly for the regimen of afternoon strolls he had begun, following his heart attack; if he’d been carrying his stick that night, would he have had a chance for self-defence?

When we let ourselves out of the secret doorway, the only things left behind were Mycroft’s sixteen political thunderbolts and one considerable mess.

The bobbing light accompanied us along the passageway to Mycroft’s other hidden exit, on St James’s Square. Again, I stowed the candle and peered through a peep-hole to make sure our emergence from a blank wall would not be noticed, then worked the mechanism.

In the outer world, the low sunlight made the autumnal leaves glow; in sympathy, perhaps, a small corner of my mind began to light up, and I fingered the letter in my pocket.

Mycroft Holmes had a Russian doll of a mind. He was a man whose secrets had secrets. Any layer of hidden meaning was apt to have another layer, and one below that.

At opposite ends of the flat, he had left a letter to his brother and an unidentified key. With any other man, one would assume the two were unrelated. With Mycroft, there was the very real possibility that he had left two clues that by themselves were without meaning, that only together-if one persisted in the great hunt of life and found both-created a third message: The key is in the Interpreter. Or a fourth meaning. Or fifth.

There was also the likelihood that I was ascribing to my departed brother-in-law an omniscience he lacked: Even Mycroft Holmes would hesitate to lay out clues that his brother would not think to follow.

I badly wanted to talk to Holmes about this; however, I did have another set of remarkably sharp eyes with me.

“Let’s take supper,” I said, the first words either of us had spoken for at least ten minutes.

Down a side street lay a tiny Italian restaurant where I had once had an adequate meal. They were not yet serving, but were happy to ply us with wine and antipasti. When the waiter was out of earshot, I pulled Mycroft’s letter from my pocket and laid it on the table-cloth before Goodman.

“I found this in a place where not one man in a million would think to look. I’d like you to read it, keeping in mind that its author was the man who designed and arranged those bookshelves. Tell me if anything strikes you.”

He read it, twice, then folded it and handed it back to me. “There is hidden meaning there.”

“Yes,” I said in satisfaction. “I thought so.”

“Something to do with the secretary, I should have said. Who, unlike the housekeeper, goes nameless.”

I unfolded the page, and my eyes were drawn, as they had been each time before, to that unlikely capital I on the verb Interpret.

“Wait here,” I told him, and slipped out of my seat and onto the street outside.

Ten minutes later, I sat down again, finding a laden platter of glistening morsels and a full glass of red wine. I laid my purchase on the table.

A glance at its table of contents gave me the page number, and a review of the story took a few minutes. I gazed into space for a bit, and when the waiter drifted past, I woke and asked, “Have you a London telephone directory?”

“I am sure we do. Which letter were you looking for?”

“K. I think.”

He went away, confused but cheerful about it, and Goodman said, “Not S for sigma?”

By way of answer, I placed the book before him, open at the twenty-year-old short story “The Greek Interpreter.”

Unless the capital I had been a slip of the hand, which I found hard to credit, it was a teasing directional arrow left by Mycroft for his brother. Mycroft’s first appearance in Dr Watson’s tales had been in the adventure of the Greek Interpreter, when Mycroft’s upstairs neighbour, a pathologically naïve freelance interpreter named Melas, was sucked into a case of theft and deception, nearly losing his life in the process.

The Christian name of Mr Melas is not given, but the victim of the would-be theft, who died in the event, was a young man named Kratides. Key to his troubles was a sister named “Sophy.” A name that in Greek begins with the letter sigma.