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I was sceptical, as he’d spent perhaps thirty seconds in the survey. “How can you be certain?”
He did not answer; it occurred to me that I’d asked an unanswerable question, so I changed it to “Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
Very well; I’d trusted his eyes in the night-time woods, perhaps I should do the same in this night-time city. “All right, let’s see if he is home.”
But he was not: The curtains were drawn, and a piece of advertising had been left against the door, which I had seen in none of the other houses. We went back onto the pavement, so as not to attract the attention of the man walking his dog or the tipsy couple, and kept our heads averted as we strolled down to the end of the street and turned towards the lights of New Bond Street.
“I’ll wait here for a time,” I said. “He may be in later.”
“You plan on breaking in,” my companion noted.
“Er. Perhaps.”
“Do you need me?”
“I was going to suggest you find your way back to the hideaway.”
“I will go and sing to the trees for a while, I think.”
With no further ado, he turned in the direction of Hyde Park. I watched him go, wondering if he could possibly mean that literally. I only hoped he was not arrested for vagrancy. Or lunacy.
I circled corners until I was across from the Sosa door-or doors-and when the street was empty, I chose a low wall and settled down behind it. After ninety minutes that were as tedious and uncomfortable as one might imagine, the surrounding houses had all gone dark (for in Mayfair, no traces survive of the eponymous a
I waited until the local constable had made his semi-hourly pass. Then I climbed to my feet, brushed off my skirt, and went to break into the house of a spymaster’s assistant.
The locks to the basement flat were impressive, the sorts of devices I could be cursing over for an hour, and the door was a bit too exposed for comfort. However, those who find security in large and impressive locks often neglect other means of entry-and indeed, the adjoining window, although well lifted up from the area tiles, was both wide and inadequately secured. Ten seconds’ work with my knife-blade, and its latch gave.
Being Mayfair, the window-frame was even well maintained, emitting not a squeak as it rose. In moments, I was inside.
I stood, listening: The room was empty, and I thought the house as well. As I turned to pull down the window, something brushed against my toe; when the window was down (unlatched, in case of need for a brisk exit) I bent and switched on my pocket torch. It was a tiny Japanese carving called a netsuke, a frog with an oddly expressive face and perfect details. I left it where it lay, and walked through his flat, making sure the rooms were empty. Which they were, although the missing razor and tooth-brush, the empty hangars, and the valise-sized gap on a bedroom shelf suggested that he had not merely stepped out for the evening.
Richard Sosa’s home was a handsome, self-contained flat made from those portions of the building once given to the servants, although more opulent than one might expect of servants-or of a man with a secretary’s income. Some of its opulence was that of old money-much of the furniture had descended from the house above, receiving fresh upholstery in the process. But those things that reflected Sosa’s personal taste-the delicate Oriental ivory carvings, two new carpets, the paintings on the walls-had not been bought with a governmental salary.
On the table just inside the front door lay a card: Chief Inspector J. Lestrade, New Scotland Yard, with a telephone number and in his writing:
Please telephone at your earliest convenience.
Back in the first room, I checked the remaining curtains to be certain that no light would escape. The first was overlapped, but the second showed a slight gap. As I tugged them together, something fell to the floor: another tiny netsuke, a rabbit, ears flat against its back.
Cautiously, I peered behind the fabric of the remaining window with my hand obscuring the head of the torch, and saw a third carved figure, this one a sparrow, perched on the window’s upper rim. Its balance was precarious, nearly half its circumference protruding past the painted wood. And when I loosened my fist to allow a trace more light to escape, I could see the trigger: a thread, attached to the curtains, looped around the sparrow’s ivory neck. With my other hand, I pushed the fabric away from the window, and the netsuke fell, its weight pulling it out of the loop of thread.
Well, well: The grey little secretary had picked up a few tricks.
I looked over at the window I had come in by. Thick carpet lay underneath the window, but would I have missed the sound of an ivory frog falling to the floor? Possibly.
I returned the rabbit and the sparrow to their perches, but I did not bother to loop the thread back-any man with the foresight to set up a sign of intruders would also know the angle at which he had left his traps.
The creatures were unexpected, in two ways: an indication of considerable care and sophistication, and an inescapable note of whimsy. Mycroft’s secretary was not so grey as he appeared.
I searched the place with a nit-comb, taking my time so as to leave no evidence of my presence. The constable’s footsteps went past four times, every thirty-four to thirty-seven minutes, as I uncovered the secretary’s life. His office suits ran the gamut from pure black to dark charcoal, the neck-ties included those of a minor public school, and his leisure wear leant heavily towards fla
His bathroom cupboard said that he suffered from angina, for which he had been prescribed nitro-glycerine, as well as dyspepsia, ingrown toenails, migraines, and insomnia. He wore an expensive French pomade, and possessed a curious electrical instrument that looked like a torture device but which I decided was to stimulate the growth of hair follicles.
I found two art books that might at a stretch be termed erotica (on an upper shelf in the library), the playbill for a slightly raunchy revue (three years old and buried in a desk drawer), and some modernist sketches that might, perhaps to the mother living upstairs, be considered risqué. I found no drugs, and no sign of female company (actually, of any company at all).
The desk in his small, tidy study had a telephone and a leather-bound 1924 diary. I went through it closely, copying various times and numbers, but Sosa either was cautious about writing down too much information, or trusted himself to remember the essentials: Appointments were often just an initial and a time, sometimes “Dr H” or “dentist” and the time. Three times he had written down telephone numbers, two of those with an abbreviated exchange. The last of the three was on the Thursday that Mycroft disappeared, with the same exchange Mycroft had, although it was not Mycroft’s number. I could simply ring the numbers, but without knowing what alarms might be set off, it might be best to leave the task of identifying the numbers to Holmes.
I returned the book to its position by the telephone, and turned my attention to his desk drawers. One of them held files, a number of which contained carbon copies of letters from Mycroft, the ornate capital M he used as a signature indicating that these were official duplicates, not mere draughts. They were addressed to the current and the last Prime Ministers, to the owner of a large newspaper, to several Members of Parliament. Reading them, I was reassured that the contents were not particularly inflammatory: Whatever Sosa’s qualities, sheer carelessness was not among them.