Страница 67 из 77
“Very well, let us make haste.”
“If you would just-”
“Stand back-I know. The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth down as the gentle glass from heaven. Bash away, Mr Sosa.”
Sosa bashed, until the frame was cleared of glass. He then disappeared, for a disarmingly long period, while Mycroft stood below, his hands working hard against each other.
A young eternity later, an object little smaller than the window leapt through the hole and plunged downwards. Mycroft stumbled back, seeing it as Sosa being thrown inside by the returned gaoler-but then the large darkness caught and rapidly unfurled, dancing its way all the way down to the floor: the ladder.
Mycroft rested his hand against his pounding heart for a moment. The torch-light hit him and he heard his name. He dropped his hand and picked his way over the glass to the ladder, tugging it with little conviction. It seemed sturdy.
He gave a last glance to his prison, and the formula scratched into the wall, then committed his stockinged foot to the first rung.
Five rungs up, the ladder dipped alarmingly, and he clung to the insecure rope as if it would do an iota of good. He waited, feeling motion on the line. Then came two sharp tremors, as if its tautness was being slapped.
“Mr Sosa, may I take it that the two raps were to indicate the rope is secure?”
Two tremors came down again; reluctantly, Mycroft inched up another rung, then another.
At the top, he saw the problem: The knots had held admirably; the pipe had been less secure. He gave up on gentle motions and threw himself over the frame onto the roof.
Sosa, red-faced and trembling from the effort of keeping the metal pipe from bending catastrophically, sank to the roof and put his head in his hands.
After a minute, not far from open tears, the secretary staggered to his feet and came over to pat his employer on the shoulder, back, and arm. Mycroft began to feel like a prize dog, and feared that in another minute, the man would embrace him.
“Remind me to increase your salary,” he said.
This distracted Sosa. “Sir, I did not do this for the salary,” he protested.
Mycroft laughed. He laughed for quite a while, finding it oddly difficult to regain control of his face, but eventually he forced levity to arm’s length and stood up.
“My afternoon meal was heavily drugged, with what appeared to be Veronal.”
“Did you eat it?” Sosa asked in alarm.
“Of course not. But my captor will assume I did, and will return before long so as to catch me unconscious. I believe, Mr Sosa, you have come only just in time.”
“Oh, dear. Perhaps not.”
Mycroft looked up in alarm, hearing the dread in his secretary’s voice, then moved over quickly to see what had attracted the man’s attention.
Down on the empty street below, a large figure got out from behind the wheel of a van that looked remarkably like those used by a mortuary to transport bodies.
“Fast, man,” Mycroft urged. “If we can get down the stairs and take him by surprise, I can use this stout pipe you most thoughtfully-sorry, what was that?”
“I said, wouldn’t you rather use your gun?” The revolver looked incongruous balanced in the secretary’s thin palm, but most welcome.
“Mr Sosa, you are a gem among men.”
They were an unlikely pair of avengers, a thin balding man in a high collar with dust on his knees and a look of resolute terror on his sweating face, following a shoeless, unshaven, once-fat man in a filthy suit belted by an aged Eton tie, rapidly tip-toeing down a rickety metal stairway and through a derelict hallway.
The muffled gunshots that followed, heard by two waking prostitutes, a nurse snatching a quick cigarette outside St Thomas’ hospital, six ex-Army madmen in Bedlam, and three members of the House of Lords in solemn conclave with a glass of sherry on the Terrace, were dismissed as a back-firing lorry.
Chapter 63
Heavens, Sosa has been at my right hand for twenty-six years,” Mycroft told us indignantly. “I’m surprised that you imagine me such a poor judge of character.”
“I, well,” I said, biting my tongue to keep from saying, Nor had I imagined you an embezzler.
“The hypothesis was, Mr Sosa wished to inherit your position,” Holmes said. Mycroft looked at me askance, and did not deign to acknowledge such a ridiculous suspicion.
“Sosa came to me immediately the blackmailer approached him. He’d been ordered to turn over certain minor pieces of information, thus saving himself from scandal and earning a small sum as well. The photographs were of his sister and, shall we say, politically rather than socially embarrassing, while the information requested was indeed of little importance. The sort of thing that could be learnt elsewhere with a bit of digging.”
“It was a toe in the door,” Holmes remarked.
“Precisely. A thing that might tempt a man to succumb without preying on his conscience over-much. I naturally gave Sosa permission to pass on the information.”
“Thus setting a trap.”
“The first faint preparation for a trap. More like a thread to grasp. A delicate and convoluted thread, little better than the mere suspicion I’d had to that point, but I seized it, and I have spent the past five months trying to follow it to its source.”
“A twenty-pound trout on five-pound test line,” Goodman’s sleepy voice murmured from the corner.
Mycroft looked around in surprise. “Yes, a telling analogy. Attempting to reel my opponent in.
“And then, as I said, you two arrived back in the country, and we were instantly overtaken by Damian’s problems.”
“Why keep you alive?” Holmes asked.
Another man might have been taken aback by the callous question, but Mycroft merely said, “I spent much of my captivity meditating on that question, and eventually decided that I was being kept, as it were, on ice, until my death could serve a function.”
“How did your secretary find you?” I asked.
“I keep Sosa apprised of the general outlines of any of my projects, including this one. He became uneasy on the Thursday I disappeared, when I failed to return to work in the afternoon. Then in the evening he had a telephone call from his blackmailer instructing him to send Captain Lofte back to Shanghai. When Friday not only found me absent, but saw the deposit of a sizeable sum into his bank account, he grew alarmed, and began to work his way down the dramatis personae of our recent portfolios. Brothers was still missing, but now his general factotum, Gunderson, was as well.
“Mr Sosa may be a mere secretary, but he has not worked with me all these years for nothing. He placed the telephone call to Captain Lofte, but he also made arrangements with the neighbours at Gunderson’s and Brothers’ homes, to send word if either man returned. He applied himself wholeheartedly to the hunt, with little result. I fear the poor fellow was worn quite thin by the time he heard of activity in Gunderson’s rooms on Tuesday night. The moment he received the news, Wednesday morning, he took up a position across the street from Gunderson’s lodgings house, in an agony of trepidation lest his quarry had already left, or he would miss him when he did.
“Five hours later, at two-thirty in the afternoon, Gunderson came out carrying a small bag, and headed for the river.
“Gunderson never looked behind him. Although if he had, what would he have seen? One drab clerk among a thousand others, harried and indistinguishable.
“Yes, I am quite pleased with Mr Sosa.
“Gunderson went straight to the warehouse. And since the route to my prison led up a stair-well with many broken windows, Sosa could follow the man’s progress to the top storey. He waited for Gunderson to leave again, which was almost immediately-he had been dispatched to bring me my final, heavily drugged afternoon meal. Sosa watched him go, then summoned his courage and crossed over to the warehouse.