27

HALFWAY THROUGH TUESDAY AFTERNOON, I LOOKED up from the final page of Testimony and noticed how very empty Mycroft's flat was. I had slept late and came out of the guest room to find both Holmes and Mycroft away, Mycroft to the office where he had worked for most of his life, and Holmes, as a terse note on the dining table informed me, “Gone to Cerne Abbas.” Mycroft's housekeeper, Mrs Cowper (whose odd hours I never could predict), made me breakfast and then left me to my work. Since one or the other of the men had taken with them the list of forty-seven names from Millicent Dunworthy's ledger, my work consisted of the book I had stolen the night before.

My formal training, the field in which I had spent much of the past seven years, was in the analysis of theological texts. Thus I approached Testimony the way I would any unfamiliar manuscript: a quick skim followed by a closer read, making note of themes, idiosyncrasies, and references I wished to hunt down.

Six hours and a whole lot of words later, I closed the cover and my attempt at scholarly detachment faltered. I looked at the symbol on the book's cover, and saw a tattoo on a dead woman's belly. I went to make myself a cup of tea, and thought I heard something move in the back of the apartment. When I looked into Mycroft's study to see, I then thought I heard the front door open and close. I checked that it was locked, and started to go through the entire flat. When I caught myself stooping to look under a bed, I loudly said a rude word and left, taking with me nothing but the key.

I marched along Pall Mall and through Cleveland Row to Green Park, turning up the Queen's Walk and continuing down the other two sides. Then it dawned on me that I had just described a triangle, the shape that figured so prominently in everything to do with the Children of Lights. Impatiently, I crossed over to St James's, making myself slow down and pay attention to my surroundings: up the Mall, down Horse Guards Road, then back along the Birdcage Walk-where it struck me that not only was St James's Park laid out as a sort of triangle itself, it even had a circle-the Victoria memorial-at its peak.

I abandoned the parks entirely, and made for the Embankment.

Testimony was nonsensical, even silly in places-I had found myself chuckling aloud at the thought of Millicent Dunworthy declaiming some of its fairly blatant sexual imagery, all about energies bursting forth and enveloping. Much of the writing employed tired heresies and re-worked exotica, leavened by the occasional flash of imagination and insight, and I had found the author overly fond of ornate language and self-aggrandisement.

So why had it left me feeling as if I had read someone's pornographic journal?

As soon as I asked myself the question, my inner eye provided the answer: Yolanda Adler, dressed in new clothing, sacrificed at the foot of an ancient monument, probably with the weapon the author called the Tool.

I walked, and walked. Eventually, I burnt off the worst of the crawling sensation along my spine, and made my way to a nearby reading library to track down some of the Norse and Hindu references. At half past five, I walked back to Pall Mall and let myself into Mycroft's flat. He came in as I was pouring myself a cup of tea.

“Good afternoon, Mary.”

“Hello, Mycroft. Do you know if Holmes planned to return to night?”

“I believe he anticipated having to stay the night in Poole.”

“He's going to talk to Fiona Cartwright's employment agency?”

“Depending on what he found in Cerne Abbas. He borrowed my small camera, although I do not know what he expects to record with it.”

“He doubts it was suicide?”

“My brother accepts nothing he has not judged with his own eyes.”

True: An unexplained cut on the hand of a gun-death was enough to make him question the official verdict. “Was it you who took the list of names from the table?”

“I put a man on it. He should have a complete report tomorrow.”

“What about Shanghai; anything from there?”

“It is not yet a week since I wired,” he protested gently.

“It's been a busy week,” I said, by way of apology, although I was thinking, How long does it take someone to hunt down a few records anyway? “Here, have a cup of tea, Mrs Cowper's made plenty.”

“I was thinking to change for my afternoon perambulation.”

“Shall I keep you company?”

“I should be very glad to have you join me on my self-imposed penance to the gods of excess,” he pronounced, and went to trade his black City suit for something more appropriate to a stroll through the park.

In light-weight and light-grey suiting, whose gathered waist-band emphasised its elephantine wrinkles, he took up a straw hat and held the door for me.

Neither of us spoke much as we passed by the open windows along Pall Mall, but once we were among trees, he asked, “Have you learnt anything from the book you purloined?”

“It's left a very nasty taste in my mouth.”

“I see.”

“Anyone who capitalises that many English nouns should be shot.”

“The author's diction offends you?”

“The author's arrogance and assumptions offend me. His dedication to the idea that all happenstance is fate offends me. His imprecision offends me. His images are both pretentious and disturbing. The sense of underlying threat and purpose are…” I heard myself speaking in the erudite shorthand the Holmes brothers used, and I cut it short. “He scares me silly.”

“Tell me how,” Mycroft said, equally capable of brevity. I walked for a bit, ordering my thoughts, before I went on.

“The book concerns the spiritual development of a man-one assumes the writer, although it is in the third person-from a boy born under signs and portents, through his dark night of the soul, to his guided enlightenment. It has four sections with eight topics each-eight is a number significant in many traditions, although it could mean nothing, here-and a concluding section that acts as a coda. What begins as standard nuttiness darkens in the middle. The fourth section-Part the Fourth, he terms it-concerns his ‘Great Work,’ which appears to be a mix of alchemy and, well, human sacrifice. Only two of his thirty-two topic headings are repeated: ‘Sacrifice,’ which is divided into its submissive and its transformative aspects, and ‘Tool.’ I'm not certain, but thinking about it, I wonder if the Tool could be a knife forged from meteor metal.”

“A sacrificial knife,” he said.

One who did not know Mycroft Holmes would have heard the phrase as a simple intellectual conclusion: I could hear not only the distaste, but the pain underlying that: He, too, had Yolanda Adler before his eyes.

“He doesn't say it in so many words,” I told him. “And when he mentions primitives cutting out and eating the hearts of their enemies, it sounded as if he took that as metaphorical, not literal. Everything in Testimony is couched in these pseudo-mythic terms; the author is deliberately crafting a holy scripture.”

“Megalomaniacs I have known,” he mused. “I believe you are familiar with Aleister Crowley?”

“His name has come up a number of times in the past few days.”

“So I would imagine, if that text of yours is representative of this circle's interests.”

“Holmes thinks that Crowley 's manifesto is in large part artifice, stemming from and feeding into an overweening egotism. If Crowley is God-or Satan, which for him amounts to the same thing-then how can his followers deny him his wishes, whether those be sex, or money, or just admiration of his poetry? If his desires are unreasonable, that's because he's a god; if he's a god, then his desires are reasonable.”