I asked, “Did you get the impression that he was talking about himself? Wondering if he should remain loyal, for example? Or someone else?”

She answered slowly. “It sounded-looking back, that is; I can’t be certain what I felt at the time-but I should say it sounded as if he was trying to understand the underpinnings of someone’s concept of loyalty. Not his own.”

“But that’s all he said?”

“It’s all I remember. When I asked him what he meant, he laughed and changed the subject.”

“To what?”

“Oh, just a question about a novel we’d both been reading.”

Mycroft Holmes discussing a novel? For that matter, Mycroft discussing business with a woman he’d first met in the course of a crime? There must be unexplored depths to the woman-although Dr Watson’s story intimated as much.

“When was this-your last conversation with him?”

“The twenty-seventh of August, a Wednesday. He had been very occupied for several days, to the extent of cancelling a musical engagement, but he rang me that morning to say he was free for a few hours.”

That Wednesday, I had been flying to Orkney while Holmes was bobbing about the North Sea: It was, as she said, the first day in many that Mycroft had been free of us. This was also the day before he was taken in by Lestrade for questioning, and then disappeared.

“You said Mycroft occasionally talked about his colleagues. Any of them in particular?”

“Recently?”

“In the past few months.”

“I’m sure he did, but nothing that stands out in my mind. Let me see. His secretary-his work secretary, that is, Mr Sosa-was out for some days with what I gathered was an embarrassing illness, although I couldn’t tell you the details. One of his associates in Germany went missing for a period, in March, I believe it was, and My-Mr Holmes was quite preoccupied.”

“Do you know if this associate reappeared?”

“I think Mr Holmes would have mentioned, had his worries been for nothing. To put my mind at rest.”

A missing agent, I noted: Had Mycroft died in Germany, I should certainly know where to begin enquiries.

“Anyone else?”

“He talked about you and your husband a number of times during the winter,” she replied. “He was relieved when you came away from India without mishap, and concerned later, when you had problems in California.”

I blinked: That Mycroft would talk about business matters to a pair of “sympathetic ears” was surprising enough, but that he talked freely about his family was extraordinary.

“And very recently-that same Wednesday, it would have been-he told me a tale about a young associate who travelled from the Far East in record time. He loved it when one of his young people had a triumph like that. Let’s see, what else? He mentioned Prime Minister MacDonald, once or twice. And there was a colleague, Mr West-Peter James West, he called him, with all three names-who had done something unexpected. Speaking up to his superior, I believe it was, although that was one of those cryptic remarks, nothing detailed like the other young man’s trip from the East. Oh, but he did tell me about a conversation he’d had with the king a few weeks ago, when they both happened to be passing through St James’s Park.”

“Do you remember what that conversation was about?”

Her black eyes, unexpectedly, sparkled with inner amusement. “I believe it was to do with the lèse-majesté of ducks.”

I laughed, joined by Goodman’s shouted Ha! of humour.

I thanked Mrs Melas for her help, and made to rise. She seemed surprised, hesitating as if to ask something, but whatever it was, she changed her mind and got to her feet, holding out the key.

“Do you wish to keep this?”

“No,” I told her. “I think its only purpose was to point towards you.”

“Do you think so? I gave it to Mr Holmes many years ago, when he first helped me set up a household. It’s nice to think he kept it as a memento. Even if I had changed the actual lock.”

This was not at all what I had meant, but I could see no purpose in disabusing the woman of the notion that Mycroft’s keeping the key had an emotional, rather than merely practical, use.

At the door, Mrs Melas asked, “Would-do you think anyone would object, if I came to the funeral?”

“Whyever would they?” I replied. Which rather begged the question of who was going to be there to object?

“Ours was, well, not a liaison he openly acknowledged,” she said.

And only then, with her standing at my elbow, did my mind deliver up the question: Mycroft? Was the woman’s cool exterior in fact a struggle to contain grief? Had she been about to call Mycroft by name, when telling me about his concern for his agent in Germany? Did this mean that my brother-in-law’s diamond-hard mind and ungentle personality had a softer side? That Mycroft… that Mrs Melas…

I thanked her again, and made haste to get out the door.

Down the street, I became aware of Robert Goodman, a shadow at my side. I laughed, a shade uncomfortably. “From the woman’s reaction, one might almost think…”

“One might,” he agreed.

Ridiculous. Quite impossibly ridiculous.

Wasn’t it?

Chapter 44

She expected something, there at the end,” Goodman observed some indeterminate time later.

“You mean when she looked as if she was about to ask a question?”

“More as if she was hoping you might ask.”

I paused on the pavement, going over that portion of the conversation, her air of expectancy before she stood. “You may be right. I felt she was telling the truth, so far as it went. But holding something back as well. Was she waiting for me to give some kind of a password?”

“Somewhat melodramatic, that.”

I laughed, both because Goodman was saying it, and because of the woman’s history. “You didn’t read the end of the ‘Interpreter’ story.”

“You took it away before I finished.”

“The two men who kidnapped Sophy Kratides, killed her brother, and assaulted Mr Melas, were later found dead in Buda-Pesht. It looked as if they had stabbed each other in a quarrel; however, a Greek girl travelling with them had vanished.”

“More knives,” Goodman murmured.

“Knives are personal,” I commented. We walked on.

“Have you further plans?” he asked.

“I must speak with Mycroft’s colleagues,” I told him.

“Tonight?”

It was, I was startled to find, nearly ten o’clock. “Perhaps not. In any case, I’m not sure where to find the fellow she mentioned-Peter James West. He may attend the funeral; if not, it will have to wait until Monday. But Mycroft’s secretary-his proper secretary, that is, not…” Whatever rôle Sophy Melas played. “Sosa lives not too far from here; we could at least go past and see if his lights are lit. However, we shall have to approach him with care-he will not talk about anything he regards as an official secret. He knows me-I wonder if we might be able to convince him that you’re a part of the organisation? Can you stay silent and look mysterious?”

The expression Goodman arranged on his features was more dyspeptic than mysterious, but perhaps a bureaucrat would expect no less.

The grey-faced and humourless Richard Sosa was a life-long bureaucrat who for more than twenty years had kept Mycroft’s appointments book and typed his letters. The man lived, with an unexpected note of upper-class levity, in Mayfair, in the basement apartment of his mother’s house, around the corner from Berkeley Square. Sosa mère et fils had long settled into a mutually satisfactory state of bitter argument and disapproval, which occasionally blew up into more active conflict, such as the time his mother bashed him with a fry-pan for being late to a promised dinner.

Perhaps the “embarrassing illness” to which Mrs Melas referred had been another such episode.

At the top of the quiet street, I paused to study the noble doorways. Goodman murmured, “No-one awaits.”