Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(112)
It was not the first time I’d seen my friend in the midst of a visit by the black dog. Seeing that man—yes, that creature of glittering intellect and cool reason—so affected never failed to shake me. This was certainly the most serious episode I’d witnessed—if, that is, my memory is not tricking me with its penchant for drama again. His hands, normally so steady and sure, shook visibly as he put match to pipe and exhaled a cloud of choking smoke to hover in the yellow fog staining the ceiling and the books on the highest cases.
“Holmes, whatever it is, you know I’ll help in any way I can.”
He glared fiercely, then looked away. “It’s Mycroft,” he said.
I knew better than to say anything, so I waited.
“It’s not anything so crass as sibling rivalry. Mycroft is my superior in abductive reasoning and I admit it freely and without rancor. His prodigious gifts come at the expense of his physical abilities.” I repressed a smile. The Holmes brothers were a binary set, with Holmes as the vertical, whip-thin 1, and Mycroft as a perfectly round 0 in all directions. Holmes, for all his cerebral nature, possessed an animal strength and was a fearsome boxer, all vibrating reflex and devastating “scientific” technique. Mycroft might have been one of the most important men in Whitehall, but he would have been hard-pressed to fight off a stroppy schoolboy, let alone some of the villains Sherlock had laid out in the deadly back-ways of London.
“If my brother and I have fallen out, it is over principle, not pettiness.” He clenched his hands. “I am aware that insisting one’s grievance is not personal is often a sure indicator that it is absolutely personal, but I assure you that in my case, it is true.”
“I don’t doubt it, Holmes, but perhaps it would help if you filled me in on the nature of your dispute?”
Abruptly, he levered himself out of his chair and crossed to stand at the drawn curtains. He seemed to be listening for something, head cocked, eyes burning fiercely into the middle-distance. Then, as if he’d heard it, he walked back to me and stood close enough that I could smell the stale sweat and tobacco again. His hand darted to my jacket pocket and came out holding my phone. He wedged it deliberately into the crack between the cushion and chair.
“Give me a moment to change into walking clothes, would you?” he said, his voice projecting just a little louder than was normal. He left the room then, and I tapped my coat-pocket where my phone had been, bewildered at my friend’s behavior, which was odd even by his extraordinary standards.
I contemplated digging into the cushions to retrieve my phone—my practice partners were covering the emergency calls, but it wasn’t unusual for me to get an urgent page all the same. Private practice meant that I was liberated from the tyranny of the NHS’s endless “accountability” audits and fearsome paperwork, but I was delivered into the impatient attentions of the Harley Street clientele, who expected to be ministered to (and fawned over) as customers first and patients second.
My fingers were just on its corner when Holmes bounded in again, dressed in his usual grey man mufti; Primark loafers, nondescript charcoal slacks, canary shirt with a calculated wilt at the collar, blue tie with a sloppy knot. He covered it with a suit-jacket that looked to all appearances like something bought three for eighty pounds at an end-of-season closeout at a discounter’s. As I watched, he underwent his customary, remarkable transformation, his body language and habits of facial expression shifting in a thousand minute ways, somehow disguising his extraordinary height, his patrician features, his harrowing gaze. He was now so utterly forgettable—a sales-clerk in a mobile phone shop; a security guard on a construction site; even a canvasser trying to get passers-by to sign up for the RSPCA—that he could blend in anywhere in the UK. I’d seen him do the trick innumerable times, with and without props, but it never failed to thrill.
“Holmes—” I began, and he stopped me with a hand, and his burning stare emerged from his disguise. Not now, Watson, he said, without words. We took our leave from the Baker Street mansion flats, blending in with the crowds streaming out of the train-station. He led me down the Marylebone Road and then into the back-streets where the perpetual King’s Cross/St Pancras building sites were, ringed with faded wooden billboards. The groaning of heavy machinery blended with the belching thunder of trucks’ diesel engines and the tooting of black cabs fighting their way around the snarl.
Holmes fitted a bluetooth earpiece and spoke into it. It took me a moment to realize he was speaking to me. “You understand why we’re here?”
“I believe I do.” I spoke at a normal tone, and kept my gaze ahead. The earpiece was on the other side, leaving Holmes’s near ear unplugged. “You believe that we are under surveillance, and given the mention of Mycroft, I presume you believe that this surveillance is being conducted by one of the security services.”
He cocked his head in perfect pantomime of someone listening to an interlocutor in an earpiece, then said, “Precisely. Watson, you are an apt pupil. I have said on more than one occasion that Mycroft is the British government, the analyst without portfolio who knows the secrets from every branch, who serves to synthesize that raw intelligence into what the spying classes call ‘actionable.’”
We turned the corner and dodged two builders in high-visibility clothing, smoking and scowling at their phones. Holmes neither lowered his tone nor paused, as either of those things would have excited suspicion.