Mycroft Holmes: The Case of the Romanov Pearls (The Mycroft Holmes Adventure series Book 6) Read online

  The Casebook of Mycroft Holmes:

  The Case of the Romanov Pearls

  David Dickinson

  © David Dickinson, 2012, all rights reserved

  David Dickinson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 2012 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Contents

  The Casebook of Mycroft Holmes: The Case of the Romanov Pearls

  Extract from: Mycroft Holmes and Murder at the Diogenes Club

  The Casebook of Mycroft Holmes: The Case of the Romanov Pearls

  The waves were beating harder now. There was a rumble where there had been a whisper earlier in the day. Over by the West Pier the spray around the great girders was rising a couple of feet before falling back into the dark waters. A red orb was setting slowly above Lancing and its Victorian chapel. The figure wrapped in a couple of blankets in a wheel chair on the balcony of the second floor of The Majestic Hotel wondered if there was an equation that could tell what the increase in the size of the waves would be in an hour’s time. Beside the wheel chair a young man was squatting on the ground waiting for instructions.

  Much of the life of the man in the wheelchair had been spent with equations and statistics. Figures for the size of the National Debt. Figures for the annual revenue from the Customs and Excise. Figures for the amount of income tax raised from an unwilling populace in any given year. For the figure on the balcony was none other than Mycroft Holmes, Auditor of all Government Departments, adviser to a long series of Prime Ministers of Great Britain. The young man was his assistant Tobias.

  Readers of my humble tales will recall that towards the end of the adventure called Murder in the Diogenes Club Mycroft had taken to his bed in his rooms in Pall Mall and was at death’s door. His landlady, Mrs Hudson, despaired of his life. Like his younger brother Sherlock, Mycroft loathed doctors of all descriptions and refused to see any member of that profession.

  It was only by subterfuge that Tobias succeeded in uniting Mycroft and medicine. The celebrated Harley Street doctor Moore Agar was smuggled into the bedroom disguised as a leading economist from the German Finance Ministry in Berlin. Once at the bedside Agar wasted no time in telling his client, as he had told his brother before him, that he must lay aside all his business and surrender himself to complete rest if he wished to avert a complete breakdown. The doctor hinted very strongly that if his instructions were not followed, Mycroft would be joining the Government statistics himself in the Death columns of The Times. Various medicines were produced and Mrs Hudson ordered to ensure that they were taken at the appropriate time. A slight improvement ensued, which Mrs Hudson put down to her lightly battered cod in a mild cheese sauce – fish, in Mrs Hudson’s world, being especially efficacious for the invalid – and Tobias to the banning of Mycroft’s beloved Turkish Delight which he, Tobias, had always believed had been designed by the Turkish Sultans to poison their enemies.

  After prolonged discussions between Dr Agar, The Treasury and Ten Downing Street it was agreed that Mycroft could be sent for convalescence to the bracing sea air of Brighton, a resort close enough to |London for Cabinet Ministers or Permanent Secretaries to have easy access to the Government Auditor by train. The Majestic was chosen largely for the quality of its chefs. The doctor had made strict instructions about Mycroft’s diet, but even within those restrictions their skill was such that it was thought The Majestic kitchens could tempt a reluctant convalescent to the table.

  Mycroft was not a good patient. Dr Agar would appear unexpectedly early in the morning or late in the evening and deliver ferocious lectures about the importance of his instructions being followed to the letter. Mycroft complained about his suite of rooms. These were at the front of the building, facing the sea with very high ceilings and space enough for tennis in the Great Living Room with its twin double doors onto the balcony and the sea front. He complained about the noise in the public rooms and asked Tobias why the Diogenes Club, of which he, Mycroft, was a founder member and where you could only speak in the Strangers Room, could not be persuaded to rent one floor of the hotel and introduce the rule of silence. He even complained about the food. Dr Agar had left specific instructions about diet. The Government Auditor was not allowed the same dishes as the other guests. The only problem came in the Georgian dining room looking out over the English Channel. Mycroft could see great helpings of lobster with cream sauce passing him by on their ornate trolleys. Crème Brule or Zabaglione with strawberries and blueberries were available, but not to the inhabitant of Pall Mall currently incarcerated on the second floor. Mycroft was not amused.

  Among Mycroft’s fellow guests at the Majestic in this month of May was one of England’s richest women, the Duchess of Alcester. She had been divorced from her husband several years before on charges which included his sexual relations with the estate servants and enormous gambling debts. The Countess made off with much of her husband’s remaining wealth and all his family’s astonishing jewel collection. Some of these gems had been bought, some acquired by marriage but the White Pearls of the Romanovs had been won in a late night gambling session at the Pushkin Club on Nevskii Prospekt in St Petersburg where Russian aristocrats habitually gambled away their stables, their estates and, occasionally, their wives.

  Clarissa, for such was the name of the Duchess, could see little point in owning these jewels without other people seeing that she owned them too. Why should they languish in some vault, there to blush unseen, she would tell her staff. On the evening in question she was dining late and alone in the Fitzherbert suite, named after a famous inhabitant of an earlier Brighton who had been married illegally to the Prince Regent, next to the main dining room. Alone, apart from her personal butler come security advisor, formerly of the Irish Guards, stationed about ten feet behind her chair. Alone, apart from the Head Waiter, hovering at a discreet distance to the left of her table. Alone, apart from her personal waiter and the hotel sommelier who lurked nearby, with a wine list that contained some of the most expensive vintages in the country. Alone, apart from the long string of the White Pearls of the Romanovs which hung around her neck.

  Dr Watson has often referred in his chronicles of Mycroft’s younger brother Sherlock to the fallibility of witnesses and the unreliability of narrators. Different versions of events will duly be presented in this monogram. This much we know. Shortly after ten o’clock the lights went out. The Fitzherbert suite was plunged into total darkness apart from ectoplasmic figures on the pavement beyond the glass and the dark grey mass of the sea. There was one loud scream, cut short with the sound of a blow from a fist or a cudgel. When the electricity came back on, after a remarkably brief interval, the various parties were placed as follows. The wine waiter was guarding one door, the Head Waiter the other. It was clear that nobody had escaped from the suite. Lying insensate on the ground was the dark suited figure of the Duchess’s man. Collapsed over one of the dining chairs was the waiter. Leaning back in her chair was the Duchess herself, unconscious like her two companions. Lying on the floor near the Duchess’s table was a hotel sponge with a powerful smell. The police doctor later established it had been soaked in chloroform. The string of the white pearls of the Romanovs was gone from her throat and was nowhere to be seen. When examined, none of those present and conscious could remember anything apart from their own actions. The two hotel staff guarding the doors were following a pre-arranged plan, originally devised two years
before for an Indian Maharajah with a retinue of beautiful but fractious young women and the largest diamond in the world, and rehearsed a number of times since.

  Mycroft Holmes was not, of course, present in the Fitzherbert Suite at the time. He was playing a desultory game of chess with Tobias at a corner table in his enormous living room. Tobias privately regarded these chess contests as a barometer of his employer’s health. Before the illness Tobias had never won a game. Since the illness he had never lost one. On the verge of defeat, with one solitary pawn left to defend a beleaguered King, Mycroft and Tobias heard the tramp of feet rushing up and down the stairs, the blowing of whistles and shouts of command. The Brighton Constabulary had arrived in force and in remarkably quick time.

  Forty five minutes after the incident the hotel manager Valentine Delaney presented himself in Mycroft’s rooms. He knew the identity of the Government Auditor, of course, and the nature of his rare but triumphant interventions in the annals of London crime as well as he knew of the Duchess of Alcester. He came straight to the point.

  “Mr Holmes,” he began, in his light Dublin brogue, “I have over a hundred policemen trampling all over my hotel. I would rather have the benefit of your experience and your powers than those of all these men in uniform. Surely it is God’s will that has sent you here at this time. He has brought you to Brighton to solve this mystery and preserve the good name of The Majestic. May the Lord be praised!”

  Delaney had an uncle in Dublin who was the news editor of the leading newspaper in the city. “Charm and flattery, my boy,” the journalist used to tell his nephew, “charm and flattery, invaluable in this wicked world. Don’t pay any attention to those who tell you to lay them on with a trowel. Use a bloody shovel if you can’t find anything bigger.”

  Tobias had been watching Mycroft very closely. Normally, like his brother on occasions like this, he would form the fingers of his hands into a steeple and rest his chin on the top. Not this time. Mycroft’s hands were lying in his lap and his chin was drooping as if he were falling asleep.

  “Mr Holmes, forgive me, the hour is late. I will not trouble you much longer. The police have sealed the hotel off. Nobody is allowed to leave. Brighton station is closed for the time being and all potential passengers are being searched by the constabulary before they can depart. Similar restrictions are in operation at the roadblocks on the main thoroughfares out of the town. Three specially trained officers are searching every inch of the dining room where the pearls disappeared. And yet, Mr Holmes, and yet. It’s the very devil, this theft, so it is. I fear we will be no further forward in the morning than we are now. There are arrangements already in place with Scotland Yard. A small, but expert team is coming down to help us tomorrow. You may even know the Inspector in charge. I believe he had connections with your brother.”

  Delaney waited expectantly for some response from the Government Auditor but the corpulent figure kept his own counsel.

  “Lestrade, that’s the fellow’s name. Inspector G Lestrade. Do you know by any chance what the G stands for, Mr Holmes?”

  Only now, leaning forward for a closer look at his guest, did Valentine Delaney realise that Mycroft was fast asleep and looked like he had been fast asleep for some time.

  Tobias did not have any double doors in his quarters. He did not have a balcony either, or even a living room. His room was up with the servants in the attics on the top two floors of the hotel. There was a small bedroom with a single bed and a tiny cupboard for his clothes. A mean window looked out, not on to the sea front and the Channel, but onto the rear quarters of the hotel next door. Shaky fire escapes that had once been black festooned the sides of the building. Right at the bottom was a great container filled with the rubbish from the hotel. Looking out at the feral cats and the seagulls swooping low to search for new booty, Tobias thought about the cases he had known with Mycroft and the ones he had read about by Dr Watson concerning Mycroft’s brother. Always, he told himself, as the seagull chorus turned from a chamber ensemble to a full orchestra with the arrival of a fresh consignment of refuse from the kitchens, there was a key to the mystery, a phrase, a look, a forgotten piece of history, a clue that the Holmeses spotted long before anybody else. Tobias knew that the medicines, the rows of bottles and phials in Mycroft’s bathroom, were probably keeping him alive. But he very much doubted whether they were making him better. What was the answer? What was the secret? As he closed his window and climbed into his small bed, Tobias’s brain was working at the speed that had won him the first place of his year in the Mathematics Tripos at Cambridge several years before.

  Very early the next morning word went out to the leading jewel and diamond merchants in London’s Hatton Garden, to their equivalents Holbein and Neeskens in the world’s diamond capital, Antwerp, to Fassbender and Rauch in Vienna, to Yusupoff, Yusupoff and Yusupoff in St Petersburg, and to Goldsmith, Goldfarb and Himmelstein, dealers in precious jewels in New York City. The message was the same. ‘White Pearls of the Romanovs have vanished in Brighton, England. Please report any interest, or scintilla of interest, to Inspector Lestrade, Scotland Yard, London.’

  There was a sharp knock on the door of Mycroft’s suite just before nine o’clock. The visitor did not wait for a reply.

  “Mycroft, Mycroft, you know my methods! Never send a letter when a telegram will do. Never send a telegram when you can make a personal appearance. How good to see you up and dressed at a time like this! I rather feared you might still be abed like the tramps in the doorways I passed on my way from the station.”

  Sherlock Holmes was dressed in a dark suit with a long frock coat and a white shirt. He carried a fierce looking stick in his left hand, as if highwaymen and footpads might beset a man on the Brighton seafront. Mycroft, wearing a double breasted grey suit with a Diogenes Club tie, nodded wearily and ushered him to a small dining table by the window.

  “Breakfast should be here any minute, Sherlock,” he said, with the air of a man who might just have completed a marathon race, “I’m sure Tobias here can order another helping.”

  “Capital, capital!” cried the younger Holmes five minutes later, attacking a plate of eggs, bacon, sausage and tomato with great vigour, “an early start gives a man a good appetite. Did I tell you that I missed a golden opportunity to make a fortune last week?”

  Mycroft, picking at a lightly boiled egg, shook his head.

  “Watson put me onto it, but you know my views about correspondence. Too boring to read, most of it. So I didn’t open his letter until it was too late.”

  Sherlock Holmes leant forward and helped himself to another couple of sausages. “You remember the case, years ago now it must be, of Silver Blaze, the missing racehorse named after his white forehead? How his trainer was murdered and the horse apparently vanished only to re-appear at the very last minute in time to win the Wessex Cup at Tavistock Races? Well, Watson is something a dark horse himself when it comes to the turf and he maintains a close, if well hidden, interest in current form. He wrote to tell me that Silver Blaze, after his triumphs on the flat, had been put out to stud, and one of his progeny, Flower of Silver, by Silver Blaze out of Dartmouth Flower, was making his first appearance at this year’s Wessex Cup. Apparently he shares the same streak of white on his forehead as his forebear, but very few racing fans were prepared to invest in a horse on his very first outing. Watson put twenty pounds on at fifteen to one and suggested I did the same. The horse, of course, won by eight lengths and is the toast of Devonshire. Watson is the toast of his bank manager with three hundred pounds to his name. I missed my chance. Never mind.”

  Sherlock Holmes sprang from his chair and flung one set of double doors open. He strode rapidly onto the balcony and peered about him in all directions.

  “Policemen, my dear Mycroft, policemen everywhere. I did not think Brighton contained so many officers. And the newspapers tell me that more are expected from London later today. Have you formed an opinion on this singular case, brother? Have you kept
yourself informed?”

  Mycroft stared sadly at the carpet. “The hotel manager came to tell me about it yesterday evening, but I’m afraid I fell asleep.”

  “Never mind,” said Sherlock Holmes, “such women as this Duchess of Alcester are very dangerous. They are a peril to the rest of society. The good Watson was not putting words into my mouth when he reported my comments on a similar specimen, Lady Frances Carfax, and she nearly ended up being buried alive:

  ‘One of the most dangerous classes in the world is the drifting and friendless woman. She is the most harmless and often the most useful of mortals, but she is the inevitable inciter of crime in others. She is helpless. She is migratory. She has sufficient means to take her from country to country and from hotel to hotel. She is lost, as often as not, in a maze of pensions and boarding houses. She is a stray chicken in a world of foxes. When she is gobbled up she is hardly missed. I much fear that some evil has come to the Lady Frances Carfax.’

  “You must have set eyes on the Alcester woman, Tobias,” Mycroft said, “what did you think of her?”

  “She wasn’t wearing the pearls when I saw her,” Tobias replied, “but she did have some enormous cameo round her neck.”

  “Did she indeed,” cried Sherlock, striding out to the balcony and back, his hands clasped tight together behind his back, “do you suppose that she had a fixed plan, a rota if you like, for wearing the baubles? Cameo on Monday, pearls on Tuesday, diamonds on Wednesday, that sort of thing? Great God, you don’t suppose the thieves got the wrong day, do you? They thought they were going to pinch the great emerald of the Nizam of Hyderabad and got the Romanov Pearls instead?”

  “You don’t think that would imply a fixity of purpose not always found in the female of the species?” Tobias ventured, thinking of his mother and her three sisters together, “I mean, she might make the plan but would she stick to it?”