Chapter Forty-four

It was nine-thirty. I had been in the house more than two hours, and was no closer to finding Gabriela than I had been when the sun came up. The odds of the doctor returning increased with every tick of the big clock in the hallway. However, there was little point in leaving the house until either he or Holmes showed up. And there were certainly plenty of rooms to hide in.

I debated taking a few folders away to some upstairs room, but if he noticed them missing, it would be over. And I could look at them here, but it was too dangerous to show light, and drawing the curtains risked his noticing when the head-lamps went across the house.

Instead, I slid open the library window a couple of inches, to give me warning of an approaching motor, and draped the travelling rug over a small table to hide my light. I considered taking one of the candles, but between the heat, the inevitable drips, and the chance of a betraying smell, it was better to wear down my batteries. I withdrew under the blanket with the solicitor’s file, and settled in to read.

This time, I began at the back of the file-folder, although I found the sequence of letters more thematic than chronological.

The earliest correspondence was from January, 1923, when a German solicitor wrote to inform Dr Mikó that a distant uncle had died and left him his entire estate. Most of it was tied up in stocks and properties, but to judge by the doctor’s grateful letters, the cash alone made for a huge windfall. The surprise, the questions, the letters that followed brought a sense of wonder. Mikó travelled to Hamburg twice, to see the solicitor, or possibly three times—some of the correspondence seemed to be missing.

The first trip was four months after the initial news reached him. A letter in June, written upon his return to Brașov, was filled with simple pleasure, his thanks, and a mention that the inheritance would make a considerable difference to “my people here.”

Shortly after that, the doctor placed an order for the English shooting-brake. That was also around the same time that Father Constantin said he had expanded the days of his surgery in Bran.

For the next year, the letters concerned the transfer of ownership and details of the properties involved. Then came a letter dated June 1924. After some detailed instructions on a problematic contract in Dusseldorf, Mikó wrote:

In recent months, I have been considering this substantial change in my life, and I would like to come and speak with you in person about the possibilities it has opened. I also need you to find for me an expert in Roumanian and international property law, who can—

The remainder of the letter was missing.

Then in November, just under two years after the uncle had died, the doctor made another trip to Hamburg, although it was only referred to obliquely—“As per our conversation last month,” said the carbon letters in German. During that conversation, he had apparently instructed his solicitor to sell as many of the properties as possible. One letter made passing reference to his Roumanian solicitor, so I made note of the name, but there was no hint as to what he was doing other than “going forward.”

The entire folder, I thought, felt maddeningly incomplete. Almost as if the man had gone through and deliberately removed key documents.

“Doctor, what are you hiding?” I murmured aloud—and with that, two things happened. First, my eye caught on a phrase halfway down a page, and second, the creak of a floorboard had me fighting out from under the rug to confront my attacker.

“Holmes! Damn it, man, couldn’t you have cleared your throat or something? How did you get here? I didn’t hear a motor.”

“I had the Queen’s driver drop me at the end of the drive, since I did not think coming all the way to the house would be the best idea. He seemed to think that the doctor had a telephone installed here, and gave me the number of a taxi service in Brașov, in case I got stuck.”

“We may need to ring them if the doctor doesn’t reappear. But I’m glad to see you.”

The papers were spread across half the floor, the table now lay on its side, the travelling rug thrown off—it was a good thing I’d decided against the candle, or we’d be stamping out flames. I started gathering up pages and returning them to some kind of order. It took me a minute to find the one I’d been reading.

“Sorry?” I asked, realising he’d said something.

“Where is the doctor? His motor is not in the stables.”

“He was only here for a few minutes and then he drove off again, about two hours ago. I expect he’s dining out, since he didn’t have anything before he left. Did Andrei tell you where I’d gone? Oh,” I said, remembering the last thing he’d said to me before we parted ways. “You said you’d realised that Florescu was hiding something from us. Could it have been Andrei?”

“To be honest, I suspected it had to do with the doctor. There is a great deal of history between them that Mr Florescu did not bother to tell us about. However, more immediately, yes: Andrei told me you’d been interested in how he’d seen the doctor’s motor, so I knew you were going after him. However, it did take some time to discover the exact location of the Mikó house.”

“Huh,” I said. “I didn’t think of that.”

“No? How did you get here?”

“He brought me. Not that he knew it. I was under that seat he has in his motor, for transporting patients. Turns out it’s a kind of box. There’s a lock on the outside.”

I could see the many questions running across his face, but since any of them would have come out as accusations, he hesitated—just long enough for me to wave the page under his nose.

“I’ve found something, but we probably should move to a room that doesn’t overlook the drive quite so openly. Oh—wait. Does this look familiar?”

I had dug out the single sheet of card-stock from the desk. He took it, felt it, tested its bend, even held it under his nose. “It is very similar, but I should have to have both in a laboratory to see if it is in all ways the same as the other.”

“Do you want to hang on to it?”

He thought for a moment, then handed it back to me. “For the time, let us leave it here.”

I put it back in the drawer. “There’s no one in the house, his servants appear to have been gone for a couple of weeks. We should hear when he returns, but it’s probably best not to be right here. Bring that folder,” I said, and restored the table, woollen throw, and window to their original positions.

The billiards room had no windows and plenty of dust. I flipped on a lamp and took the folder from Holmes, spreading out pages across the baize surface. “The Mikós have been prominent in the Brașov area for centuries. There’s a family tree in the library that links the doctor’s ancestors to the area’s thirteenth-century Saxon rulers. This was their country house—they had another in Brașov itself, but the doctor’s father sold it about fifty years ago. That seems to have marked the beginning of a down-turn in the family fortunes. By the time the War began, the Mikó estate was in trouble, and when Transylvania went to Roumania in 1920, things became very tight indeed. The doctor appears to be the last survivor of the family, and inherited the estate when his father died in 1910. Between 1919 and 1923, he had to sell off several remaining farms from around the estate. Then two and a half years ago, he inherited a fortune from an uncle he’d scarcely known.

“And yet, he did not spend it on this house. He hired back a couple of the servants, bought that car and had it adapted as an ambulance, and had some very nice suits made—but he spent almost nothing on the family house. Oh, except a new hot-water geyser in his bath-room.”

“Yet he continued living here,” Holmes noted, taking the page I handed him. This showed the current boundaries of the estate—considerably reduced from those on the grand, faded map in the estate offices.

“Last November, he went to Hamburg to see the solicitor he’d inherited along with his uncle’s estate. Since then, the main focus of their communications has been the process of converting real estate and stock portfolios into cash.”

“Any indication what he plans to do with it?”

“That’s what I was searching for. But while I looked, I kept noticing that there were pages missing and references made to letters that weren’t here. And yes, it could be poor record-keeping, but it could also be—”

“A deliberate attempt to expunge the record of some systematic crime or wrongdoing.”

“Exactly.” Holmes was bent over the fanned-out pages on the table, picking up one here, setting one atop another there. I let him be, since confirming the faint patterns I thought I had seen was even more important than hurry. Ten minutes later, he straightened, his grey eyes continuing to travel over the pages.

“Do you see it, too?” I asked.

“I see an outline.”

I held out the page in my hand. “Because his filing system is somewhat slap-dash, he left a couple of things that he might not have intended. One of them was an order from Fortnum & Mason—I’ll tell you about that in a minute. But I think he also overlooked this letter in the culling process. That phrase, with the word Familienschloss?” I tapped the German lettering. “It’s to his solicitor in Hamburg. And my German’s a little rusty, but it seems to me he’s saying that his Roumanian property lawyer is looking for a way that he can take back the family castle.

“Holmes, I think he’s talking about Bran.”