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“You don’t have to wait for me, Victor. I’m quite good at reading by myself,” Holmes noted with a chuckle. Victor, however, remained next to him, starting to bite vigorously on his right forefinger nail, which had evidently been the recipient of such snack attacks many times before as the nail was to the quick.
“No, quite all right. I’m still on lunch break.”
The room was filled with large wooden frames burnished a solid gold color with silver trimming and drawers with dragon pulls on them, so that the interiors could be pulled out for perusal.
A series of tags denoted year, month and day on the drawers. The lowest to the backside of Holmes was open and missing all its contents.
Those contents laid akimbo to each other, where Holmes had spread them out at first to survey their headlines before digging deeper into each o ne separately.
“They give you that much time?”
“Oh, I can take as long as I want. I’m one of the architects. They expect us to prowl the place, looking for ways to improve it all. Sometimes I sit in one of these underground rooms for days with nothing to do, but think.”
“Interesting.”
Victor manages a weak smile. “And that is how I learned about the magic.”
“Right sir, I’ll be laying the floor beneath this table next.”
Victor’s eyes rounded in horror.
He jumped up.
Manley stood behind him.
Now Holmes was worried. Why was Victor looking like a terrified hare chased by wolves?
“No problem, Manley, Mister Holmes and I will be leaving shortly anyway.”
Holmes nodded, even though he had no such intention. And worst case scenario, there was always tonight.
Something about this construction going on.
Something about the way the burly man had bullied Victor. No, this Manley chap. What kind of weight did they hold over poor Victor to scare him so deeply? For it was obvious he was being held on a tight leash.
Why?
Something about the way Victor had cowed, even before this Manley chap, who seemed friendly enough. But as Holmes well knew by now, the surface of a package did not always denote its contents.
“Just one more minute and we’ll be gone,” Holmes said to Manley’s satisfaction. He nodded and went to a corner of the room to haul a stack of marble slabs and drag them across the floor next to the table, where h e waited, his attention fully on the newspaper that Holmes had open.
The page was the obituary.
“You into dead people, Mister Holmes?”
Holmes smiled. “Not at all, but sometimes it seems like dead people are quite into me.”
Manley’s eyes briefly widened, and then he stooped to open up a bundle of slabs. “Well, back to work then.”
But he didn’t cut the slabs loose, his eyes remained on Holmes, even as he pretended to be doing otherwise.
Holmes laid the newspaper he had been reading through on the heap of other newspapers, and then rose.
Victor rose as well.
“Good day, Manley.”
“Good day, Victor. We are looking forward to your next insights into our construction.”
“And I will be quite sure to alert you once I have them,” Victor promptly replied, no smile on his face, his voice somewhat quivery.
Holmes nodded his head and followed Victor out. He glanced to the side and noted that Manley was watching them like a hawk, even as the burly man, Victor’s boss evidently had earlier.
Definitely not a sign of good will.
Something was rotten in Denmark as William Shakespeare, his good friend, was prone to say and he intended to find out what that was. Victor hadn’t spoken of any such thing, but now he was beginning to think his friend was in grave danger. But what kind, he couldn’t discern quite yet.
Victor shut the door behind them with a sigh of relief.
Holmes already had a picture in his mind of that door being opened again.
As they passed the second door, Holmes noted fleeting shadows moving below its bottom.
He arched an eyebrow in consideration, but said nothing. He just followed Victor back the way they had come, ignoring the stares that were being focused on Victor’s fellow workers as they were passed.
