NINETEEN

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

As Widcombe Manor hove into view I saw a gleam of red . . . Marianne’s car was parked beneath a tree at the side of the drive. In an instant Holmes was out and striding along the narrow, flower-bordered walk that led to the house. I hurried after him. He knocked on the door, then rang the bell. No one answered. We walked to the back and peered into the kitchen window. Through dusty panes we could see only patches of sunlight and the edge of a table. I rapped on the window, then rapped on the back door. Finally I dialled Sir Hugh’s landline on my mobile. I could hear the sound of ringing somewhere inside the house, but no one answered.

A bumblebee hummed heavily across the flower beds and vanished in trees, and a bird whistled tiny notes that fell like pebbles into a pool of silence.

Holmes strode off in the direction of the pond. The swans glided towards the middle at his approach. He called, ‘Let’s have a look at the barn.’

The side door was open. We made our way to the back of the building, where Bart had his workshop and laboratory. ‘There is nothing here,’ said Holmes. ‘They have cleaned it out.’

Everything was gone. The large plasma television monitor on the wall, the computers, the workbench filled with electronic equipment – everything had been removed. All that remained were a cage of dragonflies and a cage of houseflies. I felt sorry for them. I took them outside and opened their cages. The houseflies vanished in an instant, as if they had never existed. The dragonflies seemed bewildered at first, till I shook the cage, and then they roused themselves and hovered as if surprised, and finally shot away into forest gloom beyond the paddock.

‘I confess I am worried about Marianne,’ I said. ‘Where could she be?’

‘You are right to worry,’ Holmes replied, clenching the briar pipe in his right hand, and frowning. ‘My guess is that she is at Castle Mornay. Let’s hope that I am right. And let’s hope that we can get there in time to save her.’

‘My God, Holmes! What are you saying!’

‘I am asking, my friend, what is the fastest way to get to Castle Mornay? By plane, by car?’

‘Let me think . . . today is Sunday. By the time we get ourselves to Birmingham, park the car, book a plane to Inverness, arrive there, rent a car and drive the rest of the way . . . it’s probably six of one and a half dozen of the other. And we have no assurance at this point that we can get a plane out today.’

‘Then let us linger no longer!’ cried Holmes. ‘Let us drive for the Scottish borders.’

But before we set off for Scotland I wanted to be certain that Marianne was not in the house, tied up – or, worse. I smashed the front door twice with my shoulder before the inner bolt splintered through wood. I hit it again and it flung wide open, and then I ran through the house. But I found no one, neither downstairs nor upstairs.

Holmes was already in my car. I drove north on the M6 past Birmingham and Manchester to Carlisle, then on towards Glasgow. As the sun sank in the sky I turned east towards Edinburgh, then turned north and passed over the Firth of Forth Bridge. By then I was getting weary. And the world had changed, become strangely beautiful and bleak, and it was evident we were now in rock-harsh and chilly Scotland. Dusk fell as we crossed the Grampian Mountains. We descended into a little valley, slipped neatly out of the main motorway and into a smaller road that led us to Kingussie, and there we stopped for the night at The Duke of Gordon Hotel.

I knew the hotel. Seventeen years earlier I had ridden my bicycle from Dunnet Head to Lands End, and my father had accompanied me in a car. Each day he had driven ahead ninety miles or so and booked a hotel, and then I had pedalled into town to a room and a supper all organized. He had stopped at Kingussie and booked a room at this hotel, and he and I had walked in the garden together before our supper. Today I was tired from the drive but needed to stretch my legs, so in fading light I strolled where my father and I had strolled, and I imagined him walking beside me, imagined I heard him speaking. But it was no good. He wasn’t there. Not even his ghost. In twilight I returned to the hotel and went upstairs for a short nap. I am a person for whom even the shortest of naps is an astonishing elixir, and after ten minutes I arose, much refreshed, and accompanied Holmes down to the dining room. I ordered lamb cutlets Boswell with mint jelly and roasted potatoes, accompanied by a robust red wine.

Holmes slipped his pipe into the side pocket of his Harris tweed sport jacket. ‘We find ourselves involved in a very strange case, Wilson. It began as a family affair but I fear it has become an international plot that could have a stunning and terrible effect on the world for years to come.’

‘You have lost me on both levels,’ I said. ‘Please be good enough to fill me in on your conclusions at the family level, for a start. We have accumulated a vast rubble of details about Lotte Linger’s complicated clan, but I can make very little of it all.’

Holmes finished his appetizer and touched his napkin to his lips. He looked at me curiously, as if deciding how to explain things to this particular student. He lay down his napkin and looked away, and assumed an almost professorial air. ‘My dear fellow,’ said he, ‘our tale is the tale of a youngest son. Consider the world that was made for that son. It consisted of two kingdoms, the first in green English countryside, a manor house and a barn and a pond full of swans and a paddock full of horses. The second, a rocky Scottish realm crowned with a castle by a loch. The first was for all year, the second for summer. There is an older brother, much admired. There is a father whose opinions seem almost those of a god. And there is a mother, celebrated, beautiful, bringing the dazzle of celebrity to both manor and castle. This is a world nearly perfect, and the youngest son doesn’t wish it to change. He loves it all too well: he idolizes the older brother, the father, and the mother, and he believes his two worlds – each a version of fairyland – are made forever. But then things change. The father dies, the mother remarries, another child, a girl, enters the scene. By then the youngest son is fourteen, and he is used to having the world to himself, and he is stunned by the intrusion. Eventually he grows to hate the girl. But he also comes to want her. When she passes puberty he tries to seduce her and is rejected. His hate grows. Meanwhile the girl’s father has left, and yet another man has taken the place of Lord Gray – a very different man, a softer man, a scholar who quietly denies what Lord Gray told him was true. This third father insists that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. It sounds a silly cavil to the outside world, perhaps, that the younger son should object to this, but to that son the belief of his stepfather is blasphemy. He loves his mother still, but she has, in a sense, betrayed him, betrayed the family by marrying such a man – she has betrayed his childhood world and put it into the hands of the enemy. He cannot help but love her, but now he mistrusts her. All that remains unchanged of his childhood world is the older brother, still witty, intellectual, aloof, protective, perfect.

‘I gather, Wilson, that over the course of the century which I missed, Freud fell out of favour and in the world in which we now find ourselves – with some astonishment, on my part – Freud is regarded more as a curiosity than a source of wisdom. Yet he said many things that are suggestive. Somewhere he writes that the dream of a man always springs from the period of childhood, and that this dream is continually trying to summon childhood back into reality, and to correct the present day by the measure of childhood. Surely this is somewhat true of all of us, is it not? We want the sweetness of things the way they were when we were, for the first time, led by our mother’s hand into the garden of the world’s delights. Alas, Bart Gray allowed this common dream of mankind to become a ruling passion. As a child he liked tiny flowers and insects, liked to collect only tiny things. And as a man, the same. He specialized in miniaturization research at Cambridge, and in biological studies. As a child he was cruel, stuffing firecrackers into the mouths of frogs – and like many a scientist he has continued his cruelty to animals in later life. As a child he passionately believed in his father’s ideas, however bizarre, and as a man he continued to believe in them. As a child he worshipped his older brother, and as a man he worships him still. He has carried his childhood attitudes into his adult life to an abnormal degree.’

‘I follow you, Holmes. I agree that your analysis seems plausible. And then what?’

‘And then his obsession with his childhood and family made him not just marginally antisocial but a traitor to his country. He learnt that the castle and the manor were both threatened by the negligent money management of his mother – and by the economic crisis in which the world today finds itself. Both the castle and the manor – the worlds of his youth, the only beautiful worlds he knew – would soon be lost. But this was impossible, could not be allowed, was against nature, against God. Ergo, any action that could save the world about to be destroyed was an action – as any sane man could surely see – not only moral and right, but obligatory. And so he decided to sell the technology he had been developing at Cambridge for the British government to an organization that wishes to destroy not just Britain but all the liberal democracies of the West – he decided to sell it to Al Qaeda.

‘But for this,’ Holmes went on, popping a little forkful of trout into his mouth, ‘he needed help, an intermediary to make the contacts with Al Qaeda, and to manage the demonstrations of the technology, and to make the sale. That man is Lars Lindblad. Lindblad made contact with Katrinka Pushkin – he knew her, according to Lestrade, from his days of selling weapons to insurgents along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Lindblad arranged to demonstrate the microbomb technology to Ms Pushkin. He arranged the various demonstrations of Bart’s weapons. And how were targets for the demonstrations picked? By paying attention to Alexis Gray’s views as to who in this world most deserved pain – his views as expressed in his Bif Carcanson column. No doubt Bart thought Alexis would approve. Because it seems to me, my dear Wilson, that Bart Gray is now living in a world that is completely black and white, with no shades of grey. He shares that world with religious zealots, fascists, political extremists of all kinds – in short, with people whose main interest in life is not to be wise but to be certain.

‘The Shakespeare letter was but a side issue. When Bart learned that Sir Hugh Blake had found the letter and that he intended to discredit his father, Lord Gray, by publishing it, Bart simply used the resources at hand, in the form of Lars Lindblad, to steal the letter and get it out of circulation. It was at that point, through that inconsequential side issue, that you and I were brought into the case, simply because it happened that your old school chum’s niece worked at the place where the letter was stolen. Such are the whims of Chance.’

I tried to calm myself by speaking calmly. I was worried about Marianne. ‘And what is our task tomorrow, Holmes?’ I took a sip of wine.

Holmes shrugged. ‘We will find Marianne Hideaway and the Shakespeare letter.’

‘But could it be possible,’ I said, ‘that they really went to Brussels, as Bart said. Or, for that matter, that they went somewhere altogether else? Everyone has said the castle was closed up five years ago.’

‘If Marianne and the letter are not at the castle, you and I will be in a desperate situation. But I have little doubt on that score. Several days ago I telephoned the inn at Kilfinnoch. I pretended to be a photographer interested in taking pictures of the castle. The innkeeper, Mr MacGregor, was not encouraging about the possibility of taking close-up pictures of Castle Mornay. He said that for the past couple of years anyone trespassing on the castle property was quickly accosted by a man – an American – who warned them off. MacGregor told me that the only practical way of approaching Castle Mornay is by boat. The castle sits on a promontory over the lake, but it is not visible from the village. MacGregor avows that the castle has been occupied for the past two years by tenants who never show themselves in the village. A Land Rover has been seen frequently travelling along the mostly unused south lake road, which, after a little distance, becomes a private road on Castle Mornay property. According to MacGregor, Bart Gray has appeared from time to time over the past few years in the bar of MacGregor’s inn – in fact, was there just three weeks ago. I have a theory, Wilson, that we may encounter a number of people at Castle Mornay, including a certain Shotgun Abernetty, an American cousin of Filbert Abernetty. I learnt a good bit about this American Abernetty in the Abernetty dossier at Scotland Yard. He is a dubious character who has several times been charged with violent crimes but never convicted.’

‘Perhaps he is the American who warns people off,’ I suggested.

‘Very possibly. I have learnt from Lestrade that Filbert Abernetty is frequently gone from his clock shop in Bath, often for several weeks at a time.’

‘The same pattern that Bart Gray seems to have been following.’

‘That had occurred to me,’ said Holmes.

‘It just seems strange that Marianne has not phoned. She should surely have charged her phone by now. Even if she lost it, she would know I must be worried, and she would have borrowed a phone to let me know. That is why I’m a bit concerned. How many people do we expect to find at the castle?’

‘Excellent question,’ said Holmes. ‘Bart, Filbert Abernetty, Shotgun Abernetty, possibly Marianne Hideaway and Grandpa Gray . . .’

‘Heavens, I’d forgotten about the old man!’ I said. ‘He wasn’t at Widcombe Manor, and since it appears he is unable to take care of himself . . . you may be right.’

‘It is also barely possible,’ said Holmes, ‘that Lars Lindblad and Katrinka Pushkin will be there. They may be meeting with Bart if their business arrangement with him – the transfer of technology or of actual hardware – is close to completion. But this we have no way of knowing. And possibly there are others there – if, for instance, technicians were needed, if they have created a bomb factory of some sort. All this is a mystery yet to be cleared up.’

‘But Holmes . . .’ I paused, pondering how to phrase my question.

‘Yes?’

‘If he actually kidnapped her, then – but that seems so unlikely!’

‘On the contrary, it is very likely. It is not only likely but probable. He is mad, Wilson. You don’t seem to grasp that simple fact. The pills – those are what have finally convinced me. The exploding pills have convinced me not only that Bart Gray is mad, but that Marianne Hideaway is in deadly danger, and so are we all. I asked myself, what use could these microbombs be? I have tried to imagine how they might be used by a terrorist movement. Well, there are many possible uses, but if it is true that Bart Gray and Filbert Abernetty have managed to miniaturize a bomb to fit it into a pill capsule, then the danger is enormous. Imagine how many people take medications in the Western world. Many of these medications are manufactured in China and other places where control is not anything like our own governments demand. If microbombs were introduced into the pharmaceutical industry on a large scale, then much of the population would be ready to explode at any given moment. The perpetrators might then merely send out a radio signal to cause a large portion of the population to start bleeding internally. It would be an ultimate form of terror. People would know they couldn’t trust even their own bodies. Millions of people. Think what would have happened if Marianne Hideaway had swallowed her vitamin pill before it exploded? Even to a person who never took pills, the world would be a frightening place. Such a person might be riding on the Underground, might hear a few dull pops as Al Qaeda sent out a radio signal, and would see people all around him in the carriage begin bleeding from the mouth and slumping to the floor.’

‘You frighten me, Holmes.’

‘We must leave very early tomorrow morning, and get to Castle Mornay as quickly as we can,’ said Holmes, and his face was uncharacteristically grim as he spoke.

The waiter arrived, smiling and precise and genial. I had planned to finish my meal with crowdie and oatcakes, but suddenly I didn’t feel hungry any more.