The Mycroft Holmes Omnibus by Dickinson David

Author:Dickinson, David [Dickinson, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2014-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

Mycroft Holmes and The Case of the Missing Popes

I have seen Dr Watson’s library. In particular I have stared in wonder at the special section where his black notebooks, marked by their year of origin, march in order across the shelves. In these, he recorded the many and various cases of his friend Sherlock Holmes, the greatest consulting detective the world has ever seen. They reminded me, those notebooks, in their order and precision, of the five lines of battle presented by the one hundred and sixty three warships of the Home Fleet on parade at Spithead for Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897. Even now, the details of some of the more singular memoirs described on those pages cannot be told. The potential embarrassment for the men of this country once thought great and for the Governments of Europe remains formidable in scope and impossible of execution. Time must yet run its measure and its tread.

My own accounts of the activities of Sherlock Holmes’s elder brother Mycroft are smaller. These records are not organised like the casebooks of Dr Watson, faithfully annotated as if he were describing a patient’s symptoms for posterity. My notes are scanty and scattered, scribbled on the sheets of half-finished notebooks, in the blank pages of unread novels, across the white spaces left in the newspapers and magazines. Mrs Hudson, if she were to see them, would not rest until order had been established.

But, in one respect, the two histories have this in common. Dr Watson was fond of observing that it was not always the most spectacular cases, dramatic murders, civilisation itself in peril, vast hounds with dripping fangs at large on the moors, that showed the powers of Sherlock Holmes at their most creative and their most original. Often it was simpler affairs where the crimes were minor but the circumstances bizarre and the characters unusual where his talents showed to their best advantage.

So it was with Mycroft Holmes and the adventure I am about to relate. It was a warm June morning in the Government Offices in Great George Street. There was a series of measured steps in the corridor outside. A tall, distinguished looking man strode into the room.

“Good morning, Mycroft.”

“Good morning to you, Foreign Secretary,” the Government auditor waved his visitor to a chair. Sir Edward Granville was clean shaven and wearing a suit that would have been fashionable a generation before. He had about him the air of an ascetic, a thoughtful bishop perhaps, or an Oxford philosophy don. He had been a close ally of Mycroft Holmes all his life, often siding with him in Cabinet arguments where Mycroft had good sense on his side but no regard for political popularity in the country.

“I have come to ask a great favour of you, Mycroft. I know how little you care for your routine to be disturbed. I know how little you care for the more commonplace aspects of detection. But I have a great problem this morning and I would like to ask for your assistance, and the exercise of your powers.

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