He hailed a cab – a proper cab, not one of the thin boards on which people sat astride – and gave a junction of two streets as the address. Leaning over to Sherlock, he said, ‘We can walk the last hundred yards or so. Uncomfortable, but necessary. I always make it a rule not to reveal my ultimate destination to people I do not know, if I can help it. Half the cab drivers in this city are in the pay of the Third Section.’
When they arrived, Mycroft handed the driver a coin and waited until he had driven away before he indicated to Sherlock that they were going to cross the road and walk back a little way.
The building that Mycroft stopped outside was three storeys high, and made of a reddish-brown stone. A main entrance was situated in the centre of the ground floor, three steps up from the pavement.
Mycroft and Sherlock entered through the doors. Stairs led up from the lobby. As if he’d been there a thousand times before, Mycroft walked straight across to the stairs and put his hand on the banister. He turned to Sherlock. ‘They say that in the Winter Palace, here in Moscow, the Tsar has a small room that ascends from one floor to another, moved by some kind of steam-driven screw mechanism. The time when all buildings have such rooms cannot come too quickly for me.’ Puffing, he started to climb the stairs. Sherlock followed, smiling.
The first-floor landing gave on to a long, dark corridor that ran the length of the building. Sherlock could smell vague odours of food: boiled ham, boiled cabbage, bread. Mycroft walked confidently down the corridor until he came to a particular door. Glancing in both directions, checking that nobody was watching, he pushed against it.
The door moved.
‘The wood around the lock is splintered,’ Mycroft said. ‘This is decidedly not good.’
He opened the door and entered the hallway, pulling Sherlock after him. With a movement that was surprisingly quick for such a large man, he moved sideways, to the wall, and pushed Sherlock in the other direction. Sherlock realized that Mycroft was trying to minimize the time they were silhouetted in the doorway, just in case there was somebody in the apartment with a gun. Good thinking.
They waited for a few moments, listening. There was no sound from inside. Eventually Mycroft moved forward, down the hall to a half-open door.
The room inside was a mess. It was, or had been, a living area, but the chairs were smashed and the tables knocked over. Paintings on the walls were disarranged. Shards of pottery and glass lay on the floor: the detritus of smashed decorative figurines, teacups and wine glasses. There was nobody there, living or dead.
Mycroft’s eyes scanned the room quickly. He turned and walked back into the hall to check the other rooms. Looking over his shoulder, Sherlock could see that one was a bedroom, the other a bathroom. They were empty of people as well, but they had been comprehensively wrecked in the same way as the main room.
‘Someone was searching for something,’ Mycroft murmured, standing in the entrance hall and looking around.
‘They didn’t find it,’ Sherlock said.
‘You are correct, but how did you come to that conclusion?’
‘Because if they had, there would have been areas where nothing was smashed or overturned – the areas that they would have got around to if they hadn’t found what they were looking for.’
‘Unless…?’ Mycroft prompted.
Sherlock thought for a moment. ‘Unless whatever it was they were looking for was actually in the last place they looked.’
‘Or, more likely…?’
‘Or they weren’t sure how many things they were looking for, so they had to search everywhere.’
Sherlock’s brother nodded. ‘Correct. What else can you deduce from the state of this place?’
‘Whoever searched it didn’t care if anybody knew they had searched, otherwise they would have made an effort to be tidier.’
‘You are again correct.’ Mycroft’s face was bleak. ‘I fear for Robert Wormersley’s life. Either he was here at the time, in which case he has been taken away by whoever smashed the door down and ransacked the apartment, or he was absent, in which case he would have turned tail and run as soon as he saw the damaged door. Either way, his fate is still uncertain.’
‘He wasn’t here at the time,’ Sherlock said with certainty.
‘And you deduce that how?’
Sherlock indicated the front door. ‘The door was locked, but not bolted. You can see the bolts still intact on the back of the door. If your friend was in the apartment and had locked the door then he would certainly have bolted it as well. The fact that it was locked but not bolted indicates that he had left, and locked the door behind him.’
‘Good work,’ Mycroft said approvingly.
Sherlock moved back into the main room and looked it over again. There was something about it that bothered him, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Something out of place. Or something in place where everything else was out of place. It nagged at him like something caught between his teeth.
‘I’m not seeing something,’ he said. ‘Or I’m seeing something but not understanding it.’
‘It will come to you,’ Mycroft said, ‘if you let it. Let your mind mull the problem over while you think about something else.’ He looked around. ‘I fear there is nothing else to see here. We should leave.’
Outside, in the street, Mycroft hailed a passing carriage. Sherlock tugged his sleeve. ‘I think I can remember the way back to the hotel. I was taking note of the streets as we came here. Is it all right if I walk back? I want to see some of the city.’
‘Very well,’ Mycroft said. He passed Sherlock a handful of money. ‘The principal currency in Russia is the rouble. The rouble is divided into exactly one hundred kopeks.’ He clapped Sherlock on the shoulder. ‘Now, you go and take a look around. I believe I will return to the hotel and think about our next move.’
As Mycroft’s carriage vanished round a corner, Sherlock began to walk. Moscow looked, sounded and, more importantly, smelt different from the places he was used to. The snow, for instance, muffled a lot of the noise, so that the clamour he’d been used to in London was largely absent. Moscow seemed like a quiet city. Although, he considered, it might also have been quiet through fear of the Tsar’s secret police and what they might do to people who said the wrong things.
The route was fixed firmly in his mind, and as Sherlock walked he found himself admiring the solid, impressive architecture of the city. As he got closer to their hotel he found himself turning into an open square so large that it almost seemed to bend with the curvature of the Earth. Ahead of him a cathedral rose up like some fantastic creation made out of strawberry ice cream and spun sugar. He had never seen anything like it in his life. It seemed to be a series of towers of different heights and apparently different diameters, each one randomly topped with a pointed spire or an onion-shaped dome which was painted or tiled in different colours: red, green, blue, yellow and white, all intermixed in various combinations of chequerboard patterns or swirls. Each spire or dome was topped with a large crucifix. As Sherlock walked slowly around the cathedral, staring all the time, he noticed that it kept changing its appearance. There was no obvious symmetry about it. Whichever angle he examined it from, it was a different shape. Like many things he’d seen in Russia since they had arrived, it looked like a collision between a complete accident and a deliberate creation.
On his right, just across a moat of partly frozen water, he could see the tall, red-brick walls of what he thought was the Kremlin – the palace and grounds where Tsar Alexander II lived, and from where he ruled over his immense domain. In between the cathedral and the Kremlin walls, and extending off to Sherlock’s right, was Red Square.