The Unexpected Coincidence (4 page)

Either way, it
meant that Mycroft could progress with his problem. The dirt found
around the sofa came from a mix of three different areas of London,
the majority coming from a patch of the river that stretched from
Rainham to Purfleet, and most notably from the Rainham nature
reserve and marshland. Whatever the terrorists were up to, they
visited the nature reserve a lot, and Mycroft suspected they might
have been hiding something there. The rest of the mud came from
places he already knew the people had visited, like the Silvertown
barrier.

It didn't take him
long to message the relevant officials and get a team down to the
right area to have a look for signs of trespassing or other
suspicious activity. His team were still keeping an eye on the
other locations the terrorists had been seen in, so he knew they
hadn't been to any of those recently.

He rubbed his
forehead with his fingers, aware that a dull ache of some kind was
settling in for the night. The meetings that morning had provided
far too much stress. Government officials wanted answers, and they
had no one else to grill but him. Sometimes he wished he wasn't
such an important part of the system that ran the United Kingdom.
It always fell to him to keep the country safe and prosperous. A
task that wasn't made any easier by the many bungling prime
ministers who'd ruled and the two large wars he'd had to live
through.

While he was
lamenting the lack of strong leadership within the country, the
shrill sound of a mobile phone ringing pierced the otherwise silent
evening in his house. He frowned and reached for the spare handset
in his drawer. At some point he'd expected Amelia to get in contact
with him, but he'd expected it several hours earlier and in message
form. He'd need to reprimand her for phoning.

“Miss Jones,” he
said as he picked up, not doing anything to hide his annoyance at
her.

“Myron! I think I
need your help.”

He heard the faint
edge of panic in her voice and sneered. Maybe she wasn't as good at
controlling her emotions as she'd displayed last time they'd been
together. Not wishing to indulge her outburst, he decided to change
the subject immediately. Hopefully she'd understand he had
absolutely no intention of helping her with anything.

“Do you not have
something to report about the second stage of our lessons?”

There was another
pause and Mycroft waited.

“Are these letters
from you, then?” she asked, sounding calm but confused. It was his
turn to not understand. The lines on his head furrowed.

“What
letters?”

“I had one posted
through my door in the early hours of this morning and another
brought to the hotel I'm at less than half an hour ago. I didn't
think they were from you, but I...”

“They're not.”

“They say they're
from a fan, but I think I've got a stalker, Myron, and I'm not sure
I'm safe here. I was hoping...”

“And you didn't
observe anything strange today?” he asked, not interested in her
fears concerning her fans. She chose her career, and any hazard it
caused her was of her own making.

“I did notice this
one guy.”

“What did he look
like?” Mycroft sat back, pleased she'd at least noticed him. Maybe
all faith in her intelligence wasn't lost.

“He had dark hair,
a little taller than me. Glasses, with quite wide rims.”

“Go on,” he
encouraged, pleased she'd picked up on that much.

“He had a strange
coat – although it was far too big for him – and he was a bit
nerdy. He also said he was a carer for his mother who has multiple
sclerosis, and he was very conversationally awkward.”

Mycroft frowned
again and hesitated to interrupt her. She was no longer describing
the right person. He'd specifically instructed his man to wear a
suit and carry an umbrella just like Mycroft's. It would have made
him easier to spot, but the first challenge of this stage couldn't
be too difficult if she was going to learn.

“He also said he
had a brother and liked my character, Dalton, which is in the
letters. He came across as the stereotypical type to...”

Mycroft gave an
exasperated sigh loud enough that Amelia must have heard it.
Mercifully, she went silent.

“I have absolutely
no interest in your fans, although he isn't a threat to you. He
couldn't possibly be the person who delivered your letters and also
followed you to the hotel.”

“Then why did you
ask? Oh... I'm so sorry, Myron. I was so preoccupied with these
letters and the strangeness of them. I've missed something I was
meant to notice, haven't I?”

“Yes, you have.”
It pleased him that she was apologetic, but nevertheless she had
failed a task and he'd said it was grounds to end their
arrangement. But now it came to it, he found his mouth firmly shut
and he didn't tell her it was over. Instead, he listened as she
sighed.

“I know begging
for a second chance isn't going to work. Is there anything I can
say that would make you consider starting this challenge
again?”

Mycroft sat back
and thought about her question. He hadn't expected her to fail so
soon, not given how highly his younger brother thought of her.
Something in the letter she received must have made her lose focus,
and given how she'd behaved when they were abducted, it must be
more than the usual female would be emotionally compromised by.

“Has the stalker
threatened you?” he asked, curiosity overriding his
displeasure.

“No, not directly.
The second letter mentioned his dislike of the greeting I received
from a couple of my friends at the signing today. He suggested I
was too familiar with them.”

“So he was
there.”

“Definitely.”

“But you didn't
notice him? Or anyone else?” Mycroft hesitated over giving her a
second chance. She had calmed down while talking to him, and it was
at least somewhat impressive that her response to a threatening
letter was to try and spot the sender herself. Before he could
continue and tell her this, she took the silence as indication that
he had nothing else to say.

“I only noticed
the person I mentioned, Guy Thomas. But if you don't think he's the
type, then I guess I was wrong about that too.”

“You sound
tired.”

“I am. I woke up
to the first letter and it has been a long day.”

“Then you'd best
get some sleep. You'll need it. I fully expect a message from you
tomorrow evening telling me what you've observed. Perhaps you can
figure out who this man is at the same time as achieving your next
challenge, and I can be
entertained
by both attempts.”

“Thank you,
Myron.” A lighter note lifted her voice, but she still sounded
weary.

“Go on, get some
sleep. That's an order.”

“As you command,”
she said in the same manner she'd used before. He could imagine the
merry light in her eyes as she said it, and he found himself
smiling as he hung up.

Once the phone was
tucked back in the drawer it lived in Mycroft realised he'd
possibly just made the most irrational decision so far in his long
life. Never before had he given anyone but Sherlock a second
chance.

He frowned and got
up to summon his housekeeper for some more tea. It didn't feel
right to have let Amelia get away with failing, but he'd done it
now. He could only hope Amelia kept her head and didn't make him
regret it. Once more, he wondered if it had been a good idea to
agree to teach a woman, but something had made him curious about
her, and he'd followed her into that bookshop one afternoon in
September. All the strange decisions he'd made had followed that
one, like waves on an ocean. Maybe he needed to turn the tide.

Mycroft felt
better after drinking his tea, and settled into his leather chair
by the fire to read a book. He had one of his favourite classics
open, and was reading the first edition in its original language,
Russian.

Before he could
read more than a few pages, his laptop chimed to let him know he
had an email. With a sigh, he went back to it to see if it was
anything important, and was pleased to find it was and he hadn't
been disturbed for no good reason.

One of his men had
spotted footprints in the marshes. The trail had led a small team
to a cache of blueprints, food and a few Russian weapons. At least
one of the men he was after had been hiding there recently.

Mycroft tapped out
a quick reply telling them to keep their distance and observe. It
wouldn't help if they scared the man off. It would be better to let
him come and go and give Mycroft a trail he could follow himself.
It was time to take over from the amateurs and solve this
problem.

Amelia felt a lot
better as she put her knife and fork down and sat back from her
breakfast plate. It was now empty apart from a small smear of
tomato juice left over from the baked beans. There was nothing
quite like an English breakfast to start off a busy day.

With the assurance
from Myron that Guy wasn't her stalker she felt a little better,
and it was more than she expected for him to be allowing a second
attempt at one of the tests he had for her. It encouraged her, even
if she did feel nervous about the day. At some point she would need
to spot the right thing and be able to give Myron the details. He'd
given her no indication of what she should spot and when, but given
that he also wanted her to look out for her own stalker and tell
him about that, it would be wise of her to observe every little
detail she could. Amelia found herself feeling very grateful that
she'd slept well and was more awake and aware than she'd been in
days. She'd need it.

As Shane had
promised, the driver knocked on her hotel door to accompany her to
the car, and when she arrived at the book shop for her signing she
noticed there was a burly man watching over the queue of people
there to see her. With both Myron and her publishers taking the
threat seriously and lending her what support they could, she felt
her tense muscles relax. She gave the people around her a genuine
smile as she greeted them.

Her new bodyguard
accompanied her into the building which had a similar size and
layout to the Bath shop, with the slight exception of a café that
sat just behind her signing table. This early in the morning it
wasn't very busy, with just two women sat chatting over drinks. She
could tell from the size of their handbags and the child-related
objects flowing out of the top of one that they must have dropped
their young children off at some kind of nursery for a few hours to
themselves. Nothing unusual there, and not related to her stalker
or stage two of her training, but a good start in practising her
observational skills for the day.

It didn't take her
long to get into the usual routine that accompanied these events,
and keeping an eye out for strange people around her only slowed
the ritual by a few seconds as she took the opportunity to scan the
scene in front of her every time she posed for a photo with fans or
said goodbye to another satisfied reader. When she was physically
signing the books, she paused on her way to lean on the table to
glance over towards the café. She also gave the area a more in
depth sweep every time she took a drink from the bottled water she
was supplied with.

It wasn't long
before midday when she noticed a well-dressed man sitting in the
café at a small table. He'd moved the chair to one side from the
neat rows so he was angled towards her. She couldn't be sure, as
his glasses had an odd tint to them, but he appeared to be gazing
in her direction a lot, despite having a paper in his hands.

When she stopped
for lunch and noticed him looking at her for a third time, she
smiled and tilted her head ever so slightly sideways. He
immediately reached into his jacket pocket and pulled something
out, which he deftly folded into the paper as he closed it.

While she was
still looking he got up, placing his hand on top of the newspaper.
Before he walked away, he gave her a slight nod and tapped the top
of the paper with his fingers. A burst of emotion washed over her.
This was either her stalker or Myron's lesson, and at this point
she didn't know which.

She did know she
needed to get to that paper.

“Be right back,”
she mumbled and walked away from her table, right over to the café.
Her eyes fixed on the paper the entire way, and she breathed a sigh
of relief as she got to it before anyone could try and claim it in
the now heaving sitting area.

After staring at
it for a moment, she lifted the paper so it held the message or
small item inside and carried it back to where her bodyguard was
waiting.

“I wanted to check
the paper at lunch,” she said, thinking on her feet. “One of my
friends said they might be in it.”

“Do you want me to
come to the staff room with you, Miss?” he asked, not even showing
an interest in what she'd just done. She smiled but shook her
head.

“I'm sure I'll be
fine in there. Why don't you have lunch as well, Toby?” He nodded
and headed towards the shop exit, not giving her or the strange
behaviour a second glance.

With her food
arrangements sorted and waiting for her in the staff room, Amelia
picked up her handbag. While she walked across the shop floor she
rifled through the pages of the newspaper until her fingers brushed
across something that had a different feel to it. Glancing down,
she saw it was a small envelope. An A in Myron's handwriting
adorned the outside, almost as big as the entire package.

While still out of
sight among the book shelves, she pulled the letter out and slipped
it into her handbag. A thrill of delight rippled through her. If
nothing else, she'd managed to get Myron's challenge right this
time.