“Pshaw!” he said. “I know they’re close but I don’t fancy the India Office or the Foreign Office. Once those places get their clutches into a person you’d have to spend most of the day in meetings. Meetings in those places become a substitute for thought or action of any kind. We’ll take the Parthenon, Tobias. It’s close to my rooms. Of course we’ll still have to spend a lot of the time here.” Mycroft stared at the documents that littered his desk, the files lined up in his bookshelves as he might have looked at a favourite nephew or a beloved painting. “I couldn’t move my papers.” He popped another Turkish Delight and massaged his calf. “I wonder if I haven’t got a sprain with that unaccustomed exercise, Tobias. Don’t let me ever do such a thing again.”

  Mycroft limped slowly to a corner of his great office and returned with some folders. “Somewhere in here Tobias, there should be accounts of previous great crises in the banking world. I’ve met that chap who runs Gorings, Lord Basildon. Arrogant fellow. Thought he owned everything. It should be easy being a banker, Tobias. Take the money in, pay as little interest as you can. Lend it out to respectable people at the highest rate you dare. Pocket the difference between the two interest rates and you get rich. But slowly. Nowadays the bankers and everybody else want to get rich today, if not half an hour ago, so they chase round after all sorts of hare brained schemes. They take too many risks.” Mycroft paused and looked at one of his papers. He began to laugh. His great stomach began to shake with mirth.

  “Have you heard of Poyais, Tobias?”

  “No, sir, Is it a place or a tribe perhaps?”

  “It’s a place,” Mycroft continued, “said to lie in British Honduras between Guatemala and Nicaragua. Round about the end of the Napoleonic Wars a man called Gregor Macgregor, a soldier and adventurer, got involved in various liberation movements in that part of the world. And the City, God bless it, was having one of its fits of irrational exuberance by buying Latin American bonds and Latin American securities as if they were as safe as the Bank of England. This Macgregor decided to cash in. He floated and sold £200,000 worth of Poyais bonds. He produced a guide book under a false name describing the benign climate, the friendly natives of the little country, the fledgling democracy. He sold land to settlers, some of whom actually turned their British money into the Poyais currency and set out on chartered boats to make a new life in Central America.”

  “What happened to them, sir? Are their descendants still there? Is there a Poyais cricket team perhaps? Poyais United football club?”

  “I fear not, Tobias. The place didn’t exist. The investors lost all their money. Many of the settlers died. Macgregor had invented the whole thing. But it just shows that gullibility never really goes away.”

  There was an enormous bang from the machine room next door as if half the floorboards had been pulled up in one go.

  “Can you go and settle us into the Parthenon, Tobias? I need to send a number of telegraphs to my fellow Government auditors and financiers. If I dictate some of them to you now, you could go ahead and dispatch them. Do you know, I think this wretched bank Gorings is going to collapse unless we can act decisively. It is simply too large to be allowed to go under.”

  Mycroft leant back in his chair and closed his eyes. Tobias could see that the great brain was purring into action. Governor of the Bank of France, he said. Managing Director of JP Morgan in Wall Street. Governor of the National Bank in St Petersburg. In all cases the message was the same. Tobias whistled to himself as he closed his notebook and prepared to set off.

  “Sir, Jaikie is without, and that tall friend of his, Wee Robert. What shall I tell them?”

  “Send Jaikie to the Bank of England, Tobias, and tell him to wait for the Governor’s report into Gorings. He’s to wait for as long as it takes. The other fellow can await instructions.”

  Tobias felt that Wee Robert should change his tailor. He was fourteen years old but already almost six feet tall. His trousers were too short by four or five inches and there was another shortfall between his wrists and the end of his jacket. Jaikie was in a belligerent mood.

  “Bank of England, is it?” he cried. “I don’t care for them banks nor them bankers neither. They’ve got vey superior porters in them places. One of them caught me trying to liberate his watch from his waistcoat and chased me right down Lombard Street. I had to hop on a bus to get away from the bastard. That was the last time I paid for a bus fare, mind you.”

  “Do you know the City at all, Jaikie?”

  The ragamuffin snorted derisively. “Know the City of London? Is my name Jaikie? We had a bad banker in the Scrubs not too long ago. The rogue was forever sending buy and sell notes off to his friends down there. Mind you, he lost Chalky The Shotgun White a heap of money in some dodgy foreign railway shares. Chalky was furious. Said he’d break every bone in the banker’s body, a bone a day for a fortnight.”

  Jaikie paused for the magnitude of the threat to sink in.

  “Did he do it, Jaikie, break all the bones I mean?”

  “Naw, the villain managed to get his hands on some money to pay Chalky back. But he was never the same afterwards, the bad banker. He went right off his food. They say he joined the Salvation Army once he was let out. Ta Ta.”

  With that Jaikie began whistling ‘I know that my Redeemer Liveth’ and trotted off on his way. Tobias reflected that the Auntie who taught him to read must have included Handel’s Messiah in the religious tunes she taught her younger relations.

  *

  Fifteen minutes later Tobias had despatched his messages. Their temporary offices were comfortable with a large desk and a new telephone for Mycroft and a small table for Tobias by the doorway. Tobias raced off to the Jermyn Street store, home among other things to the Turkish Delight Mycroft favoured.

  Twenty minutes later Mycroft set off from the Government Offices in Great George Street to his new quarters, walking at his normal stately pace. Tobias could see him coming out of the Parthenon windows. When he approached Pall Mall, the Government Auditor appeared to take heart. Here were the clubs he loved, the Parthenon, the Diogenes, the Hypocrites and many more. Here were his own quarters in his apartment, tenderly cared for by Mrs Hudson. As he walked into the club Tobias felt, rather fancifully, that Mycroft resembled a Roman Cardinal, a veteran of many an intrigue in the murky byways of The Curia, progressing through the streets of Vatican City acknowledging the greetings of the faithful.

  It was tea time when a panting Jaikie re-appeared, bearing a large white envelope. Mycroft was spreading a giant’s portion of Parthenon butter and Parthenon jam onto his third Parthenon scone.

  “Ran all the bloody way,” Jaikie panted to Tobias in the great reception area with the black and white marble floor. “I’ve got news for you, Tobias. Them rats or mice what was eating your cables, they’ve invaded the City. Two of them big banks, Lowthers and Finches, have got the little bastards now. All their cables have gone. They’re running around like headless chickens. I reckon the market for messengers is going to take a turn for the better.”

  Mycroft looked dark when he was told the news. “I wonder, Tobias, I really do. We need more information and we need it quickly. If you were a travelling mouse or rat, Tobias, you would make your way from our old offices to the Strand, along Fleet Street, up Ludgate Hill and past St Paul’s. Could you send Jaikie and his friend along that route, one to each side of the street, and ask the hotels and offices and shops if they have been attacked by these vermin?”

  “Do you think the creatures might be descended from the one in Dr Watson’s story that cannot yet be told, sir?”

  “What was that Tobias? I fear my memory is currently with Argentine security prices.”

  “Why, sir, The Giant Rat of Sumatra!”

  “It’s possible. But I think they may have been imported from rather closer to home.”

  “What do you suspect, sir?” A terrible prospect flashed through Tobias’s brain. “Do you think it might not be an accident?”

  “We must await the intelligence, Tobias. I did not become the Auditor of all Government Departments without a suspicious mind.”

  Tobias sent the Du Cane Road Irregulars off on their rodent finding mission. “What news from the Governor, Tobias?”

  “Do you want the full details, sir, or shall I just give you the headlines?” During his time with Mycroft Tobias had become expert at filleting documents, rather like an experienced sub editor instantly grasping the kernel of a news story and producing an appropriate headline.

  “Just the key facts, if you would.”

  Tobias scanned the document at lightning speed. “They’re five million short,” he said. “That’s with the second tranche of the payment to Buenos Aires, various loans they’ve taken out with other banks and a heap of dodgy mortgages they should never have issued. Overall, they are actually worth much more than that but it would take a long time, a couple of years at the least, to realise all their assets and unwind their positions. Two days from now they’re going to crash, sir. The Governor’s man doesn’t think anybody is going to lend them that much money.”

  Mycroft lit one of his strong cigarettes and blew a great cloud of smoke in the direction of the fireplace. “This is a disaster, Tobias. A disaster for the Gorings personally, their houses and estates will all have to be sold, a disaster for their bank which will surely have to close, and more important, a disaster for London as the hub of the world’s financial system. All the business of securing bills on London will drift away to Paris and Frankfurt and New York. It will never return. Thousands and thousands will lose their jobs. The Treasury’s tax revenues will be decimated. One of Gorings ancestors, rather more prudent than the current master, was in the habit of saying that he would rather lose all his money than lose his good name. You could always make more money, he said, but you could never recover your reputation. This is the worst news I have heard in my entire time as Auditor of all Government Departments.”

  “There must be something we can do, sir,” said Tobias with the eternal optimism of youth.

  “I am going to consider our options, Tobias. There are precious few of them.” Mycroft leant back in his chair. Over the next forty minutes Tobias reckoned he smoked seven cigarettes in quick succession. There was a knock at the door. Jaikie and Wee Robert were waiting outside.

  “Well?” said Tobias. “What news?”

  “It’s a mystery, Tobias,” Jaikie began.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Wee Robert cried.

  “There’s not a single shop, bank or office on that route that has lost its cables, and that’s a fact,” said Jaikie, scratching his small and very dirty head. “It’s like them plague of locusts in the Bible missing out on all the children of Israel and only visiting the bad people, whatever they was called, the ones who got drowned in the Black Sea.”

  “Red Sea, Jaikie,” said Tobias with a smile.

  “They’ve all got the wind up now,” Jaikie continued, “them people on the Strand and up that Ludgate Hill, trying to get their hands on ratcatchers like they was going out of fashion. I wonder if Chalky The Shotgun White knows any ratcatchers. He could make a killing.”

  Mycroft raised himself from his chair and padded over to the great window. “Write me a line, Tobias, to Spencer Bishop. Ask him if there are any unusual financial transactions in play at the moment. Warn him that the perpetrators may have gone to a lot of trouble to cover their traces.”

  “Who is this Bishop, sir? I take it he is not a prelate of the Church of England?”

  “He is the financial equivalent of Langdale Pike, Tobias, the man who sits in his club collecting all the society gossip in the capital. Spencer Bishop is an albino with a pronounced limp. He floats between the Exchange and the coffee houses and the chop houses and the bars of the City soaking up all the tittle tattle that ebbs and flows at such remarkable speed round Bishopsgate and The Royal Exchange. He has done useful, nay, sterling service to the Government of this country in the past.”

  Mycroft stared out at Pall Mall. Men were going to their clubs, he realised, and though he might be in a club now, it was not his own and he was already an hour and a half behind his normal hour of entry to the Diogenes.

  “Could I make a suggestion, sir?”

  “Please do, Tobias, Your suggestions are always welcome and usually helpful.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Tobias was brushing his light brown hair away from his forehead. “You will remember, I’m sure, sir, the three anonymous sources who tipped the Bank of England off about the plot to debase the currency some time ago?”

  “You mean the private bank in Vienna, the Anglophile moneylender in Munich, and an anonymous tip off from the Casino in Monte Carlo?”

  “Yes, sir. The thing is, sir, the then Governor gave me the contact details of who they all were when the affair had blown over. He said they might come in useful at some point in the future. I have the details in my notebook here.”

  “Capital, Tobias, Capital! Get on to them straight away! You know what to say, suspicious financial movements and so on. I wonder if Ephrussis in Vienna will be able to help.”

  Mycroft returned to his desk and began fiddling absentmindedly with his telephone instrument. Not that he ever used it. He waited until Tobias had sent his messages, staring at the ceiling.

  “Let us cut to the quick, Tobias. I have a plan. I have no idea if it will work or not. It is rather like picking a combination lock. You have to ensure that your keys are going to tumble in precisely the right order or you won’t open the device. I would like you to arrange me a series of meetings tomorrow morning, starting with the Prime Minister himself at ten o’clock in Number Ten Downing Street. The rest of them will have to come here. I cannot be traipsing round the City like a parcel in a series of uncomfortable cabs. Eleven o’clock, Lord Millman, head man of Millmans with their interests spread out all over Europe like dragon’s teeth. Twelve o’clock the Chairman of Finches. One o’clock Lowthers. Two o’clock that German fellow Bucholdtz, Three o’clock, that rogue Johnston from Johnstons, though I have little hope of him. Four o’clock Willoughby of Willoughbys. Five o’clock Sunny Rowlandson. Six o’clock, God help us, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Tell them all it is a matter of the utmost national importance that they appear at the appointed time.”

  “I shall get onto it straight away, sir. Jaikie and his friend can deliver the messages when I’ve typed them up.”

  “One last thing, Tobias,” Mycroft was making for the door and the silent comfort of the Diogenes Club up the road. “Can you type a letter of resignation for me, addressed to the Prime Minister, and have it on my desk first thing in the morning?”

  Tobias stared at his master. There was about him a look of steely determination and resolve, a look of massive power that Tobias had never seen before. He decided to ask no questions. “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

  Mycroft vanished into the fog that had returned to the streets of the capital. Before he left the office Tobias checked the details of his beloved Tottenham Hotspur team to play Woolwich Arsenal in a key match on the Saturday. It was Spurs strongest team. As he made his way home to his aunt’s house in Maida Vale Tobias prayed that Government Auditor’s team would be at their peak tomorrow.

  Mycroft stumbled back to his rooms at a quarter to ten. After a few minutes Mrs Hudson heard him playing the piano. It was Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, a work he only played in moments of supreme crisis. Mingling with the notes she heard the distant boom of Big Ben striking the hour of ten. There were sixty hours left to save the City of London.

  *

  Shortly after eight o’clock the next morning Tobias found Jaikie lurking outside the grand entrance of the Parthenon, a slight little figure with the fog swirling around him. Jaikie was in a state of high excitement.

  “Tobias,” he announced, “I’ve got important news for you. Our Chief, the Chief of the Du Cane Road Irregulars, has had a summit meeting with the heads of the five gangs round about. That’s unheard of. We had the Acton High Street Apaches, the Shepherd’s Bush Green Invincibles, the Haringey Hotspurs, Kensington High Street Diehards and the Notting Hill Gate Steadfasts, them’s really bad boys, Tobias, them Steadfasts. Each gang leader brought protection to the meeting, Jimmy Nine Fingers Flanagan from Haringey brought two. They’ve agreed a truce. No more fighting, offensive weapons to be kept at home. Each gang pledged to deploy its members as messengers to the City firms while the rat crisis lasts. The Chief gets a fifth of all the takings. He told Harry Fatbelly Squires from Shepherd’s Bush he’d carve his name on Fatbelly’s face if he cheated on the figures. It’s the national crisis, Tobias. We’re doing our bit. Wee Robert is going round the firms now suggesting which messengers work where.”

  “That’s very commendable, Jaikie. Very public spirited, I should say.”

  “There’s one other thing, Tobias. Our prices been doubled for the duration. When this flap is over they’ll go back to normal.”

  “Market forces seem to have to come to juvenile gangland,” Tobias observed, only too aware that even if he wanted to he could not take a stand over money at a time like this.

  There was a great pile of cables waiting for Tobias. Mycroft looked in for a fix of Turkish Delight before he set off for his meeting in Downing Street.

  He was led up the stairs past the portraits of previous Prime Ministers on the wall. Mycroft wondered which of them could help him now. Sir Robert Peel the man who split his party over the Corn Laws? William Ewart Gladstone, pillar of financial rectitude with budget speeches over five hours long, would be saviour of London’s prostitutes in the dark hours of the night? There was only one, looking enigmatically at the world with a mocking smile. Charming, clever, devious, the Prime Minister who turned his Queen into an Empress, Disraeli was his man.

  Even at ten o’clock in the morning the Prime Minister looked tired. People said that the lines on his forehead were increasing at the rate of two a year under the pressures of office.

  Mycroft explained the position, the likely collapse of Gorings, the catastrophic effect this would have on the City of London and the wider Empire, financial power ebbing to the other great capitals of Europe and to New York across the Atlantic.