Chapter 12: The Brother Who Isn't Grieving

The card arrived on Thursday morning, between a bill from the printer on Tooley Street and a brief note from Lestrade confirming that Hooper had been placed on administrative suspension — the word *administrative* doing considerable work in that sentence, Watson thought, covering the thing Lestrade could not yet say directly. The card was ivory, heavy stock, engraved rather than printed, and contained only a Pall Mall address and a time: three o'clock. No signature. No salutation. The handwriting was not Mycroft Holmes's, because Mycroft Holmes did not write his own correspondence when a secretary would do, but the specific gravity of the thing — its assumption that Watson would come, its absence of any mechanism by which Watson might decline — was Mycroft entirely.

Watson set it against the inkwell and looked at it for a moment.

Then he went back to Adelaide's notation.