The Language of Bees

by Laurie R. King

  I pulled down the bed-clothes and climbed underneath them, propping the pillows behind my back. “Why did Damian leave you? Did he say?”

  “He simply left, before dawn, after being wakened from a nightmare. He had left once before; this time, he did not return. He was last seen at ten o'clock Friday morning, walking up Regent Street with a man.” He described the man, clearly searching his memory as he did so for any similarity to someone he knew, but equally clearly failing to make any connexion. “I believe he received a message to buy a copy of The Times, where he saw an agony notice with the instructions for the meeting.”

  “Addled,” I exclaimed.

  “You saw it?”

  “I did, but I thought it a coincidence.” Before he could scold me for dismissing a clue, I asked him about the man, and he told me about interviewing the Café Royal porter.

  So: Holmes could not prove his son's whereabouts. My thoughts went back to the body lying in the nearby morgue. “Holmes, I find it difficult to reconcile a person who would … do as you suggest, with the Yolanda Adler I have heard described these past days. She may be colourful, and certainly has some decidedly odd religious beliefs, but even the neighbours who wondered if she was entirely reliable didn't actively claim that she was—is—a neglectful mother. I'd have said she was reformed from her ways.”

  “So Damian claimed. And the first two days, he seemed as much irritated as concerned. But for whatever reason, by Thursday night his mood darkened. He spoke of drugs and suggested that, since the end of June, something has been disturbing her.”

  “It's true, a dependence on drugs has a habit of going dormant rather than extinct.”

  “As we well know,” he said in a dry voice, then continued briskly.

  “His description of her actions to us the other night was, I venture to say, fairly conservative compared to the facts of the matter.”

  We sat quietly contemplating the mind of a young man who would knowingly marry a drug-addicted prostitute in a foreign country.

  “Well,” I said at last, “if she fell back, it must have been a fast journey. Ten days ago she was chatting with her neighbour in the park while their children played.”

  He rubbed tiredly at his eyes. “It has been some time since I have toured the depths of the city's depravity—two hot baths and I still feel unclean. I cannot say I hit upon every establishment in the city, but certainly most of them. Yolanda and her child are not there.”

  I firmly kept my mind's eye turned away from the picture. “What about outside of London? Couldn't she have gone to Birmingham, or even to Paris?”

  “Indeed.”

  Or to Sussex, to die at the feet of a prehistoric hill-carving.

  Tomorrow would tell.

  “Have you any thoughts on where Damian went?”

  “I believe messages were left for him in several places where he was apt to go. An envelope with his name on it was left at the Café Royal on Wednesday; the porter gave it to him when he appeared early on Friday. And when I broke into their house in Chelsea last night—”

  “Ha!”

  “Sorry?” he asked at the interruption.

  “I was outside of the house earlier this evening, and decided to break in later and spend tomorrow—today—Sunday searching it by daylight.”

  “I shall save you the trouble, then, Russell, and say that the only thing to suggest where either of them might have gone was a typed message saying, ‘Look at the Friday Times personal adverts.’ By which time, I had already seen the ‘Addled’ notice. Too late. There may well be one at his studio as well—I'd intended to look there tonight.”

  “Instead, you heard about the body at the Wilmington Giant and caught an evening express, arriving here too late to investigate there, but early enough for Mrs Hudson to cook you a squab pie.”

  “A newsboy was calling the headline on Oxford Street at three o'clock. And in fact, Mrs Hudson and I walked in within a quarter hour of each other. She had been somewhat taken aback to find the house empty on her arrival.”

  “I left her a note!” I protested.

  “I quote: ‘Holmes and I have been called away, I'm not certain when we will return, I hope you are well.’ She did not find this terribly informative.”

  “I gave her all the information I had,” I snapped, “which was more than you did.”

  “True,” he agreed, without a trace of apology. He pawed through the litter on the window-sill for something to tamp his pipe with, coming up with a large nail that he had once thought might be evidence in a case, but was not. “Your turn.”

  “I solved your bee mystery,” I told him.

  Such was the intensity of his concern over Damian that he looked blank for a full two seconds. “Ah. Yes?”

  “I'll tell you about it later. But I also found your album of Damian's early work, and on Friday I finally uncovered your records of his history.”

  “Not until Friday?”

  “I wasn't looking for it earlier,” I retorted. “I was busy with your dratted bees. And I thought that if you wished my assistance with Damian's wife, you'd have asked me.”

  “What made you change your mind and go to London?”

  “Perhaps it's because we've been moving forward for so many months, that sitting still felt peculiar. And I was uneasy, after reading his case file.”

  “Hardly a case file,” he objected.

  “Holmes, he killed a man.”

  My husband sighed, but he made no attempt to defend or justify his son's act. Perversely, this made me want to try.

  “Although granted, he was—”

  He cut me off. “You are correct. When a man kills in the heat of battle, he is a soldier. When he does so off the battlefield, he is a murderer. Damian's mind was unbalanced, but that does not excuse his actions. However, boredom or no, I shouldn't have thought you would immediately assume that because a man kills someone in a bar fight, six years later he is still dangerous.”

  “I didn't! It was more … Well, the officer who died, he looked more like you than Mycroft does. I was … uneasy.”

  He stared at me, then began to splutter with laughter. “Russell, Russell, we must ensure that you are never again subjected to inactivity, if it introduces such flights of fancy into your mind.”

  “What was I to think?” I demanded. “You vanish without a word, even Mycroft doesn't know what you're—”

  He held up a placating hand. “Yes, very well, I see I was in the wrong, that my failure to communicate has cost you both time and mental distress. I apologise.”

  My outrage subsided, and died. Unexpected apologies were such disarming things. “My time wasn't entirely wasted, I think.”

  He moved to the window-sill to scrape out his cold pipe onto the shrubs below. “So tell me, apart from beehives, where did your investigations take you?”

  “I started with Mycroft, who said you had asked him to make enquiries in Shanghai. Then I went to Damian's gallery to look at his art, and to Chelsea to talk with the neighbours. The gallery told me that he is an immensely talented painter who revels in disturbing images, his neighbours indicated that he has a surprisingly conventional home life, except for the occasional disappearances of his wife.

  “I then went to visit Yolanda's church.”

  “Which one?”

  “They call themselves the Children of Lights, with a mish-mash of a service run out of a meeting hall in the Brompton Road. It's new, started up in January, but there were over a hundred people there the other night, despite the heat. People with a certain amount of money, I'd say.”

  “On a Saturday. Are they Adventists?”

  “Not exactly.” I described the hall, the participants, the service. “The Children of Lights—plural—are led by a man who calls himself The Master, although he wasn't there that night. The woman who led the service did little more than read from a book, although she took care to keep me from looking at it too closely, afterwards. She thought that Yolanda might have known The Ma
ster before he started the London meetings—not necessarily in Shanghai, but still. And considering Yolanda's interest in spiritual matters, it seemed possible that either the book or this woman—Millicent Dunworthy is her name—might lead me to The Master, who in turn might know where Yolanda is. So I followed her home.”

  “Describe the book.”

  “It's an oversized volume with a design but no name on the cover. Privately printed, I'd say, judging from the ornate black and gold cov—”

  “Yes,” Holmes interrupted.

  I wriggled upright from where I had been slumping against the soft pillows. “You've seen it?”

  “The Adlers have one, among a surprisingly large collection of religious esoterica. That one caught my eye, the cover being, as you say, striking.”

  “You didn't look at it?”

  “Not inside, no.”

  The faint edge of regret in his voice kept me from remonstration: Holmes' determined lack of interest in things theological had long been a bone of contention between us.

  I took off my spectacles and laid them on the bed-side table, rubbing my eyes. It had been a long day, filled with bees and Bohemians, children scrubbed for bed and children in the most terrible distress. Troubling facts and distressing images chased each other around my fatigued mind, until I fell asleep thinking of the painting I had agreed to buy: a hillside of darkened cat's fur; standing stones circling a spread-eagled figure; a doubled moon looking on. In the confused jumble as fatigue overcame me, the thought occurred that the outstretched figure was not asleep, it was dead.

  The Spark (2): In those willing to devote themselves,

  the divine spark begins to smoulder With greater effort,

  with unbroken concentration, a tiny flame will appear,

  reaching greedily for fuel to its Power:

  Transformation is at hand.

  Testimony, II:3

  I SLEPT FITFULLY, AWARE OF HOLMES IN THE WINDOWSEAT, outlined by the brilliant moonlight. At half past four, he brought me coffee; we were dressed and in the motor before the eastern sky was more than faintly light.

  The Giant is less than five miles from the house in a direct line, but by road nearly twice that. As we turned north beside the Cuckmere, I asked Holmes, “Do you want me to go into Wilmington?”

  “The footpath near Lullington is the more commonly used. Let us look there first.”

  Half a mile past Lullington, I edged the car into the grass beside the road, hoping we could extract it when we were finished—and hoping, too, that no wide lorry or hay wagon would need to pass on this Sunday morning. While I was lacing on my walking shoes, Holmes examined the verges up and down the intersection of footpath and roadway. I could see that he found nothing of interest.

  We left the motor and set off along the pathway to Windover Hill. This was a section of the prehistoric South Downs Way, the ridgeline path worn by six thousand years of travellers that crossed the chalk landscape from Winchester to Eastbourne, dotting the hills with villages, dykes, forts, burial mounds, and monuments such as the one we were approaching.

  As with many archaeological artefacts in Britain, the age, purpose, and design of the Giant, or Long Man, engender vigorous debate. Fifth Century or Fifteenth? Does he represent a farmer, or a warrior? Had the original details been smudged with the centuries, or had he always been an unadorned drawing in the turf? Solar calendar? Religious site? Or an elaborate thumb of the nose to the priory that faced it?

  Whatever his date and purpose, the Giant was now the stark outline of a big-headed figure, hands held out to grasp featureless lines as tall as he is. Whether these lines were originally farming implements, spears, or something else entirely only adds to the debate.

  “You know Hughes' theory of the Long Man, in that Kipling book?” I called at Holmes' back as we walked, eyes on the ground.

  “That it was carved by fairies?”

  “Better than that. It's the sun god, Phol, holding back the gates of darkness.”

  Holmes glanced over his shoulder. “Is there a sun god Phol?”

  “Well, there is a set of Medieval incantations that indicates Phol is another name for Baldur, and Baldur is sometimes depicted standing in the gates to the underworld. And don't forget, Polegate is just over the hill.”

  He did not dignify that with a response, merely saved his breath for climbing.

  The air was rich with the mingled odours of fresh-cut hay and a dawn breeze off the sea. Birdsong rose up with the light, to join the bleats of sheep. The sky shifted from pale rose to cloudless blue, and the corduroy surface of Windover Hill, terraced by ten thousand generations of meandering hoof, turned to rich green: August had been wet, before we arrived.

  The morning was perfectly beautiful, and I could have walked forever. In minutes, I rather wished we had.

  It was clear where the dead woman had lain, both from the heavy traffic of many booted feet and from the marks that had gone before them.

  “She was actually killed here,” I said.

  “One rather suspected as much,” Holmes mused, hunkered down over the gruesome stain. “It's quite a trek with a dead weight slung across one's shoulders.”

  “Would you say her throat was cut?”

  “They've trampled into invisibility everything but the main area of pooling, but assuming that mark over there is blood and not tomato sauce from some idiot constable's luncheon pail, then I should say yes, the distance indicates arterial blood.”

  “Did she struggle?”

  “We will know when we see her, and her clothing. The ground here and along the path is too torn up to say.”

  I stepped away from the gore-soaked centre of his interest, and bent to study the surrounds, looking for anything that would suggest how, and why, a woman died—a stranger, yes, but very possibly one linked to me by her marriage and my own.

  We quartered the ground around the Giant's feet for two hours, gathering bits of paper, cigarette ends, the odd stub of food from the lunch of hikers' picnics, anything that might have been left in recent days. Holmes, bent double with his strong magnifying glass, found some odd dark grey crumbs, a substance that puzzled him although I thought they looked like pebbles, or even gristle from someone's sandwich. Halfway between the figure's feet, a metre from the edge of the blood, he found an untrampled smear of ash, which he gathered assiduously. He spent a long time near a wide rock protruding from the ground a dozen feet from where the woman had died, measuring and sketching a pair of indentations in the ground below it that suggested someone had sat there, and gathering two envelopes of material—a black thread and a few grains of sand, both of which seemed to me as remarkable as lumps of coal in Newcastle or fish scales in Billingsgate.

  My own contribution to the evidence envelopes were: the wrapper from a packet of Italian almond-and-oat biscuits, blown down the hill; a delicate handkerchief embroidered with the letter I, or perhaps J; and a dry, chewed-over thigh bone from a domestic chicken.

  We continued along the footpath past the Giant to the village of Folkington; there, finding nothing more suggestive than an assortment of cigarette stubs.

  “Do you want to knock up the people who live along here?” I asked him.

  He studied the nearby buildings, then shook his head. “We need to see the body first, then we can decide. In any event, I should think that the police will have questioned them already.”

  Returning, we followed the ridge-top path above the Long Man, an area littered with archaeological curiosities—an old flint mine, a couple of quarries, several barrow mounds, and traces of the Roman ridge road. I sat down to remove a pebble from my shoe; Holmes settled beside me, scowling at the magnificent view that stretched out at our feet: hillside, trees, the Cuckmere valley, the Weald beyond. Church-bells drifted across the freshening air. Were it not for the thought of what awaited us, I should have been ravenous.

  “Did I give you the booklet by Alfred Watkins on British track-ways?” he asked; before I could respond, he c
ontinued. “Developing an earlier work by a madman named Black, theorising that Britain has certain innate geometrical lines that connect prehistoric monuments and the later Roman roads. Ley lines, Watkins calls them, the human landmarks reflecting the organisation of the land itself.”

  Aimless chatter like this, often nonsensical, was the way Holmes distracted himself. I knew from what.

  “You've found no sign of the child Estelle, here or in London?” I asked. It was not really a question, but Holmes shook his head.

  “It is lamentably easy to dispose of a small body,” he said. “Add to that the inescapable human fact that the younger the child, the more attention it attracts. If this woman was Yolanda Adler, I think it unlikely that we shall find her daughter alive.”

  A spasm of pain ran through the beautiful morning, and I was grateful when Holmes launched himself straight down the near-vertical hill to the path near the Giant's feet.

  It was near nine o'clock and the sun was well up in the sky. I craned my neck for a last look at the figure, then turned towards the lane where we had left the motor. Ten steps along the path, Holmes dropped to his knees and pulled out his glass.

  It might have been a heel-mark, the dent left by a shoe “inadequate for the footpaths,” as the newspaper had put it. It might also have been the mark left by a walking-stick or a sheep, but Holmes found several more of them, and traced the dimensions of the clearest one onto a piece of paper before resting a stone over it, in case he wanted a plaster cast.

  “It would suggest that she came here willingly,” I said to Holmes' bent back.

  “It would suggest that she came under her own power,” he corrected me. “That is quite another matter.”

  It was five minutes before ten when we located the office of the local coroner, which was in fact the doctor's surgery. The clamour of bells calling the faithful together faded around us. I ran a hasty comb through my wind-blown hair and checked the state of my hands and skirt before following Holmes to the door.

  The man who answered was clearly intending to join a church service before too long—either that or he had a remarkably formal attitude towards his job. He introduced himself as Dr Huxtable, and shook Holmes' hand, then mine.