The Language of Bees

by Laurie R. King

  “Unless the clothing was intended to deflect suspicion, as well as raise a challenge to his father's intellect.”

  There was no arguing with that.

  He added, “There is also the possibility that Damian's involvement is secondary. That he plays a peripheral rôle in … whatever this is we are looking at.”

  Nor with that.

  “The author of that book,” I answered at last, “whoever he might be, is either a dangerous charlatan, or an even more dangerous psychopath.”

  Mycroft said nothing: He was going to make me speak my thoughts to the end.

  I went on. “In either case, he would strike one as both plausible and engaging.”

  No response, which was the same as agreement. I took a deep breath.

  “The question is, could Holmes be duped by such a person?”

  “Any man may be duped, if he wishes to believe.”

  This time, even a stranger would have heard the pain in his voice. I shook my head, more in denial than in disagreement.

  “Yes,” he insisted. “Even my brother. The key to deceit is to find the weak point in one's target.”

  “I've only spent a couple of hours in Damian's company, but I have to say, if he is the author of that book, I should look to madness, not duplicity. However—” I had to clear my throat before I could give voice to the end point of this line of thought. “The author of that book is almost certainly responsible for …”

  “Where is the child Estelle?” Mycroft said, his voice soft.

  Again, I shook my head; this time the gesture was one of despair.

  Mycroft drifted to a halt, leaning on his stick to stare unseeing at Kensington Palace. “The one faint ray of light in all this is that, assuming it is tied to the influence of the full moon, we have twenty-three days until the next one. Surely we can lay hands on the young man, given three weeks.”

  He is Holmes' son, I thought but did not say aloud. I did not need to, not to Holmes' brother.

  Holmes' brother was now, I noticed, staring at me.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Have you eaten today?”

  “Yes. I think so. I don't remember.”

  “I thought not. You have that stretched look I have seen you wear, when you have not eaten. Surely we can remedy that, at the least.”

  And so saying he raised a hand and conjured a taxi.

  The brothers Holmes have an irritating habit of being right, and so it proved now with Mycroft and food. Not that a meal rendered the world rosy, but an unstarved brain permitted my near-panic to take a small step away, that I might assemble my thoughts and come up with a plan.

  Perhaps my attachment to Holmes made me too ready to condemn the son he had so eagerly clasped to his breast. My suspicions of Damian, though justified, were compounded by my burden of emotions, namely the residual resentments that I had lived with since the 1919 revelation that Holmes had a life from which I was precluded. It was unlikely that I should have a child: That Holmes had one already opened a separation between us.

  But it was not merely the bitter edge of envy that set me in opposition to Damian Adler. Holmes had adopted Damian's cause with a wholesale enthusiasm I would not have expected. Under less dire circumstances, I might almost be entertained by the chance to prove Holmes fallible; on the other hand, both experience and loyalty demanded that I throw myself over to Holmes' stance and labour to prove his son's innocence. But Damian's fate rendered the first option repugnant, and Yolanda's death made the second impossible: Were I to join in declaring Damian's innocence, the dead would have no voice.

  Scotland Yard, it appeared, were positioned on one side; Holmes and Damian occupied the other: The equation needed a balancing point, a mind committed to cold facts, a heart given only to impartiality.

  It was left to me to pursue the middle course of truth: me, and Mycroft.

  Holmes had always freely bowed to his brother's superiority when it came to pure observational ability, declaring that his brother's ability to store and retrieve facts was matched by no living man. Mycroft had never come near to Holmes as an investigator, being severely limited by his disinclination to stir beyond his small circuit of rooms, club, and office. However, what I needed now was not an investigator, but a pure retrieval mechanism. It could save me days of tedium amongst the back-issues.

  If the moon was at all significant, its meaning might have begun to manifest before the Cerne Abbas possible-suicide in June. When Mycroft was seated in his chair again, glass to hand and fragrant cigar in its ash-tray, I asked him.

  “What,” he said, “other murders around the time of full moons? There were none—none worthy of note.”

  “Not necessarily murders, but events. For example, Holmes mentioned a dead ram in Cumbria, although it was only another letter by an outraged gentleman-farmer to The Times.”

  His light grey eyes fixed on me, slowly losing their habitual vagueness. After a minute, he sat back, laced his fingers across his waistcoat, and let his eyelids drift half closed. I picked up my pen and the block of paper.

  “March the twenty-first,” he began, “was a Friday. London saw a death on the Thursday night, a sixty-nine-year-old woman in Stepney run down by a lorry. The lorry driver stopped and was detained, then released because the woman was nearly blind and deaf. On the following day, a man was found dead in an alley off the Old Bethnal Green Road, no signs of foul play, being drunk and it being a wet night. No bodies on the Saturday, although a house in Finsbury that was used as an informal Hindu temple had a rude word scratched on its door.”

  He paused, reaching for the next pigeon-hole of his orderly brain, then resumed. “In Manchester during those three days, there were no deaths, no crimes of a religious nature, but several arrests were made following a talk at a vegetarian restaurant concerning Madame Blavatsky. In York …”

  This was going to be a long night.

  Blood: Blood and pain are companions of birth, no less for

  the second-born, torn from the womb of ignorance to

  stand naked before the storms of the world. A second-born

  man is doubly vulnerable: This is the mystery of birth.

  Testimony, III:2

  WEDNESDAY MORNING, MYCROFT SEEMED NONE the worse for wear from his prodigious feat of memory of the night before, but I was still fatigued as I read through my ever more incoherent notes. There seemed a stupendous number of crimes on my pages, and I wondered how the figures a week on either side of the full-moon dates would compare—then winced at the thought of having to go through that experience a second time.

  In March, a man named Danielson had been knifed in a fishing village in Cornwall, his body found the morning after the full moon, his assailant not identified. In April, a shepherd's death was probably exposure, but then on 18 May there was an interesting item: Blood was seen near the entrance of a large chambered tomb in the Orkney Islands. When the farmer went to see, he found a sheep dead inside the chamber, its throat savaged by a dog.

  Right, I thought, I can just see asking Lestrade to look into that. That reminded me: “What about Holmes' dead ram? It's not on this list.”

  Mycroft blinked. “Might he have been making a jest with Lestrade?”

  “It didn't sound like it.”

  Mycroft's gaze focused on the coffee pot in the centre of the table, as he slipped effortlessly back into the retrieval state. Twenty minutes later, as I was myself eyeing the pot and wondering if it would shatter his concentration were I to pour myself another cup, he stirred and picked up his cold cup.

  “The only dead sheep that received mention in the news or in my dispatches was the one in Cumbria, although it happened the first week of May, not during the full moon. I shall make enquiries with my colleagues in Agriculture.” He sounded mildly embarrassed, as if admitting to failure, and I hastened to re-assure him.

  “I shouldn't think it matters, just that if we're looking at odd deaths during full moons, especially if there is some link to N
eolithic sites, then Holmes is right, we ought to take livestock into account.”

  He nodded, still looking abashed, and finished his breakfast. When he left, he had Testimony under his arm.

  I studied the long list he had dictated.

  Each date began with events in and around London, then dropped down into the southland before working its way north—indicating that Mycroft's mind had put the facts into order, rather than eidetically regurgitating the various newspaper articles. Although that would have been incredible enough.

  I began to work my way down the pages, putting an X beside anything I thought worth a closer look, particularly those near ancient monuments.

  Near the March full moon, three sheep had been found dead in a field in Oxfordshire, less than a mile from the Rollright Stones; the Cornish fisherman Danielson was killed, and although there was no mention of standing stones or what have you, Cornwall was so littered with prehistoric monuments, it was hardly worth noting; an old woman was discovered in a pew in a tiny village church near Maidstone, after the Sunday morning service: Her fellow parishioners had not disturbed her, thinking she was praying, or sleeping, but it turned out she had been peacefully dead since the Friday.

  In April, a shepherd in Yorkshire died from exposure, with no mention of burial mounds or ancient Druidic altars.

  In May came the ewe in the chambered tomb in Orkney, and although it was mildly interesting that two sheep had died near Neolithic monuments in the same month, I anticipated that any report from Mycroft's agricultural colleague would give me a few dozen more: Sheep and standing stones both tend to be found in desolate stretches of land, for similar reasons: Valuable farmland would have been put under the plough already, with any inconvenient stones broken down and carted off for the farmer's use.

  June saw the death of Fiona Cartwright at Cerne Abbas, a full moon, but the moon was a week past full when the summer solstice clash of opposing beliefs erupted at Stonehenge.

  July was noteworthy for the largest number of events, possibly because with the long days and a stretch of warm weather, more people were out and about. There were no fewer than three injuries along Hadrian's Wall at the full moon, because (according to Mycroft) one of the local tourist agencies had decided to sponsor night rambles along the wall, with catastrophic results. None of the walkers had died, but one was still in hospital with a head injury, and it was not yet known whether he had fallen or been attacked. On the morning of 17 July, blood was found spattered across the altar of the Kirkwall cathedral in the Orkneys, although when no body showed up to go with the blood, it was decided that a cat had brought its prey inside for a sacrilegious meal. I noted that this was the second mention of the Orkney Islands, but what I found more interesting was the idea of an Orkney cathedral in the first place: a grandiose image for a remote dot of land.

  August was noteworthy for the death of Yolanda Adler at the Wilmington Giant; there had been other incidents scattered across the country, but the only likely fatality had taken place the Tuesday before the full moon, a man who celebrated the loss of his job by going up to a remote site in the Yorkshire moors to slit his wrists. I made note of this one, to find details not contained in Mycroft's newspapers.

  While I was pushing the multitude of incidents around in my mind and wondering how best to investigate any links, the telephone rang. The housekeeper picked it up, then I heard her say my name.

  It was Holmes, and although his voice was all but incomprehensible with distance, my heart jumped with the reassurance that he was safe.

  “Russell, is that you? Thank goodness, it's taken me an hour to convince the operator that I did in fact require a trunk call. Is there any word of Damian?”

  “None, although the morning papers are baying after him.”

  “I've seen. I'm on my way to Stonehenge, and then—”

  “Holmes, before we're cut off, let me tell you what Mycroft and I have been looking at.” I gave him a quick outline of sixteen of what I deemed the most likely incidents, from the three sheep at the Rollright Stones to the Yorkshire suicide.

  At the end of it, the line crackled for several seconds, alarming me that he had not heard most of my recitation, but then his voice came into my ear.

  “Thank you, Russell, I shall see how many of those I can investigate over the next days, beginning with Stonehenge. I've been to see the agency in Poole, which is a fairly low-end affair, and will post their description of—”

  The ear-piece went dead. I lingered at the table, shuffling papers and reading the newspaper, but eventually I gave up and asked Mrs Cowper to call me from the bath if he came through again. When I had dressed, I took my hat and bag and went to tell her that if Holmes rang, she should simply write down what he told her.

  “Very well, ma'am,” she said. “Did you want me to tell him about the letter?”

  “What letter is that?”

  It had come while I was in the bath, thin paper and a post office pen, sent first to Sussex, then re-addressed to London in Mrs Hudson's writing. The franking showed it had been processed in London on Saturday morning. There was no return address and I did not recognise the hand, but I tore it open and read:

  Friday evening, 15th

  Dear Father,

  I have received a message from Yolanda to say that she and Estelle are with friends in the country, and that she hopes I will join them there. I apologise for getting the wind up so and hauling you from your needed rest in Sussex. I ought to have known that it was merely Yolanda being her sweet and maddening self. I can only hope this reaches you before you have spent too much more energy on the paper chase I've laid you.

  I will not apologise, however, for having got to know you somewhat during the past days, even under such trying circumstances. I had anticipated—this will be no surprise to you—that matters between us might be less congenial than in fact they turned out to be. When things settle somewhat, I shall be back into touch and we can begin afresh, with a proper meeting and introductions all around. I can only trust that the manner in which you “met” Yolanda will not overly influence your future relations with her.

  D

  P.S. You were right about my mother. She was an extraordinary woman, and she had a lovely laugh.

  I sat down, and read it again.

  Then I took off my hat, and read the letter a third time, slowly.

  Written Friday, picked up from a letter box Saturday, arrived in Sussex late on Monday, back into the post there on Tuesday, and thus to London.

  At last, I told myself, a piece of evidence supporting Damian's innocence.

  Or, was it? Could this letter be the work of a very clever villain, laying a false trail?

  Cold facts and impartiality pointed out the two possibilities: One, on Friday afternoon Damian Adler was in London, writing a graceful apology to his father before reuniting with his wife and child. Or two, on Friday afternoon, an associate of Damian Adler's had posted a previously written letter to lay the groundwork for an alibi.

  If this letter was the work of a villain, then he was not only immensely clever (and Damian was certainly that) but highly practiced: Holmes himself could not have composed a more disarming note.

  No, this proved nothing.

  I looked at the silent telephone, cursing the poor timing of this missive's arrival, then thought of how it might change my plans for the day.

  Today was Wednesday, with its regular evening meeting marching through the weeks of Millicent Dunworthy's desk-diary. If the police had not already shown Yolanda's photograph to the railway personnel in Eastbourne, Polegate, and Seaford, asking if she had passed through on Friday, and with whom, then this letter made it ever more urgent that I do so.

  However, travelling to three towns in Sussex would put me back in London too late to follow Miss Dunworthy to her meeting. I could not go south today.

  It was on the edge of my tongue to add to my message for Holmes, but the letter was not the sort of thing I wished to convey through the off
ices of Mrs Cowper—neither the message that his son had written to say he was safe, nor the equally likely message that his son was in danger.

  Instead, I put the letter back in its envelope, put my hat back on my head, and went out to hunt down a maid, a chemist, and a provider of high-class picnics.

  The Adlers' maid, Sally Blalock, told me little about the Adlers that I could not have guessed (were guessing permissible in the vicinity of Holmes). Yolanda was a woman of whims and peculiar habits (“The things that family eats!” Sally declared. “Garlic, in everything! And Missus Adler doesn't touch meat, can you imagine? How can a person survive on nuts and such?”) and even more peculiar interests, fond of the child but not permitting child-care to interfere with the important matters of her life. Nannies came and nannies went—three of them inside six months, lost through odd foods and peculiar attitudes concerning discipline and education—and only her husband's firm insistence prevented Mrs Adler from dragging Estelle to Spiritualist meetings, interminable lectures from the Vedanta Society, and week-end spiritual courses in Yoga or Numerology or Egyptian Meditation, whatever that might be.

  Not that her husband kept her from her interests—far from it. He encouraged her, merely requiring her to arrange for some appropriate care for Estelle before Yolanda went off to Cambridge or Surrey. For short meetings, that was generally the maid; for longer absences, it was often Damian himself.

  “He doesn't mind, I don't mean to say that, he doesn't at all, it's just that he's an artist, you know? An Important Artist, and how can a man be expected to make his paintings with a child underfoot? And 'Stella's a lovely child, I don't mean to say she isn't, bright and usually friendly, but that little girl does have a mind of her own, and if she doesn't want to sit quietly and play with her dollies, she will not be jollied along, which means that he doesn't get too much work done when his wife's away, as you might guess.”