The God of the Hive: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

by King, Laurie R.

  It was vexing, being unable to reach Russell, not even knowing how long it would be before he could reach her. Or Mycroft, for that matter.

  Which raised a further source of aggravation: Mycroft. If the gaps in the Brothers case made for a mental itch, what he knew of Mycroft’s situation brought on the hives: Mycroft Holmes, taken in for questioning by Scotland Yard? Lestrade might as easily interrogate the king.

  He had just knocked out his second pipe-load into the sea when a head of tousled copper hair appeared from the open hatch. The quizzical expression on the doctor’s face indicated that she and Damian had been talking, and that his son had kept little back.

  “Sherlock Holmes?” The rising tone was not quite incredulity, but made it clear that she was questioning her patient’s clarity of mind, if not his outright sanity.

  “Madam,” Holmes replied with a tip of the head, and resumed his study of the eastern horizon.

  “I’m supposed to believe that?”

  “A lady physician might be inclined towards belief in many impossible things.”

  “That’s scarcely on the same level.”

  He sighed. “You wish me to prove myself. I might show you identification, but papers can be forged. And I might recite the details of my professional life, but you would protest that I had merely read Dr Doyle’s fanciful tales in the Strand. Shall I then put on a demonstration, trot out my own patented brand of common sense? Shall I tell you that I know from your voice that you were born in Kirkcaldy and educated in Nottingham? That your father was a doctor who has either died or become incapacitated for work, freeing you to adopt his bag when you qualified? That the books and equipment you added to the somewhat antiquated surgery in Wick assured me that your skills were both considerable and up-to-date? That I knew you also had nursing experience because of the distinctive scarring on your fingers, which one sees on a person who has been in continuous proximity to infected wounds? That your shoes and your haircut are approximately the same age, which tells me you have been in Wick less than four weeks? That you wore a ring on your left hand for some years, and took it off around the time you started medical school? That—”

  “All right! Stop!” She studied her left hand for a minute, comparing it to her right, then thrust both into her pockets. “You are often doubted, as to your identity?”

  “One tends to use pseudonyms.”

  “And … your son. Although his name is Adler.”

  “His mother thought it best.”

  She pulled her coat more tightly around her, and considered the decking. “My father died in the 1919 epidemic. And it was an engagement ring—the one I took off. When my fiancé died, it was all I had of him. I wore it until 1922.”

  Holmes said nothing.

  “Mr Adler’s wife was very pretty. To judge by his drawing of her, that is.”

  “So I understand,” Holmes agreed, although she’d not been particularly lovely when he saw her in the mortuary, the plucky little idiot whose infatuation with a lunatic had landed them all in their current predicament—but that was neither charitable nor pertinent.

  “He tells me she was murdered.”

  “Two weeks ago. Damian only learnt of it yesterday. Her name was Yolanda, a Chinese woman from Shanghai. I never met her in life, but her first husband, from whom she had parted before she met Damian, turned out to be a madman convinced that human sacrifice performed at key places and auspicious times would transfer the psychic energies of his victims into him. He killed Yolanda and at least three other innocents. It was his bullet you retrieved.”

  “‘Psychic energies’?” He felt her gaze boring against the side of his head. “You’re joking.”

  “Would that I were.”

  “He planned to make himself into …”

  “A sort of Gnostic Übermensch, I suppose.”

  Either she understood the reference to Nietzsche, or she was too distracted to hear it. “And the police find this difficult to believe?”

  He glanced at her, surprised not by sarcasm, but by the lack of it. Most people of his acquaintance would cavil at the reasoning of the mad: Dr Henning spurned the distraction to grasp the essentials. Admirable woman.

  “They may reach the same conclusion eventually; however, I was disinclined to hand Damian over to them until they did so. As I said, his reaction to being enclosed is extreme.”

  “What do you intend to do?”

  “Were the wind less assertive, I’d have put in along the coast of England, found a safe haven for Damian, and made my way to London. Now, I shall have to shelter him in Europe and make a more circuitous way home.”

  She spotted a sturdy basket that had come to rest beside the capstan, and upended it, sitting with her face turned towards the long-vanished Scotland. “He says he’s only known you a short while.”

  “We met briefly in the summer of 1919. After that, he went to Shanghai. I lost sight of him until he appeared on my terrace in Sussex, nineteen days ago.”

  “And in that time his wife died at the hands of a crackpot, and you solved the case, then uncovered several other deaths, and eventually tracked the murderer to far distant Orkney, where Mr Adler was wounded. And this mad religious leader was killed.”

  “An adequate précis, yes.”

  “You killed the man?”

  “A gun went off; he died.”

  “And yet you say that you have committed no crime.”

  “Homicide in defence of self or family is not a crime. My son saved my life.”

  She blinked, not having expected that her patient was the man with the gun. After a minute, she asked, “The man was about to kill you?”

  “Damian was his intended sacrifice, to coincide with yesterday’s solar eclipse over the sixty-fifth latitude. I intervened; there was a struggle.”

  “Well,” she said. “You’ve certainly had a busy three weeks.”

  “My wife did much of the work.”

  “Your wife.” The flat syllables indicated that Damian had neglected this part of the tale.

  “She read theology at Oxford.”

  “Of course she did.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing. How do you intend to get the police to listen to you? Or will Mr Adler be forever in hiding?”

  “That would not do at all. I have resources, and they will listen. However, I need to reach them first, without attracting police attention.”

  “Hmm. And may I ask, where is Mr Adler’s daughter? He’d got as far as the confrontation on Friday night before exhaustion took him.”

  “The child is with my wife.”

  “Where?”

  “Orkney, when last I saw them.”

  “Mrs Holmes was on Orkney as well?”

  “She goes by the name Russell, but yes, she was there. Damian’s memories of the incident at the Stones may be uncertain, but she and I were both present. However, with Damian injured, we could not risk having the child to slow us down. So we split up, and Russell and Estelle remained behind.”

  “You left your wife and a child to explain to the police about a dead madman?”

  “I should be astonished if Russell was still there when the police arrived.”

  “She, too, is evading the police?”

  “Dr Henning, you heard me say that all three of us have warrants out for our arrest, from before this. And all three of those warrants are unjustified. I say again, you will come to no harm, apart from the inconvenience of this voyage. For which I sincerely apologise.”

  He met her gaze then, grey eyes locking on green, and in a moment, she surprised him. Her eyes began to dance, and her mouth twitched, and then she was laughing, with full acceptance and good humour and not a trace of the hysteria one might expect of a woman in her situation. She laughed so hard, the basket jumped out from underneath her and left the doctor sitting on the grubby deck.

  “Oh, my,” she said, fishing out a handkerchief. “My, my, my. And to think that mere minutes before you arri
ved in my surgery, I was making an inventory of supplies that I’d counted ten times already and wondering if it was too late to take a position of public-school nurse that I’d been offered in Edinburgh.”

  “Yes, well,” Holmes said, “my wife does not tend to complain of boredom.”

  “I can see that.” She stretched her legs out straight and clasped her hands on her skirts, a gesture of decision. “Very well. I should tell you that I happen to have a relative on the Dutch coast. Would you consider that ‘safe haven’ for your son?”

  Chapter 16

  I coasted through the darkness on silent wings for a time, and then snapped back into a confusion of pain and terror and the stench of petrol. Some furious creature was struggling against me, a knife was buried into my kidneys, and my head felt like a football: kicked about and swollen with air.

  Directed less by thought than by animal instinct aimed at making the noise and pain go away, I patted at the furious struggling creature. After a while its noises and struggles diminished somewhat. Nothing I could do about the vacant pounding inside my skull, but, continuing the patting motion, I eased the creature off my belly, which reduced the stabbing of the knife.

  I had no idea where I was, but I emphatically did not want to be there: topsy-turvy with walls pressing in on me, the crackle of broken glass accompanying my every motion, noises of distress beating at me. And not only noises—the enclosure was jumping in time to a pounding from outside.

  My unoccupied hand came up of its own will and looped my dangling spectacles back onto my ears. With clarity came awareness: The panel in front of my nose had a hole in it. A bullet hole?

  Suddenly the heavy reek of petrol was intolerable, and my entire body was seized by the need to be away—away! Whatever this enclosure was, it moved alarmingly with every blow from that person on the other side. My mouth formed some words—Stay there, perhaps?—and my body convulsed with the effort of turning the right way around.

  On my knees was better than on my back. And my hands could grasp the lower (upper?) edge of the enclosure and tug: heavy, but it moved. The pounding and noise cut off abruptly, and I tugged again, but it was impossible to brace myself, crowded into this tiny space with another.

  I would have more room to move if the small creature were not pressing against me—but what to do with it? I returned my grip to the lower edge of my cage, and said, “Get out when I lift this.”

  And I lifted, straining with all my might and biting down on a scream of pain. The gap between hands and ground grew: two inches, then five, and now on a level with my hips. Quivering with effort, my skull near to explosion, I gasped, “Out!” and felt the creature squirm past me, beneath the dangerous weight of this structure, wailing in protest but obeying. A tiny pair of shoes gave a final kick against my knees, and then I was alone in the trap. I let the impossible weight settle down around me and collapsed against the side, panting and near to blacking out again.

  The pounding started up again, with renewed urgency. A few of the accompanying words began to register: Petrol was chief among them, then fire.

  A child’s voice from without joined the chorus, twining around the fire-person’s masculine bellows. My head—oh, my head! If they would only be quiet for a moment.

  Estelle, that was the small creature’s name. And with her gone I could—just—manoeuvre myself into a half-standing, hunched-over position, my back against what was, in fact, the upturned floor of the enclosure. Which did me no good, since I couldn’t very well lift the weight and crawl out at the same time, but perhaps—

  “Estelle? Estelle!” Shouting sent a bolt of agony through my head; it took me a moment to notice that she was no longer wailing and the man no longer shouting.

  “’Stella, I need you to find something to prop under the back of the ’plane”—yes, there was an aeroplane in the equation—“when I lift it up. Can you find a big, heavy stick, about as tall as you are?” Could she? She was a mere child; I had no idea what she could do.

  I heard her voice, although I couldn’t make out her words. She seemed to be moving towards my right, which indicated some kind of response to my command. The voice stopped, then started up again. It did this two or three times. A conversation? Did small children hallucinate? Or was it normal to converse with imaginary friends at times of stress?

  “Estelle, can you find a stick, please? It’s really important, honey.”

  “No, I—”

  But her protest was cut off by a shudder in the enclosure, and without stopping to reflect on the unlikeliness of a child of forty months (even if she was Holmes’ granddaughter) understanding the fulcrum principle, I responded by pushing upwards with all my strength against the floorboards.

  The machine rose, tail-end first, leaving the heavy engine off to my left. Tentatively, I let my knees sag a fraction; when the load remained up, I dropped to the ground and dove out from under the remains of the ’plane.

  “Good work, Estelle,” I started to say, but then I saw her, thumb in mouth, staring towards the tail end of the machine. I took three steps forward, and saw the person responsible for lifting the burden.

  I say person, but my concussed brain knew full well that it was indulging in a few hallucinations of its own, and that I had conjured up the creature of my recent thoughts and mythic dream. The being on whose shoulders our tail assembly was resting might have been spawned by the trees all around us: a wiry figure, all beard and hair, clothed in dark brown corduroy trousers, a lighter brown tweed jacket with an orange patch on one sleeve, a once-red shirt, a lavender tweed waistcoat, and a cap the green of the branches behind him. The cap had a feather in it. I glanced down, half-expecting hooves or fur where his trousers stopped, but he wore boots, their leather the colour of the soil.

  I met a fool in the forest, a motley fool, my mind recited idiotically.

  I became aware that he had said something. This creature of the woods had made speech. I blinked at him, and he repeated it, more loudly, but I was distracted by a presence at my side. A small child—Estelle. Estelle had both arms wrapped around my leg, as if clinging to a rooted tree in a hurricane. My hand smoothed the back of her head; I was dimly aware that she was sobbing, and only the woodman’s urgency forced a key word from his thrice-repeated warning into my awareness.

  “Petrol!”

  Petrol. Fire. Javitz—and the poor devil already bore the scars of flame.

  Some dim awareness of a long-ago situation that had involved a child in need of distraction penetrated my mind, causing my hand to reach for an object that I didn’t know was there until I drew it out: a delicate porcelain dollies’ tea-cup, slipped into my pocket days before. I pressed it—miraculously unbroken—into the child’s hand. She looked at the familiar toy and unwrapped her arms from my leg, making sounds of exclamation while allowing me to usher her away (away! from the fire!) and settle her on the ground. I then moved with alacrity back to the remains of the machine.

  The wreck was little more than a cigar-shaped tube—both wings had shredded, the propeller was gone, and the whole thing had flipped over. I squatted to look underneath, and blinked at the sight of Javitz’s head and shoulders, upside-down on the earth while his legs disappeared upwards. He worked to turn his head around.

  “My foot’s caught,” he gasped. “Get out of here. The petrol will go up any moment.”

  It was already dripping down the control-stick and across the pilot’s clothing.

  “What can I do?” I asked him.

  “Let me have your revolver, and then run.”

  My thinking processes, far from clear, failed to connect the weapon with a means of freeing a caught foot. However, I could think of another weapon that might do it.

  I dropped my jacket and the gun on the ground, then called to our hirsute rescuer, “Can you keep the machine absolutely still? If it shifts and makes a spark, we’ll both be trapped.”

  “I can,” came the reply.

  Javitz protested furiously all the whi
le I was inching my way in beside him.

  His right boot was caught on something invisible in the broken belly of the aeroplane. Ignoring his furious commands, I slid the knife out of my boot and walked both hands up a trouser leg sodden with petrol: knee; calf; ankle. When I reached his boot, my fingertips found the bit of metal snagging the laces. He had fallen silent, rigid with dread; I needed only whisper my warning: “Brace yourself.”

  The knife point slid under the laces and the tough cord parted. He grunted as his full weight settled onto his bent neck. I held his foot away from the metal snag, waiting for him to pull away.

  The only direction he could move was out, under the hanging body of the aeroplane, both of us praying that the buttons and ties of his clothing did not create any friction. Head, shoulders, torso, legs, and finally his feet—one booted, one bare—were pulled past my own feet and disappeared from view. My face was mere inches from his toes as I followed, fast as my legs could scrabble.

  Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the fur coat and rucksack, spilt from the compartment. As I rose to my feet, I stretched out a hand to snatch them up: The pack came without hindrance; the fur caught briefly on something before coming free.

  As it did so, a faint clang came from the depths of the machine. I took three panicked leaps, halfway to Estelle, and then the Whomp! of igniting petrol shoved at me and I caught her up in a somersault that ended in a tangle of legs, leaves, and fur among the trees.

  If the petrol tank had not been down to its last quarter, the explosion would have incinerated us all. Still, there was plenty of fuel to set the machine instantly ablaze.

  I stuck up my head, taking a census. Estelle sat, wide-eyed, covered in leaves, shocked speechless. I threw aside the fur and went to pick her up, although on closer examination, she seemed less terrified than amazed. Javitz, on the other hand, had come to a halt with his back against a tree and was staring white-faced and shuddering at the flames. Our rescuer—our rescuer was nowhere to be seen.