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

by King, Laurie R.

  He stood facing the motorcar.

  The two figures moved—for an instant Holmes could not breathe, thinking they were struggling—but they were merely moving, away from the pools of light and into the dimmest reaches between them. When they were but a doubled outline, a voice came down the roadway. “Mr Holmes?”

  “One of them,” Mycroft answered, and removed his hat.

  That would do for a signal, Holmes decided, and walked out from his own darkness, to stand, also hatless, in the pool of light opposite Mycroft.

  The shocked silence was broken by Mycroft’s voice.

  “I’m afraid your Mr Gunderson won’t be returning to your service. He is lying in a mis-marked grave, not far from here.”

  Longer silence, then: “It matters not. Our agreement stands.”

  The two brothers exchanged a look from their opposite lamp-posts, and Holmes walked onto the bridge.

  I had my field glasses trained on the other end of the bridge, shifting back and forth across the roadway. I could hear faint voices, but not what they were saying. However, I could see Holmes start forward. I reached into my pocket to finger the keys of the motorcycle, parked and waiting in the lee of the hospital.

  Holmes had closed half the distance between him and the motorcar when he heard a voice from ahead, and saw motion where the doubled figures stood—saw, too, what had caused it.

  The blond figure that had come onto the bridge a minute before the motorcar appeared was gathering something from the pavement and getting to its feet. Goodman—it had to be he—turned towards the centre and began to walk in his quick, easy stride. His hands were free and seemed to be empty, and at each step his right hand reached out to slap the handrail in a cheery gesture. He was singing in a low voice, an old and half-familiar tune, wrapped up in his own world, to all appearances utterly unaware that there were others on the bridge.

  Holmes could only keep moving, and hope the man holding Damian had steady nerves.

  “Stop, there,” the man called, aimed at the small oncoming figure, who kept singing, kept patting, kept walking.

  Holmes was a stone’s throw from the two figures when the man ordered him, too, to stop. He did so, hands outstretched.

  He was close enough now to see that both men were masked, Damian entirely, the other man with a head-covering cut away to reveal eyes and mouth. The mask glanced over his shoulder at the oncoming figure, still oblivious and still close to the railing, then came around again to demand of Holmes, “Is this something of yours?”

  “Nothing of mine,” Holmes replied, which was the absolute truth.

  “Watch him,” he called over his shoulder to the driver, then to Holmes, “If he makes a move for his pockets, I’ll cut your son’s throat.”

  Holmes fought to keep his voice reasonable. “Look at the fellow—he’s either drunk or a lunatic, and apt to do anything,” he protested, then added more mildly, “You really ought to climb back in your motor and get away while you can. You’ve seen that my brother is alive and well. If you’re as clever as I think you are, you could be across the Channel before the police can lay their blocks.”

  “Oh, I don’t think this is entirely over.”

  Holmes did not recognise the voice, which in any case was not only muffled by the mask, but had an artificial sound to it, both in timbre and in accent. If he had long enough to study the sound, he might trace its true origins. He doubted he’d be given the chance.

  “Get into the motor, Mr Holmes,” the disguised voice said.

  “I need to see the prisoner first.”

  “You don’t recognise him without his face? Very well.”

  The man dropped the knife just long enough to tug the sack off his prisoner’s head.

  * * *

  Blinking against the dust, Damian saw his father, standing to his left with the bridge stretching out behind him and the mass of Parliament’s houses rearing up behind: Despite everything, his fingers twitched as if to reach for a sketching pencil. However, with the bite of the blade again at his throat, he did not move further.

  Now, out of the side of his other eye, he saw motion: a small man in worn trousers, a pale hat, and shirt-sleeves, marching happily across the bridge as if all alone on a woodland path. The man with the knife at Damian’s throat was watching him, too—Damian would have bet that any nearby eyes would be drawn to him. The figure’s self-absorption was so marked, it even penetrated the apprehension of the prisoner.

  Then the man stopped, causing a shudder to run out in all directions. He was standing directly beneath the bridge’s central light, looking now at the two figures held together by a razor-sharp piece of worked meteor. Deliberately, he removed his hat and set it atop the handrail. His hair was a tumble of straw, his eyes green even in lamp-light, and in his left hand was a small rubber ball.

  He bounced it once, caught it without looking, and spoke. “Are you the father?”

  I could not believe what I was seeing: Goodman was walking openly down the length of the bridge, simply asking to be shot. I took a step out of the shadows, feeling the careful clockwork of Mycroft’s plan stutter and grind.

  No, oh Goodman, no, please don’t.

  What were they saying?

  “You want me to shoot him?” said the voice from the motorcar.

  “No,” said the man with the knife. “Let us avoid gunfire if we can.”

  His question unanswered, the green eyes shifted to look farther down the roadway. The small man raised his voice to ask, “Is he the father?”

  When Holmes, too, gave no reply, the figure stepped away from the railing. Three others reacted instantaneously.

  “Stop!” West snapped, over Buckner’s voice asking, “You sure you don’t want me to shoot?”

  “He’s a poor bloody simpleton, for heaven’s sake,” Holmes shouted.

  The blond man stepped down from the wide footway, and stopped. He bounced and caught the ball a couple of times, looking intently at the prisoner. “You’re the father. Estelle’s father.”

  Damian jerked, oblivious to the knife cutting into his skin. Estelle—who was this man?

  “Yes,” he said. It came out half-strangled, but it came out.

  The green eyes beamed at him as if the word were a gold trophy. The eyes were young and fearless and full of mischief; the eyes were older than the hills.

  “I really think you should let me shoot—”

  “Enough!” West barked. He recognised the small man now: the bandleader, the wife’s pet woodsman, caretaker of the estate in Cumbria. “Buckner, get out and keep these two in place while I get rid of this.”

  The motorcar door opened and the driver stepped out, turning his gun on the two tall men, prisoner and soon-to-be prisoner. His boss rapidly crossed the roadway until he was standing face to face with the bothersome drunkard. “You,” he said. “Be gone.”

  “Ha!” Goodman’s response was a laugh. “Yes, I am gone, and I return. But you?”

  West moved before the last word had left Goodman’s mouth.

  Goodman made a sound, and looked down at the blood spilling across the front of his shirt.

  The moment the masked figure moved towards Goodman, I began to run, knowing I would be too late, knowing I had to try. I sprinted down the impossibly long bridge, and saw the Green Man stagger back, his shirt-front going instantly dark. He tripped on the footway, going to one knee then recovering to move, doubled over, towards the railing. He laid his chest across the metal (for an instant, the image of Estelle flashed through my mind, draped across the tree-round foot-stool before Mr Robert’s fireplace). One leg rose, painfully slow, and a heel crawled its way across the railing, to hook onto the far side. His arms embraced the wide iron, and then he rolled, and vanished into the darkness beyond.

  He was gone.

  Four men watched the blond man stagger back. They heard the small cry when his belly touched the iron railing, but he kept moving, onto the wide rail, moving like a wounded animal crawling to
its hole.

  The blond man rolled over, and disappeared.

  There was no splash. West, knife in his hand, waited. He swivelled, making certain that the two men stood where they were and that his man was on guard, then walked over to the side, sticking his head over the railing to look.

  And a hand came up, as if born of the bridge, or the night. A hand that had led lost souls through the woods and drunk tea with a child and loaded men onto the bed of an ambulance. A hand that raised up and wrapped around the back of Peter James West’s head.

  Holmes took one step forward, thinking only of Mycroft’s need for the man, but froze when the driver shouted a warning.

  Then behind came a figure he knew well, sprinting down the horribly exposed bridge. In a moment, the driver would hear, and would turn—and now he was turning, his gun moving towards her and Holmes was in motion, shoving Damian in the direction of the struggling figures and shouting, “Keep that man from going over—Mycroft needs him!” then “Russell!” he was shouting, and running for all he was worth.

  The Yard marksman, with a clear line on his target, eased down the trigger a split instant before the man turned around.

  * * *

  Damian’s hands were tied—literally—but his father had spoken, and he would do all he could to obey. Six long leaps took him to where his abductor was fighting against the pulling hands, heels free of the pavement now, and he slammed into the man, throwing his weight across the sprawled body, pinning him against the bridge. Damian’s shoulder screamed at the blow, but he lay hard against the rigid back, locking the man to the railing, staring past his shoulder into a pair of brilliant green eyes.

  The expression in them, oddly, was one of disappointment.

  I closed on the struggle, which had been joined by Damian, coming out of nowhere to throw himself onto the man in the mask. A zzip flew alarmingly close past my head, followed instantly by a pair of gunshots, one close and one farther away. I ducked, tearing my attention from the railing in time to see Holmes crash into the driver and wrench the revolver from his hand.

  I leapt up and ran again, reaching the knot of legs and torsos before any of them went over. The black mask had slipped, and now drifted into the dark, although all I could see of our opponent was a flash of white against his otherwise dark hair. He jerked another half inch towards the edge; Damian grunted with pain but redoubled his efforts.

  “Stop!” I shouted. “Robert, stop, let me help you, I can’t—”

  “Let me have him,” said the voice from below.

  “No, Robert, please, take my hand, I’ll get you to—”

  “Please,” his voice asked. Such a reasonable request. “Please.”

  Time stretched out while I gazed down into those eyes. I could see Death there—I had worked in hospitals; I knew what Death looked like—but Robert Goodman was there as well, the Green Man, Estelle’s champion, speaking to me without words. His hands were shaking with effort, his toes were jammed precariously into the base of the railing. I could see what it was costing him to hang on.

  Voices reached me, from a distance:

  Damian, into my left ear: “I’m to stop him from going over. Father said. Mycroft needs him.”

  Holmes, from somewhere behind me: “I’m coming, Russell!”

  From farther away, Mycroft shouting: “Hang on to that man!”

  And Goodman, saying without words, Please. Please.

  My eyes filled with tears before I put my hands on Damian’s shoulders and peeled him away.

  Two men vanished off the side of the bridge, with a single splash.

  Holmes brushed me aside, gun in hand, to crane over into the river. Mycroft followed, cold with fury, incapable of speaking to me. Soon the bridge was swarming with uniformed constables who ran down the banks with torches, waiting for the bodies to surface on the outgoing tide.

  I picked up the hat from the rail, noticing that it was missing its feather, and dropped it over the side. The pale straw was visible for an instant, then it passed out of the lamp-light and was gone.

  At the far end of the bridge, where I headed to tell Billy that we would not need his skills, another object caught my eye: a small rubber ball that had rolled down the lip of the footway until it came to rest against some dry leaves. That, I put in my pocket.

  The mortal remains of Peter James West were discovered a week later, among the debris at the side of the river near Tilbury. Of Robert Goodman, there was no trace.

  Epilogue

  The Green Man’s tale is one of mythic sacrifice. The figure personifies growth, the vegetation that springs up so joyously in the spring only to be brutally mowed down in the autumn. He is vitality personified, short-lived yet eternal, a cycle of life and apparent death.

  When Peter James West disappeared over the bridge into the Thames, his passing left a vacuum in the Empire’s array of power, and any vacuum brings disorder to things around it.

  Mycroft was there, inevitably, to breach the holes and restore order, although without West—for it had been he who went into the water—the extent of his machinations proved almost impossible to uncover. The Labour government was voted out a few weeks later following a piece of highly dubious political chicanery that bore all the hallmarks of West’s office. Holmes claimed that his brother did not blame me for the overthrow of a government, but I did not entirely believe him. In any case, it was a long time before I was to have an easy conversation with my brother-in-law.

  When I told Estelle that her friend Mr Robert was gone, she threw herself upon me and wept, and I found that under the impetus of her tears, my own were loosed as well. She wept again when Damian told of her mother’s death, three days later on the train to Edinburgh.

  In Edinburgh, we met the Holland steamer. The first passenger to disembark was a small, intense woman who stormed from the boat like a red-headed fury, both relieved at the safety of her former patient, and irate at her own failure to protect the man who, clearly, was more than a patient to her. From Edinburgh, we travelled to Wick, there to stay in a house hired outside of the town. I found it remarkably restful, to sit before the fire, helping Estelle with her lessons and reading an accumulation of old newspapers, drinking strong Scottish tea in the morning and strong Scots whisky in the evenings.

  There we stayed until Lestrade left a message for us in the agony column, assuring us that Damian had been cleared of all suspicions. But by that time, Damian was in no hurry to be back in London. And the doctor was considering the benefits of packing up her locum practice for good and moving south.

  Between one thing and another, Holmes and I did not return to Sussex until the third week of October, having been diverted by events along the way (none of which surprised me: Holmes has always been a remarkable magnet for problems). At long last, we settled back into our home, and had nearly a week’s peace before I drove to Eastbourne to pick up Damian and Estelle. They were spending a few days with us before leaving for Paris. Where, as Damian pointed out, a young woman of mixed heritage might be granted the freedom to be herself: Paris was not blind to skin colour and eye shape, but it found other attributes to be of greater concern.

  Holmes and I both expected that before long, Dr Henning would join them there.

  It was the last day of the month, All Hallow’s Eve, and as I helped load their luggage, the rain that had held out all day spat down around us. Estelle shrieked, Damian laughed, and we quickly bundled into the car to motor up onto the Downs.

  “Is this a new motorcar, Mary?” Estelle asked.

  “It is indeed. Do you like it?”

  “It’s lovely. May I honk the horn?”

  “When we reach the house, you may.”

  “I can play jackstones now,” she told me.

  “You can? That’s very clever of you.”

  “She worked at it for hours,” Damian said. “She has the determination of a bulldog.”

  At the house, the horn duly sounded, I bundled them all inside and finished the unlo
ading myself. When all was inside and the motor secure, I went up and changed, coming down with damp hair and the exhilaration of storm in my blood.

  Estelle was sitting in front of the fire, working her way through a demonstration of jackstones. Her small hand was remarkably efficient, her concentration, as her father had said, extraordinary. She was singing under her breath, her voice tiny but true, her own words set to the tune of “John Barleycorn” that Goodman had taught her.

  She came to an end of the stones and jumped to her feet, her grey eyes shining.

  “Uncle Mycroft sent me a present,” she declared. “Papa said I had to wait until we were here before I opened it.”

  “Well, you’re here.”

  She seized my hand and dragged me towards the kitchen.

  Among the bags and valises we brought from the motorcar at the station were a pair of boxes which, on closer examination, were not actually from Mycroft, but which had been posted the previous week to his London address. One was a wooden cigar box addressed to me; the other was a wooden tea crate with Estelle’s name on it.

  Damian had picked up one of Mrs Hudson’s knives, only to have it snatched from his hand with loud protests. While she was finding him a screw-driver, I picked open the twine on my own parcel and curiously looked at the contents: a lump of some hard black substance the size of a child’s fist, and another fire-stained object the size of my thumb. I picked up the heavy black stuff to examine it more closely, to be distracted by Estelle’s exclamations at her box.

  Wood-shaving spilt onto the kitchen table when the top came free, revealing a small curve of some rich brown colour. Damian brushed it off before handing it to his daughter: a delicate wooden disc, some two inches wide, made of oak. Another lay in the shavings beneath it, and another, then: a tea-cup into which a man’s fingertip would barely fit.