The Language of Bees (17 page)

“No. Which hotel?”

“The place in Battersea run by the cousin of my old Irregular Billy.”

“Perhaps that explains it.”

“His absence may have more to do with our activities yesterday
than with the quality of our lodgings. I took him on a round of houses of ill repute.”

“Is this related to our last telephone conversation, when you requested that I look into the wife’s background?”

“Precisely. Have you had any results?”

“It’s been little more than forty-eight hours. Sherlock—”

“Mycroft, we must find her.”

“I see that. And him.”

“It is also possible that he received a message.”

“You speak of the one in
The Times
agony column, couched as an advert for nerve tonic?”

“I should have known you’d notice it.”

“‘Addled by your family? Rattled by uncertainty? Eros has ten morning tonics for you to try on Friday.’”

“That’s the one, although one rather wonders that it was accepted, considering the double entendre. Damian appears to have met the man at the statue on Piccadilly Circus, at ten o’clock.”

“Am I to understand, Sherlock, that you have spoken with the staff at the Café Royal?”

“Damian took breakfast there early this morning, when he was given an envelope left for him two days earlier. He was later seen walking up Regent Street in the company of a man the porter did not know, a man of average height, in his forties, with dark hair, good-quality clothes, no facial hair, and a scar near his left eye.”

“What do you intend to do now?”

“I’ve left a message for Damian at the Battersea hotel. He may yet return there. I’ve been past his house twice today, but there are no signs of life. I am going there now—I’ll break in and get some sleep, then search the place by daylight. I cannot think why it has proved so difficult to find any trace of a Chinese woman and her child.”

“Do you wish me to summon Billy to assist you?”

“We may have to, if it goes on for much longer.”

“I understand. If Damian rings or sends a message, where can I reach you?”

“At Damian’s home, if you can manage to ring a code so I’ll know
it is you. After that, I’ll telephone to you again tomorrow night-Saturday.”

“Anything else you would like me to do?”

“Nothing. Except, if the boy gets into touch, tell him … I can’t think what you could tell him.”

“I will convey your fervent best wishes.”

“Something along those lines. Thank you, Mycroft.”

“Take care, Sherlock.”

The Guide (2):
See the steps, lit clear: The boy, tormented
in soul, wrestled with the Angels and took on their volatile
essence. Thus, when he met his Guide, he was set alight
,
as a volatile substance lights at the mere touch of flame
.
Testimony, II:1

I
TRIED, SATURDAY MORNING, TO CONVINCE MYSELF that two long-ago accusations of violence, against a man actively engaged in combat, were no great sin. Damian had not even been charged with the 1918 assault, in part because both men were drinking and witnesses disagreed over which man had started the fight. To compound matters, not only was Damian still convalescing from his wounds, he was a decorated hero (which I had not known) while the other officer was both hale-bodied and whole, and known to be belligerent when drunk: hence the verdict of shell-shock and a quiet placement in the mental hospital at Nantes, rather than a court martial. If Holmes was willing to discount Damian’s past, if he was willing to agree that the officer’s death had been an accident stemming from self-defence, who was I to disagree?

I got up early from my sleepless bed and spent two hours resolutely
finishing the job of emptying my trunks and hauling them to the lumber room. I made toast and attempted to settle to the newspapers, but my eye seemed constantly preoccupied with my discoveries of the night before, and kept catching on headlines concerning death and madness and adverts for honey. When my eye was caught by a personal notice that began with the word
ADDLED
, I shoved the paper away and went outside, wandering restlessly through the garden, feeling as if I had drunk several carafes of powerful coffee instead of a single cup.

Around ten o’clock, I found myself in Holmes’ room studying his unopened trunks, and decided to make a start on them before Mrs Hudson got back that evening. Half an hour later, with every inch of the room buried under the débris of long travel, I looked at the knot of worn-through stockings in my hand and came to my right mind.

I was not Holmes’ housekeeper; neither he nor Mrs Hudson would thank me for my labours.

The reason for my uncharacteristic housewifeliness was, I had to face it, uneasiness: When I had turned the page in Holmes’ file and seen the photograph of the dead officer, all I could think of was that the man looked like Holmes.

Which was ridiculous. I was not worried, any more than I had been bored or lonely in my solitude. Clearly I needed something to occupy my time other than sorting socks. The best thing was to keep busy. I had intended to return to Oxford later in the week, to resume my life and my work there. Instead, I would go now.

Although I decided to stop first in London and have a little talk with Mycroft. It was, I told myself, the sensible thing to do.

Holmes’ elder brother was looking remarkably well, for a man who had peered over the abyss into death the Christmas before. He’d dropped a tremendous amount of weight, and from the colour of his skin, actually spent some time out-of-doors.

He brushed aside my compliments, admitted to a loss of “three or four stone” although it had to have been nearly five, then grumbled
that bodily exercise was a tedium beyond measure, and commented that he had heard I joined the short-haired league.

My hand went to my hair, removed when we were in India. “Yes, I needed to dress as a man. Holmes nearly passed out with the shock.”

“I can imagine. Still, I never thought the Gibson Girl look suited you.”

“Thank you. I guess. Were you going out?” I asked, taking in his brown lightweight suit.

“It is of no importance,” he said. “After luncheon I have developed the habit of going for a turn around the park instead of taking a nap, as I used to do, but I shall happily delay that pleasure.”

“No, no, I’m just off the train, I’d appreciate a breath of air.”

With a grimace at the disappearance of an excuse for lethargy, Mycroft caught up his stick and straw hat and we descended onto Pall Mall, to turn in the direction of St James’s Park.

“Have you seen your brother?” I asked.

“I have not seen him since January, although I spoke with him across the telephone twice, on Wednesday afternoon and again last night.”

“Was he in London?”

“I believe so. In any case, Wednesday’s call was from Paddington, although that can mean anything.”

“Or nothing.” Paddington Station sent trains in all directions north of London, but it was also a main connecting stop on the city’s Underground. “What did he want?”

“The earlier call was to request my assistance with an overseas element of an investigation.”

Mycroft’s oddly unfamiliar face—it now had bones in it, and the skin had gone slack with the loss of padding—was held in an expression I nonetheless knew well: noncommittal innocence. The quick mind inside the slow body was waiting to see if I knew what Holmes was up to before he revealed any more.

“Let me guess: Shanghai.”

Inside Britain, Holmes’ sources of information were without peer, but once an investigation stretched past Europe or certain parts of
America, his web of knowledge developed gaps. Mycroft, however, had spent his life as a conduit of Intelligence that covered the globe: When Holmes had need of information beyond his ken, he turned to Mycroft.

Shanghai had not been a guess, and Mycroft saw that.

“Yes, I was given to understand that young Damian had come to Sussex.”

“Damian was there when we got in on Monday, then both of them were gone when I woke up Tuesday. I don’t know where they were going, but last night I found Holmes’ file on Damian, and I was … concerned.”

“Concerned,” he mused, nodding at the ground.

“Damian killed a man in 1918,” I blurted. “Not the same man he was accused of killing in 1919.”

“In neither was he charged.”

“You knew, about both of them?”

“I did.”

“Why …” I stopped: He hadn’t told Holmes for the same reason he hadn’t told him of Damian’s existence in the first place. “Have you seen his paintings—Damian’s?”

“A few of them. I hear he has a small show at a gallery off Regent Street, I’d planned on going to that.”

“He paints madness.”

“I’d have thought that a common enough theme amongst modern artists.”

“With more or less deliberation. But there’s something profoundly unsettling about his work.”

“Hmm,” Mycroft said.

“What about last night’s phone call?”

“My brother was enquiring whether or not I had seen Damian.”

“He’s lost him?”

“I don’t know if ‘lost’ is the correct term, but Damian left the hotel where they were staying early on Friday morning, and as of eleven o’clock last night he had not returned. I believe Sherlock would have got a message to me, had the boy reappeared.”

“I see. Well, in any case, I should talk with Holmes before I go up to Oxford, just to let him know where I am and see if he needs my assistance. Do you have any idea where he might be?”

Mycroft reached into his breast pocket and took out a business card, crisply engraved on a startling bright red stock with an address on one of the lanes that connected with Regent Street. On its reverse, in Mycroft’s handwriting, was another address: 7 Burton Place, in Chelsea.

“I do not know where my brother is, but those are the addresses of Damian’s gallery and his home. Either of those might be a good place to start.”

I looked at him in surprise. “You’ve simply been carrying this around?”

“When I heard that you were not with my brother, I knew it would not be long before you came looking.”

I grinned and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, then reversed my direction.

“What shall I do with your valise?” he called after me.

I waved a hand in the air and broke into a trot.

To my surprise, the gallery that sold Damian Adler’s paintings was not some narrow and dingy upper-storey hole several streets “off” Regent Street, but a prosperous, glass-fronted shop a stone’s throw from the Royal Academy. A bell dinged at my entrance. Voices came from behind a partition at the back and a sleek woman in her early forties poked her head around the wall, giving me a brief but penetrating once-over. I did not think that I impressed her overmuch, since I had not intended to enact a patron of the arts when I left Sussex. “I shall be with you momentarily,” she said in a French accent.

“I’m happy to look,” I told her. She went back to her conversation, which had to do with the delivery of a painting.

The gallery had two rooms. The first displayed paintings, and a few small bronze sculptures, that would have been considered dangerously
avant-garde
before the War but were now just comfortably
modern. I recognised an Augustus John portrait, and two of the bronzes were Epsteins. It was the next room that held the more demanding forms: one canvas made up of paint masses so thick, it could have been the artist’s palette board mounted on the wall; three twisted sheets of brass that might be horses’ heads or women’s torsos, but in either case appeared to be writhing in pain; a gigantic, wide-brimmed cocktail glass tipped to pour its greenish contents into a puddle on the floor.

I spotted the first of Damian’s paintings immediately I came into the room. It was an enormously tall, narrow canvas, twelve feet by two, and appeared at first glance to have been sliced from a larger, more complete image: branches and leaves at the top, giving way to a length of marvellously realistic bark and, at the bottom, the clipped grass out of which the tree was growing.