The Language of Bees (25 page)

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 continued. “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.

“Come in, come in, I was just making certain that all was ready for you. Come, here’s my office, have a seat. Would you like tea? Coffee?”

The tramping had made me thirsty, and I slipped my grateful acceptance in before Holmes could turn him down. The doctor got up
from behind his desk and went out of the room, which made Holmes grimace, but we heard a woman’s voice, so he was not about to do the task himself. And indeed, he was back in a moment.

“My wife will bring the tea, the kettle’s just boiled. And I have to say, it’s an honour, sir, to have you in my surgery. My wife feels the same—she was, in fact, rather hoping to be permitted to meet you, when I told her that you were coming. So, you said you thought you might know this young lady. Is this to be one of your mysterious cases, to be written up in
The Strand?”
The doctor tried to hide his eagerness behind an air of worldly joviality, but without success.

“I could hardly reveal the details of a case, if in fact she is a part of one, could I?” Holmes said repressively.

“No, no, of course not, I certainly agree, it’s not to be thought of. Perhaps I should point out, however, that I am a duly sworn servant of His Majesty, in my rôle of coroner, which may qualify me for, well…”

Holmes just looked at him.

The door opened, fortunately, and the doctor’s wife came in, staring so avidly at Holmes that she nearly missed the edge of the desk with the tea tray. I caught the corner and shoved it back into balance, and she gave a startled laugh at the sudden rattle of cups. “Oh! My, how silly of me, I nearly had it all on the floor.”

I regretted my craving for tea, and by way of compensation took a heavy lacing of milk and gulped the still-hot liquid. Holmes fielded inquisitive remarks like a tennis champion, and the moment my empty cup hit the saucer, he got to his feet.

“Shall we go and see what you have?”

The muscles of a corpse, a day and a half after death, have gone through rigor mortis and slackened again. Even with the relative coolness of the room’s stone walls, the decomposition of summer had begun to change the shape of her face and taint her pale skin. Her eyes and mouth had been leached of colour, her black hair lay flat and damp against her head, and the sheet that covered her diminished the outlines further; nonetheless, there was no question.

This was Yolanda Adler.

Holmes reached out for the sheet at her chin; I turned sharply away to lift the other end and examine her feet.

They were tiny, neat, and nicely kept, although they bore signs of having spent much of their life bare or in ill-fitting shoes. In recent years they had fared better, and showed few of the calluses and bunions that many women suffer. However, she had recently walked some distance in ill-fitting shoes: Her toes and heels were blistered.

“May I see the clothes she wore?” I asked.

“Oh, we burnt those awful things.”

We both turned to stare at him, speechless. Huxtable looked back and forth between Holmes’ narrowed grey eyes and my widened blue ones, and spluttered his protest. “They were dreadfully blood-soaked, I couldn’t have them around the place, really I couldn’t. A nice frock, my wife has one very like it—didn’t want her to think of it every time she went to put hers on. And she had some very pretty, you know, underthings, but—”

“You even burnt her under-garments?” Holmes demanded in outrage.

“Between the bloodstains and having to cut them off of her, there was nothing left, so I put them into the furnace rather—”

“Have you never heard the term
evidence
, man?”

“Yes, of course, but the police had taken their photographs, and they had the description of the garments, even a tag in the back of the frock—from Selfridges, like my wife’s. I never thought to ask.”

“What about her shoes?” I asked.

He turned from Holmes’ frigid condemnation with gratitude. “Yes, oh certainly I have those, and her stockings as well, those were silk and not much stained at all, so I kept them, for when the body was claimed. And the hat, of course. Do you—”

“Yes. Please.”

The doctor scurried into the next room and came back with a paper-wrapped parcel that he laid down on the generous margins of the autopsy table. I pulled open the twine and drew out a beautifully made shoe of light brown leather, and set its heel against the sheet of paper Holmes spread out with his sketch of the path-side indentations:
an exact match. The shoes were so new they had not yet developed creases. The right one had a splash of dried blood on its toe. The soles and heels were clotted with damp chalk and grass, matching the boots I had left in the car outside.

I picked up the left shoe and slid it onto her foot; as I’d thought, there was room for two fingers behind her heel.

“The shoe is at least a size too large,” I commented. Holmes grunted, and turned back to his close examination of her small, soft hands.

I tucked the cloth back over her naked feet, then took my time re-wrapping the shoes. I held the stockings up to the light, but all they told me was that she had fallen to her right knee on soft ground once, leaving a green stain and starting a small hole in the mesh that had not had time to unravel. The hat was a summer-weight straw cloche, as new as the shoes. Close examination showed one small fragment of grass adhering to the left side of the brim, with a smear of chalky soil beside it: The hat had fallen from her head and rolled on the ground.

With reluctance, I turned my attention farther up the table, to have my eye caught by a mark on her torso. I pulled the sheet down as far as her navel, and saw a dark red tattoo, an inch and a half long, in a shape that, had I not seen it elsewhere already, my eyes might have read as phallic:

It lay in the centre of her body, between the umbilicus and the rib-cage; its soft edges indicated that it had been there for years. I pointed it out to Holmes, who turned his attention away from the finger-nails of her left hand (where, I noticed, she had worn a wedding ring, no longer there).

Over the protest of the doctor, we pulled away the sheet entirely, and turned her over (the unnatural flop of her head made me very glad I had not eaten the cake on the wife’s tea tray), but there were no other tattoos, and what marks she bore had been done long ago.

We turned her back and pulled the sheet up again. Before her head was covered, Holmes tipped her head slightly to show me the skin behind her left ear: A lock of hair had been snipped away, leaving a bare patch the diameter of a pencil. I nodded, and walked around to look at her right arm and hand. She had a bruise on the tender inside of her wrist, old enough to have begun to fade; one of her neatly manicured finger-nails was broken; there was a grey stain on her middle finger.

I pointed it out to Holmes. “Ink?”

He took her hand, splaying her child-like fingers so as to see more clearly. “Yes,” he said. He returned her arm to her side, but his own hand lingered on hers. He studied her, this woman his son had loved. “I wonder what manner of voice she had?” he murmured.

Then he twitched the sheet up to cover her.

“When will you do the autopsy?” he asked Huxtable.

“I was scheduled to do it this afternoon, although—”

“I would appreciate it if you would send me a copy of your results. You have my address?”

“Yes, but—”

“Who is the officer in charge of the investigation?”

“Well, it would have been Detective Inspector Weller, but I understand it’s been given to Scotland Yard because of the … unusual aspects of the case. Which is why, as I was about to say, the poor girl might be taken up to London for the autopsy. I was told I should hear one way or the other before Sunday dinner.”

“I see. I shall ring you later today, then, and see where it stands. Good day, Dr Huxtable.”

Our hasty departure took us as far as the doorway before Huxtable remembered why we had come in the first place.

“Er, sorry,” he called, “the message said you might be able to identify—”

“No!” Holmes snapped. “We don’t know who she is.”

I stared at him, but he swept out of the door, leaving the doctor spluttering his confusion as to why we had shown such interest in a stranger.

At the car, I got behind the wheel and turned to ask Holmes why he had claimed ignorance, but one glance at the side of his face had me reaching for the starter and getting the motor-car on the road.

The expression that hardened his features and turned his eyes to flame was one I had rarely seen there.

Rage, pure and hot.

Study (1):
The next years were spent in a study of
Transformation: How could the man control the process?
What Tools might shape Transformation, what methods
bring it about?
Testimony, II:5