The Language of Bees (26 page)

H
ALFWAY TO POLEGATE, HOLMES FINALLY STIRRED, and reached for the cigarette case in his pocket. When the tobacco was going, he rubbed the match out between his fingers and let the breeze take it, then seemed to notice for the first time that we were on the move.

“Where are you going?”

“Home. If I pass through a second time without greeting Mrs Hudson, she might just go back to Surrey permanently. Apart from which, with that expression on your face, I figured
you’d
be wanting your revolver.”

“This was my son’s wife.” His voice was like ice. “A young woman who had lifted herself from the gutter on the strength of her own wits. A person whose acquaintance I was looking forward to making. Instead of which, I find her laid out like a slaughtered farm-animal.”

“Did you see anything under her finger-nails?”

“If she struggled, it did not include digging her fingers into the ground or scratching at an assailant.”

I thought this as good a time as any to tell him what I had seen. “Those shoes were very new and not inexpensive, but a woman would never have bought that ill-fitting a pair for herself. They gave her blisters. And the stockings she wore were far too long for her. She’d had to hook the garters down into the stocking itself—one of them had already worn through.”

“One might add the general unlikelihood of a Bohemian choosing to dress in silk stockings and a flowered summer frock. I saw no such garments in her wardrobe at home.”

I thought of my conversation with the neighbour’s child. “Perhaps she dressed that way to make a more staid impression on someone.”

“But if, as you suggest, she chose neither the shoes nor the clothing herself, then either she assembled the garments from another woman’s wardrobe, or she was given them to wear.”

“By someone who didn’t know her size very well,” I said without thinking. To my consternation, Holmes did not react, even though my statement clearly suggested that Damian’s knowledge of his wife’s dress size was a factor to be taken into consideration. He simply smoked and looked daggers at the passing view, while I bent over the wheel and concentrated on not driving over any distracted churchgoers or Sunday ramblers.

Greetings with Mrs Hudson cost me an hour, which Holmes spent shouting down the telephone and crashing about in his laboratory. I was saved from the enumeration of her Surrey friend’s ills by Holmes’ bellow from above that he wished to leave in a quarter hour. I tore myself away and hammered up the stairs, throwing an assortment of things into a bag and conversing with him as we went in and out of various rooms.

“—need to speak with the station masters in Eastbourne, Polegate, and Seaford, and show them her photograph.”

“Do you have her photograph, then?”

“How else should I intend to show them it?”

“Sorry. Do you wish me to bring weapons?”

“Your knife might be wise.”

I shuddered at the brief vision of a blade crossing the ivory throat of Yolanda Adler, but added my slim throwing knife and its scabbard to the heap on the bed. “I should like to see the Adler house for myself, Holmes. Might we spend the night there, so I can look at that book by light of day?”

“I would have stolen it for you, had I known you were interested.” His voice was muffled by the door to the lumber room down the hallway, and I heard thumps and a crash.

I raised my voice, a trifle more than mere volume required. “I’m interested because she was. Both of them, come to that—Damian’s art is infused with mystic symbols and traditions.”

Holmes’ voice answered two inches away from my ear, making me jerk and spray a handful of maps across the floor. “Religion can be a dangerous thing, it is true,” he remarked darkly, and went out again.

I got down on my knees to fish the maps out from under the bed. “Did you find out who is in charge of her case, at Scotland Yard?”

“Your old friend and admirer, Lestrade.”

“Really? I’d have thought him too high-ranking for an unidentified woman in a rural setting.”

“I haven’t spoken with the good Chief Inspector himself, but I am led to understand the newspapers are summoning outrage at the ‘desecration of Britain’s ancient holy places,’ and to have this following a death in Cerne Abbas and an assault at Stonehenge means that Scotland Yard will be doing all it can to deter a
cause célèbre.”

I found myself smiling. “I can just imagine what Lestrade has to say about having to investigate suicidal Druids.”

In a moment, his head appeared around the door frame. “Was the woman who killed herself at Cerne Abbas a Druid?”

“She was an unemployed secretary, according to the papers. It was a farmer’s letter to the editor that mentioned Druids.”

“Disappointing,” he said, looking both at me and through me. “I don’t know that I have ever before encountered Druidical suicides.”

“It would be an original means of marking your return.”

“The lunatics rejoice,” he said, and nearly chuckled. Then he caught himself, and his eyes came into focus. “Are you ready Russell?”

But now it was my turn to look through him, as a thin idea stirred in the back of my mind. Lunatics and linked deaths; Holmes sitting in the moonlit window; a startling eclipse; full moons doubled above a cat’s-fur hillside; a conversation:
Madness is linked to the moon
.

“Er, Holmes, I’m going to be a bit longer. Would you mind awfully taking a look at the orchard hives before we leave? It seemed to me that a couple of them were wanting the addition of a super, and it would be a pity if it drove them to swarm while we were away.” I could see that he was torn between the urgency of the case and the call of his long-time charges, so I added, “Holmes, it’s Sunday. How much do you imagine we’ll be able to accomplish in London anyway?”

“One hour,” he said, “no more.”

I waited at the window until I saw him cross the orchard. Then I trotted downstairs to the library and looked up the phases of the moon in the 1924 almanac. Dry-mouthed, I pushed the almanac back into place and went upstairs again, glancing out of the window to make sure he was still occupied before I fetched the key to the lumber room.

The oversized storage cupboard that Holmes called his lumber room was where all the useless odds and ends of a lifetime waited to be dragged into light as evidence, exemplar, or key piece of arcane research. (Including an assortment of deadly poisons—hence the lock.) It took a while to find his collection of outdated almanacs, in one tea-chest amongst a dozen others. I was not certain that there would even be one for that war year of 1918, but there was, although undersized and on the cheapest of pulp paper.

I perched atop an African wood drum and cautiously turned the limp pages to the calendar showing phases of the moon.

In April 1918, the full moon came on the 26th.

The day before young Damian Adler had killed a man in a drunken brawl. My hands trembled as they reached for the next year’s volume.

Full moon: 11 August 1919.

Four days later, Damian had been arrested in the death of a drugs
seller, fifty miles from Paris—to be released, not through proving an alibi, but through disproving a witness.

Yolanda Adler had been killed on 15 August 1924, when the moon was still full in the sky.

And as I had found downstairs: Miss Fiona Cartwright of Poole died of a bullet wound on 17 June: the night of a full moon.

The hair on the nape of my neck stirred.

Damian Adler, a painter of moonscapes and madness.

A sound came from somewhere in the house, and my hand flung the almanac into the chest and slammed down the lid. With only a degree more deliberation, I locked up the lumber room and returned the key to its hook in the laboratory, then took a furious brush to the dust on my skirt.

Absurd. Damian was no lunatic.

What if I had it the wrong way around? In 1918, Damian Adler—convalescing, shell-shocked, and drunk—had hit a man. If the other officer had been sober, or younger, or stronger, Damian would have been guilty of nothing more than fisticuffs in a bar, not a killing. It had been the night of a full moon; the moon came to haunt the artist’s work, not as a stimulus of death, but as a reminder?

And the other deaths? Were Fiona Cartwright and Yolanda Adler merely coincidences? I mistrusted coincidences as much as Holmes did, but in fact, they did occur. And Fiona Cartwright’s death was a suicide. Wasn’t it?

“Ready, Russell?”

The voice up the stairs startled me. I threw the clothes-brush onto the bed and began to stuff the waiting valise.

I would say nothing of my … I couldn’t even call them suspicions. Morbid thoughts. This was Holmes’ son. If there was evidence, Holmes would follow it, and Holmes would acknowledge it. I would say nothing, although the awareness of those dates was already eating into me like a drop of acid.

I caught up my bag and walked down the stairs.

“Here I am, Holmes. Let me just see if there’s anything Mrs Hudson wishes from Town.”

Study (2):
With Despair and hunger at his heels,
he followed the faint paths of those who had gone before.
After long years, he found the first keys:
the Elements and Sacrifice
.
Testimony, II:5

A
S I SETTLED IN BEHIND THE WHEEL OF THE MOTORCAR, I noticed the red welts on my companion’s hands, testimony to the disinclination of bees to be disturbed. “Are the hives well?” I asked him.

“All five needed an additional super,” he replied.

“It’ll make Mr Miranker happy that you’ve paid them attention.”

“He has looked after them well, in my absence.”

“I like him.”

“You’ve met?”

“We met Wednesday, at the abandoned hive. I told you I solved that mystery—I should have said, he and I together did so.” As I negotiated the light Sunday traffic into Eastbourne, I described my investigation of the missing colony of
Apis mellifera
. We broke off so I could park the motor at the station while he bought tickets and showed the
staff Yolanda Adler’s photograph, then met again in an empty compartment (the week-end flow of travellers back towards London still being occupied with eking out their final hours of sun).

“None of the men working today was on duty Friday,” he grumbled, so I finished telling him about the bees, touching lightly upon my own suggestion concerning the remoteness of the hive and quickly going on to Mr Miranker’s conclusion. The story went on for some time, since I thought he would like to know every small detail of the matter. At last I came to an end, and presented my conclusion. “The hive died because the queen was too soft-hearted, Holmes.”

He snorted at my interpretation of the hive’s failure; belatedly, I heard the echo of wistfulness in my voice, and glanced sideways at him.

It had been not a snort, but a snore: Following one night spent staring out at the moon over the Downs, and the night before prowling the city in search of a son, Holmes had fallen asleep.

An hour later, his voice broke into my thoughts. “I trust you did not tell Mr Miranker that you believed the hive succumbed to loneliness?”