The Language of Bees (49 page)

Yolanda.

Holmes took a clean handkerchief from his breast pocket and spread it on the desk, tipping the black lock and ring into its centre. The empty envelope went back into the safe; the handkerchief he folded over and tucked into his pocket. I did not object: Its incriminating value in Brothers’ possession was not worth the revulsion of leaving it here. He shut the safe, and came back to where I sat.

“Anything of interest?”

I pointed out several oddities that I had come across in the drawers but took care to leave in place. Now, Holmes pulled each out, tossing them onto the blotting-paper: Clearly, he cared no more for alerting Brothers to the search than he did about leaving finger-prints. “The blade is the wrong shape,” he said of the stiletto I had found in the top drawer. He glanced through the pamphlet on Norse gods published by the United Kingdom Associated Sons of Scandinavia, but the rest—the monographs on Stonehenge and Hadrian’s Wall, a
Times
article on a hoard uncovered in Devon, a booklet about the northern constellations, the dollies’ tea-cup—those he flicked over with a dismissive finger before returning to the shelves, to pull down and shake out each book, one after another.

I fitted the tiny porcelain cup onto the end of my little finger. It was an odd thing to find in the possession of this man. And exactly a week before, I had seen a set the precise match of this one, three cups on a diminutive enamel-ware tray. Had we found this missing cup with the other trophies in the safe, it would have had a very different meaning, but dropped with other things into a drawer …?

And now, the object started off a series of thoughts that I had tried to keep at the back of my mind. However, it had to be brought to light, and when, if not now?

“Holmes, do three-year-olds play dollies’ tea-party?”

“My experience with three-year-olds is limited,” he replied.

“The Adlers’ neighbours, at number eleven, have a daughter of eight or nine. She plays dollies’ tea-party. I did myself when I was her age. And she is in the habit of playing with Estelle Adler when they meet in the park. She made reference to books as well. Although some children do read at a young age. I did, myself.”

“Does this fascinating narrative have a direction?”

I took a bracing breath. “All along, Holmes, Damian has been … less than completely forthcoming with us.”

“He has lied?” Holmes said bluntly. “People generally do, although I have told you his reasons.”

“But, about the child.”

He stopped what he was doing. “What about her?”

I spun the tea-cup around the end of my finger, so as not to meet his eyes. “That photograph, of the Adlers. It looked out of date.”

“How do you mean?”

“Yolanda’s dress and hair. Fashion changes rapidly these days, particularly skirt lengths. The dresses in her house reflected current tastes-even those that were not new had had their hems adjusted. I noticed, because it struck me as incongruous, a Bohemian so attentive to fashion.” I lifted my gaze from the cup on my finger. “I’d have said the skirt in that photograph is three or four years old. And the hair-cut.”

“The photograph was taken in Shanghai,” he pointed out.

“Where, I agree, styles may be behind the times. It is equally possible that Yolanda only discovered a sense of fashion after she came to London. But—”

“You are suggesting that the picture was taken some years ago? Why should Damian—”

He stopped.

I finished the thought. “If the photograph was in fact taken some
years ago, then the child is older than Damian permitted us to believe. Would the neighbour’s girl be as interested in exchanging books, were Estelle three and a half years old?”

“This could not be the child born in 1913,” he declared.

“Dorothy Hayden? No, I agree, not unless this photograph is a remarkably good fake. But even if Yolanda and Brothers—Hayden—this man has entirely too many names! Even if they separated in 1917, a child could have been born after that, and been small when Damian arrived in 1920.”

“You are proposing that, were Damian concerned that I would not search for his wife once I knew her history, it would apply doubly were I to suspect the child was not even his. And it would,” he conceded, “further explain Yolanda’s continued contact with her former husband, were he the father of the child.”

He turned back to the shelves, but I thought his mind was not on his actions. Nor, in truth, was mine.

We found nothing of further interest, although I was grateful Brothers had been here for less than a year, and had not filled the house with a lifetime of macabre treasures.

When we had finished, Holmes wrapped a sheet of paper around a glass paperweight from the desk, for the finger-prints, and slid it into his pocket, along with a phial of the unidentified liquid from the safe and a sample of the blotting sand. He stood looking down at the desk with its litter of pamphlets and objects—not the tea-cup, which lay in my pocket—and then picked up the stiletto. He considered it with his thumb for a moment, then raised it high and drove it viciously down: through a postcard photograph of an Irish stone cross; through the train time-table below that; through the cheaply printed pamphlet of Norse churches in Britain and the almanac page showing the phases of the moon for 1924 and the stained green blotter, deep into the wood of the desk itself.

We left it there, a declaration of war.

Back at Mycroft’s flat, which was silent but for the snores rumbling down the hallway, we assembled a dinner of bread and cheese, drank some tea, and took ourselves to bed.

Most unusually, it was Holmes who fell asleep and I who lay, gazing at the patterns of street-lights on the ceiling. After an hour, shortly after four a.m., I slipped out into the sitting room and settled with a rug over my legs and another pot of tea at my side, reading Monday’s newspapers.

Something was stirring in my mind, and I did not know what it was. It was in part the awareness of tension: Yes, I was relieved that Damian seemed to be in the clear, but that had been replaced by the growing conviction that he and the child had driven away into mortal danger.

More than that, some combination of events, or of objects witnessed, prowled in the back of my mind; some alarming shape was growing in the darkness, and the only way of encouraging it to emerge into the light of consciousness was to ignore it. I turned resolutely to the news, important and trivial, and drank my tea until it was cold and bitter. Finally, I switched off the light and sat in the gathering dawn.

Today I should have to have another conversation with the Adlers’ maid, Sally. Nothing she had said gave a shape to the child’s age, but surely if I asked, she would be able to tell me just how old Estelle was. Other than size, what were the determining differences between an ordinary eight-year-old and a precocious four-year-old? Teeth, perhaps? I should have to find out first. And why hadn’t I thought to confirm her age with that neighbour?

(Something I had read, days ago, teased at the back of my mind. That heap of papers in Sussex, it must have been, month after month of news items that blurred into one another. A murder here, a drugs raid there, given equal weight with a photograph of a hunt breakfast and a June excursion to the seaside … I firmly withdraw my mind from the direct approach.)

Also today, we should have to find the owner of that trim terrace house a short walk from three train stations. Whether Brothers
owned it or let it, there would be paperwork—which could be why he had taken such care to keep Gunderson from knowing about it.

(An excursion to the seaside. But, not the seaside …)

Should I ask Holmes to review with Mycroft the crimes of the full moons? Perhaps the two brothers together would see a pattern I had missed.

(She died on a full moon, and I’d been reading the newspapers that week and come across something….)

My days in Sussex had, actually, been a lovely holiday, four entire days of solitude and bees, brought together, now that I thought of it, in Holmes’ book. A man who retired at a remarkably early age from the busy hive of humanity that was London, resigning himself to the conviction that the person he called “The Woman” was lost to him, that his life was—for all he knew—sterile. He had disappeared, freeing me to enjoy the peace and the book and the skies—first the meteors, then that remarkable eclipse of the moon. What a pity he had been in the city, where the skies were no doubt too light—

(An advert! For a Thomas Cook tour, to the eclipse—but not to the lunar eclipse; why run a tour to something visible from one’s back garden? That meant—)

I threw off the rug and padded down the hallway to Mycroft’s study, impatiently running my grit-filled eyes across the shelves until I spotted his 1924 almanac.

I found the page, read it, and looked up to see Holmes in the doorway, summoned by my footsteps, or by my brain’s turmoil.

“What have you found?”

“It may be nothing.”

“Tell me,” he demanded.

“Thomas Cook was advertising an expedition to Scandinavia-well, that’s not important.” I tried to order my thoughts. “Holmes, it may not be the September full moon that Brothers is waiting for. Full moons enter into it, but I think he’s picking off celestial events. The ram at Long Meg died on the first of May, the Celtic festival of Beltane. Albert Seaforth died on the night of the Perseids. Brothers may be aiming for the solar eclipse.”

“An eclipse? In England?”

“No, it’s mostly Arctic. Parts of northern Scandinavia will see it, although it looks as if Bergen, Norway, might be on the very edge. However, Holmes, I—”

“When?”

I looked back at the page, hoping I had read it wrong, but I had not. “August the thirtieth.”

Four days away.

The Tool:
A Tool must incorporate all four Elements
.
Beyond that, the Tool must be shaped by the Practitioner
to have a life of its own, both to draw in and to give out
Power The Tool must move the hand even as the
hand moves it
.
Testimony, IV:3

H
EAVY SILENCE PRESSED ON US. HOLMES STARED at me for the longest time before his eyes flicked down to the almanac, and he drew a ragged breath. His mouth was coming open as he turned to the door.

“Mycroft!” he shouted.

With a crash of feet on the floor, Mycroft Holmes woke to his brother’s need. Within minutes, the telephone was summoning help from near and far. The voices of the Holmes brothers were soon joined by others, and I listened through the open study door as the complex machinery of Mycroft’s department was seized and turned towards finding a pair of men, the younger of whom could possibly appear ill or intoxicated, with a child, age three to eight. Borders;
ferries; telegrams: By seven-thirty, the sitting room sounded like a general headquarters on the eve of battle.

All the while, I sat at Mycroft’s oversized desk, trying to order my thoughts. A part of my mind was occupied with drawing up a list of possible sites Brothers might choose that were within striking distance of Bergen: Viking country, whence the raiders had set off to conquer the British Isles; home of Woden, the Viking’s chief god and a figure who occupied much of Brothers’ image of himself.