Laurie King - The God of the Hive

“Halfway to Holland, more or less.”

“Holland? Why on earth-?”

“It would appear that is where the wind and waves care to take us.”

“But we can’t go to Holland. What about this poor woman?”

“She, in fact, cast the deciding vote. Having treated you, she was loath to watch her work go for naught by permitting the toss of the boat to reopen your wounds.” What the doctor had said was, As the people in Wick seem disinclined to offer me employment, I may as well stay with the one patient who will have me . A sentiment that Holmes not only appreciated as a benefit to the lad in the bunk, but agreed with. Dr Henning had proved a surprisingly robust personality; he wondered what Russell would make of her.

Damian closed his eyes again, this time in despair rather than pain. “First a boat, then a doctor. I should have stayed in Orkney and let myself be arrested.”

An infinitesimal twitch from the bed-clothes betrayed the doctor’s reaction to that last word.

“If we are both in gaol,” Holmes said in a firm voice, “there will be no-one to prove your innocence. As soon as I assemble the evidence, we shall present it, and ourselves, to the police. Until then, subjecting you to incarceration will serve no end. And I believe we now must bring Dr Henning into our confidence.”

Without the slightest chagrin, the woman threw off the covers and sat up, blinking at the two men. “I’d like a cup of tea before we launch into explanations,” she said to Holmes, and to Damian, “How are you feeling?”

Holmes moved over to the stove while the other two concerned themselves with the sensations beneath the gauze. The doctor decided, as Holmes had earlier, that healing was under way, and no infection had begun.

He distributed the mugs, then pulled on a pair of stinking oilskins and a coat, stirred several spoons of sugar into a third mug of tea, and managed to get up the companionway without pouring it over himself.

The young fisherman’s face was gaunt with fatigue and his fingers were clumsy as they stripped off their gloves and wrapped around the mug. Holmes laid a hand on the wheel and, as the beverage scalded a path down the fisherman’s throat, said, “Your sense of responsibility is admirable, but you have been on deck for twenty-four hours, and you would better serve us all if you had some sleep. I am perfectly competent to keep us on a straight course for two or three hours.”

Gordon said nothing, just savoured the hot, sweet drink while studying Holmes’ hands, the sails, the sea. When the cup was empty, he said, “If anything changes-anything at all-you’ll wake me?”

“I imagine any slight change will rouse you before I can call, but yes. If so much as a bird lands on the deck, I’ll shout you up.”

Without another word, Gordon walked across to the hatch, looking half-asleep already as his feet hit the companionway. When his head had disappeared, Holmes felt as if he were drawing breath for the first time in thirty-six hours.

It was, in truth, precisely the sort of undemanding distraction he required at this point: his eyes occupied with the shapes and heading of other vessels on the North Sea water while his mind took the Brothers case from the shelf to examine it. He even managed to get a pipe going, to assist his meditations.

The need to spirit Damian away had taken priority-although the urgency of an investigation did tend to lag when its main actor died-but he hoped that Russell had lingered in the burnt-out hotel where Brothers had gone to ground long enough to unearth its secrets.

Not that she would have stayed until daylight: The police were sure to arrive there, and Russell would choose the child’s safety and freedom over any gathering of evidence. She would have done the best search she could by candle-light, then slipped away-removing or destroying first anything that might lead back to Damian.

But competent as Russell was, it remained a frustration to walk away from a case before its conclusion. True, they’d had no sign that Brothers’ acolytes had either participated in or were poised to resume their master’s crimes, but there was an itch at the back of his mind, the feeling that some piece of pattern did not quite match the others. Although even now, with the first leisure he’d had in days, he could not decide where that ill-fitting piece lay.

Perhaps, Holmes suggested to the machine in his mind that chewed up information and spat out hypotheses, the sensation of an ill fit was due not to something missing, but to the very nature of the man at its centre? Everything about Brothers-ideas, appetites, impulses, reason-was unbalanced; why should that not taint the case itself? Plus, there was no doubt that the speed of events over recent days made it impossible for data to catch him up. That alone made the case seem incomplete.

It was vexing, being unable to reach Russell, not even knowing how long it would be before he could reach her. Or Mycroft, for that matter.

Which raised a further source of aggravation: Mycroft. If the gaps in the Brothers case made for a mental itch, what he knew of Mycroft’s situation brought on the hives: Mycroft Holmes, taken in for questioning by Scotland Yard? Lestrade might as easily interrogate the king.

He had just knocked out his second pipe-load into the sea when a head of tousled copper hair appeared from the open hatch. The quizzical expression on the doctor’s face indicated that she and Damian had been talking, and that his son had kept little back.

“Sherlock Holmes?” The rising tone was not quite incredulity, but made it clear that she was questioning her patient’s clarity of mind, if not his outright sanity.

“Madam,” Holmes replied with a tip of the head, and resumed his study of the eastern horizon.

“I’m supposed to believe that?”

“A lady physician might be inclined towards belief in many impossible things.”

“That’s scarcely on the same level.”

He sighed. “You wish me to prove myself. I might show you identification, but papers can be forged. And I might recite the details of my professional life, but you would protest that I had merely read Dr Doyle’s fanciful tales in the Strand . Shall I then put on a demonstration, trot out my own patented brand of common sense? Shall I tell you that I know from your voice that you were born in Kirkcaldy and educated in Nottingham? That your father was a doctor who has either died or become incapacitated for work, freeing you to adopt his bag when you qualified? That the books and equipment you added to the somewhat antiquated surgery in Wick assured me that your skills were both considerable and up-to-date? That I knew you also had nursing experience because of the distinctive scarring on your fingers, which one sees on a person who has been in continuous proximity to infected wounds? That your shoes and your haircut are approximately the same age, which tells me you have been in Wick less than four weeks? That you wore a ring on your left hand for some years, and took it off around the time you started medical school? That-”

“All right! Stop!” She studied her left hand for a minute, comparing it to her right, then thrust both into her pockets. “You are often doubted, as to your identity?”

“One tends to use pseudonyms.”

“And… your son. Although his name is Adler.”

“His mother thought it best.”

She pulled her coat more tightly around her, and considered the decking. “My father died in the 1919 epidemic. And it was an engagement ring-the one I took off. When my fiancé died, it was all I had of him. I wore it until 1922.”

Holmes said nothing.

“Mr Adler’s wife was very pretty. To judge by his drawing of her, that is.”

“So I understand,” Holmes agreed, although she’d not been particularly lovely when he saw her in the mortuary, the plucky little idiot whose infatuation with a lunatic had landed them all in their current predicament-but that was neither charitable nor pertinent.