Laurie King - The God of the Hive

“He tells me she was murdered.”

“Two weeks ago. Damian only learnt of it yesterday. Her name was Yolanda, a Chinese woman from Shanghai. I never met her in life, but her first husband, from whom she had parted before she met Damian, turned out to be a madman convinced that human sacrifice performed at key places and auspicious times would transfer the psychic energies of his victims into him. He killed Yolanda and at least three other innocents. It was his bullet you retrieved.”

“‘Psychic energies’?” He felt her gaze boring against the side of his head. “You’re joking.”

“Would that I were.”

“He planned to make himself into…”

“A sort of Gnostic Übermensch , I suppose.”

Either she understood the reference to Nietzsche, or she was too distracted to hear it. “And the police find this difficult to believe?”

He glanced at her, surprised not by sarcasm, but by the lack of it. Most people of his acquaintance would cavil at the reasoning of the mad: Dr Henning spurned the distraction to grasp the essentials. Admirable woman.

“They may reach the same conclusion eventually; however, I was disinclined to hand Damian over to them until they did so. As I said, his reaction to being enclosed is extreme.”

“What do you intend to do?”

“Were the wind less assertive, I’d have put in along the coast of England, found a safe haven for Damian, and made my way to London. Now, I shall have to shelter him in Europe and make a more circuitous way home.”

She spotted a sturdy basket that had come to rest beside the capstan, and upended it, sitting with her face turned towards the long-vanished Scotland. “He says he’s only known you a short while.”

“We met briefly in the summer of 1919. After that, he went to Shanghai. I lost sight of him until he appeared on my terrace in Sussex, nineteen days ago.”

“And in that time his wife died at the hands of a crackpot, and you solved the case, then uncovered several other deaths, and eventually tracked the murderer to far distant Orkney, where Mr Adler was wounded. And this mad religious leader was killed.”

“An adequate précis, yes.”

“You killed the man?”

“A gun went off; he died.”

“And yet you say that you have committed no crime.”

“Homicide in defence of self or family is not a crime. My son saved my life.”

She blinked, not having expected that her patient was the man with the gun. After a minute, she asked, “The man was about to kill you?”

“Damian was his intended sacrifice, to coincide with yesterday’s solar eclipse over the sixty-fifth latitude. I intervened; there was a struggle.”

“Well,” she said. “You’ve certainly had a busy three weeks.”

“My wife did much of the work.”

“Your wife.” The flat syllables indicated that Damian had neglected this part of the tale.

“She read theology at Oxford.”

“Of course she did.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing. How do you intend to get the police to listen to you? Or will Mr Adler be forever in hiding?”

“That would not do at all. I have resources, and they will listen. However, I need to reach them first, without attracting police attention.”

“Hmm. And may I ask, where is Mr Adler’s daughter? He’d got as far as the confrontation on Friday night before exhaustion took him.”

“The child is with my wife.”

“Where?”

“Orkney, when last I saw them.”

“Mrs Holmes was on Orkney as well?”

“She goes by the name Russell, but yes, she was there. Damian’s memories of the incident at the Stones may be uncertain, but she and I were both present. However, with Damian injured, we could not risk having the child to slow us down. So we split up, and Russell and Estelle remained behind.”

“You left your wife and a child to explain to the police about a dead madman?”

“I should be astonished if Russell was still there when the police arrived.”

“She, too, is evading the police?”

“Dr Henning, you heard me say that all three of us have warrants out for our arrest, from before this. And all three of those warrants are unjustified. I say again, you will come to no harm, apart from the inconvenience of this voyage. For which I sincerely apologise.”

He met her gaze then, grey eyes locking on green, and in a moment, she surprised him. Her eyes began to dance, and her mouth twitched, and then she was laughing, with full acceptance and good humour and not a trace of the hysteria one might expect of a woman in her situation. She laughed so hard, the basket jumped out from underneath her and left the doctor sitting on the grubby deck.

“Oh, my,” she said, fishing out a handkerchief. “My, my, my. And to think that mere minutes before you arrived in my surgery, I was making an inventory of supplies that I’d counted ten times already and wondering if it was too late to take a position of public-school nurse that I’d been offered in Edinburgh.”

“Yes, well,” Holmes said, “my wife does not tend to complain of boredom.”

“I can see that.” She stretched her legs out straight and clasped her hands on her skirts, a gesture of decision. “Very well. I should tell you that I happen to have a relative on the Dutch coast. Would you consider that ‘safe haven’ for your son?”

I coasted through the darkness on silent wings for a time, and then snapped back into a confusion of pain and terror and the stench of petrol. Some furious creature was struggling against me, a knife was buried into my kidneys, and my head felt like a football: kicked about and swollen with air.

Directed less by thought than by animal instinct aimed at making the noise and pain go away, I patted at the furious struggling creature. After a while its noises and struggles diminished somewhat. Nothing I could do about the vacant pounding inside my skull, but, continuing the patting motion, I eased the creature off my belly, which reduced the stabbing of the knife.

I had no idea where I was, but I emphatically did not want to be there: topsy-turvy with walls pressing in on me, the crackle of broken glass accompanying my every motion, noises of distress beating at me. And not only noises-the enclosure was jumping in time to a pounding from outside.

My unoccupied hand came up of its own will and looped my dangling spectacles back onto my ears. With clarity came awareness: The panel in front of my nose had a hole in it. A bullet hole?

Suddenly the heavy reek of petrol was intolerable, and my entire body was seized by the need to be away -away! Whatever this enclosure was, it moved alarmingly with every blow from that person on the other side. My mouth formed some words- Stay there , perhaps?-and my body convulsed with the effort of turning the right way around.

On my knees was better than on my back. And my hands could grasp the lower (upper?) edge of the enclosure and tug: heavy, but it moved. The pounding and noise cut off abruptly, and I tugged again, but it was impossible to brace myself, crowded into this tiny space with another.

I would have more room to move if the small creature were not pressing against me-but what to do with it? I returned my grip to the lower edge of my cage, and said, “Get out when I lift this.”

And I lifted, straining with all my might and biting down on a scream of pain. The gap between hands and ground grew: two inches, then five, and now on a level with my hips. Quivering with effort, my skull near to explosion, I gasped, “Out!” and felt the creature squirm past me, beneath the dangerous weight of this structure, wailing in protest but obeying. A tiny pair of shoes gave a final kick against my knees, and then I was alone in the trap. I let the impossible weight settle down around me and collapsed against the side, panting and near to blacking out again.