Laurie King - The Language of Bees

I SLEPT FITFULLY, AWARE OF HOLMES IN THE WINDOWSEAT, outlined by the brilliant moonlight. At half past four, he brought me coffee; we were dressed and in the motor before the eastern sky was more than faintly light.

The Giant is less than five miles from the house in a direct line, but by road nearly twice that. As we turned north beside the Cuckmere, I asked Holmes, “Do you want me to go into Wilmington?”

“The footpath near Lullington is the more commonly used. Let us look there first.”

Half a mile past Lullington, I edged the car into the grass beside the road, hoping we could extract it when we were finished-and hoping, too, that no wide lorry or hay wagon would need to pass on this Sunday morning. While I was lacing on my walking shoes, Holmes examined the verges up and down the intersection of footpath and roadway. I could see that he found nothing of interest.

We left the motor and set off along the pathway to Windover Hill. This was a section of the prehistoric South Downs Way, the ridgeline path worn by six thousand years of travellers that crossed the chalk landscape from Winchester to Eastbourne, dotting the hills with villages, dykes, forts, burial mounds, and monuments such as the one we were approaching.

As with many archaeological artefacts in Britain, the age, purpose, and design of the Giant, or Long Man, engender vigorous debate. Fifth Century or Fifteenth? Does he represent a farmer, or a warrior? Had the original details been smudged with the centuries, or had he always been an unadorned drawing in the turf? Solar calendar? Religious site? Or an elaborate thumb of the nose to the priory that faced it?

Whatever his date and purpose, the Giant was now the stark outline of a big-headed figure, hands held out to grasp featureless lines as tall as he is. Whether these lines were originally farming implements, spears, or something else entirely only adds to the debate.

“You know Hughes' theory of the Long Man, in that Kipling book?” I called at Holmes' back as we walked, eyes on the ground.

“That it was carved by fairies?”

“Better than that. It's the sun god, Phol, holding back the gates of darkness.”

Holmes glanced over his shoulder. “Is there a sun god Phol?”

“Well, there is a set of Medieval incantations that indicates Phol is another name for Baldur, and Baldur is sometimes depicted standing in the gates to the underworld. And don't forget, Polegate is just over the hill.”

He did not dignify that with a response, merely saved his breath for climbing.

The air was rich with the mingled odours of fresh-cut hay and a dawn breeze off the sea. Birdsong rose up with the light, to join the bleats of sheep. The sky shifted from pale rose to cloudless blue, and the corduroy surface of Windover Hill, terraced by ten thousand generations of meandering hoof, turned to rich green: August had been wet, before we arrived.

The morning was perfectly beautiful, and I could have walked forever. In minutes, I rather wished we had.

It was clear where the dead woman had lain, both from the heavy traffic of many booted feet and from the marks that had gone before them.

“She was actually killed here,” I said.

“One rather suspected as much,” Holmes mused, hunkered down over the gruesome stain. “It's quite a trek with a dead weight slung across one's shoulders.”

“Would you say her throat was cut?”

“They've trampled into invisibility everything but the main area of pooling, but assuming that mark over there is blood and not tomato sauce from some idiot constable's luncheon pail, then I should say yes, the distance indicates arterial blood.”

“Did she struggle?”

“We will know when we see her, and her clothing. The ground here and along the path is too torn up to say.”

I stepped away from the gore-soaked centre of his interest, and bent to study the surrounds, looking for anything that would suggest how, and why, a woman died-a stranger, yes, but very possibly one linked to me by her marriage and my own.

We quartered the ground around the Giant's feet for two hours, gathering bits of paper, cigarette ends, the odd stub of food from the lunch of hikers' picnics, anything that might have been left in recent days. Holmes, bent double with his strong magnifying glass, found some odd dark grey crumbs, a substance that puzzled him although I thought they looked like pebbles, or even gristle from someone's sandwich. Halfway between the figure's feet, a metre from the edge of the blood, he found an untrampled smear of ash, which he gathered assiduously. He spent a long time near a wide rock protruding from the ground a dozen feet from where the woman had died, measuring and sketching a pair of indentations in the ground below it that suggested someone had sat there, and gathering two envelopes of material-a black thread and a few grains of sand, both of which seemed to me as remarkable as lumps of coal in Newcastle or fish scales in Billingsgate.

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.