Laurie King - The Language of Bees

It might have been a heel-mark, the dent left by a shoe “inadequate for the footpaths,” as the newspaper had put it. It might also have been the mark left by a walking-stick or a sheep, but Holmes found several more of them, and traced the dimensions of the clearest one onto a piece of paper before resting a stone over it, in case he wanted a plaster cast.

“It would suggest that she came here willingly,” I said to Holmes' bent back.

“It would suggest that she came under her own power,” he corrected me. “That is quite another matter.”

It was five minutes before ten when we located the office of the local coroner, which was in fact the doctor's surgery. The clamour of bells calling the faithful together faded around us. I ran a hasty comb through my wind-blown hair and checked the state of my hands and skirt before following Holmes to the door.

The man who answered was clearly intending to join a church service before too long-either that or he had a remarkably formal attitude towards his job. He introduced himself as Dr Huxtable, and shook Holmes' hand, then mine.

“Come in, come in, I was just making certain that all was ready for you. Come, here's my office, have a seat. Would you like tea? Coffee?”

The tramping had made me thirsty, and I slipped my grateful acceptance in before Holmes could turn him down. The doctor got up from behind his desk and went out of the room, which made Holmes grimace, but we heard a woman's voice, so he was not about to do the task himself. And indeed, he was back in a moment.

“My wife will bring the tea, the kettle's just boiled. And I have to say, it's an honour, sir, to have you in my surgery. My wife feels the same-she was, in fact, rather hoping to be permitted to meet you, when I told her that you were coming. So, you said you thought you might know this young lady. Is this to be one of your mysterious cases, to be written up in The Strand?” The doctor tried to hide his eagerness behind an air of worldly joviality, but without success.

“I could hardly reveal the details of a case, if in fact she is a part of one, could I?” Holmes said repressively.

“No, no, of course not, I certainly agree, it's not to be thought of. Perhaps I should point out, however, that I am a duly sworn servant of His Majesty, in my rôle of coroner, which may qualify me for, well…”

Holmes just looked at him.

The door opened, fortunately, and the doctor's wife came in, staring so avidly at Holmes that she nearly missed the edge of the desk with the tea tray. I caught the corner and shoved it back into balance, and she gave a startled laugh at the sudden rattle of cups. “Oh! My, how silly of me, I nearly had it all on the floor.”

I regretted my craving for tea, and by way of compensation took a heavy lacing of milk and gulped the still-hot liquid. Holmes fielded inquisitive remarks like a tennis champion, and the moment my empty cup hit the saucer, he got to his feet.

“Shall we go and see what you have?”

The muscles of a corpse, a day and a half after death, have gone through rigor mortis and slackened again. Even with the relative coolness of the room's stone walls, the decomposition of summer had begun to change the shape of her face and taint her pale skin. Her eyes and mouth had been leached of colour, her black hair lay flat and damp against her head, and the sheet that covered her diminished the outlines further; nonetheless, there was no question.

This was Yolanda Adler.

Holmes reached out for the sheet at her chin; I turned sharply away to lift the other end and examine her feet.

They were tiny, neat, and nicely kept, although they bore signs of having spent much of their life bare or in ill-fitting shoes. In recent years they had fared better, and showed few of the calluses and bunions that many women suffer. However, she had recently walked some distance in ill-fitting shoes: Her toes and heels were blistered.

“May I see the clothes she wore?” I asked.

“Oh, we burnt those awful things.”

We both turned to stare at him, speechless. Huxtable looked back and forth between Holmes' narrowed grey eyes and my widened blue ones, and spluttered his protest. “They were dreadfully blood-soaked, I couldn't have them around the place, really I couldn't. A nice frock, my wife has one very like it-didn't want her to think of it every time she went to put hers on. And she had some very pretty, you know, underthings, but-”

“You even burnt her under-garments?” Holmes demanded in outrage.

“Between the bloodstains and having to cut them off of her, there was nothing left, so I put them into the furnace rather-”

“Have you never heard the term evidence, man?”

“Yes, of course, but the police had taken their photographs, and they had the description of the garments, even a tag in the back of the frock-from Selfridges, like my wife's. I never thought to ask.”

“What about her shoes?” I asked.

He turned from Holmes' frigid condemnation with gratitude. “Yes, oh certainly I have those, and her stockings as well, those were silk and not much stained at all, so I kept them, for when the body was claimed. And the hat, of course. Do you-”

“Yes. Please.”

The doctor scurried into the next room and came back with a paper-wrapped parcel that he laid down on the generous margins of the autopsy table. I pulled open the twine and drew out a beautifully made shoe of light brown leather, and set its heel against the sheet of paper Holmes spread out with his sketch of the path-side indentations: an exact match. The shoes were so new they had not yet developed creases. The right one had a splash of dried blood on its toe. The soles and heels were clotted with damp chalk and grass, matching the boots I had left in the car outside.

I picked up the left shoe and slid it onto her foot; as I'd thought, there was room for two fingers behind her heel.

“The shoe is at least a size too large,” I commented. Holmes grunted, and turned back to his close examination of her small, soft hands.

I tucked the cloth back over her naked feet, then took my time re-wrapping the shoes. I held the stockings up to the light, but all they told me was that she had fallen to her right knee on soft ground once, leaving a green stain and starting a small hole in the mesh that had not had time to unravel. The hat was a summer-weight straw cloche, as new as the shoes. Close examination showed one small fragment of grass adhering to the left side of the brim, with a smear of chalky soil beside it: The hat had fallen from her head and rolled on the ground.

With reluctance, I turned my attention farther up the table, to have my eye caught by a mark on her torso. I pulled the sheet down as far as her navel, and saw a dark red tattoo, an inch and a half long, in a shape that, had I not seen it elsewhere already, my eyes might have read as phallic:

It lay in the centre of her body, between the umbilicus and the rib-cage; its soft edges indicated that it had been there for years. I pointed it out to Holmes, who turned his attention away from the finger-nails of her left hand (where, I noticed, she had worn a wedding ring, no longer there).

Over the protest of the doctor, we pulled away the sheet entirely, and turned her over (the unnatural flop of her head made me very glad I had not eaten the cake on the wife's tea tray), but there were no other tattoos, and what marks she bore had been done long ago.

We turned her back and pulled the sheet up again. Before her head was covered, Holmes tipped her head slightly to show me the skin behind her left ear: A lock of hair had been snipped away, leaving a bare patch the diameter of a pencil. I nodded, and walked around to look at her right arm and hand. She had a bruise on the tender inside of her wrist, old enough to have begun to fade; one of her neatly manicured finger-nails was broken; there was a grey stain on her middle finger.