Laurie King - The Language of Bees

“One hour,” he said, “no more.”

I waited at the window until I saw him cross the orchard. Then I trotted downstairs to the library and looked up the phases of the moon in the 1924 almanac. Dry-mouthed, I pushed the almanac back into place and went upstairs again, glancing out of the window to make sure he was still occupied before I fetched the key to the lumber room.

The oversized storage cupboard that Holmes called his lumber room was where all the useless odds and ends of a lifetime waited to be dragged into light as evidence, exemplar, or key piece of arcane research. (Including an assortment of deadly poisons-hence the lock.) It took a while to find his collection of outdated almanacs, in one tea-chest amongst a dozen others. I was not certain that there would even be one for that war year of 1918, but there was, although undersized and on the cheapest of pulp paper.

I perched atop an African wood drum and cautiously turned the limp pages to the calendar showing phases of the moon.

In April 1918, the full moon came on the 26th.

The day before young Damian Adler had killed a man in a drunken brawl. My hands trembled as they reached for the next year's volume.

Full moon: 11 August 1919.

Four days later, Damian had been arrested in the death of a drugs seller, fifty miles from Paris -to be released, not through proving an alibi, but through disproving a witness.

Yolanda Adler had been killed on 15 August 1924, when the moon was still full in the sky.

And as I had found downstairs: Miss Fiona Cartwright of Poole died of a bullet wound on 17 June: the night of a full moon.

The hair on the nape of my neck stirred.

Damian Adler, a painter of moonscapes and madness.

A sound came from somewhere in the house, and my hand flung the almanac into the chest and slammed down the lid. With only a degree more deliberation, I locked up the lumber room and returned the key to its hook in the laboratory, then took a furious brush to the dust on my skirt.

Absurd. Damian was no lunatic.

What if I had it the wrong way around? In 1918, Damian Adler-convalescing, shell-shocked, and drunk-had hit a man. If the other officer had been sober, or younger, or stronger, Damian would have been guilty of nothing more than fisticuffs in a bar, not a killing. It had been the night of a full moon; the moon came to haunt the artist's work, not as a stimulus of death, but as a reminder?

And the other deaths? Were Fiona Cartwright and Yolanda Adler merely coincidences? I mistrusted coincidences as much as Holmes did, but in fact, they did occur. And Fiona Cartwright's death was a suicide. Wasn't it?

“Ready, Russell?”

The voice up the stairs startled me. I threw the clothes-brush onto the bed and began to stuff the waiting valise.

I would say nothing of my… I couldn't even call them suspicions. Morbid thoughts. This was Holmes' son. If there was evidence, Holmes would follow it, and Holmes would acknowledge it. I would say nothing, although the awareness of those dates was already eating into me like a drop of acid.

I caught up my bag and walked down the stairs.

“Here I am, Holmes. Let me just see if there's anything Mrs Hudson wishes from Town.”

AS I SETTLED IN BEHIND THE WHEEL OF THE MOTORCAR, I noticed the red welts on my companion's hands, testimony to the disinclination of bees to be disturbed. “Are the hives well?” I asked him.

“All five needed an additional super,” he replied.

“It'll make Mr Miranker happy that you've paid them attention.”

“He has looked after them well, in my absence.”

“I like him.”

“You've met?”

“We met Wednesday, at the abandoned hive. I told you I solved that mystery-I should have said, he and I together did so.” As I negotiated the light Sunday traffic into Eastbourne, I described my investigation of the missing colony of Apis mellifera. We broke off so I could park the motor at the station while he bought tickets and showed the staff Yolanda Adler's photograph, then met again in an empty compartment (the week-end flow of travellers back towards London still being occupied with eking out their final hours of sun).

“None of the men working today was on duty Friday,” he grumbled, so I finished telling him about the bees, touching lightly upon my own suggestion concerning the remoteness of the hive and quickly going on to Mr Miranker's conclusion. The story went on for some time, since I thought he would like to know every small detail of the matter. At last I came to an end, and presented my conclusion. “The hive died because the queen was too soft-hearted, Holmes.”

He snorted at my interpretation of the hive's failure; belatedly, I heard the echo of wistfulness in my voice, and glanced sideways at him.

It had been not a snort, but a snore: Following one night spent staring out at the moon over the Downs, and the night before prowling the city in search of a son, Holmes had fallen asleep.

An hour later, his voice broke into my thoughts. “I trust you did not tell Mr Miranker that you believed the hive succumbed to loneliness?”

“Not in so many words, no. Although he did agree that it was possible the lack of proximity to another hive might have contributed to its extinction.”

“Loneliness alone does not drive a creature mad, Russell. However, I freely admit that an excess of royal benevolence is not a diagnosis that would have occurred to me. One can hope that Miranker's replacement queen proves sufficiently ruthless. Do you suppose Lestrade will be at the Yard today, or ought we to hunt him down at his home?”

“He might be at work, although you'd have to conceal your identity to have him admit it over the telephone.”

“True, the cases which have brought me into his purview have tended to demand much of his time. The same, now that I think of it, might be said of his father before him.”

The younger Lestrade had followed his father into the police, then New Scotland Yard, and thus inevitably into contact with Sherlock Holmes. I had seen a considerable amount of Lestrade the previous summer, during a complicated and ultimately uncomfortable case involving an ancient manuscript and modern inheritances. I doubted he would relish the opportunity of working with either of us again this soon.

“Do you suppose they will look into the meaning of her blisters?” I asked him.

“I should doubt it.”

“But you don't wish to tell them who she is?”

“I intend merely to say that this is a Sussex crime I have been asked to investigate by an anonymous party, no more.”

“Holmes, if you-”

“I will not come to their aid in this matter,” he snarled. “There is too much here I do not yet understand.”

“Well,” I said, “if I can find where the shoes came from, I might find who bought them for her.”

“Is that a line of enquiry you can begin today?”

“I can start, but the shops themselves will not be open.”

“Do what you can. In the meantime, I shall hunt down Lestrade and see what I can prise out of him.”

“I'd also like a copy of that photograph you have.”

He slid his hand into his breast pocket and drew out a note-case, handing me a freshly printed reproduction of the photograph Damian had given him. The facial details were not as crisp as the original, but would be sufficient for my purposes.

I studied it, as I hadn't before. Yolanda was not, in fact, as pretty as I had remembered. Her face was a touch too square, the eyes too small, but the face beneath the dowdy hat was alive and sparkling with intelligence, which made her far more attractive than any surface arrangement of features. The child in her arms was blurred and turning to the side, but the corner of her eye suggested an Asian fold, even though the child's glossy hair lacked the thick, straight texture of the mother's.