Laurie King - The Language of Bees

I closed the door gently and heard the front door slam. I scurried for the stairs and reached the first floor before the PC's chair squawked from below.

Safe in the darkness, I bent over with my hands on my knees, breathing in the foreign odours of the house-sandalwood and ginger where most of the neighbours' would smell of cabbage and strong soap-while my racing heart returned to something under a hundred beats per minute.

Eight minutes until Holmes' second disturbance.

I reached the study with a minimum of creaking floorboards. Once there, I unlatched the window and raised it a crack (to make sure it opened, if I was interrupted) before placing a rug at the bottom of the door and a chair under its handle. I switched on the torch, its narrow beam all but invisible outside of the room.

I found the book straight away: Testimony. Here again, the title page had just the name, with no author, no publisher, no date-although despite the book's beauty and expense, it looked as if a child had been permitted to lick a chocolate ice over the title page, leaving behind a narrow smear that could not quite be wiped away. I turned a couple of pages, and saw the first illustration: a small, tiled roof beneath a night sky whirling with streaks of light. The drawing was not signed, but there was no question as to the artist.

I paged through until I found another finely worked drawing, then a third before I made myself stop. I slid the book into the rucksack, and went on searching-for what, exactly, I was not certain. I found a planchette , for the consultation of spirits, and several small statues of Asian gods, including a superb ivory carving from China covered with scenes from the life of the Buddha. There were several paintings on the wall, none of them by Damian, all of them either overtly or vaguely religious. The shelves were not heavily laden, either because the Adlers were not great readers or because they had only arrived here a few months before, but I saw among the volumes the most recent collection of Conan Doyle stories, and beside it a magazine. I was not surprised to find it was The Strand, from January, which as I recalled had Dr Watson's rather feeble episode concerning the so-called Sussex vampire.

Two shelves were filled with religious esoterica. Some of the titles were familiar, others I took down to glance at, putting them away again when they confirmed my expectations. Two volumes suggested a closer look; they went into the rucksack with Testimony . A book by Crowley I left where it was.

The desk was little used, although some notes and a list of book titles confirmed that the letter Damian showed us in Sussex had been written by Yolanda.

The sound of Holmes' second interruption broke the stillness of the house: the clanging of the brass bell; constabulary footsteps; two minutes of raised voices as he sent this persistent drunk on his way; the PC's footsteps returning.

Holmes would watch for the signal that I was outside and safe; when it did not come, he would wait twenty minutes, then ring a third time. Past that, he risked arrest for disturbing the peace of the irritated PC: If I wasn't out by then, we had agreed, I should be on my own.

A narrow cupboard beside the bookshelf that held religious works revealed a white robe with the Children of Lights emblem embroidered on the left breast. I measured the garment's length with my eyes: It might come to my own shins, which suggested that, unless Damian wore it short like an undergraduate's gown, this belonged to Yolanda. There was no gold ring, but there was one oddity: a small, very shadowy painting of an old man in a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat dipped low over his left eye: Damian's work. Woden again? Why hang it inside of the cupboard? I lifted it from its hook to check the back, but could see nothing unusual about it. Perhaps Yolanda had liked it but Damian considered it a muddy failure, and did not want it displayed in the open? A puzzle.

I gently closed the cupboard door and slid the rucksack onto my shoulders, then disassembled the blockade on the door and eased it open.

No glowering PC awaited me.

Moving along the edge of the hallway to lessen the chance of squeaks underfoot, I explored the other doors, putting my head inside each room and giving a brief shot from the torch to tell me what it contained. The Adlers' bedroom was the room whose dim light I had seen from the garden, from a fixture high on a wall that looked as if it stayed on all of the time. They had a single wide bed, a table on either side with reading lights. Her bed-side table had a drawer with several hand-lotions and nail files. His table held a framed photograph of Yolanda in a traditional high-necked Chinese dress, looking less at home than she had in the Western dress of the other photo.

Next door was Yolanda's dressing room, with a variety of colourful, fashionable clothing. Not a flower in sight, I noticed: Yolanda had died wearing Millicent Dunworthy's taste.

Damian's wardrobe was not quite what I had expected, for it showed an awareness of style not reflected by what he had worn to Sussex. I wondered if he had chosen those scruffy clothes to underscore his Bohemian identity, or as a statement that he didn't care what Holmes saw him in.

Between the dressing rooms were a sumptuous bath and a modern lavatory, with a medicine cabinet that contained a number of packets with Chinese labels, some corked bottles containing unlabelled herbs, and a few modern nostrums that suggested Damian had suffered from a chest cold and Yolanda occasionally required a pill against female aches. Then another bedroom, this one fitted out as a nursery.

Dolls, books-a lot of books-and a basket of brightly coloured toys. A diminutive enamel-ware tray with a miniature tea-set for four, missing one cup but otherwise perfect, and perfectly exquisite. A neatly made bed, a diminutive wardrobe. But the walls were the reason the room pulled me in: Damian had painted them.

Even under the fitful gaze of my torch, the walls were incredible. The room seemed to be atop a hill, with a blue sky broken by the occasional puffy cloud overhead, a changing landscape stretching out in all directions, and a green carpet underfoot to remind one of grass: One half expected a fresh breeze on one's face. To the north stood a city on a bay, its boats suggesting a location considerably farther east than London: Shanghai, perhaps? Then came a tropical beach, with coconut palms and birds too exotic even for Nature. Farmland came to the south, more French than English, with a small, Tuscan-looking hill town in the distance. That gave way to jungle, with monkeys and a sharp-eyed parrot watching over the child's cot. Everything there looked real enough to walk to.

It must have taken him weeks.

I would happily have stood there for an hour-would very happily have curled up to sleep in that tiny bed-had I not heard the third and final ring of the doorbell. Reluctantly, I pulled myself out of the room and padded down the hallway to the sound of loud constabulary curses from downstairs.

I waited until he had yanked open the front door and was shouting at Holmes before I trotted down the stairs and through the kitchen. Holmes was apologising loudly, sounding for all the world like a sobering drunk. “The wife says I should bring you these, she baked them this afternoon, and tell you I'm sorry to disturb you. She's right, I don't know what I was thinking, I ought to know my own front door and this surely isn't it.”

In the face of open apology accompanied by a tray of biscuits (brought for the purpose, freshly baked by Mycroft's invisible kitchen) the constable's righteous anger deflated. I passed out of the kitchen door and let the latch lock behind me, scaling the wall and dropping the block of rope-bound wood into the nearest ash can before the PC had dunked his first biscuit.