Laurie King - The Language of Bees

I blinked, waiting for him to pick his way through the fusillade of words, but he caught the idea of two hundred very expensive picnic baskets the moment it flew past him, and he smiled.

He brought out the order book, located the name Dunworthy on the Monday previous, and produced a brochure which would tell me precisely what had been in the basket: The Vegetarian Epicure, it was called.

My eye ran down the description, searching for anything that might qualify as the desired morsel, when near the bottom it caught on an item that made me blink.

“Good heavens,” I said involuntarily.

“Pardon?”

“Oh, nothing, I just…” I pulled myself together and manufactured a frown. “You know, it wasn't Monday I saw the basket and tasted the crusty widgets, I'm sure it wasn't.”

“No, madam, it was probably on Friday. The order was made on the Monday, but the lady specified that it would be picked up by her brother on the Friday.”

I looked up, startled. “Her brother?”

“Well, I assumed so. The name was Dunworthy. Perhaps I was mistaken. I thought she was considerably older than he, but then of course-”

“Oh, her brother, yes. Tall young fellow, long hair-an artistic type?”

“No,” he said slowly. “He was in his early forties, with ordinary hair. Not at all what I should call ‘artistic’ He had a scar near his eye,” he volunteered, laying a finger next to his left eye.

“Oh, him,” I said. “Her other brother. I always forget about him, I've only met him the once. Did he have his wife with him? Pretty little Chinese woman?”

“I didn't see anyone answering that description. Might I-”

But before he could ask me why I was so interested in the brothers of a friend's secretary, I said, “But if they had that basket, then what could it have been I tasted?”

He perused the list of contents before asking tentatively if it might not have been the strawberry tartlets, although clearly he'd been looking for something rather more exotic that had attracted my palate.

“Oh, exactly! You clever man, it must have been those! Thank you for reading my mind, you have saved my entire party from the touch of the bourgeois. Shall I have my secretary telephone to you with the details? Yes, that's what I'll do, she's so much better than I, and now that I know what it was that put you in mind…” To his confusion, I was still talking as I went out of the door, the brochure firmly in hand.

He might have been even more confused had he seen me come to a halt on the street outside, to look again at the brochure. Yes, I had read it aright: Included with the nut pâté and three flavours of cheese for afters was a packet of almond-and-oat biscuits, from Italy.

A biscuit packet that currently lay on the work-table in Holmes' laboratory in Sussex, awaiting his attentions.

So: A clean-cut man in his forties, with a scar beside his left eye, whose name was almost certainly not Dunworthy. Not only did this description in no way fit Damian Adler, it sounded like the man seen walking with Damian up Regent Street, the last time Damian was seen.

Some day, I reflected, we should have to invent a means of actually locating a person based on a finger-print, as photographs were circulated to police departments now. Until that day, the prints a villain left behind were useful primarily in court, a nail of absolute proof in his coffin.

The biscuit wrapper would have to wait in Sussex, until we had a print to compare to it.

BEFORE LEAVING MYCROFT'S FLAT THAT MORNING, I had assembled a burglar's kit ranging from sandwiches to steel jemmy, wrapping the tools inside a dark shirt and trousers and tucking in a pair of head-scarfs-one bright red-and-white checked cotton, the other the sheerest silk in a subdued blue-green design-then placing the whole in an ordinary shopping bag. I had deposited the bag with the Left Luggage office at Paddington, knowing that dragging it around all day would tempt me to jettison some if not all of its weight.

I went to Paddington now to retrieve it, then crossed town on the Underground to the accountants' office that had filled the “income” column of Millicent Dunworthy's personal ledger during recent months. It was a street that had, once upon a time, been a high street, in a building that began its life, three centuries earlier, as a coaching inn.

The income listed in the ledger indicated a full working week. Since she had taken off most of the previous week's Monday to buy a frock, shoes, and picnic basket for Yolanda's rendezvous with death, I thought it unlikely that she would miss another day this soon.

And I was right, she was there, her desk clearly visible from the front window. I found a café and had a coffee, then went into the booksellers' next door and spent some time with the new fiction at the front window. A book called A Passage to India so caught my attention that I nearly missed Miss Dunworthy's exit from the office across the way; when I looked up from the page, she was down the street and walking fast. I dropped the book and hurried after her, the checked scarf wrapped prominently around the brim of my hat.

But she was merely going to the nearest bus stop. I slowed to a more casual gait and followed, head averted, trying to decide if she was the sort of woman who would climb to the upper level of the bus. If so, it would be difficult to hide from her. If not, I might manage to duck quickly up the stairs without her seeing me.

And then what-leap from an upper window, when I saw her get off?

Yes, if it came to that.

Or I could engage a taxi now, and manufacture some story that justified following a city bus as it made its halting way through the town.

A bus approached, its number identifying it as a route that meandered far out into the suburbs. Millicent Dunworthy stepped forward, and I pressed closer in her direction, slumping to reduce my height beneath the level of the gentlemen's hats and taking care to keep a lamp-post between us.

She got on, and moved towards the front. I wormed my way into the queue, bought my ticket, and trotted up the stairs.

It took several stops before I could claim a window seat with a view of the disembarking passengers, but by employing sharp elbows and a winsome smile, I beat an old woman out of her choice. Ignoring her glare, I removed the bright scarf from my hat and pushed it into the shopping bag on my lap.

We travelled through endless London suburbs, with scores of stops and a constant flux of passengers, and still Miss Dunworthy did not appear below. I started to wonder if perhaps she had removed her hat-or changed her garments entirely, as I was equipped to do? Had she spotted me, and slipped past when I was trapped away from the windows?

The bus churned on, with ever fewer passengers. Solid terraces gave way to groups of houses, then individual semi-detached dwellings. The first field appeared, and another cluster of houses, and finally, when I was the only person on the top of the bus, we stopped again, and Millicent Dunworthy climbed down. She turned to exchange a greeting with the conductor-they sounded like old friends-and I ducked down. Had she seen my head so quickly vanish from sight? When the bus started up again, I risked a glance: To my relief, she was not staring after us in puzzlement, but had set off in the other direction, beside a high brick wall with heavy vegetation inside. The wall was not a perfect rectangle, but left the road at odd angles to encircle an isolated country house that had no-one overlooking it.