Laurie King: The Language of Bees

Another memory came back to me then, bringing a wash of foreign air through the sultry room. It came from Palestine, in February, shortly after the Hazr brothers and I had ripped Holmes from the hands of his Turkish tormentor. As we parted ways, the elder Hazr, Mahmoud-silent, deadly, and himself bearing scars of torture-had been moved to make a rare incursion into personal speech: Do not try to protect your Holmes, these next days. It will not help him to heal.

I nodded, and finished my preparations for bed. As I lay down on the lavender-scented sheets, I reflected that Holmes and I seemed to have a habit of forcing unpalatable decisions on one another.

THE DAY WAS ALREADY HOT WHEN WE SET OFF for the avocat's office the next morning, the city air close and unhealthy against us. The sling chafed at my neck; my light dress was soon damp, as was my hair beneath the summer hat. Things were no better inside the legal gentleman's office, where the stifling air was compounded by the man's unbounded energy. He put us in chairs and then strode up and down the carpet, gesticulating and thinking aloud in fluent if accented English until the heat he seemed to generate made me light-headed.

Fortunately, we had not much time before the train left. His secretary came in with his hat in her hand, and bundled us off into a taxicab to the station. Monsieur Cantelet talked the whole time, Holmes listening intently, ready to seize the scraps of information being tossed on the freshet of words.

Holmes had been following the case, albeit at a distance, for a week already , and his occasional phrase of explanation helped me piece together the central facts: Damian Adler had been arrested for the murder of a drugs seller; the man sold mostly morphine and hashish, and Damian was known to be one of his customers; the two men had an argument in a bar that ended in a fistfight, although there was some disagreement as to whether the fight had been over the man's wares or a girl. In any event, two days later, the man was found in an alleyway, unconscious and bleeding from a head wound. He died in hospital; the police asked questions; the answers led them to Damian.

The evidence against him included the presence of morphine and hashish in his room, signs of a fight on his face and hands, and the clear accusation of a witness.

M Cantelet ran through all this with a light-hearted enthusiasm, which seemed odd, if not inappropriate, until he began to tell us about the witness. “The gentleman's veracity has been questioned,” the lawyer said happily in his musical accent. Said witness, it seemed-one Jules Filot-was known to his more jocular intimates as an habitual snitch and manufacturer of evidence on demand, which explained his nickname: “Monsieur Faux.”

M Cantelet did not think that it would take a great effort to smash the case against Damian Adler. His private detective had spent the days since Mycroft's request for assistance had been received insinuating himself into the life of M Filot, and would make himself available to us at mid-day. In the mean-time, we were to be permitted an interview with the prisoner, at the gaol.

“By great good fortune, M Adler had the sense not to admit to the crime.”

“He says he's innocent?” Holmes asked.

“The young man neither admits nor denies, merely says he does not remember. Ideal, for my purposes.”

Ideal it might be, but less than wholly reassuring for us.

Ste Chapelle was a tiny village, which I had already determined that morning by the fact that it did not appear on any of the hotel's maps. The town gaol was down the street from the station and across from a tiny café. It was, in fact, the local gendarme's front room, little more than a small bedroom with bars across the windows and a square of glass set into its stout wooden door. The gendarme made note of our names in a record-book, unbolted the door, handed us a couple of stools, and left us alone.

I did not want to be there, but I did not know how to absent myself. I took a deep breath, and followed M Cantelet inside.

The young man, who stood with his shoulder touching the window-bars, looked startlingly like Holmes in a masterful disguise: thin to emaciation and pale as the walls, but with the same beak nose, the same long fingers, the same sense of wiry strength.

There, the similarity ended: Holmes' uncanny gift for tidiness was replaced by perspiration stains and the stench of old sweat; where Holmes was controlled even when excited, this younger version was vibrating with tension. His eyes darted about the room, his fingers plucked incessantly at shirt buttons and fraying cuffs. He was either nervy to the edge of a break-down, or still emerging from prolonged drug use.

The avocat , shifting to an equally energetic French, marched across the cell with his hand outstretched. The young man put out his hand, but his blank stare suggested a lack of comprehension. Surely he was fluent in French?

After a time his grey eyes wandered away from the voluble avocat to rest on me. It was a shock, because these were Holmes' eyes-same shape, same colour, same height above mine-but dull, with pain or confusion or even-hard to imagine-a lack of intelligence. I found myself searching for a glimpse of mind beneath the flat gaze, but there was no flash of wit, merely the weary perseverance of an animal in distress.

Then the hooded grey eyes came to Holmes. The head tilted in concentration, a gesture eerily like his father, and sense came into them. Curiosity, yes, but also animosity. I stepped aside, and suddenly he flushed. With colour came an unexpected beauty, the darkness of his lashes and the delicacy of his features making him for the first time utterly unlike Holmes.

The avocat filled the silence nicely. “Capitaine Adler, it is not often that a man is given the opportunity to say this, but may I present your father? Monsieur Holmes, your son, Capitaine Damian Adler.”

Neither man moved. The avocat cleared his throat. “Yes, well, I shall leave you two alone for a few minutes, while I speak with the gendarme about the case.”

I made haste to follow him out of the cell.

M Cantelet and I sat outside for a long time, waiting in the shade of a linden tree as village life went on before us. When Holmes emerged, he said nothing of what had transpired in that cell.

He never did.

We removed to a tiny hotel near the train station, where we were joined by M Cantelet's private investigator, M Clémence. The investigator was, it seemed, dressed for his undercover rôle, with flashy clothes, pencil-thin moustache, and oil-slicked hair parted in the centre, but he gave his evidence succinctly and showed no signs of the too-common shortcomings of the breed, which are an inflated self-confidence and an impatience with humdrum detail. I could feel Holmes relax a notch.

The man told us what he had done, gave a brief outline of where he intended to go from there, answered Holmes' questions, and listened calmly to Holmes' suggestions. At no point did he demonstrate scorn for the amateur, merely a workman-like and not unimaginative approach to figuring things out.

Holmes found little to object to, when the man had left us.

Which did not mean he intended to take his hand off the investigation. He might have put off his involvement in the case until now, but he had no intention of delaying it further. The avocat caught the post-luncheon train back to Paris, but we remained in Ste Chapelle to prepare our campaign: Holmes proposed to infiltrate the group in which the witness Filot-“Monsieur Faux”-moved, while I addressed myself to the more mundane aspects of property, relationship, and inheritance: the local records office, where my bad arm would not be a liability. We made a start that afternoon, going our separate ways until nightfall.