Laurie King - The Language of Bees

I said to Holmes, “Did you agree that the stain on Yolanda Adler's fingers looked like ink?”

“I did.”

“Because it's possible she wrote that final letter to Damian at this desk, with this pen.” I showed him; he said nothing, just turned his attention to the wall safe that he had found beneath a painting of Stonehenge under a full moon (amateurish and melodramatic and markedly not by Damian Adler).

I opened the desk's upper drawers and found, among the discarded pens, stationery, and paper clips, a wooden box containing half a dozen of the heavy, crude gold rings worn by the Inner Circle, in various sizes. Despite their solid appearance, they felt like gold plate. The next drawer down held maps of England, Scotland, Iceland, Germany, and all of the Scandinavian countries.

The bottom drawer held an assortment of rubbish, including a dog's collar that had clearly been buried for years, a pair of new-looking leather bedroom slippers, and a pretty little dollies' tea-cup.

I did not find a master journal filled with bloody writing, nor did Holmes.

He did, however, find something nearly as obscene.

Holmes finally gave a grunt of satisfaction, and the safe door came open. I went to look over his shoulder.

There was money, quite a bit of money, in the currencies of several countries. Two passports, one well-used British document under the name of Harris, the other for a resident of Shanghai named Hawthorn. A velvet pouch containing a palmful of diamonds, cut and polished and splashing a startling brilliance across the dim-lit room. A bottle holding several ounces of unidentified liquid, with three small glass phials waiting to be filled. And seven envelopes of heavy white paper, folded shut but not sealed.

On each was written a number; in each was a sample of hair. As Holmes had anticipated, several were from animals-envelopes one and two had tufts of sheep's wool, while number four had three tail-feathers from a rooster. Number three, however, was definitely human, grey and about eight inches long. Number five was from a man, brown with a few grey hairs, its pomade staining the envelope. Number six held half a dozen strands of a horse's tail. And number seven: heavy black hair four inches long, one end neatly bound with white silk thread, attaching it to a beautifully worked gold wedding ring, a delicate version of the one I had seen on Damian's hand.

Yolanda.

Holmes took a clean handkerchief from his breast pocket and spread it on the desk, tipping the black lock and ring into its centre. The empty envelope went back into the safe; the handkerchief he folded over and tucked into his pocket. I did not object: Its incriminating value in Brothers' possession was not worth the revulsion of leaving it here. He shut the safe, and came back to where I sat.

“Anything of interest?”

I pointed out several oddities that I had come across in the drawers but took care to leave in place. Now, Holmes pulled each out, tossing them onto the blotting-paper: Clearly, he cared no more for alerting Brothers to the search than he did about leaving finger-prints. “The blade is the wrong shape,” he said of the stiletto I had found in the top drawer. He glanced through the pamphlet on Norse gods published by the United Kingdom Associated Sons of Scandinavia, but the rest-the monographs on Stonehenge and Hadrian's Wall, a Times article on a hoard uncovered in Devon, a booklet about the northern constellations, the dollies' tea-cup-those he flicked over with a dismissive finger before returning to the shelves, to pull down and shake out each book, one after another.

I fitted the tiny porcelain cup onto the end of my little finger. It was an odd thing to find in the possession of this man. And exactly a week before, I had seen a set the precise match of this one, three cups on a diminutive enamel-ware tray. Had we found this missing cup with the other trophies in the safe, it would have had a very different meaning, but dropped with other things into a drawer…?

And now, the object started off a series of thoughts that I had tried to keep at the back of my mind. However, it had to be brought to light, and when, if not now?

“Holmes, do three-year-olds play dollies' tea-party?”

“My experience with three-year-olds is limited,” he replied.

“The Adlers' neighbours, at number eleven, have a daughter of eight or nine. She plays dollies' tea-party. I did myself when I was her age. And she is in the habit of playing with Estelle Adler when they meet in the park. She made reference to books as well. Although some children do read at a young age. I did, myself.”

“Does this fascinating narrative have a direction?”

I took a bracing breath. “All along, Holmes, Damian has been… less than completely forthcoming with us.”

“He has lied?” Holmes said bluntly. “People generally do, although I have told you his reasons.”

“But, about the child.”

He stopped what he was doing. “What about her?”

I spun the tea-cup around the end of my finger, so as not to meet his eyes. “That photograph, of the Adlers. It looked out of date.”

“How do you mean?”

“Yolanda's dress and hair. Fashion changes rapidly these days, particularly skirt lengths. The dresses in her house reflected current tastes-even those that were not new had had their hems adjusted. I noticed, because it struck me as incongruous, a Bohemian so attentive to fashion.” I lifted my gaze from the cup on my finger. “I'd have said the skirt in that photograph is three or four years old. And the hair-cut.”

“The photograph was taken in Shanghai,” he pointed out.

“Where, I agree, styles may be behind the times. It is equally possible that Yolanda only discovered a sense of fashion after she came to London. But-”

“You are suggesting that the picture was taken some years ago? Why should Damian-”

He stopped.

I finished the thought. “If the photograph was in fact taken some years ago, then the child is older than Damian permitted us to believe. Would the neighbour's girl be as interested in exchanging books, were Estelle three and a half years old?”

“This could not be the child born in 1913,” he declared.

“Dorothy Hayden? No, I agree, not unless this photograph is a remarkably good fake. But even if Yolanda and Brothers-Hayden-this man has entirely too many names! Even if they separated in 1917, a child could have been born after that, and been small when Damian arrived in 1920.”

“You are proposing that, were Damian concerned that I would not search for his wife once I knew her history, it would apply doubly were I to suspect the child was not even his. And it would,” he conceded, “further explain Yolanda's continued contact with her former husband, were he the father of the child.”

He turned back to the shelves, but I thought his mind was not on his actions. Nor, in truth, was mine.

We found nothing of further interest, although I was grateful Brothers had been here for less than a year, and had not filled the house with a lifetime of macabre treasures.

When we had finished, Holmes wrapped a sheet of paper around a glass paperweight from the desk, for the finger-prints, and slid it into his pocket, along with a phial of the unidentified liquid from the safe and a sample of the blotting sand. He stood looking down at the desk with its litter of pamphlets and objects-not the tea-cup, which lay in my pocket-and then picked up the stiletto. He considered it with his thumb for a moment, then raised it high and drove it viciously down: through a postcard photograph of an Irish stone cross; through the train time-table below that; through the cheaply printed pamphlet of Norse churches in Britain and the almanac page showing the phases of the moon for 1924 and the stained green blotter, deep into the wood of the desk itself.