Laurie King - The Language of Bees

The housekeeper came in with a more recognisable breakfast tray, moving a table in front of Holmes' eccentric choice of seating. “Have something to eat, Holmes,” I urged.

He seemed not to hear me, so I took a slice of pristine toast, smeared it with butter and marmalade, and folded it in two, placing it into his hand. Absently, he took a bite, but kept talking.

“Steamers to Bergen leave from Hull, and Mycroft has two men on their way, with photographs. It shouldn't require delaying the boat, which is scheduled-”

“Holmes, may I say something?”

His grey eyes came up, and he looked at me for the first time. “Of course, Russell. What is it?” He took a bite of the toast, his body feeding itself while his mind was elsewhere.

“We may be on the wrong track.”

He swallowed impatiently, dropping the remains of his breakfast in the ash-tray. “Explain.”

“When we believed Estelle to be three years old, you thought it unlikely that a solitary man-Brothers-would risk burdening himself with an infant. And as you said, disposing of a small body is lamentably easy. However, we know that the child was alive as of Wednesday night. Which makes this important.” I handed him the letter.

Monday, 25 August

Dear Miss Russell,

The infirmities of age are sufficiently vexing upon one's body, but the effects on the mind I find particularly troublesome. This note is by way of being a second thought, which in better times would have come to me while you were still in my presence. I can only trust that there is an element of truth in the saying, better late than never.

As I thought over the situation with which you presented me yesterday, I came to realise that I had neglected to mention one aspect of necromancy, perhaps because it is one of the things so abhorrent, it causes the healthy mind to shudder away. I speak of the relative potency of the blood of an innocent.

Throughout the ages and across the world, the sacrifice of a virgin is regarded as being the most efficacious. When I lay down to sleep last night, I found my rest disturbed by the thought that your suspected necromancer might be in the vicinity of young innocents.

If there are young women near him, or a child of either sex, warn them away, I beg you.

Yours,

Clarissa Ledger

When his eyes had reached the bottom of the page, I asked, “What if his intended sacrificial victim isn't Damian? What if it's the child? Who could be his own child. As he sacrificed his own wife?”

Hope and horror warred in his face, but without a word he carried the letter out of the room. Two minutes later, Mycroft came in, his braces down and dots of shaving cream under his chin, and picked up the telephone. When he had reached his second in command, he said, “Morton? We need to change the search description. The two men and a child may be one man and a child. Yes.”

In twenty minutes, the orders made previously had been amended, and the phone was set back into its hooks. Mycroft left us, and came back clean of shaving cream, tie knotted, waistcoat buttoned. We moved to the dining table, where Mrs Cowper set a bowl of freshly boiled eggs in a napkin before Mycroft. Holmes and I had coffee; he supplemented his beverage with another cigarette. A number of times over the years, I had cause to regret that I did not use tobacco: This was one of those. Instead, I dropped my head in my hands and rubbed my scalp, as if to massage my thoughts into order.

“It would help,” I complained, “if we knew just what Brothers had in mind. His is not a random striking-out. He has a plan. What is it?”

“Human sacrifice at a point of solar eclipse to bring about the end of times?” Holmes asked. It sounded truly mad, when put that way. I scratched my head some more, and a thought surfaced.

“Why kill Yolanda? Was it entirely in service of the ritual, and she was convenient? Or was it revenge, that she left him and married Damian?”

“We don't know that she left him,” Mycroft objected. “Granted, she brought proceedings against him, but that is the way of amicable divorces.”

“Testimony reveals Brothers to be a man eager to embrace coincidence,” Holmes remarked. “He could have seen the two impulses as driving him to the same point.”

“And a third,” I added as something came back to me. “Remember Damian told us that Yolanda was troubled about something in the middle of June? What if she found out that her former husband and head of her church had killed Fiona Cartwright at Cerne Abbas? If Brothers thought she was about to turn him in, that would have been a further reason.”

Mycroft shifted in his chair. “Still, I should have said the ritual element was particularly strong, if he went to the trouble of dressing her in new clothing.”

“Were any of the others wearing new clothes?” I asked, but that question had not been addressed on the police reports.

“We may have to wait until we give what we have to Lestrade,” Holmes said, “before we can answer that.”

“In any case,” I decided, “we may not be certain what he wants with the child, but I should say his goal with Damian is twofold: revenge over Yolanda, and doing what Testimony calls ‘loosing’ Damian's power.”

“‘He has the Tool,’” Mycroft recited, “‘to cut through empty pretence and loose the contents of a vessel.’”

“He would consider the ‘contents’ of Damian's ‘vessel’ to be considerable.”

“As for the child,” Holmes said, “‘The greater the sacrifice, the greater the energies loosed.’”

“‘The world lies primed,’” I said quietly, “‘for a transformative spark.’”

The morning that had begun in a storm of activity dragged slowly. Holmes paced and smoked, frustrated by the difficulties of leaving this place while Lestrade's arrest warrants waited for us outside. I retreated to Mycroft's study with the list of livestock deaths that I had begun to incorporate on Friday evening, and Mycroft picked up a novel by G. K. Chesterton, to all appearances completely undistracted.

Two hours later, I heard the two men talking; a short time later, Holmes put his head through the study doorway.

“I'm going to Norway,” he said abruptly. “They may need me in Bergen.”

I did not know if they meant Damian and Estelle or Mycroft's men, but it hardly mattered. “All right.”

His look on me sharpened. “You don't agree?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“Russell, this questioning of your abilities must stop. If you have something to contribute, speak up.”

“Patterns,” I said helplessly. “He has to have a pattern, and the only one I can find makes little sense.”

“Show me.”

So I showed him. And Mycroft, who had abandoned Chesterton to help Holmes assemble a kit for Scandinavia, and heard us talking.

I had been unable to shake the idea that my path over the past two weeks was littered with crumbs of evidence, like the trail left through the woods in the fairy-tale. But, just as a random scattering of crumbs can be connected into lines, so will random evidence appear to coincide.

And I was not sure enough of myself to be certain that the patterns I saw were real.

“One might think that if a sacrifice draws on and reflects the power of an eclipse, the performer would move heaven and earth to be standing in a place of greatest darkness. But I'm not sure that is of paramount importance to the author of Testimony . The book is full of minor inconsistencies; symbolic truth is far more important to him than mere fact.”

Most men, launched on a desperate search for a son or nephew, would be impatient with this excursion into academic theory; these two men were not.

“So, two small pieces of evidence bother me. First, one of the books on Brothers' desk was a guide to Great Britain. He'd made marks on the entries for London and Manchester, and had dog-eared, then smoothed out, several other pages, including the one describing the Wilmington Giant. There were two slips of paper in the guide-book. One marked the beginning of the London section, the other was for the Scottish Isles.