Laurie King - The Language of Bees

Then drops began sporadically to spatter my glass cage. Most of it blew past Javitz, but his hand came up several times, wiping his face.

It made for a long fifty miles, tumbling and tossing in the clouds. We came out of the mid-day murk alarmingly close to the ground, and Javitz corrected our course to point us at the aerodrome. A gust hit us just short of the ground and we hit the grass with a terrifying crack from below.

The American gingerly slowed the machine, and I waited for him to turn us about and head back to the hangers we had flashed past. Instead, he throttled down the motor, then stood to look back at the buildings: It seemed that we were to walk back to the aerodrome. I popped up the cover and started to rise, but he stopped me.

“Stay right there. We need your weight.”

“Sorry?”

“If you get out,” he explained impatiently, “we'll shuttlecock. Flip over.”

“I see.” I sat firmly in my seat, thinking heavy thoughts, until I heard voices from outside.

Two large men clung to the wings, the wind bullying us back and forth, while we came about and made our way back to the aerodrome. Only then was I permitted to climb down. I felt like going down on quivering knees to kiss the earth.

One of the men directed me to a café adjoining the air field, where I went in a wobbly scurry while the rain spat down and Javitz tied down the machine and contemplated the wounded undercarriage.

In the shelter of a room with a baking coal stove, I peered through the window and amended my thought: It appeared we would be making arrangements for repairs as well. Javitz and a man in a waterproof were squatting on either side of the right wheel, peering at where the struts connected with the body.

I closed my eyes for a moment, then turned and looked at the waitress. “Would it be possible to have something hot to eat? It looks as though I shall be here for a while.”

She was a maternal sort, and ticked her tongue at my state. “We'll get you something nice and warming,” she said, beginning with drink both hot and stout. I allowed her to slip a hefty and illicit dollop of whisky into the cup of tea before me, and downed the tepid atrocity in one draught. It hit me like a swung punching bag, but when the top of my head had settled back into place, I found that the impulse to pull out my revolver and begin shooting had subsided as well.

I placed the cup gently back into its saucer, took a couple of breaths, and decided that the day was not altogether lost. The men would fix the strut, the wind would die down, we would be in Orkney by nightfall.

And when we found that, in fact, Brothers had opted for Norway?

I would not think about that at the moment.

I reached for the tea-pot, and my eyes were filled with tweed: a man, beside the table; a small, round man in need of a shave, wearing a freckled brown suit and rather rumpled shirt.

“Miss Russell?” His accent was as Scots as his suit.

“Yes?”

“M' name's MacDougall. Ah've a message for yeh.”

“From?”

“Mr Mycroft Holmes.”

“Sit. Please. Tea?” For some reason, my tongue seemed limited to one-word sentences. But he sat, and the arrival of a second cup saved me the difficult decision of how to carry out my offer, so that was good. I watched him slip in and out of clear focus, and summoned my thoughts.

“He sent me a wire, askin' me t'watch for an aeroplane. Wi' the weather as it is, I'd gone home, but the man here rang me.”

“Mycroft. Yes. Good.”

“Er, are you altogether well, mum?”

My gaze slid towards the window, where the machine that had tried so hard to kill us sat, wet and complacent as men addressed themselves to its undercarriage. “It was a dilli-a difficult flight.”

The man's gaze followed mine. “Ah can imagine. Ah know three men who've bein kilt flyin'-ye'll never get me up in one a'them infernal machines.”

“Thank you,” I said coolly.

His eyes came back to mine. “Sorry. I'm sure they're ever so much safer now, and your pilot's sure ta-”

“You were saying,” I interrupted. “About Mycroft.”

“Yes. Well, Ah was the one took his orders Tuesday, to be looking for one and possibly two men and a bairn-and sorry to say we've seen nothing of them, although it was nobbut an hour after receivin' the first wire that Ah had men at Waverley, Princes Street, and Haymarket-for the trains, yeh know-and at Leith for the steamers.”

So it is Bergen after all, I thought, that mad-man with his knife at the throat of-

“But while they were watching, Ah myself made the roonds of the restaurants in the toon. And Ah found they may have been here on Monday.”

“No! Really?” I said, frankly astonished. “But you're not certain?”

“Not without a photograph. But two English men took luncheon at the hotel near Waverley Station on Monday, and the younger was tall and had a beard. And they had a bairn with them.”

“The child is with them?”

“So the waiter said.”

I felt like weeping with relief. “Waverley Station-where do trains from there go?”

“ London, Glasgow, and the north of Scotland. But if you're going to ask me to question the ticket-sellers, there's little point, without a pho-”

I stood up fast, then grabbed at the table to keep from sprawling on my face. While the room spun around me, I said through gritted teeth, “Take me to that hotel.”

“Mum, I dinna think-”

“Do you have a motor?” I demanded.

“Yes, but-”

“I have photographs,” I told him, and began to hunt them out of my pocket when my eye was caught by a figure trotting across the tarmac towards us. I left my hand where it was; Javitz opened the door and stuck his head inside. Rain dripped from his hat.

“Miss Russell? We're set to go, as soon as she's fuelled up.”

I stood motionless, caught by indecision: I deeply mistrusted leaving a vital interrogation to others, even if the other was one of Mycroft's… The tableau might have lasted forever-one dripping, one with her hand in her pocket, one waiting in apprehension-had the waitress not decided this was a good time to present me with my meal.

The aroma of meat and roast potatoes reached me where the motion did not. I pulled my hand from my pocket, then looked at the plate, and at her.

“I don't think I'm going to have time to eat that. But if your cook could make me half a dozen bacon butties or fried-egg sandwiches to take with me, there'll be a gold guinea if it's here in four minutes. Mr Javitz, do you plan to stop again short of Thurso?”

“ Inverness.”

“I'll be with you as soon as the food is ready.” The two left, in opposite directions. I turned to Mycroft's tweed-suited agent. “Mr…?”

“MacDougall,” he provided.

“Yes. Did you question the waiter about… anything?”

“Just if those men had been here.”

“Not about their behaviour, their temper?”

“Mr Holmes didna' ask for that.”

“Well, I am asking. I need you to go back to the hotel with these photographs, and confirm that this was the older man, this the younger, and this the child-he has a fuller beard now, and she's a bit older. I also need you to ask about the behaviour of the men-were they amiable or angry, did one of them seem drunk or drugged? Did they seem to be working in harness, or was one of them in charge and the other fearful, or resentful, or… You see what I'm asking?”

“Ah do.”

“Can you then find a way to get me that information at either Inverness or Thurso?”

“Ah've a colleague in Inverness, although Ah dunno if Ah'll have the information by the time you reach there.”

“We shall probably be forced to spend the night at Inverness,” I told him. “Have your colleague there ask for us at the air field. And lacking Inverness, send a wire to the telegraph office in Thurso.”