Laurie King: The Language of Bees

There was an intensity, almost a violence, to these Stones that the Ring on the hill did not have. I had fancied them earlier as having been dropped by the gods, but that was too passive. Rather, they looked as if the gods had seized each sharp-edged slab to drive it savagely into the turf, pulling away a blood-smeared hand.

I caught myself: I'd been away from Holmes for too long, and my imagination was running away with me.

Still, when I looked at that stone altar, I shivered.

I returned to the coach and rode unprotesting to the island's second town of Stromness, but when the others were shepherded in the direction of a restaurant, I slipped away. I walked back the way we had come, taking my time with the four miles so it would be deep dusk for the last mile; three motor-cars passed; each time, I dropped into the grassy verge away from their head-lamps.

The sky was moonless; the hotel was a faint outline against a marginally lighter expanse of clouds. I crept towards the smell of smoke and pressed myself into the wall between the first two windows, trying to hear above the perpetual sough of the wind. In the absence of a stethoscope, I pulled the knife from my boot-sheath and rested its point against the stones, setting the handle in back of my ear. Nothing.

Moving down the wall to the next windows, I tried again, and again heard only the sounds of the night and the thud of my own heart. Around the corner, the wind was loud enough to obscure anything less than a shout, so I kept circling to the side facing away from the loch. Again I listened, again-wait. Not voices, but a rhythmic thump, thump, thump, that then quickened in pace for a dozen or so beats. Feet, coming down stairs?

I moved to the boarded-up back of the hotel, and there I glimpsed motion. A light flickered, danced, and steadied: a candle, half-visible through the boards. A figure moved around the room; I heard the sound of water flowing into a vessel, saw a flare of light as a gas cooker lit beneath the kettle. The shadowy figure pulled open drawers, coming out from the third one with a long knife. He took it to a shapeless lump on the table beside the tea-pot, and began sawing: bread.

All this was with his back to me, so he was nothing but an indistinct shape in a dim room. I considered moving around to the boarded-up door and seeing if I could find a crack, but before I could move, he turned, and the unruly hair and beard identified him: Damian Adler.

If prisoner he was, then a very blasé prisoner indeed, making tea and sandwiches as if living in a burnt-out building with a religious fanatic was the humdrum stuff of everyday Bohemian life.

He turned away to the tea-pot, and I pressed my face closer against the glass, trying to get some sense of the man. Did he, too, burn with the fanaticism of Testimony? Had this rumpled figure participated in the ritual murder of his wife? Was he about to join in the similar slaughter of an innocent step-daughter?

My nose hovered near the glass, my spectacles dangerously close to tapping its hard surface; without warning, a hand came down on my shoulder.

THE SCREAM THAT CAME FROM MY THROAT WAS instantly stifled, emerging as a strangled death-rattle. Before Damian could turn I was already gone, attacking my attacker.

My muscles responded automatically to the hand on my shoulder, but as instantly lost all strength at the hasty whisper, “Russell!”

“Holmes? Holmes! What the hell are you- Quick, away from the window.”

I pushed him away, to the corner and beyond, then eased my head back: A shadow pressed against the window, looking for the sound; after a minute, it retreated. I turned and punched Holmes on the chest.

“Damn it, Holmes, what are you doing here? You were on your way to Norway, for God's sake.”

“You did not receive my message?”

“No-how would I receive a message? I haven't heard a word from you since you left London.”

“Interesting. I'd have thought Mycroft…”

“Holmes.”

“I rethought my plans.”

“Obviously.”

“‘Many things having full reference to one consent, may work contrariously; as many arrows, loosed several ways, fly to one mark.’”

“Holmes!”

“Shakespeare, on bees. Henry the Fifth,” he added.

“Damn it, Holmes!”

“I decided you were right.”

“You decided-? Good heavens. Well, sweet bloody hell, I wish you'd let me know earlier, I nearly jumped through the window when you grabbed me.”

“That would have been unfortunate.”

I hit him again, for good measure, and felt somewhat better. Felt considerably better, in fact, with him at my side. I threw my arms around him and hugged him, hard, then stood back and explored his face with my hands.

“You haven't shaved in days,” I exclaimed, “and why are you so damp? You're freezing.”

“I have spent most of the past three days at sea,” he answered, which explained both the difficulty of shaving and the permeating moisture.

“We need to get you out of the cold.”

“That is of secondary importance.”

“They're brewing tea, they won't be going anywhere for a time. Let me just check-” I tip-toed back to the window, and glimpsed Damian unconcernedly pouring water into the tea-pot. I retrieved Holmes and led him towards the hotel's out-buildings.

These were securely locked, but the padlock on the biggest one would not have challenged a child. The interior stank of fish and contained a lot of nets, poles, gum boots, and paddles, but in a window-less corner room I found a store of elderly bed-clothes and paraphernalia for the guests, from water carafes to expensive fly-fishing rods. A wicker picnic basket contained a filled paraffin burner, a packet of tea leaves, and even a tin of slightly crumbled biscuits. When I lit the burner, a remarkably bearded husband came into view, tugging a blanket around his shoulders.

I was startled, then began to laugh. “You were the bearded Englishman!”

“I did not know you found facial hair so amusing,” he grumbled.

“Not on its own-but when I was asking after Damian and Brothers in Thurso, I described him as a ‘bearded Englishman.’ I didn't think to add, ‘of thirty.’ So when a man said he'd seen such a person and I told him the Englishman was my step-son, the poor fellow was taken aback, that my husband should be so…”

“Truly ancient.”

“I thought his astonishment odd, at the time, but I never considered… Holmes, what are you doing here?”

“When did you last hear from Mycroft?” he asked.

“Not directly since I left, but I had two telegrams in Thurso at midday today. They were from Mycroft's men, passing on the information that the blood found in the Kirkwall cathedral had been analysed and found to have been kept liquefied by chemicals, and that ashes had been found in the Ring of Brodgar, but then-”

“Those pieces of news were what turned me from my path.”

“I see. So perhaps you didn't hear that Mycroft's flat had been raided?”

“Lestrade?” Holmes' incredulity matched my own, when I had heard.

“So it would appear.” I told him what little I knew, but he could find no sense in Lestrade's imprudent assault on Mycroft's home, either.

“That does explain why I haven't heard further from my brother, and why he did not pass on to you my change in plans.”

“How far had you got?”

“Well into the North Sea, I fear, when one of the officers brought me a cable from Mycroft with the information about the blood in the cathedral.”