The Language of Bees (45 page)

I woke early the following morning, saw the vague pre-dawn shape of Mycroft’s guest room, and turned over again. Then I noticed how quiet it was. In London. Drat: Sunday again.

I was on my third cup of coffee when first Holmes, then his brother emerged. Mycroft was cheerful, or at least, as cheerful as Mycroft got, but Holmes shot a dark look at the windows in just the way I had earlier.

Sundays were most inconvenient, when it came to investigation.

Still, it was not a total loss. For one thing, at ten after eight, interrupting our toast and marmalade, a set of discreet knuckles brushed at the door. I went to answer, and found “Mr Jones,” a thick packet in his hand. He peered around me to check that Mycroft was in before he handed it over.

I took it to Mycroft. He tore it open, removing a note; as he read it, his face went enigmatic, and I braced myself for bad news.

“The pathologists for Fiona Cartwright and Albert Seaforth report that there was no indication of Veronal grains in the stomachs of the two victims.”

“They missed it,” I declared.

“Perhaps with Miss Cartwright, but the Seaforth examination appears to have been quite thorough. He was not given powdered Veronal to render him unconscious.”

He handed me the reports, which indicated that Fiona Cartwright had drunk a cup of tea at some point before she shot herself, and Albert Seaforth had taken a quantity of beer. I had to agree, if powdered Veronal had been there, the pathologist would have found it. Which meant that as far as the drugs Brother used, we were back to square one.

“Still,” I said, “he must have drugged Seaforth in some manner. I can’t see a man this size just sitting down and permitting his wrists to be slit.”

“Veronal comes in liquid form as well,” Holmes commented. “I
imagine he required the powdered form for Yolanda because he could stir it before-hand into the nut pâté. It would be a simple matter to dribble some from a bottle into a cup of tea in a busy café or a pint in a pub, but it would require sleight-of-hand to do so on an open hillside.”

A truly macabre image: a man casually handing a pâté-laden biscuit and glass of wine to the woman who had once been his wife, sitting on the grass with a picnic basket at their feet, the Long Man at their backs, and a waiting knife on his person.

Mycroft handed the remaining contents of the envelope to Holmes. They were photographs, both the reproductions of the Shanghai newsman’s shot of “Reverend Hayden,” and two rolls of film that Holmes had taken at the murder sites. He divided them into four piles, one for each site, removing those that showed the great monoliths of Stonehenge. We pored over them, separately and together, but other than illustrating some very attractive pieces of English countryside, they told us little.

“Lonely places to die, all of them,” I remarked.

“One supposes they were chosen, in part, for that reason,” Holmes replied.

“Well, if he’d wanted to commit his acts in a prehistoric site surrounded by people, he’d have been hard put to find one. Most of those that survive are in remote areas—central England may once have had as many standing stones and dolmens and such as Cornwall and Wales still do, but central England has more people needing stones for houses and walls.”

“Certainly I found these sites most inconveniently located.”

I did not mention that I had heard his sigh of relief when settling into bed the night before, hours after I’d gone to sleep.

I swallowed my last bite of toast and picked up one of the Shanghai reproductions, which still looked familiar, but still did not tell me why. “I’m going up to Oxford, I shall be back before dinner. Holmes, promise me you won’t vanish again, please?”

“I shall endeavour to be here by six o’clock tonight,” he announced, adding, “Not that I shall have much luck in the daylight hours.”

“You’re hunting down where our man got the other sedative?” It was not so much a shrewd guess as the voice of experience, for when it came to London’s underbelly, Holmes grasped any excuse to keep me clear of it.

“Drugs sellers tend not to take a Sunday holiday,” he said.

“I shall take your word for it. And, Mycroft, are you—”

“I shall begin enquiries as to the history and whereabouts of Reverend Brothers. But you, Mary, what are you doing in Oxford?”

I put on my hat and picked up my handbag. “It’s going to be a perfectly lovely day on the river. Perhaps I shall take a friend punting.”

I left my bemused menfolk staring at my back and wondering if I, too, had not gone just a bit mad.

Great Work (1):
The once-born seeks simple life
.
The twice-born seeks true understanding
.
The thrice-born, divine-man seeks to shape the world
,
and set volatile Spirit alight
.
Testimony, IV:1

I
N FACT, A BOAT ON THE RIVER WAS PRECISELY WHAT I had in mind, although it was more means than end.

My academic interests (sadly neglected over the past year) were in those areas of theological enquiry codified before the beginning of the Common Era—what is generally called the Old Testament, what those of us whose religious affiliations stretch back before Jesus of Nazareth know more precisely as the Hebrew Bible.

However, if my own interests are early, that does not mean I am unaware of the more contemporary, even futuristic branches of theology. I have friends who are experts in the Medieval Church; I have attended lectures on Nineteenth Century Religious Movements; I know people whose fingers are on the pulse of the wilder reaches of modern religion—some of those very wild indeed.

So when a question arose about Black Masses, I knew just where to go.

Clarissa Ledger was a Huxley—cousin of some sort to Thomas Henry, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” whose grandson Aldous looked to be the literary world’s latest
enfant terrible
. Clarissa Ledger was also C. H. Ledger, M.D., D. Phil, one-time Warden of St Hilda’s, author of fourteen books on religious topics ranging from Chinese Taoism to the Sufis of the Arabian peninsula, a woman of enormous curiosity, determination, physical courage (I had seen her initiation scars from a two-year sojourn in the mountains of East Africa), and mental agility, all of which persisted into her eighty-seventh year. To her immense irritation, her body’s infirmities meant that now, the world must come to her.

I found her at home, as usual on a Sunday, returned, fed, and rested after attending early Communion at one or another of the rich array of Oxford churches. This morning it had been St. Michael’s, which she pronounced “deliciously gloomy,” and delivered a wickedly perceptive and academically precise flaying of the rector’s homily, making me snort with unkind laughter. Her attendant granddaughter shook her head in disapproval, and served us cups of weak tea and tasteless biscuits before leaving us to our talk.

Professor Ledger gazed mournfully down at the liquid in her cup. “One of the medicine men pronounced on the evils of strong drink, which caused my family to unite against me and deny me coffee. I think they are hoping it may have a calming effect on my tongue as well.”

“I remember your coffee. Perhaps they are merely hoping to preserve the china from dissolving altogether.”

“I threatened to move bag and baggage back to the desert, but they did not take the threat seriously.” She looked up from her cup, and fixed me with a beady blue gaze. “If you receive a wire from me demanding assistance, know to bring your passport with you.”

I laughed—slightly uncomfortably, I admit, since it was exactly the sort of thing this old lady would do. “Or, I could bring you coffee from time to time.”

“That might be better, Mary. I’m not sure how my bones would care for sleeping on the ground now.”

We talked for a while about adventures, and I told her about my time in India earlier that year, and about the spring in Japan. I thought she might disapprove of the interference such investigations had on my academic career, but she saw past that to the riches of experience. Eventually, she asked me what brought me to see her.

“I need to know about the Black Mass.”

“Not here,” she said immediately. “If you want to talk about that, we need to be in the sunshine.”

I found myself smiling at her. “How would you feel about punting?”

Her wizened face lit up. “So long as I am not in charge of the pole, I should love it.”

So in the end, I did spend the day messing about in a boat. Her granddaughter and I trundled Professor Ledger around to St Hilda’s in a Bath chair, chatting all the while about northern India. Once there, it was no effort at all to transfer her slight weight onto one of the college’s boats, which had been draped with cushions and rugs to rival Cleopatra’s barge. The granddaughter added food and drink sufficient to an Arctic expedition, a large umbrella, and a parcel of smelling salts and aspirins. I stepped onto the stern, rolled up my sleeves, and pushed away upstream, the granddaughter’s voice still calling instructions from the bank.

A punt is twenty-four feet of low, blunt-ended boat propelled by dropping the end of a young tree into the river bottom, leaning on it with precision, then snapping the dripping pole up, hand over hand, until all sixteen feet of it are clear of the water. Several hundred of these repetitions go into a day’s entertainment. It is a skill that, once learnt, comes back naturally, although after a long hiatus, disused muscles protest.

We dawdled around the cricket grounds, past the Sunday throng sunning themselves at the Botanic Gardens, dodging amateur boats-men and the seal-like heads of boys swimming in the high, mud
coloured water. The sun-dappled contrast to last night’s rainy preoccupation with a series-murderer made me feel as if I were emerging from an opium dream into fresh air. From time to time, my elderly companion would engage the occupants of other boats—once when she sweetly but inexorably exchanged our six bottles of picnic lemonade for one bottle of champagne belonging to a group of Balliol students (they had several more) and later absently to stuff that now-empty bottle into the throat of an adjoining row-boat’s blaring gramophone—but for the most part, she talked. The subject matter caused nearby boats to linger for a moment, uncertain that they had overheard correctly, then hastily paddle or shove away when they had confirmed that yes, that extraordinary old lady had in fact just said such a thing.

“The Black Mass is, essentially, magic,” she began. “One might, of course, make the same accusation of the Church’s own ritual Mass, depending on how seriously one interprets the idea of Transubstantiation and the transformation of the communicants who partake of Christ’s body.” A pimpled boy at the oars ten feet away dropped his jaw at this statement, staring at Professor Ledger until the shouts of his passengers drew his attention to the upcoming collision. She went blithely on.

“No doubt, a high percentage of communicants over the centuries have taken the symbol as actual, and indeed, the Church itself encourages the belief that the Host is literally transformed from wheat flour into the body of Christ, and that when we take of His flesh, we are ourselves transformed into His flesh. Cannibals the world around would instantly agree, that eating a person imbues one with his essence. Speaking of which, did my granddaughter pack along those little meat pies I asked her for? Ah yes, there they are. Would you like one?”

I permitted the punt pole to drift behind us in the water, steering but not propelling, while I accepted one of the professor’s diminutive game pies. I took a bite.

“Grouse?” I asked.

“One of my grandsons takes a house in Scotland for the Twelfth every year,” she said.

“Very nice.” Also very small. I took the glass I had propped among the boards at my feet, washed the pie down with champagne, and resumed the pole.

Professor Ledger jammed a clean handkerchief into the neck of the bottle and tied a piece of string around it, then dropped it over the side to keep it cool but unsullied in the river water—a very practiced move, indeed. She then held up a morsel of the pie in her gnarled fingers, eyeing it with scientific detachment. “One must wonder, if one partakes of the essence of grouse, how does it manifest? Does one explode into violent flight, or begin to make odd noises, or start to reproduce spectacularly?” This time a courting couple on the bank overheard her; as we drifted past, they craned after us so far, I expected to hear two large splashes.