The Language of Bees (50 page)

But when I had made the list, I then pulled out a small-scale map of the United Kingdom and studied that, chin on hands. After a while, I put on some proper clothes and went down to ask the building’s concierge for his copy of
Bradshaw’s
time-table. I came back up and passed through the room, unnoticed by nine urgently occupied men, to settle again at the desk.

An hour later, I saw Mycroft, still in his dressing-gown, go into his room. Holmes was speaking on the sitting room telephone, but a minute later, silence fell for the first time since he had called his brother out of sleep. I heard the click of his cigarette lighter, and the puffing noise of pillows being arranged on the divan.

I went out and found Holmes sitting before the fireplace, staring intently at the cold stones. While the water was boiling for coffee, I went through the sitting room and gathered half a dozen empty cups, piling them up for washing. Absently, I toasted bread, and had managed to scrape half their burnt substance into the sink when Mrs Cowper arrived for the day. She looked in astonishment at the signs of turmoil and dishevelment where normally she would find a cup and one sullied ash-tray, then snatched open the oven door, releasing yet another cloud of smoke. I hastily retreated with my own ravaged toast to where Holmes sat.

He looked startled when I held a cup under his nose, and the long ash from his forgotten cigarette dropped to the carpet. “Russell, there you are. Ah, coffee, good. Did you see your letter?”

The morning post lay on the table near the door. A cream-coloured envelope bore my name, in an antique and slightly shaky hand. I
carried it back to the divan and thumbed it open. It was from Professor Ledger, to whom I had given my address in London.

“Mycroft has arranged that all border crossings be watched,” Holmes was saying. “All international ferries and steamers will be searched, and all ports in northern Europe sent photographs of the two men, in case they’ve already crossed over. The same with aeroplanes—and harbour masters, in case he tries to hire a small boat. I fear we are closing the stable door on the horse’s tail, and that they left the country immediately you saw them drive away from the walled house, but perhaps we can at least track where he has broken out.”

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.

“Second. In Millicent Dunworthy’s desk was a folder pertaining to the Children of Lights. A ledger recorded costs—hiring the hall, building cabinets, candles, tea—but there were also other notes. One concerned the cost of placing an advertisement in various newspapers; there were several estate agent listings for halls for hire, larger than the room they’re using now. And there was a page in Miss Dunworthy’s handwriting with times and prices. The sort of thing you’d jot down without needing to write the details, because you knew what they referred to.

“I did not write those down, but to the best of my recollection, those times and prices match your concierge’s
Bradshaw’s
for trains from London to Scotland.”

I reached for the small map I’d been studying, then rejected it in
favour of a proper one from Mycroft’s map drawer. Elbowing aside the accumulated notes and books, I laid the map on the blotter, then found a yard-stick in the corner and a rusty protractor probably not used since Mycroft was a school-boy.

“Now, this part I’m not sure about, since I was working on a smaller scale, but let’s see how it transfers to this one.” I made a small X halfway up the left side of Britain. “Four sites in England, beginning with May Day, or Beltane, when a ram was slaughtered in a stone circle in Cumbria. The second, on the seventeenth of June—a full moon—was Fiona Cartwright, at the carving of a male figure in the hillside in Dorset.” I put a second
x
on the map, over Cerne Abbas, then a third in the upper right, the emptiness of the Yorkshire Downs. “On the twelfth of August, the night of the Perseids meteor shower, Albert Seaforth was killed at a stone circle in Yorkshire. And three days later, on the second night of the full moon, Yolanda Adler died at another male hill carving, in Sussex.” I put an
x
for Yolanda at the map’s lower right.

“The male victims—the ram and Albert Seaforth—were found at the circles: Long Meg and her Daughters, and the High Bridestones, both female places. The two women were found at the male figures.”

Four marks on a map; two pairs of balanced masculine-feminine energies. I laid the straight-edge across the marks and connected them, making a shape that was not quite trapezoidal, since the upper corners were slightly higher on the left.

“A quadrilateral polygon,” Holmes noted, his voice unimpressed.

But I was not finished. “I asked Mycroft about events occurring around full moons. Among those he recalled were a sheep with its throat savaged in a Neolithic tomb in Orkney, on the eighteenth of May, and an odd splash of blood on the altar of the cathedral in Kirkwall, also in Orkney, on July the sixteenth: Both of those dates were full moons.”

They watched as I laid the yard-stick along the two side lines of the shape and extended them up to form a long, narrow triangle stretching the entire length of Britain, and more.

The meeting point was in the sea north of the Orkney Islands. I
tapped my front teeth with the pencil, dissatisfied. “On the other map, they came together in the middle of the Orkney group. Here—”

I duplicated the lines on the smaller map, then set the point of the protractor at the triangle’s tip, describing a circle that encompassed the islands. When I took my hands away, this was the shape that remained: