The God of the Hive (7 page)

Green, stretching out in all directions, unbroken and reaching up to pull us to pieces.

Oh, dear.

Javitz was no doubt thinking the same thing, only with profanity. I could see his jaws moving as he cursed the timing of our forced descent, then he pulled himself all the way upright and I caught my first glimpse of his injury: The clothing over the left side of his body, waist to knee, was stained with blood; the white silk scarf he had used as a tourniquet on his upper thigh ranged from dark brown to fresh red.

The flapping noise grew louder, while Javitz struggled to counteract the effects of an increasingly large metallic sail under our feet.

A giant hand laid hold of us and tugged, and the very framework around us began to twist: In moments, the aeroplane would be ripped to pieces.

Javitz turned and shouted, loud enough for me to hear, “Brace yourself!”

There was little bracing I could do, rattling around in my miniature glass house as I was. I threw my arms and body around Estelle, and told her in a voice that I hoped was firm and comforting that we were going to land but it would be a big bump so she was to stay curled up and not be frightened—but my words were cut short as the giant hand jerked us with a crack felt in the bones. Javitz cut the fuel. For a moment, it
was silent enough to hear my voice reciting Hebrew. Then the world exploded in a racket of tearing metal and crackling trees, the screams of three human voices, and an unbelievable confusion of sound and pain and turmoil as we tumbled end over end and fell crying into the dark.

Chapter 15

A
crying seagull woke Damian. His eyes flared open, then squeezed shut against the pain. When he had himself under control, he looked first at his father, who had sat all night on a stool between the bunks, then towards the lump of bed-clothes opposite that was the kidnapped doctor.

Damian licked his dry lips; instantly, Holmes was holding a mug of water for him to drink. When his father had lowered his head to the pillow, the young man murmured, “Where are we?”

“Halfway to Holland, more or less.”

“Holland? Why on earth—?”

“It would appear that is where the wind and waves care to take us.”

“But we can’t go to Holland. What about this poor woman?”

“She, in fact, cast the deciding vote. Having treated you, she was loath to watch her work go for naught by permitting the toss of the boat to reopen your wounds.” What the doctor had said was,
As the people in Wick seem disinclined to offer me employment, I may as well stay with the one patient who will have me
. A sentiment that Holmes not only appreciated as a benefit to the lad in the bunk, but agreed with. Dr Henning had proved a surprisingly robust personality; he wondered what Russell would make of her.

Damian closed his eyes again, this time in despair rather than pain.
“First a boat, then a doctor. I should have stayed in Orkney and let myself be arrested.”

An infinitesimal twitch from the bed-clothes betrayed the doctor’s reaction to that last word.

“If we are both in gaol,” Holmes said in a firm voice, “there will be no-one to prove your innocence. As soon as I assemble the evidence, we shall present it, and ourselves, to the police. Until then, subjecting you to incarceration will serve no end. And I believe we now must bring Dr Henning into our confidence.”

Without the slightest chagrin, the woman threw off the covers and sat up, blinking at the two men. “I’d like a cup of tea before we launch into explanations,” she said to Holmes, and to Damian, “How are you feeling?”

Holmes moved over to the stove while the other two concerned themselves with the sensations beneath the gauze. The doctor decided, as Holmes had earlier, that healing was under way, and no infection had begun.

He distributed the mugs, then pulled on a pair of stinking oilskins and a coat, stirred several spoons of sugar into a third mug of tea, and managed to get up the companionway without pouring it over himself.

The young fisherman’s face was gaunt with fatigue and his fingers were clumsy as they stripped off their gloves and wrapped around the mug. Holmes laid a hand on the wheel and, as the beverage scalded a path down the fisherman’s throat, said, “Your sense of responsibility is admirable, but you have been on deck for twenty-four hours, and you would better serve us all if you had some sleep. I am perfectly competent to keep us on a straight course for two or three hours.”

Gordon said nothing, just savoured the hot, sweet drink while studying Holmes’ hands, the sails, the sea. When the cup was empty, he said, “If anything changes—anything at all—you’ll wake me?”

“I imagine any slight change will rouse you before I can call, but yes. If so much as a bird lands on the deck, I’ll shout you up.”

Without another word, Gordon walked across to the hatch, looking half-asleep already as his feet hit the companionway. When his head had disappeared, Holmes felt as if he were drawing breath for the first time in thirty-six hours.

It was, in truth, precisely the sort of undemanding distraction he required
at this point: his eyes occupied with the shapes and heading of other vessels on the North Sea water while his mind took the Brothers case from the shelf to examine it. He even managed to get a pipe going, to assist his meditations.

The need to spirit Damian away had taken priority—although the urgency of an investigation did tend to lag when its main actor died—but he hoped that Russell had lingered in the burnt-out hotel where Brothers had gone to ground long enough to unearth its secrets.

Not that she would have stayed until daylight: The police were sure to arrive there, and Russell would choose the child’s safety and freedom over any gathering of evidence. She would have done the best search she could by candle-light, then slipped away—removing or destroying first anything that might lead back to Damian.

But competent as Russell was, it remained a frustration to walk away from a case before its conclusion. True, they’d had no sign that Brothers’ acolytes had either participated in or were poised to resume their master’s crimes, but there was an itch at the back of his mind, the feeling that some piece of pattern did not quite match the others. Although even now, with the first leisure he’d had in days, he could not decide where that ill-fitting piece lay.

Perhaps, Holmes suggested to the machine in his mind that chewed up information and spat out hypotheses, the sensation of an ill fit was due not to something missing, but to the very nature of the man at its centre? Everything about Brothers—ideas, appetites, impulses, reason—was unbalanced; why should that not taint the case itself? Plus, there was no doubt that the speed of events over recent days made it impossible for data to catch him up. That alone made the case seem incomplete.

It was vexing, being unable to reach Russell, not even knowing how long it would be before he could reach her. Or Mycroft, for that matter.

Which raised a further source of aggravation: Mycroft. If the gaps in the Brothers case made for a mental itch, what he knew of Mycroft’s situation brought on the hives: Mycroft Holmes, taken in for questioning by Scotland Yard? Lestrade might as easily interrogate the king.

He had just knocked out his second pipe-load into the sea when a head of tousled copper hair appeared from the open hatch. The quizzical
expression on the doctor’s face indicated that she and Damian had been talking, and that his son had kept little back.

“Sherlock Holmes?” The rising tone was not quite incredulity, but made it clear that she was questioning her patient’s clarity of mind, if not his outright sanity.

“Madam,” Holmes replied with a tip of the head, and resumed his study of the eastern horizon.

“I’m supposed to believe that?”

“A lady physician might be inclined towards belief in many impossible things.”

“That’s scarcely on the same level.”

He sighed. “You wish me to prove myself. I might show you identification, but papers can be forged. And I might recite the details of my professional life, but you would protest that I had merely read Dr Doyle’s fanciful tales in the
Strand
. Shall I then put on a demonstration, trot out my own patented brand of common sense? Shall I tell you that I know from your voice that you were born in Kirkcaldy and educated in Nottingham? That your father was a doctor who has either died or become incapacitated for work, freeing you to adopt his bag when you qualified? That the books and equipment you added to the somewhat antiquated surgery in Wick assured me that your skills were both considerable and up-to-date? That I knew you also had nursing experience because of the distinctive scarring on your fingers, which one sees on a person who has been in continuous proximity to infected wounds? That your shoes and your haircut are approximately the same age, which tells me you have been in Wick less than four weeks? That you wore a ring on your left hand for some years, and took it off around the time you started medical school? That—”

“All right! Stop!” She studied her left hand for a minute, comparing it to her right, then thrust both into her pockets. “You are often doubted, as to your identity?”

“One tends to use pseudonyms.”

“And … your son. Although his name is Adler.”

“His mother thought it best.”

She pulled her coat more tightly around her, and considered the
decking. “My father died in the 1919 epidemic. And it was an engagement ring—the one I took off. When my fiancé died, it was all I had of him. I wore it until 1922.”

Holmes said nothing.

“Mr Adler’s wife was very pretty. To judge by his drawing of her, that is.”

“So I understand,” Holmes agreed, although she’d not been particularly lovely when he saw her in the mortuary, the plucky little idiot whose infatuation with a lunatic had landed them all in their current predicament—but that was neither charitable nor pertinent.

“He tells me she was murdered.”

“Two weeks ago. Damian only learnt of it yesterday. Her name was Yolanda, a Chinese woman from Shanghai. I never met her in life, but her first husband, from whom she had parted before she met Damian, turned out to be a madman convinced that human sacrifice performed at key places and auspicious times would transfer the psychic energies of his victims into him. He killed Yolanda and at least three other innocents. It was his bullet you retrieved.”

“‘Psychic energies’?” He felt her gaze boring against the side of his head. “You’re joking.”

“Would that I were.”

“He planned to make himself into …”

“A sort of Gnostic
Übermensch
, I suppose.”

Either she understood the reference to Nietzsche, or she was too distracted to hear it. “And the police find this difficult to believe?”

He glanced at her, surprised not by sarcasm, but by the lack of it. Most people of his acquaintance would cavil at the reasoning of the mad: Dr Henning spurned the distraction to grasp the essentials. Admirable woman.

“They may reach the same conclusion eventually; however, I was disinclined to hand Damian over to them until they did so. As I said, his reaction to being enclosed is extreme.”

“What do you intend to do?”

“Were the wind less assertive, I’d have put in along the coast of England, found a safe haven for Damian, and made my way to London. Now, I shall have to shelter him in Europe and make a more circuitous way home.”

She spotted a sturdy basket that had come to rest beside the capstan, and upended it, sitting with her face turned towards the long-vanished Scotland. “He says he’s only known you a short while.”

“We met briefly in the summer of 1919. After that, he went to Shanghai. I lost sight of him until he appeared on my terrace in Sussex, nineteen days ago.”

“And in that time his wife died at the hands of a crackpot, and you solved the case, then uncovered several other deaths, and eventually tracked the murderer to far distant Orkney, where Mr Adler was wounded. And this mad religious leader was killed.”

“An adequate précis, yes.”

“You killed the man?”

“A gun went off; he died.”

“And yet you say that you have committed no crime.”

“Homicide in defence of self or family is not a crime. My son saved my life.”

She blinked, not having expected that her patient was the man with the gun. After a minute, she asked, “The man was about to kill you?”

“Damian was his intended sacrifice, to coincide with yesterday’s solar eclipse over the sixty-fifth latitude. I intervened; there was a struggle.”

“Well,” she said. “You’ve certainly had a busy three weeks.”

“My wife did much of the work.”

“Your wife.” The flat syllables indicated that Damian had neglected this part of the tale.

“She read theology at Oxford.”

“Of course she did.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing. How do you intend to get the police to listen to you? Or will Mr Adler be forever in hiding?”

“That would not do at all. I have resources, and they will listen. However, I need to reach them first, without attracting police attention.”

“Hmm. And may I ask, where is Mr Adler’s daughter? He’d got as far as the confrontation on Friday night before exhaustion took him.”

“The child is with my wife.”

“Where?”

“Orkney, when last I saw them.”

“Mrs Holmes was on Orkney as well?”

“She goes by the name Russell, but yes, she was there. Damian’s memories of the incident at the Stones may be uncertain, but she and I were both present. However, with Damian injured, we could not risk having the child to slow us down. So we split up, and Russell and Estelle remained behind.”

“You left your wife and a child to explain to the police about a dead madman?”

“I should be astonished if Russell was still there when the police arrived.”

“She, too, is evading the police?”

“Dr Henning, you heard me say that all three of us have warrants out for our arrest, from before this. And all three of those warrants are unjustified. I say again, you will come to no harm, apart from the inconvenience of this voyage. For which I sincerely apologise.”