The Language of Bees (29 page)

W
E TOOK OUR INNOCENT FACES TO NEW SCOTLAND Yard bright and early on Monday morning, and were only kept cooling our heels for half an hour before Lestrade came to lead us into his office.

The newspaper headlines that morning had read:
Third Outrage in Prehistoric Monuments
, with details of Yolanda’s death, but not yet her name.

“Mr Holmes,” Lestrade said, his joviality forced, but still a relief: He did not suspect that there might be a link between our presence and the young woman whose search for Yolanda Adler on Saturday had led to his presence on Burton Place last night. “Sorry to have missed you yesterday, I was told you had been by. Did you get the message I left with your brother?”

“I did, although not until late. Has the dead woman in fact been identified?”

“Oh yes,” he said over his shoulder, “there’s no doubt. Her husband is missing, and their child.”

“A child as well? How unfortunate. Do you expect to find all three dead?”

“I expect to find that he killed her and fled the country with the child. He’s foreign, you know—or anyway, only English on paper.”

“Of course, it is so often the husband, particularly with foreigners. I don’t suppose you have such a thing as a motive?”

“He’s an artist, Mr Holmes, a dyed-in-the-wool Bohemian. Probably a Bolshevik as well, most of them are.”

“Yes, that certainly explains it. You are doing an autopsy?”

“Later today, yes, although there’s little question as to the cause of death.” We’d reached his office; he held the door.

“So I understand, however, the possibility of drugs …?”

“Was she involved in drugs?”

“How should I know that?” Holmes said in surprise. “I don’t even know who she is, merely that she was found near the Long Man.”

“She doesn’t look much like a drugs user.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of sleeping-tablets.”

Lestrade’s suspicion faded. “But even if we find that she was up to her pretty eyebrows in cocaine, it makes no difference in the investigation.”

“It might point you to suspects other than the husband,” I interjected before Holmes could bristle.

“Ah, Mrs—er, Miss Russell, you’re looking well. I see you have joined the smart set. The hair-cut,” he explained.

“Chief Inspector Lestrade,” I replied, holding out my hand.

“Er, do sit down. Now, Mr Holmes, explain again your interest in this woman?”

“In fact, it is the pattern I am investigating.”

“Yes, I wondered if that might not be the case. The ‘pattern’ is a figment of a newsman’s imagination. Evidence suggests that the suicide at Cerne Abbas was just that, and Stonehenge was random violence
among a group of religious nut-cases. Next you know, they’ll be mounting a campaign to set guards over that white horse up in Oxfordshire and along the length of Hadrian’s Wall. Anything to sell papers.”

“And yet I see you have the two files out on your desk. Shall I look them over, and let you know if anything in particular catches my eye?”

From Lestrade’s expression, he was remembering Holmes’ habit of taking over his investigations, if not his life. No doubt he would have preferred us to stay in America.

“I don’t know that I should permit that,” he began.

Holmes studied his finger-nails. “I can, if you wish, summon recommendations from your chief, or the Lord Mayor, or the Prime Minister, or even—”

The Chief Inspector gave a sigh of resignation. “That won’t be necessary, Mr Holmes. I need not remind you not to remove anything from either of these files, and not to speak of the cases to others.”

“Of course. But, may I ask, was there in fact a ram found, in Cumbria?”

We both stared at him. “A
ram?”
Lestrade demanded.

“Yes, there was a—”

“You think Scotland Yard investigates dead
livestock
?”

“Only if there is—”

“Mr Holmes, I have never lived outside of London, but even I know that sheep die sometimes, and that foxes and dogs eat them. No ram was slaughtered.” Lestrade’s chair squealed back. “Now, if you will excuse me, I have an investigation to run, and I’d like to keep one step ahead of the papers. Artists,” he declared, shaking his head as he put on his hat. “Interviewing artists makes me bilious.”

Rather to my surprise, he did not plant a uniformed constable over us, to ensure that we did no mischief to his office.

“How long before he suspects, do you suppose?” I asked Holmes in a low voice.

“That you and I were both looking for Yolanda Adler long before she died? He will know by the time he has interviewed the neighbours.”

“What do you suggest we tell him then?”

“I suggest we keep out of his way until he is no longer interested in the question,” he replied, and opened the older, thicker file. But first, I had to know:

“What was that about a ram, Holmes?”

“Found last spring, at a stone circle in Cumbria called Long Meg and her Daughters.”

“Was that in the paper this morning? I didn’t see it.”

“You did not read the letters.”

“Oh, Holmes, not another outraged farmer?”

He did not answer me. There were times I had some sympathy for Lestrade’s opinion of Holmes’ techniques. I pulled towards me the crisp, new folder labelled with the name of Yolanda Adler, and gingerly opened the cover.

I was grateful that it did not yet contain the details or photographs of the autopsy, although it did have a sheaf of photographs from the hillside where she had been found. Her frock was indeed beyond repair, and I supposed that if I were faced with that garment, I might be tempted to rid myself of its unfortunate juxtaposition of sprigged lawn and dried gore.

When I had finished with the thin offering, Holmes pushed across the section of the Fiona Cartwright file that he had read. I picked up the pages with interest.

Fiona Cartwright was a forty-two-year-old, unmarried secretary and type-writer, originally from Manchester. She had moved to Poole shortly after the War when her employer, Fast Shipping, opened a branch there. When the owner, Gordon Fast, died in 1921, the business was sold and Miss Cartwright was replaced by a younger woman.

Since then, she had worked at a series of secretarial jobs, and the previous summer had registered with an employment agency that had placed her in eight temporary positions during the autumn and winter months. The agency had arranged an appointment for Miss Cartwright with a new client, Mr Henry Smythe, on Monday, 16 June, but never heard back from Miss Cartwright to say whether or not she had taken the position.

Mr Smythe was a salesman travelling in paper goods, from “somewhere in the north” (according to the agency), who telephoned from an hotel in Poole requesting secretarial assistance for the two or three days he was in town, specifying (again, the agency) “a lady who was not too young and flighty.”

Mr Smythe had not been heard from again: A note at the bottom, dated that morning, indicated that Lestrade had ordered an enquiry into Smythe’s company and his whereabouts.

Miss Cartwright’s brother, still living in Manchester, described his sister as “down” over the lack of permanent employment and “troubled” by her dull future, although very recently she’d written a rather odd letter home about the importance of heavenly influence on human life. “She liked funny old religious things,” he said. “I thought she meant that the tides of fate were turning, and that she’d get a job soon.”

Reading between the lines, even Fiona Cartwright’s brother believed it was a suicide.

The description of the autopsy was cursory, spending less time on describing the path of the single bullet than it did the presence of the weapon beside her, and agreeing that the verdict should be suicide. Stomach contents were dismissed as “normal,” whatever that meant, and the state of her epidermis was similarly categorised with the incongruous phrase “no signs of violence.” There was, however, one oddity: She had a deep cut in the palm of her left hand, unbandaged and fresh.

Holmes flipped over the covers of Yolanda Adler’s file.

“What do you make of that cut on Fiona Cartwright’s hand?” I asked him.

“The coroner seems to think she received it in a fall climbing to the place where she died. With no photographs, no details of the scene, not even the question of whether her clothes were blood-stained from the cut, all we can conclude about her death is that the coroner is incompetent. Shall we go?”

I put the Cartwright file together, then glanced at my watch. “I’d like to see about the shoes Yolanda wore, before Lestrade gets around to it. The shop should be open.”

“And I must compose an anonymous letter to Damian’s lawyer in Paris, advising him that the police may call. Shall we meet back at my brother’s?”

“How about the Café Royal instead?”

He raised his eyebrows. “We shall have our passports stamped for Bohemia. At one o’clock, then, Russell.”

On foot and by sardine-tin omnibus, my steps took me out of Westminster and past the Palace to the Brompton Road again, although not as far down as the meeting room for the Children of Lights.

Harrods is a meeting place for another kind of worship, that of excess in all its glory. Under the stoutest of circumstances, I can tolerate twenty minutes inside its decorative doors before my fingers begin to twitch and my eyes scan the endless halls for an exit. But then, I am not a person who considers browsing through shops a recreational activity.

Even with a specific objective in mind—ladies’ shoes—it did not prove simple. Did I wish walking shoes, riding boots, ballet flats, shoes for the hunt, shoes for tennis—ah, heeled dress shoes. Daytime, evening wear, or for Court?

I eventually tracked down the department featuring the Cardiff designer: There sat the shoe, glossy and unsullied by grass or bloodstains, the small, pointless bow at the back a bit of frippery that should have looked pathetic but instead struck me as oddly brave. One of the VAD nurses I knew during the War had painted her lips with care each morning before stepping onto the ward, to cheer up the boys, she said. This shoe in my hand had the same attitude.

“A lovely shoe, that,” said a voice at my shoulder.

“Not, however, for me,” I said.

“It is also available in a patent black.”

I put the shoe down and turned to give the woman a smile. I could see from her encouraging expression that she had already glanced at my feet, and knew that the only way I could be wearing this shoe would be if I ordered a pair made to fit.

Although, this being Harrods, she could probably arrange that as well.

It would almost be worth it, to see Holmes’ expression.

“Actually,” I said, “I am trying to find a person who purchased just this shoe recently. Is there someone who would be able to help me?”

She reached out to shift the display model, rectifying my deliberately careless placement of the shoe against its mate. The proprietary gesture confirmed what I suspected: This woman
was
this department.

“I rather doubt that would be possible,” she answered.

“Let me explain. My sister is two years older than I, and received all the family elegance and little of its common sense. This spring, while I was out of the country, she fell in with a man of dubious background. Very good looking, you understand, and enormously plausible, but not, shall we say, out for my sister’s best interests. Lally—that’s what we call her, her name’s Yolanda—always wants to believe the best of a person, and I’ve always been around to keep her from doing anything too stupid, until now.

“I must speak with her, but this man denies that she is with him. I even managed to track them to an hotel in Paris this past week, but they had just left. No doubt they caught wind of my search. The only trace of them was a shoe under the edge of the bed, just one shoe. This shoe.”

The woman had gone from mistrust to the edge of enthrallment—still uncertain, but wanting to believe, wanting the romance of one of her shoes in the midst of a tale of misplaced love and sororal fealty. One thing might bring her onto my side.

I stretched out a finger and touched the little bow. “However, I have to say, the shoe we found wasn’t quite as pretty as this one. It looked as if Lally’d been made to walk through puddles in it.”

“But she’s only had the shoes for a week,” she exclaimed.

I kept all trace of triumph from my face. “Yes, I thought they looked new. A week, you say?”

“Almost to the hour. Monday last, they were. One of my first sales of the day. I notice those early sales,” she confided. “I find the weeks tend to continue as they begin.”

“Did she come in herself, to buy them?”

“I’m afraid not,” the woman answered, clearly much taken with the scenario of a foolish girl whose love led to near-imprisonment.

“Was it him, then? Tall, thin?”

But she was shaking her head before I started the second sentence—and with a jolt I realised that I felt relief at her denial, because my vague description could also be a specific description of Damian. “Those shoes were purchased by a woman.”

“Yes? Not an Oriental woman, though?” I asked, holding my breath.