The Language of Bees (31 page)

Outside, the growing heat and the enervating stink and humidity
brought my spirits down another peg. My ransacking of Miss Dunworthy’s flat had been, in truth, only partly successful. I wanted that book so badly I had even considered snatching it from the desk and stealing it outright. Had I no alternative, I might have risked it.

But I had an alternative—although not during daylight hours.

Which reminded me of Holmes. I walked to the corner and whistled up a cab to take me to the Café Royal.

I arrived a quarter hour late, and found Holmes well on his way to a conquest of Bohemia.

The Sacrifice of Submission:
Be clear: Sacrifice is wholehearted, or it is nothing. It must cost dearly: Abraham offering his son; Woden hanging himself in a tree; the Son of Man accepting an agonising death. The greater the cost, the greater the energies freed for Transformation.

Sacrifice is the fame that sets quiescent Power alight,
and consumes the world in a crash and a billow of smoke,
and then in a whisper.
Testimony, II:8

D
OMINOES MIGHT NO LONGER BE A FIXTURE IN the Café Royal, but Holmes had summoned a set, and was playing against a man I recognised as one of the foremost bookmakers in London; Holmes was winning. I looked with care around the other tables, not wishing to run into Alice or her Ronnie, but fortunately they were absent.

There was no doubt the Café community knew that Yolanda Adler was dead and Damian was being, as they say, sought for questioning. From the thrilled tones on all sides, it was the foremost topic of conversation.

The same gentleman who had ushered me in on Saturday night now escorted me to where Holmes sat, murmuring my name under his breath as he left. I looked after him in surprise.

“I
thought
I recognised him the other night,” I said to Holmes, “but he gave no indication that he knew me.”

“Of course not,” Holmes said. “The staff of the Café Royal are nothing if not discreet.”

I ordered something non-alcoholic and waited with little patience for Holmes to finish beating the bookie at dominoes. An importunate newsman made it to the first tables before being pounced upon and thrown out. Finally, Holmes accepted two pounds from the loser, then handed them back with instructions to place them on something called Queen Bea to win the next time she ran. The two men shook hands, the tout taking his beer and his loud check suit away to a table of similarly dressed individuals across the room.

I leant forward over my glass and started in. “I just had a few minutes in Miss Dunworthy’s flat,” I began, only to notice that his attention was clearly elsewhere. He put down his glass and rose with a look of mingled resignation and mild amusement.

I swivelled on the red plush seat and saw a small, well-made woman approaching, dressed in gipsy-bright garments, dark eyes sparkling in olive skin. She had the panache of a Cockney, and I was not in the least surprised when she marched up and pumped Holmes’ hand; an onlooker might have thought them old friends.

“Mrs Loveday,” Holmes said. “Good to see you again. This is my wife, Mary Russell. Russell, this is Betty Loveday, also known as Betty May.”

I caught myself before I could say, “I’ve heard of you,” since the knowledge that one has been discussed is never a comfortable one. However, the little thing grinned as if I had voiced my admission, and I thought that she was, in fact, well accustomed to being a topic of conversation.

Holmes gave her a chair, ordered her a drink, and lit her cigarette before turning to me. “Mrs Loveday was in earlier, when I was talking to a mutual friend about Damian Adler. She seems to think that Mrs
Adler might have been murdered because of her interest in things spiritual.”

The small face and dark eyes fixed on me. “Do you know Aleister Crowley?”

“The spiritual ch—” I caught myself, and changed charlatan to “—leader? I’ve never met him personal—”

“Never, never go near him! He is a demon in human guise. I am risking my sanity merely entering this place, where he sometimes comes to gloat and to hunt for fresh victims.”

I looked at Holmes, startled, but he was busying himself with tobacco.

“Er,” I said.

“The Mystic killed my dear, loving husband Raoul. He tempted Raoul and hypnotised him and then led him into hell in Sicily,” she declared.

It was, judging by the tempo of her storytelling, a well-worn tale, and I wasn’t at all sure why Holmes had inflicted it on me. He smoked and drank and after a while caught the waiter’s eye and ordered three meals, as our Bohemian Ancient Mariner churned on with a recital of drugs and ill health and the terrible knowledge that her beautiful young undergraduate was being degraded and trampled into the mud of morality by the detestable Crowley.

Our meal arrived, and I gladly dug into it, nodding attentively as she wound through a detailed account of the Crowley monastery in Sicily, where sex and drugs were central to worship, and the only God was Crowley. There is little new under the sun, when it comes to religion—the only truly distasteful part of it was the presence of children, although it sounded as if they were kept away from the drugs and the orgies.

Short of walking out on her in mid-sentence, I could not think of a way to stop her. I concentrated on my meal, listening with half an ear to her sad and unsavoury story, until I felt a sharp tap of another shoe against my own. Looking up, I saw Holmes watching me; I obediently returned my attention to the woman.

“He hypnotised my Raoul, and took away his inner strength by
drugs, until Raoul had not enough will left to resist when The Mystic told him to commit murder.”

“Murder?” I repeated, startled.

“Yes, of a cat. She was a small and harmless cat, but she scratched The Mystic one day when he frightened her, and so he told Raoul that she was an evil spirit and had to be sacrificed. And Raoul had to do it.”

“Good heavens.”

“Yes! Raoul! Who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but would catch it and put it outside. They all had to gather around in their robes and chant and then Raoul had to take the knife, and they … they had to drink the blood, and my poor Raoul got sick and died from it, from drinking the poor cat’s blood.”

I just gaped at her, my meal, the surroundings, even Holmes forgotten. Gratified by my response, she continued the story, telling of the nightmare of having her husband die in her arms, of his burial, of her awful trip home …

My intention of questioning the Café’s habitués about Damian Adler shrivelled and died. I laid down my utensils, and told Holmes, “I believe I’ve heard all I need. I’ll wait for you outside.”

The heat bouncing off the pavement washed over me. For an instant, the image of the slaughtered cat merged in my mind with Yolanda, making me so queasy, I thought I might disgrace myself there on the street, but soon I felt the first buoying effects of anger, first at the woman May, for polluting the Café with her disgusting tale and spoiling a perfectly good meal, and then at Crowley, that such a man was allowed the freedom of England. When Holmes came out of the Café doors, I turned sharply on my heel and marched away in the direction of Oxford Circus. Soon, he was beside me, and before long my hand had gone through his arm.

“How soon before we can go back there?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s liable to be in residence for hours. Still, I’m glad you heard her story.”

“Why on earth would you want me to hear that dreadful tale?”

“I admit, I hadn’t considered its effects when delivered over a dining table. However, I thought it a worthy illumination of the extremes to be found in modern belief.”

“Crowley’s been called the wickedest man in England.”

“By himself, certainly.”

“You think it an act?”

“Not entirely. He’s like a petulant boy who searches out the most offensive phrases and ideas he can find, to prove his cleverness and his superiority. You know that his so-called church takes its motto from the Hellfire Club.”

“Fait ce que vouldras,”
I murmured. “Do as you like. Which, if you are rich enough, covers any sin and perversion you can invent.”

“Crowley is not wealthy, but he manages very well, in part because he is deeply charismatic, with eyes some find compelling. No doubt he has brains, and ability—he was at one time a highly competent mountaineer. At seventeen, he climbed Beachy Head to the Coast Guard outpost in under ten minutes. If one can believe his claim.”

“Have you any reason to think that Yolanda was involved with this Crowley nonsense?”

“Were he in the country, I should wish to take a closer look at him, but he has not been here for some time. I shouldn’t think Crowley is your group’s ‘Master.’”

I resolutely turned my mind from the image of slaughtered cats. “Did you discover anything of interest before I came?”

“Damian has not been seen there since he passed by on Friday morning.”

“Where can he be?” I wondered aloud.

“And you: Have you found anything?” he asked, ignoring my plaintive remark.

“Yes, a great deal.”

As we threaded our way along the once-noble colonnades of Regent Street, surrounded by the irritable shouts and klaxons of a city in summer, I told him what I had found in Miss Dunworthy’s flat: the
ledger for the Children of Lights; the receipts for the clothing Yolanda Adler had worn to her death; the overheard weeping.

“However, Holmes,” I said at the end of it, “I cannot envision the woman with a knife at Yolanda’s throat.”

“She lacks the independent spirit?”

“I should have said, she lacks that degree of madness.”

“It amounts to the same thing,” he said. “She is a follower.”

“Definitely. And of a man, not a woman.”

“The spinster true-believer is a species I have met before, generally in the rôle of victim. They beg to be fleeced of all they possess.”

“I shouldn’t say Miss Dunworthy possesses much.”

“Her wits, her energy, her palpable innocence and good will.”

“Those, yes. But, Holmes, about that book,
Testimony
. She had a copy, in a drawer she’s lined with velvet as a sort of shrine. I didn’t get much of a chance to look at it.”

“You wish to return to Damian’s house.”

“I need to see that book. You don’t suppose Lestrade took it?”

“I shouldn’t have thought so, although he will have left a presence there, on the chance Damian returns.”

“Several constables, do you think?”

“Unlikely. Shall we toss a coin for who creates the distraction this time?”

“You know—” I stopped, reconsidering what I was about to say. “You know where the book is, so it would make sense for you to fetch it. On the other hand, I should be interested to see what else the Adlers own in their collection.”

“Religion being your field, not mine,” Holmes noted.

“Not if you consider Crowley’s practise a religion. My expertise is about twenty-five hundred years out of date. But still, you’re right, I’m better suited than you.”

“Then I shall endeavour to draw the constable’s fire while you burgle the household of its exotic religious artefacts.”

“I shouldn’t think the constable on duty will be armed, Holmes.”

“Only with righteous indignation and a large stick.”

“Mycroft will stand bail, and I’ll bring dressings and arnica for your bruises,” I assured him.

At eleven-fifteen, we were in our positions on either side of the Adler house.

I was in the back. My soft soles made no noise going along the alley. I laid a hand on the gate latch, but found my first hitch: The gate was now padlocked from within.

I had, however, come armed for burglary, with a narrow-beamed torch, dark clothing, and a makeshift stile for climbing fences. I jammed the bottom edge of my length of timber into the soil, propping its upper end against the bricks of the wall. I got one foot onto the step this made, and hoisted myself onto the wall.

I sat there for a moment, grateful that some past owner hadn’t seen fit to set broken glass along the top, and surveyed the house. Much of it was dark, but one upstairs window had a dim glow, and the downstairs sitting room lights burned low behind drapes and around the boards nailed over its broken windows. The kitchen alone was brightly lit. I retrieved my stile by the length of rope tied around its middle, then dropped down into the garden, setting the board against the wall again, in case of a hasty departure.