The Language of Bees (35 page)

At the end of it, the line crackled for several seconds, alarming me that he had not heard most of my recitation, but then his voice came into my ear.

“Thank you, Russell, I shall see how many of those I can investigate over the next days, beginning with Stonehenge. I’ve been to see the agency in Poole, which is a fairly low-end affair, and will post their description of—”

The ear-piece went dead. I lingered at the table, shuffling papers and reading the newspaper, but eventually I gave up and asked Mrs Cowper to call me from the bath if he came through again. When I had dressed, I took my hat and bag and went to tell her that if Holmes rang, she should simply write down what he told her.

“Very well, ma’am,” she said. “Did you want me to tell him about the letter?”

“What letter is that?”

It had come while I was in the bath, thin paper and a post office pen, sent first to Sussex, then re-addressed to London in Mrs
Hudson’s writing. The franking showed it had been processed in London on Saturday morning. There was no return address and I did not recognise the hand, but I tore it open and read:

Friday evening, 15th

Dear Father,

I have received a message from Yolanda to say that she and Estelle are with friends in the country, and that she hopes I will join them there. I apologise for getting the wind up so and hauling you from your needed rest in Sussex. I ought to have known that it was merely Yolanda being her sweet and maddening self. I can only hope this reaches you before you have spent too much more energy on the paper chase I’ve laid you.

I will not apologise, however, for having got to know you somewhat during the past days, even under such trying circumstances. I had anticipated—this will be no surprise to you—that matters between us might be less congenial than in fact they turned out to be. When things settle somewhat, I shall be back into touch and we can begin afresh, with a proper meeting and introductions all around. I can only trust that the manner in which you “met” Yolanda will not overly influence your future relations with her.

D

P.S. You were right about my mother. She was an extraordinary woman, and she had a lovely laugh.

I sat down, and read it again.

Then I took off my hat, and read the letter a third time, slowly.

Written Friday, picked up from a letter box Saturday, arrived in Sussex late on Monday, back into the post there on Tuesday, and thus to London.

At last, I told myself, a piece of evidence supporting Damian’s innocence.

Or, was it? Could this letter be the work of a very clever villain, laying a false trail?

Cold facts and impartiality pointed out the two possibilities: One, on Friday afternoon Damian Adler was in London, writing a graceful apology to his father before reuniting with his wife and child. Or two, on Friday afternoon, an associate of Damian Adler’s had posted a previously written letter to lay the groundwork for an alibi.

If this letter was the work of a villain, then he was not only immensely clever (and Damian was certainly that) but highly practiced: Holmes himself could not have composed a more disarming note.

No, this proved nothing.

I looked at the silent telephone, cursing the poor timing of this missive’s arrival, then thought of how it might change my plans for the day.

Today was Wednesday, with its regular evening meeting marching through the weeks of Millicent Dunworthy’s desk-diary. If the police had not already shown Yolanda’s photograph to the railway personnel in Eastbourne, Polegate, and Seaford, asking if she had passed through on Friday, and with whom, then this letter made it ever more urgent that I do so.

However, travelling to three towns in Sussex would put me back in London too late to follow Miss Dunworthy to her meeting. I could not go south today.

It was on the edge of my tongue to add to my message for Holmes, but the letter was not the sort of thing I wished to convey through the offices of Mrs Cowper—neither the message that his son had written to say he was safe, nor the equally likely message that his son was in danger.

Instead, I put the letter back in its envelope, put my hat back on my head, and went out to hunt down a maid, a chemist, and a provider of high-class picnics.

The Adlers’ maid, Sally Blalock, told me little about the Adlers that I could not have guessed (were guessing permissible in the vicinity of Holmes). Yolanda was a woman of whims and peculiar habits
(“The things that family eats!” Sally declared. “Garlic, in everything! And Missus Adler doesn’t touch meat, can you imagine? How can a person survive on nuts and such?”) and even more peculiar interests, fond of the child but not permitting child-care to interfere with the important matters of her life. Nannies came and nannies went—three of them inside six months, lost through odd foods and peculiar attitudes concerning discipline and education—and only her husband’s firm insistence prevented Mrs Adler from dragging Estelle to Spiritualist meetings, interminable lectures from the Vedanta Society, and week-end spiritual courses in Yoga or Numerology or Egyptian Meditation, whatever that might be.

Not that her husband kept her from her interests—far from it. He encouraged her, merely requiring her to arrange for some appropriate care for Estelle before Yolanda went off to Cambridge or Surrey. For short meetings, that was generally the maid; for longer absences, it was often Damian himself.

“He doesn’t mind, I don’t mean to say that, he doesn’t at all, it’s just that he’s an artist, you know? An Important Artist, and how can a man be expected to make his paintings with a child underfoot? And ’Stella’s a lovely child, I don’t mean to say she isn’t, bright and usually friendly, but that little girl does have a mind of her own, and if she doesn’t want to sit quietly and play with her dollies, she will not be jollied along, which means that he doesn’t get too much work done when his wife’s away, as you might guess.”

Husband and wife seemed to be on friendly terms (“I don’t mean to say otherwise, if you see what I mean?”), although there was the occasional disagreement and some shouting, and from time to time the missus would pick something up and throw it at the wall—or at Damian—but he’d never respond in type. She’d never seen Damian hit or even threaten his wife, he just would look tired—“resigned, like, you know what I mean?”—and return to his studio.

Judging by how the young woman talked about her employers, Yolanda was unaccustomed to servants, and thus alternated between overbearing and over-solicitous. Damian was more natural—“ever so nice, like”—but drew clear lines, not permitting Sally to set foot into
his studio, for example, and remonstrating with her when she became distracted by a gentleman friend in the park one day, and let Estelle wander. Another man would have fired her outright, and she and I both knew it.

She had spoken with the police, and told me what she had already told them, which was essentially the same tale Damian had given us: Friday’s missing wife and Saturday’s discovered letter. Sally had not been to the house since the police had taken possession on Sunday, so she could not say if her employers had returned.

When I left, she asked if I thought she should be looking for another position. I could only say that I did not know.

The chemist was less forthcoming. He did not think he ought to talk about prescriptions he had filled for others, not without their permission. So I took out the letter I’d written that morning, in a hand that resembled the writing in Millicent Dunworthy’s desk, and repeated my tale: Aunt Millicent’s accident, upending the “Mixture” into a basin of soapy water; her need for the prescription before she left with the church group to Bognor tomorrow, but her inability to get free from work; hence the letter.

If he had her telephone number at work, I should have to make a quick escape, but he did not, and clearly, he did not know her handwriting well enough to tell it from mine.

Grumbling, he filled and labelled a bottle, took my money, and declared that this would not be permitted again.

Nodding meekly, I committed a criminal act in his ledger and left. On the street, I took the box of cachets from the brown paper wrapper: Veronal, a powerful barbiturate. There had been none in her medicine cabinet; however, ten or fifteen grains of this would be just the thing to knock out a woman, preparatory to murder.

The hardest challenge would be Fortnum and Mason, where the customer is king and information is never freely bandied. If I could not
prise what I needed out of them, I should have to pass the task to a certain friend, whose title would have the staff scraping the floor in their eagerness to serve. I wanted to avoid bringing him in, if I could manage on my own—the fewer who knew of the tie between Holmes and The Addler, the better, and this particular amateur sleuth would put the whole picture together in a flash.

So I presented myself before the desk where picnic baskets might be ordered, and began talking in my most breathless and aristocratic manner.

“There’s this garden party, early next month, you see? And we could have the usual fizz and caviar, but really, where’s the fun in that?” I blinked my wide blue eyes, and the gentleman could only agree. “So a friend, well, I suppose the secretary of a friend, but what does that matter? This friend’s secretary—her name is Millicent, Millicent Dunworthy, isn’t that extraordinary—she happened to order a picnic basket and then the two people it was originally intended for, something came up, who knows, and so she had the basket out on the desk, you see, for people to help themselves, because why let good food spoil? And I’d been out all night with Poppy—you know Poppy, you help with all her parties—and we stopped off to see my friend on the way home, and here was this open basket and I was famished, absolutely raving famished, so I had this little crusty thingmabob that was really quite, quite nice, and later when I was thinking about this garden party I’m doing I said to myself, Ivy—that’s my name, you see-Ivy, that crusty whatsit would be just the thing. So I doddled along to talk to you about the chance of finding out what that thingmabob was, and can we maybe order two hundred or so of them? And the rest of the baskets, of course, one for each. And if you could put some nice things like peaches and a really good fizz and perhaps quails’ eggs or something?”

I blinked, waiting for him to pick his way through the fusillade of words, but he caught the idea of two hundred very expensive picnic baskets the moment it flew past him, and he smiled.

He brought out the order book, located the name Dunworthy on
the Monday previous, and produced a brochure which would tell me precisely what had been in the basket:
The Vegetarian Epicure
, it was called.

My eye ran down the description, searching for anything that might qualify as the desired morsel, when near the bottom it caught on an item that made me blink.

“Good heavens,” I said involuntarily.

“Pardon?”

“Oh, nothing, I just…” I pulled myself together and manufactured a frown. “You know, it wasn’t Monday I saw the basket and tasted the crusty widgets, I’m sure it wasn’t.”

“No, madam, it was probably on Friday. The order was made on the Monday, but the lady specified that it would be picked up by her brother on the Friday.”

I looked up, startled. “Her brother?”

“Well, I assumed so. The name was Dunworthy. Perhaps I was mistaken. I thought she was considerably older than he, but then of course—”

“Oh, her brother, yes. Tall young fellow, long hair—an artistic type?”

“No,” he said slowly. “He was in his early forties, with ordinary hair. Not at all what I should call ‘artistic’ He had a scar near his eye,” he volunteered, laying a finger next to his left eye.

“Oh,
him,”
I said. “Her
other
brother. I always forget about him, I’ve only met him the once. Did he have his wife with him? Pretty little Chinese woman?”

“I didn’t see anyone answering that description. Might I—”

But before he could ask me why I was so interested in the brothers of a friend’s secretary, I said, “But if they had
that
basket, then
what
could it have been I tasted?”

He perused the list of contents before asking tentatively if it might not have been the strawberry tartlets, although clearly he’d been looking for something rather more exotic that had attracted my palate.

“Oh, exactly! You clever man, it must have been those! Thank you
for reading my mind, you have
saved
my entire party from the touch of the bourgeois. Shall I have my secretary telephone to you with the details? Yes, that’s what I’ll do, she’s so much better than I, and now that I know what it was that put you in mind …” To his confusion, I was still talking as I went out of the door, the brochure firmly in hand.

He might have been even more confused had he seen me come to a halt on the street outside, to look again at the brochure. Yes, I had read it aright: Included with the nut pâté and three flavours of cheese for afters was a packet of almond-and-oat biscuits, from Italy.

A biscuit packet that currently lay on the work-table in Holmes’ laboratory in Sussex, awaiting his attentions.

So: A clean-cut man in his forties, with a scar beside his left eye, whose name was almost certainly not Dunworthy. Not only did this description in no way fit Damian Adler, it sounded like the man seen walking with Damian up Regent Street, the last time Damian was seen.

Some day, I reflected, we should have to invent a means of actually locating a person based on a finger-print, as photographs were circulated to police departments now. Until that day, the prints a villain left behind were useful primarily in court, a nail of absolute proof in his coffin.

The biscuit wrapper would have to wait in Sussex, until we had a print to compare to it.