The Language of Bees (47 page)

My hand completed the gesture and returned the book to the carry-bag. I gave him my best smile, and said, “Sir, you don’t know how close you came to being kissed.”

He was imperturbable. “Next time you have a print job, madam, just keep us in mind.”

A casual stroll past Tolliver’s bindery told me that this establishment did not do much of its business printing menus and playbills. Two small windows faced the street. One of them had neat black-and-gilt letters across it:

Tolliver
BOOKS BOUND

The other window looked more like the display of a jeweller than a printer, with two small volumes nestled into folds of deep green velvet. One book stood, showing a cover of bleached deerskin that invited touch. The leather was graced with a delicate vine curling around letters that said, with an incongruous lack of originality, ALBUM. The vine had three blue-green fruits, round turquoise beads set into the embossing.

The other book lay open, and showed a page from what looked like the diary of a very gifted amateur watercolourist, with a shadowy sketch of a Venice canal surrounded by handwritten commentary.

I had found the shop twenty minutes earlier, passing on the opposite side of the busy street, then making a circle around its block of shops and flats. Unfortunately, there was no access to the back of the shop, as there might have been for a printer that used greater quantities of ink and paper. If I wanted to break in, I should have to do so through the front door.

I tore my gaze away from the pair of books and went through that front door now. The air bore a rich amalgam of expensive paper, leather, ink, machine oil, and dye-stuffs, with a trace of cigar smoke underneath. A bell rang, somewhere in the back, but the man himself was already there, bent and balding although he moved like a man in his thirties. He greeted me with an encouraging smile.

I laid my prepared tale before him: aged uncle with an interesting life; upcoming birthday; big family; multiple copies needed of his
round-the-world journal. Many colour pages: Could Mr Tolliver help?

Mr Tolliver could help.

I then drew out the copy of
Testimony
and placed it on the counter. “I rather liked what you did with the sketches in this, and the paper—what’s wrong?”

He had taken an almost imperceptible step away from the book; his smile had disappeared. “Is this your book?” he asked.

“No, I borrowed it from a friend.” His expression remained closed, so I changed my answer. “Well, not so much a friend, just someone I know.” Still no response. “And not so much borrowed. I sort of took it.”

“You
stole
this?”

An effective witness interview is dependent on tiny hints and clues, reading from words, gestures, and the shift of muscles beneath skin, just what the person is thinking, and what he wants to hear. It happens so swiftly it seems intuitive, although in fact it is simply fast. Here, Tolliver was disapproving of the theft, but also, faintly, reassured.

“No no, I didn’t steal anything, I borrowed it. But I didn’t give my friend too much of a choice in the matter, short of snatching it out of my hands. I will return it, honest, I merely wanted to look at it more closely. Apart from the words, it is very beautiful.”

I hoped he might relent a shade at the compliment, but if anything, he appeared less forthcoming than before.

And sometimes, an effective witness interview is dependent on techniques one finds distasteful. Such as telling the truth.

I sighed. “I am not actually in need of a printer. A friend’s wife was murdered. I believe the police are looking in the wrong direction. I think the man who had this made knows something that might help. I need to find him.”

He studied me for a long time, until I began to feel nervous: He had no reason to know that I was avoiding the police—my image was not yet posted across the news—but it was possible he knew of Damian
Adler’s connexion with this book. At last, he reached out to caress one leather edge with his thick finger. He looked regretful, like a father whose son had committed a shameful crime.

“Twice in my career I have turned down commissions for reasons other than practical ones,” he said. “The first was early, just my second year, when I was asked to bind a photograph collection of young girls that I found—well, intrusive. The second was to be a privately issued novel built around a series of police photographs of murder victims. Again, the salacious overtones were repugnant.

“In neither case, you understand, was it the display of flesh that made me say no. Why, just this past autumn, I bound a collection of, shall we say, personal drawings and poems as a gift from a wife to her husband. It turned out very pretty indeed.

“Those other two projects I rejected because I didn’t like the thought of my work around that content. Do you understand?”

“I believe so.”

“This book,” he said, laying his hand flat on the cover, “made me wonder if I shouldn’t regretfully decline it as well.”

“But you did not.”

“I did not. I read it, before I started on the plates, which I do not always do. I found it odd, but not overtly offensive.”

“So why were you tempted to reject it?”

He tapped the cover thoughtfully with his fingertips:
one, two, three, four
. “It might have been the attitude of the man himself. Somehow he reminded me of the two men who brought me their little prizes to beautify. A trace of defiance, as if daring me to find fault with requests they knew to be unsavoury.”

“But in this case, you could not.”

“The sketches alone justified the project. In fact, I suggested to him that he might like to do a second version with just the artwork.”

“What did he say to that?”

Tolliver’s eyes twinkled. “He wasn’t entirely pleased—the words, I understood, were his. He did say that he was working on a simpler version of the text, to be used with those same illustrations, a book intended for higher numbers. But I had to tell him that on my equipment,
I should not be able to do a large print run.” Tolliver did not sound regretful about the refusal.

“When was this?”

“January,” he said promptly. “I generally take two weeks’ holiday the beginning of the year—I’m always rushed off my feet December, and seldom finish the last-minute commissions until after Christmas—and he was one of the first customers to come through the door after that. Which may explain my inclination to take on his job.”

“What—” I started to ask, but he had not finished his thought.

“Although the sketches would probably have decided me even if he’d come in during December, because Damian Adler was a client I wished to keep.”

My heart gave a thump; it was all I could do to keep from looking over my shoulder to see if the police lurked outside of the door: The wry tone to his words told me he knew that Damian as a long-term customer was no longer a sure thing.

“Damian Adler is a client?”

“This is the friend whom the police are mistakenly looking for? I do read the newspapers. I thought him a most personable young man, with the kind of talent one does not see every day. He was one of the few new clients I undertook in December—he had a portfolio of prints and sketches that he wished me to mount and bind as a present. For his father, I believe it was, although he called by a few days later to tell me that there was no longer any urgency.”

“I’ve seen that book,” I interrupted—why hadn’t I realised this earlier? “It’s stunning.”

Tolliver dipped his head at the statement, but did not disagree. “However, I stayed up late for several nights to finish it before my holiday, both for the sheer pleasure of the thing, and to encourage Mr Adler to bring me other commissions. When I saw these drawings, I recognised them as being his, and I understood that Mr Adler had recommended me to Reverend Harris.”

Harris—yet another name to the man’s armoury.

“This is a man in his forties? With a scar next to his left eye?”

“That is right.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

He idly opened
Testimony
, paging through the text until he came to one of the ink drawings: the moon, in sharp black and white, centred on the page. He studied the drawing as if consulting it, then abruptly stepped away and bent, knees cracking, to draw a heavy leather-bound order-book from beneath the counter.

He flipped back through the pages, then turned the ledger around on the counter for me to read.

The address, I thought, would be phoney—Bedford Gardens was a street in Kensington, but I didn’t think the numbers went that high. However, written beside it was a telephone number. If Smythe-Hayden-Harris-Brothers valued
Testimony
as highly as I thought, he might have been unable to bring himself to give a fake telephone number. Capping my pen, I ran my eyes across the ledger page, blinking involuntarily as I noted the sums involved. Then I looked more closely, and saw that this was for nine books.

“I see you made him nine copies?”

“Eight, actually. I offered to make fifteen or twenty—it’s the plates that cost the money, you see, the actual materials are, well, not negligible, but the lesser of the whole. But he wanted precisely eight, and ordered the plates of the text destroyed.”

“Really?”

“Yes. He even insisted on seeing the destroyed plates—not those of the drawings, those he asked me to save for the simpler edition of the book.

“The ninth book consisted of blank sheets of very high quality paper interspersed with the original drawings. That one was called
The Book of Truth
—inside, not on the cover. The cover had the same design I put on
Testimony.”

“I see. Well, thank you, Mr Tolliver. You’ve been a considerable help.”

“I hope you find what you are looking for,” he replied. Then, as I turned for the door, his voice stopped me. “Just, take care.”

I studied his face, seeing more than mere politeness there. “Why do you say that?”

He was regretting it, this revelation about a customer, but he answered
anyway. “I don’t know that Reverend Harris is the most wholesome of individuals. He did not strike me as altogether … balanced.”

“I’ll watch myself,” I assured him, and went to find a public telephone, to set Mycroft onto the telephone number. I then took shelter in a café, drinking tea in a back corner well away from any constabulary eyes, until it was nearer to dusk.

When I rang Mycroft again, he had an address for me.

The address was one of a street of sturdy, proud, brick-and-stone terrace houses that rose three stories above the street. Its stone steps were scrubbed, its trim freshly painted. Unlike its neighbours the curtains were tightly drawn—because the master of the house was expected back after dark, or because he was not expected back at all? I strolled slowly past, taking in what details I could from a house with no eyes, then turned right and right again, down the service lane of dustbins and delivery vans.

And stopped dead.

A man was coming down the alley from the other end, a dapper figure in a crisp linen suit, a neck-tie of a blue that glowed even in the crepuscular light, and a straw hat. He was swinging an ebony cane. He wore a black ribbon around his neck, which disappeared behind the bright blue silk scrap inhabiting his breast pocket: a monocle. Seeing my approach, he doffed his hat-brim half an inch above his sleeked-down hair.

Holmes.

Will:
When a group of people are devoted to a goal, when
they are consecrated into a way of living and dedicated to
a Great Work, their communal Will glows and pulses like
a small sun, providing energy for the Practitioner’s Work
.
Testimony, IV:2