The Language of Bees (61 page)

“Are you sure?” He was not asking about the timing.

“No,” I said. “But I saw a stretcher in the shed.”

So we carried him.

He nearly refused to go without his child. Only when I promised to guard her with my life did he agree, and even then he demanded to see
her himself first. It took both of us to convince him that waking the child by moving her downstairs to say good-bye would put her in danger.

“Almost as much danger as the delay you’re causing puts her in,” Holmes finally pointed out. We carried him. Two and a half miles to the end of the bay near Stromness; only once did we have to flatten ourselves to the verge to avoid head-lamps. The dinghy was there, hidden among reeds, and was big enough for two. Holmes and I got Damian upright, and Holmes started to lead him to the small boat.

Damian shook him off and grabbed my hand. “You promise you’ll protect my Estelle? Tell her that her mother and I have to be away, but we’ll be together very soon? You promise?”

“I promise to do everything I can to make her safe and comfortable.”

“And loved?”

“Yes. And loved.”

Holmes helped him into the boat, wrapping the blankets around him. Then he came to stand beside me. The water surged and ebbed gently at our boots; the few lights of Stromness sparkled across the ever-shifting surface.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re going to find my services as nanny come expensive,” I told him, the threat both playful and real. But baby-sitting was not what he had in mind.

“I knew you would persist,” he said abruptly. “I knew that, were there evidence against Damian, you would find it.”

“Holmes,” I said, startled.

“Thank you for not forcing me to investigate my son.”

“I… yes. Get him to a doctor.”

“Soon.”

“And stay in touch—through Mycroft.”

“If he isn’t also under arrest,” he said wryly, climbing into the dinghy.

“I’d almost forgot. You don’t suppose he is?”

“If he is, you can always reach me through
The Times
agony column.”
He sounded unworried about his brother’s fate, and I agreed: Mycroft Holmes could look after himself.

“Holmes, don’t—” I caught myself, and changed it to, “Just, take care.” Too melodramatic, to say,
Don’t make me tell the bees that their keeper has gone
.

And so it ended as it had begun: Holmes vanished into the night with his son, leaving me with his other responsibilities.

I waited on the shore until he had reached the off-lying fishing boat and raised its captain. I heard the sounds as they pulled Damian on board, and the noise of the engine reached me half a mile down the road; after that I moved at a fast jog, all the way to the burnt-out hotel. I could see lights at the Stones, as the police puzzled out what had taken place there, but they did not seem to have discovered the violated hotel.

I let myself in and went upstairs. The candle was burning low in its saucer. Estelle was still asleep, although I thought the sound of her breathing was less profoundly drugged. I crept forward and eased my arms into the warm bed-clothes, moving so cautiously one might have thought I was handling nitroglycerine. She smelt of milk and almonds, and as I pulled the tangle of cotton and wool towards me, her breath caught. I froze. After a moment, she sighed, then nestled into my chest like a kitten in the sun.

An extraordinary sensation.

I stood slowly, and with exquisite care picked my way down the stairs to the inner room. There I reversed the process, letting her weight settle onto the pads where her father had rested earlier. Cautiously, I slipped my hands out from under her: Her breathing continued, uninterrupted, and I felt as if I had won some sort of a trophy.

I left the lamp burning, in case she woke, and returned upstairs to see what had been left behind.

I took anything that would identify Damian or Brothers, including Damian’s sketch-book and passport. I put a few of Estelle’s warm garments and an old doll into a pillow-case, then shut everything else that might shout
Child!
into her small hard-sided suitcase. I carried it
out of the back door, weighted it with rocks, and hurled it far into the loch.

The night was clearing, the wind gentle: Holmes and his Thurso fisherman would have no problems crossing the strait. I walked to where I could see the Stones, and found them dark, which seemed odd. Perhaps rural police were less equipped with search-lights? Or less concerned about the dead, and satisfied with taking the body away and delaying an examination of the site until daylight?

I went inside, took some food from the hotel’s pantries, and returned to where my young charge gently snored.

I chewed on dry biscuits and drank a bottled beer, studying her. She was, I saw, the three-and-a-half-year-old Damian had led us to believe, not the eight-or nine-year-old I had hypothesised: Reading or not, friends with an older child or not, that sleeping face had the soft and unformed features of a near-infant.

So it was no surprise, when she stirred and woke half an hour later, to feel myself looked upon by a pair of eerily familiar grey eyes, imperious as a newly hatched hawk.

They were Holmes’ eyes. Estelle was Damian’s child.

The grey gaze travelled around the room, registering the absence of her father and the man she knew as Hayden. Unafraid, she sat upright.

“Who are you?” Her voice that of a small child: The intelligence behind it was something more.

“I’m …” I smiled at the thought, and at her. “I suppose you could say that I’m your grandmother.”

“Where’s my Papa?”

“I’m afraid your Papa’s hurt, Estelle. His own Papa came to help him, and is taking him to a doctor.”

“My Mama hasn’t come yet, has she?”

“I… no.”

“Are you a friend of Mr Brothers?”

“No, I’m not.”

“I don’t like him very much.”

“I can see why.”

“His other name is Mr Hayden. He got angry, when I tried to colour in his book.”

“Did he?”

“I thought it was a book for colouring,” she explained. “My Papa has books for his colouring, and my Mama has books for her writing, and they don’t mind when I colour in theirs, but Mr Brothers didn’t want me to use his.”

“It sounds reasonable—” I stopped, feeling a cold trickle up my spine. My God, how could I have overlooked it? “This book of Mr Brothers’. It had blank pages?”

“Some. It had writing, too, but I couldn’t read it. I don’t read cursive yet. And it had some of Papa’s drawings.”

The Book of Truth
, Tolliver’s other binding project. It hadn’t been in London, it wasn’t in his room here. Which could only mean that Brothers had it with him—but of course he did, along with the quill and the blotting sand. And even if he hadn’t dared risk writing then and there, and been forced to bring some of the blood away in a flask, the book was the culmination of his ritual. He would carry it with him.

He would carry it always …

There had been blood, on Brothers’ overcoat, where Damian shot him: That I had seen. Granted, the blood had been slightly to one side of the hole—surely that was because the garments shifted when he fell? And the relatively small amount of bleeding was because he’d died immediately the bullet entered his heart. Wasn’t it?

Fifty blank pages, six drawings, two covers—heavy covers, knowing Tolliver’s work. If his
Book of Truth
had been in Brothers’ inner breast pocket—worn over his heart, as it were—when the bullet hit him, would it have been heavy enough to deflect a bullet upward, so it lodged in a shoulder rather than the heart?

I was on my feet before I realised I had moved. The child drew back in alarm; I tried to think. My impulse was to snatch her and sprint for the door, but I told myself that, if Brothers hadn’t found her in the
three hours since we had left him for dead, the chances were that I had a few more minutes. And I did have a gun.

“Honey, we have to leave,” I told her. “Can you get dressed for me, and put on your shoes and your coat?”

I helped her slow fingers, stuffed the remaining biscuits in my pocket and turned off the light. I took her hand in my free one, and whispered, “We have to be very quiet. We’re going out of this place and down the road a little, and after that we can talk again. All right?”

She said nothing, and it took me a moment to realise that she had responded by nodding: No, not older, just preternaturally clever. I squeezed her hand, and opened the door.

The hotel was nothing but shadow. Estelle tried her best, but her shoes made noise against the grit on the floor, and in a few steps I bent and picked her up. Which was better, but now she was breathing in my ear and I could hear nothing else.

I crept with her across the room. Brothers had used the back door, so I went to the front, putting her down to work the lock.

Once the door was open, I caught her up and ran: no following footsteps, no shout or motion behind us.

We made it to the road, and across, then up a small lane to a barn before at last I accepted that we were safe. I put the child down and sat beside her, my head dropping onto my knees as I caught my relieved breath.

After a minute, I felt a small hand touch my leg, and I wrapped my own around it.

“Shall I call you my Grandmama?” she asked.

I choked down a laugh. “Maybe you ought to just call me Mary, until we decide.”

“Very well,” she said, which made me laugh again.

“Mary?” she asked. “Where are we going?”

I lifted my head to the sky, and saw the stars.

The sensible thing would be to go to the police and trust them to accept my explanation. True, they would take Estelle away, and in the
lack of other family they would put her into care, but they were not ogres. Surely they would return her to me, or to her father, as soon as things were settled. The sensible thing would be to send Mycroft a wire and hope that he was in a position to get me out of this.

But then, were I a sensible person, would I have been sitting on an Orcadian hillside at five in the morning with an unknown step-granddaughter’s hand in mine? I looked at her, and squeezed her tiny, trusting hand.

“Estelle, how would you like to go up in an aeroplane?”

Many days later, lodged in the hidden depths of Scotland, I read an out-of-date newspaper article concerning a farmer who lived beside the Stones of Stenness, wakened that Friday night by gunshots and the sight of flames amidst the stones. When he reached the spot, with shotgun and paraffin lamp to hand, he found only a broken lamp, the burnt edge of a blanket, and signs of a bloody struggle.

No sign of a hand-bound book written in blood; no knife crafted from a meteor’s iron.

Police investigations the following day turned up no body, and no injured person had been seen by the doctor’s surgery. The police were puzzled, and suggested that a youthful prank at the Stones had gone awry.

Some of us knew otherwise.

… to be continued.

For Lynn and Robert
on whose backs this book was written

Acknowledgments

This book owes much to the extraordinary willingness of a lot of people to put up with peculiar questions and offer expertise in exchange.

Anthony and Anna Tomasso, Clare Claydon and Win Westerhof, and Susan Rice, ASH, BSI, all tried to educate me about bees; where I resisted their tutoring, I apologize for the demands of the fictional process. Zoe Elkaim brought me books and researched a myriad of weird factoids. Glen Miranker, a most dependable gentleman, traded a donation to the Baker Street Irregulars for the chance to be turned into a broken reed of a Sussex beekeeper. Alice Wright did the same, permitting herself to be re-shaped into a Soho sculptress of questionable virtue in exchange for a donation to the Enoch Pratt library and Viva House.

John Mallinson, North West, and Burt Gabriel at the Hiller Air Museum; Francis King and Keith Jillings helped me get a 1924 Bristol Tourer into the air, on paper anyway. Cara Black nudged my French, Doug P. Lyle, MD gave me all kinds of problems when he corrected my forensic history, and Vicki Van Valkenburgh and Kathy Long helped keep my electronic identity in order.

As always, I owe the librarians of UCSC’s McHenry Library a hive’s-worth of blessings, for their boundless energy and creativity.

A portion of the proceeds from this book go to the beehive project of Heifer International. For details, see my website at
www.LaurieRKing.com
.

If you enjoyed
The Language of Bees
,
please read on for a preview
of the exciting new mystery featuring
Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes,
The God of the Hive
.
Available now from Bantam Books