The Language of Bees

by Laurie R. King

  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.

  The lawn behind the house was dry with the heat, and crackled underfoot; the rucksack on my back and the clothing I wore rustled with every step; neither would be heard from the house, but they were enough to grate on my nerves. Breaking into a middle-aged woman's flat was not the same proposition as invading a house guarded by a police constable.

  The next hitch came when I saw that said constable had taken up residence in the kitchen, ten feet from the back door through which I intended to go. He was sitting on a kitchen chair with his collar loose and his feet up on another chair, reading a detective novel. A tea-pot, milk bottle, and mug sat to hand. Shelves behind him held cooking implements unusual for a British household: the wide, curved pan called a wok; a stack of bamboo steamers; a row of small tea-cups without handles.

  Holmes and I had agreed to a delay of a quarter hour for me to work on the locks before he created his distraction; now, there was little I could do for that quarter hour but watch the constable turn his pages and drink his tea.

  A young eternity later, the bell rang, and rang, and rang again. At the first sound, the man in the chair dropped his book in surprise and swore an oath. His feet hit the floor the same instant the second ring rattled the night, and on the third he was passing through the doorway, hands going to his collar-buttons.

  I jumped for the door and slid my picks into the mechanism.

  Holmes had promised me a bare minimum of four minutes of freedom on this first disturbance. At five minutes, sweating and swearing, the lock gave way. I turned the knob; to my intense relief, the bolt inside had not been pushed to.

  I closed the door gently and heard the front door slam. I scurried for the stairs and reached the first floor before the PC's chair squawked from below.

  Safe in the darkness, I bent over with my hands on my knees, breathing in the foreign odours of the house—sandalwood and ginger where most of the neighbours' would smell of cabbage and strong soap—while my racing heart returned to something under a hundred beats per minute.

  Eight minutes until Holmes' second disturbance.

  I reached the study with a minimum of creaking floorboards. Once there, I unlatched the window and raised it a crack (to make sure it opened, if I was interrupted) before placing a rug at the bottom of the door and a chair under its handle. I switched on the torch, its narrow beam all but invisible outside of the room.

  I found the book straight away: Testimony. Here again, the title page had just the name, with no author, no publisher, no date—although despite the book's beauty and expense, it looked as if a child had been permitted to lick a chocolate ice over the title page, leaving behind a narrow smear that could not quite be wiped away. I turned a couple of pages, and saw the first illustration: a small, tiled roof beneath a night sky whirling with streaks of light. The drawing was not signed, but there was no question as to the artist.

  I paged through until I found another finely worked drawing, then a third before I made myself stop. I slid the book into the rucksack, and went on searching—for what, exactly, I was not certain. I found a planchette, for the consultation of spirits, and several small statues of Asian gods, including a superb ivory carving from China covered with scenes from the life of the Buddha. There were several paintings on the wall, none of them by Damian, all of them either overtly or vaguely religious. The shelves were not heavily laden, either because the Adlers were not great readers or because they had only arrived here a few months before, but I saw among the volumes the most recent collection of Conan Doyle stories, and beside it a magazine. I was not surprised to find it was The Strand, from January, which as I recalled had Dr Watson's rather feeble episode concerning the so-called Sussex vampire.

  Two shelves were filled with religious esoterica. Some of the titles were familiar, others I took down to glance at, putting them away again when they confirmed my expectations. Two volumes suggested a closer look; they went into the rucksack with Testimony. A book by Crowley I left where it was.

  The desk was little used, although some notes and a list of book titles confirmed that the letter Damian showed us in Sussex had been written by Yolanda.

  The sound of Holmes' second interruption broke the stillness of the house: the clanging of the brass bell; constabulary footsteps; two minutes of raised voices as he sent this persistent drunk on his way; the PC's footsteps returning.

  Holmes would watch for the signal that I was outside and safe; when it did not come, he would wait twenty minutes, then ring a third time. Past that, he risked arrest for disturbing the peace of the irritated PC: If I wasn't out by then, we had agreed, I should be on my own.

  A narrow cupboard beside the bookshelf that held religious works revealed a white robe with the Children of Lights emblem embroidered on the left breast. I measured the garment's length with my eyes: It might come to my own shins, which suggested that, unless Damian wore it short like an undergraduate's gown, t
his belonged to Yolanda. There was no gold ring, but there was one oddity: a small, very shadowy painting of an old man in a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat dipped low over his left eye: Damian's work. Woden again? Why hang it inside of the cupboard? I lifted it from its hook to check the back, but could see nothing unusual about it. Perhaps Yolanda had liked it but Damian considered it a muddy failure, and did not want it displayed in the open? A puzzle.

  I gently closed the cupboard door and slid the rucksack onto my shoulders, then disassembled the blockade on the door and eased it open.

  No glowering PC awaited me.

  Moving along the edge of the hallway to lessen the chance of squeaks underfoot, I explored the other doors, putting my head inside each room and giving a brief shot from the torch to tell me what it contained. The Adlers' bedroom was the room whose dim light I had seen from the garden, from a fixture high on a wall that looked as if it stayed on all of the time. They had a single wide bed, a table on either side with reading lights. Her bed-side table had a drawer with several hand-lotions and nail files. His table held a framed photograph of Yolanda in a traditional high-necked Chinese dress, looking less at home than she had in the Western dress of the other photo.

  Next door was Yolanda's dressing room, with a variety of colourful, fashionable clothing. Not a flower in sight, I noticed: Yolanda had died wearing Millicent Dunworthy's taste.

  Damian's wardrobe was not quite what I had expected, for it showed an awareness of style not reflected by what he had worn to Sussex. I wondered if he had chosen those scruffy clothes to underscore his Bohemian identity, or as a statement that he didn't care what Holmes saw him in.

  Between the dressing rooms were a sumptuous bath and a modern lavatory, with a medicine cabinet that contained a number of packets with Chinese labels, some corked bottles containing unlabelled herbs, and a few modern nostrums that suggested Damian had suffered from a chest cold and Yolanda occasionally required a pill against female aches. Then another bedroom, this one fitted out as a nursery.