The Tomb of the Honey Bee: A Posie Parker Mystery (The Posie Parker Mystery Series Book 2)

by L. B. Hathaway

  ‘I take it you mean that this coin is Alaric Boynton-Dale’s property?’ Binkie said sourly, almost sneering at the explorer’s name. Binkie looked like a child who had had his favourite toy taken away unexpectedly. He crossed his arms and glared across the desk at her.

  Posie nodded, sticking to her guns. ‘Yes. It belongs to Alaric, as you say. I am acting as his…er, his agent in this matter.’

  Posie tried to look as convincing as possible. What was a small white lie between old acquaintances anyway? No matter that Alaric hadn’t really instructed her to act for him as his agent. How could he when he had never met her before, had never even heard of her?

  She wasn’t yet at liberty to tell anyone that Alaric had gone missing so she would just have to bluff this out with Binkie. She hoped against hope that the coin wouldn’t turn out to be stolen property, in which case she could find herself in a very tricky situation.

  ‘If you are acting as his agent, I’m very surprised that Alaric should be asking for any information about it at all,’ snapped Binkie. ‘I would have thought he knew everything there was to know about this coin, possibly more than we do here at the museum. Although how he acquired it was obviously highly irregular.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Posie’s heart was beating wildly. What on earth had she got herself into? Or was this just Binkie being difficult? Before she could ask him anymore however, Binkie was getting to his feet and pocketing his magnifying glass. You didn’t need to know him of old to know he was in a first-rate strop.

  ‘So are you going to leave that coin with me or not?’ he demanded petulantly.

  ‘No, of course not! Don’t be such a noddle, Binkie! Sit down!’

  But before she could say any more, Binkie had flounced from the room, slamming the door shut behind him. Posie stared at the space where he had vanished in wonder. This visit was supposed to have been easy, and it had proved anything but! She gathered herself together as the young man in the room started up with a flurry of apologies. He introduced himself quickly as Harry Redmayne, an Egyptologist at the museum.

  ‘You’ll just have to forgive Professor Dodds,’ he smiled kindly, sitting down at Binkie’s vacated desk chair. ‘He gets awfully excited about coins. He could even kill for one! This one in particular, it seems.’

  ‘Can you help me?’ Posie asked, sensing a more approachable soul.

  ‘Of course. What is it you want to know?’

  ‘Start with how Alaric owns this coin. What is “irregular” about it?’

  Mr Redmayne smiled. ‘Actually, I should tell you that I am an old, old friend of Alaric’s, we go back a long way. In fact, I was stepping out with his sister Violet for a while there…such a stunning girl. Unfortunately, I was deemed not wealthy enough for her,’ he trailed off, staring at the wall, miles away.

  He jolted himself back to the present sharply:

  ‘Anyway, what was I saying about Alaric? Golly, ah, yes! We are both bee-keepers in our spare time. And that’s why Professor Dodds called me in here today: he thought I might be interested in seeing this coin. It’s very famous, you know. I’m leaving today, so the timing was good. I’m off to conduct an archaeological excavation for the museum in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. It seems that paintings and hieroglyphs about bee-keeping have been found in one of the tombs there. They think that the tomb may be a monument to a Bee Goddess or a Bee God, and hence they want me to have a look. Anyway, sorry…you were asking me about the coin…’

  Mr Redmayne flicked through the fat catalogue on the desk. He jabbed at a place on the page with his index finger and nodded:

  ‘It seems that Alaric’s father was perhaps the most important coin-collector in the country at the turn of the century. In 1893 he is recorded as donating his best, most specialist pieces to the museum, keeping only a few worthless pieces for himself. His original collection was priceless – mainly Roman, it says here – and he exchanged a collection of more than two thousand precious Roman coins for that single bee coin you now have in your bag.’

  Posie gasped. ‘Why?’

  Mr Redmayne smiled. ‘All because his eleven-year-old son Alaric wanted it: he fell in love with that coin. You see, he had a fascination for bees, and the legend behind that coin from an early age. The bee coin belonged to the British Museum, and they agreed to the swap. At the time it must have seemed a very good deal to them.’

  Mr Redmayne continued:

  ‘That wouldn’t happen anymore, of course. In the last few years ancient coin specialists like Professor Dodds have been getting very hot under the collar about it. The story of this bee coin has assumed an almost mythical reputation, which is appropriate really. People see it as a disgrace that the exchange was allowed to happen: people such as Professor Dodds think that the coin still belongs here.’

  Harry Redmayne splayed his hands apologetically. ‘Although strictly speaking, the coin is an Italian national treasure. It’s from Sicily. It belongs there.’

  ‘Sicily?’ breathed Posie eagerly, on the edge of her seat. Mr Redmayne flicked the pages of the fat journal again.

  ‘Yes, the coin is from the seventh century B.C. It’s truly ancient.’

  Posie almost fell off her chair in disbelief. Mr Redmayne smiled:

  ‘Little is known about the coin really, although it’s the only one of its sort to survive. The ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians have long worshipped the bee: certain types of honey were believed in ancient times to be more precious than gold. It was believed that some types of honey could cure people of illnesses, even bring about eternal life…’

  ‘And what about the inscription on the back?’ Posie whispered. ‘Do you know what that means?’

  Harry Redmayne frowned. ‘I can’t help you with the first word, “Serafina”. But I can help you with “Hyblaea”. It means several things. Hyblaea was the Bee Goddess, worshipped by the ancient Sicilians, and it’s possible that this coin is a reference to her. It also refers to a string of volcanic mountains in eastern Sicily, called the Hyblaean mountain range. But I think the reason Alaric was interested in the coin from such a young age was because it alluded to a honey. A truly legendary honey from Sicily.’

  Posie nodded eagerly. This seemed to fit with what Cosima Catchpole had been mentioning the day before. Encouraged, Harry Redmayne pressed on:

  ‘You remember what I said about mythical honey being more precious than gold? The Hyblaean honey is one of those: it has medicinal qualities, but it’s also understood to be perhaps the finest honey in the world. It is legendary, the Latin writer Vergilius even mentioned how fine it was in the first century B.C! Imagine!’

  Posie had never heard of Vergilius, but she did her best to give what she hoped was a knowing nod. ‘So what was so special about it?’ asked Posie, wrinkling her nose up in concentration, tucking her hair behind her ear.

  ‘What is so special about it,’ grinned Mr Redmayne. ‘It’s still being produced! And to answer your question, it’s special because of a number of things. The bees on the island harvest on unique flowers which grow near the salty sea and which grow in the earth of the ashy Hyblaean volcanoes. The taste is truly original, but why it is so special remains a closely-guarded secret.’

  ‘So it definitely exists?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s very rare. It’s known to be produced in only one place in Sicily, by one set of bee-keepers. The existence of this place is top-secret, the secret passed down from generation to generation. You can buy the honey in a shop in a town on the island, but one spoonful alone will cost you the earth! If I had time I would try and track it down. I might just learn a thing or two from those bee-keepers: if they let me observe them at work, that is. Just as that coin you are holding onto is seen as a sort of Holy Grail by coin-collectors, so the Hyblaean honey is seen as a kind of Holy Grail by bee-keepers. I strongly believe that the coin in your bag is from the place where Hyblaean honey is made. That is what would have interested Alaric.’

  He cocked
his head and smiled. He had kind eyes.

  ‘Is that where Alaric has gone to?’ he asked quietly. Posie looked at him, shocked. She hadn’t said anything about Alaric’s disappearance.

  ‘I tried calling him earlier this week, that’s all. I wondered if he might like to come with me to Egypt, to see the tomb paintings. But I think he must be busy. He never returned my calls.’

  Posie knew her face had turned blush-red and she tried to avoid the sincere gaze. She had been found out, of sorts.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Harry, standing up and closing the journal. ‘If he’s engaged on something secret, I know he can’t be disturbed. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to check on my travelling bags. I think I may have forgotten my sleeping-bag in my rush today. Is there anything else I can help you with?’

  In an instant Posie had made up her mind. She had heard enough and she was losing precious time. If this was a fool’s errand she’d beat herself up about it later. But she felt that everything pointed towards this island, the island of Sicily, off the coast of Italy. It seemed possible now that Alaric had gone there deliberately.

  ‘If you were to go to Sicily, to look for the place where this honey is made…where would you start?’

  Harry Redmayne nodded as if he had expected such a question.

  ‘Ortigia,’ he said certainly. ‘It’s a tiny island off the city of Siracusa, in the south-east of Sicily.’

  ‘Why would you go there?’

  ‘Ortigia is very near the Hyblaean mountains. But more importantly, it’s where the only shop which sells the honey is located. Chances are that’s because it’s the nearest place to the bee-keepers who make it.’

  The obliging Mr Redmayne wrote down an address on the back of his business card. He passed it across to Posie:

  ‘Go there.’

  ****

  Posie sat quite undisturbed, Mr Minks asleep on her lap, a cup of fresh tea and a plate of uneaten chocolate biscuits in front of her for her lunch.

  She was enjoying the calm of the quiet office, the window open over the dirty London rooftops, the smell of gently melting tarmac wafting in. She was leaving tonight.

  She had been lucky. She had managed to ring through and book the last available first-class sleeper carriage on the Train Bleu down to the South of France. From Nice she would take a connecting train on to Genoa in Italy, and then she would embark on a long ferry ride of twenty hours over to the island of Sicily. The whole journey would take around three days.

  Posie loved travelling and it was with a feeling of rising excitement that she contemplated the adventure before her. Posie had already thrown her new Army & Navy purchases into her overnight bag from Boynton Hall, and she had decided that her trip abroad did not necessitate a trip back to her bedsit in Nightingale Mews; she had almost everything she needed with her, and she liked to travel light. Much to Prudence’s horror.

  ‘You don’t need anything else, Miss?’ Prudence had almost pleaded, staring at the one small leather bag in disbelief. Prudence had stared in panicky horror too at the neat sleeping-bag which sat alongside the overnighter.

  ‘Oh, yes! There is something I’ve forgotten, now you mention it.’

  ‘Go on, Miss. You want me to step over to Liberty on Regent Street and buy you a nice sensible cotton dress, suitable for travelling alone in?’ Prudence had cast a look over at Posie’s trouser suit with distaste.

  ‘No, no. Nothing of that sort, Prudence dear,’ she smiled, not taking the bait. ‘Can you go to Stanford’s Map Shop on Long Acre and get me a really good detailed map of Sicily – especially of Ortigia – if they have one? And then, on your way back, stop off at Mr Bernie Sharp’s offices in Covent Garden. He has a parcel for me.’

  Posie kept being revisited by the full horror of Ianthe Flower’s death, and the thought of the missing end page of Ianthe’s novel had kept playing over and over again in her mind.

  She had called Bernie Sharp on her return from the British Museum. All of Harry Redmayne’s talk of bees and honey and Egyptian tombs had made something twitch in her mind about Ianthe’s incomplete book, The Tomb of the Honey Bee. Posie had found herself wondering about the novel in general.

  Would reading it help her understand what it was that Ianthe had been wanting to tell her on that last fateful morning at Boynton Hall? It couldn’t hurt to read it, anyway, provided Bernie Sharp was willing to let her have a copy, if he had a copy to spare. Besides, there was a very long journey ahead in which to while away the time.

  She had been surprised by the uncharacteristically friendly tones of the ratty little man on the other end of the receiver. She had been expecting obstructiveness, or at least hostility.

  ‘You’re in luck, Miss Parker,’ Bernie Sharp had said almost amiably.

  ‘Of course, the police have now got the original; “evidence”, they call it. But I’ve had three of my best typists working day and night all through yesterday and I’ve now got three copies of The Tomb of the Honey Bee. One will be sent to the printer next week ready for typesetting, I will keep one copy here and therefore there is one spare, so you can take it. Promise me that you won’t lose it though, or show it to anyone, or leave it anywhere? This is my livelihood we are talking about, after all.’

  Posie promised solemnly. ‘Golly! So you’re going ahead? Printing it without its final page?’ she had asked, somewhat incredulously.

  ‘That’s right. I’ve taken instructions from Ianthe’s only surviving heir, well, the only heir who can be found right now. She now controls the literary estate, too. She thinks we should just publish and let the reader decide who did the dastardly deed for themselves. No point hanging around to see if the missing page turns up.’

  ‘Oh? I thought Lady Violet said Ianthe had no family? Who is the heir you are talking about?’

  There was a shrill of laughter from the receiver. ‘It is Lady Violet. They were second cousins. Ianthe has left Violet and her brother Alaric everything, half each. Of course it seems Alaric can’t be found just now, so I’m taking my instructions from Violet alone. It was a huge surprise apparently! Of course, it will be months until Violet and Alaric can get their hands on any money; it’s all tied up, but the end result is the same. And The Tomb of the Honey Bee will prove to be a nice little money-spinner for us all! In the meantime, I’ve agreed to get Lady Violet’s cookbook published. That too will be quite a sensation. She always pumps up sales when she appears in magazines and newspapers! I’m actually expecting her to drop by my offices shortly to sign the necessary paperwork.’

  So that was why Bernie Sharp was feeling so happy, Posie realised. No obstacles in his way to publish Ianthe’s last (and likely to be most successful) book, and a new client who seemed to have the potential to make him yet more money. Posie felt pleased for Violet. At least something good might come out of poor Ianthe Flowers’ terrible death.

  But she had quite forgotten! In all the excitement of the morning Posie had forgotten to keep Lady Violet updated, as she had promised, and payment or no payment, the girl was still officially employing her.

  Not wanting to move from her comfortable position at her desk, or to move Mr Minks, who was snoring gently, Posie decided to write to the girl rather than telephone. She would get Prudence to post the letter later on:

  Lady Violet,

  I believe I may know where Alaric has gone. It’s just a hunch, and I’m not sure why exactly he is there, but I believe he’s in Sicily, Italy. I think he chose to go, so please don’t keep thinking the worst. I’m hopefully going to track him down, starting in Ortigia.

  If you need me, get in touch with Prudence, my secretary. But I will telegram you as soon as I have more news.

  Best wishes,

  Posie

  She wrote a brief note to Inspector Lovelace too, along the same lines, informing him that she would update him when she had reached her destination.

  Posie was still munching her way through the plate of biscuits when Mr Minks woke up and silently
shimmied away to a sunnier spot. Able to move freely again, and quite unconsciously, Posie found herself slipping her hand into the carpet bag and pulling out Alaric’s bee coin.

  Opening one of her desk drawers, she pulled out a small sewing kit and within it she pulled free a skein of dark blue embroidery silk. She looped it through the tiny hole which Alaric had cut into the top of the coin and pulled it taught: in one swift movement she had tied it around her own neck and pulled the silk tight. The coin nestled like a pendant in the hollow of her collar-bone. A perfect, snug fit. It felt right there, almost warm, as if Posie had worn it every day of her life. Posie tried not to think of how much the coin might be worth in monetary terms, but she smiled to remember Binkie’s reverence for it and wished he could see her wearing it so casually.

  Earlier in the year she had had the chance to hold a rare diamond which had been worth Seven Hundred Thousand Pounds, and every second of the physical contact had felt excruciating. This was the direct opposite: the story, the history, the strange and complicated symbolism behind the bee coin itself felt welcoming, intriguing. Posie vowed she would only take the coin off her neck when and if she met Alaric Boynton-Dale for real.

  Posie crossed to the window. She looked out at the pigeons. This had been one of Len’s favourite spots and he always came and leant nonchalantly against the wall, staring out, sharing a cup of tea or coffee with her. There was still no news.

  Posie sighed. She was horribly aware that the train which would take her to Nice would be stopping off on the way at the nearby Cap d’Antibes, where Inspector Leferb had confirmed that Len was still residing in a boarding-house.

  In fact, it was only a distance of some fourteen miles between the two seaside resorts. Should she get off the train at Antibes? Should she check for herself that all was okay with Len? Or was there no fool like an old fool, as Ianthe had once joked. Should she just leave well alone and stay on the train?

  For once Posie simply didn’t have a clue.