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

by L. B. Hathaway

  Tired though she was, she felt giddily happy at the thought of finding the Monastery, and, if she was right, finding Alaric safe within.

  When Posie reached the front of the queue the Hotel Manager started up in a wild jabber of Italian. Posie shook her head in frustration:

  ‘Io non capisco. I’m so sorry; I don’t understand.’

  Just then a man’s voice cut through the echoey blue-and-white tiled entrance hall. Posie looked to her left and noticed a tall man standing in the shadows, near the birdcage lift, blocking the route up to her room. She couldn’t see his face but something about his stance was vaguely familiar.

  ‘The Hotel Manager is telling you that people have been here today, asking if you were staying here,’ said the man in a halting but impeccable English.

  ‘First, an English man visited. He had thick glasses. Then, later, a woman came here with long curling red hair. The Hotel Manager says both of these people were very strange; they didn’t want to leave their details. The woman wanted to see your room upstairs, but the Manager sent her away. The red-haired woman also asked after Alaric Boynton-Dale. She asked if he was staying here with you…’

  Posie’s mind raced. Binkie had obviously been the first visitor, and then Cosima. So, she hadn’t imagined Cosima’s presence lurking in the market, after all. She felt a sense of light relief that she wasn’t going totally crazy.

  The man by the birdcage lift suddenly stepped out into the light, and Posie recognised him at once as the young man with the dark olive eyes from the Il Gioiello Ambra. She now saw he was wearing the same white cassock as the old man in the shop, and that a thick gold crucifix also hung about his neck.

  ‘I, too, have been waiting for you,’ the man said, motioning for her to follow him.

  ‘My name is Brother Luca and I am sent to collect you. We need to leave right now. It is imperative that we are not followed. Where we are going is a closely-guarded secret, and it seems you have more strange people sniffing around you than can altogether be considered desirable. So we will leave by the back exit, here. Come!’

  ‘Who sent you here for me?’ asked Posie guardedly. She had been on the receiving end of tricks such as these before, most recently in February of that year, when she had been convinced to get inside a supposed police car which had turned out to be packed to the gunnels with world-class jewel thieves. They had then kidnapped her.

  ‘I think you know who sent me for you. I don’t think I need to repeat his name,’ said Brother Luca infuriatingly. Posie’s heart was hammering in her throat: could it be this easy? Was she being handed Alaric Boynton-Dale on a plate? It seemed so.

  ‘Come!’ Brother Luca started to walk towards the dim back quarters of the guesthouse.

  ‘Wait!’ Posie squealed indignantly, making up her mind on the spot that she should indeed follow the monk, but feeling that she was horribly unprepared. ‘I need to change! Freshen up!’

  ‘No time for that!’ said the monk firmly. ‘It’s now or never! You choose if you want to stay behind to dress up nicely. But I’m not hanging around for you!’

  Jeepers, Posie thought to herself at the monk’s bluntness. How very rude!

  But she puffed along behind Brother Luca as quickly as she could manage. He didn’t bother to look around to see if she was keeping up.

  ****

  They travelled out of Ortigia together on foot, in silence, through a series of tiny back alleys and lanes, with Posie constantly turning her head to check she wasn’t being tailed by what now amounted to quite a collection of possible stalkers.

  Eventually, on one of the three bridges which joined Ortigia to the main part of Siracusa, Brother Luca indicated towards a green van parked up hard against the kerb, its canvas sides painted with gaudy pictures of fruit.

  ‘Get in the back,’ he whispered, and Posie clambered up into the dark, canvas-drawn interior, to find herself sitting amongst empty fruit crates on the hard metal floor. She was not altogether unsurprised to get a glimpse of the old monk from the apothecary shop sitting behind the steering wheel, his fingers drumming impatiently as Brother Luca swung in beside him, pulling the canvas partition firmly closed so that Posie was left without any view.

  For the next hour they travelled uphill, bumping and jumping and feeling every little rock under the van’s tyres. But Posie felt confident it would all soon be worth it: the Serafina Monastery was almost in reach.

  ****

  Thirteen

  At last they arrived. Posie was aware of falling shadows, and the sun going down behind low, rocky mountains covered in verdant vegetation. Everywhere she looked she saw olive groves and orange orchards and trees with stars of jasmine on every branch. The scent was overpowering.

  ‘This way, please,’ said Brother Luca flatly, without any emotion.

  Behind a curve of a grey mountain a glossy white marble stone building was suddenly revealed, complete with an ornate glittering golden-tiled roof. The sun was reflected in its many stained glass windows, flashing from the huge golden crucifix mounted on the top of a square bell tower. From a far-off chapel came the sound of chanting.

  Posie found herself quickly ushered into a huge white-painted room with a grand curved roof. It smelt chalky and felt restful, and was low lit with a series of candles in sconces along the walls.

  It was a moment before she realised that Brother Luca had gone, but as her eyes adjusted to the gloom she realised she was not alone: at one end of the room was a plain wooden table, and at it sat Alaric Boynton-Dale.

  ‘Miss Parker?’ he said, standing up with a half-smile, indicating she should join him at the table. His voice was pleasantly gravelly, totally unlike what she had been expecting. She marched across the tiled floor purposefully. She extended her hand and he gripped it firmly.

  ‘Welcome to the Serafina Monastery.’

  She studied Alaric quickly, and found herself surprised. Heaven knew she was not the kind of girl to go weak at the knees when she came across the rich or famous, but she realised with a start that the newspapers, which loved to print his image and details of his exploits again and again, had never done him justice: here was a man who was strikingly handsome; tall with very stark, lean features which were softened just slightly by laughter lines which creased around his eyes, and by his light brown hair which was worn slightly longer than it should have been. He looked older than she had thought he would, too. Definitely a man who had reached his mid-forties, rather than a man in his late thirties, as she knew he was.

  His face was deeply sun-tanned and he had deep-set eyes which were the colour of old bronze coins: at once green, then golden, then brown. Alaric was also looking at her neck with an arched eyebrow. Posie sat down on the wooden chair which was offered to her and untied the silk thread around her neck.

  ‘I can give this back to you now!’ she declared. ‘I told myself that as soon as I delivered this back to you, and located you, my job was done! Golly, I’m so pleased to find you here. And well. And alive!’

  Alaric picked up the coin but did not look at it. Instead he looked directly at Posie, a mix of inquisitiveness and humour playing about his eyes. But what Posie read there most of all was sadness.

  ‘Who asked you to find me?’ he asked softly, in the low gravelly voice. ‘How did you know I was here? How did you track me down? It says here you are a detective…’

  She now saw that he had papers and various bits of information spread out before him on the table. He was holding onto her business card, and also that of Harry Redmayne. She saw with a start of surprise that there was also a blurry, smudgy photograph of her peering nosily through a window – the one Brother Luca must have taken yesterday at the Il Gioiello Ambra shop – and she also recognised Alaric’s typewritten list of coins on which she had written her guesthouse address. The old monk must have given Alaric all of the information in one go, and he must have agreed to meet her off the back of it.

  ‘I need to know who you are working for. I am sure you
are aware I am hiding out here, lying low. Someone wants me dead, Miss Parker. I cannot be too careful.’ Alaric indicated quickly to a small black pistol half-concealed under a thick wad of papers.

  Never one to be shocked, Posie nodded. Besides, guns had never scared her – Len had carried one around with him on a daily basis – in fact, he probably still did, even in the Cap d’Antibes.

  ‘I understand,’ she said, more confidently than she felt. ‘I’ll start at the beginning.’

  She told him about Lady Violet instructing her to find out what had happened to him, the way that Lady Violet feared he had been murdered. She described the main list of suspects Lady Violet had outlined and the brief, horrible visit she had made to Boynton Hall. She described her encounter with Major Marchpane and his entrusting the bee coin to her, as he had been flummoxed by its meaning. She described Ianthe Flowers’ wish to tell her something important, and then she told him about Ianthe’s death by poison, not forgetting to include the detail of the missing page of the manuscript of The Tomb of the Honey Bee.

  She watched Alaric gasp in horror and grow pale beneath his sun-tan, and then look by turns sickened, then shocked. He was muttering under his breath:

  ‘Murder? Oh, poor Cousin Ianthe, what a way to go…she didn’t deserve that…’

  Posie described in some detail Scotland Yard’s involvement in Ianthe’s murder inquiry. She then outlined her trip to the British Museum and her encounter with Harry Redmayne, the Egyptologist who had called Alaric to see if he wanted to accompany him out to Luxor. She described how Harry had provided her with clues as to the significance of Hyblaean honey, and Ortigia, and crucially, with the address of the little shop.

  ‘It’s not a very nice story, really, is it?’ she said, sadly. ‘But here I am anyway. I’m so glad I found you. I have to confess that at points I was worried about you myself, especially when I saw you had left everything at home: your tent, your clothes, your travelling kit. But I can tell your sister that you are alive and fit as a fiddle!’

  To her surprise Alaric clutched his head in his hands and emitted a low groan. Had she said or done something wrong?

  ‘Don’t fret,’ she reassured him. ‘I won’t tell a sausage where you are, if that’s what’s worrying you. I know this place is a secret; both the Serafina Monastery and the honey. I couldn’t find it again if I tried, either! The fruit van they brought me up here in was as good as any blindfold I’ve ever come across!’

  Alaric looked at Posie with scrunched up concentration in his eyes, not speaking.

  ‘What is it?’ she said softly.

  ‘You’re a very clever girl,’ he said at last. ‘Finding me like this. I take my hat off to you. But you’re jolly well right, it’s not a very nice story. Not one bit of it. And please don’t tell anyone where I am. None of this has happened like it was meant to…I got a shock when the monks told me someone was looking for me. Well, that it was you, and not Cosima…’

  ‘How do you mean? Not Cosima?’

  Alaric sighed:

  ‘All this beastly stuff kept happening to me, as you know. The final straw was the destruction of my beehives: a heartless, terrible action. It upset me far less that it was I who was probably intended to die, than the knowledge that those thousand hives of hard-working bees had been murdered… I couldn’t hang around at Boynton Hall any longer, staring at the destruction of those fields. I realised my life was in danger, but I needed peace and quiet, above all else. I left on the spur of the moment, just in the clothes I was wearing. I left everything behind. I just had time to send a message to Cosima. And then I came here, to get away, to reassess my life. To hide. I couldn’t believe someone was trying to kill me, it was terrible. I told Violet this in a telegram I sent from the station: I told her not to jolly well worry.’

  Posie thought it was not a good time to mention the fact that the scantily-worded telegram had posed as many questions as it had answered, and that she for one had originally thought it was a suicide note.

  Posie nodded. ‘How did you know about this place? The Monastery seems to be a secret. Even Harry Redmayne didn’t know about it, or didn’t know it was the place which makes the special honey…’

  Alaric smiled and Posie caught a glimmer of amusement beneath the sadness.

  ‘I’ve always known about it. As long as I can remember, anyway. I was a spoilt child, and my father always gave me what I wanted, which included this coin here. You know it’s from here originally? That the monks kept it safe here for centuries before it ended up in the British Museum? I made it my business to know about the Serafina Monastery, and the Hyblaean honey which they produce. I told myself that one day I would track it down, and come out here. It was right that I came here now. I knew the monks would hide me.’

  ‘How did you find it?’

  Alaric laughed: ‘I’m not an explorer for nothing, you know! Same as you’re not a detective for nothing!’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Posie nodding. ‘But I’m surprised the monks just let you come up here and stay, even a famous explorer like yourself. They seem a pretty hostile bunch to me. Did you have to pay them?’

  Alaric shook his head. ‘Not as such.’ He waved the bee coin on its piece of navy silk at Posie.

  ‘This is the payment. I told the monks that it would be arriving here any day, and that in exchange for sheltering me in the safety of the Monastery and for letting me observe them at work making the Hyblaean honey, they could have their ancient coin back. That’s why they were so excited to see you pitching up at their apothecary in town wearing it around your neck, and why they’ve surpassed themselves in getting you up here. You told them you wanted to see me, but all they were interested in was the coin!’

  ‘Along with half the world, it seems,’ said Posie with a raise of a not altogether approving eyebrow. She told Alaric briefly about Binkie Dodds and how he had followed her to Sicily in pursuit of it, like a man driven mad.

  ‘I’m glad it’s going back to where it belongs, anyway,’ she said. ‘But one thing puzzles me: how did you expect to receive the coin here? Forgive me for saying it, as I know he is a great friend of yours, but entrusting the coin to Major Marchpane without any proper instructions was a bit risky, wasn’t it? He told me himself that he was never one for “clues”. In fact, it turned out that Major Marchpane had never, in all the years you knew each other, noticed that you wore the coin around your neck! How on earth could he have brought it out here for you?’

  Alaric sighed wearily. ‘I didn’t send the coin to Hugo Marchpane,’ he said, his shoulders drooping. ‘I told you just now. I sent it to Cosima, asking her to look after Bikram, my dog. And I sent her a message…a note…’

  Realisation dawned on Posie. It was all a stupid mix-up, with incomprehension on every level, on all sides. It amazed her sometimes that the cleverest, brightest people in the world could be so obtuse.

  ‘You said in the note something like “You know what this means”, didn’t you?’

  Alaric nodded quickly.

  ‘The bee coin was a double sign, wasn’t it? First, it was a sign that you were okay, and that you had chosen to leave of your own accord, rather than been murdered, and second, you thought you had given Cosima enough information in that brief note for her to get the coin back to you here…’

  And Posie tailed off. She had suddenly realised something: Alaric must still have been in love with Cosima when he sent that note to her a week ago. Which meant he loved her still. He had wanted Cosima to come out here too, to join him. For some reason Posie felt a pang at this. Perhaps the sting of her recently-thwarted romantic dreams with Len Irving had made her more sensitive to the feelings of others in similar situations?

  ‘Yes,’ said Alaric resolutely. ‘That’s exactly right. Spot on. When we were together, before she broke up with me, that is, I would talk on and on about Hyblaean honey, the mountains here, the Monastery where this coin came from. She knew it was my dream to come out here… I can’t understand
how she didn’t realise what I meant in the note; it must have been obvious that this is where I would have chosen to hide. What happened?’

  Posie cleared her throat tellingly. She was going to have to be cruel to be kind, but gently.

  ‘Two things happened. Forgive me, Mr Boynton-Dale, but you overlooked one important detail: your dog Bikram and Lady Cosima do not get on. At all. I don’t know why, but Bikram prefers Major Marchpane, and Lady Cosima is afraid of Bikram. Clever though he is, and even if you instructed him clearly to find Cosima, the unfortunate fact is that he went and found Major Marchpane instead, thus delivering the message to the wrong person. And Major Marchpane thought it best to keep it a secret. BUT, even if Bikram had delivered the message to Lady Cosima, I am very much afraid that she would not have made it out here either.’

  Posie toughed it out, gritting her teeth as she spoke:

  ‘I questioned her about the coin, and it meant very little to her. She seemed to recall the word “Hyblaean” as being linked to honey, but very little else. Certainly nothing as concrete as was required to find you out here. Perhaps, after all, the Major and Lady Cosima are more suited to each other than you think. Neither of them are very details-oriented, and perhaps neither of them are very good at listening to people, or observing people either.’

  Posie vowed she would not mention Cosima’s stinging words which came back to her in a horrible flurry: ‘My love for Alaric was not strong enough to make it work in the long-term’, coupled with the revelation that ‘in truth, I probably wasn’t listening…sometimes I just drifted off…’ She would not mention the steely way Cosima had implied Alaric had loved her far more than she had ever loved him, or the resolve she had heard in Lady Cosima’s voice when she had spoken of her newly-mended marriage. Or of how Major Marchpane, obviously not the brightest when it came to emotions, well and truly believed that Alaric had given Cosima up for good.