The God of the Hive: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

by King, Laurie R.

  “But with him he had a parcel, the contents of which were most intriguing. My shoes and belt were there, and a clean shirt—not one of mine, but in my size. Also a clothes’ brush, razor, and bottle of water, indicating that he intended to render me more or less presentable. But the contents of a large envelope were the most suggestive of all: my note-case, into which a photograph of a rather attractive and scantily clad female had been inserted; a card for a night-club called The Pink Pagoda; a torn-off section of the London map showing the area about The Pink Pagoda, with an X drawn across a nearby alley; the forms necessary for a London mortuary to conduct a burial; and the autopsy for a man matching my size and general description, signed by an out-of-town pathologist, and dated the following day.

  “Poor Mr Sosa, the events of that afternoon nearly did him in. Flying bullets and the presence of a dead man were bad enough, but then I made him wait there with me until dark—hoping that Gunderson’s boss, or at least a colleague, might come looking for him, which they did not—because in my weakened condition I could not manhandle Gunderson’s body down to the mortuary van by myself. And after that, he had to drive, then help me dump the body. I think by this time his mind had gone numb, because he did not even protest when I told him we needed to wait until the police had showed up, before carrying out the charade that Gunderson’s employer had intended for me.

  “I had found a flask of gin in the glove compartment of the van, and made my secretary take a swallow to steady his nerves. And when the time came, he flashed his identity at the police with what appeared to be bored panache, but was, in fact, sheer terror. Then we snatched the body from out of their hands and delivered it, with the papers, to the funeral home.

  “After that, I had Sosa drop me at the Angel Court entrance, and I ordered him to go to an hotel I knew near Maidenhead, and check in under an assumed name. I also ordered him to drink the remainder of the gin and go immediately to bed—he is a teetotaller, but I expected it might be a choice between alcohol and a complete breakdown, and thought the effect of drink would be simpler to deal with.”

  With that, Mycroft picked up the final biscuit and sat back, as if his tale was at its end.

  “So you’ve been here since Wednesday?” I prompted.

  “I have a long-standing arrangement with Mrs Melas, that I might use her upstairs flat if ever I needed a retreat. She even came to see if I might be here, while I was in my prison—she left a note on the desk for me, asking that I get into touch. Fortunately, she hasn’t been back since.”

  “She believed the reports of your death, as we did. I did,” I corrected myself, although Holmes’ claims to the contrary were not entirely convincing.

  Mycroft winced. “Yes, I feared the report would trouble you. There was little I could do. Any public message-board such as the agony column was sure to be watched. As I said, my opponent has a remarkably subtle mind.”

  That gave me pause, to think that the messages Holmes and I had posted to each other might have been not only noticed, but understood. However, one would also have had to know where the bolt-holes were to trace us to them, and there this faceless opponent had met his limits.

  “I knew you would return to London, once you had dealt with Brothers. With luck, you would even find me before I began to eat Mrs Melas’ leather chair. But you say that Brothers is not dead. How do you intend to find him?”

  Brothers be damned, I thought, and interrupted. “Did you send Mr Sosa away?”

  “On Thursday, it must have been,” Holmes noted. “Once he’d brought you the morning papers.”

  “And food. Yes, I sent him to the country with his mother, and had him get into touch with your Mrs Hudson and my own Mrs Cowper. We have a wide number of acquaintances at the moment who are taking in distant scenery.”

  Poor Mrs Hudson, banished yet again for her own good. At least Dr Watson was out of it this time.

  “We cannot afford any more hostages to fortune,” Holmes agreed.

  “That was my thought. However, I had not suspected that Mr Sosa was made of such stern stuff. He returned to St James’s Square at mid-day on Thursday, where I had agreed to be available to him, were he to want me, and brought me a pair of Gladstone bags stuffed with edibles and the news. However, he was badly shaken: That morning he had decided that he could scarcely spend the day in the same shirt he had worn the day previous, and went home to pack a valise. There he found signs of a most expert break-in and the insinuation of several pieces of incriminating evidence amongst his things. He gathered his mother and fled; the two of them were in the mortuary van with her cat and canary. I gave him strict orders to abandon the stolen motor and take her away for at least two weeks. After the invasion of his home, I believe he will obey me. I only hope I can talk him into returning to my employ, once this is over.”

  “Good,” Holmes said to his brother. “Tell me, what do you propose to do about your faceless opponent?”

  “Now that I have you, I’d thought—”

  “Wait,” I said. Damian was lodged in Holland somewhere and Javitz was protecting Estelle—but if our opponent was all-knowing, there remained one member of our party to consider: “Goodman.”

  The man attached to that name gave a snort and sat upright on the divan, blinking against the light. I said, “That is your family’s estate, in Cumbria, where you live?”

  “My … yes.”

  “You could be traced from there?”

  He shrugged, to indicate its remote possibility. I turned to Holmes.

  “If our opponent has figured out who Goodman is, and if he’s desperate enough, he could use them—the family is away, fortunately, but the servants are there, and vulnerable.”

  Goodman snorted again, this time a sound of derision. “That family? Were he sane, a threat to a mere servant would not bend a son of the family. But mad? One cannot manipulate a madman. No sensible man would try.”

  With that, he turned over on the divan and went back to sleep.

  We three looked at each other, and admitted the wisdom of the fool’s pronouncement.

  “You were saying, Mycroft?” Holmes asked.

  “I was saying, with your assistance, I believe we might revive the trap I had been constructing before Mr Brothers stumbled into our lives. There may be fewer of us than I had anticipated. However, I believe we can adapt it to our reduced numbers.”

  The conversation that followed led us nearly to dawn, and the plan Mycroft laid and Holmes and I amended was a good one: simple, solid, and requiring little luck to succeed. Our opponent might not realise yet that Mycroft was alive, but he must be aware that Gunderson was missing. It was unfortunate that Mycroft had lacked the personal stamina, or the reliable manpower, to set watch over the warehouse. Nonetheless, the combination of blood on the floor, bullets in the walls, and a broken sky-light would surely put the most phlegmatic of villains in a state of panic.

  Mycroft need only walk in the door of his Whitehall office to send any rats scurrying for their holes. With me at the building’s telephone board and Holmes at its exit, one or the other would lead us to their source.

  Before the sun rose behind the curtains that Monday morning, our plans were laid.

  Mycroft stood, moving like an old man. Holmes and I were little better. I looked at the mantelpiece clock: nearly six.

  “You will leave soon?” I asked Mycroft.

  Holmes was frowning at his brother’s stiffness and spoke first. “The afternoon will suffice.”

  “Really?” I dreaded to hear what other activity he had in mind. “So what now?”

  “A few hours of sleep might be for the best.”

  “Sleep, Holmes?” I exclaimed. “Do we do that?”

  “As best we might, given the age of Mrs Melas’ beds.”

  When we began to stir, Goodman woke and stretched full-length on the striped divan, looking remarkably like Estelle. Then he jumped to his feet.

  “Unless you need me to guard the door or repel boarders, I’l
l be gone for a bit. Shall I hang the picture back over the hole downstairs, on the chance someone wanders in?”

  Holmes started to object, but I was more accustomed to Goodman’s habit of popping in and out of view, and told my long-time partner, “He knows the back entrance, he knows to take care that no one sees him use the hidden doors, he’ll be careful.”

  “And I’ll bring a pint of milk,” Goodman said.

  “But not an entire arm-load of groceries,” I ordered. “Nothing you can’t slip unseen into your pockets. We don’t want you to look like a delivery boy.”

  He put on his straw hat and marched with jaunty steps to the kitchen. I had a sudden pang of doubt—we could be trapped here—but stifled it, and went to find a bed. It wanted airing, but a slight mustiness would not keep me from sleep.

  I felt I had scarcely closed my eyes when a presence woke me. I forced an eye open, and saw green; blinked, and the green became an eye; pulled back my head, and Goodman came into view, his face inches from mine.

  I sat sharply upright, glanced over, and found Holmes, incredibly, still asleep—who would have thought Goodman could enter this place without waking either of the brothers? When I turned back to my human alarum clock, my vision was obscured by an object that, when I had pushed it away sufficient to focus, proved to be a folded newspaper.

  His other hand came around the side of the page, one finger pointing at the print. “Is this for you?”

  I took the paper, and read:

  THE BEEKEEPER wished in trade for the object of his affection central Bensbridge, alone, 2:30 am, reply acceptance in evening standard.

  Chapter 64

  Robert Goodman sat on the rooftop, watching London rush to and fro between his dangling toes. The view was omniscient—in the theatre of the streets, his seat was in the gods. Which was only appropriate, considering the Person on whom he was meditating.

  Are you frightened of anything?

  Suffer the little children, to come unto me, because they will speak the truths only fools know. Oh, the Son of Man knew what he was talking about, that was for certain.

  And the Son of Man did his own sitting on the heights, thinking on the morrow, wondering if he might not simply slip away and leave his friends to sort it out.

  A simple child that lightly draws its breath / And feels its life in every limb; what should it know of death? Interesting, that the Bard of Avon had so few children in his writing while Wordsworth had so many. If Wordsworth had been a playwright forced to deal with actors, would he, too, have replaced children with sprites and fairies?

  A simple child should know nothing of death, or fear, or hunger. But children did, all the time. Estelle Adler certainly did, poor mite—mother murdered, father hunted. But what was that to him?

  An ambulance driver had responsibilities, but they were not those of an officer. A driver’s demands were immediate, clear-cut, and rode light upon the conscience: Men died, but if one had done one’s job, those deaths could be laid at the foot of someone else. Some officer.

  Even then, even Before, his very soul—that Other whom he once was—had cringed from an officer’s relationship with the men in his command. Not through cowardice: He would risk life and limb to bring a man home, even one who was not going to reach the field hospital alive. But he would not lead them. He would not love them and comfort them and cajole them into the path of flying metal. He’d have put a lump of metal into his own brain first.

  Are you frightened of anything, Mr Robert?

  An omnibus paused between his toes, sucking up a row of tiny figures, evacuating others. The Son of Man could walk among those figures and go unnoticed, for to their minds, they were the gods. Modern gods, whose mighty commands rang down the telephone wires; who parted the waters with steamers and digging machines; who rained fire from the heavens over the poor cowering wretches in the trenches; who thundered rage in the engines of their trains and the blare of their motorcar klaxons.

  Take away this cup, for I am afraid. If the Son of Man couldn’t talk his way out of what was coming for him, how could any other son of man?

  A tiny dot of brilliant blue caught his eye, and he bent forward to watch it: a woman’s hat, a spot of defiant joie de vivre sailing the drab sea before it was swallowed by a shop.

  With the bright spot gone, he became aware of the pull of the street, far below. Mad world, mad kings, mad composition! There was earth beneath the tarmac and tile, real earth, and its call was, ultimately, not to be denied. Who was to say it would not be today?

  Without a doubt, the time had passed for men like him. The city below him was a machine, its people mere moving parts generating goods and money. Cold rationality had spread across this fair land: Its nobility were those who stole for good purpose. Which he could understand—gods made their own rules—but these took no joy in life. The gods of this England were film stars and dispensers of tawdry advice, and they embraced brittle frivolity rather than the deep and supple exuberance of woodland creatures. In this England, Ariel would wear a straight-jacket, Hamlet would be fodder for the gossip columns. Hadn’t he seen Oberon and Titania this very morning, aged and worn as the feather in his borrowed hat: a man and a woman, older than their years, sitting on a park bench in their cast-off overcoats and sharing a scrap of ill-cooked food? The king and queen of the fairy world, eking out their days amongst the wind-blown biscuit wrappers.

  Goodman pulled the feather from his hat band. This primary flight-feather of Strix aluco had greeted him one morning outside his front door, a gift from the tawny lady whose home was in the old oak, whose voice often called to him at night. His fingers smoothed the barbs to order, but there remained a gap. One barb was missing. When had that happened? He worked at it with his fingertips, as if his flight from the roof-top depended on the feather’s perfection, but even with the barbules linked, there remained a hole near the shaft.

  Are you frightened of anything, Mr Robert?

  The hole in the owl’s feather was the shape of an elongated tear-drop. Turned slightly, it reminded him of the shape of a child’s eye. A half-Chinese child’s eye.

  He shuddered, and let go the feather, leaning forward, forward until a gust of wind caught it, whipping it around the corner and out of sight.

  A child’s eye.

  Late November, in the depths of an eternal war, a war with no beginning, no end, only stink and muck and death. One rainy day all his men had been taken from him, and in exchange he had been given an ambulance filled with groaning bodies and a dead driver. And so he became Goodman and no longer had to be The Other who ordered his men into the bullets, and he drove like a demon to claw the bleeding away from Death.

  Then in December, The Powers Above had decreed that a particular piece of ground must be won, a tiny hillock of no more importance than any other hillock won or lost over the past twenty-eight months. It was to be a surprise push. It was certainly a surprise to the citizens of a much-shelled village, trying to scrape a few potatoes from the liquid ground.

  And a child. God only knew where her parents were—under a collapsed building, leaking into a field. But the child was there, a grubby thing in a too-short dress and a too-large hat who had climbed—or been placed—on a bit of surviving wall, where she kicked her heels and watched the parade of passing motors and horses; soldiers marching in one direction, soldiers staggering or being carried in the other.

  No fear, no curiosity, just sitting and watching, hands in her lap, as if she’d been sitting and watching the whole of her young life.

  One glance, and the passing soldiers and ambulance drivers could tell she was not right. A closer look, and Goodman had seen the almond curve to her eyes, the protruding tongue-tip that imparted a look of great concentration. She was what they call Mongoloid, what his mother—what The Other’s mother—had called one of God’s innocents. The child had sat there like a talisman for three trips to the Front, and then she was gone. The wall was gone. He drove two more trips before he stopped to s
ee. The hat was there; she was not. She was not there all the way until dark, but that night she was back, her epicanthic eyes watching him, that night and a string of other nights. Once the battle had moved on a few miles, he returned to the village and found an old woman who knew of the child, who confirmed that the mother had died and the father was gone to war. The old woman did not know where the child was. He asked soldiers. He haunted the hospital tents. In the end he drove off in his ambulance, far down the line to where the French uniforms began, in pursuit of a rumour of troops who had adopted a mute orphan as their mascot. But it was not she.

  Then he was arrested, and it was discovered that Goodman had been born on a battlefield when The Other had died. He expected to be lined up and shot, but word came of a medal, and as a favour to the French, they sent him to Craiglockhart instead. There he met Rivers, and told him, just a little, about the girl on the wall.

  Only after, when he’d crawled off to Cumbria and found the old woodsman’s hut and let the land remake him, had she gone away, for good.

  Until an aeroplane came at him out of the sky and gave birth to a very different child with the same almond-shaped eyes.

  And now below him lay the child’s nest, her hive, the loud, confusing, cold-hearted world into which she had been born. She might appear a being that could not feel the touch of earthly years—Wordsworth’s children, again—yet in no time at all the shades of the prison-house would close in on her and she would grow up. There was nothing he could do to stop it. She could not live in a Cumbrian estate among the owls and the hedgehogs. Her people lay below him. In his pocket was the drawing her father had done, the child become a woman: That was her world.

  Her world, not his: He had no place here. But because of a child with a certain shape to her eyes, he must try to see the life in the machine, to see the sweetness in what they produced. He must do what he could to make it a place worthy of her.