O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [89]
Holmes swallowed his wine, with more speed than manners, and began to speak; the abbot rose and went to his cabinet, bringing the wine back with him. He filled Holmes’ empty glass, and sat down again with the bottle close at hand.
“Sometime between Christmas and the New Year you had a visitor here,” Holmes was saying. “I do not know if he appeared as a brother from one of your other houses, or if he stole a habit from you, but I do know that when he left, he had a monk’s habit in his bag. He also helped himself to the candles from your chapel. Do you know this man?”
“What makes you think such a thing happened, my son?”
“I have spent the last three weeks tracing his footsteps, ever since three men were killed near Jaffa: a farmer who helped the English during the war and his two field hands. The person who came here distanced himself from the murders, which he, shall I say, encouraged, if not arranged, but did not actually commit.
“On the night of the new moon this man was down at the Salt Sea buying a shipment of explosives from a salt smuggler. The smuggler’s son happened to see a monk’s robe in the man’s packs. Sometime that evening the man stuck one of your chapel’s candles on a stone, blew it out when it was down to the last inch, and left it.
“Mikhail the Druse found it. Mikhail was following this man, very probably saw his transaction with the smuggler, scraped off the candle when he came across it, and dropped it into his pack—not as evidence, I dare say, but for its intrinsic usefulness to a thrifty man like Mikhail, as a source of light or as a fire starter.
“Unfortunately for Mikhail, the man discovered him. He and his assistant turned and chased Mikhail into the Wadi Estemoa. There they murdered him, removing from his belongings a small notebook. They then left him for the jackals, and took themselves and their load of dynamite off into the countryside, or into Jerusalem, to hide it.
“I fear that Mikhail the Druse was not a man naturally gifted at espionage. I believe that when he recorded information in his notebook he either did not bother to encode it, or else used a code easily broken, because when the man we seek laid his hands on the notebook, he discovered that Mikhail’s master was a man called Joshua, and that Mikhail had something to do with a pair of wandering scribes named Ali and Mahmoud.
“Between the night of the new moon, when Mikhail the Druse was murdered, and the night of the full moon, when the man arranged a motorcar accident, he sought out information from within the British camp, most likely using a source he had used before—a partner, even. This source revealed that the two scribes would be with General Allenby in Haifa on Wednesday, and were to return by motorcar to Jericho the following morning. He even knew the route to be taken.
“No doubt the central man would have preferred to seize one of the Hazr brothers, but as chance would have it, they were thrown free and I was thrown into the arms of the men laying the trap. Maalesh,” he commented with a crooked smile. The abbot picked up the bottle and filled Holmes’ glass again without speaking.
“This is what I know of him,” Holmes concluded. “I ask you again: Do you know the man?”
“He is not a man.”
Holmes and I looked at each other, startled.
“Surely you can’t mean—” Holmes began.
“He is a demon.”
“Ah.” Holmes subsided, and did not glance at me this time.
“But perhaps your vision of the world does not allow for the existence of evil creatures,” the abbot said.
“Well,” said Holmes slowly, “yes. I should say that I have met evil, true evil. Not many times, but often enough to recognise it.”