The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [101]
I had just come up to the window when a sound like a meaty palm slapping a table came from just outside the wall, followed a second later by a more familiar report. Holmes reacted instantly and dove across the room at me just as the window imploded in a shower of fly-ing razor-sharp glass and a second slap came from the opposite wall. We both came up in a crouch, and Holmes seized my shoulder.
“Are you hit?”
“My God, was that—”
“Russell, are you all right?” he demanded furiously.
“Yes, I think so. Do you—” but he was sprinting low towards the door as it opened and an inspector in mufti looked in open-mouthed. Holmes gathered him up, and they pounded off down the stairs in pur-suit. I steeled myself to creep around to the broken window and edge one eye over the lower corner. A steam launch was making its rapid way downriver, but there was also a mother with a pram stopped on the bridge, turned to look at a retreating taxi-cab, her shoulders in an attitude of surprise. Inside of a minute Holmes and the others had swept up to her, and she was soon surrounded by gesticulating men pointing east over the river and south across the bridge. I saw Holmes look unerringly up to where I stood in the window, turn to say some-thing to the tweedy inspector, and then set his shoulders resolutely and walk, hatless and head down, back to the Yard.
With typical police efficiency and priorities, Lestrade’s office was filled with people measuring angles and retrieving bullets from the brickwork, none of whom had a dustpan or a means of blocking the icy air from the window. I retreated into the next office but one, a room with no window. As soon as Holmes appeared I knew there would be no arguing with him, although I intended to try. “I think you’d best change that order to clothing for several days, Russell,” were his first words. “Stay away from windows, don’t eat or drink anything you’re not absolutely certain is safe, and keep your revolver with you.”
“Don’t take sweets from strangers, you mean?” I said sarcastically, but he would not anger.
“Precisely. I shall return in two or three hours. Be ready to leave when I get back.”
“Holmes, you must at least—”
“Russell,” he interrupted, and came over to grasp my shoulders, “I am very sorry, but time is of the utmost urgency. You were going to say that I must tell you what is happening, and I shall. You wish to be con-sulted; I intend to do so. In fact, I intend to place a fair percentage of the decisions to be made into your increasingly competent hands. But not just at this moment, Russell. Please, be satisfied with that.” And he shifted his hands to both sides of my head, bent forward, and brushed his lips gently across my brow. I sat down abruptly, felled by this thunderbolt, until long after he had gone ...which, I realized be-latedly, was precisely why he had done it.
olmes’ air of illicit excitement told me that he was ex-tremely unlikely to be back from his haunts in two or three hours. Irritated, I scribbled the lists for the young policewoman, gave her the last of my money, and turned my back on the windowless of-fice. I was jumpy at every window I passed, but I wanted to take a closer look at the parcel of clothing that had arrived for me that morning, which I had only seen from a distance. I made my way to the laboratories, where I disturbed a gentleman in an unnecessarily profes-sional white coat standing at a bench with a shoe in one hand. He turned at my entrance, and when I saw what he held, I was stunned speechless. The shoe was my own.
This pair of shoes now inhabiting the laboratory bench had disap-peared from my rooms some time during the autumn, in one of those puzzling incidents that happen and are finally dismissed with a shrug. I had worn them the second week of October, and two weeks later when I went to look for them, they were not there. It troubled me, but frankly more because I took it as a sign of severe absentmindedness than anything