The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [120]
“She never meant to kill you, then!”
“I was glad to see that. The problem had troubled me. Oh, not her murder attempt, but that mine was the first. The whole point of killing you and Watson, as I read it, was to hurt me, but how could I be hurt by your deaths if I were already dead? I was very pleased to see that explained by the trigger. It also confirms that you shall be safe if we appear alienated. I shall have to arrange for a discreet guard for Mrs. Hudson when she returns from Australia, but Watson’s protec-tion we shall continue to leave to Mycroft.”
The rest of the pages were interesting, but not as important as the fact of the wire trigger. The prints on the intact Oxford bomb were those of the deceased man, and his alone. The cab’s prints included those of Holmes, myself, and Billy, its owner and another driver (both of whom Lestrade had interviewed and released), and two others, one of whom had a thumbprint matching the one on the button. This gentleman was well-known to the police record books and was soon apprehended. His colleague made an escape out the back window of his house and was ru-moured to have fled to America. The large man in custody was being charged with all the injuries done to Billy and to the cab, but Lestrade was of the opinion that the man would not be threatened into revealing anything concerning his employer. “He does not appear frightened of retribution,” wrote Lestrade, “simply very firm in his refusal, despite threats of a long prison term for the assault. It should be noted that his wife and their two teenaged sons have recently moved into a new house and seem to have an income from outside. Their bank account does not reflect any great change, but they have significant quantities of cash to spend. Thus far enquiries have been without result.”
I looked up at Holmes through his cloud of grey smoke.
“We have another family man in our group, I see.”
“Read on, the plot thickens quickly.”
The Yard’s next document concerned the dead man, John Dickson, who had bombed Dr. Watson’s house. He had indeed been apparently reformed, living happily, to all appearances, with his wife and children and working in his father-in-law’s music business. About six weeks be-fore the trio of bombs, he had come into a comfortable inheritance, from a distant relative who had died in New York. According to his widow, he had told her that the inheritance was to be in two parts, of equal size, the second to be received within four or five months. He began talking about University for the young children, and the surgery one of them needed on a crippled leg, and they planned a trip to France the following summer. However, shortly after the first sum of money arrived, he began to become secretive. He put a lock on a back shed and spent hours in there. (The investigation revealed traces of the explosive powder used and clipped ends of wire such as the Oxford bomb had preserved.) He disappeared occasionally for one or two days, returning travel-stained and weary, but oddly excited. He had left the house on a Saturday night in the middle of December, saying that he should be away for several days, but that after this trip he should not have to leave again. The wife and her father tried to persuade him not to go, it being a very busy time of year for the shop, but he was adamant.
In the early hours of Thursday morning he was killed by the bomb, apparently a result of the timing mechanism having been tampered with. One week later a bank draught was received in the wife’s name, drawn from a bank in New York. Police there found that the account had been opened some weeks before by a woman who had brought in cash for the purpose. An odd afternote was that the amount of the second payment was exactly twice what the first had been, rather than an equal