The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [44]
I sorted them by date. The first, dated the tenth of August, was a small item from a back page, circled by Holmes. It concerned the American Senator Jonathan Simpson, leaving to go on holiday with his family, a wife and their six-year-old daughter, to Wales.
The next article was three days later, the central headline on the first page of the news. It read:
senator’s daughter kidnapped huge ransom sought
A carefully typed ransom note had been received by the Simpsons, saying simply that she was being held, that Simpson had one week to raise £20,000, and that if he went to the police the child would die. The article did not explain how the newspaper had received the information, or how Simpson was to keep the police out after it had been on the front page. The newsworthiness of the case gradually dwindled, and today’s paper, five days after the heavily leaded kidnap headlines, held a grainy photograph of two haggard-looking people on a back page: the parents.
I went and perched my shoulder against the door of the laboratory as Holmes measured and poured and stirred.
“Who called you in?”
“Apparently Mrs. Simpson insisted.”
“You don’t sound pleased.”
He slammed down a pipette, which of course shattered.
“How could I be pleased? Half of Wales has trudged the hillside into mud, the trail is a week old, there are no prints, nobody saw any-one, the parents are hysterical, and since nobody has any idea of what to do, they decide to humour the woman and bring in old Holmes. Old Holmes the miracle worker.” He stared sourly at his finger as I fastened a plaster to it.
“Reading that drivel of Watson’s, a person would never know I’d had any real failures, the kind that grind away and keep one from sleeping. Russell, I know these cases, I know the feel of how they be-gin, and this has all the marks. It stinks of failure, and I don’t want to be anywhere near Wales when they find that child’s body.”
“Refuse the case, then.”
“I can’t. There’s always a chance they overlooked something, that these suspicious old eyes might see something.” He gave a sharp bark of cynical laughter. “Now, there’s a morsel for Watson’s notes: Sher-lock Holmes trusting in luck. Sit down, Russell, and let me put this muck on your face.”
It was horrid, warm and black and slimy like something the dog left behind, and had to go up my nose, in my ears, and around my mouth, but I sat.
“We will be a pair of gipsies. I’ve arranged for a caravan in Cardiff, where we’ll see the Simpsons and then make our way north. I had planned to hire a driver, but since you’ve been practising on Patrick’s team, you can do it. I don’t suppose you’ve picked up any useful skills at Oxford, such as telling fortunes?”
“The girl downstairs from me there is a fiend for Tarot. I could probably imitate the jargon. And there’s the juggling.”
“There was a deck in the cupboard—Sit still! I told Scotland Yard I’d be in Cardiff tomorrow.”
“I thought the ransom note said they had one week? What can you expect to do in two days?”
“You overlooked the agony columns in the papers,” he scolded. “The deadline was as much a pro forma demand as the insistence that the police be kept out of it. Nobody takes such demands seriously, least of all kidnappers. We have until the thirtieth of August. Senator Simpson is trying to raise the money, but it will come near to breaking him,” he added in a distracted voice, and smeared the repulsive goop onto my eyelids. “A senator, even a powerful one like Simpson, is not always a rich man.”
“We’re going to Wales. You think the child is still there?”
“It is a very remote area, no one heard an automobile after dark, and the police had every road blocked by six o’clock in the morning. The roadblocks are still up, but Scotland Yard, the Welsh police, and the American staff all think she’s in London. They’re busy at that end, and they’ve thrown us Wales as a sop to get the Simpsons out from un-der their feet. It does mean that we’ll have a relatively free hand once we’re there. Yes, I think she is still in Wales;