The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [47]
“That you will not, man. No,” he shouted, and grabbed Holmes’ upraised arm. “We’ll not be having that. There’s to the station with the both of you; we shall see if that cools your tempers.” He looked at me more closely and then turned to the group of men. “Perhaps you gentlemen might care to check your pockets, see if there might be anything missing?”
To my relief there was nothing, although I would not have put it past Holmes to add that bit of verisimilitude to the proceedings. The constable made good his threat anyway, and as my voice joined with Holmes’ in vociferous abuse we were bundled into the back of a police van and taken away. Once inside the wagon we did not look at each other. I sniffed occasionally. It concealed the smile that kept creeping onto my lips.
At the station a PC seized Holmes’ handcuffed arm and led him roughly away. My own young constable and the matronly sort he handed me over to both seemed undecided as to whether I was an in-nocent victim or a worse scoundrel than my father, and it required an enormous amount of effort and a tedious amount of time before I could make myself sufficient of a nuisance to be granted my request, which was a brief interview with Chief Inspector Connor. Finally, I stood outside the door that held his name on a brass plaque. The tight-lipped, over-corseted matron hissed at me to stay where I was and went to speak with a secretary. Matron glared at me, secretary raked me with scandalised eyes, but I did not care. I was there, and it was only twenty past twelve.
To my dismay, however, the secretary decided to stand firm. She shook her head, waved her hand at the closed door, and was very ob-viously refusing me access to the man inside. I dug out a pen and a scrap of paper from my capacious pockets and, after a moment’s thought, wrote on it the name of the child whose fate brought us here. I folded it three times and walked over to hold it out deferentially to the secretary.
“I’m terribly sorry, Miss,” I said. “I shouldn’t think of bothering the chief inspector if I weren’t absolutely certain that he would want to see me. Please, just give this to him. If he does not wish to see me after that, I shall go away quietly.”
She looked at the folded scrap, but perhaps the uplifted syntax got through to her, because she took my note and went resolutely through the door. Voices from inside cut off short, then came hers in tones of apology, and then an abrupt and stifled exclamation was all the warn-ing I had before a florid, middle-aged man with thinning red hair and an ill-fitting tweed suit stormed out of the doorway, growling magnifi-cently in the rumble and roll of his Welsh origins.
“If the Pharaoh in Egypt had been so plagued by Moses as I have been by all the troublemakers of the world he would have delivered the children of Israel in his own carriage to the very gates of Jericho. Now look you here, Miss,” he pinned me down with a pair of tired, brilliant blue eyes, “there’s pitiful, there is, the sly ways of your sort, coming by here and—”
I leant into the gale of his speech and contributed two low, forceful words of my own.
“Sherlock Holmes,” I pronounced. His head snapped up as if I had slapped him. He took a step back and ran his eyes over me, and I was amused to see him think that even a man famous throughout the world for his skill at disguise was not likely to be the person before him. His eyes narrowed.
“And how are you knowing about—” He stopped, glanced at the startled woman in the doorway, went back to close his door, and then led me away into a smaller, shabbier office than the one I had caught a glimpse of—an interview room, with three doors. He closed the door behind us.
“You will explain yourself,” he ordered.
“With pleasure,” I said sweetly. “Would you mind awfully if I were to sit down?”
For the first time he actually looked at me, drawn up short by the thick Oxford drawl emerging from the gipsy girl, and I reflected upon the extraordinary effect gained by speech that is incongruous with