The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [54]
He stood with his back to the light, and I felt his eyes on me. I stood up abruptly and went for my spectacles and coat.
“I’ll get some fresh air. Go back to sleep,” I repeated fiercely, and stumbled from the caravan.
Twenty minutes down the road my steps finally slowed; ten minutes after that I stopped and went to sit on a dark shape that turned out to be a low wall. The stars were out, a relatively uncommon thing in this rainy corner of a rainy country, and the air was clean and smelt of bracken and grass and horse. I pulled great draughts of it into me and thought of Mrs. Simpson, who had called it breathing champagne. I wondered if Jessica Simpson were breathing it now.
The Dream gradually receded. Nightmare and memory, it had be-gun with the death of my family, a vivid re-creation that haunted and hounded me and made my nights into purgatory. Tonight, though, I had Holmes to thank for interrupting it, and its aftermath was con-siderably lessened. After an hour, cold through, I walked back through the first light of dawn to the wagon, and to bed and a brief sleep.
In the morning neither of us mentioned the night’s occurrences. I cooked porridge for breakfast, flavoured with light flecks of ash and so lumpy Mrs. Hudson would have considered it suitable only for the chickens. We then walked up towards the described campsite, taking a roundabout route and a spade to justify our presence.
The site was unattended when we arrived. The tent was still stand-ing, slack-roped and flabby-sided, with a blackened circle and two rusting pans to one side where Mrs. Simpson had cooked her meals. The area smelt of old, wet ashes, and had the forlorn look of a child’s toy left out in the rain. I shuddered at the image.
I went up to the tent door and looked in at the jumble of bedrolls and knapsacks and clothing, all abandoned in the scramble to locate the child and now compulsively preserved in situ by police custom.
Holmes walked around to the back of the tent, his eyes on the trampled, rain-soaked ground.
“How long have we?” I asked him.
“Connor arranged for the constable on guard to be called away un-til nine o’clock. A bit under two hours. Ah.”
At his expression of satisfaction I let the canvas flap fall and picked my way around to the tent’s back wall, where I was met by the singular vision of an ageing gipsy stretched full out between the guy ropes with a powerful magnifying glass in his hand, prodding delicately at the tent’s lower seam with his fountain pen. The pen disappeared into the interior of the tent. I turned and went back inside, and when the bed-ding had been pulled away I saw what Holmes had discovered: a tiny slit just at seam line, the edges pushed inward and the threads at both ends of the cut slightly strained.
“You expected that?” I asked.
“Didn’t you?” I was tempted to make a face at him through the canvas, but refrained; he’d have known.
“A tube, for sleeping gas?”
“Right you be, Mary Todd,” he said, and the pen retreated. I stood up, head bent beneath the soggy canvas roof, and looked at the corner where Jessica Simpson had slept. According to her parents, the only things missing from her knapsack or the tent had been her shoes. No pullover, no stockings, not even her beloved doll. Just the shoes.
The doll was still there, feet up beneath the tangle of upturned bed-ding, and I pulled out the much-loved figure, straightened her crum-pled dress, and brushed a tangle of yarn hair from her wide painted eyes. The once-red lips smiled at me enigmatically.
“Why don’t you tell me what you saw that night, eh?” I addressed her. “It would save us a great deal of trouble.”
“What was that?” asked Holmes’ voice from a distance.
“Nothing. Would there be any objection if we took the doll with us, do you think?”
“I shouldn’t think so. They only left these things here for us to see; they have their photographs.”
I pushed the doll into my skirt pocket, took a last look around, and went outside. Holmes stood, back to