The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [57]
“What is it, Russell?”
“Oh, nothing. You just sound so... callous.”
“You prefer a surgeon who weeps at the thought of the pain he is about to inflict? I should have thought you had learnt that lesson by now, Russell. Allowing the emotions to involve themselves in an in-vestigation can only interfere with the surgeon’s hand. Now, assuming the child was taken as early as midnight, and it is light by five o’clock; without an automobile, that would place the limits they could have ridden approximately here,” and he drew a semicircle, using as its cen-ter the Y where the trail had disappeared. “Within this area; a place where a telephone is to hand; a large enough village for the delivery of The Times out of London to go unremarked. You won’t overlook the significance of the agony column?”
“Of course not,” I hastened to reassure him.
He reached back onto his sheaf of maps, withdrew half a dozen of the very largest scale, and fitted them together. We puzzled over the lines of streams and roads, footpaths and houses. I absently wiped a smear of pickle from the map and brushed off some crumbs, and thought aloud.
“There are only four small villages in that direction. Five, if we count this furthest, though it would have forced them to ride very fast. All are near enough to the road, they might have a telephone line. These two villages seem rather more scattered than the others, which might give whatever house they’re in more privacy. I can’t see that we’ll make them all by tomorrow.”
“No.”
“We have only six more days before the ransom is to be paid.”
“I am aware of that,” he said testily. “Get the horse in the traces.”
We were away before the constable returned, but it was nearly dark before we came to the first village. Holmes trudged off to the pub, which looked to be on the ground floor of someone’s home, while I cared for the horse and tried to concentrate my brain on conversation with the children who inevitably appeared at our arrival. I had found that there was usually one who took responsibility for communicating with this strange visitor. In this case the representative was a dirty girl of about ten. The others kept up a running commentary, or perhaps a simultaneous translation in a Welsh that was too fast and colloquial for me to grasp. I ignored them all and proceeded with my tasks.
“Are you a gipsy then, lady?”
“What do you think?” I grunted.
“My Dad says yes.”
“Your Dad is wrong.” Shocked silence met the heresy. After a minute she plucked up her nerve again.
“If it’s not a gipsy you are, then what?”
“A Romany.”
“A Romany? There’s foolish, there is! They carried spears and they’re all dead.”
“That’s a Roman. I’m Romany. Want to give this to the horse?” A small boy took the oats from me. “Is there anyone in town who’d like to sell me a couple of suppers?” My crowd silently consulted, then:
“Maddie, run you by there and ask your Mam. Go now, you.” The tiny girl, torn between the desire to keep watch and the undeniable honour of providing service, reluctantly took herself down the road and disappeared into the pub.
“Have you no pan?” asked a small person of one sex or another.
“I don’t like to cook,” I said regally, and shocked silence, deeper than before, descended. If the other was heresy, I could be burnt for this. “Is there a telephone in town?” I asked the spokesman.
“Telephone?”
“Yes, telephone, you know, the thing you pick up and shout down? It’s too dark to see any wires. Is there one in town?” The puzzled faces showed me this was the wrong village. A child piped up.
“My Da’ used one once, he did, when the Grand’ died and he had to tell his brother by Caerphilly.”
“Where did he go to use it?”
An eloquent shrug in the light of the lamps. Oh, well.
“What for do you need a telephone machine?”
“To call my stockbroker.” I continued before they could ask for a definition, “You don’t get many strangers through here, do you?”
“Oh, many there are. Why, only at Midsummer’s, an autocar filled with English came here and stopped,