The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [117]
“Several shop-keepers and residents thought the description sounded familiar, but without a photograph, or even a drawing, there is little to trigger memory. He will continue tomorrow, further afield.”
“I had no better luck today.”
I had gone immediately home, where I had offended Mrs Hudson for a third time by being unwilling to settle to a conversation or take a meal. I got what I needed and left, but no taxi driver or railway employee recognised either my photograph of Yolanda Adler or the vague description of a black-haired man with a scar next to his eye.
“However, I'm interpreting the lack of response as a positive negative: If Yolanda Adler took a train to Sussex last week, someone would have remembered her,” I told Mycroft. “And Gunderson said his boss had driven the motor some time between Thursday night and Monday morning. He didn't notice the mileage, but he said it was nothing unusual for The Reverend to drive himself. I wonder if Lestrade has got any more out of him than I did?”
“The ears I have within Scotland Yard tell me no, that Gunderson is just a hireling. If he knew where Brothers and Damian had gone, he would give them up in hopes of winning some points for himself.”
“They're not letting Gunderson go, are they?”
“Indications are that they will hold him, if for nothing else than the gun. Scotland Yard does not approve of felons with guns. I imagine, however, that he will have given Lestrade an adequate description of the Amazon who trussed him and poked holes in his epidermis.”
“Lestrade will be steaming,” I said with regret. “Apart from the search for Brothers' house, have you had any results?”
He had, clearly, been waiting for me to ask: He had been busy that day, and between what his “ears” at Scotland Yard had passed on, and what his own operative had been set to find, he had quite a bit. Reverend Thomas Brothers, newly born in November 1923, had a British passport under that name, issued four weeks later, and a sizeable bank account. His man was tracing the deposits and cheques written, but the preliminary report was that Brothers was inordinately fond of cash, even when it came to large amounts. Brothers either had a laden safe, or another account that received systematic deposits of bank notes.
However, as Gunderson had intimated, there was no record of a man named Thomas Brothers entering the country—or purchasing a house, or buying a motor-car. Mycroft had set into motion a close search through the records, looking at any middle-aged male who had come into Britain during the two months before Gunderson was hired, but that would take many days.
“I also,” Mycroft told me, “took a look at our file for Aleister Crowley. Not, as you have said, that Crowley is directly related to this case, but I hoped it might suggest other avenues of investigation.
“There are certain points of similarity to Testimony, but I imagine those would exist between any two belief systems built around individuals who think themselves gods. One thing did come to my attention: Crowley was in Shanghai for a brief time, in 1906. He tells a story concerning a delay there that kept him from arriving in San Francisco, in April of that year.”
I looked up, startled. “The earthquake and fire?”
“He claimed that but for the Shanghai delay, he would have been there at the time.”
“You're suggesting that when Testimony says the narrator ‘preserved the mortal life of the Guide from flames and the turmoil of an angry earth,’ he is talking about Crowley and San Francisco?”
“It is one possibility. The other item of interest concerns the man's claim of a simultaneous meteor and comet. My informant at the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that, if we are looking for the birth date of a middle-aged man, the closest one may come is August and September of 1882. The Perseids were over by the time the Great September Comet was noticed on the first of September, but it reached its maximum brightness so quickly, it requires no great stretch of the imagination to claim that it was in the sky earlier.”
“So we could