The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [119]
I didn't have the heart to tell him.
Nor did I let him know that there was no record of a Reverend Smythe on the books of any British church body.
Friday afternoon, a positive storm of information battered the door of Mycroft's flat.
Albert Seaforth, subject of Holmes' telegram, turned out to be an unemployed schoolteacher from York, fired in late May when one of his students told her parents that her Latin teacher had made advances. He had been found the previous Thursday morning, sitting upright against a standing stone, looking out over a desolate portion of the Yorkshire moors. His wrists had been slit; the knife was still in his hand.
“When did he die?” I asked Mycroft, who rang me from his office with the information.
“Approximately a day before.”
“He'd been there for a day and no-one noticed?”
“The only neighbours are sheep.”
I looked at the notes I had made while on the telephone: Seaforth. Fired 19 May. Knife in hand. If this man was another victim, it confirmed a pattern of marginally employed individuals.
An hour later, Mycroft rang again to say that his pet laboratory had analysed the mixture that the Circle had been drinking: mead, spices, Chartreuse (hence the colour), hashish (which I had expected), and mushrooms (which I had not).
“Mushrooms. As in toadstools?”
“As you know, the distinction is imprecise, and the samples deteriorated. The mycologist is continuing to work on it.”
When I had rung off, I scratched my head for a bit and then gathered my things to leave, nearly overlooking, in my distraction, the danger of going out of the front door. I caught myself and changed direction, emerging five minutes later in St James's Square. This time I aimed my research enquiries at the Reading Room of the British Museum. I had a moment's qualm as I handed my ticket to the guard at the door, but either Lestrade hadn't thought to notify them, or they were above the fray, because the man waved me in without hesitation.
I found what I needed before closing time, although I nearly walked into the arms of one of Lestrade's men on Jermyn Street as I made my way to the Angel Court entrance. Fortunately, I saw him first, and made haste to evade him.
Mycroft was walking down his hallway, just returned from his walk, when I emerged from the odour of burning honey.
“Ah, Mary,” he said, unsurprised at my appearance. “I have something for you.”
“And I you.”
We met in the sitting room over drinks, and exchanged our papers: I sat and read the results of the agricultural colleague's report, giving minute details of six months of dead livestock, while he frowned over my scribbled notes on the meal eaten by the dead warriors of Valhalla, preparatory to working themselves into their Berserker frenzy: mead and toadstools.
I set his report aside, all thirty pages of it, until I had pencil in hand and the other list of full-moon events beside it.
“Sherlock came through on the telephone this afternoon,” he said. “Shockingly bad connexion, from Newcastle upon Tyne, but I managed to convey the need to keep his head down around the police.”
“What is he doing?”
“He'd only got as far as telling me that he was headed to the Yorkshire Moors when we were cut off.”
“Well, at least there's a chance you won't have to stand bail for him in Newcastle or some equally remote place.”
“There is that.”
After we ate, I took over the dining table and began to make my way laboriously through the livestock report.
As I had anticipated, there were dozens of animal deaths, from one end of the country to the next, and not one of them an obvious ritual sacrifice. Perhaps our man had a purpose other than bloody religion, I speculated with the half of my mind not taken up by dead cows. (Three had died in Cornwall during April, fallen one after another into an abandoned tin mine.) Maybe it was personal: He had a grudge against women