The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [143]
I said to Holmes, “Did you agree that the stain on Yolanda Adler's fingers looked like ink?”
“I did.”
“Because it's possible she wrote that final letter to Damian at this desk, with this pen.” I showed him; he said nothing, just turned his attention to the wall safe that he had found beneath a painting of Stonehenge under a full moon (amateurish and melodramatic and markedly not by Damian Adler).
I opened the desk's upper drawers and found, among the discarded pens, stationery, and paper clips, a wooden box containing half a dozen of the heavy, crude gold rings worn by the Inner Circle, in various sizes. Despite their solid appearance, they felt like gold plate. The next drawer down held maps of England, Scotland, Iceland, Germany, and all of the Scandinavian countries.
The bottom drawer held an assortment of rubbish, including a dog's collar that had clearly been buried for years, a pair of new-looking leather bedroom slippers, and a pretty little dollies' tea-cup.
I did not find a master journal filled with bloody writing, nor did Holmes.
He did, however, find something nearly as obscene.
Holmes finally gave a grunt of satisfaction, and the safe door came open. I went to look over his shoulder.
There was money, quite a bit of money, in the currencies of several countries. Two passports, one well-used British document under the name of Harris, the other for a resident of Shanghai named Hawthorn. A velvet pouch containing a palmful of diamonds, cut and polished and splashing a startling brilliance across the dim-lit room. A bottle holding several ounces of unidentified liquid, with three small glass phials waiting to be filled. And seven envelopes of heavy white paper, folded shut but not sealed.
On each was written a number; in each was a sample of hair. As Holmes had anticipated, several were from animals—envelopes one and two had tufts of sheep's wool, while number four had three tail-feathers from a rooster. Number three, however, was definitely human, grey and about eight inches long. Number five was from a man, brown with a few grey hairs, its pomade staining the envelope. Number six held half a dozen strands of a horse's tail. And number seven: heavy black hair four inches long, one end neatly bound with white silk thread, attaching it to a beautifully worked gold wedding ring, a delicate version of the one I had seen on Damian's hand.
Yolanda.
Holmes took a clean handkerchief from his breast pocket and spread it on the desk, tipping the black lock and ring into its centre. The empty envelope went back into the safe; the handkerchief he folded over and tucked into his pocket. I did not object: Its incriminating value in Brothers' possession was not worth the revulsion of leaving it here. He shut the safe, and came back to where I sat.
“Anything of interest?”
I pointed out several oddities that I had come across in the drawers but took care to leave in place. Now, Holmes pulled each out, tossing them onto the blotting-paper: Clearly, he cared no more for alerting Brothers to the search than he did about leaving finger-prints. “The blade is the wrong shape,” he said of the stiletto I had found in the top drawer. He glanced through the pamphlet on Norse gods published by the United Kingdom Associated Sons of Scandinavia, but the rest—the monographs on Stonehenge and Hadrian's Wall, a Times article on a hoard uncovered in Devon, a booklet about the northern constellations, the dollies' tea-cup—those he flicked over with a dismissive finger before returning to the shelves, to pull down and shake out each book, one after another.
I fitted the tiny porcelain cup onto the end of my little finger. It was an odd thing to find in the possession of this man. And exactly a week before, I had seen a set the precise match of this one, three cups on a diminutive enamel-ware tray. Had we found this missing cup with the other trophies in the safe, it would have had a very different meaning, but dropped with other things into a drawer …?
And now, the object started off a series of thoughts that I had tried to