The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [144]
“Holmes, do three-year-olds play dollies' tea-party?”
“My experience with three-year-olds is limited,” he replied.
“The Adlers' neighbours, at number eleven, have a daughter of eight or nine. She plays dollies' tea-party. I did myself when I was her age. And she is in the habit of playing with Estelle Adler when they meet in the park. She made reference to books as well. Although some children do read at a young age. I did, myself.”
“Does this fascinating narrative have a direction?”
I took a bracing breath. “All along, Holmes, Damian has been … less than completely forthcoming with us.”
“He has lied?” Holmes said bluntly. “People generally do, although I have told you his reasons.”
“But, about the child.”
He stopped what he was doing. “What about her?”
I spun the tea-cup around the end of my finger, so as not to meet his eyes. “That photograph, of the Adlers. It looked out of date.”
“How do you mean?”
“Yolanda's dress and hair. Fashion changes rapidly these days, particularly skirt lengths. The dresses in her house reflected current tastes-even those that were not new had had their hems adjusted. I noticed, because it struck me as incongruous, a Bohemian so attentive to fashion.” I lifted my gaze from the cup on my finger. “I'd have said the skirt in that photograph is three or four years old. And the hair-cut.”
“The photograph was taken in Shanghai,” he pointed out.
“Where, I agree, styles may be behind the times. It is equally possible that Yolanda only discovered a sense of fashion after she came to London. But—”
“You are suggesting that the picture was taken some years ago? Why should Damian—”
He stopped.
I finished the thought. “If the photograph was in fact taken some years ago, then the child is older than Damian permitted us to believe. Would the neighbour's girl be as interested in exchanging books, were Estelle three and a half years old?”
“This could not be the child born in 1913,” he declared.
“Dorothy Hayden? No, I agree, not unless this photograph is a remarkably good fake. But even if Yolanda and Brothers—Hayden—this man has entirely too many names! Even if they separated in 1917, a child could have been born after that, and been small when Damian arrived in 1920.”
“You are proposing that, were Damian concerned that I would not search for his wife once I knew her history, it would apply doubly were I to suspect the child was not even his. And it would,” he conceded, “further explain Yolanda's continued contact with her former husband, were he the father of the child.”
He turned back to the shelves, but I thought his mind was not on his actions. Nor, in truth, was mine.
We found nothing of further interest, although I was grateful Brothers had been here for less than a year, and had not filled the house with a lifetime of macabre treasures.
When we had finished, Holmes wrapped a sheet of paper around a glass paperweight from the desk, for the finger-prints, and slid it into his pocket, along with a phial of the unidentified liquid from the safe and a sample of the blotting sand. He stood looking down at the desk with its litter of pamphlets and objects—not the tea-cup, which lay in my pocket—and then picked up the stiletto. He considered it with his thumb for a moment, then raised it high and drove it viciously down: through a postcard photograph of an Irish stone cross; through the train time-table below that; through the cheaply printed pamphlet of Norse churches in Britain and the almanac page showing the phases of the moon for 1924 and the stained green blotter, deep into the wood of the desk itself.
We left it there, a declaration of war.
Back at Mycroft's flat, which was silent but for the snores rumbling down the hallway, we assembled a dinner of bread and cheese, drank some tea, and took ourselves to bed.
Most unusually, it was Holmes who fell asleep and I who lay, gazing at the patterns of street-lights on the ceiling. After an hour, shortly after four a.m., I slipped out into the