The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [147]
“Holmes, may I say something?”
His grey eyes came up, and he looked at me for the first time. “Of course, Russell. What is it?” He took a bite of the toast, his body feeding itself while his mind was elsewhere.
“We may be on the wrong track.”
He swallowed impatiently, dropping the remains of his breakfast in the ash-tray. “Explain.”
“When we believed Estelle to be three years old, you thought it unlikely that a solitary man—Brothers—would risk burdening himself with an infant. And as you said, disposing of a small body is lamentably easy. However, we know that the child was alive as of Wednesday night. Which makes this important.” I handed him the letter.
Monday, 25 August
Dear Miss Russell,
The infirmities of age are sufficiently vexing upon one's body, but the effects on the mind I find particularly troublesome. This note is by way of being a second thought, which in better times would have come to me while you were still in my presence. I can only trust that there is an element of truth in the saying, better late than never.
As I thought over the situation with which you presented me yesterday, I came to realise that I had neglected to mention one aspect of necromancy, perhaps because it is one of the things so abhorrent, it causes the healthy mind to shudder away. I speak of the relative potency of the blood of an innocent.
Throughout the ages and across the world, the sacrifice of a virgin is regarded as being the most efficacious. When I lay down to sleep last night, I found my rest disturbed by the thought that your suspected necromancer might be in the vicinity of young innocents.
If there are young women near him, or a child of either sex, warn them away, I beg you.
Yours,
Clarissa Ledger
When his eyes had reached the bottom of the page, I asked, “What if his intended sacrificial victim isn't Damian? What if it's the child? Who could be his own child. As he sacrificed his own wife?”
Hope and horror warred in his face, but without a word he carried the letter out of the room. Two minutes later, Mycroft came in, his braces down and dots of shaving cream under his chin, and picked up the telephone. When he had reached his second in command, he said, “Morton? We need to change the search description. The two men and a child may be one man and a child. Yes.”
In twenty minutes, the orders made previously had been amended, and the phone was set back into its hooks. Mycroft left us, and came back clean of shaving cream, tie knotted, waistcoat buttoned. We moved to the dining table, where Mrs Cowper set a bowl of freshly boiled eggs in a napkin before Mycroft. Holmes and I had coffee; he supplemented his beverage with another cigarette. A number of times over the years, I had cause to regret that I did not use tobacco: This was one of those. Instead, I dropped my head in my hands and rubbed my scalp, as if to massage my thoughts into order.
“It would help,” I complained, “if we knew just what Brothers had in mind. His is not a random striking-out. He has a plan. What is it?”
“Human sacrifice at a point of solar eclipse to bring about the end of times?” Holmes asked. It sounded truly mad, when put that way. I scratched my head some more, and a thought surfaced.
“Why kill Yolanda? Was it entirely in service of the ritual, and she was convenient? Or was it revenge, that she left him and married Damian?”
“We don't know that she left him,” Mycroft objected. “Granted, she brought proceedings against him, but that is the way of amicable divorces.”
“Testimony reveals Brothers to be a man eager to embrace coincidence,” Holmes remarked. “He could have seen the two impulses as driving him to the same point.”
“And a third,” I added as something came back to me. “Remember Damian told us that Yolanda was troubled about something in the middle of June? What if she found out that her former husband and head of her church had killed Fiona Cartwright at Cerne Abbas? If Brothers thought she was about