The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [148]
Mycroft shifted in his chair. “Still, I should have said the ritual element was particularly strong, if he went to the trouble of dressing her in new clothing.”
“Were any of the others wearing new clothes?” I asked, but that question had not been addressed on the police reports.
“We may have to wait until we give what we have to Lestrade,” Holmes said, “before we can answer that.”
“In any case,” I decided, “we may not be certain what he wants with the child, but I should say his goal with Damian is twofold: revenge over Yolanda, and doing what Testimony calls ‘loosing’ Damian's power.”
“‘He has the Tool,’” Mycroft recited, “‘to cut through empty pretence and loose the contents of a vessel.’”
“He would consider the ‘contents’ of Damian's ‘vessel’ to be considerable.”
“As for the child,” Holmes said, “‘The greater the sacrifice, the greater the energies loosed.’”
“‘The world lies primed,’” I said quietly, “‘for a transformative spark.’”
The morning that had begun in a storm of activity dragged slowly. Holmes paced and smoked, frustrated by the difficulties of leaving this place while Lestrade's arrest warrants waited for us outside. I retreated to Mycroft's study with the list of livestock deaths that I had begun to incorporate on Friday evening, and Mycroft picked up a novel by G. K. Chesterton, to all appearances completely undistracted.
Two hours later, I heard the two men talking; a short time later, Holmes put his head through the study doorway.
“I'm going to Norway,” he said abruptly. “They may need me in Bergen.”
I did not know if they meant Damian and Estelle or Mycroft's men, but it hardly mattered. “All right.”
His look on me sharpened. “You don't agree?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Russell, this questioning of your abilities must stop. If you have something to contribute, speak up.”
“Patterns,” I said helplessly. “He has to have a pattern, and the only one I can find makes little sense.”
“Show me.”
So I showed him. And Mycroft, who had abandoned Chesterton to help Holmes assemble a kit for Scandinavia, and heard us talking.
I had been unable to shake the idea that my path over the past two weeks was littered with crumbs of evidence, like the trail left through the woods in the fairy-tale. But, just as a random scattering of crumbs can be connected into lines, so will random evidence appear to coincide.
And I was not sure enough of myself to be certain that the patterns I saw were real.
“One might think that if a sacrifice draws on and reflects the power of an eclipse, the performer would move heaven and earth to be standing in a place of greatest darkness. But I'm not sure that is of paramount importance to the author of Testimony. The book is full of minor inconsistencies; symbolic truth is far more important to him than mere fact.”
Most men, launched on a desperate search for a son or nephew, would be impatient with this excursion into academic theory; these two men were not.
“So, two small pieces of evidence bother me. First, one of the books on Brothers' desk was a guide to Great Britain. He'd made marks on the entries for London and Manchester, and had dog-eared, then smoothed out, several other pages, including the one describing the Wilmington Giant. There were two slips of paper in the guide-book. One marked the beginning of the London section, the other was for the Scottish Isles.
“Second. In Millicent Dunworthy's desk was a folder pertaining to the Children of Lights. A ledger recorded costs—hiring the hall, building cabinets, candles, tea—but there were also other notes. One concerned the cost of placing an advertisement in various newspapers; there were several estate agent listings for halls for hire, larger than the room they're using now. And there was a page in Miss Dunworthy's handwriting with times and prices. The sort of thing you'd jot down without needing to write the details, because you knew what they referred to.
“I did not write those down, but to the best of my recollection, those times and prices match