The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [149]
I reached for the small map I'd been studying, then rejected it in favour of a proper one from Mycroft's map drawer. Elbowing aside the accumulated notes and books, I laid the map on the blotter, then found a yard-stick in the corner and a rusty protractor probably not used since Mycroft was a school-boy.
“Now, this part I'm not sure about, since I was working on a smaller scale, but let's see how it transfers to this one.” I made a small X halfway up the left side of Britain. “Four sites in England, beginning with May Day, or Beltane, when a ram was slaughtered in a stone circle in Cumbria. The second, on the seventeenth of June—a full moon—was Fiona Cartwright, at the carving of a male figure in the hillside in Dorset.” I put a second x on the map, over Cerne Abbas, then a third in the upper right, the emptiness of the Yorkshire Downs. “On the twelfth of August, the night of the Perseids meteor shower, Albert Seaforth was killed at a stone circle in Yorkshire. And three days later, on the second night of the full moon, Yolanda Adler died at another male hill carving, in Sussex.” I put an x for Yolanda at the map's lower right.
“The male victims—the ram and Albert Seaforth—were found at the circles: Long Meg and her Daughters, and the High Bridestones, both female places. The two women were found at the male figures.”
Four marks on a map; two pairs of balanced masculine-feminine energies. I laid the straight-edge across the marks and connected them, making a shape that was not quite trapezoidal, since the upper corners were slightly higher on the left.
“A quadrilateral polygon,” Holmes noted, his voice unimpressed.
But I was not finished. “I asked Mycroft about events occurring around full moons. Among those he recalled were a sheep with its throat savaged in a Neolithic tomb in Orkney, on the eighteenth of May, and an odd splash of blood on the altar of the cathedral in Kirkwall, also in Orkney, on July the sixteenth: Both of those dates were full moons.”
They watched as I laid the yard-stick along the two side lines of the shape and extended them up to form a long, narrow triangle stretching the entire length of Britain, and more.
The meeting point was in the sea north of the Orkney Islands. I tapped my front teeth with the pencil, dissatisfied. “On the other map, they came together in the middle of the Orkney group. Here—”
I duplicated the lines on the smaller map, then set the point of the protractor at the triangle's tip, describing a circle that encompassed the islands. When I took my hands away, this was the shape that remained:
“However, the four points could as easily signify this,” Holmes objected, taking the pencil and yard-stick to connect the corners of the polygon, determining its centre point. We bent to look at an area north of Nottingham and Derby.
“Ripley?” I said. “Sutton? There's nothing Neolithic there, that I can see.”
“There's nothing Neolithic at the meeting place of the triangle, either, unless it's under the North Sea.”
“You're right.” I took off my spectacles and rubbed my tired eyes. “I told you it made little sense. Although it did look better on the smaller map.”
“It is but a matter of three or four degrees,” Mycroft said in a soothing voice, and stood up. “In any case, perhaps I had better widen the recipients of the watch order to include domestic steamers.”
“And trains,” I said.
Holmes said nothing, just studied the map as if hoping for the appearance of glowing runes in the vicinity of Nottingham. Then his gaze shifted north, to the spatter of islands off the end of Scotland.
I knew what he was thinking, as surely as if he were muttering his thoughts aloud. He was weighing how certain I was, how carefully I had gathered those snippets of evidence, if his eyes might not have caught something mine missed. After all, in both cases—the timetable and the dog-eared guide-book—the information was caught on the run, as it were, noted in passing while I was closely focused on something that appeared more important.