The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [181]
I left the lamp burning, in case she woke, and returned upstairs to see what had been left behind.
I took anything that would identify Damian or Brothers, including Damian's sketch-book and passport. I put a few of Estelle's warm garments and an old doll into a pillow-case, then shut everything else that might shout Child! into her small hard-sided suitcase. I carried it out of the back door, weighted it with rocks, and hurled it far into the loch.
The night was clearing, the wind gentle: Holmes and his Thurso fisherman would have no problems crossing the strait. I walked to where I could see the Stones, and found them dark, which seemed odd. Perhaps rural police were less equipped with search-lights? Or less concerned about the dead, and satisfied with taking the body away and delaying an examination of the site until daylight?
I went inside, took some food from the hotel's pantries, and returned to where my young charge gently snored.
I chewed on dry biscuits and drank a bottled beer, studying her. She was, I saw, the three-and-a-half-year-old Damian had led us to believe, not the eight-or nine-year-old I had hypothesised: Reading or not, friends with an older child or not, that sleeping face had the soft and unformed features of a near-infant.
So it was no surprise, when she stirred and woke half an hour later, to feel myself looked upon by a pair of eerily familiar grey eyes, imperious as a newly hatched hawk.
They were Holmes' eyes. Estelle was Damian's child.
The grey gaze travelled around the room, registering the absence of her father and the man she knew as Hayden. Unafraid, she sat upright.
“Who are you?” Her voice that of a small child: The intelligence behind it was something more.
“I'm …” I smiled at the thought, and at her. “I suppose you could say that I'm your grandmother.”
“Where's my Papa?”
“I'm afraid your Papa's hurt, Estelle. His own Papa came to help him, and is taking him to a doctor.”
“My Mama hasn't come yet, has she?”
“I… no.”
“Are you a friend of Mr Brothers?”
“No, I'm not.”
“I don't like him very much.”
“I can see why.”
“His other name is Mr Hayden. He got angry, when I tried to colour in his book.”
“Did he?”
“I thought it was a book for colouring,” she explained. “My Papa has books for his colouring, and my Mama has books for her writing, and they don't mind when I colour in theirs, but Mr Brothers didn't want me to use his.”
“It sounds reasonable—” I stopped, feeling a cold trickle up my spine. My God, how could I have overlooked it? “This book of Mr Brothers'. It had blank pages?”
“Some. It had writing, too, but I couldn't read it. I don't read cursive yet. And it had some of Papa's drawings.”
The Book of Truth, Tolliver's other binding project. It hadn't been in London, it wasn't in his room here. Which could only mean that Brothers had it with him—but of course he did, along with the quill and the blotting sand. And even if he hadn't dared risk writing then and there, and been forced to bring some of the blood away in a flask, the book was the culmination of his ritual. He would carry it with him.
He would carry it always …
There had been blood, on Brothers' overcoat, where Damian shot him: That I had seen. Granted, the blood had been slightly to one side of the hole—surely that was because the garments shifted when he fell? And the relatively small amount of bleeding was because he'd died immediately the bullet entered his heart. Wasn't it?
Fifty blank pages, six drawings, two covers—heavy covers, knowing Tolliver's work. If his Book of Truth had been in Brothers' inner breast pocket—worn over his heart, as it were—when the bullet hit him, would it have been heavy enough to deflect a bullet upward, so it lodged in a shoulder rather than the heart?
I was on my feet before I realised I had moved. The child drew back in