The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [66]
“I'm sorry to hear that. Could we also look at where they found her? It's been a while since I last visited the Giant.”
“Do you wish to take the motor-car?”
“It would be easiest.”
“The quickest, certainly.” Holmes had resigned himself to my driving, over the years, but he had never developed an affection for it.
“Good. Now tell me, what were you doing in London this past week?”
“Crawling through the sewers.”
“Literally?”
“Figuratively,” he answered, which was something of a relief. “Tuesday we searched the hospitals, morgues, and clinics, and started on her known friends. Wednesday we made the rounds of all the churches that Damian could recall her mentioning—an exhausting number, as it proved. Thursday… Thursday we visited bawdy houses.”
“Bawdy—houses of prostitution, you mean?”
“Starting at the top and working our way down.”
“Why should she have gone there?”
“Russell,” he chided.
“Oh, yes, I realised from the start that she'd probably been a … professional herself, but I shouldn't have thought anyone would wish to return to that life once they got out.”
“Not the life itself, but certain elements. Money—”
“But Damian was making money.”
“—drugs.”
“Yes,” I said reluctantly. “But she had the child with her.”
“That being precisely why I did not investigate those houses that specialise in children until Damian was no longer with me, on Friday.”
“Oh, Holmes. You can't imagine …” I found myself unable to complete the sentence.
“At this point, I know so little about Yolanda Adler, I may as well be working blind.”
“Holmes, no mother would—”
“Damian thought it possible that his wife had left the child with a friend while she went away, and although a woman would be mad to hand a small child over to a stranger while there was a loving father at home, I pretended to agree with him that it was a possible scenario. I don't think I need to tell you that mothers have been known to … act irresponsibly.”
Of course they did. If Yolanda had grown tired of the child, or been led astray by a seducer, or tempted by money, or … My stomach went suddenly queasy around Mrs Hudson's cooking, and the air from the open window felt cold.
I pulled down the bed-clothes and climbed underneath them, propping the pillows behind my back. “Why did Damian leave you? Did he say?”
“He simply left, before dawn, after being wakened from a nightmare. He had left once before; this time, he did not return. He was last seen at ten o'clock Friday morning, walking up Regent Street with a man.” He described the man, clearly searching his memory as he did so for any similarity to someone he knew, but equally clearly failing to make any connexion. “I believe he received a message to buy a copy of The Times, where he saw an agony notice with the instructions for the meeting.”
“Addled,” I exclaimed.
“You saw it?”
“I did, but I thought it a coincidence.” Before he could scold me for dismissing a clue, I asked him about the man, and he told me about interviewing the Café Royal porter.
So: Holmes could not prove his son's whereabouts. My thoughts went back to the body lying in the nearby morgue. “Holmes, I find it difficult to reconcile a person who would … do as you suggest, with the Yolanda Adler I have heard described these past days. She may be colourful, and certainly has some decidedly odd religious beliefs, but even the neighbours who wondered if she was entirely reliable didn't actively claim that she was—is—a neglectful mother. I'd have said she was reformed from her ways.”
“So Damian claimed. And the first two days, he seemed as much irritated as concerned. But for whatever reason, by Thursday night his mood darkened. He spoke of drugs and suggested that, since the end of June, something has been disturbing her.”
“It's true, a dependence on drugs has a habit of going dormant rather than extinct.”
“As we well know,” he said in a dry voice, then continued briskly.
“His description of her actions to us the other night was, I venture to say, fairly conservative compared to the facts of the matter.