The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [91]
“Then I shall endeavour to draw the constable's fire while you burgle the household of its exotic religious artefacts.”
“I shouldn't think the constable on duty will be armed, Holmes.”
“Only with righteous indignation and a large stick.”
“Mycroft will stand bail, and I'll bring dressings and arnica for your bruises,” I assured him.
At eleven-fifteen, we were in our positions on either side of the Adler house.
I was in the back. My soft soles made no noise going along the alley. I laid a hand on the gate latch, but found my first hitch: The gate was now padlocked from within.
I had, however, come armed for burglary, with a narrow-beamed torch, dark clothing, and a makeshift stile for climbing fences. I jammed the bottom edge of my length of timber into the soil, propping its upper end against the bricks of the wall. I got one foot onto the step this made, and hoisted myself onto the wall.
I sat there for a moment, grateful that some past owner hadn't seen fit to set broken glass along the top, and surveyed the house. Much of it was dark, but one upstairs window had a dim glow, and the downstairs sitting room lights burned low behind drapes and around the boards nailed over its broken windows. The kitchen alone was brightly lit. I retrieved my stile by the length of rope tied around its middle, then dropped down into the garden, setting the board against the wall again, in case of a hasty departure.
The lawn behind the house was dry with the heat, and crackled underfoot; the rucksack on my back and the clothing I wore rustled with every step; neither would be heard from the house, but they were enough to grate on my nerves. Breaking into a middle-aged woman's flat was not the same proposition as invading a house guarded by a police constable.
The next hitch came when I saw that said constable had taken up residence in the kitchen, ten feet from the back door through which I intended to go. He was sitting on a kitchen chair with his collar loose and his feet up on another chair, reading a detective novel. A tea-pot, milk bottle, and mug sat to hand. Shelves behind him held cooking implements unusual for a British household: the wide, curved pan called a wok; a stack of bamboo steamers; a row of small tea-cups without handles.
Holmes and I had agreed to a delay of a quarter hour for me to work on the locks before he created his distraction; now, there was little I could do for that quarter hour but watch the constable turn his pages and drink his tea.
A young eternity later, the bell rang, and rang, and rang again. At the first sound, the man in the chair dropped his book in surprise and swore an oath. His feet hit the floor the same instant the second ring rattled the night, and on the third he was passing through the doorway, hands going to his collar-buttons.
I jumped for the door and slid my picks into the mechanism.
Holmes had promised me a bare minimum of four minutes of freedom on this first disturbance. At five minutes, sweating and swearing, the lock gave way. I turned the knob; to my intense relief, the bolt inside had not been pushed to.
I closed the door gently and heard the front door slam. I scurried for the stairs and reached the first floor before the PC's chair squawked from below.
Safe in the darkness, I bent over with my hands on my knees, breathing in the foreign odours of the house—sandalwood and ginger where most of the neighbours' would smell of cabbage and strong soap—while my racing heart returned to something under a hundred beats per minute.
Eight minutes until Holmes' second disturbance.
I reached the study with a minimum of creaking floorboards. Once there, I unlatched the window and raised it a crack (to make sure it opened, if I was interrupted) before placing a rug at the bottom of the door and a chair under its handle. I switched on the torch, its narrow beam all but invisible outside of the room.
I found the book straight away: Testimony. Here again, the title page had just the name, with no author, no publisher, no date—although despite