The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [99]
He paused, reaching for the next pigeon-hole of his orderly brain, then resumed. “In Manchester during those three days, there were no deaths, no crimes of a religious nature, but several arrests were made following a talk at a vegetarian restaurant concerning Madame Blavatsky. In York …”
This was going to be a long night.
Blood: Blood and pain are companions of birth, no less for
the second-born, torn from the womb of ignorance to
stand naked before the storms of the world. A second-born
man is doubly vulnerable: This is the mystery of birth.
Testimony, III:2
WEDNESDAY MORNING, MYCROFT SEEMED NONE the worse for wear from his prodigious feat of memory of the night before, but I was still fatigued as I read through my ever more incoherent notes. There seemed a stupendous number of crimes on my pages, and I wondered how the figures a week on either side of the full-moon dates would compare—then winced at the thought of having to go through that experience a second time.
In March, a man named Danielson had been knifed in a fishing village in Cornwall, his body found the morning after the full moon, his assailant not identified. In April, a shepherd's death was probably exposure, but then on 18 May there was an interesting item: Blood was seen near the entrance of a large chambered tomb in the Orkney Islands. When the farmer went to see, he found a sheep dead inside the chamber, its throat savaged by a dog.
Right, I thought, I can just see asking Lestrade to look into that. That reminded me: “What about Holmes' dead ram? It's not on this list.”
Mycroft blinked. “Might he have been making a jest with Lestrade?”
“It didn't sound like it.”
Mycroft's gaze focused on the coffee pot in the centre of the table, as he slipped effortlessly back into the retrieval state. Twenty minutes later, as I was myself eyeing the pot and wondering if it would shatter his concentration were I to pour myself another cup, he stirred and picked up his cold cup.
“The only dead sheep that received mention in the news or in my dispatches was the one in Cumbria, although it happened the first week of May, not during the full moon. I shall make enquiries with my colleagues in Agriculture.” He sounded mildly embarrassed, as if admitting to failure, and I hastened to re-assure him.
“I shouldn't think it matters, just that if we're looking at odd deaths during full moons, especially if there is some link to Neolithic sites, then Holmes is right, we ought to take livestock into account.”
He nodded, still looking abashed, and finished his breakfast. When he left, he had Testimony under his arm.
I studied the long list he had dictated.
Each date began with events in and around London, then dropped down into the southland before working its way north—indicating that Mycroft's mind had put the facts into order, rather than eidetically regurgitating the various newspaper articles. Although that would have been incredible enough.
I began to work my way down the pages, putting an X beside anything I thought worth a closer look, particularly those near ancient monuments.
Near the March full moon, three sheep had been found dead in a field in Oxfordshire, less than a mile from the Rollright Stones; the Cornish fisherman Danielson was killed, and although there was no mention of standing stones or what have you, Cornwall was so littered with prehistoric monuments, it was hardly worth noting; an old woman was discovered in a pew in a tiny village church near Maidstone, after the Sunday morning service: Her fellow parishioners had not disturbed her, thinking she was praying, or sleeping, but it turned out she had been peacefully dead since the Friday.
In April, a shepherd in Yorkshire died from exposure, with no mention of burial mounds or ancient Druidic altars.
In May came the ewe in the chambered tomb in Orkney,