Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [95]
‘Tell me we’re not going to carry them up the stairs and throw them over the edge,’ Matty whispered.
‘We’re not going to carry them up the stairs and throw them over the edge,’ Sherlock confirmed.
‘Then what are we going to do?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘What do you mean, you’re not sure?’
‘I mean I haven’t thought it through yet. It’s all been a bit of a rush.’
Matty snorted. ‘You had plenty of time on the fishing boat.’
‘I was thinking about something else.’
‘Yeah,’ Matty said, ‘I noticed.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘We could set fire to them,’ he pointed out.
Sherlock shook his head. ‘Look at the spacing. We could set fire to one or two of them, but the flames wouldn’t spread and the bees would probably get us.’
Matty looked around. ‘What are they eating?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We’re in the English Channel. There’s no flowers out here, and I don’t think seaweed counts. What are the bees eating?’
Sherlock thought for a moment. ‘That’s a good question. I don’t know.’ He glanced around. ‘Let’s look round, in case we find something. Split up, and meet on the other side. Don’t get caught.’
Matty headed left and Sherlock headed right. Looking back, Sherlock saw that the gloom had already swallowed Matty up.
The serried ranks of beehives passing by as he moved formed an almost hypnotic pattern. He couldn’t see any bees – perhaps the darkness was keeping them confined to the hives – but he thought he could hear them: a low, soporific buzz, almost on the edge of his consciousness. He noticed that there were wooden frames set up at various points in the cavernous space. Some of them held wooden trays, others were empty. Sherlock wondered where he had seen trays like that before. Something about them was familiar.
A grotesque figure came into view through the gloom: a man dressed in an all-encompassing canvas suit whose head was covered with a muslin hood held away from his face by bamboo hoops. He was bending over a large box – one of many that Sherlock could now see were lined up along this portion of the curved wall that bounded the space. He straightened up, holding a tray like the ones that had been fitted into the easel-like frames scattered around, and walked towards the hives. A fine haze seemed to rise up from the tray as Sherlock watched him go.
He remembered just as the man in the bee-suit reached a frame and slotted the tray inside. He’d seen beekeepers in the same suits at Baron Maupertuis’s manor house just outside Farnham removing similar trays from underneath the hives. And then suddenly everything fell into place – the trays, the haze of powder that rose up from them, the ice that he’d seen the thug Denny unloading from the train in Farnham and Matty’s question about how the bees ate in the absence of flowers. It was all so perfectly logical! Bees collected pollen from flowers, storing it on fine hairs on their legs until they got to the hive and then used it as food. Put a tray beneath a hive, and create some kind of ‘gate’ that the bees had to go through to get into the hive, and you could brush some of the pollen from their legs and collect it in specially positioned trays. Put the trays on ice and you could store the pollen for when you needed it – for instance, when the bees were being kept somewhere where there were no flowers. Place the trays scattered around, and the bees could collect the pollen from them, not even realizing that this was the second time they had collected the pollen.
Remembering Farnham, and the station, another memory clamoured for Sherlock’s attention: something that Matty had told him. Something about powder. About bakeries. He ransacked the lumber room of his memory, trying to bring the words to mind.
Yes. Powder. Flour. Matty had mentioned a fire that had