The Language of Bees

“Several constables, do you think?”

“Unlikely. Shall we toss a coin for who creates the distraction this time?”

“You know-” I stopped, reconsidering what I was about to say. “You know where the book is, so it would make sense for you to fetch it. On the other hand, I should be interested to see what else the Adlers own in their collection.”

“Religion being your field, not mine,” Holmes noted.

“Not if you consider Crowley 's practise a religion. My expertise is about twenty-five hundred years out of date. But still, you're right, I'm better suited than you.”

“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 the book's beauty and expense, it looked as if a child had been permitted to lick a chocolate ice over the title page, leaving behind a narrow smear that could not quite be wiped away. I turned a couple of pages, and saw the first illustration: a small, tiled roof beneath a night sky whirling with streaks of light. The drawing was not signed, but there was no question as to the artist.

I paged through until I found another finely worked drawing, then a third before I made myself stop. I slid the book into the rucksack, and went on searching-for what, exactly, I was not certain. I found a planchette, for the consultation of spirits, and several small statues of Asian gods, including a superb ivory carving from China covered with scenes from the life of the Buddha. There were several paintings on the wall, none of them by Damian, all of them either overtly or vaguely religious. The shelves were not heavily laden, either because the Adlers were not great readers or because they had only arrived here a few months before, but I saw among the volumes the most recent collection of Conan Doyle stories, and beside it a magazine. I was not surprised to find it was The Strand, from January, which as I recalled had Dr Watson's rather feeble episode concerning the so-called Sussex vampire.

Two shelves were filled with religious esoterica. Some of the titles were familiar, others I took down to glance at, putting them away again when they confirmed my expectations. Two volumes suggested a closer look; they went into the rucksack with Testimony. A book by Crowley I left where it was.

The desk was little used, although some notes and a list of book titles confirmed that the letter Damian showed us in Sussex had been written by Yolanda.

The sound of Holmes' second interruption broke the stillness of the house: the clanging of the brass bell; constabulary footsteps; two minutes of raised voices as he sent this persistent drunk on his way; the PC's footsteps returning.

Holmes would watch for the signal that I was outside and safe; when it did not come, he would wait twenty minutes, then ring a third time. Past that, he risked arrest for disturbing the peace of the irritated PC: If I wasn't out by then, we had agreed, I should be on my own.

A narrow cupboard beside the bookshelf that held religious works revealed a white robe with the Children of Lights emblem embroidered on the left breast. I measured the garment's length with my eyes: It might come to my own shins, which suggested that, unless Damian wore it short like an undergraduate's gown, this belonged to Yolanda. There was no gold ring, but there was one oddity: a small, very shadowy painting of an old man in a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat dipped low over his left eye: Damian's work. Woden again? Why hang it inside of the cupboard? I lifted it from its hook to check the back, but could see nothing unusual about it. Perhaps Yolanda had liked it but Damian considered it a muddy failure, and did not want it displayed in the open? A puzzle.

I gently closed the cupboard door and slid the rucksack onto my shoulders, then disassembled the blockade on the door and eased it open.

No glowering PC awaited me.

Moving along the edge of the hallway to lessen the chance of squeaks underfoot, I explored the other doors, putting my head inside each room and giving a brief shot from the torch to tell me what it contained. The Adlers' bedroom was the room whose dim light I had seen from the garden, from a fixture high on a wall that looked as if it stayed on all of the time. They had a single wide bed, a table on either side with reading lights. Her bed-side table had a drawer with several hand-lotions and nail files. His table held a framed photograph of Yolanda in a traditional high-necked Chinese dress, looking less at home than she had in the Western dress of the other photo.

Next door was Yolanda's dressing room, with a variety of colourful, fashionable clothing. Not a flower in sight, I noticed: Yolanda had died wearing Millicent Dunworthy's taste.

Damian's wardrobe was not quite what I had expected, for it showed an awareness of style not reflected by what he had worn to Sussex. I wondered if he had chosen those scruffy clothes to underscore his Bohemian identity, or as a statement that he didn't care what Holmes saw him in.

Between the dressing rooms were a sumptuous bath and a modern lavatory, with a medicine cabinet that