The Language of Bees

plaster picked up the blood-stains.”

He packed away the envelope, and said, “We'll need the evidence from the Sussex site.”

“It's in my safe,” Mycroft said. “I'll get it.”

“I brought everything up when I heard Lestrade was out for our scalps,” I told Holmes. “I was afraid to leave it for him to find. There were finger-prints, on-”

“On the biscuit wrapper, so Mycroft said.”

“I was glad. Holmes, I am so glad I was wrong about Damian.”

“Not half so glad as I,” he replied.

“What were you doing at eight-thirty Wednesday night?” I asked abruptly.

“Wednesday? I would have been climbing over a church wall in Penrith to get away from a dog. Why do you ask?”

But Mycroft came back with the packet, and I just smiled and shook my head.

Holmes went through the same ritual of envelopes and paper: vegetation, sand, cigarette ends, a black thread, two wooden matches, three of the soft pebbles, and one of the tiny odd fragments that resembled finger-nails. Although in this case, one of those was easier to see against the white sheet, being lined in fading red-brown.

“What are those things?” I finally said.

“Mycroft?” Holmes asked of his brother.

“I haven't seen any for years, but they look to me like the trimmings of a quill pen.” Mycroft's slow voice vibrated with meaning, but it took me a moment to follow.

When I did, I snapped away from the tiny brown scrap, a cold finger trickling down my spine. “A pen? My God, do you mean he…”

I couldn't finish the sentence, so Holmes did. “Dipped a quill pen in his victim's blood and wrote with it? So it would appear.”

“Extraordinary,” Mycroft rumbled.

“But… I mean to say, I can understand-intellectually, I suppose, although not… I can just understand that a mad-man might want to write a message with a victim's blood, but then and there? Trimming his pen while the body lies at his feet, blood still…”

I gulped, unable to finish the sentence.

“Blood remains liquid but a short time,” Holmes said. “I ought to have known six days ago: Sand on chalk soil means something.”

“What, it meant that someone had been to the beach before visiting the Giant?”

“This is not beach sand, Russell. It is blotting sand.”

“Oh,” I said. “God.” I stared in disgust at the minuscule scraps of quill until Holmes had replaced them in their concealing paper, then I picked up his glass and tossed back a dose of brandy. It made me cough and caused my eyes to water, but Mycroft did not even rebuke me for my ill treatment of his precious liquid.

“Where are these from?” he asked, gesturing at the envelopes.

“The first, with the two foot-prints, was from Cerne Abbas. The second comes from a large stone circle in Cumbria called Long Meg and her Daughters; the farmer heard his dog barking on the first of May, and when he looked out, he saw what appeared to be a candle burning in the field where the circle was. Going to investigate, he found a ram belonging to the next neighbour but one, lying on the centre-stone with its throat cut. The third envelope, that with all the cigarettes, is from High Bridestones-the site, unfortunately, was the focal point of a motor-coach full of lady water-colourists, two days before Albert Seaforth died there. And the fourth, as you know, was from the Wilmington Giant.”

“Same boots, same matches,” I said.

“Identical candle-wax,” he added.

“Is that what those soft pebbles are? Dirty wax?”

“Not dirty: dark.”

“Dark? You mean black? Like those used by the Children of Lights. Or in a Black Mass.”

“Is there actually such a thing as a Black Mass?” Mycroft asked. “One has heard about it, of course, but it always seemed to me one of those tales the righteous build to convince themselves of their enemies' depravity.”

“ Crowley practices it,” Holmes told him. “Don't you remember, last year, the death of young Loveday?”

“Raoul Loveday died of an infection down at Crowley 's villa in Italy, although his wife claimed Crowley 's magic killed him.”

“Yes, but he died after a Black Mass at which they drank the blood of a sacrificed cat,” I said. “We met Loveday's wife, and although it wouldn't surprise me if she'd shared in the drugs side of the experience, what she has to say about the ceremony seemed real enough.” A still more awful thought struck me. “Holmes, there's a line in Testimony about primitive people eating their enemies' hearts. You don't suppose that Brothers…”

“Drank his victims' blood as well?” Holmes considered for a moment, then shook his head. “I saw nothing to indicate that, no place where, for example, smears suggested a cup wiped clean. And if the blood was meant as a communal partaking, would he have done so when he worked alone?”

I hoped not. I truly hoped not.

I went to our room a short time later. As I was brushing my teeth, Holmes came in, looking for his pipe.

“You're staying up?” I asked, unnecessarily: The pipe meant meditation.

“I need to read Testimony.”

“What did you make of Lofte's information?”

“Which part of it?”

Very well; if Holmes was going to be obtuse, I could be blunt. “The part of it where Damian's wife was married to a murder suspect, Holmes. Did Damian know that she was married before? That she had a child by Hayden? That she's been attending his church? That the illustrations were for the man's book?”

“I believe he knew, yes.”

“But why would he go along with it? And why not tell you?”

“I should imagine that he did not tell me for the same reason he attempted to conceal his wife's unsavoury past: He feared that if I knew who she had been, I should assume her to be a gold-digger of the worst stripe and wash my hands promptly of the business. It is, after all, more or less what I assumed when I first encountered Damian's mother.”

“But isn't that precisely what this woman is-was?”

“You do not admit to the possibility of reform?”

I started to retort, then closed my mouth. Yolanda Chin had been a child when she was forced into a life of prostitution; she was not yet an adult when she married a middle-aged Englishman, who turned out to be a crook, and perhaps much worse. Did I have any reason to think that Yolanda herself was a criminal? I did not. Did I have any reason to believe she was betraying Damian, in any way but attending her first husband's church? I did not.

Holmes saw the internal debate on my face. “It is easier to picture the boy as a victim of an unscrupulous adventuress, but I see no evidence of that, Russell. He loved her. Still does, if you are correct and he does not know she is dead. My son loves his wife,” he said simply. “That is the point at which I must begin.”

“And yet you think he knows. About her continuing attachment to Brothers?”

“He knows. One must remember, the Bohemian way of life is not a surface dressing with Damian.”

I thought about that, and about the denizens of the Cafe Royal: two couples, leaving arm in arm with the other's spouse; Alice, Ronnie, and their Bunny; the Epstein household of husband, wife, husband's lovers, and their various children; the manifold permutations of the Bloomsbury Group, with lovers, husbands, wives' lovers become husbands' lovers and vice-versa; all of it determinedly natural and open, all of it aimed at a greater definition of humanity.

Yes, Damian could well know, and knowing, permit-even approve of-his wife's continued liaison with a man to whom she had once been married.

I had to laugh, a little sadly. “I'm a twenty-four-year-old prude.”

“And thank God for it.”

“Still,” I said, “I'd have thought that if Damian knew about Yolanda's links to Brothers, he'd have looked to