The Beekeeper's Apprentice (14 page)

Nonetheless, across all the tumultuous events of the intervening years that one case stands out in my mind, for the simple reason that it marked the first time Holmes had granted me free rein to make deci-sions and take action. Of course, even then I realised that, had the case been of any earthly significance whatsoever, I should have been kept firmly in my auxiliary role. Despite that, the glow of secret satisfaction it gave me lasted with a curious tenacity. A small thing, perhaps, but mine own.

Five weeks later, however, a case came upon us that put the Monk’s Tun affair into its proper, childish perspective. The kidnapping of the American senator’s daughter was no lark, but a matter of international import, dramatic, intense, a classic Holmes case such as I had not yet observed, much less been involved with, and certainly not as a central protagonist. The case brought into sharp focus the purpose surrounding my years of desultory training, brought forcibly home the entire raison d’être of the person Sherlock Holmes had created of himself, and moreover, brought me up against the dark side of the life Holmes led.

That single case bound us together in ways my apprenticeship never had, rather as the survivors of a natural disaster find themselves inextricably linked for the rest of their days. It made me both more certain of myself and, paradoxically, more cautious now that I had wit-nessed at first hand the potentially calamitous results of my unconsid-ered acts. It changed Holmes, too, to see before him the living result of his years of half-frivolous, half-deliberate training. I believe it brought him up sharply, to be confronted with the fact that he had created a not inconsiderable force, that what had begun as a chance meeting had given birth to me. His reappraisal of what I had become, his judgement of my abilities under fire, as it were, profoundly influ-enced the decisions he was to make four months later when the heav-ens opened on our heads.

And yet, I very nearly missed the case altogether. Even today my spine crawls cold at the thought of December without the mutual knowledge of the preceding August, for the groundwork of trust laid down during our time in Wales made December’s partnership possible. Had I missed the Simpson case, had Holmes simply disappeared into the thin summer air (as he had done with numerous other cases) and not allowed me to participate, God alone knows what we would have done when December’s cold hit us, unprepared and unsupported.

oward noon on a blistering hot day in the middle of Au-gust our haying crew reached the end of the last field and dis-persed, in heavy-footed exhaustion, for our homes. This year the easy camaraderie and rude high spirits of the Land Girls had been cooled by the presence of a man amongst the crew, a silent, rigid, shell-shocked young man—a boy, really, but for the trenches—who did no great work himself and who started at every sudden noise, but who served to keep us at our work by his mere distressing presence. Thanks to him we finished early, just before midday on the eighteenth. I trudged home, silently inhaled a vast meal in Patrick’s kitchen, and, wanting only to collapse between my clean sheets for twenty hours, instead took myself to the bathroom and stripped off my filthy Land Girl’s smock, sluiced off my skin’s crust of dust and chaff cemented there by sweat, and, feeling physically tired but glowing with strength and well-being and marvelling in the sense of freedom following a hard job well done, I mounted my bicycle and, hair streaming damply behind me, rode off to see Holmes.

Cycling slowly up the lane to the cottage, my ears were caught by a remarkable sound, distorted by the stone walls on either side. Music, but no music I had before heard, emanating from Holmes’ house, a gay, dancing tune, instantly invigorating and utterly unexpected. I stood more firmly on the pedals, rode around the house to the kitchen door, and let myself in, and when I followed the sound through to the sitting room, for an instant I failed to recognise the dark-skinned, black-haired man with the violin tucked under a chin scruffy with two days of stubble. The briefest flash of apprehension passed across the fa-miliar face, followed rapidly by a gleam of gold from his left incisor as this exotic ruffian gave me a rakish grin. I was not fooled. I had seen his original reaction to my unexpected appearance in his doorway, and my guard went instantly up.

“Holmes,” I said. “Don’t tell me, the rector needs a gipsy fiddler for the village fête.”

“Hello, Russell,” he said with studied casualness. “This is an unan-ticipated pleasure. I am so glad you happened to stop by, it saves me from having to write. I wanted to ask you to keep track of the plant experiment. Just for a few days, and there’s nothing terribly—”

“Holmes, what is going on?” He was entirely too innocent.

“ ‘Going on’? Nothing is ‘going on.’ I find I must be away for a few days, is all.”

“You have a case.”

“Oh, come now, Russell—”

“Why don’t you want me to know about it? And don’t give me some nonsense about governmental secrets.”

“It is secret. I cannot tell you about it. Later, perhaps. But I truly do need you to—”

“Jigger the plants, Holmes,” I said angrily. “The experiment is of no importance whatsoever.”

“Russell!” he said, offended. “I only leave them because I have been asked by someone I cannot refuse.”

“Holmes,” I said warningly, “this is Russell you’re talking to, not Watson, not Mrs. Hudson. I’m not in the least bit intimidated by you. I want to know why you were planning to sneak out without telling me.”

“ ‘Sneak out’! Russell, I said I was glad you happened by.”

“Holmes, I’m not blind. You’re in full disguise except for your shoes, and there’s a packed bag in the corner. I repeat: What is going on?”

“Russell, I am very sorry, but I cannot include you in this case.”

“Why not, Holmes?” I was becoming really very angry. So was he.

“Because, damn it, it may be dangerous!”

I stood staring across the room at him, and my voice when it came was, I was pleased to note, very quiet and even.

“My dear Holmes, I am going to pretend you did not say that. I am going to walk in your garden and admire the flowers for approximately ten minutes. When I come back in we will begin this conversation anew, and unless you wish to divorce yourself from me entirely, the idea of protecting little Mary Russell will never enter your head.” I walked out, closing the door gently, and went to talk with Will and the two cats. I pulled some weeds, heard the violin start up again, this time a more classical melody, and in ten minutes I went back through the door.

“Good afternoon, Holmes. That’s a natty outfit you’re wearing. I should not have thought to wear an orange tie with a shirt that particu-lar shade of red, but it is certainly distinctive. So, where are we going?”

Holmes looked at me through half-shut eyes. I stood blandly in the doorway, arms folded. Finally he snorted and thrust his violin into its disreputable case.

“Very well, Russell. I may be mad, but we shall give it a try. Have you been following the papers, the Simpson kidnapping case?”

“I saw something a few days ago. I’ve been helping Patrick with the hay.”

“Obviously. Take a look at these while I put your persona to-gether.”

He handed me a pile of back issues of
The Times,
then disappeared upstairs into the laboratory.

I sorted them by date. The first, dated the tenth of August, was a small item from a back page, circled by Holmes. It concerned the American Senator Jonathan Simpson, leaving to go on holiday with his family, a wife and their six-year-old daughter, to Wales.

The next article was three days later, the central headline on the first page of the news. It read:

senator’s daughter kidnapped huge ransom sought

A carefully typed ransom note had been received by the Simpsons, saying simply that she was being held, that Simpson had one week to raise £20,000, and that if he went to the police the child would die. The article did not explain how the newspaper had received the information, or how Simpson was to keep the police out after it had been on the front page. The newsworthiness of the case gradually dwindled, and today’s paper, five days after the heavily leaded kidnap headlines, held a grainy photograph of two haggard-looking people on a back page: the parents.

I went and perched my shoulder against the door of the laboratory as Holmes measured and poured and stirred.

“Who called you in?”

“Apparently Mrs. Simpson insisted.”

“You don’t sound pleased.”

He slammed down a pipette, which of course shattered.

“How could I be pleased? Half of Wales has trudged the hillside into mud, the trail is a week old, there are no prints, nobody saw any-one, the parents are hysterical, and since nobody has any idea of what to do, they decide to humour the woman and bring in old Holmes. Old Holmes the miracle worker.” He stared sourly at his finger as I fastened a plaster to it.

“Reading that drivel of Watson’s, a person would never know I’d had any real failures, the kind that grind away and keep one from sleeping. Russell, I know these cases, I know the feel of how they be-gin, and this has all the marks. It stinks of failure, and I don’t want to be anywhere near Wales when they find that child’s body.”

“Refuse the case, then.”

“I can’t. There’s always a chance they overlooked something, that these suspicious old eyes might see something.” He gave a sharp bark of cynical laughter. “Now, there’s a morsel for Watson’s notes: Sher-lock Holmes trusting in luck. Sit down, Russell, and let me put this muck on your face.”

It was horrid, warm and black and slimy like something the dog left behind, and had to go up my nose, in my ears, and around my mouth, but I sat.

“We will be a pair of gipsies. I’ve arranged for a caravan in Cardiff, where we’ll see the Simpsons and then make our way north. I had planned to hire a driver, but since you’ve been practising on Patrick’s team, you can do it. I don’t suppose you’ve picked up any useful skills at Oxford, such as telling fortunes?”

“The girl downstairs from me there is a fiend for Tarot. I could probably imitate the jargon. And there’s the juggling.”

“There was a deck in the cupboard—Sit still! I told Scotland Yard I’d be in Cardiff tomorrow.”

“I thought the ransom note said they had one week? What can you expect to do in two days?”

“You overlooked the agony columns in the papers,” he scolded. “The deadline was as much a pro forma demand as the insistence that the police be kept out of it. Nobody takes such demands seriously, least of all kidnappers. We have until the thirtieth of August. Senator Simpson is trying to raise the money, but it will come near to breaking him,” he added in a distracted voice, and smeared the repulsive goop onto my eyelids. “A senator, even a powerful one like Simpson, is not always a rich man.”

“We’re going to Wales. You think the child is still there?”

“It is a very remote area, no one heard an automobile after dark, and the police had every road blocked by six o’clock in the morning. The roadblocks are still up, but Scotland Yard, the Welsh police, and the American staff all think she’s in London. They’re busy at that end, and they’ve thrown us Wales as a sop to get the Simpsons out from un-der their feet. It does mean that we’ll have a relatively free hand once we’re there. Yes, I think she is still in Wales; not only that, I think she’s within twenty miles of the place from which she disappeared. I said sit still!” he growled. He was rubbing the sludge into my ear, so I could not see his face.

“A cool character, if that’s the case,” I offered, not meaning the child.

“Cool, as you say. And careful: The notes are on cheap, common paper, in common envelopes, typed on the second most common kind of typewriter, three or four years old, and mailed in busy post offices across London. No fingerprints. The spelling, choice of words, and punctuation are consistently atrocious. The layout on the page is pre-cise, the typist indents exactly five spaces at the beginning of each paragraph, and the pressure on the keys indicates some familiarity with typing. Other than the window dressing of illiteracy, the mes-sages are clear and not overly violent, as these things go.”

“Window dressing?”

“Window dressing,” he said firmly. “There is a mind behind this, Russell, not some casual, uneducated lout.” In his face and in his voice a total abhorrence of the crime itself fought a losing battle with his constitutional relish for the chase. I said nothing, and he continued to coat my hands and arms past the elbow with the awful stuff. “That is why we will take no risks, assume no weaknesses on their part. Our disguise is assumed the instant we step outside of that door over there, and not let down for a moment. If you cannot sustain it, you’d best say so now, because one slip could mean the child’s life. To say nothing of the political complications that will result if we allow a valued and somewhat reluctant Ally’s representative to lose his child while on our soil.” His voice was almost mild, but when he looked into my eyes I nearly quailed before him. This was no game of putting on Ratnakar Sanji’s turban and a music-hall accent, where the greatest risk was be-ing sent down; the penalty for failure in this rôle could be a child’s life. Could even be our own lives. It would have been easy, then, to excuse myself from the case, but—if not now, I asked myself, when? If I re-fused now, would I ever find the necessary combination of courage and opportunity again? I swallowed, and nodded. He turned and put the beaker on the table, where it would sit, undisturbed, to greet our weary eyes when we returned.