The Beekeeper's Apprentice (17 page)

“We need to do a thorough check on this equipment, I fear,” he said. “The last time I hired one of these the wheel fell off. It would not be convenient this time. You strip the horse down, take a look under the traces, and I think you’ll find a few sores. Currycomb, rags for padding, and ointment for the sores are in the calico bag.” He disap-peared beneath the caravan, and while I brushed and treated the puz-zled horse, he tightened bolts and applied grease to dry axles. With the horse back in harness, I went around to see if I might be of help and found his long legs protruding from the back.

“Need a hand?” I called.

“No point in both of us looking like mechanics. I’m nearly fin-ished.” A minute passed, silent on my part, grunts and low impreca-tions on his.

“Holmes, there’s something I must ask you.”

“Not just now, Russell.”

“I need to know. Is my presence... an embarrassment?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“I mean it, Holmes. Inspector Connor today all but accused you...me... I just need to know if my presence is inconvenient.”

“My dear Russell, I hope you don’t flatter yourself that because you talked me into bringing you on this delightful outing, that means I am incapable of refusing you. To my considerable—Oh blast! Give me a rag, would you? Thank you. To my considerable surprise, Russell, you have proven a competent assistant and, furthermore, hold some prom-ise for becoming an invaluable one. It is, I can even say, a new and oc-casionally remarkable experience to work with a person who inspires, not by vacuum, but by actual contribution. Hand me the large span-ner.” His next remarks were punctuated by grunts. “Connor is a fool. What he and his ilk choose to believe is no concern of mine, and thus far it has not seemed to harm you. You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool as well were I to discount your tal-ents merely because of their housing.”

“I see. I think.”

“Besides,” he added, his voice muffled now by the undercarriage, “a renowned bachelor such as myself, you probably would be more of an embarrassment were you a boy.”

There really was no possible response to that statement. In a few minutes, filthy as a miner, Holmes emerged, cleansed himself as well as he was able, and we set off up the road again.

We wobbled along north in the colourful, remarkably uncomfort-able little caravan, walking up the hills whenever the sway of the high wooden seat and the jolts to the base of the spine became too much, which was most of the time. Holmes peppered me with information, badgered me mercilessly into my rôle, criticised and corrected my walk and speech and attitude, forced Welsh vocabulary and grammar down my throat, and pontificated between times on the Welsh countryside and its inhabitants. Were it not for the constant awareness of a fright-ened child’s life and the fraying thread that held it, the outing would have been great sport.

Up through Glamorgan we walked and rode and walked again, into Gwent and then Powys, turning west now into the hilly greensward that curled up towards the Brecon Beacons, all hill farm and bracken fern, terraces and slag heaps and sheep. The shepherds eyed us with mistrust as we rumbled past, although their thin, black, sharp-eyed, sus-picious dogs, lying with bellies pressed to the ground, as alert as so many pessimistic evangelists to snatch back a straying charge, spared us not a glance. As we passed through the villages and hamlets children ran shrieking to the road, and then stood in silent wonder staring up at our red, green, and gold splendour, their fingers in their mouths and their bare feet spattered with mud.

Wherever we went, we performed. While the children watched, I juggled, pulled colourful scarves from their colourless pockets and ha’pennies from dirty ears, and when we had the attention of their mothers, Holmes would come out of the pub wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and pull out his fiddle. I told the fortunes of women who had none, read the cracked lines on their hard palms and whispered vague hints of dark strangers and unexpected wealth, and gave them stronger predictions of healthy children who would support them in their old age. In the evenings when the men were present their wives looked daggers at me, but when their ears were caught by “me Da’s” ready tongue, and when they saw that we were moving on for the night, they forgave me their husbands’ glances and remarks.

On the second day we passed the police roadblock, receiving only cursory abuse since we were going into the area being guarded, not coming out. On the third day we passed the Simpsons’ camping site, went on a mile, and pulled off into a side track. I cooked our tea, and when Holmes remarked merely that he hadn’t thought it possible to make tinned beans taste undercooked, I took it that my cooking was improving.

When the pans were clean we lit the oil lamp and closed the door against the sweet dusk, and went again through all the papers Connor had given us—the photographs and the typed notes, the interviews with the parents, statements from witnesses on the mountain and from the senator’s staff in London, a glossy photograph of Jessica taken the previous spring, grinning gap-toothed in a studio with its painted backdrop of a blooming arbour of roses. Page after page of the material, and all of it served only to underline the total lack of solid evidence, and the family’s coming financial emasculation, and the brutal, staring fact that all too often kidnappers who receive their money give only a dead body in return, a corpse who can tell no tales.

Holmes smoked three pipes and climbed silently into his bunk. I closed the file on the happy face and shut down the lamp, and lay awake in the darkness long after the breathing above me slowed into an even rhythm. Finally, towards the end of the short summer’s night, I dropped off into sleep, and then the Dream came and tore at me with its claws of blame and terror and abandonment, the massive, sham-bling, monstrous inevitability of my personal hell, but this time, be-fore its climax, just short of the final moment of exquisite horror, a sharp voice dragged me back, and I surfaced with a shuddering gasp into the simple quiet of the gipsy caravan.

“Russell? Russell, are you all right?”

I sat up, and his hand fell away.

“No. Yes, I’m all right, Holmes.” I breathed into my hands and tried to steady myself. “Sorry I woke you. It was just a bad dream, worry about the child, I guess. It takes me that way, sometimes. Noth-ing to be concerned about.”

He moved over to the tiny table, scratched a match into life, and lit a candle. I turned my face away from him.

“Can I get you anything? A drink? Something hot?”

His concern raked at me.

“No! No, thank you, Holmes, I’ll be fine in a minute. Go back to bed.”

He stood with his back to the light, and I felt his eyes on me. I stood up abruptly and went for my spectacles and coat.

“I’ll get some fresh air. Go back to sleep,” I repeated fiercely, and stumbled from the caravan.

Twenty minutes down the road my steps finally slowed; ten minutes after that I stopped and went to sit on a dark shape that turned out to be a low wall. The stars were out, a relatively uncommon thing in this rainy corner of a rainy country, and the air was clean and smelt of bracken and grass and horse. I pulled great draughts of it into me and thought of Mrs. Simpson, who had called it breathing champagne. I wondered if Jessica Simpson were breathing it now.

The Dream gradually receded. Nightmare and memory, it had be-gun with the death of my family, a vivid re-creation that haunted and hounded me and made my nights into purgatory. Tonight, though, I had Holmes to thank for interrupting it, and its aftermath was con-siderably lessened. After an hour, cold through, I walked back through the first light of dawn to the wagon, and to bed and a brief sleep.

In the morning neither of us mentioned the night’s occurrences. I cooked porridge for breakfast, flavoured with light flecks of ash and so lumpy Mrs. Hudson would have considered it suitable only for the chickens. We then walked up towards the described campsite, taking a roundabout route and a spade to justify our presence.

The site was unattended when we arrived. The tent was still stand-ing, slack-roped and flabby-sided, with a blackened circle and two rusting pans to one side where Mrs. Simpson had cooked her meals. The area smelt of old, wet ashes, and had the forlorn look of a child’s toy left out in the rain. I shuddered at the image.

I went up to the tent door and looked in at the jumble of bedrolls and knapsacks and clothing, all abandoned in the scramble to locate the child and now compulsively preserved in situ by police custom.

Holmes walked around to the back of the tent, his eyes on the trampled, rain-soaked ground.

“How long have we?” I asked him.

“Connor arranged for the constable on guard to be called away un-til nine o’clock. A bit under two hours. Ah.”

At his expression of satisfaction I let the canvas flap fall and picked my way around to the tent’s back wall, where I was met by the singular vision of an ageing gipsy stretched full out between the guy ropes with a powerful magnifying glass in his hand, prodding delicately at the tent’s lower seam with his fountain pen. The pen disappeared into the interior of the tent. I turned and went back inside, and when the bed-ding had been pulled away I saw what Holmes had discovered: a tiny slit just at seam line, the edges pushed inward and the threads at both ends of the cut slightly strained.

“You expected that?” I asked.

“Didn’t you?” I was tempted to make a face at him through the canvas, but refrained; he’d have known.

“A tube, for sleeping gas?”

“Right you be, Mary Todd,” he said, and the pen retreated. I stood up, head bent beneath the soggy canvas roof, and looked at the corner where Jessica Simpson had slept. According to her parents, the only things missing from her knapsack or the tent had been her shoes. No pullover, no stockings, not even her beloved doll. Just the shoes.

The doll was still there, feet up beneath the tangle of upturned bed-ding, and I pulled out the much-loved figure, straightened her crum-pled dress, and brushed a tangle of yarn hair from her wide painted eyes. The once-red lips smiled at me enigmatically.

“Why don’t you tell me what you saw that night, eh?” I addressed her. “It would save us a great deal of trouble.”

“What was that?” asked Holmes’ voice from a distance.

“Nothing. Would there be any objection if we took the doll with us, do you think?”

“I shouldn’t think so. They only left these things here for us to see; they have their photographs.”

I pushed the doll into my skirt pocket, took a last look around, and went outside. Holmes stood, back to the tent and fists on his hips, looking down the valley.

“Getting the lie of the land?” I asked.

“If you were kidnapping a child, Russell, how would you get her away?”

I chewed my lip for a few minutes and contemplated the bracken-covered hillsides.

“Personally, I should use an automobile, but no one seems to have heard one that night, and it’s a goodly hike to anywhere with three and a half stone of child on one’s back, even for a strong man.” I stud-ied the hill and saw the trails that wandered over and around it. “Of course. The horses. No one would notice one more set of prints with all these here. They came in on horseback, didn’t they?”

“It’s a sad state of affairs when, being confronted by a hillside, the modern girl thinks of an automobile. That was slow, Mary Todd. Over-looking the obvious. Theological training is proving as destructive to the reasoning abilities as I had feared.”

I cringed away and whined at him.

“Aw, Da’, it waren’t me fault. I war lookin’ a’t’evidence.”

“Harden your
t
more,” he corrected absently. “So, which way?”

“Not towards the road; there’d be too much chance of being seen.”

“Down the valley then, or over the hill?” he considered aloud.

“A pity we weren’t here a week ago; there might have been some-thing to see.”

“If wishes were horses...”

“Detectives would ride,” I finished. “I should go further away from the nearest village, I think, along the hill or over it.”

“We have an hour before the guard is back. Let us see what there is to find. I’ll go up the hill; you take the base of it.”

We zigzagged along and up the hill in increasingly wide arcs out from the tent. Half an hour went by with nothing but aching backs and stiff necks to show for our scrutiny. Forty-five minutes, and I began to listen nervously for the Welsh equivalent of “Oy, what’s this then?” from the campsite behind us. The two of us reached the furthest points in our arcs and turned back toward the middle. Something caught my eye—but it was nothing, just a gleam of bare stone where a hoof had scraped a rock. I went on, then turned back for a second look. Would an unshod hoof actually scrape into stone? On the whole I thought not.

“Hol—Uh, Da’!” I called. His head came up, and he started across the hillside at a long-legged trot, the spade bouncing on his shoulder. When he came up he was barely winded. I pointed and he dropped down with his glass to look more closely.

“Well done indeed. That excuses your lapse earlier,” he said mag-nanimously. “Let us see how far this might take us.” We continued in the direction we had come, walking slowly on either side of the clear path cut by generations of hoofs. An hour later we passed the limits of the police search.