The Beekeeper's Apprentice (18 page)

Holmes and I spotted the white patch at the same moment. It was a small handkerchief, nearly trampled into the mud. Holmes worked it out of the soil and held it outspread. In one corner was an embroidered
J
.

“Was this an accident?” I wondered aloud. “Could she have been awake enough to drop it deliberately? Might a six-year-old do that? I shouldn’t have thought so.”

We continued, and in a few minutes my doubts were stilled, for to one side of the path a narrow strip of blue ribbon hung limply from a patch of bracken. I held it up triumphantly.

“That’s my girl, Jessie. Your hair ribbon.”

We walked on, but there were no further signs. Eventually the path split, one going up and over the hill, the other dropping down towards some trees. We stood looking at the two offerings expectantly, but no ribbons or signals caught our eyes.

“I’ll take the uphill again.”

“Wait. Down near those trees, is the ground scuffed up?” We went down, and there, in a little hollow, were indeed signs of some flurry of activity. Holmes walked around it carefully, and then bent down quickly, reaching for something invisible to me twenty feet away. He continued his scrutiny, picked up another object, and finally allowed me to approach.

“She jumped off the horse,” he said, running his fingertips back and forth an inch above the trampled ground. “She had bare feet, al-though they had taken her shoes; they had not bothered to put them on her. Her hands were not tied. Here,” he said stabbing a finger at a clod of turf, “you see the short parallel lines? Her toes. And here, the longer lines that draw together? Her fingers made those as she gath-ered herself off the ground and sprinted towards those bushes.” Once he had pointed out the signs I could see them, clear despite the inter-vening rains. He rose and followed the marks left by hoofs and heels. “She made it this far before they caught her, by her night dress, which popped a button,” he held out the object he had picked up earlier, “and by her hair, which was of course loose from having the ribbon re-moved.” He held up several mud-crusted strands of auburn hair.

“Dear God,” I groaned, “I hope they didn’t hurt her when they caught her.”

“There’s nothing on the ground that tells one way or the other,” he said absently. “What was the moon doing on the twelfth of August?”

I was quite certain he did not need me to tell him, but I thought for a moment, and answered. “Three-quarters full, and it had stopped raining. She may have been able to see well enough to tell when the path split, or perhaps she was trying to make it to the trees. In either case, we know where she’s come. Quite a child, our Miss Simpson. But I doubt there will be any further signs.”

“It is unlikely, but let us be thorough.”

We followed the horse trail for another hour, but there were no more signs or marks of shod hoofs. At the next trail fork we stopped.

“Back to the caravan, Mary, my girl. A bite of lunch, and the gip-sies will resume their itinerant musicale.”

We got back to the wagon to find company, in the form of a large constable with a very dark expression on his face.

“And what might the two of you have been doing on this hillside?” he demanded.

“Doin’? We been stayin’ the night, I’d a thought that obvious,” re-torted Holmes, and walked past him to store the spade in its niche.

“And where have you been gone to all mornin’?”

“Out diggin’ for truffles.” He jerked his thumb at the implement.

“What?”

“Truffles. Little roots, very expensive in the shops. The Lords and Ladies like ’em in their food. Find ’em sometimes in the hills.”

“Truffles, yes, but they use pigs to find them, not spades.”

“Don’t need pigs if you’ve got the gift. My daughter here, she’s got the gift of sight.”

“You don’t say.” He looked at me with skepticism, and I smiled at him shyly. “And did this daughter of yours with the gift of truffles find any?”

“Naow, not today.”

“Good. Then you’ll not mind moving on. Within the hour.”

“Want m’dinner first,” said Holmes sulkily, though it was closer to teatime than the noon hour.

“Dinner, then. But gone in two hours, you’ll be, or it’s in a cell you’ll find yourselves. Two hours.”

He stalked off over the hill, and I sat down and giggled in relief. “Truffles? For God’s sake,
are
there truffles in Wales?”

“I suppose so. See if you can find some food while I dig out the maps.”

Holmes’ maps were of the extremely large-scale topographical sort, showing the kinds of vegetation, the rights-of-way, and small black squares indicating houses. He folded the table up out of the way and chose a series of maps from a shallow drawer beneath my bunk. I handed him a sandwich and a tin mug of beer, and we walked across the paper floor-covering in our stockinged feet.

“This is our route,” he pointed out. “The campsite, here, and the trail going away, roughly along this contour line.” The tip of his brown finger followed the contour of the hill, dropped down into the hollow on the next map, and stopped at the Y junction on the edge of the third. “From here, where? She had to be inside, Russell, before light. In a building, or a vehicle.”

“But not...under the ground?”

“I think not. Had they intended to kill her, surely they would have done so when she tried to escape, to save themselves further trouble. I saw no indication of blood there.”

“Holmes!” I protested in dismay.

“What is it, Russell?”

“Oh, nothing. You just sound so... callous.”

“You prefer a surgeon who weeps at the thought of the pain he is about to inflict? I should have thought you had learnt that lesson by now, Russell. Allowing the emotions to involve themselves in an in-vestigation can only interfere with the surgeon’s hand. Now, assuming the child was taken as early as midnight, and it is light by five o’clock; without an automobile, that would place the limits they could have ridden approximately here,” and he drew a semicircle, using as its cen-ter the Y where the trail had disappeared. “Within this area; a place where a telephone is to hand; a large enough village for the delivery of
The Times
out of London to go unremarked. You won’t overlook the significance of the agony column?”

“Of course not,” I hastened to reassure him.

He reached back onto his sheaf of maps, withdrew half a dozen of the very largest scale, and fitted them together. We puzzled over the lines of streams and roads, footpaths and houses. I absently wiped a smear of pickle from the map and brushed off some crumbs, and thought aloud.

“There are only four small villages in that direction. Five, if we count this furthest, though it would have forced them to ride very fast. All are near enough to the road, they might have a telephone line. These two villages seem rather more scattered than the others, which might give whatever house they’re in more privacy. I can’t see that we’ll make them all by tomorrow.”

“No.”

“We have only six more days before the ransom is to be paid.”

“I am aware of that,” he said testily. “Get the horse in the traces.”

We were away before the constable returned, but it was nearly dark before we came to the first village. Holmes trudged off to the pub, which looked to be on the ground floor of someone’s home, while I cared for the horse and tried to concentrate my brain on conversation with the children who inevitably appeared at our arrival. I had found that there was usually one who took responsibility for communicating with this strange visitor. In this case the representative was a dirty girl of about ten. The others kept up a running commentary, or perhaps a simultaneous translation in a Welsh that was too fast and colloquial for me to grasp. I ignored them all and proceeded with my tasks.

“Are you a gipsy then, lady?”

“What do you think?” I grunted.

“My Dad says yes.”

“Your Dad is wrong.” Shocked silence met the heresy. After a minute she plucked up her nerve again.

“If it’s not a gipsy you are, then what?”

“A Romany.”

“A Romany? There’s foolish, there is! They carried spears and they’re all dead.”

“That’s a Roman. I’m Romany. Want to give this to the horse?” A small boy took the oats from me. “Is there anyone in town who’d like to sell me a couple of suppers?” My crowd silently consulted, then:

“Maddie, run you by there and ask your Mam. Go now, you.” The tiny girl, torn between the desire to keep watch and the undeniable honour of providing service, reluctantly took herself down the road and disappeared into the pub.

“Have you no pan?” asked a small person of one sex or another.

“I don’t like to cook,” I said regally, and shocked silence, deeper than before, descended. If the other was heresy, I could be burnt for this. “Is there a telephone in town?” I asked the spokesman.

“Telephone?”

“Yes, telephone, you know, the thing you pick up and shout down? It’s too dark to see any wires. Is there one in town?” The puzzled faces showed me this was the wrong village. A child piped up.

“My Da’ used one once, he did, when the Grand’ died and he had to tell his brother by Caerphilly.”

“Where did he go to use it?”

An eloquent shrug in the light of the lamps. Oh, well.

“What for do you need a telephone machine?”

“To call my stockbroker.” I continued before they could ask for a definition, “You don’t get many strangers through here, do you?”

“Oh, many there are. Why, only at Midsummer’s, an autocar filled with English came here and stopped, and drank a glass at Maddie’s mam’s.”

“Just coming through don’t count,” I asserted loftily. “I mean comin’ in and eatin’ and drinkin’ here and stoppin’ for a time. Don’t get many of them, do you?”

I could see from their faces that they didn’t have any convenient group of strangers to offer me, and sighed internally. Tomorrow, per-haps. Meanwhile—“Well, I’m here, but we’re not stopping long. If you want to run home and tell your people, we’ll have a show for you to watch in an hour. Unless my Da’ finds the beer here too good,” I added. “I tell fortunes too. Run along now.”

The supper was good and plentiful, the take from the fiddling and cards poor. Before dawn the next morning we jingled off down the road.

The next village had telephone wires but few isolated buildings. Neither my small informant nor the pub inhabitants could be gently prodded into revealing any recent influx of strangers. We moved on after midday, not pausing to perform.

Our next choice started out promising. Telephone lines, several widely scattered buildings, and even a response to questions about strangers caused my pulse to quicken. However, by teatime the leads had petered out, and the strangers were two old English ladies who had come to live here six years before.

We had to backtrack to reach the road to the other villages, and as dusk closed in on us I was thoroughly sick of the hard, jolting seat and the imperturbable brown rump ahead of me. We lit the wagon’s side lamps and climbed down with a lantern to lead the horse. I spoke to Holmes in a low voice.

“Could the kidnappers be locals? I know it looks like outsiders, but what if it was just a couple of locals?”

“Who spotted an American senator and thought up a gas gun and letters in
The Times
on the spur of the moment?” he drawled sarcasti-cally. “Use the wits God gave you, Mary Todd. Locals are almost cer-tainly involved but are not alone.”

We crept wearily into village number four, where for the first time we were not greeted by a company of children. “Too late for the little ones, I suppose,” Holmes grunted, and looked at the small stone pub with loathing.

“What I would give for a decent claret,” he sighed, and went off to do his duty for his king.

I settled the horse, found and heated a tin of beans over the caravan’s tiny fire, and slumped at the minuscule wooden table with the Tarot deck, sourly reading my fortune: The cards gave me the Hanged Man, the enigmatic Fool, and the Tower with its air of utter disaster. Holmes was a long time in the pub, and I was beginning to consider moving over to my bunk, travel-stained clothing and all, when I heard his voice come suddenly loud into what passed for the village’s high street.

“—my fiddle, and I’ll play you a dancin’ tune, the merriest of tunes that ever you’ll hear.” I jerked upright, all thought of sleepiness snatched from me and the beans turning instantly to bricks in my stomach. The caravan’s door flew open and in came me old Da’, sev-eral sheets to the wind. He tripped as he negotiated the narrow steps, and fell forward into my lap.

“Ah, me own sweet girlie,” he continued loudly, struggling to right himself. “Have you seen what I done with the fiddle?” He reached past me to retrieve it from the shelf and whispered fiercely in my ear. “On your toes, Russell: a two-storey white house half a mile north, plane tree in front and another at the back. Hired in late June, five men living there, perhaps a sixth coming and going. Curse it!” he bellowed, “I told you to fix the bloody string,” and continued as he bent over the instrument, “I’ll make a distraction at the front of the house in fifty minutes. You make your way—carefully, mind you—around to the back and see what you can without getting too close. Black your skin and take your revolver, but use it only to save your life. Watch for a guard, or dogs. If you’re seen, that’s the end of it. Can you do it?”