The Beekeeper's Apprentice (38 page)

“She never meant to kill you, then!”

“I was glad to see that. The problem had troubled me. Oh, not her murder attempt, but that mine was the first. The whole point of killing you and Watson, as I read it, was to hurt me, but how could I be hurt by your deaths if I were already dead? I was very pleased to see that explained by the trigger. It also confirms that you shall be safe if we appear alienated. I shall have to arrange for a discreet guard for Mrs. Hudson when she returns from Australia, but Watson’s protec-tion we shall continue to leave to Mycroft.”

The rest of the pages were interesting, but not as important as the fact of the wire trigger. The prints on the intact Oxford bomb were those of the deceased man, and his alone. The cab’s prints included those of Holmes, myself, and Billy, its owner and another driver (both of whom Lestrade had interviewed and released), and two others, one of whom had a thumbprint matching the one on the button. This gentleman was well-known to the police record books and was soon apprehended. His colleague made an escape out the back window of his house and was ru-moured to have fled to America. The large man in custody was being charged with all the injuries done to Billy and to the cab, but Lestrade was of the opinion that the man would not be threatened into revealing anything concerning his employer. “He does not appear frightened of retribution,” wrote Lestrade, “simply very firm in his refusal, despite threats of a long prison term for the assault. It should be noted that his wife and their two teenaged sons have recently moved into a new house and seem to have an income from outside. Their bank account does not reflect any great change, but they have significant quantities of cash to spend. Thus far enquiries have been without result.”

I looked up at Holmes through his cloud of grey smoke.

“We have another family man in our group, I see.”

“Read on, the plot thickens quickly.”

The Yard’s next document concerned the dead man, John Dickson, who had bombed Dr. Watson’s house. He had indeed been apparently reformed, living happily, to all appearances, with his wife and children and working in his father-in-law’s music business. About six weeks be-fore the trio of bombs, he had come into a comfortable inheritance, from a distant relative who had died in New York. According to his widow, he had told her that the inheritance was to be in two parts, of equal size, the second to be received within four or five months. He began talking about University for the young children, and the surgery one of them needed on a crippled leg, and they planned a trip to France the following summer. However, shortly after the first sum of money arrived, he began to become secretive. He put a lock on a back shed and spent hours in there. (The investigation revealed traces of the explosive powder used and clipped ends of wire such as the Oxford bomb had preserved.) He disappeared occasionally for one or two days, returning travel-stained and weary, but oddly excited. He had left the house on a Saturday night in the middle of December, saying that he should be away for several days, but that after this trip he should not have to leave again. The wife and her father tried to persuade him not to go, it being a very busy time of year for the shop, but he was adamant.

In the early hours of Thursday morning he was killed by the bomb, apparently a result of the timing mechanism having been tampered with. One week later a bank draught was received in the wife’s name, drawn from a bank in New York. Police there found that the account had been opened some weeks before by a woman who had brought in cash for the purpose. An odd afternote was that the amount of the second payment was exactly twice what the first had been, rather than an equal amount as Dickson had anticipated. The two draughts de-pleted the account, which was closed. Lestrade concluded by noting that although it was irregular, there was no way to prove that the money was connected to the bombing; therefore, it looked as though the widow would be allowed to keep it.

“What do you make of that second payment, Holmes? Guilt pangs?”

“Cleanliness has affected your brain, Russell. Clearly the murder was premeditated.”

“Yes, of course. The original amount was what had been planned for. But possibly not by Dickson.”

“Make a note, Russell, to ask Lestrade about Dickson’s state of mind at the time of death.”

“You are thinking that it might have been suicide? In exchange for a payment to the family?”

“Whatever it is, it adds an interesting facet to our foe’s personality. She is a person with international connexions, or so the large quantity of American currency would tend to indicate, yet she carries through on her agreement with a dead man. On top of everything else we know about her, she’s a murderer with a sense of honour. Most subtle.”

I returned to the packet, which included a faint carbon copy of the bomb report, highly technical and couched in police English, several large, glossy photographs of the cab and the Ladies’, and a letter from Mycroft. I glanced at the first, set aside the photographs, and began to read Mycroft’s cramped but remarkably impersonal handwriting. The first part of the letter was concerned with the bomb: He agreed that it had been Dickson’s work, adding that although the toggle detonator had been manufactured in America before 1909, it had apparently been ex-posed to London’s corrosive air for some many months. He went on to address the problem of the marksman who had shot at us in Scotland Yard, who may or may not have been the same gentleman whom the mother pushing her pram across the bridge had witnessed bundling an elaborate contraption like a street photographer’s camera, complete with hood and, in this case, wheels, into the backseat of a waiting taxi-cab and squealing off. Concerning this he wrote:

I perceive a distinct odour of red herring, as with the fleeing steam-launch, which we discovered was hired—anonymously, with cash—to make off at all speed immediately the captain heard a sound “like a shot.”

Concerning the identity of your lady pursuer (continued Mycroft) very little has appeared, but for the following: Three days ago on my way to the Club, an unbelievably unsavoury character with the physiognomy of a toad—and something of the colour—sidled up to me in a manner meant, no doubt, to appear casual, and muttered out of the corner of his flat lips that he had a message for my brother. (I do wish that you might arrange for these persons to send letters. I suppose they are illiterate. Might they be instructed in the use of the telephone?) The sum total of his message was, and I quote: Lefty says there’s Glasgow Rangers with buckets of bees in town, the pitch and toss is somebody’s Trouble. End quote.

I thought this might be of interest to you.

Incidentally, heartiest congratulations on the success of your Palestinian episode, no more than I expected from you, but the Minister and the PM are immensely grateful. I suppose that when your name finds its way onto next year’s lists you will wish me to arrange for its removal. This becomes tedious, and I gather that before too long I shall be doing the same for Miss Russell.

I trust this finds you and your companion well. I anticipate your return (with something of the eager interest of a fox outside a henhouse into which he has seen saunter a cat).

Mycroft

I tore my eyes from the intimations of the penultimate paragraph and looked up from the missive.

“Glasgow Rangers? Buckets of bees?”

“Cockney rhyming slang. Strangers, with a great deal of money— bees and honey—and the boss is somebody’s ‘trouble and strife.’ Wife. A woman.”

I nodded thoughtfully, put down the letter, and took up the photo-graphs to lay them out on the low table in front of the sofa, and began to study them carefully. The photographer had taken two full sets of the in-terior of the cab, the first as it had been originally, the second after I had removed my scraps. With a pang I remembered the pleasure the green silk dress had brought me as I saw a portion of its cuff in one photograph.

“What was the point of this destruction, Holmes? Why attack the clothes, and not us? Even Billy wasn’t badly hurt, just parked to one side. Do you mind if I open the window a bit?”

“It is a bit thick in here, isn’t it? That’s good. Better close it in a minute or two, though, we don’t want our voices heard. Why indeed, as you say, might a foe be content with a few clothes and the seat cush-ions of an old cab? Except to show us that she knew where we were, and that she could as easily have done the same to our bodies as your clothes. And finally, to thumb her nose at me by pulling my own trick of leaving reversed footsteps, and topping it off with Baker Street mud. It was a demonstration, no doubt about that, but was that all? I think not. Look closely at the slashes on the seats, there.” He arranged the last set of photographs so that they overlapped, to place the seats in a continuous line. “Do you see something?”

I looked at the shredded seats, the cuts that crossed, met at their lower ends, and ran parallel. I laid my spectacles to one side and squinted hard at the clear black and grey images. “Is there a pattern?” I asked, hearing the excitement in my voice. “Hand me that pencil and pad, would you, Holmes?” The first two cuts crossed each other in the middle, and I wrote an
X
on my pad. The next two met at the lower edge of the seat, a
V.
After some minutes and discussion with Holmes, I had a string of
X
s,
V
s, and straight lines on my pad that looked like this:

XVXVIIXXIIXIIXXIIXXIVXXXI

“Roman numerals?” I wondered. “Does this mean anything to you?” I asked Holmes, whose steely eyes were studying the page in-tently. I could see that it did not, so I put on my glasses and sat back.

“A string of twenty-five Roman numbers. Do they add up to some-thing?” I did the simple sum in my head, ten plus five plus ten and so on. “One hundred forty-five, if they make up twenty-five separate numbers. Of course, they could say fifteen, seventeen, twenty-two, twelve, and so forth.”

“What would that come to?”

“There won’t be much difference, because of the nature of Roman numerals, but it comes to, let’s see—143.”

“Interesting. And the number between them is 144, a dozen dozen.”

“And the two sums added together make 288, which is the number of dollars my father had in his desk when he died. Holmes, these num-bers games could go on forever.”

“What if we translated the numbers into letters, one of the more simplistic codes?”

We scribbled and thought, but came up with nothing. Reading it as 15, 17, 22, 12, 22, 24, 20, 11 yielded gibberish as OQVLVXTK, and no other combination made any sense either. I finally pushed it away.

“There are just too many variables, Holmes. Without a key we can’t even know if it’s a word, or the combination to a safe, or a map coordinate, or—”

“Yet she left it for us to find. Where could she have put the key?”

“Judging from her previous style, I should say that the key is both hidden and completely obvious, which is always the most effective means of hiding something.”

It was very late now, and my eyes felt gritty. I picked up the con-versation where we had left it before the slash pattern had appeared.

“I agree that she was demonstrating her cleverness. She won a number of points in that round. I wonder what her next move might have been had we not been spirited away by Mycroft. Cutting off Wat-son’s nose to show that she could have taken his head?”

“More to the point, what will her move be now, when we walk openly home? For how long will her wariness last before she thinks it is perhaps not a trap, that we truly are divided and the trauma of it has made me an empty wreck? Mere extermination is not what she wants, apparently. She wishes to ruin me first. Very well, we’ll give her that, and wait for her to move.”

He carefully inserted the papers and photographs back into their oversized envelope and stood looking down at me.

“Well, Russell. Thank you for showing me Palestine. It may be a long, long time before we are able to speak freely. I shall say good night, and good-bye, and we will meet when the prey takes the bait and comes into our trap.” His lips gently brushed my forehead, and he was gone.

hus began our act of alienation. Holmes and I had only a few days to perfect our rôles of the two friends now turned against each other, the father and daughter alienated, the near-lovers become bitterest, most implacable of enemies. It takes time to develop a part, as all actors know, time and an exploration of the nuances and quirks of the person being played. We had to be word-perfect before we reached England for the trap to be effective. We had to assume that we were being watched at every moment, and a slight slip of affection could be disastrous.