The Beekeeper's Apprentice (45 page)

I sat at arm’s length from Holmes and looked past the gun’s maw at my mathematics tutor. She was sitting in the very corner of the room behind a rank of shelves, so that the shadow cast by the shelves cut di-rectly across her. The overhead glare illuminated her tweed- and silk-covered legs from the knee down, and occasionally the very end of the heavy military pistol. All else was dim: an occasional flash of teeth and eyes, a dull glint from the gold chain and locket she wore at her throat; all else was shadow.

“Mr. Holmes, we meet at last. I have been looking forward to this meeting for quite some time.”

“Twenty-five years or more, isn’t it, Miss Donleavy? Or, do you pre-fer to be addressed by your father’s name?”

Silence filled the laboratory, and I sat bewildered. Did Holmes know where the woman came from? Her father ...?

“Touché, Mr. Holmes. I take back my earlier criticism; you still do a nice line in bon mots. Perhaps you might explain to Miss Russell.”

“It was her own name that Miss Donleavy signed on the seats of the four-wheeler, Russell. This is the daughter of Professor Moriarty.”

“Surprise, surprise, Miss Russell. You did tell me what a very supe-rior sort of mind your friend has. What a pity he was born trapped in a man’s body.”

With a wrenching effort I took control of my thoughts and sent them, useless as it might now seem, in the direction of the last plan that Holmes and I had laid. I swallowed and studied my hands on the tabletop.

“I cannot agree, Miss Donleavy,” I said. “Mr. Holmes’ mind and his body seem to me well suited to each other.”

“Miss Russell,” she said delightedly, “sharp as always. I must admit I had forgotten how I always enjoyed your mind. And, as you intimate, I had also forgotten that the two of you have become ...alienated. I must say I often wondered what you saw in him. I could have done a great deal with you had it not been for your irrational fondness for Mr. Holmes.”

I pointedly said nothing, just studied my hands. I did wonder why they weren’t shaking.

“But now the fondness has turned, has it?” she said, in a voice that was soft and tinged with sadness. “So very sad, when old friends part and become enemies.”

My heart leapt with hope, but I kept all expression from my face. If she believed this, we might yet get around her. It was difficult for me to tell, partly because I had to judge solely by her voice and also because my trust in my own perceptions had been badly shaken, but beyond this she also seemed somehow foreign, her reactions exaggerated, fluctuating.

I had little time to reflect on the question, because Holmes stirred at my side and spoke up, his voice flat.

“Kindly refrain from baiting the child, Miss Donleavy, and con-tinue: I believe you have something you wish to say to me.”

The round metal circle on her knee began to shake slightly, and af-ter a brief moment of terror I heard her laughter, and I felt ill. She had been playing with me. We might have fooled her for a time, but now our act was exposed, and even the small chance we’d had with deception was no longer ours.

“You are right, Mr. Holmes. I have not much time, and you have robbed me of a great deal of energy in the last few days. I have no great energy to spare, you understand. I am dying. Oh yes, Miss Russell, my absence from the college was no sham. There is a crab with its claws in my belly and no way to remove it. I had originally planned to wait sev-eral years for this, Mr. Holmes, but I do not have the leisure now. Be-fore much longer I will not have the strength to deal with you. It must be now.” Her voice echoed in the tiled laboratory and whispered away like a snake.

“Very well, Miss Donleavy, you have me at your mercy. Let us dis-miss Miss Russell and get on with the issues between us.”

“Oh no, Mr. Holmes, sorry. I cannot do that. She is a part of you now, and I cannot deal with you without including her. She stays.” Her voice had gone cold, so cold it was hard for me to connect it with the person who had drunk tea with me and laughed in front of a fire. Cold, and with danger uncoiling from its base. I shivered, and she saw it.

“Miss Russell is cold, and I imagine tired. We all are, my dear, but we have a while to go before the end. Come now, Mr. Holmes, don’t keep your protégée here all day. I am sure you have a number of ques-tions you would like to ask me. You may begin.”

I looked at Holmes, sitting less than a yard from me. His hand rubbed across his face in a gesture of fatigue, but for the briefest frac-tion of an instant his eyes slid sideways to meet mine with a spark of hard triumph, and then his hand fell away from features that were merely bone tired and filled with defeat. He leant back in his chair with his long, bony hands spread out on the table before him and gave a tiny shrug.

“I have no questions, Miss Donleavy.”

The gun wavered for a moment.

“No questions! But of course you have—” She caught herself. “Mr.
 
Holmes, you needn’t try to irritate me. That would be a waste of our precious time. Now come, surely you have questions.” Her voice had an edge to it, and a flash of memory came, of a time when I had failed to make a logical connexion that ought to have been obvious, and her voice had cut deep. In perfect counterpoint came the voice of Holmes, fatigued and slightly bored.

“Miss Donleavy, I tell you, there are no questions in my mind re-garding this case. It has been very interesting, even challenging, but it is now over, and all the significant data have been correlated.”

“Indeed? Pardon me if I doubt your word, Mr. Holmes, but I suspect you are playing some obscure game. Perhaps you might be so good as to explain to Miss Russell and myself the sequence of events. Hands on the table, Mr. Holmes. I have no wish to cut this short. Thank you. You may proceed.”

“Shall I begin with the occurrences of last autumn, or of twenty-eight years ago?”

“As you wish, though perhaps Miss Russell may find the latter course of some interest.”

“Very well. Russell, twenty-eight years ago I, not to mince words, killed Professor James Moriarty, your maths tutor’s father. That it was self-defence does not contravene the fact that I was responsible for his falling to his death over the Reichenbach Falls, or that it was my in-vestigation into his extensive criminal activities that was the direct cause of his seeking to kill me. I found him out, I exposed his network of crime, and I was the immediate cause of his death.

“However, Russell, I made two mistakes at that time, though how I might have anticipated events I cannot at the moment think. The first was that my subsequent three-year-long disappearance from England allowed the scattered remnants of Moriarty’s organisation to regroup; by the time I returned it had succeeded in extending itself internation-ally, with little structure left aboveground in this country. My second mistake was to allow Moriarty’s family—the existence of which was one of his better kept secrets—to disappear from my view. His wife and young daughter left for New York, never to be seen again. Or so I had thought. Was Donleavy your mother’s maiden name?”

“Ah, so you do have a question! Yes, it was.”

“Minor lacunae, Miss Donleavy, and hardly worth the effort of pur-suit. What does it matter, whether the hair you left for me to find was your father’s? or, which room in the warehouse across the river the marksman was in before shooting at Miss Russell? or indeed, was it you or some minion who prematurely triggered the bomb that killed Dick-son? Peripheral matters left unanswered make for an untidy case but hardly affect its basic framework.”

“An interesting statement, from a man who bases his investiga-tions on minutiae,” she commented, with some justification. “But we’ll let it pass. Yes, it was my father’s hair, from the days when he wore it down to his collar. My mother kept it in a locket. This locket I wear, in fact. And yes, my friend with the accurate rifle was indeed in the warehouse, although I understand that Scotland Yard is still look-ing for the launch. How they can imagine that anyone could aim from a boat on water and achieve any degree of accuracy—And as for Dick-son, he knew the risks when he signed on. I was angry with him, for making such a mess of the bomb that incapacitated you, and it made him clumsy. I was generous with his family’s compensation, you will give me that.”

“What price a man’s life, Miss Donleavy? How many guineas is rec-ompense to a widow, three fatherless children?” His voice hardened. “You killed him, Miss Donleavy, yourself or one of your hired thugs, who heard your anger and took it as command. You intended him dead when you opened the New York bank account from which he was paid, last November. And he is now dead.”

We sat in utter silence, and my heart beat ten, eleven times before she responded, with grudging admiration and a touch of amusement, and sounding again like herself.

“Mr. Holmes, how generous is the urge to Christian forgiveness in your soul, to perceive the man who nearly killed you and your two closest associates as a poor fellow whose widow and children weep for him.”

“John Dickson was a professional, Madam, an artist with fuse and explosive. He never killed, and only once injured, in his entire career, until you brought him out of retirement. I can only assume you held something over him, some threat to his family, I imagine, to force him to engage in wholesale slaughter. Do not play games with me, Madam, with your accidents and your shows of pique; my patience has its limits.”

The room’s silence was so heavy I was sure she would hear my heart rate accelerate when I saw the end of the gun sag slightly away from me. He had her complete attention now. In a minute her voice came from the dark corner, flavoured with what sounded like respect.

“I can see that with someone like you about a person would never become complacent. You are quite correct: I suppose I did want him dead and tidied out of the way. His affection for those poisonous chil-dren of his was a weakness, and he would have exposed me when he had the chance. Ah well; introspection has never been one of my strong points. I have an unfortunate tendency to overlook side issues when I have a goal before me. As Miss Russell could tell you, I think.”

The silver muzzle was again aimed directly at me, and I willed my muscles to relax, cursing inwardly. We were all silent for a long minute, two, and when she started again I knew that Holmes had mis-calculated, that his successful gambit had, instead of distracting her, only driven her more strongly into asserting her domination over him. I could have told him, but he could not have known. Her counter-move was vicious and calculated to take him at his weakest point, where pride met aloof independence.

“I believe,” she said slowly, and again she had fluctuated into that slightly “off” manner that made me feel as if I did not know her in the least. “I believe that I shall call you Sherlock. An awkward name, that. What was your father thinking? Nonetheless, we have had such an in-timate relationship—admittedly one-sided up to now—for so many years, I believe it is time to make it reciprocal. You will address me please by my Christian name.”

Before she reached the end of this bizarre little speech I knew what the strong sense of wrongness was that I had sensed in her. When I had known her at Oxford, she had struck me as a person whose frus-trations with the demands of University life would cause her, before too long, to make a break with the University and go elsewhere to ex-ercise her considerable abilities. Indeed, that is what I had half as-sumed had taken place when she did not return for Hilary term. It was now clear that the break had taken place, but internally: The tightly controlled impatience she had always exhibited had broken free, and the knowledge of her superiority had progressed to a sense of su-premacy. Eccentricity had flowered into madness.

It was an almost textbook illustration of dementia, but I needed no book to tell me what my crawling skin knew: The woman was more dangerous than her gun, as volatile as petrol fumes and malignant as a poisonous spider. My frantic thoughts could find no option to grab hold of, could conceive of no way to calm her, or even distract her. I could only sit, still and unimportant, to one side, and leave the field to Holmes’ vast experience.

“Madam, I can hardly think that—”

“You ought to think very carefully, Sherlock, before you choose.”

I had heard that tone of voice before, on occasions when her reit-erated query as to whether I was satisfied with my solution had sent me scrambling for my error before she came down on me like a barbed whip. Holmes either did not perceive the threat or chose to ignore it.

“Miss Donleavy, I—”

The gunshot exploded into the closed room at the same instant that something tugged gently at my upper arm and a piece of equip-ment disintegrated noisily on a shelf next to the door, and I just had time to hope fervently that Mrs. Hudson would not be brought in by the noise when the pain flared. Holmes heard my gasp and turned to me as I clamped my left hand over the wound.

“Russell, are you—”

“She is fine, my dear Sherlock, and I suggest that you sit quietly or soon she will not be at all fine. Thank you. I assure you that I hit pre-cisely what I intend to hit with this gun. I do nothing by halves, and that includes target practise. And incidentally, you need not worry that your guard will interrupt us this evening; he and Mrs. Hudson are both sleeping very soundly. Now, take your hand away, my dear, and let us see how much you are bleeding. You see? Barely a nick. A pretty shot, I think you’ll agree. You know,” she said in another voice en-tirely, that of a woman of reason and compassion, “I am really terribly sorry that I had to do that to you, Miss Russell. I hope you realise that I am not in the habit of shooting my pupils.” Her voice tried to coax a smile from me, and the terrible thing was, despite the looming panic and shock, I wanted to give it to her. Wanted to trust her.