Power. A third-born man is little less than the angels. A
third-born man is the image of God.
Testimony, III:8
MYCROFT CLEARED AWAY THE EMPTY PLATTER and the glasses, and returned with an antique-looking bottle and smaller glasses. Having cocoa and red wine already arguing in my stomach, I turned down his offer.
“I've been saving this for you to try,” Mycroft told his brother. “I'd have brought it out for Mr Lofte, but I judged that in his condition, strong drink might render him unconscious.” The two men sipped and made appreciative noises and traded opinions on districts and pre-war (pre-Boer war) vintages before my ostentatious glance at my wrist-watch returned us to the task at hand.
“I had two more telephone calls from Lestrade today,” Mycroft said. “On the first, he informed me that he had, in fact, put out arrest warrants for both of you. On the second, he asked if you had fled the country with Damian Adler.”
“Has Damian fled the country?” I asked.
“So far as I could determine, Lestrade's evidence consists of Scotland Yard's inability to find him. So, Sherlock, what have you found for us amongst the primitive monuments?”
Holmes pulled a travel-stained rucksack out from under his chair, undoing the buckle and upending its contents onto the low table: three large and lumpy manila envelopes, their ties securely fastened.
Mycroft went to his desk for a stack of white paper, while Holmes picked up the first envelope and undid the tie, pulling out six sealed standard-sized envelopes of varying lumpiness.
One by one he slit the ends, shaking the contents of each onto a fresh sheet of paper: sandy soil in one; a coin in the next; two burnt matches; a handful of leaves and blades of grass, each stained with what could only be blood; four tiny, dark lumps that looked like pebbles; two different shoe-prints on butcher's paper, from a woman's heeled shoe and a larger man's boot, taken from the plaster casts Holmes had made, inked, and abandoned at the site—plaster casts make for a considerable weight to carry about the countryside.
When the six sheets were displaying their wares, he waited for us to look at them more closely, then began to return the objects to their envelopes. I picked up one of the pebbles, and found it softer than rock. Wax, perhaps. Or—gristle from a picnic lunch? Yes, I had seen their like before.
The second large envelope used four sheets of paper: one for grass with the same stains, one for a piece of cotton cording not more than half an inch long, and a third for a pinch of bi-coloured sand, light and dark brown. The fourth appeared to have nothing on it, except I had watched Holmes upend the envelope with great care. He handed me his powerful magnifying glass; I got to my knees for a closer look, and saw two tiny objects approximately the colour of the paper, little larger than thick eye-lashes. Like finger-nail clippings, without the curve.
With care, I slid the paper across the table to Mycroft and gave him the glass. When we had finished, Holmes packed this manila envelope away, and reached for the third.
This was the thickest, and its contents were similar to that of the others: spattered grass; twists of paper containing three different samples of soil, one of them pure sand; four identical wooden matches; a chewing-gum wrapper; six cigarette ends, none of them the same and two with lipstick stains, pink-red in one case and slightly orange in the other; half a dozen of the soft pebbles; a boot-print that apppeared identical to that in the first envelope; one white thread and the twig that had caught and pulled it; and a final object that Holmes had wrapped first in cotton wool, then in Friday's Times, rolled to make a stiff tube. He snipped the string holding the protective layers, revealing a dirty plaster shape approximately six inches long and curving to a wicked point: a plaster of Paris knife blade. I picked it up, lifting an eyebrow at Holmes.
“This is from a remote site in the Yorkshire Moors, a stone circle known as the High Bridestones. Albert Seaforth chose it as a place to commit suicide. I found it interesting that, after slitting his wrists, he drove the blade into the soil to clean it.”
“He was found with a knife in his hand,” I said. “The blade was bloody, his fingers were not. The blade was not this shape.”
Holmes said, “The hilt left an oval impression on the ground, with the slit in the centre. You can see where the plaster picked up the blood-stains.”
He packed away the envelope, and said, “We'll need the evidence from the Sussex site.”
“It's in my safe,” Mycroft said. “I'll get it.”
“I brought everything up when I heard Lestrade was out for our scalps,” I told Holmes. “I was afraid to leave it for him to find. There were finger-prints, on—”
“On the biscuit wrapper, so Mycroft said.”
“I was glad. Holmes, I am so glad I was wrong about Damian.”
“Not half so glad as I,” he replied.
“What were you doing at eight-thirty Wednesday night?” I asked abruptly.
“Wednesday? I would have been climbing over a church wall in Penrith to get away from a dog. Why do you ask?”
But Mycroft came back with the packet, and I just smiled and shook my head.
Holmes went through the same ritual of envelopes and paper: vegetation, sand, cigarette ends, a black thread, two wooden matches, three of the soft pebbles, and one of the tiny odd fragments that resembled finger-nails. Although in this case, one of those was easier to see against the white sheet, being lined in fading red-brown.
“What are those things?” I finally said.
“Mycroft?” Holmes asked of his brother.
“I haven't seen any for years, but they look to me like the trimmings of a quill pen.” Mycroft's slow voice vibrated with meaning, but it took me a moment to follow.
When I did, I snapped away from the tiny brown scrap, a cold finger trickling down my spine. “A pen? My God, do you mean he …”
I couldn't finish the sentence, so Holmes did. “Dipped a quill pen in his victim's blood and wrote with it? So it would appear.”
“Extraordinary,” Mycroft rumbled.
“But… I mean to say, I can understand—intellectually, I suppose, although not… I can just understand that a mad-man might want to write a message with a victim's blood, but then and there? Trimming his pen while the body lies at his feet, blood still…”
I gulped, unable to finish the sentence.
“Blood remains liquid but a short time,” Holmes said. “I ought to have known six days ago: Sand on chalk soil means something.”
“What, it meant that someone had been to the beach before visiting the Giant?”
“This is not beach sand, Russell. It is blotting sand.”
“Oh,” I said. “God.” I stared in disgust at the minuscule scraps of quill until Holmes had replaced them in their concealing paper, then I picked up his glass and tossed back a dose of brandy. It made me cough and caused my eyes to water, but Mycroft did not even rebuke me for my ill treatment of his precious liquid.
“Where are these from?” he asked, gesturing at the envelopes.
“The first, with the two foot-prints, was from Cerne Abbas. The second comes from a large stone circle in Cumbria called Long Meg and her Daughters; the farmer heard his dog barking on the first of May, and when he looked out, he saw what appeared to be a candle burning in the field where the circle was. Going to investigate, he found a ram belonging to the next neighbour but one, lying on the centre-stone with its throat cut. The third envelope, that with all the cigarettes, is from High Bridestones—the site, unfortunately, was the focal point of a motor-coach full of lady water-colourists, two days before Albert Seaforth died there. And the fourth, as you know, was from the Wilmington Giant.”
“Same boots, same matches,” I said.
“Identical candle-wax,” he added.
“Is that what those soft pebbles are? Dirty wax?”
“Not dirty: dark.”
“Dark? You mean black? Like those used by the Children of Lights. Or in a Black Mass.”
&nbs
p; “Is there actually such a thing as a Black Mass?” Mycroft asked. “One has heard about it, of course, but it always seemed to me one of those tales the righteous build to convince themselves of their enemies' depravity.”
“Crowley practices it,” Holmes told him. “Don't you remember, last year, the death of young Loveday?”
“Raoul Loveday died of an infection down at Crowley's villa in Italy, although his wife claimed Crowley's magic killed him.”
“Yes, but he died after a Black Mass at which they drank the blood of a sacrificed cat,” I said. “We met Loveday's wife, and although it wouldn't surprise me if she'd shared in the drugs side of the experience, what she has to say about the ceremony seemed real enough.” A still more awful thought struck me. “Holmes, there's a line in Testimony about primitive people eating their enemies' hearts. You don't suppose that Brothers…”
“Drank his victims' blood as well?” Holmes considered for a moment, then shook his head. “I saw nothing to indicate that, no place where, for example, smears suggested a cup wiped clean. And if the blood was meant as a communal partaking, would he have done so when he worked alone?”
I hoped not. I truly hoped not.
I went to our room a short time later. As I was brushing my teeth, Holmes came in, looking for his pipe.
“You're staying up?” I asked, unnecessarily: The pipe meant meditation.
“I need to read Testimony.”
“What did you make of Lofte's information?”
“Which part of it?”
Very well; if Holmes was going to be obtuse, I could be blunt. “The part of it where Damian's wife was married to a murder suspect, Holmes. Did Damian know that she was married before? That she had a child by Hayden? That she's been attending his church? That the illustrations were for the man's book?”
“I believe he knew, yes.”
“But why would he go along with it? And why not tell you?”
“I should imagine that he did not tell me for the same reason he attempted to conceal his wife's unsavoury past: He feared that if I knew who she had been, I should assume her to be a gold-digger of the worst stripe and wash my hands promptly of the business. It is, after all, more or less what I assumed when I first encountered Damian's mother.”
“But isn't that precisely what this woman is—was?”
“You do not admit to the possibility of reform?”
I started to retort, then closed my mouth. Yolanda Chin had been a child when she was forced into a life of prostitution; she was not yet an adult when she married a middle-aged Englishman, who turned out to be a crook, and perhaps much worse. Did I have any reason to think that Yolanda herself was a criminal? I did not. Did I have any reason to believe she was betraying Damian, in any way but attending her first husband's church? I did not.
Holmes saw the internal debate on my face. “It is easier to picture the boy as a victim of an unscrupulous adventuress, but I see no evidence of that, Russell. He loved her. Still does, if you are correct and he does not know she is dead. My son loves his wife,” he said simply. “That is the point at which I must begin.”
“And yet you think he knows. About her continuing attachment to Brothers?”
“He knows. One must remember, the Bohemian way of life is not a surface dressing with Damian.”
I thought about that, and about the denizens of the Café Royal: two couples, leaving arm in arm with the other's spouse; Alice, Ronnie, and their Bunny; the Epstein household of husband, wife, husband's lovers, and their various children; the manifold permutations of the Bloomsbury Group, with lovers, husbands, wives' lovers become husbands' lovers and vice-versa; all of it determinedly natural and open, all of it aimed at a greater definition of humanity.
Yes, Damian could well know, and knowing, permit—even approve of—his wife's continued liaison with a man to whom she had once been married.
I had to laugh, a little sadly. “I'm a twenty-four-year-old prude.”
“And thank God for it.”
“Still,” I said, “I'd have thought that if Damian knew about Yolanda's links to Brothers, he'd have looked to Brothers when she disappeared.”
“Yes, well, I believe he may have done so. On the Wednesday night, he left the hotel for a time. It appeared to be an attack of claustrophobia.”
“He's claustrophobic?” I pictured the room Damian and Estelle had shared at the walled house, its two large windows wide open to the night. “Did he leave for long enough to get up to the walled house and back?”
“By taxi, yes.”
I woke early the following morning, saw the vague pre-dawn shape of Mycroft's guest room, and turned over again. Then I noticed how quiet it was. In London. Drat: Sunday again.
I was on my third cup of coffee when first Holmes, then his brother emerged. Mycroft was cheerful, or at least, as cheerful as Mycroft got, but Holmes shot a dark look at the windows in just the way I had earlier.
Sundays were most inconvenient, when it came to investigation.
Still, it was not a total loss. For one thing, at ten after eight, interrupting our toast and marmalade, a set of discreet knuckles brushed at the door. I went to answer, and found “Mr Jones,” a thick packet in his hand. He peered around me to check that Mycroft was in before he handed it over.
I took it to Mycroft. He tore it open, removing a note; as he read it, his face went enigmatic, and I braced myself for bad news.
“The pathologists for Fiona Cartwright and Albert Seaforth report that there was no indication of Veronal grains in the stomachs of the two victims.”
“They missed it,” I declared.
“Perhaps with Miss Cartwright, but the Seaforth examination appears to have been quite thorough. He was not given powdered Veronal to render him unconscious.”
He handed me the reports, which indicated that Fiona Cartwright had drunk a cup of tea at some point before she shot herself, and Albert Seaforth had taken a quantity of beer. I had to agree, if powdered Veronal had been there, the pathologist would have found it. Which meant that as far as the drugs Brother used, we were back to square one.
“Still,” I said, “he must have drugged Seaforth in some manner. I can't see a man this size just sitting down and permitting his wrists to be slit.”
“Veronal comes in liquid form as well,” Holmes commented. “I imagine he required the powdered form for Yolanda because he could stir it before-hand into the nut pâté. It would be a simple matter to dribble some from a bottle into a cup of tea in a busy café or a pint in a pub, but it would require sleight-of-hand to do so on an open hillside.”
A truly macabre image: a man casually handing a pâté-laden biscuit and glass of wine to the woman who had once been his wife, sitting on the grass with a picnic basket at their feet, the Long Man at their backs, and a waiting knife on his person.
Mycroft handed the remaining contents of the envelope to Holmes. They were photographs, both the reproductions of the Shanghai newsman's shot of “Reverend Hayden,” and two rolls of film that Holmes had taken at the murder sites. He divided them into four piles, one for each site, removing those that showed the great monoliths of Stonehenge. We pored over them, separately and together, but other than illustrating some very attractive pieces of English countryside, they told us little.
“Lonely places to die, all of them,” I remarked.
“One supposes they were chosen, in part, for that reason,” Holmes replied.
“Well, if he'd wanted to commit his acts in a prehistoric site surrounded by people, he'd have been hard put to find one. Most of those that survive are in remote areas—central England may once have had as many standing stones and dolmens and such as Cornwall and Wales still do, but central England has more people needing stones for houses and walls.”
“Certainly I found these sites most inconveniently located.”
I did not mention that I had heard his sigh of relief when settling into bed the night before, hours after I'd gone to sleep.
I
swallowed my last bite of toast and picked up one of the Shanghai reproductions, which still looked familiar, but still did not tell me why. “I'm going up to Oxford, I shall be back before dinner. Holmes, promise me you won't vanish again, please?”
“I shall endeavour to be here by six o'clock tonight,” he announced, adding, “Not that I shall have much luck in the daylight hours.”
“You're hunting down where our man got the other sedative?” It was not so much a shrewd guess as the voice of experience, for when it came to London's underbelly, Holmes grasped any excuse to keep me clear of it.
“Drugs sellers tend not to take a Sunday holiday,” he said.
“I shall take your word for it. And, Mycroft, are you—”
“I shall begin enquiries as to the history and whereabouts of Reverend Brothers. But you, Mary, what are you doing in Oxford?”
I put on my hat and picked up my handbag. “It's going to be a perfectly lovely day on the river. Perhaps I shall take a friend punting.”
I left my bemused menfolk staring at my back and wondering if I, too, had not gone just a bit mad.
Great Work (1): The once-born seeks simple life.
The twice-born seeks true understanding.
The thrice-born, divine-man seeks to shape the world,
and set volatile Spirit alight.
Testimony, IV:1
IN FACT, A BOAT ON THE RIVER WAS PRECISELY WHAT I had in mind, although it was more means than end.
My academic interests (sadly neglected over the past year) were in those areas of theological enquiry codified before the beginning of the Common Era—what is generally called the Old Testament, what those of us whose religious affiliations stretch back before Jesus of Nazareth know more precisely as the Hebrew Bible.
However, if my own interests are early, that does not mean I am unaware of the more contemporary, even futuristic branches of theology. I have friends who are experts in the Medieval Church; I have attended lectures on Nineteenth Century Religious Movements; I know people whose fingers are on the pulse of the wilder reaches of modern religion—some of those very wild indeed.