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.”
“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?”