Mycroft shifted in his chair. “Still, I should have said the ritual element was particularly strong, if he went to the trouble of dressing her in new clothing.”
“Were any of the others wearing new clothes?” I asked, but that question had not been addressed on the police reports.
“We may have to wait until we give what we have to Lestrade,” Holmes said, “before we can answer that.”
“In any case,” I decided, “we may not be certain what he wants with the child, but I should say his goal with Damian is twofold: revenge over Yolanda, and doing what Testimony calls ‘loosing’ Damian's power.”
“‘He has the Tool,’” Mycroft recited, “‘to cut through empty pretence and loose the contents of a vessel.’”
“He would consider the ‘contents’ of Damian's ‘vessel’ to be considerable.”
“As for the child,” Holmes said, “‘The greater the sacrifice, the greater the energies loosed.’”
“‘The world lies primed,’” I said quietly, “‘for a transformative spark.’”
The morning that had begun in a storm of activity dragged slowly. Holmes paced and smoked, frustrated by the difficulties of leaving this place while Lestrade's arrest warrants waited for us outside. I retreated to Mycroft's study with the list of livestock deaths that I had begun to incorporate on Friday evening, and Mycroft picked up a novel by G. K. Chesterton, to all appearances completely undistracted.
Two hours later, I heard the two men talking; a short time later, Holmes put his head through the study doorway.
“I'm going to Norway,” he said abruptly. “They may need me in Bergen.”
I did not know if they meant Damian and Estelle or Mycroft's men, but it hardly mattered. “All right.”
His look on me sharpened. “You don't agree?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Russell, this questioning of your abilities must stop. If you have something to contribute, speak up.”
“Patterns,” I said helplessly. “He has to have a pattern, and the only one I can find makes little sense.”
“Show me.”
So I showed him. And Mycroft, who had abandoned Chesterton to help Holmes assemble a kit for Scandinavia, and heard us talking.
I had been unable to shake the idea that my path over the past two weeks was littered with crumbs of evidence, like the trail left through the woods in the fairy-tale. But, just as a random scattering of crumbs can be connected into lines, so will random evidence appear to coincide.
And I was not sure enough of myself to be certain that the patterns I saw were real.
“One might think that if a sacrifice draws on and reflects the power of an eclipse, the performer would move heaven and earth to be standing in a place of greatest darkness. But I'm not sure that is of paramount importance to the author of Testimony. The book is full of minor inconsistencies; symbolic truth is far more important to him than mere fact.”
Most men, launched on a desperate search for a son or nephew, would be impatient with this excursion into academic theory; these two men were not.
“So, two small pieces of evidence bother me. First, one of the books on Brothers' desk was a guide to Great Britain. He'd made marks on the entries for London and Manchester, and had dog-eared, then smoothed out, several other pages, including the one describing the Wilmington Giant. There were two slips of paper in the guide-book. One marked the beginning of the London section, the other was for the Scottish Isles.
“Second. In Millicent Dunworthy's desk was a folder pertaining to the Children of Lights. A ledger recorded costs-hiring the hall, building cabinets, candles, tea-but there were also other notes. One concerned the cost of placing an advertisement in various newspapers; there were several estate agent listings for halls for hire, larger than the room they're using now. And there was a page in Miss Dunworthy's handwriting with times and prices. The sort of thing you'd jot down without needing to write the details, because you knew what they referred to.
“I did not write those down, but to the best of my recollection, those times and prices match your concierge's Bradshaw's for trains from London to Scotland.”
I reached for the small map I'd been studying, then rejected it in favour of a proper one from Mycroft's map drawer. Elbowing aside the accumulated notes and books, I laid the map on the blotter, then found a yard-stick in the corner and a rusty protractor probably not used since Mycroft was a school-boy.
“Now, this part I'm not sure about, since I was working on a smaller scale, but let's see how it transfers to this one.” I made a small X halfway up the left side of Britain. “Four sites in England, beginning with May Day, or Beltane, when a ram was slaughtered in a stone circle in Cumbria. The second, on the seventeenth of June-a full moon-was Fiona Cartwright, at the carving of a male figure in the hillside in Dorset.” I put a second x on the map, over Cerne Abbas, then a third in the upper right, the emptiness of the Yorkshire Downs. “On the twelfth of August, the night of the Perseids meteor shower, Albert Seaforth was killed at a stone circle in Yorkshire. And three days later, on the second night of the full moon, Yolanda Adler died at another male hill carving, in Sussex.” I put an x for Yolanda at the map's lower right.
“The male victims-the ram and Albert Seaforth-were found at the circles: Long Meg and her Daughters, and the High Bridestones, both female places. The two women were found at the male figures.”
Four marks on a map; two pairs of balanced masculine-feminine energies. I laid the straight-edge across the marks and connected them, making a shape that was not quite trapezoidal, since the upper corners were slightly higher on the left.
“A quadrilateral polygon,” Holmes noted, his voice unimpressed.
But I was not finished. “I asked Mycroft about events occurring around full moons. Among those he recalled were a sheep with its throat savaged in a Neolithic tomb in Orkney, on the eighteenth of May, and an odd splash of blood on the altar of the cathedral in Kirkwall, also in Orkney, on July the sixteenth: Both of those dates were full moons.”
They watched as I laid the yard-stick along the two side lines of the shape and extended them up to form a long, narrow triangle stretching the entire length of Britain, and more.
The meeting point was in the sea north of the Orkney Islands. I tapped my front teeth with the pencil, dissatisfied. “On the other map, they came together in the middle of the Orkney group. Here-”
I duplicated the lines on the smaller map, then set the point of the protractor at the triangle's tip, describing a circle that encompassed the islands. When I took my hands away, this was the shape that remained:
“However, the four points could as easily signify this,” Holmes objected, taking the pencil and yard-stick to connect the corners of the polygon, determining its centre point. We bent to look at an area north of Nottingham and Derby.
“Ripley?” I said. “Sutton? There's nothing Neolithic there, that I can see.”
“There's nothing Neolithic at the meeting place of the triangle, either, unless it's under the North Sea.”
“You're right.” I took off my spectacles and rubbed my tired eyes. “I told you it made little sense. Although it did look better on the smaller map.”
“It is but a matter of three or four degrees,” Mycroft said in a soothing voice, and stood up. “In any case, perhaps I had better widen the recipients of the watch order to include domestic steamers.”
“And trains,” I said.
Holmes said nothing, just studied the map as if hoping for the appearance of glowing runes in the vicinity of Nottingham. Then his gaze shifted north, to the spatter of islands off the end of Scotland.
I knew what he was thinking, as surely as if he were muttering his thoughts aloud. He was weighing how certain I was, how carefully I had gathered those snippets of evidence, if his eyes might not have caught something mine missed. After all, in both cases-the timetable and the dog-eared guide-book-the information was caught on the run, as it were, noted in passing while I was closely focused on something that appeared more important. Had I been actively looking for train tables at the time, then he could have counted on my memory of some scribbled notes as being rock-hard and dependable. But numbers seen and half-noted while my mind was elsewhere?