The Language of Bees

3

I MET DAMIAN ADLER ON THE SAME DAY HIS FATHER did, in August 1919. Damian was twenty-four then, I was nineteen, and Holmes at fifty-eight had only discovered a few days before that he was a father. It was not a happy meeting. At the time, none of us were happy people. None of us were whole people.

Apart from it bringing peace to the world at last, 1919 was not a year one would like to repeat. Its opening had found us in ignominious flight from an unknown and diabolically cunning enemy-we told ourselves we were merely regrouping, but we knew it was a rout. Mycroft, who held some unnamed and powerful position in the shadier recesses of His Majesty's Government, had offered us a choice of retreats in which to catch our breath. For reasons I did not understand, Holmes gave the choice over to me. I chose Palestine. Within the month, he was taken prisoner and tortured to the very edge of breaking. On our return to England, Holmes' body was whole, but his spirit, and our bond, had been badly trampled.

When I looked at him that spring, all I could see was that my choice had put that haunted look into his eyes.

Then at the end of May, we finally met our enemy, and prevailed, but at the cost of a bullet through my shoulder and the blood of a woman I had loved on my hands.

When Holmes looked at me that summer, all he could see was that his past had put that drawn look of pain and sleepless nights on my face.

Thus, that August of 1919 found the two of us wounded, burdened by guilt, short-tempered, and-despite living under the same roof while my arm recovered-scarcely able to meet each other's eyes or bear the other's company. Certainly, we both knew that the intricate relationship we had constructed before our January flight from England lay in pieces at our feet; neither of us seemed to know how to build another.

Into this tense and volatile situation fell the revelation that Holmes had a son.

Mycroft had known, of course. Holmes might keep his finger on the pulse of every crime in London, but his brother's touch went far beyond England 's shores. Mycroft had known for years, but he had let slip not a hint, until the day the young man was arrested for murder.

Two unrelated letters reached us towards the end of July 1919. The first was for Holmes; I did not see it arrive. The second followed a few days later, addressed to me, written by a child we had rescued the previous year. The simple affection and praise in her laboriously shaped words reduced me, at long last, to the catharsis of tears.

A door that had been tight shut opened, just a crack; Holmes did not hesitate.

“I need to go to France and Italy for six weeks,” he told me. Then, before I could slam the door shut again, he added, “Would you care to come with me?”

Air seemed to reach my lungs for the first time in weeks. I looked at him, and saw that, in spite of everything, in Holmes' mind our partnership remained.

Later that evening, sitting on the terrace while the darkness fell, I had asked him when we were to leave.

“First thing in the morning,” he replied.

“What?” I stood up, as if to go pack instantaneously, then winced and sat down again, rubbing my shoulder beneath its sling. “Why the rush?”

“Mycroft always needs things done yesterday,” he said. Far too casually.

“This is another job for Mycroft?”

“More or less.”

By this time, my antennae were quivering. An off-hand attitude invariably meant that Holmes was concealing something of which I would disapprove. However, as I watched him reach for the coffee pot to refill a near-full cup, it seemed to me his discomfort had a deeper source than a need to manipulate me into cooperation. He looked genuinely troubled.

A year before, I would have pressed and chivvied him until he gave it up, but after the events of recent months, I was not so eager to beat my mentor-turned-partner into submission. He would tell me in his good time.

“I'll write Patrick a note, to let him know I'm away,” I said. Holmes hid his surprise well, simply nodding, but I could feel his eyes on me as I went into the house.

The next day, the train had been crowded with summer merrymakers; the boat across the Channel was so heavy-laden it wallowed; the train to Paris contained approximately half the population of Belgium -none of whom were stopping in Paris. No-one in his right mind stopped in Paris in August.

With this constant presence of witnesses, it wasn't until we stood in the hallway of our Paris hotel that Holmes slid his hand into his inner pocket and took out the envelope that had been teasing his fingers all day.

“Read this,” he said abruptly, thrusting it at me. “I shall be in my room.” He crossed the corridor and shut his door. I waited for the boy to deposit my cases and receive my coin, then closed my own.

I laid the letter on the desk, eyeing it as I unpinned my hat and stripped off my gloves. Mycroft's handwriting, the unadorned copperplate he used for solemn business. No postal franking, which meant that it had been delivered by messenger. The envelope had seen a lot of handling. I had an odd image of Holmes, taking it out of his pocket and reading it again and again.

I sat down on the hard little chair before the decorative, unusable French desk, and unfolded the letter. It bore a date six days before-the day, I suddenly realised, that he had disappeared for many hours, to return even more preoccupied than usual.

Dear Brother,

In the autumn of 1894, half a year after you made your dramatic return to the London scene, I received a visit from a French gentleman whom I had met, briefly, some years before. His purpose was to urge me to travel to a village named Ste Chapelle, thirty miles south of Paris. As you well know, I do not travel, and told the man as much. He, however, put before me certain information that convinced me such a trip was necessary.

At the other end of the journey was an American lady of your acquaintance, whose name I shall not put into writing, but with whom, as you had already informed me, you had a liaison. You were led to believe that she tired of your presence after some months, that she resolved to return alone to her native country.

In fact, she did not return to the United States. Although she had become a British citizen after she married Godfrey Norton, after your departure, she moved to the village near Paris. There she bore a child.

It was to Ste Chapelle that I went, there to meet her and the infant. A boy. She named him Damian, appending her own maiden surname. He appeared in lusty good health. Certainly, he sounded so.

The lady wished me to know of the child, on the chance that something happened to her. She also swore me to a promise that you were not to be told while she was alive, and thereafter not until such time as I deemed it necessary. Her concern was that you not be, to use her word, distracted.

The price of my agreement was that she accept a monthly stipend, that the boy might be raised without financial hardship. Reluctantly, she accepted.

I came near to telling you in 1912, when she died, but at the time you were involved in the Mattison case, and that was followed by the Singh affair, and by the time that was over, you were in America preparing a case against Von Bork and his spy ring. There seemed no time when you were immune from distraction.

I did keep a close eye on the young man following his mother's death. He was then eighteen, attending university in Paris. In 1914 he joined the French forces-he being more French than American-and served honourably, starting as a junior officer and ending up, in the autumn of 1917, a captain.

He was wounded in January 1918, blown up in a barrage. He received a head wound and a cracked pelvis, spent a week unconscious, and was eventually invalided out.

Unfortunately, he did not manage to get free of the drugs used to control the pain. Unfortunately, he fell into hard ways, and among evil people. And now, the reason I am forced to write to you in this manner: He has been arrested for murder.

Stark details, and with your current responsibilities, no way to soften this series of blows. I have begun enquiries into the case against him, but as yet do not know the details-as we both know, the evidence may be so grossly inadequate, all he requires is legal support; on the other hand, it may prove so strong that neither of us can help him. I have arranged for one of the better criminal avocats to assume his case, but in any event, it is no longer my place to stand between you.

I hope you will forgive me, and her, for keeping Damian from you. By all accounts he was a promising young man before the War, and before the scourge of drugs befell him. I should mention that, to go by his photograph, there is little reason to deny that he is yours.

Tell me what I can do to assist you. He is being held in the gaol in Ste Chapelle, the town where he was born, thirty miles to the east of Paris.

If you speak to him, please convey an uncle's best wishes.

Mycroft

P.S. I forgot to say: Damian is an artist, a painter. Art in the blood…

4

DISTRACTED. THAT WAS A HELL OF A WORD.

And why had Holmes waited nearly a week before setting off for France? I turned back to where Mycroft had written “with your current responsibilities.” Did this mean me? Was it I that had kept Holmes from flying to the aid of his son?

It took me some time to work up the nerve to cross the hallway. When I did, I found my friend and teacher at the open window, smoking and staring down at the darkening streets. Not a breath stirred. I sat on the hard little chair before his useless, ornate desk, and arranged the letter in the centre of its gilt surface.

“Well,” I said. “That must have made you feel… ”

“Guilt-ridden?” His voice was high, and bitter.

Guilt, yes. But, to be honest, gratitude as well, that she had not forced him to re-shape his life, his career, around a child. And gratitude would have brought shame, and resentment, and righteous indignation, and anger. Then in the days since the news had reached him, no doubt curiosity and sadness, and a mourning of lost opportunities.

“It must have made you feel as if you'd been kicked in the stomach.”

He did not respond. The traffic sounds that had beat at the window when we first arrived were fading, replaced by the voices of pedestrians on their way to theatre or restaurant. It was quiet enough that I heard the faint shift of ice in the silver bucket that had accompanied our arrival.

At the suggestion, I rose and went to fill a glass with ice, covering it with a generous dose of some amber alcohol from the decanter beside it. I carried it over to Holmes, who just looked at it.

“Russell, I've known about this for the better part of a week. The time for a good stiff drink is well past.”

“But I didn't know until now, and I think you can use this better than I.”

He did not argue with my roundabout logic, simply took my offering. I went back to the chair.

“This is Irene Adler's son that Mycroft is talking about?” I asked: facts first.

The ice rattled as he raised the glass against his teeth. I took the gesture as confirmation.

“It… happened during the three years you were away from London?” When all the world except his brother thought Holmes dead, although in fact he had travelled-to Mecca, to Lhasa, and to the south of France.

“After Reichenbach Falls,” he agreed. “When I came down out of Tibet and was sailing for Europe, news reached me that Miss Adler-Mrs Norton-that Irene had been in a terrible accident, which took the life of her husband and caused her to retire from the stage. As I happened to be passing near Montpellier, I thought it… acceptable to call on her. I suppose I entertained the notion that, if grief had driven her to abandon her career, perhaps adding myself to the chorus of protest might make her reconsider. She had an extraordinary voice,” he added. “It was a pity to lose it.”

“But it wasn't grief?”

“No. She had sustained injuries, subtle, but definitive. When I found her, she was living on the fine edge of poverty, eking out a living as a voice coach. I was in no hurry to return to London, so I paused there for a time, helping her become more firmly established. I lent her sufficient funds to purchase a piano and a small studio, and amused myself doing odd jobs in the city, everything from research into some aspects of coal-tar to peeling carrots for a restaurant. During those months we became… friends.”

I hastened to interrupt. “And it would seem that the news of the mysterious death of Ronald Adair in London reached you at about the time she…” Threw you out? Tired of you? In any case, discovered herself with child.

“-told me she planned to return home to America,” he provided. “Alone. And as soon as I was back in London, the life of the metropolis closed over my head. Nine years passed. It seemed but the snap of a finger. Then I retired, and nine years turned into a chasm. Had she wished to communicate with me, she knew where I was. She had not. Thus, it seemed, the matter had been decided. One of the more foolish decisions of my life.”

He stared into his glass, but he must have been thinking of the nine-year-olds he had known, if nothing else among the street urchins he'd dubbed his Irregulars. Had he ventured an overture, he might have met the boy then, on the edge of adolescence. Had he sought her out-and he would certainly have found her-he might have had another life. A life that did not include bees or a hermit's retreat on the Sussex Downs. Or an encounter with an orphan named Russell.

“She was-going by Watson's story-a highly gifted woman,” I ventured.

“In both talent and brains. I was twenty-seven years old when the hereditary king of what Watson chose to call Bohemia came to me, demanding that I retrieve an incriminating photograph possessed by this vain and scheming prima donna from New Jersey. I saw myself a god among men. An easy case, I thought, a satisfying payment in both gold and glory: A dab of paint, a change of costume, a dash of human nature, toss in a smidgen of distraction and a childish smoke-bomb, and voilà-I would take back this adventuress's tool of blackmail.

“Except that she was not out for blackmail, merely self-preservation from her royal paramour. What is more, she was one step ahead of me all the way-including on my very doorstep, utilising my own tools of disguise. ‘Good evening, Mr. Holmes,’ she said to me.” He dropped his voice for her imitation of a man's speech, bringing an eerie trace of the woman into the room. “And even with the scent of her under my very nose, even as I put up my feet and crowed to Watson how clever I was, she was laying her own plans, carrying out her own solution.” He turned from the window, searching me out in the dim room. “You know she used me as a witness in her marriage ceremony to Godfrey Norton?”

“I remember.”

He laughed, a sound that contained amusement and rue in equal parts, and I saw his outline stir, heard the rustle of his clothing. Something small and shiny flew in my direction, and I snatched it from the air: a well-worn sovereign coin with a hole in it.

“She paid me for my witnessing with that,” he said. “I assumed at the time that she had failed to recognise me, but later found that she well knew who I was, and was amused, despite the urgency of her distress. I carry it always, to remind me of my limitations. Here-I even had her autograph it for me.”

He crossed the room and switched on the desk lamp. I held the coin under its beam, and there on the back side of it I saw the scratched initials IAN. Irene Adler Norton.

I rubbed at the smoothness of the coin, oddly pleased that it served as a reminder of professional inadequacies and not of a person. I handed it back to him. He turned it nimbly over in his fingers, then clipped it back onto his watch-chain and tucked it away.

“Let us go and eat,” he said, sounding relieved that the worst of the self-revelation was over.

“Can we find a place out of doors?” I requested.

“ Paris is not at her best in the summer,” he agreed.

When I had freshened and changed my dress, we left the hotel and walked down the street until we found a likely bistro, one that spread its tables onto the pavement.

But after facts, and before relaxation, I required instruction. “Since the letter came,” I asked, “have you found any more about the charges against…?” I found it difficult to shape the phrase your son.

“Damian. As you read, Mycroft has arranged the assistance of one of France 's more capable defence attorneys. I have an appointment with him in the morning, and we shall then go to Ste Chapelle and meet the lad.”

Did we include, or exclude, me? If the latter, would he not have said he and I?

“But, Holmes, why didn't you set off immediately you received the letter?”

“I did, in fact, telephone to Mycroft to say that I would leave instantly, but he talked me out of it. He thought I might be more effective if I waited until we had some data with which to work, but beyond this, he pointed out that, if the boy was coming out from under the influence of drugs while in gaol, he would not thank me for seeing him for the first time in that condition. And although I am not accustomed to permitting the personal to influence my investigations, in the end, I had to agree that it might be better to wait until the boy had his wits about him.”

Somewhat mollified, although not altogether convinced, I picked up my knife and began thoughtfully to cover a piece of bread with near-liquid butter.

“Does he know?” I asked. “The boy?”

“Hardly a boy,” he pointed out. “He knows now.”

“How long …?”

“I have no idea when or even if his mother told him about me. Mycroft was forced to explain the situation to the avocat. He in turn told Damian, but apparently Damian showed no surprise at my name. Which could also be due to his mental state. Or, I suppose he may have never heard of Sherlock Holmes.”

“If a tribe of desert nomads in Palestine knows the stories,” I said-which had been the case during our winter sojourn there-“the chances are good a young man in France has come across them.”

“I fear you are right.”

“So, has any progress been made in the intervening days?”

“It looks,” he said, with a mingled air of apprehension and satisfaction, “as though the evidence against him rests largely on a single eyewitness.”

I understood his ambiguity. The testimony of a witness, a person there to stretch out a finger in court and declare the defendant's guilt aloud, was a powerful tool for the prosecution. On the other hand, placing the entire weight of a murder trial on one human being could easily blow up in the prosecutor's face. All the defence had to do was find some flaw in the accuser himself-criminal history, financial interest, flawed eye-sight-and the case began to crack.

If the legal person Mycroft had found to represent Damian Adler was indeed capable, I suspected that the man would be more than experienced with the techniques of destroying testimony.

Relief, a trace of optimism, and a faint stir of air cheered our dinner, and we spoke no more that night about either Adler, fils or mère.

But as I laboriously, one-handedly, dressed for bed in my stifling room, that word responsibilities came back to nag me, and the real question finally percolated to the surface of my mind: Why tell me about Damian? Why hadn't Holmes simply announced that he would be away for a time? Or not even bothered with an announcement-just disappeared, with nothing but a brief note or a message left with Mrs Hudson? God knew, he'd never hesitated to do that before.

Although the thought of waking one morning to find him simply gone would not have been an easy one. Since the shooting, I had come to lean very heavily on his presence. While resenting it at the same time.

I cradled my arm, looking away from my reflection in the glass. Had his response when I asked about his delay been a glibly prepared speech, designed to conceal his worry? Did he believe that I was so fragile that I might not withstand abandonment? Had my admittedly precarious mental state left him with no choice but to bring me along?

Certainly, Mycroft's reference to “your current responsibilities” suggested that both Holmes brothers saw my need for comfort as equal to a prisoner's need for aid.

Which led to the conclusion that Holmes felt there was nothing for it but to reveal to me one of the most private and distressing episodes of his life. To lay out his most personal history, while it was still raw and unformed, to my eyes. To allow my presence to rub salt into the wounds of what he had to consider one of his most abject failures.

I should go home, immediately. I should pack and call a taxi, leaving a brief note to preserve my own self-respect, and to provide a bulwark for the shreds of Holmes' dignity.

And yet…

I could not shake the notion that there had been a degree of relief underlying his chagrin. Almost as if the humiliation was a thing to be borne for a greater cause, to be got through quickly. But for what?

I found myself considering the previous summer, the beginnings of the case involving the child whose letter had recently reduced me to tears. My arrival at Holmes' house that day had been unexpected: I found him in disguise and about to depart, intending to slip off before I could become enmeshed. But why had he not simply taken an earlier train? That case-so nearly missed entirely-became a cornerstone of our subsequent partnership, firm foundation for a tumultuous year.

Had Holmes, deliberately or unconsciously, lingered that afternoon so that I might find him?

Was his present uncharacteristic solicitude for my tender state a means of ensuring my presence here?

I did not feel all that precariously fragile. Granted, I was not at my best, but surely he could see that I was finding my feet again? That I was not about to fall to pieces if left alone?

I raised my gaze to the looking-glass before me. I was nineteen years old. During recent months, I had proven myself strong, adult, and capable, not only to myself, but to Holmes-my teacher, my mentor, my entire family since I stumbled across him on the Downs, four and a half years before.

During the winter, the balance of our relationship had begun to shift, from apprentice and master to something very close to partnership. Several times I had even wondered if some deeper link was not in the process of being forged between us.

Holmes was a master of avoiding undesirable situations. If he had seen my recovery, and chose to discount it, then it followed that he wanted me here. That this steely, invulnerable man, once mentor, now partner, still friend, had his own reasons for laying his vulnerability at my feet, as a man kneels to expose the nape of his neck to his sword-wielding sovereign.

Another memory came back to me then, bringing a wash of foreign air through the sultry room. It came from Palestine, in February, shortly after the Hazr brothers and I had ripped Holmes from the hands of his Turkish tormentor. As we parted ways, the elder Hazr, Mahmoud-silent, deadly, and himself bearing scars of torture-had been moved to make a rare incursion into personal speech: Do not try to protect your Holmes, these next days. It will not help him to heal.

I nodded, and finished my preparations for bed. As I lay down on the lavender-scented sheets, I reflected that Holmes and I seemed to have a habit of forcing unpalatable decisions on one another.

5

THE DAY WAS ALREADY HOT WHEN WE SET OFF for the avocat's office the next morning, the city air close and unhealthy against us. The sling chafed at my neck; my light dress was soon damp, as was my hair beneath the summer hat. Things were no better inside the legal gentleman's office, where the stifling air was compounded by the man's unbounded energy. He put us in chairs and then strode up and down the carpet, gesticulating and thinking aloud in fluent if accented English until the heat he seemed to generate made me light-headed.

Fortunately, we had not much time before the train left. His secretary came in with his hat in her hand, and bundled us off into a taxicab to the station. Monsieur Cantelet talked the whole time, Holmes listening intently, ready to seize the scraps of information being tossed on the freshet of words.

Holmes had been following the case, albeit at a distance, for a week already, and his occasional phrase of explanation helped me piece together the central facts: Damian Adler had been arrested for the murder of a drugs seller; the man sold mostly morphine and hashish, and Damian was known to be one of his customers; the two men had an argument in a bar that ended in a fistfight, although there was some disagreement as to whether the fight had been over the man's wares or a girl. In any event, two days later, the man was found in an alleyway, unconscious and bleeding from a head wound. He died in hospital; the police asked questions; the answers led them to Damian.

The evidence against him included the presence of morphine and hashish in his room, signs of a fight on his face and hands, and the clear accusation of a witness.

M Cantelet ran through all this with a light-hearted enthusiasm, which seemed odd, if not inappropriate, until he began to tell us about the witness. “The gentleman's veracity has been questioned,” the lawyer said happily in his musical accent. Said witness, it seemed-one Jules Filot-was known to his more jocular intimates as an habitual snitch and manufacturer of evidence on demand, which explained his nickname: “Monsieur Faux.”

M Cantelet did not think that it would take a great effort to smash the case against Damian Adler. His private detective had spent the days since Mycroft's request for assistance had been received insinuating himself into the life of M Filot, and would make himself available to us at mid-day. In the mean-time, we were to be permitted an interview with the prisoner, at the gaol.

“By great good fortune, M Adler had the sense not to admit to the crime.”

“He says he's innocent?” Holmes asked.

“The young man neither admits nor denies, merely says he does not remember. Ideal, for my purposes.”

Ideal it might be, but less than wholly reassuring for us.

Ste Chapelle was a tiny village, which I had already determined that morning by the fact that it did not appear on any of the hotel's maps. The town gaol was down the street from the station and across from a tiny café. It was, in fact, the local gendarme's front room, little more than a small bedroom with bars across the windows and a square of glass set into its stout wooden door. The gendarme made note of our names in a record-book, unbolted the door, handed us a couple of stools, and left us alone.

I did not want to be there, but I did not know how to absent myself. I took a deep breath, and followed M Cantelet inside.

The young man, who stood with his shoulder touching the window-bars, looked startlingly like Holmes in a masterful disguise: thin to emaciation and pale as the walls, but with the same beak nose, the same long fingers, the same sense of wiry strength.

There, the similarity ended: Holmes' uncanny gift for tidiness was replaced by perspiration stains and the stench of old sweat; where Holmes was controlled even when excited, this younger version was vibrating with tension. His eyes darted about the room, his fingers plucked incessantly at shirt buttons and fraying cuffs. He was either nervy to the edge of a break-down, or still emerging from prolonged drug use.

The avocat, shifting to an equally energetic French, marched across the cell with his hand outstretched. The young man put out his hand, but his blank stare suggested a lack of comprehension. Surely he was fluent in French?

After a time his grey eyes wandered away from the voluble avocat to rest on me. It was a shock, because these were Holmes' eyes-same shape, same colour, same height above mine-but dull, with pain or confusion or even-hard to imagine-a lack of intelligence. I found myself searching for a glimpse of mind beneath the flat gaze, but there was no flash of wit, merely the weary perseverance of an animal in distress.

Then the hooded grey eyes came to Holmes. The head tilted in concentration, a gesture eerily like his father, and sense came into them. Curiosity, yes, but also animosity. I stepped aside, and suddenly he flushed. With colour came an unexpected beauty, the darkness of his lashes and the delicacy of his features making him for the first time utterly unlike Holmes.

The avocat filled the silence nicely. “Capitaine Adler, it is not often that a man is given the opportunity to say this, but may I present your father? Monsieur Holmes, your son, Capitaine Damian Adler.”

Neither man moved. The avocat cleared his throat. “Yes, well, I shall leave you two alone for a few minutes, while I speak with the gendarme about the case.”

I made haste to follow him out of the cell.

M Cantelet and I sat outside for a long time, waiting in the shade of a linden tree as village life went on before us. When Holmes emerged, he said nothing of what had transpired in that cell.

He never did.

We removed to a tiny hotel near the train station, where we were joined by M Cantelet's private investigator, M Clémence. The investigator was, it seemed, dressed for his undercover rôle, with flashy clothes, pencil-thin moustache, and oil-slicked hair parted in the centre, but he gave his evidence succinctly and showed no signs of the too-common shortcomings of the breed, which are an inflated self-confidence and an impatience with humdrum detail. I could feel Holmes relax a notch.

The man told us what he had done, gave a brief outline of where he intended to go from there, answered Holmes' questions, and listened calmly to Holmes' suggestions. At no point did he demonstrate scorn for the amateur, merely a workman-like and not unimaginative approach to figuring things out.

Holmes found little to object to, when the man had left us.

Which did not mean he intended to take his hand off the investigation. He might have put off his involvement in the case until now, but he had no intention of delaying it further. The avocat caught the post-luncheon train back to Paris, but we remained in Ste Chapelle to prepare our campaign: Holmes proposed to infiltrate the group in which the witness Filot-“Monsieur Faux”-moved, while I addressed myself to the more mundane aspects of property, relationship, and inheritance: the local records office, where my bad arm would not be a liability. We made a start that afternoon, going our separate ways until nightfall.

But in the end, our preparations came to naught. The next morning early there came a message from M Cantelet to say he was coming down, and requested us to meet his train. Holmes grumbled at the delay, but we were there when the train pulled in.

I had thought the avocat effervescent the day before, but it was nothing to the bounce in his step and the rush of his words today.

His private investigator had broken the case. In conversation with M Faux's lady friend late the night before, it had transpired that the man had in fact been elsewhere on the night in question. Filot could not have seen Damian Adler commit murder, because he was twenty miles away, roaring drunk, and did not arrive back in Ste Chapelle until the following afternoon.

This, of course, did not prove that Damian had not killed the drugs seller, but it did reduce the prosecutor's foundations to sand. M Cantelet anticipated a successful argument, and I think was mildly disappointed when we arrived at the gaol and found Damian Adler already free. He stood outside of the gaol with the scowling gendarme and a stumpy, round-cheeked woman of about forty, who was wearing a dress and hat far too à la mode for a village like this.

Damian's eyes would not meet ours. They wove their way along the doorway, up the vine shrouding the front of the house, along the street outside, while his fingers picked restlessly at his clothing. In the bright light, the bald tracing of scars could be seen beneath his short-cropped hair, and it suddenly came to me that this was not merely a drug-addled derelict, nor some nightmare version of Holmes, but a soldier who had given his health and his spirit in the service of France. He was lost, as so many of his-my-generation were. It was our responsibility to help him find himself again.

The woman watched us approach, and as M Cantelet launched into speech with the gendarme, she touched Damian's arm and spoke briefly in his ear before stepping forward to intercept Holmes.

“Pardon me,” she said in accented English, raising her voice against that of the avocat. “You are, I think, Damian's father?”

“The name is Holmes,” my companion replied. “This is my… assistant, Mary Russell.”

“I am Hélène Longchamps,” she said. “An old friend of Damian's. I own a gallery in Paris. Come, you will buy me a coffee and we will talk. Damian, you sit here, we will have the boy bring you a croissant.”

Mme Longchamps, it transpired, had known Damian Adler since before the War. She had sold a score of his paintings, for increasing amounts of money, and what was more, she had cared for him: bullied him into painting, fed him when he was hungry, gave him a bed and a studio in her country house. And threw him out whenever he showed signs of drug use.

“You understand,” she told Holmes, “he changed after the War. Oh, we all changed, of course, but I am told that a head injury such as his often has profound effects on a person's mind. From what I could see, more than the injury, it was the drugs. They take hold of a man's mind as well as his body-certainly they did so with Damian. And now it takes only a moment's weakness, a brief coup de tête or a dose of un-happiness or ennui or simply a party with the wrong people, and it swallows him anew. And when that happens I become hard. I refuse him help. I say, ‘You must go to your friends, if that is how you wish to live,’ and I withhold any monies from his sales, and I wait. We have done this three times in the thirteen months since he came out of hospital and became a civilian. And three times he has returned to my door, laboriously cleaned himself of drugs, and begun to paint again.”

“Why do you do this?” I had to agree with the suspicion in Holmes' voice: A well-dressed, older woman with a talented and beautiful young addict was not a comfortable picture.

But she laughed. “I am not after a pretty bed-warmer, sir. I knew his mother, before she died, and I knew Damian from when he was five or six years. I am the closest he has to an elder sister.”

“I see. Well, madame, I thank you warmly for assisting the boy. I should like-”

She cut him off. “If you want to help the boy, you will leave him here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“M 'Olmes, I imagine you will propose to take Damian back to l'Angleterre, n'est çe pas?”

“I should think it would not be altogether a bad idea to remove him from the source of his temptations,” Holmes said stiffly.

“But yes, it would be a bad idea, the worst of ideas. The boy must find his own way. I know him. You do not. You must believe me when I tell you that attempting to shape a future for him will guarantee failure. You will kill him.”

She leant forward over the tiny table, quivering with the intensity of her belief. The effect was that of a small tabby facing down a greyhound, and it might have been laughable but for those last four words.

Holmes studied her. Even the avocat across the way fell silent, turning to see what both the gendarme and Damian were watching so intently.

Mme Longchamps sat, as implacable as any mother.

Holmes looked over at his son, and then he nodded. Mme Longchamps closed her eyes for a moment, then looked at me and gave me an almost shy smile in which relief was foremost.

Holmes walked back across the road to where his son sat. “Mme Longchamps suggests that I return to England and let you get on with it. Is this what you wish?”

Damian did not actually answer, not in words, but the look he gave the woman-grateful, apologetic, and determined-was a speech in itself. Holmes reached into his breast pocket and sorted out a card.

“When you feel like getting into contact, that is where to reach me,” he said. “If I happen to be away, the address on the reverse is that of your uncle. He will always know where I am.”

Damian put the card into his coat pocket without looking at it; something about the gesture said that he might as easily have dropped it on the ground. Holmes put out his hand, and said, with an attempt at warmth, “I am… gratified to have made your acquaintance. The revelations of this past week have been among the most extraordinary in an already full life. I look forward to renewing our conversation.”

Damian stood and walked over to Mme Longchamps. Holmes' face was expressionless as his hand slowly fell, but Mme Longchamps would not have it. She put her hands on the boy's shoulders and forced him around.

“Say au revoir to your father,” she ordered.

He looked at Holmes with an expression of hopelessness and regret, a look such as a ship-wrecked man might wear when, seeing that help would not arrive, he chose to let go of his spar. I was only nineteen and was well supplied with problems of my own, but that look on his face twisted my heart. “Adieu,” Damian said.

“I am very sorry,” Holmes told him. “That your mother never told me of your existence.”

Damian lifted his head and for the first time, the grey eyes came to life, haughty and furious as a bird of prey. “You should have known.”

“Yes,” answered Holmes. “I should have known.”

He waited. For weeks. I went back to my studies, but whenever I came down from Oxford, I saw how closely Holmes watched the post, how any knock at the door brought his head sharply around.

In the end, it was Mme Longchamps who wrote, in early December, to say that she was desolated to tell him, but Damian had gone back to his ways, and that no-one had seen him for some weeks. She assured Holmes that Damian would find her waiting when he grew fatigued of the drugs, and that she would then urge him to write to his father.

It was the only letter Holmes had, from either of them. In March, when she had not replied to two letters, he began to make enquiries as to her whereabouts.

He found her in the Père Lachaise cemetery, a victim of the terrible influenza that followed on the Great War's heels.

M Cantelet's investigator was immediately dispatched to Ste Chapelle, but Damian was gone. Cantelet and others searched all of France, but the trail was cold: No gallery, no artist, no member of the Bohemian underworld had heard news of Damian Adler since January. Even Mycroft failed to locate his nephew.

Holmes' lovely, lost son vanished as abruptly as he had appeared.

Until one summer evening in August 1924, when he stood in the middle of our stone terrace and said hello to his father.