FORTY-THREE
Those who saw the figure of Dr Watson racing through the hospital grounds turned and watched, some in admiration at his turn of speed, others in concern for the man’s heart. It was thumping in his chest, that was true, but not all of that was from his exertions.
Sister Spence, who was standing with a cup of tea outside her tent, attempted to check his progress. ‘Major Watson—’ she began, but he didn’t slow his pace.
‘Later, Sister,’ he managed to gasp. ‘I have some most urgent business.’
Watson didn’t catch her reply.
He took the steps up to the Big House two and three at a time, marvelling at his burst of energy. He might pay for it later, but he didn’t care. If he was right, this would be worth a few aches and pains.
He burst into the room, grabbed the magazine he had been sent and collapsed back on the bed, the air rasping in his throat and his heart pounding at double-time. It was a few seconds before he could pick up a pencil and begin.
My years of investigations as a consulting detective revealed nothing in the criminal annals that has been quite so baffling or exciting as trying to decipher the behaviour of the humble honeybee, specifically how information is distributed around the hive. Yet during the past three years, my colleague and companion, Thomas Patrick, and I have made considerable progress in this area.
Despite the best efforts in the last century of august apiarists such as Leon Alberti and Auguste Kerckhoffs, the mechanism by which a foraging worker bee conveys information to its fellows remains a mystery. Every year brings new theories, as regular readers of this journal can testify. After reading the works of von Frisch (Zoologische Jahrbüch, copies of which, despite the hostilities that exist between our two countries, are still imported by several learned institutions, including the Zoological Society of London), we installed glass windows into several of our hives, the better to observe events normally hidden from human eyes. Round-the-clock observations were made and records kept. Where the bee had come from – direction, type of flowers visited – was noted where possible. Any abdominal movement sketched. The direction of the ‘dance’ indicated. Several of the bees were marked with dabs of paint to help distinguish individuals. On several occasions field trips were made to try to observe where the bees from our hives were foraging. Notable
Watson couldn’t wait any longer. Along the top of the page, he wrote down the sequence of letters he had circled.
My Dear Watson
A blast of euphoria coursed through him. He looked at the phrase again.
My Dear Watson
Three words that told him there was no Thomas Patrick, no new colleague and friend.He found he was on his feet, doing a little jig, as if he had the knees of a man forty years younger.
Tommy Patrick was the villain in Chicago who had created the Dancing Men code. Alberti and Kerckhoffs weren’t apiarists – they were cryptographers. And the code used in the article was one of the simplest in the annals of ciphers, yet his blithering idiot’s eyes had not recognized it, nor the clues that the article was a device to deliver a message to Watson. It was McCrae’s mention of Chicago that had caused the synapses in his brain to finally fire properly. To appreciate that Holmes was up to his old tricks.
With shaking hands Watson set about ringing the other letters, until he had an entire missive from his old friend. He read through it, twice, and felt his eyes sting. He was tired, he supposed. Soon, his body would start protesting about his sprint through the hospital grounds and his impetuous dancing. It had been another long and eventful day and there was a lot more to do before the cloak of night allowed the war to restart in earnest. He blew his nose.
After he had finished the code, he quickly wrote out the longest, most expensive telegram he had ever composed and went in search of Miss Pippery to send it for him. Anyone observing the man who bowled down the stone steps and burst out into the gloom of late afternoon might have thought he had taken some kind of stimulant, or found an elixir that could roll back biological time by a decade or two. There was a hint of weightlessness about Watson, as if the gravity around him had been turned down a notch or two. With nary a creak of the knees he bent and scooped up Cecil, de Griffon’s Jack Russell, and, with the dog yapping under his arm, he picked up the pace, aware he had to give his body some respect now, walked briskly to the transfusion tent.