Inside the derelict building they found a camp bed, a sleeping bag, and a pathetic collection of beer cans and packets of biscuits and cake.
“It’s temporary,” Ben said, “until I find somewhere better.” On the last word he broke into a fit of coughing.
“You’ve made yourself ill, by the sound of you,” Helen said. “What are you doing here?”
“She slung me out.”
“Shirley?” Gaye said.
“Doesn’t want any more to do with me. Called me a drunken slob, a freeloader, and other things. She doesn’t care what happens to me. She’s got no mercy. I can die for all she cares.”
Gaye found this hard to believe of Shirley. “But why? Why is she so angry?”
“You don’t want to know.” He produced a series of deep, gut-wrenching coughs.
“So it was you who stole the hives?”
“Borrowed them.”
“Without permission,” Helen said. “What for? Revenge?”
“I’m getting desperate here. It’s freezing at nights. And I miss her, believe it or not. I thought she might come looking for her bees.”
“She’s not going to want you back after this.”
“You don’t get it, do you? She’ll be in a panic over the bees. I’ll say I found the guy who nicked them and scared him off. She’s going to be so grateful. I’m caring for them. This is my own bee suit I’m wearing. I was giving them a feed just now. They need a supply to get through the winter months.”
“So do you, by the look of you.”
He shivered and said nothing.
“And you really want to go back to her?”
“Wouldn’t you, living in this pigsty?”
“You were taking a risk. She could have sent the police.”
He shook his head. “That’s one thing I do know. She won’t want that lot crawling all over her farm.”
“You were banking on her finding you here?”
“There was a good chance. People talk. I thought she’d have come before this.”
What a spineless man, Gaye thought. “It hasn’t worked, has it? Face it, Ben, she doesn’t want you back, and if you stay here much longer you’ll die of hypothermia if pneumonia doesn’t get you first. Let me see if I can get you into a better situation. We belong to a club that supports a hostel for the homeless. That would be a start.”
“Would you?” he said, his eyes glossing over with self-pity.
“I’ll make a phone call now. And don’t worry. We’ll get those hives back to where they belong. We know someone experienced who’ll take it on. We won’t tell Shirley who took them. We can say it appears the rustler left them here in the expectation they’d be found and returned to their owner — which is broadly true.”
After Ben had been admitted to the hostel and served with his first cooked meal for weeks, Gaye phoned Ian Davis and asked for his help in returning the hives to Shirley Littledale. He said he’d get Vic, the schoolteacher, to help.
“We’d like to come too,” Gaye told him. “While you and Vic replace the hives we can smooth things over with Shirley. It’s unfair to ask you to deal with her.”
He chuckled. “Yes, being economical with the truth isn’t my forte. I wouldn’t want to be caught out by the queen bee.”
“Funny you should call her that,” Gaye said. “My friend Helen used the same words.”
“She does act that way.”
“And Helen said poor old Ben is just her drone.”
“Ha,” he said. “I see where this is going. Pushed out in the cold to die when he’s no use to her majesty. There’s no room for sentiment in a hive.”
Shirley was overjoyed to see her hives on the truck. “I can’t tell you what a weight off my mind this is, you lovely people. Come in and have a drink.”
“I think the men would rather get on with the unloading,” Gaye said. “Where exactly do you want the hives?”
“Where they were before is the perfect place,” Shirley said, “but I’ll have to move those sacks of fertiliser to make room. I dumped them there because I couldn’t bear to look out of my kitchen window at the empty space.”
“The men will lift them if we ask,” Helen said.
“Would they? How kind.”
In the kitchen, coffee and biscuits were soon on the table.
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you ladies,” Shirley said.
“We sell your honey, so it was in our interest to locate the hives, even if we didn’t entirely solve the mystery,” Gaye said.
“The men probably know who did it, but they aren’t saying,” Helen added without making eye contact with Gaye.
“And I won’t ask,” Shirley said. “I’m with you on this. But I think we should take a couple of mugs of coffee out to them, don’t you?”
Gaye offered to take out the tray. In the yard, Ian Davis and his colleague had already dragged the sacks aside and were getting into their bee suits.
“Before you start on the hives, have some coffee,” she told them. “Shirley couldn’t be more delighted. Where shall I leave the tray?”
“On top of the sacks will do.”
She carried it across to where they had made a neat stack of the plastic sacks. They formed a good flat surface, but there was some mud on the top sack where it had been facedown on the ground. And there was something else.
She dropped the tray.
“What happened out there?” Helen asked after the job was done and they were back in the car and about to drive off. “Was it a bee that frightened you?”
“What makes you say that?”
“The tray. The smashed mugs. I know Shirley didn’t make a big deal of it, but you looked like death when you came in and told us.”
“The other day, after we visited the beekeepers’ club, you said something about Shirley that shocked me. You said she may have murdered Ben.”
“Did I? Well, I get things wrong sometimes.”
“You said she was strong enough to have beaten the living daylights out of him. And being on a farm she could have disposed of his body several ways.”
Helen laughed. “It didn’t happen, darling. We both know that.”
“But you were serious at the time.”
“Forget it.”
“She’s the queen bee.”
“Unkind of me. I’ve seen another side of her now.”
“And Ben is just a drone. Drones get evicted from the hive and die of the cold.”
“He’s all right. He’s being looked after now.”
“But you also told me the queen kills off her rivals. It’s serial murder, you said.”
“My big mouth. I’m like that.”
“If you think about it, the ground below an apiary is the ideal place to bury bodies. No one except the beekeeper goes near. Shirley was in a terrible state when her hives were taken, but she refused to call the police. She covered up the ground with those sacks.”
“Gaye, my pet, your imagination is getting the better of you.”
“Is it?” Gaye reached for her bag and took out her credit-card case. Secured in the window pocket was the damning piece of evidence that had acted like an electric shock. “This is why I dropped the tray. It was sticking to one of the sacks they’d moved.”
“What is it? A thread? Show me.”
Gaye lifted it up and held it to the light.
A long, fine human hair, tinted blue.
End of the Affair
by Bill Pronzini
Bill Pronzini and his wife writer Marcia Muller (who also appears in this issue) are one of only two couples (after Ross Macdonald and Margaret Millar) who have both achieved Grand Master status from the Mystery Writers of America. Pronzini’s most famous creation, the Nameless Detective, first appeared in a 1971 novel and has since featured in more than forty more books. One of the most versatile writers in the field, the California author is also a prolific short-story writer. He has won multiple Shamus awards and a best-novel Edgar.