The interruption proved to be a wary soldier holding two canvas-wrapped parcels and an envelope. The envelope he handed to Mahmoud, one parcel went to Ali, and the other he put into my arms before scurrying away from the fray. While Mahmoud settled down to extract note from envelope, I glanced at my bundle, and was pleased to find canvas: It was small, and it was worn, but it was a tent. I had shared close quarters with Holmes before, but not by choice.
The brief note eventually reached me. I took it and read, in handwriting so perfect I would instantly have mistrusted its author even if I had not met him:
I have just received word that your self-styled
mullah
was shot dead in Nablus yesterday.
“Ah,” I said to Holmes. “One of those letters you removed from his safe came from a man in Nablus, did it not?”
“It is not uncommon for a blackmailer to push a victim too far,” he agreed distractedly. “Mahmoud, when you first opened the mullah’s safe, did it look at all disturbed, as if you were not the only man to rifle his papers?”
Eventually, Mahmoud gave a shrug. “It was untidy, but without knowing the man’s habits…”
“One thinks of a blackmailer as being that alone, but in truth, if a petty criminal were to perform an illegal service for another, and if that other was in a more delicate or precarious position were the crime to be brought to light, well, it would make a solid basis for a steady income.”
“That is,” I clarified, “a blackmailer may not also be a criminal-for-hire, but the criminal may easily turn his hand to blackmail.”
“A man may pretend to be a mullah in order to stir up dissent, but when his safe later reveals him to be a blackmailer, he reveals himself as a man of many parts,” Holmes elaborated.
“This is pure speculation,” Mahmoud objected disapprovingly, his English gone suddenly pure.
Holmes sighed. “True. Let us see what Mikhail’s bag has to tell us.”
We dropped to our heels to examine the possessions of Mikhail the Druse, primarily a bag of striped cloth containing the bare necessities for survival in the hills: flour, water, and dried lentils, tea and roasted coffee, part of a hard Bedouin cheese, a handful of dried figs, and half a dozen tiny muslin bags containing spices. He also had a flint and steel; a worn cooking pan and a small coffee-pot with pretty designs etched into it; tobacco in an embroidered pouch along with cigarette papers and a nearly empty box of vestas; a knife and sheath (which, judging from the bloodstains, had been removed from his person still sheathed); and a single .22-calibre bullet, overlooked no doubt by the boys who had found his body. The only two things that I thought marginally unusual possessions for a Bedouin were a small collapsible brass telescope and the stub of a pencil.
Holmes picked up the little muslin pouches one by one and sniffed at them. One seemed to puzzle him, so he picked open the bag’s draw-string to examine the contents. Poking his finger inside, he withdrew it, looked at what it held, and dabbed the fingertip against his tongue experimentally.
“Salt,” he concluded. “Rather dirty salt. And mined, I should say, rather than taken from an evaporation pond.”
“The Dead Sea has both kinds,” commented Ali absently, turning the striped pack inside-out to finger the seams and examine the straps. “If it is dirty, it is probably not government.” He threw the pack onto the floor. “Joshua was right, there is nothing here.”
Holmes had picked up the pencil stub and was eyeing it; it was two and a half inches long and sharpened with a wide blade. “No papers, diary, that sort of thing? Would your friend Joshua have mentioned if he had removed them?” he asked Mahmoud.
“Yes.”
“Mikhail was a friend of yours, I believe?”
“Mikhail was a friend.”
“What kind of man was he?”
“What does it matter? He is a dead man now.”
“A man is murdered because of what he is,” Holmes said, with what for him was remarkable patience. “If you tell me what Mikhail was, we may more easily find how his death came to him. Unless you believe it was an accident.”
Mahmoud reached out for the box of matches, slid it open as if hoping for a clue, then closed it, turning it over and over in his fingers—which, I noticed, were longer and more sensitive than I had realised. “Mikhail was a good man,” he said abruptly, eschewing maxims for the moment. “He was an honest man. and he hated the Turks. They killed his entire family some years ago, destroyed his entire village. A massacre: his mother and father, two sisters, wife, and son died overnight. He had no great love for the British, but he trusted Joshua. Mikhail was very good at what he did. There was no accident.”
It was the longest speech I’d heard Mahmoud make, in any language, and it had been delivered in an English nearly devoid of accent. Holmes did not acknowledge the occasion, merely pulled shut the strings on top of the little bag of salt and tossed it back onto the small heap of possessions. He held out his hand for the striped bag, which Ali had begun to re-load. Ali hesitated, then handed it over to him with a show of tried patience. Holmes upended it so that everything fell to the ground, turned it inside-out again, and set about examining it. In a moment his attention was caught by a small lump of something brown that had stuck itself to the seam. With a little “Ha!” of triumph he took out his penknife and began to scrape at the lump, using tiny motions to get every bit of the substance. When it was free he held it up to his nose and sniffed at it deeply.
“Do you know what it is?” I asked him.
“I ought to,” he said, and held it out for me to smell.
“Honey!”
“Beeswax,” he corrected me. “This is a short length of a candle that has been blown out, and left to go cold on a dusty piece of rock before someone scraped it off.”
“A bit of candle,” Ali said scornfully, and with heavy sarcasm added, “Even heathens use candles at times.”
Without acknowledging Ali’s remark, Holmes held the blob of wax on the end of his knife while he fished a bit of slick paper from inside his robe, and, taking great care to get all of it, scraped the wax onto the paper. He sniffed at it, wrapped it tightly, put the tiny packet inside his abayya, cleaned his knife blade on the knee of the garment, then said:
“We must go and examine the place where Mikhail died.”
“There is no point,” Ali protested. “We know where and how he was killed.”
“We know no such thing,” said Holmes placidly. Still ignoring Ali’s protests, he went to our pile of things, retrieved his wool rug, and proceeded to wrap himself in it. Sitting down on a portion of the rolled-up tent, he paused for a moment to fix Ali with a hard gaze. “I do not work well in harness with others,” he said. “If you wish to accompany me, I will permit it. However, I am not interested in your recommendations as to our course of action. Good night.” He pulled the rug over his head, curled up on the tent, and went to sleep.
As, eventually, did we all.
We woke at five o’clock to the banshee wail of the muezzin from the mosque. The hours between wakefulness and dawn were taken up with the final restoration of order to our possessions and with replenishing our supplies. After our breakfast (coffee, flat bread, and a mug of watery laban) Mahmoud rose, settled his knife in his belt, and looked at me. “Come,” he ordered.
It was only the fourth time he had spoken directly to me, and I nearly tripped over myself scurrying to obey. He did not make me walk a full pace behind him, either, as if I were a slave or a woman; he merely kept his shoulder in front of mine.