Page 40 of The Hollow of Fear
“It will be difficult to judge when she died, I take it, given this inadvertent method of preservation,” said Mr. Holmes.
“And you would be correct again, my good sir. Unless we are able to match the contents of her stomach to a known last meal.”
Lady Ingram lay flat on her back but her head had rolled to one side, her nose close to the edge of the ice shaft. Fowler turned her face. “Hmm,” he said, “didn’t she have a beauty mark in her photographs?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Treadles.
“I see only an excision here.”
Treadles brought a lantern close and saw that the beauty mark had been scooped out, leaving a small dent where it had once been. The wound had healed but still looked recent.
“A pity,” said Mr. Holmes. “It was one of her distinguishing features.”
“Ah, look at this.”
Fowler had rolled up Lady Ingram’s sleeves and a small puncture wound was visible above her wrist. The otherwise ice-pale skin around it was discolored—the discoloration extending upward in a faint line, disappearing after approximately two inches.
Likewise on her other arm.
“Intravenous injections,” said Treadles.
“The pathologist might be able to tell us exactly what the substance is. Or the chemical analyst,” said Fowler.
“Do either of you smell the odor of alcohol?” asked Mr. Holmes.
The policemen exchanged a glance. Now that Mr. Holmes mentioned it, Treadles could indeed detect the faintest whiff in the air.
“If memory serves, Lady Ingram was a teetotaler—it was debated whether she even touched the champagne served at her own wedding. A shining paragon in so many ways, our dearly departed,” said Mr. Holmes, and smoothed the ends of his mustache with what seemed to Treadles an unnecessary amount of enjoyment.
Such an odd chap.
Lord Ingram seemed drawn to people who were at least somewhat misaligned with the world.
“But alcohol, in sufficient quantities, is most certainly a poison,” Mr. Holmes went on. “Assuming that she’d been injected with absolute alcohol, would that prove to be an irritant to the blood vessels?”
Again, a skillful argument put forth for Lord Ingram’s innocence: He would not have killed his wife with injections of absolute alcohol, knowing that she did not imbibe on any regular basis.
Fowler frowned. “A rather diabolical way to kill, is it not?”
“But a relatively clean one, from a certain point of view. No need to visit a crooked chemist, as would be the case with arsenic poisoning. And the body could be passed off as having resulted from a natural death, if one wished to move it without arousing too much suspicion.”
This was a body that came from elsewhere, implied Mr. Holmes, transported in a coffin.
Fowler, frowning more deeply, performed a systematic search of the pockets—very few, given that ladies didn’t care for that sort of thing—and found nothing more than a handkerchief. He then slipped off her boots.
“Aha, what have we here?”
Something made a crinkling sound inside her woolen stocking. The removal of the stocking revealed a folded-up piece of paper that had been placed inside, against the sole of a blue-tinged foot.
Unfolded, the paper was full of writing. Upon closer inspection, however, it turned out that a single line of text was repeated nearly two dozen times, each iteration in a different hand.
Vixen Charlotte Holmes’s zephyr-tousled hair quivers when jolted in fog bank.
Upon seeing that name, Treadles’s gut tightened.
“What in the world is this?” exclaimed Fowler.
“A pangram,” said Mr. Holmes. “A sentence that contains all twenty-six letters of the alphabet.”
