Page 103 of Murder on Cold Street
“Four people were known to have keys to the back door of number 33. Miss Longstead did not approach number 33 that day. Mrs. Coltrane did at half past six in the evening, but only to check thatall the doors were locked. A neighbor’s butler also had a key but he assured me that the door was already open when he got there. That leaves Mr. Longstead.”
Miss Redmayne whistled softly. Mrs. Watson might have reprimanded her under different circumstances, but Mrs. Watson was too busy setting down her knife and fork and pulling her chair closer to the table.
Charlotte calculated that she needed to ingest at least four more brussels sprouts before she considered herself virtuous enough forbûche de Noël. Thankfully, as an adult, she found vegetables increasingly tolerable, sometimes even enjoyable. Alas, not brussels sprouts in particular. Not yet.
“Mr. Longstead’s evening jacket had jetted pockets and in one of them there was residue that smelled of peppermint,” she continued. “He regularly visited an establishment of pharmaceutical chemists that does a brisk trade in confectionary. They sold peppermint lozenges. A similar powder clung to his set of keys, and his niece reported that, when he looked in on her as she was getting ready, something bulged in his jacket, to the dismay of their housekeeper.
“At this point it would be irresponsible not to conclude that Mr. Longstead had opened the back door of number 33. I further propose that he did it before the party started, so that it wouldn’t interfere with his duties as the host. Who would he have opened it for? Everyone else we’ve spoken to was there illicitly. So he could only have opened the door for either Mr. Sullivan or Inspector Treadles.
“I inquired repeatedly into whether he could have been in league with Mr. Sullivan, and those closest to him repeatedly assured me he was not that kind of person. I was already leaning toward the notion that he opened the door for Inspector Treadles when Mrs. Treadles rushed in here this morning, all distraught, and said that her husband warned her, in no uncertain terms, from looking too deeply into the accounts at Cousins.
“Why would he warn her of such a thing unless he has been looking into them himself? And why would he, in the first place, when he didn’t even ask any questions about her work for the longest time?
“The simplest explanation for Inspector Treadles’s involvement? Mr. Longstead. But he was an engineer, not an accountant. He counseled Mrs. Treadles to have greater patience. His involvement with Cousins, even after his return, veered toward minimal. Why did he, out of the blue, develop an interest in Cousins’s finances?”
Charlotte popped the next brussels sprout into her mouth, earning her way toward thebûche de Noël. But no one else was eating anymore. All eyes regarded her intently, which made her feel obliged to chew more vigorously—and drink from her water goblet to wash everything down faster.
She coughed a little and slapped herself on the sternum. “I believe he found something by accident. I believe he found this.”
She had brought her reticule into the dining room, and now she extracted the rosewood-and-ivory-inlay box that she had found at Miss Longstead’s and passed it to Mrs. Watson.
Miss Redmayne and Lord Ingram left their seats to stand beside Mrs. Watson. Mrs. Watson had her hand on the lid but hesitated, as if she faced Pandora’s box, and by opening it, she risked releasing great infelicity into the world.
“It’s only notebooks inside,” said Charlotte.
Which Pandora’s box could very well have contained, too.
Mrs. Watson lifted the lid. Carefully and with no small reluctance, as if she were about to handle a sleeping serpent, she withdrew a small notebook. Miss Redmayne and Lord Ingram followed suit.
“Notice that the contents are in code,” said Charlotte. “Each item pasted into those notebooks has a date written beside it. The oldest small notices date from six years ago.”
Lord Ingram slowly set down the notebook in his hand. “When you told us about the Sullivans and their arrangement with Mrs.Portwine, you mentioned that Mr. Sullivan became highly agitated when he realized that Mrs. Sullivan was trying to pick the lock of the study at Mrs. Portwine’s. But later, when a similar incident happened, he no longer cared.”
Charlotte cut a brussels sprout in two and soaked one resultant half more fully in butter sauce. “Indeed. When Mrs. Sullivan and I found a secret drawer in his study tonight, half of the drawer was empty, and the dimensions of that empty space were almost exactly those of this box. I believe that when Mr. Sullivan learned of the Longsteads’ plan to no longer put their spare house up for let, at least not until they departed London, he had the idea to move the box to number 33.
“The Longsteads had not told him that Miss Longstead adored the studio and that it was the reason the house would no longer be advertised for tenancy. To his thinking, 33 Cold Street was perfect for his purposes. It would be vacant for some months, no one would be there, and he could always retrieve his box later, after the Longsteads left town, by booking another visit with the letting agent.”
Mrs. Watson frowned. “It couldn’t have been that easy to hide a box with the letting agent hovering nearby. This isn’t a large box, but to take it out and put it somewhere, all without being seen?”
The butter-drenched half brussels sprout went down rather nicely. “That might explain why the box ended up in the attic. The studio there is the single largest space in the house, but it is two sections connected by a narrow passage. If he could situate himself in one part and the letting agent in the other part, that would have given him enough time to open the door of the storage closet and put this small box into one of the larger boxes of magazines that the previous tenants had left behind.”
“The game!” cried Miss Redmayne. “The gift-hiding game the Longsteads played with each other.”
Charlotte raised her water goblet in Miss Redmayne’s direction.“Mr. Sullivan’s secrets might have remained safe, despite Miss Longstead’s occupancy of the studio, if it hadn’t been for Mr. Longstead’s search for a hiding place for his present. And what better place than the closet in the studio, right next to where Miss Longstead sat every day?
“This is entirely unsupported by evidence, but I think Mr. Longstead, when he first came across this box, believed it to contain Miss Longstead’s gift to him. There is a chance that he took it to a locksmith to get it opened. And there is a further chance that after opening the box, he became even more convinced that it was not only a gift, but a grand gift.
“He’d tried to interest her in cryptography; she never loved it to the same extent he did. But hope springs eternal. It isn’t difficult to imagine Mr. Longstead, when faced with this box of ciphers, happily assuming that, unbeknownst to him, his niece had been practicing cryptography on her own and prepared this tremendous surprise.”
“Poor Mr. Longstead,” murmured Miss Redmayne.
“The poor man,” said Mrs. Watson at nearly the same time, shaking her head.
“I don’t know when Mr. Longstead’s delight turned to something else,” said Charlotte. “But if you need further convincing that Inspector Treadles’s current predicament is intimately linked to the goings-on at Cousins, remember he told me that what Sherlock Holmes typically did should have been good enough to help him?”
Everyone around the table nodded, in varying degrees of anticipation and apprehension. The gravest expression belonged to Lord Ingram, who knew more than the two ladies.
“Sherlock Holmes typically read his correspondence.” Charlotte pulled out the two letters she had singled out and handed them around.
