Page 106 of Murder on Cold Street
“I’m not sure. We have inferred that he was assailed just outside the garden, where Lord Ingram and I found buttons from his coat.The attack would have redoubled his determination to get into the garden—and into number 33.”
She imagined Inspector Treadles racing across the garden toward what he believed to be a safe haven, a house the back door of which he had asked to be left open. Thankfully it was indeed open. He locked it behind himself and collapsed against it, panting.
As his pounding heart slowed, he gritted his teeth against the pain in his arm. The knife had slashed through three layers of sleeves. The smell of his own blood filled his nostrils.
And it was dark, so dark. Fog writhed outside. No light from number 31 fell into the empty house.
“He groped his way up the stairs. He knew of Miss Longstead’s experiments in the attic studio. He knew that there he would be able to find some alcohol with which to clean his wound. And perhaps some cloth for bandaging. And then, an unhappy discovery—followed by a nasty surprise.”
The jumble of smells in the staircase, growing stronger with each step, floral, spicy, spirituous, a bombardment of the senses. Did his eyes water? Did his throat grow irritated? Did a sense of foreboding crawl over his skin, only to be confirmed as his boots crunched over broken glass?
But what was that sound from below? Someone was coming into the house!
“He had locked the back door. But he couldn’t have guessed that Mrs. Sullivan had departed from the front door and left it unlocked. His assailant walked in. The attic door was damaged and unlockable. He went down. And further down. Was the door to the chief bedroom open? Did a bit of streetlamp light come through despite the fog? Perhaps.”
He slipped inside and locked the door. He could vaguely make out the hulking outlines of a bed. He moved forward, tripped, and landed in a spread of viscous liquid. The destruction in the attic had left his sense of smell temporarily overwhelmed, but he didn’tneed the pungency of blood to know that something horrific had taken place.
“I can only imagine how gruesome the discovery must have been,” said Charlotte softly. “In that room he was not a dispassionate investigator arriving in broad daylight, but an already fearful man stumbling over dead bodies in the dark.”
The pocket lantern on the windowsill, most likely brought by Mr. Sullivan, who’d had plans that night, would have already burned out. Did Inspector Treadles’s hands shake as he struck a match? Did sounds of fright and distress burst from his throat when the feeble light illuminated crimson pools and crumpled bodies?
Was he able to make any sense of what he saw? Or was he too busy locking the door and taking up a defensive position behind the bed? He did also stumble upon his own service revolver, an ominous find, the significance of which he did not have the frame of mind to ponder, not with the assailant prowling just beyond the door.
“Then something happened that he didn’t expect—the arrival of the police. Mrs. Sullivan had closed the front door, even if she couldn’t lock it. But the assailant might have left it open. It’s possible that he was still in the house when the police entered, but managed to slip out when the two bobbies were preoccupied with Inspector Treadles.”
Charlotte took a long draught from her water goblet. “And the rest we know—or at least have eyewitness accounts.”
“Poor Inspector Treadles,” murmured Miss Redmayne.
Lord Ingram stared at a spot on the table.
Mrs. Watson patted her face with a handkerchief, as if she’d broken out in a cold sweat, in spite of the pleasant temperature inside the dining room. “Poor Inspector Treadles indeed. But who was that assailant and what did he want with Inspector Treadles?”
“To know that, I shall first need to do something about the box of ciphers.” Charlotte rubbed her temples. “Have I ever told anyone that I’d already wearied of ciphers by the time I was sixteen?”
Twenty-one
Mr. Mears brought in coffee. But coffee was not enough for Charlotte to survive another late night; she must have cake, plenty of cake.
She took a fortifying bite—sponge roll, whipped cream filling, chocolate ganache. In a few hours, even this heavenly combination would pale before her need for sleep. But at the moment, the idea of staying awake long enough to merit an extra slice or two still excited her.
Mrs. Watson, Miss Redmayne, and Lord Ingram were already working, each dealing with a notebook from the box. Small notices from the papers often used fairly straightforward substitution ciphers. To be on the safe side, Lord Ingram had given the ladies a quick tutorial on transposition ciphers, which also appeared regularly.
Charlotte allowed herself another bite of cake and opened the notebook before her, the one with the earliest dates. In the carriage, as it drove through puddles of streetlamp light, she’d scanned the contents of the box and felt only dread at the thought of more ciphers, possibly convoluted and tortuous ones. But now, paging through this first notebook, pasted neatly with small notices in code and an occasional telegram, she was instead enveloped in a strange and strangely chilling sense of familiarity.
From the dates themselves.
The small notices were weekly—and punctual: In thisnotebook, which covered almost two years, only once did a notice appear one day later than usual.
She had come across something of the sort before.
Or had she come across this exact thing?
Lord Ingram looked up. “Holmes.”
His voice was tight, an expression of incipient—or was it already outright—dismay on his face. “Look at these.”
He had the most recent notebook, the small notices at the front of which were coded, but the last ten or twelve were not. They were in plain text—and they were biblical verses.
