Page 110 of Murder on Cold Street
“Happy Christmas, miss.”
She gazed upon the clerk’s ordinary but sincere face, and imagined that he was someone else’s Mr. Marbleton. “A very happy Christmas to you, too.”
Today and always.
Charlotte had needed to speak to Mrs. Treadles and Mrs. Cousins as early as possible in the day because she had wanted them to learn the worst from her, before they heard rumors from other sources. By the time she left Mrs. Cousins’s house, paperboys were already abroad. An hour after early editions blanketed the city, a petty criminal confessed to stealing Inspector Treadles’s service revolver on Mr. Sullivan’s orders.
Two hours later, another petty criminal came forward to admit that he had entered 33 Cold Street—because the front door was open—on the night in question, hoping to steal something, only to see two dead bodies inside. When Inspector Treadles entered, claiming to be the police, the miscreant was so terrified of being arrested for murders he hadn’t committed, he’d shoved the inspector from behind into the room and claimed he’d kill him, too! And then he fled after Inspector Treadles very logically locked the door against him.
Charlotte chuckled at the creativity of this account.
At noon she met Lord Ingram’s train at Euston Station.
Since Inspector Treadles had given actual addresses in his two seemingly ersatz letters to Sherlock Holmes, Lord Ingram had decided to see those spots for himself. He reported that at the address in Sheffield, he’d had an excellent view of a large, modern factory, but had been far away enough that even had Moriarty’s minions seized the letter,they might not have connected it to the factory, which had a large plaque that proudly declared,De Lacey Industries.
In nearby Leeds, the address Inspector Treadles had furnished had led Lord Ingram to an even larger, even more modern-looking factory, also under the umbrella of De Lacey Industries. Moriarty didn’t simply siphon funds from Cousins—and likely other companies—he used the money to build himself new sources of wealth.
Charlotte remembered the photographic plates she had taken from Moriarty’s stronghold outside Paris. There had been factories among those images. How many of them had been built this way, by draining the lifeblood of law-abiding enterprises?
She didn’t want to dwell too long on the subject, so she turned to kissing Lord Ingram instead, a much more pleasant way to pass time.
Their carriage drew up before Scotland Yard. Lord Ingram planned to inform Inspector Treadles that Sherlock Holmes had done what Sherlock Holmes typically did. Then he was going to see about securing the inspector’s release as soon as possible.
“What are you doing later in the afternoon?” asked Charlotte rather hopefully.
She didn’t have a tea gown yet but he could still come by for tea—and for what the tea gown was infamous for.
“It’s Christmas Eve, Holmes. I need to find my children some presents.”
How could she argue with that? But she quickly brightened again. “Are you going to give me a Christmas present this year?”
They rarely gave each other presents.
He raised a brow. “Are you going to give me one?”
“Yes.”
He stared at her for a moment. “Good heavens, I’m getting a hot water bottle cozy, am I not? The one you were knitting right in front of me in Paris!”
She laughed at his expression of mock horror. Her cheek in her hand, she said, “But I haven’t the slightest idea what you are going to give me.”
“The exact equivalent of a hot water bottle cozy,” he warned darkly. “The exact equivalent, Holmes.”
She was still smiling when the carriage drove away.
Charlotte had barely reached home when a message from Lord Ingram caught up with her. The coup de grâce had come: a mountain of evidence of Mr. Sullivan’s evildoing had been delivered to Scotland Yard, evidence not only of brazen embezzlement, not only of the poisoning of the younger Mr. Cousins, but of the murder of Mr. Mortimer Cousins two-and-half years ago, by ethylene glycol in the latter’s tea, when it looked as if he might recover from his severe pneumonia.
It was as Charlotte had thought. Just as Mr. Sullivan had accumulated evidence to someday point an accusatory finger at Moriarty, Moriarty’s lieutenants, who read his spiteful nature like an open book, had also secretly prepared to abandon him to the long arm of the law. After all, no investigation along that line could be allowed to proceed beyond Mr. Sullivan himself, certainly not when it might cause the confiscation of De Lacey Industries factories.
The news of the older Mr. Cousins’s murder did not surprise Charlotte. In the morning, after she had informed Mrs. Treadles and Mrs. Cousins of the abundant presence of arsenic in Mr. Barnaby Cousins’s hair, she had also warned them that she couldn’t be sure Mr. Mortimer Cousins hadn’t met a similar fate.
It didn’t surprise her, but it still saddened her. She thought of the night of the party, of uncle and nephew in that room, Mr. Sullivan with Inspector Treadles’s revolver pointed at Mr. Longstead’s chest. Had he told Mr. Longstead everything then, so that he could revel in Mr. Longstead’s pain and outrage before he killed him? And Mr. Longstead, an old man who had never been in robust health, how had he, with a bullet in his chest, found the strength to throw his walking stick at Mr. Sullivan, scramble for the fallen revolver, and fire?
Because Mr. Sullivan had been responsible, at least in part, forthe death of his beloved friend and partner, who had put Mr. Longstead’s health above profits, and had loved him more than a brother.
Thanks to all the revelations, Inspector Treadles was released just before sunset, in what the evening editions would hail as a Christmas miracle. Both Lord Ingram and Sherrinford Holmes were there to greet him, alongside his lovely and faithful wife.
“Thank you,” said Inspector Treadles to Charlotte. “I knew that if anyone could save me, it would be you. Thank you.”
