Page 74 of Murder on Cold Street
Mr. Bosworth cleared his throat. “Normally I go to bed a little past eleven, so it was easy enough to wake up my grandmother for her dose before I make my preparations for bed. But recently I’ve worked late every night.
“It’s not that I don’t wish to be punctual. The first night I knew that I would work late, I set the alarm clock to go off at eleven. But when I slammed my hand over it, intending to stop working in the next minute or so, my attention was pulled back into the work and by the time I looked up again it was a quarter past twelve.”
He looked at them, his fingers fiddling with the other alarm clock.
“That is quite understandable,” said Holmes charitably. “We have all lost track of time while deep in concentration.”
“So I was late attending to her. She always asks for the time when I wake her up. In the past I’d shown her the time on the alarmclock on her night stand. That night I was ashamed of my lateness and didn’t want her to know. So instead of showing her alarm clock to her, I changed the time on mine and showed her that instead.
“The next day I borrowed her alarm clock, so that I would have two sets of reminders. But I was so absorbed in my work that I slammed my hand on both alarm clocks and still ended up being more than an hour late. I repeated my trick with that alarm clock to show her eleven o’clock.”
He again looked at them, as if hoping for absolution.
But Holmes only said, “Since Mrs. Styles doesn’t have much use for her alarm clock, you decided to keep it. You stopped winding it and set it to eleven once it had fully stopped.”
“True,” said Mr. Bosworth slowly, the bottom of his shoe scuffing against the thick carpet that covered most of the study.
“And now the alarm clock, the one that still keeps the right time, rings only to let you know that whenever you remember next, you should go up and give your grandmother her medicine.”
Mr. Bosworth passed the alarm clock in his hand one palm to the other, and then back again. “That’s—also true.”
He must have been several years senior to her, closer to Lord Ingram’s age. Yet as he fidgeted under her gaze, Lord Ingram was reminded of a misbehaving little boy having to account for himself before a much older sister.
“Can you recall, Mr. Bosworth, at what time you gave your grandmother her dose on the night in question?”
“Not specifically, I’m afraid. But typically it has been after midnight. And these days I usually go to sleep around two. So it had to have been somewhere in between.”
Which restored the possibility that the jumper might be the murderer.
Lord Ingram exhaled.
Mr. Bosworth continued to regard Holmes with both apprehension and admiration. Lord Ingram, who often regarded Holmes inexactly the same manner, felt a surge of pleasure, the delight in seeing a master at her craft.
Holmes inclined her head. “Thank you, Mr. Bosworth. You said earlier that you didn’t see much of anything the night of Miss Longstead’s party. I said that my aim was only to see your alarm clocks. But since Lord Ingram and I are already here, I would like to ask you to please examine your recollections of that night. We are not looking for something as extraordinary as witnessing someone leap to the street below. If you noticed anything at all out of the ordinary, we’d be pleased to hear it.”
“I would dearly love to be able to be of help,” said Mr. Bosworth. “Let me think.”
He again reminded Lord Ingram of a little brother, one trying to better his sister’s opinion of him.
“Ah! Now that I look back, I remember feeling particularly annoyed at myself that night, because at some point between eleven and twelve, I actually left my desk and stood in front of this window for a minute or two.”
“This window,” behind Holmes and Lord Ingram, looked across the street.
“When I stood there, a brougham came by and stopped next to the garden gate,” continued Mr. Bosworth, “an unusual-looking brougham painted with white and black stripes. I didn’t wait to see who emerged from within, because something about the case I was working on occurred to me and I hastened back to my desk.
“At midnight, the grandfather clock in the entrance hall strikes. I don’t always hear it as it strikes, but I will later realize that it has already struck. And that realization usually marks the moment I leap up from my desk to give my grandmother her medicine.
“As I said, that day I was particularly peeved at myself, because if I’d never left the desk after the alarm went off, that would have been one thing. But I had; I’d gone to the window and then returned to my desk, until I realized that midnight had already come and gone.
“Anyway, before I went to bed that night, I stood in front of the window in my bedroom, still thinking about my case. And that was when the brougham came back again. A fog was rolling in then, and the street was already rather scantly lit, but still, it was hard to miss a horizontally striped carriage. I thought it was simply there to pick up the same guests it had dropped off earlier. It never stopped; then a few minutes later it came back again from the other direction.”
Lord Ingram and Holmes exchanged a look. A carriage that was easily identifiable even at night? They could find this vehicle.
“What colors were the stripes?”
“They were black and white,” said Mr. Bosworth, looking with hope toward Holmes. “Is that—at all helpful?”
His hope did not go unrewarded. “We will not know until we look into the carriage,” said Holmes. “But we are most grateful to you, Mr. Bosworth, for a new avenue of inquiry.”
