Page 82 of Murder on Cold Street
“I’m afraid I wasn’t given anything of the sort,” answered the foreman, mopping his face with a large handkerchief. “The place when Mr. Sullivan entrusted it to me was fresh and spanking. Awful pretty. It never occurred to me to ask how it was before.”
Mr. Bloom made no comment. He didn’t say anything until they were in a carriage, driving away, and then he asked to see the rough estimate Mrs. Watson had brought, of the cost of renovating and refurbishing this particular factory.
He studied the one-page summary, written in Holmes’s hand, for long minutes, so long that Lord Ingram and Mrs. Watson lookedat each other several times, Mrs. Watson’s expression growing more tense with each iteration.
“How accurate do you consider this estimate, Mrs. Watson?” asked Mr. Bloom at last, his voice disconcertingly quiet.
Mrs. Watson swallowed. “I’ll admit that of the three people involved in its preparation, there is not a single professional accountant. But we can trace every one of the major payments used to arrive at this sum. If anything, I’d say we’ve been conservative in our approximation.”
Mr. Bloom was again silent. Lord Ingram and Mrs. Watson exchanged another look and asked no questions.
They took a quick luncheon at the railway inn across the street from the station. And it was only after the plates had been cleared that Mr. Bloom said, “It behooves me to be prudent before making pronouncements. May I examine the accounts myself after we return to London?”
Lord Ingram felt his heartbeat suspend. What pronouncements? “I will need to obtain permission from Mrs. Treadles but I believe that will be readily granted. In fact, I will send a cable now, so that you may see the accounts as soon as possible.”
Before he could rise, Mrs. Watson, her face drawn, asked, “Mr. Bloom, I know you don’t wish to rush to judgment. But surely, you have some ideas now. Some very concrete ideas.”
Beneath the table, Lord Ingram’s nails dug into the palm of his hand.
“I do,” answered Mr. Bloom, frowning. “And unfortunately, if I must speak at the moment, I will say that at most two thirds of the money supposedly spent on this factory actually went into it. Likely only a half.”
“No,” said Mrs. Coltrane decisively. “The locks on the exterior doors of number 33 were changed after the previous tenants left.They’d been there for years and there was no telling how many copies of the keys might be lying about; it was safer to change the locks.”
She and Charlotte sat in her small office in the basement of 31 Cold Street, where Charlotte had just received the item she had officially come for, Mr. Longstead’s appointment book, freshly returned by Scotland Yard. “What about the letting agent? I assume you had one for number 33 to find new tenants?”
“We did have one. After the previous tenants left, maintenance work was done—a thorough cleaning of the flues, a changing of the wallpapers, etc. It was during that period Miss Longstead discovered the attic and fell in love.
“When the work on number 33 was nearly finished, she asked Mr. Longstead whether she couldn’t read in the studio in the interval before a new tenant moved in. She didn’t make many requests of him and he said yes immediately. The letting agent was told to give advance notice, so that Miss Longstead had time to make her way out of number 33, ahead of any prospective tenants being shown around.
“Then Mr. Longstead saw how much she enjoyed her new space and instructed me to have a word with Mr. Cornwall, our letting agent. He wanted Miss Longstead to have free use of the studio, for as long as we were in London. So his solicitor told Mr. Cornwall that we wouldn’t be putting the house up for let until we decamped to the countryside. We asked for the keys back at the same time. Mr. Cornwall is a trustworthy man, but we preferred not to take any risks.”
Mrs. Coltrane leaned forward, her expression earnest. “You see, Miss Holmes, we do have all the keys here.”
Do you?“Miss Longstead’s set is with her, true,” said Charlotte. “But we still haven’t seen Mr. Longstead’s.”
“I’m sure they must be in his study somewhere,” said Mrs. Coltrane. “In the meanwhile, I can show you the keys in my keeping.”
She rose and opened a locked key cabinet on the wall. Inside, among a congregation of keys, all carefully labeled, were the two sets for number 33, one large and one small.
“Have these keys ever left your keeping?”
Mrs. Coltrane began to shake her head but stopped. “Now that I think about it, in September, Mrs. Norwich, who lives on Rengate Street, called on Mr. Longstead in a rush. She is a widow, you see. A good woman, but a bit of a penny-pincher, as all she has is her house and her annuity.
“She’d ordered coal. But with the coal wagon standing there, it was discovered that her coal hatch couldn’t be opened. The coal company said that she would need to pay them the delivery fee and then the same fee again after the coal hatch was repaired, because they’d made their delivery and it wasn’t their fault that her coal hatch wouldn’t open.
“As I said, a bit of a penny-pincher, Mrs. Norwich. She asked Mr. Longstead if he wouldn’t mind taking delivery of this coal. Except we’d just had a delivery ourselves and our coal cellar was full. Mrs. Norwich proceeded to ask after the cellar at number 33, which was empty, so we took her coal after all—and paid for it, too, as the coal was now ours.
“I had a fever that day and stayed in bed. Miss Longstead came herself to get the key for the key cabinet from me—since the big ring of keys was needed to get to the coal cellar. I thought she would go and open the doors for Mrs. Norwich, but later, when she came to return the cabinet key and to let me know everything was back in its proper place, she told me that she’d given the keys to Mrs. Norwich instead. And Mrs. Norwich had her butler handle everything.”
Charlotte’s heart leaped. “How long were those keys in Mrs. Norwich’s hands?”
“An hour or so, I’d guess.” Mrs. Coltrane’s expression turned a little uneasy. “But she couldn’t possibly have done anything with them, could she have?”
“No, I dare say she wouldn’t have,” said Charlotte.
But what about her butler?
Charlotte would have liked to speak with Miss Longstead, but her aunt, Mr. Longstead’s last surviving sibling, had arrived in London and she had gone to condole with that lady. Charlotte returned to Mrs. Watson’s carriage. There, after consulting Miss Redmayne’s notes from her many interviews the day before, she asked Lawson, Mrs. Watson’s coachman, to drive to a nearby street. And then she composed a message and entrusted it to Lawson to deliver.
