Page 67 of A Ruse of Shadows
“Because he would be that much easier to kill, away from Ravensmere.” Talbot smiled. “Where were you last night, Miss Holmes?”
Treadles broke into a sweat, even though he’d been waiting for that question.
“Chief Inspector—”
“I would caution you to speak the truth, Miss Holmes,” said her adversary, his soft words falling like hammers upon Treadles’s hearing. “I have enough evidence to arrest you, and culprits have been tried and convicted on less. Now think carefully, Miss Holmes. Where were you last night?”
Twenty-three
Three days ago
Returning from Sittingbourne, Charlotte changed trains and headed again to Ravensmere.
This time, Lord Bancroft was already in the small side garden. At her approach, he tossed down the magazine in his hand.
Charlotte glanced at the magazine, a recent issue ofCornhill. “I hope you have sufficient reading material, my lord?”
“Hardly. I’ve already read this one three times,” he said impatiently. “Why have you come again, Miss Holmes?”
Charlotte, still dressed as a man, thrust a hand into the pocket of her jacket, leaving her thumb hooked over the double-welt opening. “I have further bad news: Mrs. Claiborne is also dead.”
Unlike the strong reaction he showed for Mr. Underwood, Lord Bancroft barely frowned. “She was irrelevant.”
Charlotte was hard-pressed to argue with that, at least from his point of view. If Mrs. Claiborne had mattered, it had been only to Mr. Underwood, who could no longer care about such things. And she couldn’t have been Lord Bancroft’s sole means of getting messages into the hands of his minions.
“On your way out, you might as well instruct the gate to remove hername from the list of permitted visitors,” said Lord Bancroft dismissively.
She knew him to be an unfeeling person; still, this was a strikingly callous response to the violent death of a woman who had shared his bed for years. But Charlotte made sure to relay his request to the guards at the gate.
“Ah, that’s a shame,” said one guard. “Such a beautiful woman, Mrs. Claiborne. Any reason we’re taking her off the list?”
“His lordship didn’t say, save that she would not come again.”
The guard kept shaking his head. “I should have had a better look at her three weeks ago, if I knew she wasn’t going to come around again.”
“Well, good sir,” said Charlotte, “this is your lucky day, as I happen to have a photograph of Mrs. Claiborne with me. Can’t compare to having her in front of you, but still, here’s another look for you.”
The guard eagerly accepted the locket. He smacked his lips. “Ah, what a beauty. So generous with her smiles, too. I shall miss those smiles. I shall.”
?The previous evening, before Holmes had sent a note to the chemist’s shop that seemed to have some connection to Mrs. Farr, she had first telephoned Lord Ingram. Lord Ingram, unable to get away just then, had dispatched someone else to watch over the chemist’s shop.
The agent had returned a few hours later and shamefacedly reported that while he had seen a young man come to pick up a message from the shop well after the shop had closed for the evening, he had not been able to follow the man for more than ten minutes before the man had turned a corner and disappeared into the night.
Lord Ingram had decided to replicate the experiment the next day. He wrote another note, in a decent imitation of Holmes’s hand, and dropped the message in the post. Postal delivery was remarkably frequent and swift in London—friends living in different districts could exchange correspondences several times in a day.
Experience indicated that he had two hours or so before his letter arrived at the chemist’s. He used that time to walk around the neighborhood, familiarizing himself with its alleys and back ways, before he started to patrol the chemist’s street up and down as a sandwich board man.
The community was far from wealthy, but it was composed of artisans, shop clerks, and others of modest but steady income. The street, one of the busiest in the area, made for a reasonable market for makers of cleaning soap, tinned goods, and such.
His simple disguise allowed him to loiter in plain sight but also to occasionally sit down with a small beer to quench his thirst as the day grew increasingly warm.
What he feared was not the heat but that given the special relationship between the chemist’s shop and Mrs. Farr, whoever came to take messages during the day might do so from the back door. So from time to time he crouched down near the mouth of the alley behind the shop, a biscuit in hand, with the air of a weary man stealing a moment of rest.
Except he didn’t need to pretend about being a weary man. He saw it in the mirror daily. That same fatigue was etched on Holmes’s face, too. Neither of them had slept much since she returned to England; a state of ill rest had not resulted from anything scandalous, or even remotely pleasurable.
And he missed his children fiercely. He knew they were having an excellent time with their beloved cousins, under the careful eye of both their governess and his sister-in-law. Still, he worried that the protective shield he held out before them was cracked and falling apart.
He had no idea how much of that anxiety stemmed from his personal circumstances, and how much was simply a by-product of parenthood. He wished there was time to sit down and talk with Mrs. Watson about how best to raise his children. He also wanted to reread the letter that he often carried with him these days, a recent one from Holmes.
