A Conspiracy in Belgravia (Lady Sherlock #2)

But was she too late? Would Stephen Marbleton dare to openly impersonate Myron Finch if he didn’t already know, with complete certainty, that the latter was not going to barge in and put an end to it?

Assuming that Stephen Marbleton had truly been away, as he had told his landlady, if Charlotte were Frances Marbleton, staying in a place she considered safe enough, only to hear her lock being picked in the middle of the night, how would she leave? She would first make a sweep of anything incriminating—probably not too many items as they had been at such covert activities for a while. And then, would she leave a message for her cohort?

If she had, knowing that there was outside interest in this location, knowing that it might be searched, she would have done so in such a way as to ensure that it was easily overlooked.

Charlotte remembered the blank notebook in the smaller room. It was still blank when she returned to examine it more closely. But as she scrutinized it from the side, one page near the middle appeared slightly thicker than the rest. And when she opened to that particular page, she saw that it had been pricked with a pin.

She closed her eyes briefly before slipping the notebook into her handbag. “Do inform Mr. Finch that we are most disappointed in him, Mrs. Woods. He will have a great deal of explaining to do.”



Charlotte expected Morse code. But when she held up the notebook page that had been pricked, the dots were in Braille.

Braille.

That in itself would not have been particularly interesting, had she not, only a few days ago, found Braille inside a dead man’s jacket.

Slowly she lowered the notebook and closed it, feeling as if she were putting the lid on a casket. She’d thought herself the kind of person who was always prepared for the worst. But knowing that something awful could happen and facing the certainty that it had—that was the difference between reading about canne de combat over a cup of tea and a piece of plum cake and the humerus-jarring reality of it, all shaky thighs and labored breaths.

She gave herself half a minute to calm down, then knocked against the top of the hackney. “I wish to alight right here!”

She had been on her way from St. James’s to Mrs. Watson’s house, but the intersection of Duke Street and Oxford Street had become the perfect place to get off.

Since she was now headed for Portman Square.





Fifteen





It was not often that Inspector Treadles wished that an interviewee would be less forthcoming. But there was no stopping Mrs. Egbert, the small, grey-haired widow who was frightfully organized.

Upon receiving Treadles and Sergeant MacDonald in her study, she had immediately presented a pile of documents. I’ll ring for tea after you’ve had a look at those.

She and her late husband had owned nearly five dozen dwellings in the environs of London. He had passed away six years ago and had left her all the properties, even though they had grown sons. “He knew very well our boys had no head for business. A decent lot, but not a single one of them capable of looking after what we had built.”

For a moment Treadles saw not Mrs. Egbert behind the impressive desk, but his own wife, so hardened and efficient that she couldn’t be bothered to offer a cup of tea and a bit of pleasantry.

He prayed, for the first time in his life, for his brother-in-law’s well-being and longevity.

“The house you are interested in was built in ’69,” said Mrs. Egbert. “For the first few years, the tenants were a young family. In the winter of ’72, the husband and the children all died from influenza. The widow quit the premises that summer. We put the house up for let again and advertised in the papers. Usually those who have an interest in a vacancy write and ask for an appointment to see the place. Mr. de Lacy, however, inquired only whether we would accept a postal order for a year’s rent.

“We had no objections at all to a year’s rent in advance. Once we had received the postal order, we sent him the keys to the house, to be called for at the General Post Office, as he had instructed. The understanding was that an agent of ours would inspect the property at least once a year—more often should there be cause for concern. And our condition was readily agreed to.”

She showed them the letters from de Lacy and the duplicates of letters that had been sent to him, the canceled postal orders, the neat numbers in a ledger that listed all the monies received from the property and all the expenses related to its upkeep.

“That was the extent of our initial contact with Mr. de Lacy. In subsequent years, he sent a postal order, without fail, a month before the period paid for in the previous year ran out. And you can see, each year we wrote him and arranged for a date on which our agent might inspect the house. He always agreed to the time we proposed—and always said that he would be away from London at the time and that our agent should feel free to enter the house using the key in the agent’s possession.

“I have here all the inspection reports. Now that I know something terrible has happened, Mr. de Lacy does seem too good to be true. But I have hundreds of tenants, some of them quite irksome, and I was all too happy to overlook a few oddities on the part of a tenant who was never any trouble and always paid his accounts in advance.”

Treadles, faced with page after page of meticulous recordkeeping, wished then that Mrs. Egbert were a little cagier. If he had the sense that she was concealing anything, then he would have gained a toehold. But her transparency forced the conclusion he’d been afraid of in the first place: that this was another dead end, as far as his investigation was concerned.

He gave the appearance of studying everything carefully, and even asked a few questions. But in the end, he left Mrs. Egbert’s house with nothing to go on—and a spiraling sense of dread that he wasn’t even scratching the surface.

That the surface was there somewhere and he was a hundred miles away, trying to feel his way out of a shipping crate.



“Let me see if I have understood you correctly, Miss Holmes,” said Lord Bancroft. “You posit that one, Finch is the name of the dead man found in Hounslow; two, he happened to be your illegitimate half brother; and three, he is currently being impersonated by Stephen Marbleton.”

He and Charlotte were seated in an eye-watering drawing room: This was the house in which Lord Bancroft had intended for them to live as man and wife, done up in what he gauged to be her taste before the first time he proposed, when he had been certain of his impending success. Charlotte had never heard the whole story from Lord Ingram, but it seemed reasonable to assume that after Lord Bancroft failed to win her hand, he had decided to turn it into a place of business. The crown’s business.

Usually Charlotte enjoyed being in the house: Lord Bancroft’s estimation of what she liked in terms of decor was barely three percent wide of the mark. But today all she could see was the dead man in Hounslow, his face a mask of agony and shock.