Sergeant MacDonald was dispatched to Devon that same afternoon. By midmorning the following day, he was wiring back reports. The young Marbletons were indeed recognized as the traveling photographer and his assistant who had come through the village. Inspector Treadles sent a pair of constables to Claridge’s, but they telephoned from the hotel, reporting that the Marbletons had already vacated their suite and left no forwarding addresses.
Within a quarter hour, Sergeant MacDonald’s next report came.
Dear Inspector Treadles,
I spoke to Dr. Birch and his sister, Miss Birch. They both identified Lady Sheridan as Mrs. Broadbent, the elderly patient staying at the inn in Barton Cross. Since Dr. Birch had to rush out to Curry House, Miss Birch was the one who took the morphine to the inn and administered it to Lady Sheridan.
When Dr. Birch came back from Curry House and called on Lady Sheridan, she was better, thanks to the morphine, though still in a state of great suffering. As he recounted what had kept him from seeing her sooner, she became more animated and asked a number of questions.
Dr. Birch doesn’t recall whether he used Mr. Sackville’s name in his exchange with Lady Sheridan—he thinks he might have. Miss Birch had this to add: After she administered the morphine, Lady Sheridan asked her to retrieve a framed photograph of her daughter from her reticule. And when Miss Birch reached in, the first thing she felt was not a photograph, but a pistol.
Yours truly,
MacDonald
When Inspector Treadles arrived at the Sheridan town house, Mr. Addison conducted him not to the drawing room, but Lady Sheridan’s bedroom.
“The doctor has just been. She doesn’t have long to live,” said the butler, looking much less spry than Treadles remembered from mere days ago. “Please be brief, Inspector.”
Lady Sheridan lay in a half recline, a hillock of pillows behind her back. Her grey hair was loose, her cheeks waxy, her eyes deeply sunken. At Treadles’s entrance, she signaled a white-capped nurse, who had been feeding her spoonfuls of broth, to leave.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to answer many questions, Inspector,” she said slowly. “I’ve had quite a bit of laudanum.”
“I’ll be quick then, ma’am. How do you explain your presence in the next nearest village to Curry House at the same time Mr. Sackville died?”
“Coincidence. I might die any minute. For old times’ sake, I wished to see my brother-in-law one last time.”
“Why did you choose to do so alone? Why not bring along Lord Sheridan?”
She snorted, a sound of bitterness. “He isn’t about to die.”
“If a social call had indeed been your only purpose, why lie about something so simple and understandable?”
“If I didn’t, Lord Sheridan would know, wouldn’t he?” Her eyelids drooped. When she looked at Treadles again, the simple action seemed to require superhuman effort. “He’d have asked me why I must undermine his proud estrangement from his brother and I hadn’t enough time left to bother with that sort of nonsense.”
“And the pistol you carried with you on the trip?”
This time she closed her eyes, a strange little smile about her lips. “A lady must take care when she travels by herself.”
Shortly after Treadles had been promoted to sergeant, he returned to Barrow-in-Furness to visit his mother. She had been in robust health, but as he said good-bye to her, he’d had a sense of foreboding. That it would be the last time he saw her. She’d died mere weeks later from a sudden and fierce fever. In the hours before his father-in-law drew his last breath, everyone had been convinced that he would fully recover, especially Alice. But Treadles had the same premonition. Mr. Cousin had died that night.
There would be no further questions for Lady Sheridan; their final meeting was at an end.
He bowed. “Thank you, ma’am. Good-bye.”
Upon Inspector Treadles’s return to Scotland Yard, he found Hodges’s written statement at his desk. Treadles filliped the piece of paper. Something about the handwriting snagged his attention, the oddly crooked g’s, the squashed o’s, and the majuscule a’s that were more ambitious than necessary.
Where had he seen this handwriting before?
Then he looked at what Hodges had actually written. He’d been staying at an inn in Camberwell, which was in London, very far from Isle of Wight, the supposed destination for his holidays.
But very close to Lambeth, where Mr. Sackville had visited twice a month for at least seven years running.