Treadles leaped up and pulled open the file case where he kept his official correspondence. Yes, there were those two letters he’d received about the house of ill repute in Lambeth. The exact same handwriting. The first letter was rather vague. The second, which he’d received two months ago, was full of anger and anguish, all but screaming into the void, warning of pure depravity, the exploitation of the most innocent and helpless, etc.
He rushed out to Lambeth, to the lane named in the letter, and stood before the skeletal remains of what must have been a structure big enough for a family of twelve. He’d been there no more than a few minutes before he realized that the house next door had an unusually large number of men hurrying in and out.
Not that news from home is much better, Alice had said on the night of Holmes’s “misfortune,” sitting at the edge of Treadles’s desk and flipping through the evening papers. Recriminations over the failure of the Irish Home Rule bill. Police still looking for suspects in the fire in Lambeth that destroyed a building and killed two.
And what had he said to her? I know about that building in Lambeth. Every last inspector in Scotland Yard got letters about it—and it isn’t even a copper hell, but a bookmaker’s. You close one down and it opens right back up two streets over.
The neighboring house was the bookmaker’s place, and the men who barged in and out the runners who collected bets and settled winnings.
What then had been the depravities committed in the house that had been burned to the ground? What kind of depravities would turn a man like Hodges, who must have seen a fair bit of the seedier side of life, into a rabid crusader?
Treadles ordered Hodges arrested and brought to London. Sergeant MacDonald delivered the valet into Treadles’s keeping late that evening.
This time Hodges didn’t look so natty. There was something about being arrested and put under the power of the Crown that stripped jauntiness from a man. A state of vulnerability that was not helped by the blank, sterile walls of an interrogation room.
“Mr. Hodges, you were the one who poisoned Mr. Sackville. You were outraged at what went on in that house in Lambeth he visited. You gave him arsenic, coinciding with the timing of his trips to London, so that he would suffer and not be able to achieve what he set out to do.”
“You can’t prove anything.”
The absence of jauntiness did not imply the absence of defiance.
“No, but I have here a sample of your writing, and every inspector at Scotland Yard has received letters from you, screaming about the intolerable deeds that went on inside the house. And then the house mysteriously went up in smoke, resulting in two deaths. That is enough ground to charge you with arson and murder, Mr. Hodges.”
Scotland Yard certainly didn’t have any other suspects. The investigation had been ongoing for weeks and the officer in charge still couldn’t be sure how many people had lived inside or what it had been used for before it was reduced to ashes and rubble.
“I didn’t burn down the house,” Hodges answered through clenched teeth.
“You will have a difficult time proving that.”
“I was in Devon.”
“You could have had accomplices in London.”
“I would never do such a thing. There were children inside. Little children!”
Hodges’s outburst ricocheted in the room. His hands balled into fists. And he panted, as if he’d run all the way from Curry House.
Treadles felt as if he’d been picked up, turned upside down, and shaken violently. “Tell me about those children,” he said, his voice sounding curiously disembodied.
“The little girl they brought me wasn’t even nine. She said she’d been in that house for a whole year, at least. And she told me that there were boys and girls at least three years younger than her.” Hodges’s throat worked. “Yes, I gave him arsenic before his next trip. But I didn’t want to kill him—I am not a murderer. I wanted to buy some time for the police to do something. Anything.”
“You had the wrong house number in your letters.”
Hodges dropped his head into his hands.
It had been an easy enough mistake. Of the two houses, only one had its number on the exterior, and though it seemed to be right in the middle, between the two entrances, the number had belonged to the bookmaker.
“When did you decide to change to chloral?” Treadles still sounded dispassionate.
Times like this, it was as if some mechanism deep inside him roared to life and insulated him in a thick layer of numbness.
“I never had anything to do with the chloral. I was gone that week. In London. I went to see if there was anything I could do to close the place down, but when I got there, it had already burned to the ground.” Hodges wiped the heel of his hand across his eyes. “And no one knew what happened to the children. No one.”