“Did you ever ask?”
“No. Even if she hadn’t died I wouldn’t have dared. She was the one who asked the questions and pointed out where we fell short—not the other way around.” He was silent for a few seconds. “That was the last I saw her. I returned home and proceeded directly to the whisky bottle. I didn’t even hear Miss Livia Holmes and Mother having a row outside. The next thing I knew was my wife shaking me, trying to make me understand that Mother was no more.”
He clasped his hands together, as if trying to hold on to his courage. “Since then I’ve been trying to find out where she’d gone that evening and whom she’d seen, if anyone. So far I’ve managed to eliminate a few of her closest friends—but I always knew it couldn’t possibly have been them in the first place. She’d call on them in sackcloth before she would in a hansom cab.”
“Sherlock believes you would like for us to pass on this information to Scotland Yard—without revealing the source, of course. Is he correct?
Shrewsbury grimaced. “Mother would be turning over in her grave if she knew what I was doing. But I don’t want to accept that she died of an aneurysm of the brain. I don’t want to accept that I was the one who sent her to her grave.”
Mrs. Watson smiled again. “You have done very well to bring the matter to Sherlock’s attention.”
“Will it—will it help solve what happened to my mother?”
“Let me confer with Sherlock first.”
Charlotte already had her questions written down in a notebook. See, she mouthed to Mrs. Watson, he’s not so bad. To which Mrs. Watson responded with a dramatic roll of her eyes before taking the notebook and returning to the parlor.
“Sherlock has a few questions. First, Mr. Shrewsbury, where exactly did you see Lady Shrewsbury get on the hansom cab?”
“Near the corner of George Street and Bryanston Square.”
“And which way did it go?”
“Toward the east.”
“Did you watch it for some time? Did it turn onto any other street?”
“It kept going for a while and then it turned south. I think that was at Montague Street.”
After he left—with a full slate of compliments for Mr. Holmes—Charlotte emerged from the bedroom, poured a cup of tea, and helped herself to a slice of the cake that he didn’t touch.
Mrs. Watson stood by the window, looking at Charlotte one moment, out of the window the next, then again at Charlotte, peacefully enjoying her cake.
“You’re awfully unsentimental, Miss Holmes, about the man who was your first.”
“It was a purely strategic decision.” Charlotte took another bite. “I like him, but not enough to stand at the window and watch him leave.”
Mrs. Watson sighed. “Young ladies these days. But I must admit, he isn’t as despicable as I thought he would be.”
“He isn’t despicable at all,” Charlotte said. “His misfortune is that he was born fun-loving into a tribe that doesn’t understand fun. They require him to be serious and ambitious, to have a lofty reputation, an enviable family, and an illustrious career in politics, of all things. He’s never been allowed to decide anything for himself, and therefore has never developed either confidence or judgment. So it really was remarkable that he would go against the will of his entire clan to tell us what he knows.”
“But does it help, what he has told us?”
Charlotte looked longingly at the rest of the cake on the plate. Alas, she was already at one-point-four chins and must refrain from a second slice. “We now know that something extraordinary took place the night before Lady Shrewsbury died. We only need to find out what it was.”
Twenty
Hodges, when he’d been brought into the interrogation room Mrs. Cornish recently vacated, betrayed no hint of anxiety. He nodded pleasantly at Treadles. “Evening, Inspector. Constable Perkins says you have some questions for me?”
Treadles regarded him for some time without speaking, a tactic meant to intimidate. From time to time suspects broke down under the weight of his gaze. Often they fidgeted in discomfort, eyes darting everywhere. But occasionally a suspect would stare right back at him with defiance. Or, even more rarely, with a great display of equanimity.
Hodges fell into this last category. He met Treadles’s gaze with a calm fearlessness that early Christian martyrs would have prayed for. But tranquility before an interrogator did not necessarily imply innocence: It could just as well indicate an arrogance bordering on pathology—or a complete lack of conscience.