Sherlock studied my face. Again. But I wasn’t willing to leave my train of thought, not even to indulge my irritation.
“It’s impossible. I mean, the man would have to have been dead almost the second the knife entered his body, and . . . oh.” I let the scene play out once more in my mind, the same that had played as I looked at the tarp-covered body that night in the park. At the blood on the tree, which had been at the man’s back. At the umbrella, which hadn’t been his at all. “If it pierced through to mark the tree, it wasn’t a knife.”
“A sword, then? But if you don’t buy him hiding a knife until the last minute, how exactly would he hide the length of a sword?”
“Perhaps along the handle of—”
Sherlock’s brow cleared before I could finish my thought, and he stood up, swaying the boat rather dangerously. “The umbrella!” he cried out. Half the lake was staring at us by the time I pulled him back down to his bench. “We’re brilliant at this.”
I refused to smile as I put my ideas together aloud. “If he was pierced through to the wood of the tree.”
“If it pierced through his heart and his spine.”
“If that could even be done with any length of sword without the man lifting his hands from his pockets.”
“It was dark,” Sherlock offered. “And perhaps it was a short sword.”
“Tantó,” I said, at the same time Sherlock said, “Gladius!”
“Roman,” Sherlock offered.
I countered with, “Japanese. Ten inches long, super sharp, and used in martial arts for demonstrations.”
“Ancient, two feet long, and most likely less widely available. You win.” Sherlock scowled. “It’s no good, though. Those things are all illegal. How would our killer get his hands on a sword, short or not? There probably isn’t a single one in London that isn’t under lock and key in some museum or historical society.”
He was right, of course, but wrong at the same time, because I knew of at least one such sword in London. It was up in our attic, without a lock or key to speak of. That is, if Dad hadn’t found it and tossed it by now. I even remembered the day my mother showed me where she kept it, in the shadows of one of the beams, where no one would think to look, she said. My mother had endless secrets. She loved to tell them to me, and still it felt like I’d never come close to knowing anything really important about her. That was what she was like. She made you feel like you knew what no one else did, but really it was something useless, like where the sword was hidden.
“Besides, they’ll never look in a copper’s house for illegal booty,” she had said. She was running her aikido forms, one hand holding the sword over her head, parallel to the roof. She held the position for one perfectly still moment, then sliced the sword through the air, impaling an invisible opponent in the neck behind her, before spinning to stab him again through the heart. For just that next moment, she was ferocious, deadly. I could believe she was a warrior—capable of anything.
But then she glanced from her ghostly opponent to me and winked. She was my mum again, and when she smiled, every trace of the warrior was gone.
“There are loads of weapons in the city,” I told Sherlock, deciding he didn’t need to know about Mum’s sword. “You know someone’s got one that was handed down to him from a family member or something.”
He seemed to consider what I said, then dismissed it with a shake of his head.
I shrugged. “It could have been any kind of long dagger. But do you think it’s possible to pierce a man through like that?” I followed my mother’s forms in my mind again and superimposed that over the crime scene, until they became one in my mind. Because if the killer had his back to Patel . . . “One to paralyze and one to kill him before he can even lift his hands to defend himself. Could the body have had two wounds?”
He frowned. “Possible. But why two?”
“One through the throat, which, if it cut into the spine, would stop movement to the hands.”
“And kill him just the same.”
“But what if it didn’t? What if the first missed the brain stem, the part that would kill a man instantly, but severed the spine in such a way that it created a C4 injury, so that he was left gasping and paralyzed. How high was the gash in the tree?”
Sherlock nodded. “Yes. It was high up—perhaps too high for a thrust to Patel’s chest. Though I couldn’t see a second gash from where we were. But the blood could have obscured a second wound, yes?”
“What if the killer really knew aikido? What if he was following a form he’d learned with a sword in class?” Without thinking, I lifted my arm over my head, holding an invisible sword just as my mom had. “Do you think we could have a trained assassin . . . ?”
I let the ridiculous suggestion hang in the air before scowling at my own words. Sherlock seemed overly pleased by it, however.