I didn’t expect Mallory would answer, and he didn’t. Though he did look at me oddly.
“Who was giving her medicine to bring her back? You know, right?”
“Why do you want to know?”
I studied Mallory’s eyes for a few moments. “I think that person may be in trouble.”
Mallory looked like he was about to answer when the door swung open and a rather triumphant-looking Evan Golding practically jogged inside the room.
“Let’s go,” Evan said, gesturing toward the still-open door.
I didn’t get up at first, half expecting Mallory to argue.
Evan smiled. “She’s free to go, isn’t she, Inspector?”
“How exactly am I free to go?”
“New evidence,” Mallory said, trying his hardest to seem nonchalant to the words, I was sure.
“And what exactly is this new evidence?” I asked.
Evan’s grin was back. “You’ve got an alibi.”
? ? ?
Evan led me out into the main office and right up to where Sherlock was standing. “It’s all down to him, I’m afraid.”
“As promised,” Lock said, gesturing to the desk next to us.
“Lily?” I hadn’t even noticed she was there. Lily Patel was sitting next to a DS at one of the many desks in the room, studying a white piece of paper carefully. She looked up at me and nodded slightly before going back to her reading. “What is she doing here?”
Sherlock smiled as Evan filled in the details. “She’s giving a statement about spending the night at your house. This lad talked her into it, of course.”
“But she left in the early morning.”
“She did,” Lock said, and his eyes brightened. “At four oh-nine a.m., exactly.”
“You have the exact time?”
“I have video,” he said, holding up his tablet. He tapped the screen and turned it toward me, and I watched a time-coded video play that looked as if it came from the cab’s black-box camera. It pulled up to the road where Lily was standing, looking like she’d spent the night vomiting in my house. She got into the cab, and it pulled away before Lock stopped the video. “That’s how I knew she didn’t do it.”
“Yes, yes. We already knew that.”
But Sherlock wasn’t done.
“It’s also how I got the idea to look for this.” The next tap on his screen started up another black-box video, though this one didn’t look to be from a taxi. The car didn’t move at all, just sat there, with the camera pointing down Baker Street. I could just make out our front stoop at the very edge of the frame, and only knew it was ours, really, because I watched Lily coming out of the house, waiting for the taxi, then watched the taxi pull away.
After about twenty seconds of nothing else happening on screen, I looked up at Lock. “The point of all this nothing?”
“Nothing is exactly the point.” He tapped to fast-forward and other than a couple of cars, a bus, and a few pedestrians, nothing happened on the street for at least ninety minutes.
“No doors opened,” I said, suddenly breaking through the mind-numbing effects of twenty-four hours in a police interview room. Then I smiled. It was rather brilliant, actually. Not that I’d ever feed Sherlock’s ego with that kind of compliment.
“Bloody brilliant,” Evan said. “I never would’ve thought to look for a parked car with a black box to prove you didn’t leave. That’s—”
“Actually rather obvious,” Lock said.
“You really need to stop telling people that,” I said.
Lock quirked a brow. “But there’s more.”
Just as the sky started to lighten a bit, a rather large shadow tromped up the street, stopping just outside our stoop. With slow, labored steps, the form moved up toward our front door, and then half of it was dumped on our top step.
“It’s too far away to see who it is, but it proves it wasn’t you,” Evan said. “And that’s all we care about, right?”
I exchanged a look with Lock, and then answered Evan’s question with one of my own. “What does all this do to my father’s murder case?”
He seemed surprised at the question. “I don’t imagine it’ll do much, really.”
“They’ve found the sword and a witness that caught someone else trying to get rid of it. No one could use that to spring him?”
“Well, I suppose that depends on the level of the other evidence they have against him.”
Not much, was the answer to that. Purely my supposition, of course, as I wasn’t privy to the police files. But my father had acted like I was the key witness against him when we’d had our little breakfast visit, which meant they couldn’t have had much other evidence. “Could you find out the status of his case for me?”
“I could ask around.”
“Why?” Lock asked me, suddenly on alert.
“I need to know if they’re going to release him. And if they are, I need to know when.”
Evan swung his briefcase a bit. “Sure. I can find out.”
I offered him the best smile I could, and said, “Thanks. Call as soon as you know anything.” I patted at my pockets and remembered that Alice had my mobile. “If Alice answers, tell her. I have to go home right away.”
Chapter 25