“God help me, Charlotte, don’t argue with me on this—”
“No. I categorically refuse. That man cannot keep a secret to save his life, and the last thing I need is for him to see me when his son—his son—I can’t.”
My uncle bowed his head. “You can do this one last thing for me.”
“This last thing—”
“Dammit,” he said, “I am not leaving you alone in this flat with that man loose in this city.”
I bit my lip. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.” I watched him breathe out.
“If it’s important to you—”
“You should probably change,” he said. “James called it a wedding reception.”
I dragged myself back to the bedroom. At home, in Sussex, we dressed for dinner, but that was an exercise I’d never taken seriously. It was another disguise, one masquerading as the self. Long skirts my mother bought me, elegant and expensive, and dark lips to match their dark colors. Done up like that, I looked years older than I was.
Here, I had nothing that didn’t belong to Rose the fashion vlogger, and I didn’t want to wear her right now.
I flipped through DI Green’s sister’s closet, wondering idly if she’d have anything that would fit me. Cardigans. Blouses with high necks and buttons on the cuffs. And then a row of cocktail dresses. Two were in my size; the second of those was red. I shed my clothes and put it on and walked over to the mirror.
Watson had once described me as a knife. It’s true that I have no “curves.” If we are speaking geometrically, I am a line. This dress didn’t change the fact of my body, but then I didn’t need it to. I took a pair of shoes from the closet and a silver evening bag from the hook on the closet door. I stuffed it with necessities. We would return for our suitcases if we could; if we couldn’t, I would make do with what I had.
“Charlotte,” Leander was saying, almost as though he were being strangled.
I found him bent nearly double over a mobile phone on the kitchen counter.
“What happened?” I asked, panting, and then I really got a look at him. “No. You’re not—you’re laughing. Why do you have my old mobile?”
He’d said he was charging both of my phones. I’d been keeping the one I’d used at Sherringford at the bottom of my bag, turned off so that the GPS couldn’t be used to track my location. It was always a good idea to have a spare.
It was almost always a good idea to have a spare.
“It says you haven’t booted it up in eleven months,” my uncle said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “Eleven months! In that time, you received zero messages. Zero texts. Until today. Until quite literally just now.”
I snatched my phone from his hand.
Four new texts:
Holmes.
Holmes.
Charlotte.
Where are you?
Nineteen
Jamie
Last year, Sussex Downs
CHARLOTTE HOLMES PUT HER HANDS TO HER FACE. SHE was crying. “Milo,” she said. “Milo. Milo, no. No, you didn’t.”
In the distance, a car started up. There was yelling, someone crying out, Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, and then wheels on loose gravel. When I turned to look, a lone figure, a man, was standing in front of the Holmeses’ dark estate. Like someone locked out of their home, or a drifter looking for a place to spend the night.
Holmes’s mother was gone. Hadrian and Phillipa—where were they?
“I—” Milo was shaking. He held the gun out in front of him. “Is August—and Hadrian—God, Lottie, I can’t do this anymore. Lucien disappeared. He disappeared. There’s no footage, no intel, no . . . I can’t keep doing this. How could I, and succeed?”
The master of the universe, asking us this question.
Holmes wrenched the rifle from his hands. Without looking down, she stripped the gun of its clip and dropped it all on the ground.
“Leander’s done,” she said. “August is dead. Is this it for you too? Are you leaving the two of us here to pick up this mess?”
“It’s your mess,” Milo said. “Isn’t it time you did?”
I was only half-hearing it, what they were saying. In the distance, the ocean raged louder. The cold bit at my hands. August Moriarty was spread-eagled, and it wasn’t a dream, I could see the outline of his coat in the snow. I couldn’t look at them, either of them, Holmes or Holmes, two faces of the same terrible god staring out in opposite directions. Passing their judgments. Firing their guns. And the figure in front of the house—he was gone, the field empty now, and the ocean was deafening.
But it wasn’t the ocean. It was sirens, a cacophony of sirens, and by the time the red and blue lights reached the top of the drive, Holmes and I were alone.
Milo had gone. One moment he was there, and the next there weren’t even footprints, as though he’d erased himself where he stood. I looked for them, for a sign. There were animal prints, deer and fox, the low slide of a rabbit, a dog’s muddy paws. Even in the winter this was a place that breathed with life.
“Watson,” Holmes was saying.
The man lingering near the house was looking at us. He held up a hand and then pointed his finger, like a teacher calling on a student. Then he pulled his coat more firmly around himself and walked away from us toward the house.
“Watson,” Holmes said. “Watson. Jamie. Look at me.”
I wrenched my eyes toward her. I felt slow, and heavy, as though someone were holding me down underwater. The up-down-up-down wail of the siren beat against us like a current. It was an ambulance. Someone must have called one. Was there a house close enough to hear the gunshot and call 999?
I almost asked Holmes. But she was looking at me like I was a cancerous growth she needed to have removed.
“What now?” I asked, half-laughing. “What’s the plan?”
Her eyes were always colorless. Now they were cold. “I need you to take the fall,” she said, turning to look at the paramedics jumping out the back of the ambulance. “I need you to confess.”
Had it been any other day, any other situation, I might have agreed. I might have flung myself into it after her. Maybe it was desperation for connection. Maybe it was delusion. Folie à deux. Maybe for the last three months I’d had a death wish, throwing myself off bridges, not caring if any net hid at the bottom.
Not this time.
“That’s what I’m here for, then. To take the blame.”
“Watson—”
“That’s the big reason behind me coming along with you. I’m the fall guy. The person you pinned it on. You’ve had weeks. Weeks, Holmes, to explain! If you’d said anything at all. Anything! I could have changed your mind! But you maneuvered me here just to—”
She whirled on me. “This is love,” she snarled, her pupils pinned, her eyes all dangerous light. “This is what love looks like.”
“Then no one’s ever loved you,” I said, “including me.” The paramedics—I would get their attention. There was a police car right behind them, men pouring out of its doors. A detective, unmistakable in her plainclothes and sunglasses, a radio in her hand.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Hey! I need help!”
“Watson,” she said, grabbing my arm, “what are you doing?”
“Telling the truth.”
She didn’t have an answer for that.
I shook her off and ran to meet the approaching officers. “There was a man here—he’s tall, he has glasses, he had a rifle with a scope. He shot our friend. He’s still out here somewhere.”
The officer looked past me, to August’s cooling body. “Where?” he demanded. “Which way did he go?”
I pointed helplessly at the copse of trees where he’d been hidden, hoping they’d find something I’d missed, something to point the way. The policeman took off at a run, the others behind him.
Holmes stared after them, wild-eyed. “Wait,” she said, “wait. Wait. I did it.”
It was soft. So soft that only the officer at the back stopped, and turned to see.
“I did it,” she said again. “It was me.”
“Miss,” he said, a bit pleading. “I know that isn’t true—”