A Question of Holmes

by Brittany Cavallaro

  It was what they’d done to Matilda Wilkes. It was what they’d done to me. Hide the problem away so you don’t have to look at her. Put her on a train. Bin her somewhere. Shove her off to another country, shove her six feet underground, and wait for her to rot.

  I was suddenly so very tired.

  “I’m not going to hurt him. August. I’ll leave him alone.”

  “Lottie,” Araminta said. “I never thought you would—”

  “He never saw me anyway.” I turned from her then. “You can find yourself a hotel, I’m sure.”

  “Charlotte—”

  Was that all she could say? My name?

  “I just want to go home,” I said, and it took me two tries to unbuckle my seat belt, but I did it. I did it with my own hands, and then I walked myself the five miles home.

  WATSON WAS WAITING FOR ME ON THE CURB OUTSIDE OUR flat. He turned his head when he saw me at the corner, and then looked straight ahead, his jaw clenched.

  “I’m locked out,” he said evenly, as I approached.

  “I know.”

  “Can we not do this?” he asked. “The whole, me dragging an apology out of you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry, Jamie. I don’t deserve you.”

  “You don’t.” He snuck a look at me. “How about an explanation, while you’re at it?”

  “I have one of those too,” I said, offering him a hand up. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Holmes,” he said, “are you okay? You seem a little . . . punchy.”

  “No,” I said, and laughed. “No! What’s that thing that Lena says? I am so not okay, Jamie. I am the opposite of okay. But don’t worry—we’ll go upstairs and sit down, and I’ll tell you all about it. And very, very soon, you’re not going to be okay too.”

  Twenty

  LATER, MUCH LATER, AFTER WE’D RAGED AROUND THE FLAT, after Watson had held a pillow so that I could punch it, after he’d cried in the bathroom where he thought I couldn’t hear, we put on sweatpants and went down to the twenty-four-hour off-license and bought as much ice cream as we could carry. At the last minute, Watson threw in a thing of Tunnock’s tea cakes so we could eat something on the walk home.

  It was only five minutes, but we were in desperate need of chocolate.

  “You don’t want to see him, do you? August?” I asked, as we settled back into bed.

  He considered it, his mouth full of marshmallow fluff. “Maybe eventually,” he said, swallowing. “If he stays there. He’d be stupid not to switch jobs every few months. He’s already taking such a risk, working in England.”

  I stared at the pint of gelato I’d balanced on my stomach. It was beginning to melt. “Does this mean I need to forgive Milo?” I asked. “What are the rules?”

  “There aren’t any,” Watson said, handing me a spoon. “I don’t plan on forgiving my father.”

  I nestled in to look at him. “Can you unpack that a little more?”

  “That,” Watson said, “is therapy-speak.”

  “I’ve been in therapy,” I reminded him.

  He sighed. “I keep thinking about my brothers. Mal isn’t even in kindergarten yet. Robbie was acting up before any of this started. And my dad is already doing the thing where he’s escaped across an ocean. Back in London, waiting for someone to take him in so he can start the whole cycle all over again: marriage, kids, running away. I don’t want to be a part of that.”

  “Is that fair?” I asked him.

  “Does it have to be?” he asked me. “It’s how I feel.”

  “You can call him,” I said, watching his brows knit, his eyes shutter. “Talk through it all. At which point, you can forgive him, or you can tell him to go to hell.”

  “Pass.”

  “Or you could never call him again.”

  Watson snorted. “There. A workable plan. Anyway, I thought you were the one asking for advice on Milo.”

  “Fine. Enumerate my options, please.”

  “You can call him. At which point, you can forgive him, or you can tell him to go to hell.”

  “You’re funny,” I told him. “Hilarious.”

  “Or you can never call him ever again. Or—”

  “Precisely. Fuck him.” I dug into my pint. It was mint chocolate chip, and it was a revelation.

  “There are other options, Horatio,” Watson laughed. “You don’t have to make up your mind tonight. You can change it six ways til Tuesday.”

  “Tonight,” I said, “I am going to fill myself with gelato until there is literally no room inside of me for feeling like shit.”

  “Cheers,” Watson said, and extracted another tea cake from its packaging. “Do you want to talk about something else?”

  “No,” I said, and affected a smile. “Not really.” And it was late, and soon enough Watson got up to shower, and when he climbed back into bed, he pulled me up against him and fell almost immediately asleep.

  If anything could make me feel better, it would have been that.

  And yet.

  I slipped out of bed, taking up my phone from the nightstand, and crept through the flat in the dark. I checked the locks on the door and the windows, drew the curtains. I poured myself a glass of water. I was stalling, I knew. I didn’t want to do it. It wouldn’t do me any good.

  And yet.

  I locked myself in Leander’s bedroom, at a far enough remove that I wouldn’t wake Watson. It was spare, tidy, the lair of a man who was always on the move. The only extravagance was the bed, piled high with duvets and pillows, its mattress pillow-soft. I flung myself down onto it, buried my face in the quilt. Someone in my family loves me, I told myself, inhaling. Someone in my family tells me the truth.

  I rolled onto my back, and I called my brother.

  He picked up on the first ring.

  “Lottie?” he said, thick with sleep. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

  I had it planned, an insouciant little snipe of a story—guess who I saw tonight, etc. What came out of my mouth was, “He’s alive. You bastard. He’s alive.”

  “Oh,” Milo said, and he sounded very, very awake. “I was wondering when I would get this call. Araminta?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Tell me how.”

  It was the same question I’d put to my aunt, but Milo, being Milo, answered it much more succinctly. “A blood capsule in the mouth. I fired into the hedgerow. He wanted to disappear, Lottie. It was the only way to make it work.”

  I breathed out through my mouth. “Jesus Christ, Milo.”

  “You didn’t honestly think that I shot him with a sniper bullet traveling at supersonic speed and he survived?” He scoffed. “I thought our father taught you better than that.”

  “I was in shock,” I said.

  “You were.” His voice gentled. “You didn’t even check him for a pulse, Lottie.”

  “He’d even told me . . .” August on the plane, flying back to Britain. I’ll change my name. I’ll disappear. They’ll never find me. “I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

  “Not then,” he admitted. “You’re in a fragile place, and last year . . . last year, you were a force of nature, and not one I could predict. This is still sooner than I’d like for you to know. I thought you could handle it eventually, when you—when things had calmed down.”

  I forced myself to keep breathing. A force of nature. So strange. So unnerving, and so young. “This is why you ran. Why you didn’t want to go to prison.”

  “I don’t kill without reason,” Milo said tartly. “And I don’t put my neck on the line for just anyone. I did it for you.”

  “For me,” I said.

  “I took August in for you. I gave him a job. A home. We became friends, Lottie, and we made a plan. And when you decided to run roughshod through Berlin, guns akimbo, acting like you suddenly knew best—yes, Lottie, you, the girl who’d stirred all this up to begin with—well, forgive me if I didn’t think to bring you in on it.” He sighed heavily. “Forgive m
e if I mourned the loss of both you and August in one fell swoop.”

  I shut my eyes. “Fine,” I said, because it was always this—love and disapproval in the same breath—and I had to escape it.

  He could tell I meant to hang up. Milo’s instincts had always been razor-sharp. “Wait,” he said. “Your case.”

  “What about it,” I said. It was pointless to ask how he knew. My brother, the spymaster.

  “Rupert Davies. He’s living with your Watson.” A shuffling sound, fingers on a keyboard. “Old family. Very old. Lots of history there.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “His grandfather was in Parliament. His father’s brother was an MP as well. For years. He’s only just retired. And . . . well, Lottie, on his staff—”

  “No,” I said, my brain speeding ahead. “Absolutely not.”

  “One of his staffers was a young Lucien Moriarty.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.” I heaved myself up and off the bed and began to pace. “That family is everywhere. They have their fingers in everything.”

  “And once you’re beholden to one, you are for life. At least that’s the case for Lucien. Did you know that the Davies family owns a small plot of land outside of Oxford proper? What do you think is buried there?”

  “It can’t be. Rupert’s the only one out of that whole wretched cabal who’s a decent person,” I said.

  Milo sighed. “Can you honestly tell me it’s a coincidence, that the only person in your program—your whole program, Lottie, I vetted them all—who has a connection to that family was assigned to live with your boyfriend?”

  I stopped at the door, my hand on the handle. “I can’t do this again,” I whispered. “I can’t have him in danger, Milo.”

  “Then walk away,” Milo said. “August did.”

  At that, I hung up the phone.

  It was three in the morning by the clock on my nightstand when I crept back in. I dressed as quietly as I could in the dark—Watson didn’t stir—and picked up the bag I’d packed when Leander and I had first moved into this flat, the bag I thought I wouldn’t ever need. In the kitchen, I looked over my uncle’s plants, by the window, and picked up the one I had placed there that afternoon.

  I sent three text messages, and then I was putting on my shoes at the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  Without looking up, I zipped my other boot. “New information,” I said, straightening the cuffs of my jeans. “I need to act.”

  “I’ll get my jacket,” he said.

  I looked up sharply. His hair was mussed, his feet were bare. “You’re not going,” I told him. He belonged back in bed. He belonged in a dorm room, in a typical summer, somewhere far, far away from me.

  “I’m not.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Holmes,” he said patiently. “If it’s too dangerous for me, it’s too dangerous for you. Are we really going to play this game?”

  I dragged my hands over my face. “The stakes just changed,” I growled. “I might need to make some . . . decisions.”

  “Stupid ones?” he asked, creeping forward. “Tell me you’re not going to go and make stupid decisions without me.”

  I laughed, despite myself, and I kept laughing despite the nervous hammer of my heart. “Watson. Go back to bed.”

  “No,” he said, and caught me around my waist. “I heard you might be in some need of a partner.”

  Twenty-One

  WE CREPT BACK TO ST. GENESIUS IN THE DARK. IT WAS late, far past curfew, and Watson had to hoist me over more than one fence before we made our way back to the quad. By the time we’d made it to his stairwell, I’d finished filling him in on everything I’d learned.

  “Do you think that Theo was lying?” he whispered as we lingered outside the door. “About Matilda calling him?”

  “My usual methods haven’t been working,” I said. It was something I hadn’t wanted to admit even to myself. “I’m able to tell if someone’s lying quickly, but . . .”

  “But everyone here’s an actor,” Watson said, putting it together.

  “Everyone. Even those that pretend they aren’t. Rupert can pretend all he’d like, but one doesn’t swoop in and steal the role of Hamlet if you’re talentless.” I reached for the doorknob. “Or if you’re working for a Moriarty.”

  Watson stopped my hand. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he said.

  I stared at him. “Watson. For all we know, Rupert is waiting at the top of those stairs with a cleaver.”

  “Right. Well,” he said, looking again at the door. “After you.”

  THE TEXTS HAD DONE WHAT I’D INTENDED—THEY WERE all waiting in their kitchen when we walked in. Gathered around the table in their pajamas, like a scene from a sitcom. There was a bowl of popcorn in the middle that none of them were eating.

  “It’s three thirty in the morning,” Anwen said, brushing off her hands. “I woke everyone up, like you told me to, but I hope you have a good reason for this.”

  Wordlessly, I unzipped my backpack. With gentle hands, Watson removed the tissue paper I’d tucked around the lithe, lovely potted plant, and handed it to me.

  I placed it on the table.

  An orchid. A yellow European orphys, to be specific. (Who knew you could buy them at the fancy grocery store?)

  “Watson found this outside your door,” I said, and waited for their reactions.

  Anwen wrapped her robe around herself with shaking hands. Theo shook his head, tightly, and reached out to touch one of its petals—then jerked his hand away. And Rupert? He looked as though he were about to cry.

  I sat, and in the guise of tying my shoelace, I took a quick but comprehensive look at their feet.

  Only one of them was wearing shoes.

  Watson said, “Last summer, the orchids were only delivered after something had happened. An accident. What happened tonight?”

  Theo shoved a lock of hair out of his eyes. He looked, suddenly, very tired. “Fuck all,” he said. “Watched a film. Ordered in a pizza. Pepperoni. We had way too much.” Beside him, Rupert nodded quickly, like a puppet. Anwen was staring at a point over my shoulder.

  Watson was hovering behind me, his hands on my chair. “Oh, amazing,” he said. “We went out to this posh restaurant for dinner with her aunt, and the food was all, like, mouse portions. Can I have some?” He walked over to the fridge and opened it, peering inside. “Oh. Is it somewhere else?”

  “I mean, we ate too much,” Rupert said. “I tossed out the box, it was huge.”

  “You didn’t just wait for housekeeping tomorrow? That’s nice of you,” Watson said, and pulled out the chair next to me, sitting down at an angle.

  “So you don’t know why the orchid was out there?” I asked. “Watson and I took it straight down to the police station. They photographed it. Took samples. We talked to DI Sadiq for a long time, and they let us bring it back here.”

  Wholly untrue, quite implausible. But to Rupert and Anwen and Theo, I was Charlotte Holmes, renowned detective.

  The rules didn’t apply to me.

  Rupert swallowed. “There wasn’t an orchid left after Dr. Larkin’s death,” he said. “Not that we know of. Maybe it’s from that?”

  “But why would it be here?” Anwen asked with a slight quaver. “That doesn’t make any sense. They’d send it to . . . her.”

  “She’s dead,” Theo said, turning on her. There it was, that revulsion. “What, are they going to plant one on her gravestone?”

  “She has family.” Anwen crossed her arms. “Friends. They could send one to them.”

  “Yes,” he said slowly, like she was an idiot. “That’s why it’s ridiculous that one showed up here. Jesus Christ, we had nothing to do with this!”

  The seams were beginning to show. It was the middle of the night. They were clearly lying about what they’d been doing. We’d interrupted a fight, or something worse.

  “You act like you know everything, Theo,�
�� Anwen said, standing. She cinched her dressing gown: an extravagant blue silk shot through with gold thread. “You were never like this before!”

  “Before what,” he said, staring up at her. On the table, his hand seized into a fist.

  “Before you started dating Matilda,” she said, taking a half step back. Her words came out in short bursts. She was scared. It was clear that my and Watson’s presence was the only reason she felt safe enough to speak. “Before you let her change you. You’d known her, what, two days? And suddenly you were calling her lady and letting her—letting her eat our food, and follow us around!”

  “She was my girlfriend,” Theo thundered. Beside him, Rupert shuddered and sank into himself.

  “No,” Anwen said tightly. “She was someone you could perform for. She acted like she had all this depth. Like she was some big, posh mystery. Well, I’m sorry—that was an act, Theo. She had secrets, but they weren’t the ones you thought.”

  Tell me a secret, Matilda had said in the video, lolling across the lawn on a blanket. Drawling her words extravagantly, drawing every eye, and then laughing it off the moment before she became ridiculous. And Theo, just days ago in the auditorium, staring at me, haunted. You’ve had this invitation to you. Like you want me to tell you all my secrets. At the time, it had made me furious.

  Now I thought I understood it.

  “What’s yours, Anwen?” I asked into the silence. Beside me, I heard Watson suck in a breath.

  She remembered I was there, then, her head whipping to the aside. Her long, wavy hair was all in snarls and knots. “I don’t owe it to anyone,” she said. “But—”

  “Tell Rupert,” Theo said, shoving back and standing. “I don’t care.” He made for the stairs.

  Like a child trying to tune out his parents’ fighting, Rupert was staring fixedly at the orchid in the middle of the table. “Anwen grew up in care,” he said. “In foster homes. Didn’t you? You and your twin sister.”