Unexpectedly, he pulled me into a hug.
“Home stuff?” he asked when he let me go. I nodded. “Fuck them.”
There wasn’t much to say to that, so I didn’t.
His eyes roved over the bathroom counter, over my cosmetics kit. With one snakelike hand, he pulled out the bottle of Adderall. “You a fan?”
I considered. “Not particularly.”
“You’re a weird kid,” he said, and emptied a few of my pills into his palm. “Listen. I’ll trade you. We’re having a party later—me and Basil and Thom. You’re a little young, maybe, but if you want you can come along. Want a sampler?” He dug a bottle out of his backpack and shook out two little white pills. “Here,” he said, giving one to me, “cheers,” and tossed his back.
I hesitated.
“It makes all that shit you’re feeling go away,” he said, and I swallowed it down so quickly that he started laughing.
When I returned to the guesthouse at midnight, my father asked me where I’d been. He trusted me to provide details. I provided them: Quentin and I had eaten pizza in the gymnasium together while he talked about his girlfriend, Tasha. I’d always liked the name Tasha. It was the first time I’d successfully lied to my father.
In actuality, once I arrived at the “party,” I was ignored. Basil and Thom had drunk a bottle of tequila between them, then spent the night retching in the restroom. After I cut Quentin’s hair, Quentin had practiced table tennis for hours with a laserlike focus I hadn’t seen on him before. As for me, I wandered down to the school swimming pool and read my encyclopedia Q–R with my feet in the water. It was de rigueur, except for the part where I’d swapped my bottle of pills for Quentin’s.
His I actually liked.
TWO YEARS LATER I TOLD MILO, IN A FIT OF HONESTY, THE real events of the night. The handwritten apology I received from Quentin was done in such a shaky hand that I could only assume that Milo had been holding a knife to his neck.
This was love. This is what love looked like.
AT 4 A.M., I PUT THE KETTLE ON. I RAN THE NECESSARY information back through my favorite American business database (subscriber-only) and took down the results, then filtered them, then filtered them again. I spent some time looking at Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood on Google Maps. Then, at four thirty, I phoned the Yard.
There was a certain pleasure in calling Scotland Yard and asking to speak to the detective inspector on duty. I was an official source. I was listed in the records as such. That knowledge was pleasurable too, though I didn’t put too much stock in such institutions.
“Stevie,” DI Green said today. “Good to hear from you.”
“Hello,” I said. Stevie was my code name, as in Nicks. It was why Green was saved in my phone as “Steve.” The detective inspector had a fondness for seventies folk rock and a certain cheesy sense of humor. “I’m settled in.”
“Excellent. You have a report to make?”
I suppose I had a soft spot for Lea Green.
I’d known her for some time. She was the detective from the famous Jameson incident, the one where, if the papers were to be believed, I’d drawn a crayon map to lead the police to the stolen emeralds. I often wished I could go back and take a pair of scissors to that day, like I was removing scenes from a play. So what if the play was my life.
Really the worst-case scenario I could imagine, had I never gotten involved with the Jameson case, would be that my father had overlooked me entirely. That I turned out to be an ordinary girl, studying for my A levels somewhere in London, on hard burn to get into Oxbridge for chemistry. Instead, I’d been a child with a famous detective’s last name, hiding behind a sofa while her father talked case notes with New Scotland Yard. All because his famous last name had given him such delusions of grandeur that he styled himself a tiny crime-solving king.
Green had been studying detective fiction at Cambridge before joining the force. Hence, her coming to my father. (I often thought she and Watson would get on quite well. He always liked formidable women.) I’d been informing for her ever since, though the operation she and I were running right now was only half legal, at best. She trusted me. Whether or not that was wise was her own business.
“I confirmed the Peter Morgan-Vilk identity,” I told her. “If you have any sway with customs, I’d pull that passport. Morgan-Vilk won’t miss it, but Lucien Moriarty will.”
“Good.” She was typing. “Your uncle came up with this information, then?”
For months I’d been telling her I was shadowing Leander as he’d been investigating Lucien Moriarty. I hadn’t been speaking with DI Green every day; I had reached out sparingly, at odd hours, to provide her with intel I had “gleaned” from my uncle’s “case notes.”
“We’ve split up,” I told her. “It was my birthday present. I’m striking off on my own.”
“Right,” she said. “Congratulations, girl. What will you do now?”
“Look into certain insinuations Morgan-Vilk made about Lucien’s political career,” I said. “I have some thoughts about Michael Hartwell’s daughter—”
“Stevie.” Green huffed a laugh. “The answer is, ‘I’m going to Disneyland.’”
“What?”
“Nothing—look, I’ll pull the Polnitz and Hartwell passports too.”
“I’m going to look into their provenance anyway. I imagine Moriarty didn’t choose them out of a hat. He’s been careful to avoid assuming identities of the deceased, for whatever reason—except for this Polnitz identity. But the others I don’t understand.”
“Leave me to figure it out. I need you to go to Greenpoint today.”
“Greenpoint,” I said. It had been in my plan, and still I disliked being ordered there.
“You could hide a little of your disdain for me, you know. Might take you further.”
I opened my mouth to apologize, and instead said, “I saw Watson yesterday. He didn’t see me.”
DI Green exhaled. If she didn’t know the full extent of my and Watson’s history, she did see firsthand how everything went to shit. “How are you feeling about it?”
It was a simple question. Why did it always make me want to bite the person asking it? “I didn’t sleep well. Is something in particular happening in Greenpoint today?”
“There’s a shipment due for Connecticut from the gallery. It leaves at close.”
Whatever mawkish emotion I was feeling was gone, erased as though with a damp cloth. “Where? Where in Connecticut?”
“Stevie—”
“Where?” I loathed asking questions to which I already knew the answer.
“You aren’t to be on the truck. You aren’t to be anywhere near the truck, do you understand? No. Lorries. You’re on intel only. I don’t want you to be seen by them. I don’t want you to be—”
“Saying something five different ways doesn’t make it more effective—”
“—or any of your Lara Croft bullshit, I mean it, Stevie—”
“Fine,” I said.
A pause. “I should go,” she said with a huff. I could hear someone—her supervisor?—in the background. “You didn’t send me that photo last night.”
Of my pills. I’d fallen asleep. “Sorry.”
“Doesn’t cut it. Send it now.” Green put the phone down.
I supposed I was going to Greenpoint, then. The ease with which I had taken her advice surprised me. Certainly, the DI had given me a good reason, but in the past, that hadn’t had been enough.
I knew, at this point, that I should have a handler. The briefest of glances at my last operation would tell you that.
If you’d said anything at all, Watson had said to me that day on the lawn. Anything. I could have changed your mind! But you maneuvered me here just to—
This is love, I’d told him. This is what love looks like, and then I’d left him to the wolves.
Yes, I needed a handler. If DI Green wasn’t the exact right fit, she was a beginning.
I took my stash out
of my coat lining. I photographed it. I made another cup of tea, put on my Rose-from-Brighton kit, topped it off with flat-black, cat-eye sunglasses, and went off to buy myself some Kevlar.
The man in the body armor shop was incredulous. “What—”
“It’s for my Fashion Institute admissions portfolio,” I said impatiently. “I’m putting together work that’s a commentary on personal security. It has a lot of tulle.”
“Tool?”
“Tulle. T-u-l-l-e. Like a tutu? Attached to a vest.” I shrugged my bag from one shoulder to the other. “Here are my measurements. I’m going to model it myself.” When he continued staring at me, I stomped my foot. “Honestly. How hard is this to understand?”
Thankfully the shop was empty; I was having to make a scene. At least I was providing this clerk with exactly the sort of girl he expected to be buying his wares, and so he’d forget me soon enough. Had I arrived as myself and quietly made my purchase, I would be the sort of oddity he would remember.
“It’s your money.” Shrugging, he turned to pull the least expensive model from the wall.
“No. I want the Byzantium Express Level 3X-A. With the moisture wicking if you have it.”
“You’ve done your research,” he said, obnoxiously surprised.
I blinked at him. “With the wicking,” I repeated.
“Wicking?”
“It’s a high-stress interview.”
The man hesitated. “That one’s seven hundred dollars, kid.”
Which would bring me down to two hundred total. Still—“I like the color,” I told him. “It goes with the skirt. Can you wrap it for me, please?”
On an empty subway platform, I did up the vest over my chemise and under my oversized blouse. I tucked my blond hair into the bag and, with quick fingers, undid the curls I’d made this morning to stick the wig’s pins into. I was myself again. Other than the ringlets.
As the train came, I found myself checking the fastenings on my vest. Was I nervous? Perhaps I was. This wasn’t an errand I’d been looking forward to. It had been number four on the list, after all.
But then, I had to see Hadrian Moriarty at some point. No better time than now.
Nine
Jamie
TEN MINUTES TURNED OUT TO BE . . . A LITTLE LONGER than ten minutes. My father replied, I appreciate the dramatics, but I have to finish my monthly sales report. We can fetch you after school tomorrow.
It was fine. I needed time to gather my thoughts, anyway. I begged uncooked rice and a garbage bag from the cafeteria, then settled my turned-off and upside-down laptop inside. The internet had told me the rice would soak up the liquid. I was dubious. The inside of the bag smelled like weird tapioca pudding.
With my laptop marinating beside me, I sat down to make a timeline. It wasn’t a complicated one. Whoever was doing this didn’t think they needed to make it complicated.
Their loss.
Deleting my physics presentation? It happened in the thirty minutes between my leaving the dorm and coming back. My father had dropped me in front of my building, so it’s possible that someone clocked my arrival—but they would have had to then watch for me to leave again, and to know I wasn’t going to creative writing club as usual. Mrs. Dunham had seen me enter and leave, but she hadn’t known when I’d return. Sure, maybe she’d immediately broken into my room and deleted my files, but—
My stomach curdled. Mrs. Dunham. I refused to believe it.
And anyway, it was beyond belief to imagine that she would have emailed Elizabeth and told her to come to my room, much less sneak in herself and sabotage my laptop while I was sleeping. It took someone with brass balls to do something like that, and while I didn’t doubt Mrs. Dunham had courage—she was the house mother to a hundred teenage boys; I was sure she’d seen some of the grossest scenes imaginable—I couldn’t imagine her being so stonehearted or so cruel. Not even for Lucien Moriarty’s money.
Because that’s what it came down to, wasn’t it? Who could be bribed. Unless we had another fanatic on our hands like Bryony Downs, made from Holmes’s bad behavior, the culprit had to be someone being paid off by the Moriartys. It made it impersonal. Gross. It maybe made it easier to solve.
Notes, then. A plan.
I would start by apologizing to Elizabeth. She deserved it. It was just dumb luck that she’d shown up while I was having that nightmare; no one could have counted on that. More likely they had snuck in to ruin my laptop, found me sleeping, and then sent Elizabeth that email, urging her over to take the blame. Muddy my understanding of the situation.
I had no illusions about my own importance. In the end, this was a person who was after Charlotte Holmes, and I was the means to that end. That had to be my working assumption, right? Me being the collateral damage.
Either that, or I’d made some brand-new enemies at Sherringford without even knowing.
I rubbed at my eyes for a minute.
Right. I had to toss my room for bugs. It only took ten minutes; the room was small, and last year I’d learned the most effective way to dismantle my dorm furniture. I slit the mattress, felt down the closet, checked the shelves, looked behind the mirror. I didn’t find anything.
Why on earth had they called in Elizabeth? Had they known I would flip out and blame her? It was more likely that they’d just hidden the bug well. I put a pin in that for now.
The next question was how they got in, and when. I could check the keycard records for the dorms. We each had one, a heightened security measure after Dobson’s death that allowed the school to track who entered every building and when. You beeped in. The problem was, you didn’t need to beep out. Someone could have been waiting in the dorm all day, waiting. There were security cameras, though. Holmes would know how to tell if the footage had been tampered with. And would someone go through all the trouble to do that? Wasn’t there an easier way to strike at Holmes? What was their motive, bringing me into this? You don’t need to know the motive, Holmes would say. You need the method. You need a pair of eyes. What you need is to get out of your head, Watson—
I shut my notebook.
I was thinking about it—her—like we were in this together. We weren’t. This was just blowback from last year. From my former life. I’d solve this, and be done. Still, it wouldn’t happen tonight. I had homework to do, and I didn’t even know what it was, thanks to my ill-advised, relationship-ending nap.
Lena was in my AP English class. It was a place to start.
Homework? I texted her. Slept through class.
Her response was instantaneous. Not talking to you you made a butt of yourself to Elizabeth and you didn’t apologize?? Jesus Jamie.
Elizabeth. Who I’d blamed for all of this. Who I was too ashamed to think about right now.
I’ll talk to her tomorrow. Giving her time to cool down.
It was a lie, and Lena knew it. You’re a coward. I’m not doing you any favors, she texted back.
It was fair. Still, I rolled my eyes. Elizabeth was the only sophomore in upperclassman housing, and she lived in Lena’s dorm. Carter Hall housed the school-wide security team on the ground floor. Elizabeth’s room shared a wall with them. Living there was the only way her parents would let her come back to school after last year, and who could blame them?
I knew that if I went to Lena’s, I wouldn’t be leaving until she (and probably a squad of security guards) personally supervised my apology to my girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend?
Oh, God. I’d fucked up.
Experimentally, I pulled the laptop out of its rice bath. It made a sloshing sound. I stuck it back in.
My phone buzzed. I’m throwing a party tonight and if you bartend and apologize to Elizabeth and suck generally less I will give you the assignment. There was a pause. Then she sent a knife emoji.
Today was not going as planned. I’d might as well just roll with it.
THAT WAS HOW I FOUND MYSELF AT AN UTTERLY DEBAUCHED party in the access tunnels on a Tuesday night.
&nb
sp; The tunnels that ran below Sherringford were built back when the school was a convent, and nuns needed a way to walk to prayers in the freezing months without freezing themselves. When the school purchased the property back in the early nineteenth century, they’d walled the tunnels off. It was only in the last fifty years or so that they’d put them back into use. Now they were used by the maintenance staff.
Also by the school drug dealers, couples looking for places to hook up, the deputy head of school looking for a safe place to stash his thousand-dollar reclining bike, the rugby team during Spirit Week to lock freshmen overnight in the boiler room, and Charlotte Holmes, back when she was looking for a place to practice her fencing.
Tonight, the party was in a cavernous room midway between Carter and Michener Halls, far enough away from either to be heard. That was the idea, anyway. Lena had apparently weaseled the access code from a janitor (“Weaseled how, exactly?” Tom had asked) and sent out the invitations.
Mine hadn’t exactly been an invitation, I guess. Usually I wouldn’t be cradling eight designer shampoo bottles filled with vodka in a dark room somewhere underneath the quad at ten o’clock. On a Tuesday.
It was the Tuesday part that was really getting to me.
“Would it be better if it was on a Friday?” Mariella was asking. She seemed genuinely curious, but it was hard to gauge sarcasm over the thumping EDM.
The room Lena had picked was for Winter Wheel storage. Students paid forty bucks to keep their bikes underground through the snowy months; come March, they’d be hauled back out again. The brick walls were hung thick with them. They deadened the sound. Right now, the room was only half-full of people, but knowing Lena like I did, we’d be at capacity by midnight. Already there was a game of poker happening in the corner, a kind of bastardized five-card stud. Holmes would have been horrified.
“Are we celebrating something?” I asked Mariella. She was setting up a strobe light. I had no idea how or why she had a strobe light.
“Tom got into Michigan,” she said. “Which is shocking to everyone, including Tom.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said, coming up behind us. I didn’t know how he could eavesdrop over the bass.
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