The Case for Jamie

by Brittany Cavallaro

  I didn’t want to die. Not anymore.

  My box of wigs, my lockpicking kit, my recording equipment, my dress blacks, my casual blacks, the makeup lockbox that held all my other faces. All of it into the suitcase.

  I put on a set of old sweats I’d found in the chest of drawers. They were too big on me, but I did them up anyway. I’d leave fifty dollars, more than enough to replace them; I had three thousand dollars to burn. More than enough for a plane ticket across the pond and a dye job when I got there. Enough to pay the fee to change my name, to make myself disappear.

  I hauled my suitcase into the kitchen, enjoying the sound of my footsteps on the tile. My boots looked ridiculous with the sweats, I was sure, but after weeks of walking silently, I needed to hear myself move.

  “I’m charging your laptop, and the phones I found in your bag.” Leander was rummaging through the pantry, throwing dry goods in a pile. There was quite a lot of peanut butter. “Who lives here? I’ll reimburse them for the food, but I want to have supplies in case we need to hole up before our flight. Ideally, we’d leave late tonight, but if we miss our window, I don’t think it’s safe to try until three or four weeks have passed.”

  “Late tonight?” I asked. It was barely four o’clock in the evening. “Why not now? We can go straight to the airport, get the red-eye to London.”

  Leander had his back to me. He spread his hands out on the counter. “I’m going say good-bye to James Watson before I go, and you’re going to come with me.”

  “You’re what?”

  “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—”

  She stalked forward. “I used a .338 sniper rifle from the top of that elm. I’ve been practicing at the range in Eastbourne for years; take my picture to them, they’ll identify me. I’ve been away for the last two years—”

  The officer took an involuntary step back. “Backup,” he said into his radio. “Backup.”

  “—but I’ve been planning this all this time, because that man over there?” She jabbed at finger at August’s body. “He broke my heart. He lied to me. He proposed to someone else. He belonged to me, and he proposed to Bryony Downs, and I will be damned if I see him go. If I saw him go. Past tense. We’re past tense now.”

  The officer put his hands up, nodding, the way you would with a tiger in a center ring.

  “And this?” Holmes jerked her hand at me. “This pathetic, sniveling boy thinks that if he gets me out of this mess, he can have me, like I’m some prize to be won. Look at it. Look at me. How much is it worth to you now?”

  “DI Green,” the officer said gratefully, as the woman in the long coat approached, picking her way through the snow. “We have a confession—I haven’t cautioned her, it’s an excited utterance—”

  Her sharp eyes went from Holmes to me and back again. “Which one?” she asked.

  “Her.”

  Did I imagine it, the DI’s disappointment? “Fine,” she said. “Cuff her. Caution her. Then ask her again. You too, boy, come along.”

  Cautiously, the officer took Holmes by the arm. Despite everything, despite the way she’d all but spit blood in his face, he treated her like she was spun glass. He put the cuffs on her wrists, and the DI put a hand on her shoulder, and the three of them walked back to the car.

  I made to follow them. And then I saw that I had missed the paramedics taking August’s body away. From a distance I saw them hoist the gurney up into the back of the ambulance. They would take him to the morgue. They would cut off his clothes and lay him on a slab, like an object. Like a doll. I wondered who they’d call to identify him. Who was left to come and say his name?

  Beyond him, the police were putting Holmes into the car. They were taking their time with it, like they were paying her a courtesy. I knew she had worked with the Yard before, in London; she’d helped some detective whose name I’d forgotten solve the case of the Jameson diamonds. The one that I’d heard about, all the way in America. But we were far from London, now, and America too, and the police here would only know the Holmes name and not the girl who wore it.

  I hadn’t realized until I registered the wet on my knees, but I had bent down to kneel in the snow. I didn’t think I could walk. Time had gone slow; the police were milling around now, putting up tape, taking out a camera and tripod from the car to photograph the scene.

  It didn’t matter. I would just stay here, in a place where I didn’t have to think.

  Someone put a hand on my shoulder. “Come with me, boy,” he said, and I nodded and got up and followed. He led me around the house and to the cellar door, still open, the floor below it dirty and covered in straw. “Down,” he said.

  I turned to look at him. It was Holmes’s father. Alistair. “Why?” I asked him.

  “They want you to wait down here,” he said. “Come along.”

  He was kind about it, in practice. He gave me an arm to help me down the stairs, and once I was down there, he produced a chair—one from the dining room table, it looked like, from its high, carved back—and let me get myself settled before he pulled out the rope.

  I didn’t remember what he did with it. I only remembered the after, the rope wrapped around me like a snake.

  Looking at me, there, he steepled his fingers under his chin. “I’m sorry to have to do this,” he said. There was something in his face that had been snuffed out. “I’d much rather have my daughter here, with you. I think it would give you some comfort to have her beside you. Do you want me to put out a chair for her too? As a symbol?”

  “No,” I said. I had the vague sense that something was wrong. I wiggled a little against the rope, but it held.

  “Oh,” Alistair said, watching me. “You’re coming out of shock. That’ll make this harder.”

  Behind him, the wall was hung with weapons—a pair of fencing foils, a set of knives with the edges dulled. This was their practice room. I looked back at Alistair’s face. His eye was bloodshot and bleeding from where I’d kicked him, crawling out of the cellar. I had the insane urge to apologize.

  It was insane, that urge. Wasn’t it? But so was being bound up to a chair in the cellar of a house where your friend had just been murdered.

  “Will you let me go?” I asked him cautiously.

  “Do you have a compelling reason?” he asked. “I always made my children give me a compelling reason. Why do you think I’ve led you here? There are several pretty points to be made. Biblical. Isaac and Abraham. You could start with those.”

  “Okay,” I said. “How about, you’re a right bastard?”

  But Alistair had already lifted up the gas canister. That was when I started struggling in earnest.

  “Help!” I yelled. “Somebody help me! I’m down here!”

  “Make no mistake,” he said, “this wasn’t my first choice of action, but it’s the only logical one remaining. Lucien has no reason anymore to keep our—our financial situation a secret.”

  “Your financial situation,” I said, gasping, as he doused my legs in fuel. I hardly felt it. They had already been wet from the snow. “What the hell does that mean?”

  Now he was washing his own legs with the gasoline. “It means I’ve been taking payouts from the Russians. Convincing my friends at MI5 to be in certain places at certain times. Leaking the information. Letting them get picked off. Like chickens in a little house, waiting. There’s a song about it, I think.”

  I was the architect of some small international conflicts, he’d told me, on the day I’d met him. “I thought you worked for the Ministry of Defense.”

  “The MoD. I started there. I spent some time in Whitehall too. Home Office. MI5. I came back. Where on earth do you think my daughter learned her skill set? She certainly didn’t intuit her abilities. But it’s over. Do you know how Lucien Moriarty escaped his surveillance in Thailand?”

  I didn’t say anything.

&nb
sp; “No guesses? Pity. Do you know what my country does to traitors? Lucien Moriarty does. And when he found he couldn’t control my actions—when he couldn’t control my daughter’s actions—he stopped mincing words. I would call in the last of my favors. I would go out there myself, have a word with Milo, a drink, I would wait until he slept, and then call on those men loyal to me in his company.”

  “You have spies? In Greystone?”

  “Of course I do,” he said, impatiently. “Why on earth wouldn’t I? It pained me to do it, of course, to help that man. He’s a blunt instrument. Much like my daughter. I’d always thought she’d come to an untidy end, but at Lucien’s hands—

  “Well. I suppose it’s no use now. Lucien is ‘on the loose,’ as ridiculous as that sounds, and no matter what promises he made me I know he’ll leak the information anyway. What loyalty does a man like that feel? None. It’ll all come to light. The only real recourse I have is to erase the evidence. I, myself, am evidence. You’re evidence as well—and Leander, of course, and my wife, though those two are beyond my reach. This is the best I can do. The insurance policy should leave a nice nest egg for my son, if he ever decides to settle down.”

  From his pocket, he pulled a lighter. Not a metal-plated one, as I’d expected, something precious and small, but a plastic one, the kind you bought at the gas station.

  “No,” I said. “No, no—no, absolutely not—”

  “Or he could just buy himself another war,” Alistair said, squinting at the small fire in his hands. “I swear, that boy has more influence than I’d ever dreamed of—”

  I kicked my feet against the floor, skittering my chair back. I was yelling now, wordlessly, an endless stream of sound.

  And then something on the stairs, something hollow-sounding, a knocking, almost, and I wasn’t sure if I was seeing right when Hadrian Moriarty came around the corner. He didn’t say anything. He just grunted, and did something with his arms, and then Alistair Holmes was laid out cold on the floor.