“Were you by any chance on the scene yesterday, Constable?”
“Yes, miss. I didn’t discover the bodies but I was among the men brought back from the station by Constable Wells.”
Holmes cradled her chin in the space between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand—her gestures, too, became more numerous, when she was in a mood to encourage the flow of information. “So you saw how they lay, the dead men, before they were moved?”
“Helped move them, too, after the photographer had been.”
She asked Constable Lamb to demonstrate for them how the men lay. He did, stretching himself out on the dust sheets, but not on the outlines themselves, for fear that the blood still hadn’t fully dried.
His imitation of Mr. Longstead in the latter’s final pose had Mr. Longstead lying faceup, one arm stretched out, the other over the wound on his chest. Mr. Sullivan, several feet away, had been more crumpled up, his legs folded, one arm caught under his body, his face almost but not entirely buried in a dust sheet.
“A pocket lantern was sitting nicely right here,” supplied Constable Lamb, patting the sill of the window under which Mr. Sullivan had lain, the one that looked toward number 31.
All this struck Lord Ingram as rather inexplicable. Judging from the way Mr. Longstead had fallen, the killer should have stood facing the door. But if he was to believe the pathologist, then for Mr. Sullivan to have staggered backward and hit the back of his head on the windowsill on his way down, the shot that killed him should have been fired from the direction of the door.
If Mr. Longstead had been murdered first, and if Mr. Sullivan had been in the room at the same time, wouldn’t he have run toward the door and been shot in the back, rather than in the forehead?
If Mr. Sullivan had been fired on first, then why had Mr. Longstead subsequently allowed the killer to march straight up to him and place the tip of the gun right against his chest? Or did Mr. Longstead arrive late enough not to witness the death of his nephew?
“Where was Inspector Treadles?” asked Holmes.
The bobby pointed at the windows facing the street. “They said he was crouched behind the bed, with his weapon drawn and aimed at the constables.”
Holmes went around the bed and lifted the sash of one of those windows. Her hands on the sill, she leaned out for a look.
“You are a little more agile than me, my lord,” she said, yielding her place. “Do you think you could have left the house via this window?”
They were three floors up, but the house had an ornate façade; below and above the windows protruded architraves that wended along the length of the entire row.
Without too much difficulty, he could hang on to the architrave just outside this window and drop himself onto the small balcony one floor below. From there, to reach the pavement walkway, he would need to leap clear of the fenced area in front of the house, which enclosed the descent to the basement service entrance. But that would not have posed too great a challenge.
Under normal circumstances.
“If I could see—not a problem. But wasn’t it all fogged up that night?”
Was that why Inspector Treadles had been at the window but had never left? Because it had been too dark and foggy to see his way down?
When Lord Ingram turned around, Holmes was inspecting the dust sheet that covered the bed. “Can I trouble you gentlemen to lift this cloth so I can have a look underneath?”
The men obliged.
He had to give her credit. She positioned the young constable on the far side of the bed, holding up the cloth with both arms above his head and therefore having no idea that she was going over the mattress with her magnifying glass.
He refrained from asking, as he and the bobby put the cloth back, what she’d been looking for.
Or whether she’d found it.
“May I make a quick sketch of this room?” she asked the bobby.
“I don’t see why not, miss.”
She was not what one would consider an accomplished artist; certainly she hadn’t the output of one. In an age when almost every lady could manage something with watercolor, he’d never seen her render as rudimentary a subject as a vase of flowers or a country landscape.
But she had the makings of a draftsman. When other tourists at the beach painted seascapes, she made blueprint-like drawings of sailing vessels and changing cabins. Once she’d sent him a sketch of a cross section of a nautilus shell, a beautiful image, at once organic and profoundly architectural. He still had it in a portfolio in the back of his dressing room at Stern Hollow, along with most of the letters he’d ever received from her.
Within a few minutes, Holmes had a decent diagram of the room, along with the location of the windows and the positions of the dead men. She put her sketchbook back into her large handbag. They walked out of the room and Constable Lamb began to go down the stairs.
“What of the attic, Constable?”
“Oh, that’s been locked again. Mrs. Coltrane, the housekeeper at number 31, asked Inspector Brighton if they could lock it up again. She said she felt too awful with it open and she was sure Miss Longstead would feel even worse. So Inspector Brighton said yes.”
“Well, then,” said Holmes, “I guess it’s time for Lord Ingram and I to visit number 31.”
* * *
Their hostess at number 31 was exceptionally beautiful.
Her African ancestry was evident in the light brown of her skin and the texture of her hair. Her European ancestry was equally evident in the color of her skin, and her golden green eyes.
Eyes that were puffy and red-rimmed from crying.
“Do please forgive us for intruding on your grief, Miss Longstead,” said Lord Ingram.
Miss Longstead gripped her handkerchief, black-bordered but still stark white against the black parramatta silk of her mourning gown. “I wish I were better able to master my emotions, but it’s been a terrible shock losing my uncle. I can’t believe he’s gone.”
“We are very sorry,” said Holmes.
“Today I walked all the way to the door of his study—to say something to him—before I remembered that he is no longer with us. Even now I expect him to walk in and demand to know what is all this ridiculousness.”
By “ridiculousness” she no doubt referred to the black drapes that now covered windows and mirrors, making the drawing room look not only somber, but slightly macabre. The woodsy scent of fresh evergreens still lingered in the air, but the Christmas tree—and all other decorations put up for either Christmas or her coming-out party—had disappeared.
Miss Longstead wiped away fresh tears. “I’m sorry. I’m not typically so useless.”