They continued the tour. After the ground floor, they went up to the first floor, which had also been used for the party. And then came the true objective of the tour: Mr. Longstead’s rooms, which, according to Mrs. Coltrane, had been left as they were, when he descended the stairs to host his niece’s coming-out soiree.
The master of the house had a floor to himself—as did Miss Longstead, who occupied the floor above his. His bedroom was tidy enough, but his study . . .
Charlotte was not particularly neat in terms of her possessions. The canopy rails of her bed usually had a petticoat or a chemise thrown over them. An empty plate or two typically graced her desk, as a woman at work required sustenance. And her nightstand always bore a jumble of items, because when she was already in bed at night, comfortably ensconced, she didn’t want to have to scramble off again for a dictionary, a pair of scissors, or the nice bonbons Miss Redmayne had brought back from Paris.
Mr. Longstead’s study, however, made Charlotte feel that she herself must be as meticulous as those servants who assured uniform distance between plates and water goblets with a measuring tape.
On his shelves, the space between the tops of the books and the bottom of the next shelf were stuffed with more books. When there was still room left, it was crammed with notebooks and dossiers. And the overcrowding was not limited to one or two areas; entire walls of shelves were packed, jammed, and wedged this way.
But at least those items had been packed, jammed, and wedged to conform to the general shape of the shelves. The desk, however, had been eaten.
At least that was one explanation for the mountainous entity that stood at the center of the study, with teeth made of lawyerly letters and thick volumes on ornithology and chemical analysis for feet.
“Mr. Longstead had his own way of organizing his papers,” Mrs. Coltrane hastened to explain. “He knew what he had and where everything was to be found.”
Minds worked very differently—Charlotte knew that better than most. But even so she found it a little difficult to credit Mrs. Coltrane’s assertions. She cleared her throat. “Do you know where anything is in here, Mrs. Coltrane?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” said Mrs. Coltrane apologetically. “No one else was to touch anything on or within three feet of his desk. Even if something had fallen off, we were to leave it alone.”
And so many things had fallen off they hid the desk from every direction.
“Well,” said Charlotte, “he is no more and I must go through his things.”
She rolled up her sleeves. Mrs. Coltrane, after a moment of astonished paralysis, joined her.
There were newspapers, some recent, some from the summer. There were communications with solicitors and agents. Personal correspondences. A number of books. There was even a photographic album, featuring a much younger Mr. Longstead, posing before a factory in various stages of completion, often alongside another young man, whom Mrs. Coltrane confirmed to be Mr. Mortimer Cousins, Mrs. Treadles’s late father.
“Are these the items typically found on his desk?” Charlotte asked Mrs. Coltrane, gesturing at this immense multiplicity, now spread on the floor, taking up almost all the room in the study.
Mrs. Coltrane was still a little glassy-eyed from the endeavor. “I’m afraid I can’t be sure, since we aren’t permitted to tidy the desk itself. And there were always several layers of everything, so I haven’t the slightest idea what was in the bottom layers.”
“What if he left some half-eaten food on his desk? No one could touch that either?”
“Oh, he would never do that to us,” said Mrs. Coltrane fervently. “He never ate in here.”
No small mercy, that.
The first desk drawer Charlotte opened was just as stuffed. Stationery, engraved pens, pencils, more letters, coins and pound notes, among dozens of other categories.
“Good gracious,” exclaimed Mrs. Coltrane. “I’m glad I never saw the insides of his drawers. It would have given me palpitations of anxiety.”
Even Charlotte felt the urge to flee. She’d seen Lord Ingram’s private spaces, when she’d investigated the case at Stern Hollow. They’d been uncluttered and exceptionally shipshape. She would like to lie on the carpet of his dressing room, and do nothing but wallow in its orderliness for a span of twelve hours, at least.
In the next drawer, Charlotte unearthed lug nuts, a handful of acorns in a yellowed envelope, and a silk drawstring pouch filled with smoothly tumbled pebbles of agate and tourmaline.
Stowed with the semiprecious stones she found a brooch made of gold-mounted jet, polished and gleaming. At its center was a glass-covered cavity that held a lock of hair, the individual filaments tied together with golden thread.
A piece of mourning jewelry.
The back of the brooch, which should have had the name and the dates of birth and death of the departed, or at least initials and the date of death, had been filed to remove the identifying information.
Charlotte handed the brooch to the housekeeper. “Have you ever seen this item before, Mrs. Coltrane?”
Mrs. Coltrane turned it over in her hands. “No, I’ve never seen it. I have seen this pouch of stones before—I believe Miss Longstead gave it to him quite some time ago.”
At Charlotte’s request, Mrs. Coltrane took the brooch to Miss Longstead, only to return shaking her head. “Miss Longstead says this is the first time she has ever come across this brooch.”
“Have you any idea who this might belong to?”
Mrs. Coltrane shook her head again. “The hair inside is dark blond. Of those close enough to Mr. Longstead in life that he would have wanted to keep a lock of their hair after death, I can only think of old Mr. Cousins as having had hair like this. But that was when he was young. His hair, or what remained of it, turned white years before he died.”
They persevered through the rest of the drawers. Afterward, as they escaped Mr. Longstead’s study at an unladylike speed, Charlotte asked Mrs. Coltrane whether she knew where Mr. Longstead kept his set of keys to number 33, which Charlotte had not seen either in his desk or as part of the evidence collected by the police. Mrs. Coltrane didn’t.
She also didn’t know whether Miss Longstead would know, but implored Charlotte not to trouble her mistress again so soon. “Please let her have a little respite from all this talk of the murders.”
It seemed unlikely to Charlotte that Miss Longstead’s mind could stray far from thoughts of the murders, but she acceded to Mrs. Coltrane’s wish and followed the housekeeper to her small, trim office in the basement of the house for tea, coconut biscuits, and Mrs. Coltrane’s account of the night of the party.
As the senior servant in charge, Mrs. Coltrane had been terribly busy, making sure that everything went off properly and that the footmen hired especially for the evening knew what they were supposed to do. She, like Miss Longstead, had thought Mr. Longstead had gone to bed—he’d told her that he might not last the entire night.