Numbly de Lacey carried on with his tasks. A little past ten he received report from the village that Mrs. Watson’s manservant, since his trip to the telegraph office, had been nursing strong drinks in the pub, looking as if he’d lost his own sister. And the sedated Mrs. Watson never left her room.
De Lacey was writing down what he had learned in the light of a kerosene lamp when the sound of hoofbeats made him come out of his tent.
A carriage, its lanterns swinging, cut across the moors. It came to a hard stop in front of the Garden’s gate. Two men leaped off and pulled the heavy rope to ring the bell. The lanterns in their hands illuminated the sharp profile of Lord Ingram—and a fellow who looked vaguely familiar. Inspector Treadles?
A deafening explosion knocked them flat.
De Lacey, two hundred feet away, threw himself down. Beneath him, the ground shook.
“What happened?” shouted his confused men.
Darkness prevailed, then matches flared, both around him and at the gate, as men relit lanterns and lamps that had fallen down and extinguished.
At the gate, Lord Ingram, on his feet again, rang the bell with all his might. But a faint tintinnabulation was all that came from inside the Garden.
“Open the gate,” shouted Lord Ingram, beating on that very gate.
Two of de Lacey’s men came running, one from north of the Garden, the other from the opposite periphery.
“Go back,” de Lacey cried. “Go back and keep patrolling.”
This was most likely a diversionary maneuver on Miss Baxter’s part. Perhaps she, too, had come to the conclusion that she could not trust Mrs. Watson to deflect all guilt over Miss Holmes’s death toward Mr. Baxter.
With her failure would come consequences.
“But—but—” began his confused patrols.
“What but? Are the walls in danger of collapsing?”
“No, but—”
“Then back to your tasks!”
Lord Ingram had gone from banging on the gate to kicking it violently. Inspector Treadles came running. “Mr. de Lacey, is it?”
“Yes?” said de Lacey with great reserve. After all these years, coppers still made him nervous.
“Would you have your men help us force the gate open? We heard there was a great deal of perchloric acid inside the compound. I am not a chemist, but I’ve been told that it is a highly dangerous, explosive chemical.”
De Lacey was torn. On the one hand, Miss Baxter had humiliated him today—greatly, even if he hadn’t been the primary target of that humiliation. Also, hadn’t he come to the realization that Mr. Baxter had stopped thinking of the woman as his daughter?
On the other hand, how would it look to Mr. Baxter if he did nothing? Even if he’d guessed correctly on how Mr. Baxter felt about his daughter, was this something Mr. Baxter would want him to know?
“Very well,” he said. “We will help.”
He sent a man to cable Mr. Baxter, who would have just reached London, wincing a little at the cost of waking up the postmaster and the telegraph clerk. Adding another man to the patrol, he brought the rest with him to the gate. The dossier had described the gate as two inches of steel, with bolts as thick as a man’s wrist, and plates and hinges riveted either to steel or well-masoned stone.
Even a tentative kick had him hiss in pain. The strongest of his men whimpered after ramming his shoulder into the gate. The poles and stakes they’d brought for the tents proved utterly useless as ramming devices.
Lord Ingram threw himself at the gate several times before Inspector Treadles forcibly restrained him. “There must be another way in.”
But how? De Lacey craned his neck backward. From the ground to the top of the parapet, the wall was at least sixty feet high and perfectly perpendicular, with no toeholds for even a goat—and he’d seen goats leaping merrily across cliffs in these parts.
Lord Ingram sat on the ground, his hands around his knees, his face buried in his arms, his posture reminiscent of a grief-stricken Mrs. Watson from earlier in the day. And then he leaped up and ran to his carriage. “Let’s go, Inspector. We have to hurry!”
Inspector Treadles, after a moment of hesitation, sprinted to the carriage too. They left at a speed far too dangerous for an overcast night.
Despite the late hour, by this time the explosion had brought some villagers from Porthangan, as well as residents of the Garden who had been staying nearby. Some villagers thought to lash ladders together, but two ladders lashed together proved unstable, and three would have been far too dangerous, while being nowhere long enough.
Mrs. Felton, in tears, suggested the culvert, a small drain built into the eastern wall. But de Lacey had already inspected the culvert upon his arrival. The culvert not only boasted a thick metal grille that would take hours to saw through, but should it start to rain, would prove perilous for anyone trying such a thing inside.
And of course, it began to pour almost immediately. The villagers and the residents of the Garden left to seek shelter, leaving de Lacey and his men to struggle with their tents and patrol through the rain, with the stench of burned flesh in their nostrils.
An hour after sunrise, Mr. Baxter arrived with dynamite. De Lacey and his men were shooing the crowd that had shown up in the morning to a safer distance, when Lord Ingram and Inspector Treadles returned too, with a large grappling hook.
De Lacey had only ever thought of the grappling hook as something used by pirates, to snag onto a ship’s rigging so that it could be boarded. But it proved a decent tool here. Lord Ingram needed only three tries to catch the grappling hook on the parapet. But as he was about to begin his ascent, Mr. Baxter confiscated the spot and had one of his own men climb up, a bolt-cutter strapped to his back, and open the gate.
Half a dozen men rushed in at once—and stopped dead in front of the meditation cabin, or what remained of it. Rubbles. Scorched earth. Bodies burned beyond recognition. Two overturned drums, looking as if they had been playthings of a careless giant, lay torn and crumpled.
Inspector Treadles grabbed Lord Ingram by the middle as the latter lunged forward. “None of these bodies can be Miss Holmes. They must belong to Miss Baxter and her two men.”
De Lacey tiptoed through the wreckage. The reek of charred flesh had dissipated somewhat overnight, which only brought to the fore a nasty chemical smell that made him want to cough. A glint of gold on a blackened body caught his eye. Turning the body over with a stick, he saw the chain of office it still wore, gold filigree squares and fleurs-de-lis.
Someone crouched down next to the body. Mr. Baxter. He touched the chain with infinite tenderness, then ripped it off the body and threw it on the ground.
“What happened here?” he asked, to no one in particular.
“If Sherlock Holmes were here, he’d probably be able to tell you precisely what happened,” said Inspector Treadles after a moment. “I can only offer a guess, which is that the three departed were emptying the contents of these drums. I understand there was perchloric acid inside?”
Mr. Baxter nodded.
“Pernicious stuff,” said Inspector Treadles. “I’ve seen industrial accidents that resulted from it. Even with care, carnage like this can happen.”
With a cry Lord Ingram stumbled forward and picked up something next to one of the overturned drums. De Lacey could not see what he had gripped in his hands, but on the ground nearby were two spent cartridges. The bullets that had killed Charlotte Holmes? Lodged in her body until it dissolved?