“So she’s in charge, then?”
“Right. And my father manages more of our day-to-day lives. I mean, I imagine he still does. I’ve been away at school for a while now.” Rupert shrugged. “I’ve never really understood businesses that pass down through a family. Financial reasons, sure. Fine. But it’s almost a kind of erasure, don’t you think? What if you could’ve cured cancer, or something, and instead someone before you were born decided you should make spreadsheets all day?” He jerked the bag open, and steam poured out. “For some reason they think I should step up, when my father got to dodge the noose. Bicker on the phone with bankers. Chase down payments from far-flung members of the royal family. Have you ever tried to get a royal to settle a past-due debt? Speaking of blood from a stone . . . of course it was just oversight, but . . .” His ever-running engine finally ran out of steam. Sighing, he stuffed a handful of popcorn into his mouth.
His interview at the station this morning had rattled him. It was either that, or this is what Rupert was like away from the stifling presence of his friends: a thoughtful, anxious sort, someone whose mouth raced ahead of his brain. Still, I knew something about family businesses and unrealistic expectations and how those things could wear on you. “That’s hard. I hate that feeling. What would you be doing otherwise?” I asked. “If you weren’t working for your family?”
He shrugged, chewing. “Theater?” he said finally. “I still can’t believe that casting. Of course, it’s not like the play will run now, it’s all moot . . . but to think that I could do Hamlet. Here. Last summer, I only helped out in the sound booth.”
“That’s not easy,” Watson pointed out.
“It is if the tech in charge won’t let you do anything. It was clear they’d just made space for me so I could hang around with Anwen and Theo. Kind of them, but a bit condescending.” He pushed the paper bag to the middle of the table, and I picked out a few kernels, held them in my palm. “I hate it, you know,” he said, looking at my hands. “That feeling of being . . . unneeded.”
Sebastian Wallis had said more or less the same thing earlier. What was it, I wondered, about Anwen and Theo, their bright exclusivity, that kept even their best friend on the outskirts? And despite all that, Theo despised something about Anwen, something he couldn’t bring himself to say out loud.
“You’ve escaped them, though,” Rupert was saying. “Your family.”
“Have I?” I asked, with a tight smile.
“Sure,” he said earnestly. “Of course you have. You aren’t studying . . . whatever you would study to be a detective.”
“I’d be at training college,” I told him. “You begin as a uniform. Work your way up. Unless you’re my bohemian great-great-great-grandfather a century or so ago, in which case you do two years at Oxford, leave for unknown reasons, and take cases from Baker Street. But no. I’m not studying any of that. The more time I spend doing detective work, the less that I like it.”
“Really?” Rupert asked, interested. Watson was watching me intently. “What don’t you like?”
I was treading uncertain ground here. This wasn’t new, of course. My work often called on me to be a chameleon—my shape stayed the same while my skin began to shift colors.
I’ve said before that the way to convincingly lie is to be convinced of what you’re saying. In the moment, you need to believe it. Thoroughly. To wit: in order to convince Rupert to trust me enough to come clean about his experience this morning with the police (and in doing so, unintentionally give up information he’d kept from them), I would need to persuade him that I, like him, wanted to escape my family business (detection).
Why was this complicated?
Because, perhaps, after escaping my family, after using my skills to escape Lucien Moriarty (if barely), I was finding that, maybe, I did want to escape my family business. At least this version of it. At least for a time. In order to uphold the law, I had to continually break it, and while I didn’t have personal compunctions about breaking into someone’s dorm room to sack it for clues, or to lie to someone to get them to tell you the truth, the more I did it, the more I started to lose the plot.
Perhaps I wanted to be a chemist. Perhaps I wanted to be a gardener, or jewel thief, or a beekeeper. Perhaps I wanted to be a detective after all. But three months ago, I was an invalid, and three months before that, I was on the run from someone who wanted my head on a platter.
All I knew was that I wanted Watson with me. But I also knew that the girl with informant status with the Thames Valley Police and a lockpicking kit in her purse was infinitely more compelling than the girl I was becoming now. Someone who wanted to eat Nutella toast on the sofa while rereading the encyclopedia article on waxwings, because she thought she’d seen one in the garden.
That girl wasn’t nearly as compelling. Wasn’t as clever or as dangerous. Wasn’t the kind of girl you followed anywhere.
I wasn’t giving Watson enough credit. I knew that. It didn’t stop me from being afraid.
“Interrogations,” I was telling Rupert. “I don’t like them. The detective’s allowed to keep you there for hours. Leave abruptly. Come back. Dig into the most private parts of your life. Lie to you about your lover seeing someone else behind your back. Insist you were somewhere you know you weren’t and then convince you of it. Confuse you. Frighten you, badly, start you babbling. Or make you think that they’re your best friend, that they agree with everything you’ve done. That they understand the part of you that killed that girl, that she had it coming, yeah? The way she was looking at that other guy. Offer you coffee, then take the cup ‘to throw it out for you’ so they can test your saliva at their lab. All of it . . . the way the police operate is so foreign to me. It isn’t how my family solves crimes. I was taught to treat the suspect’s confession as a sacred act, as someone bringing you an offering. The two of you could decide together what you did with it.”
My feelings on interrogation practices were far more complex than this little speech suggested. These methods were the kind that found missing girls like Matilda Wilkes. That said, there had, in fact, been many times when Sherlock Holmes had heard his culprit’s story and decided to let them escape into the night, rather than sending for Scotland Yard.
Judge, jury, stay of execution.
My father and my brother took a page from this book, but their decisions tended toward the bloodier side.
Luckily, Rupert couldn’t see inside my head. He was nodding along, as I knew he would. “It’s all mind games. And these are the people who are supposed to protect us? Please.”
Watson stretched; his back popped. “Trust me, Charlotte and I have been there. You should’ve seen the shady shit the American cops pulled on us, during the first investigation we helped solve.”
“It’s just unfair,” Rupert said. “They separated Anwen and me and I could hear her crying in the next room. And the detective, she was asking all these questions about last year. I could tell she didn’t like my answers, but I was telling the truth! What do you say to that?”
“Double down,” Watson said. “You know the real story. Don’t let them bully you into admitting to things you didn’t do.” He talked like he was rubbing Rupert’s shoulders in a boxing ring, playing to his sense of urgency.