Chapter Three
True to Lord Ingram’s “prediction,” Inspector Treadles called on Charlotte at her London hotel the next afternoon.
He was attired in a stylish fawn jacket in a lightweight summer wool. His wife saw to his clothes, and it appeared that Mrs. Treadles still took great pleasure in dressing her husband well.
“Lord Ingram and I met regularly this summer,” said the policeman. “I trust you know that, Miss Holmes?”
Charlotte nodded. After she and Lord Ingram had parted ways in Gibraltar, roughly three months ago, he had sailed on to Malta and Brindisi, then returned to England via the overland route and spent the summer in London. He typically took part in the Season, so that in itself was not unusual. But the Upper Ten Thousand was not accustomed to recently divorced men at their social functions, and his presence had caused some tongues to wag.
On the other hand, he was young, wealthy, and physically striking. No one blamed him for the dissolution of his marriage. And as he had limited himself to lectures and a few dinners hosted by old friends, the gossip had soon died down, replaced by renewed interest in him as a marital prospect.
None of this had been related to Charlotte by Lord Ingram but by Lady Avery, Society gossip extraordinaire, who occasionally wrote Mrs. Watson, whom she knew as Sherlock Holmes’s collaborator Mrs. Hudson, with the latest on-dits. Lord Ingram, conversely, had been curiously silent about life in the relative thick of things.
“His lordship and I had planned a trip to the Isles of Scilly in mid-August, after the end of the Season,” continued Inspector Treadles. “When we last saw each other, he let me know that chances were those plans would not come to pass. Still, I hadn’t expected this.”
“We are anticipating some problems,” said Charlotte. “To head them off, I prefer to be in London. But I had no ostensibly compelling reason to leave France. Ergo, this ruse.”
It was always a struggle, how much she ought to tell someone not yet deeply involved in everything. Would that knowledge illuminate their choices or merely make them huddle in fear?
“But pretending to have broken a limb—won’t his lordship need to remain immobile for months on end?”
“True. But there is no reason that after, say, a fortnight or so, his lordship couldn’t travel somewhere out of sight and move more freely.”
Inspector Treadles exhaled. “I would ask how I can help, but I already did at our previous meeting, and Lord Ingram said that he would greatly appreciate it if I would find a case for Sherlock Holmes.”
“Correct. Lord Ingram’s ‘injury’ handed me a reason to come to England. A good case from you would provide an excellent excuse for me to stay for a week or two.” Charlotte handed Inspector Treadles a cup of tea. “I hope you didn’t need to fish too hard for a suitable conundrum.”
“As a matter of fact, as soon as Lord Ingram mentioned this need, I thought of something that had been on my mind of late. The only problem is that, for the moment, it is an internal matter for Scotland Yard.”
“Oh?” She added a cube of sugar to his cup.
In response, Inspector Treadles stirred his tea, but rather mechanically. “Miss Holmes, you recall Inspector Brighton, who investigated the Longstead-Sullivan murders last December?”
Charlotte, loading onto her plate a slice of plum cake—from the magnificent hamper Lord Ingram had gifted her, of course—nodded.
Inspector Brighton, who had been beastly toward the inspector and Mrs. Treadles during the investigation, had boarded the RMS Provence this past spring to travel to Malta, where he was to train the local constabulary in modern detection methods on behalf of Scotland Yard.
Charlotte, unbeknownst to Inspector Brighton—and Inspector Treadles—had also boarded the sleek oceangoing steamer in disguise, for her own purposes, and had therefore witnessed certain fateful events for Inspector Brighton.
“I was relieved to see Inspector Brighton set off for Malta—it was not easy to be collegial with a man who had attempted to send me to the gallows. And perhaps Inspector Brighton was also relieved to be away on official business for a while—I was not without allies at work, and many of them considered him much too eager to see a fellow policeman come to an ignominious end.”
Did this mean that had Inspector Brighton not been so determined to charge Inspector Treadles with two counts of murder, today he might still be a trusted and feared officer of the law?
“Apparently, before he left, Inspector Brighton submitted an unsolved case for review. Knowing him, he must have seen something in the case that could rehabilitate his reputation within Scotland Yard. Of course, after the events aboard the RMS Provence, his reputation is beyond repair, but still I am wary about the case.
“Fortunately, we’ve been shorthanded these past few months, what with Chief Inspector Fowler’s injury and Inspector Brighton’s…misadventure. And when Chief Inspector Fowler returned to work, he had to set out for Malta, because the constables there still hadn’t received their promised training.
“When he comes back, I believe he will assign the case to a junior officer so as to satisfy procedural requirements. Chances are the junior officer will encounter decade-old clues that lead nowhere and give up. However, we do have several talented and ambitious newcomers, and the one who receives the dossier might very well dig up something significant.”
Inspector Treadles paused to drink from his teacup. He had arrived a little tense, no doubt worried for Lord Ingram—and discomfited by the puzzling ruse of which he had only the most superficial grasp. But that uneasiness of knowing too little had by now transmuted into the distress of possibly knowing too much.
Charlotte took a bite of her plum cake—highly toothsome, with a moist crumb and perfectly macerated raisins. “May I ask the nature of your interest in this case, Inspector?”
“Inspector Brighton wasn’t subtle about his desire to see me charged for murder. Had he succeeded, it would have made his reputation. But he didn’t. When you proved my innocence, it not only exposed his ruthlessness but also left his judgment open to question. Why had he not asked for the same accounts and documents from Cousins Manufacturing? Why had he not bothered to trace misallocated funds?”
The policeman turned his teacup on its gold-rimmed saucer a few degrees—clockwise, counterclockwise, then clockwise again—producing faintly audible scratches of porcelain on porcelain. “I doubt that Inspector Brighton cared greatly what others thought of his character, but it agitated him that his much-vaunted competence became a subject of debate. He meant to prove that while he might have stumbled on one highly visible case, his ability to sniff out guilt remained intact. And to do that, he sought to bring down a different officer at the Yard.”
“The officer responsible for the unsolved case?”
“Correct. I was lucky to escape Inspector Brighton’s malice, but I do not want anyone to pay for my good fortune with their reputation.” He looked up and hastened to add, “Please don’t understand this to mean that I have come to you to prevent any facts from coming to light—not at all. What I have is a slight advantage of time—Chief Inspector Fowler won’t be back for a few days, and even then it will likely be another fortnight before he officially assigns the dossier. In the meanwhile, I hope to learn the truth before anyone else at Scotland Yard does—the whole truth or whatever nuggets you can discover.”
Charlotte sipped her tea. She drank Ceylon in Paris, too, but in London the same tea tasted smokier and more full-bodied. “Inspector Brighton wasn’t completely without cause in trying to pin the Longstead-Sullivan murders on you: Both you and Mrs. Treadles tried to hide evidence. And he might be right about this unsolved case as well. What will you do should I discover misconduct on the part of the investigating officer?”
Inspector Treadles grimaced and reached for a slice of cake. “I don’t know, Miss Holmes—the possibility unnerves me. But if we cannot escape the truth, we might as well learn it sooner.”
?Inspector Treadles had not handed over the actual Scotland Yard dossier; instead he had given Sherlock Holmes an excellent summary, a nearly word-for-word copy of the original investigator’s report. He had also informed Miss Charlotte that Garwood Hall, where the so-called Christmas Eve Murder had taken place, was currently up for let.
Garwood Hall was located not in the environs of London but in Lancashire. After a brief discussion, Mrs. Watson and Miss Charlotte set out that very evening for Manchester.
During the journey, Mrs. Watson needed a dozen attempts before she managed to read the police summary to the end—only to realize, an hour later, that with her mind still full of Lord Bancroft’s letters, she’d failed to retain names and crucial details.
Starting with Lord Ingram’s “injury,” the ruse was all about misdirection, to make their enemies think that they were otherwise occupied. Given that assisting Inspector Treadles was very much part of the overarching plan, she had trouble thinking of the Christmas Eve Murder as a real commission for Sherlock Holmes.
And this was before one considered Inspector Treadles’s ambivalence toward the case. From speaking to Miss Charlotte, Mrs. Watson had come away with the impression that while the inspector had steeled himself for the truth, he would much rather be told that despite Sherlock Holmes’s best effort, absolutely nothing else could be unearthed about this long-ago crime.
At the railway station nearest Garwood Hall, an estate agent named Mr. Elstree collected them. After an enthusiastic greeting, he guided them to his dogcart, that most useful country vehicle.
The drive was lovely. The landscape bore no marks of industry, and every bend in the road yielded only more unspoiled greenery, fields, orchards, and pastures bordered by stacked stone walls.
Mrs. Watson imagined this vista at Christmas: wreaths of holly on farmhouse gates, the berries red and festive against waxy green leaves, an aroma of freshly baked mince pies in the air, and upon every brightly lit window, silhouettes of families gathered around laden tables.
At Garwood Hall, too, there had been a family. Mr. Victor Meadows had acquired the manor only months prior to his death, with wealth inherited from his industrialist grandfather. Mrs. Meadows, his much-younger wife of eight years, had been on hand, as well as her sister, still a child then; Mr. Meadows’s older half brother, Mr. Ephraim Meadows; and a dozen indoor servants.
No doubt the house had been Christmas-card perfect, pine garlands over the mantelpieces, a cornucopia on every table, and in the kitchen, the Christmas goose slowly roasting in the oven.
Yet underneath, ill will had festered.
But whose ill will? A mistreated member of the staff? A disgruntled worker from one of Victor Meadows’s factories? His wife, who had married him at sixteen, after the bankruptcy and death of her parents? Or his much poorer half brother, who’d seethed with jealousy and discontent his entire life, because his younger sibling had been born with not only a silver spoon in his mouth but gold rings on every finger?
“Here we are!” chirped Mr. Elstree as he reined the dogcart to a gentle stop.
Garwood Hall did not have a gatehouse. Mr. Elstree simply unlocked the gate, drove the dogcart through, and locked it again.
The gate itself might be difficult to climb, all bare wrought-iron pickets topped with stabbing finials, but the estate wall that ran along the country lane was only five feet high and posed little challenge to a nimble evildoer. With a ladder, even a clumsy one could scale it.
“Was that not a quick, easy trip from the railway station?” extolled Mr. Elstree. “And such a pretty drive ahead of us.”
The drive couldn’t compare with that at Stern Hollow—what could? For one thing, with the grounds as flat as a cricket pitch, there was no topographical variety. For another, the house became visible after only a minute or two. And in five more minutes, they were pulling up to the front door.
To be fair, the approach was nice—the lane swerved just so, to give the visitor a glimpse of the small man-made lake behind the house, with its picturesque jetty and a blue rowboat tied to a post.
The house itself, however, made Mrs. Watson shake her head. Elizabethan timbers, Gothic turrets, Palladian columns, and an Italianate belvedere—was there a single notable feature from the last few centuries of manor construction that Garwood Hall had failed to reference?
She leaned closer to Miss Charlotte. “My dear, I take it you approve?”
For this occasion, Mrs. Watson was Miss Charlotte’s mother. Or rather, she was Mr. Yardley’s mother, Mr. Yardley being the role Miss Charlotte had taken on for the day.
From behind a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, Owen Yardley’s blue eyes twinkled. “I have no complaints about an architectural buffet, Mother.”
The dutiful “son” descended first and held out his hand for Mrs. Watson. Other than his portly build, there was little else to make him stand out in a crowd. Besides the reddish hair and beard, that is.
“Oh, you men. You are all the same—blind to such glaring defects.”
“I will admit that the house is a bit of a mishmash, stylistically, but it grows on one. It most certainly does,” Mr. Elstree hastened to reassure them. “And it is perfect for a busy man of business in need of a haven away from the cities: easy access on bank holidays, no tenants to deal with, very little wear and tear, and plumbing as advanced as any in the finest town houses.”
In other words, this was not a great house, with its attendant land, myriad outbuildings, and equally burdensome responsibilities, but merely a holiday lodge of recent fabrication that boasted certain modern amenities.
Mrs. Watson anticipated a similar hodgepodge inside: medieval weaponry next to Renaissance marble statues, maybe, and Louis XIV chairs backed by Japanese print screens. But on that front, she was pleasantly surprised. The interior decoration was thematically unified by an abundance of floral patterns, from almost imperceptible Egyptian lotus motifs on the wallpapers, to ornate swirling vines on the curtains and upholstery.
Although she did chortle a little to herself at the acreage of ancestral portraits on the walls, likely acquired at auctions and meant to make prospective tenants forget that they were not, in fact, visiting the manorial home of a landowning family that had earned its first royal patent before the Wars of the Roses.
The tour wended through the public rooms and then proceeded upstairs. Mrs. Watson tensed as Mr. Elstree showed them into the master’s apartment: It was in this bedroom that Victor Meadows had been found slain on Christmas morning, 1871. But here the décor carried on its botanical cheerfulness. Even the bed, which was said to have been blood-soaked, did not exude any sinister airs. It appeared to be simply another bedstead, solidly built, the top mattress so far above the floor that a step stool had been put in place to help with the ascent.
Mrs. Watson couldn’t help herself—she went to the adjoining door. It opened easily—too easily, almost—to reveal the mistress’s bedroom on the other side, bathed in daylight.
On that fateful Christmas Day, the housemaid who came around every morning to sweep out grates and lay new fires had found Victor Meadows’s door locked. When she returned some time later, the door remained locked.
Perplexed, she’d knocked at the mistress’s apartment. Mrs. Meadows, in her dressing gown, was writing her to-do list for the day. The maid described the problem. Mrs. Meadows approached the adjoining door, only to find that it, too, had been barred from the other side.
Do you feel a draught? said Mrs. Meadows to the maid.
Icy cold air was rushing into the mistress’s room from underneath the adjoining door. Mrs. Meadows, who until then had only tried the door, now knocked and called to her husband.
Receiving no answer, they were puzzled but not alarmed. Perhaps Mr. Meadows had locked the adjoining door by mistake the night before. And it was possible he had gone for a long walk and locked the apartment door behind him when he’d left.
Mrs. Meadows instructed the maid to go on with her duties. She herself descended and spoke to the housekeeper. The housekeeper had been up early but had not seen the master come down.
At this point Mrs. Meadows’s brother-in-law, Mr. Ephraim Meadows, arrived for breakfast. Upon learning of the problem, he, too, knocked on his brother’s door. When he likewise received no response, he ventured outside and saw that one of the bedroom’s windows was wide open.
Mrs. Watson let go of the door handle still in her grip and glanced toward the windows. Her “son” stood before one.
“Sterling view, is it not?” said Mr. Elstree. “You will find the foliage very pleasing in autumn, too, my good sir.”
Mrs. Watson joined them at the windows. Instead of the scenery, Miss Charlotte seemed more interested in the architrave that ran beneath the windows. Or was “he” examining the paths on the lawn below, leading toward the front of the house in one direction and the jetty in the other?
The paths had been clear on that Christmas Eve, but snow had fallen overnight. Footprints on the paths would have been lost after the snow finally melted. Marks left below the window itself would have been trampled on Christmas morning by the entire household, which gathered to watch the gardener climb up into the open window.
“The panorama is impeccable,” said Owen Yardley. His voice was higher than Sherrinford Holmes’s. In fact, he was at least two inches taller than that other character in Miss Charlotte’s repertoire—those shoe lifts were working as advertised. “A remarkably agreeable place, Garwood Hall.”
It should have been an excellent opening for Mr. Elstree to sing more of the house’s praises. But the estate agent probably heard something in Owen Yardley’s tone, for his smile dimmed.
“My mother and I were both highly enthused about Garwood Hall,” continued Owen Yardley. “It is conveniently located and reasonably priced. We were willing to sign the lease if the property itself was halfway decent.
“On the train today we were talking about our prospects—how likely we were to find the estate in reasonable repair. Alas, a fellow passenger overheard our conversation and hastened to tell us that a former owner had been brutally murdered in this very house, in his own bed.”
All eyes darted to the bed. The bed curtains, ample yards of blue damask, fluttered with an influx of summer air. It was a handsome bed, dignified in every way.
Mr. Elstree must have taken heart from how pretty and peaceful everything looked, even in the face of a direct reference to the murder. “I would have told you about the murder myself, Mr. Yardley, had you expressed a serious interest. I still think, sir, that you should not let one instance of isolated misfortune deter you from considering this lovely house for your future residence.”
“But my son is about to win the hand of a wonderful young lady!” exclaimed Mrs. Watson. “He himself can perhaps overlook this tragic incident. What about her? I don’t think we can hide it from her.”
“But we’ve had any number of ladies live and thrive in this house, ma’am. Of the four sets of tenants since the tragic incident, except for an old brigadier general who lived by himself, all the others were families with ladies and children. They all left letters of recommendation for Garwood Hall as a delightful and salutary place to live—I shall be happy to show them to you. And while these tenants have been, without any exception, wonderful people, they were also quite ordinary—truly no superhuman courage is required to live here.”
As if to underscore his words, a sparrow landed on the window ledge, looked around for a bit, and flew away—a messenger of unimpeachable normalcy, surely, if one were at all inclined toward omens and metaphors.
Mrs. Watson grew more optimistic: She hadn’t been certain that the estate agent would know much about the murder, but it appeared that he’d had to routinely defend the place against whispers of infelicity. Perhaps he’d educated himself on the subject.
Owen Yardley obviously came to the same conclusion. “I’m relieved to hear that the instance of singular unhappiness has proved the exception rather than the rule. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about what happened to the people involved in the ill-fated incident, would you, Mr. Elstree?”
“I’ve made inquiries,” answered Mr. Elstree, both proudly and unwillingly. He no doubt viewed the murder as history as ancient as the signing of the Magna Carta, only far less relevant. “I accepted this post eight years ago. It quickly became obvious that I would need to be able to answer questions about the Christmas Eve Murder. I decided I might as well learn from those who knew the most. But by that time the only member of the family I could locate was Mrs. Harcourt, the two Meadows gentlemen’s sister. And she told me that her widowed sister-in-law lived for some time in Manchester with her young sister, after the murder, but later moved away without notice. Mr. Ephraim Meadows likely emigrated to Australia.”
“Likely?”
“That was what Mrs. Harcourt said—she told me that she hadn’t heard from him in years and could only assume he had gone abroad.”
“So she wasn’t close to this brother?”
“Half brother—she and Mr. Victor Meadows were full siblings, while Mr. Ephraim Meadows was born to old Mr. Meadows’s first wife. And no, they weren’t close. I daresay Mr. Victor Meadows didn’t much care for this half brother either. In his will, he bequeathed all of fifty pounds to Mr. Ephraim Meadows.”
Mr. Elstree lowered his voice. “I know that’s no pittance. But for a man with houses in the city and in the country, not to mention a number of factories, to leave a final parting gift of fifty pounds to his only brother? That was more than an insult—that was a slap in the face, if you asked me.”
And then, perhaps realizing that no one had asked him to pass so decisive a judgment, the estate agent reddened and cleared his throat.
“I’m sure Mr. Ephraim Meadows is living an exemplary life in the Antipodes, a burden to no one and a credit to himself.”