Chapter Thirty-Seven
THIRTY-SEVEN
I instruct Sully to have Nellie’s belongings returned before noon or I will see her charged with theft. I’ll take the items to Gray’s town house for further examination.
I’m walking a tightrope here with Sully. I can’t take her story at face value and write her off the suspect list. I do, however, believe she’s telling the truth. She’s an odious young woman who hated Nellie. But she didn’t kill her.
As for who did …
I need more information, but pieces are finally starting to align.
I’m walking down the hall when Gray appears.
“Ah, are you done?” he asks.
“For now.” Seeing his expression, I move closer. “Is everything all right?”
“It is Freddie,” he says. “He has been located.”
I exhale. “Good. I thought he might have left the city by now.”
“Not yet. He appears to be holed up in a hotel near the train station.”
We hurry down the hall and out the front door. Once we’re away from the house, I explain everything Sully told me.
“This means the missing clothing has been explained,” Gray says as we walk. “Removing the need to tie Nellie’s killer to the Adler household.”
I bite my tongue against a reply. Yes, if the theft of the clothing is unconnected to the murder, then I don’t need to focus on a killer who had easy access to the Adler home. It doesn’t mean I’m ready to rule everyone there out, though. Not yet.
Gray explains what Jack told him. After the Parsonses returned from breakfast, Edgar Parsons had a visitor, a shady-looking “gentleman” who left a message at the front desk and then met Parsons outside.
Jack and Simon watched the two talk, and then the man led Parsons over the Mound to an Old Town boardinghouse.
More talk. Money exchanged hands. The man left, and Parsons remained, not going into the house but finding a place to linger while he watched the front door.
“Jack believes Freddie is in there,” Gray says. “She recognized the fellow who came for Parsons. She believes Parsons hired him to find Freddie. It is the sort of thing the man does, and he is well known for it.”
“If that’s true, Parsons didn’t convince Freddie to leave. Freddie bolted … and Parsons knew it.”
“Perhaps because he was the one Freddie was ‘bolting’ from.”
Perhaps, indeed.
We’ve sent Simon off to a well-earned lunch while we take over the stakeout. A double-layered stakeout, because Edgar Parsons is also watching that rooming house.
I’d have expected Freddie to slink deep into the Old Town, where the sheer crush of people would hide him.
But maybe he couldn’t bring himself to accept such a drop in quality after the fancy New Town hotel.
Where he’s ended up is a decent rooming house in a decent area, and Parsons has easily found a spot to watch him, while not looking out of place among the well-heeled tourists heading toward the palace grounds.
We’ve staked out our own spot in a nearby kirkyard, where we are paying our deepest—and lingering—respects to a grave picked at random.
“I believe our target is, as you say, on the move,” Gray murmurs.
When I look over at the rooming house, I see only a partly open front door. Then I notice a foot protruding from that doorway, as if someone is holding it ajar to look before stepping out. To be sure the coast is clear.
When the figure finally emerges, I’m actually surprised that it’s Freddie. By this point, I’d come to expect a twist—that the rooming house seemed an odd choice for Freddie-on-the-run because it wasn’t actually Freddie.
But it is. And he certainly seems to be on the run, dressed in a ridiculously oversized coat with the collar up and a hat pulled as low as he can get it.
He’s carrying a stuffed carpetbag, and when a coach slows, he tenses, seeming ready to leap backward inside.
But it’s a hansom cab, the driver seeing him with that carpetbag, wondering whether he’s looking for a lift.
He waves it on and then sets out, moving fast as he blends with tourists heading back from the palace.
“And target two is in play,” I whisper, guiding Gray’s attention to Parsons, now moving in Freddie’s direction.
We stay where we are, braced for a confrontation. But Parsons only gets behind Freddie. Then he stays there, tailing him. We fall in, and it only takes a few minutes for me to realize why Freddie chose that rooming house.
“He’s heading to the train station,” I say.
“I believe so.”
The train station is on Princes Street, actually not far from where the Parsonses are staying. When Freddie fled last night, it’d have been too late for a train, so he tried to hide his tracks by crossing the Mound, while not actually going far from his ultimate destination.
The train station isn’t the one I’ve used in the twenty-first century. It’s also not the one my nan raved about—the massive Victorian Princes Street Station, remaining only in the Waldorf Astoria hotel. The current one is temporary, built awaiting that grand dame to come.
Once across the Mound, Freddie slows, as if debating his next move. He seems to realize his path will take him to Princes Street, where he could be spotted by Parsons or Stella, out for a stroll. He hesitates and then veers off the main route, heading toward the rear of the station.
Here we need to find our own path. Freddie has left the flow of people, and it’d be too tricky to follow him without being seen.
“Head in along Princes Street?” I whisper. “Try to cut him off before he reaches the train?”
“I believe I know another route.”
Gray leads me closer to Princes and then swerves in behind a building under construction. Any work seems to have ceased, and it’s quiet and empty as we weave around piles of wood and stone.
“Up here, we can—”
“Stop, please,” a voice says behind us.
We turn to see Edgar Parsons … holding a pistol on us.
“I know you are following Freddie,” he says. “I am going to ask you to allow me to handle this.”
“Let you kill your brother-in-law?” I say.
His brows knit. “I am not a killer.”
I gesture at the gun. “No?”
He lowers the barrel slightly. “This is simply to make my point, in case Freddie refuses to listen to reason. A tool, not a weapon.”
“A gun is always a weapon,” I say. “If you hold it on someone, you need to be prepared to use it. If you are not…”
I look sharply to the left, as if hearing something. Parsons wheels in that direction. When he looks back, he finds himself looking at a gun. Mine.
“If you are not,” I continue calmly, “you run the risk of your actions being misinterpreted and your targets responding accordingly. I can and will shoot, and I suspect I’m much better at it. I won’t kill you, but you won’t be running off afterwards either.”
“Lower the gun, Mr. Parsons,” Gray says, his voice nearly a growl. “This is not how you engage in civil conversation.”
When Parsons hesitates, Gray steps toward him, and my breath catches. I want to tell him no, don’t ever push someone holding a gun, even if they don’t seem prepared to use it. Maybe even more when they don’t seem prepared to use it or they’re likely to fire by accident.
Parsons lowers the gun. “I apologize. I am out of sorts, and I needed you to listen to me.”
“We are listening,” I say. “You’re here to stop Freddie from running. You believe he killed Nellie.”
“He did. I told myself I was mistaken, but I have come to realize I am not.”
“You believe they were involved in a romance,” I say.
“Yes. As Stella said, Freddie was seeing a girl. You can always tell. He slips in and out, as clumsily stealthy as a schoolboy. It seemed to start after we first checked the Adler home for a future sitting, which suggested he had met his new girl there. I thought it was the other one. The one with the straight mousy-brown hair.”
“Rose. Because she was the one who helped Freddie, and you worked with Nellie.”
Parsons nods. “I believe now that they had met earlier, likely when we first consulted with Lady Adler. But at the time, I thought it was Rose. Then, after Nellie’s ghost allegedly appeared, Freddie stopped sneaking out.
The affair had obviously ended, and I still told myself it was with Rose, and she was too upset to continue a dalliance.
But it bothered me, and it continued to bother me. ”
“Because you suspect Freddie is the one who fakes the knockings.” I meet his gaze.
“And by ‘suspect,’ I mean you’re ninety-nine percent sure it’s Freddie and you’ve decided to pretend otherwise.
But then those knockings led Stella to converse with the ghost of a young woman who had left her post. A young woman who turns out to be dead, meaning the person who faked the knockings is almost certainly the one who killed her. ”
Color rises in Parsons’s face. “Freddie has always been a fool. I hate to say that. I am fond of him, in my way, but he is reckless and silly, and he thinks only of how to polish Stella’s star and bask in its rays.”
“In other words, you think he seized on this bit of insider knowledge—that Nellie was dead—to showcase Stella’s powers … without thinking it through.”
“Yes.”
“So you believe Nellie and Freddie had an affair. Something went wrong. Maybe she pushed for more. And he killed her.”
Parsons rubs his free hand over his mouth.
“I do not know why he killed her. I … I cannot imagine such a thing. I can only presume it was in a fit of impulse. He is impulsive. She must have said something, and he reacted. I do not think he would have intentionally killed her. An accident perhaps. But he did kill her.”
“You confronted him last night.”
“Only about the affair. I was taking it slowly. If there was no affair—or it was with another girl—then I could reconsider my conclusions. I told him that I suspected he had a relationship with the deceased maid, and if so, we needed to discuss that, because surely a detective like Dr. Gray would puzzle it out, and it was better if Freddie admitted to it, with my help. He said there had been no affair with Nellie. I pushed. Then who? The other maid? Rose? He adamantly denied any such entanglement … while sweating profusely. I repeated my promise—that we could handle this, and he only needed to tell me. He continued his denial, retreated to his room … and then he was gone. Proof that I was correct. He was responsible for that girl’s death. ”
“Responsible for her death…” I muse. “That’s not the same as murdering her.
You were still hoping it was an accident.
Or that we were wrong about the cause of death and Nellie drowned herself after a romantic disappointment.
Then, in the coach last night, your wife mentioned that Nellie’s things were missing.
That got your attention.” I catch his gaze.
“Because it means that Freddie had the presence of mind to sneak into the Adler house and make Nellie’s disappearance look voluntary. That suggests murder.”
His shoulders slump. “Yes. Which means I need to deal with it.”
My gaze drops to the gun in his lowered hand.
“Not that way,” he says with impatience. “I would never kill him. He is Stella’s brother.”
“Then why not let him get on that train and flee?”
“Because he will not stay away. He is in a panic. He will run and he will hide, and then he will slink back. I need to make sure that does not happen. I will impress upon him the need to stay away. To flee to the Americas or Australia. I can give him enough to live comfortably there, where he will communicate with his sister, reassuring her that he is fine.”
“Would he be gone permanently? Or only for a few years, until no one is looking for whoever killed a mere housemaid?”
“Whichever is necessary. My concern—”
“—is protecting your wife.”
He eases back, nodding. “Yes. Thank you. I know how this must look, as if I fear association with a killer, but I only care how it will affect Stella. It would destroy her.”
“And her career.”
A hard look. “With Freddie gone, she will lose her career. I believe we have established that.”
“But if the rappings suddenly stop, she’ll know it was Freddie.”
He pockets the gun. “I will continue them myself, briefly and sporadically. I will say that obviously her bond with Freddie strengthened her gift, and now that he is gone, it is fading. I will help her deal with that and find new ways to use her empathy to help others. I have come to understand that is what is most important to her—that she can help—and I support that entirely. Her happiness is paramount to me, and while I wish I could secure it in a way that does not involve severing her from her brother, that seems inevitable, given the alternative.”
“Either way, she’ll lose him.”
“Yes.”
I put my own gun away, and Parsons relaxes, as if I’ve clearly seen his point.
“I understand, sir,” I say. “Unfortunately, that’s not how justice works, and I intend to see justice for Nellie Carmichael.”
He stiffens. His hand moves toward his pocket, but Gray is there in a blink, pulling Parsons’s arms behind him.
“If it’s any consolation,” I say as I move closer, “I don’t think Freddie killed her. He’s only running because he knows who did.”
Parsons blinks. “You think I murdered—”
“No, not you. You just spooked Freddie when you figured out who he’d been having a fling with. The actual killer.”
“One of the maids,” Gray murmurs.
I nod. “I’ll explain later, but for now, I need to make sure Freddie doesn’t get on that train. He’s going to be a very important witness. Dr. Gray, can you ensure Mr. Parsons here doesn’t interfere?”
Gray hesitates.
“It’s a busy train station,” I say. “I’ll be fine. And I’ll be right back with Freddie.”