Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
It was not often that Inspector Treadles wished that an interviewee would be less forthcoming. But there was no stopping Mrs. Egbert, the small, grey-haired widow who was frightfully organized.
Upon receiving Treadles and Sergeant MacDonald in her study, she had immediately presented a pile of documents. I’ll ring for tea after you’ve had a look at those.
She and her late husband had owned nearly five dozen dwellings in the environs of London.
He had passed away six years ago and had left her all the properties, even though they had grown sons.
“He knew very well our boys had no head for business. A decent lot, but not a single one of them capable of looking after what we had built.”
For a moment Treadles saw not Mrs. Egbert behind the impressive desk, but his own wife, so hardened and efficient that she couldn’t be bothered to offer a cup of tea and a bit of pleasantry.
He prayed, for the first time in his life, for his brother-in-law’s well-being and longevity.
“The house you are interested in was built in ’69,” said Mrs. Egbert.
“For the first few years, the tenants were a young family. In the winter of ’72, the husband and the children all died from influenza.
The widow quit the premises that summer.
We put the house up for let again and advertised in the papers.
Usually those who have an interest in a vacancy write and ask for an appointment to see the place.
Mr. de Lacy, however, inquired only whether we would accept a postal order for a year’s rent.
“We had no objections at all to a year’s rent in advance.
Once we had received the postal order, we sent him the keys to the house, to be called for at the General Post Office, as he had instructed.
The understanding was that an agent of ours would inspect the property at least once a year—more often should there be cause for concern.
And our condition was readily agreed to. ”
She showed them the letters from de Lacy and the duplicates of letters that had been sent to him, the canceled postal orders, the neat numbers in a ledger that listed all the monies received from the property and all the expenses related to its upkeep.
“That was the extent of our initial contact with Mr. de Lacy. In subsequent years, he sent a postal order, without fail, a month before the period paid for in the previous year ran out. And you can see, each year we wrote him and arranged for a date on which our agent might inspect the house. He always agreed to the time we proposed—and always said that he would be away from London at the time and that our agent should feel free to enter the house using the key in the agent’s possession.
“I have here all the inspection reports. Now that I know something terrible has happened, Mr. de Lacy does seem too good to be true. But I have hundreds of tenants, some of them quite irksome, and I was all too happy to overlook a few oddities on the part of a tenant who was never any trouble and always paid his accounts in advance.”
Treadles, faced with page after page of meticulous recordkeeping, wished then that Mrs. Egbert were a little cagier.
If he had the sense that she was concealing anything, then he would have gained a toehold.
But her transparency forced the conclusion he’d been afraid of in the first place: that this was another dead end, as far as his investigation was concerned.
He gave the appearance of studying everything carefully, and even asked a few questions. But in the end, he left Mrs. Egbert’s house with nothing to go on—and a spiraling sense of dread that he wasn’t even scratching the surface.
That the surface was there somewhere and he was a hundred miles away, trying to feel his way out of a shipping crate.
“Let me see if I have understood you correctly, Miss Holmes,” said Lord Bancroft. “You posit that one, Finch is the name of the dead man found in Hounslow; two, he happened to be your illegitimate half brother; and three, he is currently being impersonated by Stephen Marbleton.”
He and Charlotte were seated in an eye-watering drawing room: This was the house in which Lord Bancroft had intended for them to live as man and wife, done up in what he gauged to be her taste before the first time he proposed, when he had been certain of his impending success.
Charlotte had never heard the whole story from Lord Ingram, but it seemed reasonable to assume that after Lord Bancroft failed to win her hand, he had decided to turn it into a place of business. The crown’s business.
Usually Charlotte enjoyed being in the house: Lord Bancroft’s estimation of what she liked in terms of decor was barely three percent wide of the mark. But today all she could see was the dead man in Hounslow, his face a mask of agony and shock.
Had that been her first and last look at Mr. Finch?
“Precisely,” she said. “If Mr. Finch’s former sweetheart hadn’t come around begging for help because she was convinced something terrible had happened to him, no one would have known anything about his disappearance and the police would simply have one more unidentified corpse on their hands.”
“That isn’t entirely true in this case. The victim has been identified as a Mr. Richard Hayward by a friend.”
This was news to Charlotte. “Let me guess. Mr. Hayward was new to London, or at least new to this friend. The friend knows nothing of his origins. And the police haven’t been able to find out anything either.”
“That . . . does happen to be the case.”
“Then it doesn’t matter by what name the victim has been identified.”
“Let’s put aside for a moment the name of the dead man.
What I do not understand is why Stephen Marbleton introduced himself to Miss Livia.
To contact her was to court your attention.
The moment you saw him, his guise would be penetrated—which was more or less what happened.
Do you mean to tell me that the Marbletons had no idea of the connection between Livia Holmes and Sherlock Holmes? ”
Good. He didn’t dismiss her theory out of hand. Instead, he challenged it on reasonable grounds and left it up to her to justify her assertions.
It was a sad comment on the state of humanity that his willingness to take her seriously counted as a very large point in his favor, when really it should be considered a bare minimum in civil discourse.
“In Mrs. Marbleton’s letter to me near the end of the Sackville case, she specifically wished me success in my endeavors as Sherlock Holmes—given the resourcefulness of that clan, it would be careless to assume that they didn’t know I am none other than the disgraced Charlotte Holmes, daughter of Sir Henry Holmes.
As for why Mr. Marbleton approached Livia, I can only suppose it must have been a matter of necessity.
“Mr. Finch had been removed for a reason. Mr. Marbleton is impersonating him for a reason. It’s possible Mr. Marbleton believed that Mr. Finch’s relations knew something—something crucial.”
“But you yourself told me just now that no one in your family ever had any personal interactions with Mr. Finch,” Lord Bancroft pointed out.
“Your father, only via his solicitors. Your sisters, resistant to the idea of becoming acquainted with their illegitimate brother. What could they possibly know about a man they had never met?”
“Sometimes one knows things without understanding what one knows. I, without having ever met Mr. Finch, could be said to have known of his demise for days—I have even examined his body. But until more information came to light, I didn’t know what I knew.
Perhaps Mr. Marbleton sought a single missing piece, which he was convinced a member of my family might unwittingly possess. ”
Lord Bancroft’s brows drew together—he really wasn’t an unhandsome man. “I’m not sure I’m fully convinced of your theory, Miss Holmes, but I’m willing to look into this business with Mr. Finch.”
Yet another point in his favor: Not only was he willing to listen, but he was willing to act—even if it would be only a simple command issued to a subordinate. “The real Mr. Finch, or the imposter?”
“Both.”
But she was not finished yet with her theories.
She was curious to see what he thought of the next one.
“After the conclusion of the Sackville affair, I went to Somerset House and looked up marriage records for Sophia Lonsdale. When I found out that she was married to someone named Moriarty, I asked Lord Ingram whether he knew of the name. He went to you, and you warned him to steer clear of the man.”
“I did.”
“Officially, Sophia Lonsdale died many years ago. From what I’d been able to gather, it had been reported as a skiing accident.
Upon learning that Moriarty was not a man to be trifled with, I assumed that she had begun to find life with him intolerable and had therefore staged her own death in order to escape. But now I’m not so certain.
“What if, instead of a one-sided scheme, it was a jointly planned, jointly executed ruse? Perhaps they realized that she was a potential weakness for him—that his enemies could harm him by targeting her. But if those enemies believed her dead, then that was one significant vulnerability neutralized.”
Lord Bancroft leaned forward an inch. “Are you implying that Moriarty is involved in this affair?”
“More than implying, I should hope,” said Charlotte.
“I am stating it outright. That Vigenère cipher always struck me as excessive. And the Braille on the dead man’s garments—ridiculously complicated.
Then I remembered the ciphers Mrs. Marbleton presented when she first called on me.
They were much simpler, of course, but still had a similarly Baroque feel.