The Hollow of Fear

by Sherry Thomas

  “Did you try to open it?”

  “No. Once I realized it was different, I got scared that we’d been discovered and this was a warning. I ran down to the tree. She was just coming then. I told her that the lock had been changed—that maybe someone knew about us. We agreed that we shouldn’t meet for some time. She went back to the house and I went to my room above the mews.”

  “And there to spend a restless night?”

  “Well, no, I saw her at supper in the servants’ hall, but we didn’t speak. And then a restless night.”

  “What did you think when you learned that Lady Ingram’s body had been found in the icehouse?”

  “I was confused. Nobody mentioned a new lock. This morning I got up early, picked the lock of the cabinet where Mr. Dean keeps his keys, and checked the copy I’d made against his. He still had the same icehouse key as from before. And I’m sure he’d have been given a new key if the lock change had been official.”

  Treadles glanced at Fowler, who did not seem remotely displeased by the news.

  Any time his superior took pleasure in a development, it could only be bad news for Lord Ingram. And now that Treadles had tacitly yet indisputably sided with Lord Ingram, Fowler’s pleasure felt like a punch in the gut.

  “Thank you, Mr. Keeling,” said Chief Inspector Fowler. “You have been most helpful.”

  Thirteen

  Sherrinford Holmes marched into the library at Stern Hollow.

  Despite the direness of his situation, Lord Ingram had to suppress an urge to smile.

  By and large Charlotte Holmes was unhurried in her ways. Unless one knew, for example, the fiendish speed at which she read or that she needed only three seconds of observation to extract all pertinent life facts from a stranger, it was easy to mistake her for a creature of languor, or even indolence.

  The character she had created in Sherrinford Holmes, however, spoke at a rapid clip and walked with a bounce in his step. And was a far more affable soul than she had ever been. In fact, if Lord Ingram didn’t know any better, he might not find the chap comical at all. A bit peculiar but obviously a man of intelligence, discretion, and unimpeachable loyalty.

  “Already back?” said Lord Ingram, rising. “I expected you to be out for longer.”

  “Come with me,” said Holmes.

  Lord Ingram did not hesitate.

  In the vestibule a footman waited with hats, overcoats, and gloves. Mr. Walsh, the house steward, was also there, alongside Sergeant Ellerby.

  “Do you remember the two crates of expedition equipment you received a few days ago?” asked Holmes, shrugging into a caped coat.

  Lord Ingram nodded.

  The crates had arrived on the day Charlotte Holmes and Mrs. Watson toured the grounds of Stern Hollow. While he and Holmes were walking about in the kitchen garden, she had asked why he hadn’t gone on any digs. And he had pointed to the lavender house, where his staff had just finished stowing the crates, which he hadn’t bothered to open and examine, archaeology being the last thing on his mind these days.

  “Well, according to the very helpful gentleman at the village station, one more crate arrived for you the next day. Do you know about that?”

  His heart thudded. “No.”

  She turned to the majordomo. “What about you, Mr. Walsh?”

  Mr. Walsh’s eyes widened. “Now that you mention it, Mr. Holmes, I do recall being informed about an additional crate. It was the day Mrs. Newell and her guests arrived. Carts and carriages were pulling up to the house one after another with guests, luggage, and food for the kitchen. When the crate came, the two men who brought it said that a mistake had been made on the part of the equipment company and that they’d forgotten to include a few items, which was why the crate was being delivered all the way to the house instead of the railway station.”

  “At what time did the delivery come?” asked Lord Ingram, his heart beating even faster.

  “Toward dusk. Or perhaps a little later. Since your lordship hadn’t wished to bother with the other two crates, I had someone show the men directly to the lavender house. I meant to inform you, but it was a bit of an uproar that evening. I did remember twice the next day, but the first time you’d taken the gentlemen out to shoot and the second you were resting and had asked not to be disturbed. And then—and then the matter with the icehouse, and I’m afraid the additional crate completely slipped my mind.” Mr. Walsh’s complexion had turned a thoroughly perturbed pink. “My apologies, sir.”

  “I would have paid no mind to the crate even if you had mentioned it,” said Lord Ingram. “No need to dwell on it further.”

  He had no idea what he would have done had he been told, but no point saying anything else to the steward. He turned to the policeman. “Sergeant, Mr. Holmes and I are headed for the lavender house. Would you care to come with us?”

  Sergeant Ellerby, in fact, had no choice but to come with them. When Lord Ingram had gone for his ride earlier, he’d discovered that henceforth either Sergeant Ellerby or one of his constables must accompany him every time he stepped out of his own front door.

  “I would be honored, sir,” answered Sergeant Ellerby, with great sincerity.

  And gratitude.

  This gave Lord Ingram pause.

  Sergeant Ellerby had been mortified when he’d informed Lord Ingram of the curtailment to his freedom. And now he was relieved that an invitation had been issued, so that he didn’t need to officially insert himself as an unwelcome minder.

  Lord Ingram supposed he could be forgiven for thinking that deep down Sergeant Ellerby believed him innocent.

  But Sergeant Ellerby didn’t know him as a person. His faith might be nothing more than a reluctance to attribute true darkness to a man who lived in an earthly Eden. Or even a tribal allegiance to the local squire, against barbarian outsiders from London.

  No matter the sergeant’s reasons, Lord Ingram found himself grateful. From the moment Lady Somersby had barred him from descending into the ice well, he had understood that he would be the prime suspect in this murder. But intellectual knowledge was scant preparation for the reality of the investigation.

  There was Chief Inspector Fowler, of course, all lupine ferocity behind his owlish mien. There was Inspector Treadles, radiating discomfort, vacillating between sympathy and dismay. But the worst was the collective uncertainty of his staff. More than anything else, their unspoken misgivings made the air in the house heavy and the silence oppressive.

  They still believed in him—they desperately did not want him to be the murderer—but they were beginning to wonder whether they knew him as well as they had thought they did.

  Had it been twenty-four hours since Finney, the young kitchen helper, had run screaming out of the icehouse? Already, not being a murder suspect felt like a mythical state of bliss for which Lord Ingram could only yearn in hopeless futility.

  The rain was now an inconsistent drizzle, but the temperature continued to drop. A gloom had settled over Stern Hollow. What daylight still remained suffered from a watery pallor, a grayness that stripped all vibrancy from even the gaudiest stretch of autumn foliage.

  They were halfway to the lavender house when Sergeant Ellerby at last asked, “If you don’t mind, Mr. Holmes, why are we headed out to see a crate of expedition equipment?”

  Holmes pulled down the flaps of her deerstalker cap—Lord Ingram’s deerstalker cap, in fact. It fit her well and he liked seeing it on her. “If I may be frank, Sergeant, it’s obvious that Scotland Yard suspects Lord Ingram.”

  “I’m sure it’s far too early to come to any conclusions,” protested Sergeant Ellerby. “Lady Ingram’s body was only discovered yesterday.”

  “We thank you for your impartiality, sir. And I can truthfully say that no one was more flummoxed by Lady Ingram’s untimely death than my friend here. Set aside the fact that his house swarms wit
h investigators and the papers in London are saying goodness knows what, the whole thing has been incomprehensible from an operational point of view.

  “Lady Ingram did not return to Stern Hollow at the end of the Season. She hasn’t been here this autumn. How did her body end up in the icehouse? If we assume that she didn’t travel here under her own power while she was still alive, then somebody else had to have transported her body. How did they do it?”

  “The crate!” cried Sergeant Ellerby, catching on.

  “From the lavender house it’s about a furlong to the icehouse. Still no small distance to move a dead woman but doable for two men, or even one very strong one.”

  “So if you are right, we should see an open, empty crate in the lavender house?”

  “That is possible,” said Holmes. “At the very least, we should see that the lavender house’s lock has been tampered with.”

  And the padlock that had once secured the lavender house was indeed absent. Sergeant Ellerby exclaimed and went down on all fours. “I see bits of metal filings near the threshold—still new and shiny. The servant Mr. Walsh sent to accompany the men with the crate would have locked the door after the crate was put in. So when these men came back for the crate again, they must have used a bolt cutter on the lock.”

  He opened the door excitedly.

  Alas, the lavender house contained no open, empty crate.

  Sergeant Ellerby glanced uncertainly at Holmes. But it was Lord Ingram, his heart thumping, who said, “There are only two new crates here—these two.”

  He set his gloved hand atop a stack of crates placed against the far wall, between sturdy metal shelves that held a number of boxes and other crates marked FRAGILE and THIS SIDE UP. “Everything else was already here earlier. If Mr. Walsh is right and a third crate came the day before Lady Ingram was discovered—well, that crate is gone.”

  “But . . . wouldn’t it have been easier to open it here and carry only the body to the icehouse?” puzzled Sergeant Ellerby.

  “Look at the floor,” said Holmes, pointing down. “Ash, would your servants have been so untidy?”

  Elsewhere a few pieces of straw and wood splinters would not have been considered untidy in a rarely visited outbuilding. But this was Stern Hollow, where meticulousness was not an aspiration but a minimum standard. Lord Ingram’s heart thumped harder. “They wouldn’t. All the senior servants believe that cleanliness is next to godliness, and they have trained those under them accordingly.”

  Holmes nodded. “So the men who came later did uncrate in here.”

  “Then what did they do with the crate?” asked Sergeant Ellerby. “The gatehouse keeper might not mind a crate coming in. But wouldn’t he think it strange to see men leaving with one?”

  Holmes turned to Lord Ingram. “When I first visited here, I was given a map at the gatehouse. I remember more than one entrance marked on the map.”

  “So they could have left a different way and not been seen,” marveled Sergeant Ellerby.

  “Normally I would say no,” said Lord Ingram, doing his best to keep his voice even, “because the only other entrance that would let a cart through doesn’t have a manned gatehouse and is almost always locked. But if those men had a bolt cutter and a willingness to use it . . .”

  “Get us some horses, Ash. Let’s ride out that way,” said Holmes.

  * * *

  The unused entrance, from a distance, appeared properly shut. But when the company drew near, they saw that the two halves of the gate had been fastened together with nothing more than a length of rope, the chain and heavy padlock that usually secured them nowhere to be seen.

  Rain was coming down hard again. They had borrowed some mackintoshes from the coach house, but Lord Ingram’s trousers were soaking wet. And he could barely feel the tips of his fingers.

  “I’m no expert,” Sergeant Ellerby shouted to be heard above the rain. “But I didn’t see any signs that would indicate our quarries veered off the driving lane to get rid of the crate. Why do you think they took it with them?”

  “They might simply be cautious,” replied Holmes.

  “Or perhaps they needed it for some other reason,” said Lord Ingram, still searching the ground, his boots squelching in the mud.

  “Maybe,” said Holmes. “It’s getting dark and the rain isn’t helping. Let’s go back to the house!”

  As much as he would have preferred to pursue the men with the crate—or at least find some hints as to where they had been headed, she was right. It was too late in the day to see anything, and with cold, wet trousers plastered to his person, he might come across pneumonia first.

  He helped her up her horse. “Good work,” he said, in a volume meant for only her ears.

  “Thank you, my lord.” She leaned down and murmured, “And do you know what I want in return for all my good work?”

  His heart skipped several beats. “What?”

  “Three hundred quid in compensation.” She squeezed his hand through their sodden gloves. “Mrs. Watson will send an invoice.”

  * * *

  Chief Inspector Fowler spoke again to Finney, the young servant who first stumbled upon Lady Ingram’s body. The boy was confused to hear talk of a different lock and insisted that he, in his short time at Stern Hollow at least, had ever seen only one lock on the icehouse, the one he opened every time he went there, including the day he found Lady Ingram.

  The discrepancy made Treadles’s palms perspire.

  After Fowler dismissed the boy, he informed the house steward that he wished to tour Lord and Lady Ingram’s private chambers. Mr. Walsh, not exactly in a position to deny him the request, reminded him that Sergeant Ellerby and his men had already looked through the rooms’ contents.

  “Nevertheless, we wish to examine them again.”

  Mr. Walsh led the way himself, his gait stiff with disapproval.

  Lady Ingram’s rooms, where they stopped first, felt as if they had never been occupied. Dust sheets covered everything, which, in the lamplight, seemed like so many bulky ghosts. Her dressing room, which should have housed a resplendent collection, was three quarters empty. Her clothes, like the woman herself, had never returned from London.

  And the décor here had a different feel from the rest of the house, more opulent yet somehow, at the same time, stodgier.

  “Empire style,” mused Fowler, “while most of the other rooms we have seen are more modern.”

  Treadles recalled what ladies Avery and Somersby had said during their interview, that they suspected a secret oppression on Lord Ingram’s part. They had given as example that Lady Ingram had not left any imprint on Stern Hollow—that it had seemed to belong wholly to her husband.

  “Lady Ingram had very little interest in the decoration of domiciles. She was satisfied with how her rooms appeared and didn’t want men traipsing through, changing everything,” Mr. Walsh said with staunch loyalty to his employer, the one who was still alive.

  Lord Ingram’s chambers, in contrast, though of the exact same dimension as his late wife’s, felt light and airy. Instead of Old Masters artworks, which populated the public rooms of the house, here on the walls were hung charcoal sketches of archaeological sites. Treadles recognized the one depicting the site on the Isles of Scilly, where they’d all enjoyed such a convivial time—and where he had first heard the name Sherlock Holmes.

  The one that had pride of place—over the mantel—was labeled simply Roman Villa. Treadles recalled that Lord Ingram had written a small volume about the finding and excavation, when he was an adolescent, of a minor Roman ruin on his uncle’s property.

  “Inspector, if you would bring some more light here, please?” Fowler called from the dressing room.

  Treadles brought in a seven-branch candelabra and lit all the tapers. Fowler was on his knees on the large, luxurious rug at the center of the spacious r
oom. Before him lay a boot box that had been opened.

  “I’m sure if you need to inspect any items from the dressing room, his lordship’s valet will be more than happy to assist,” said Mr. Walsh, his voice almost high-pitched with anxiety.

  “Thank you but we are capable of helping ourselves,” said Fowler, in a tone that brooked no dissent. Then, more quietly, to Treadles: “I found these at the very back. Take a look.”

  The boots were old and worn and seemed thoroughly unremarkable. But when Treadles lifted them up, he saw what Fowler had seen: The soles were encrusted with coal dust.

  There had been coal dust on the floor of the icehouse.

  Of course, this wasn’t conclusive evidence that Lord Ingram had been inside the icehouse before Lady Ingram was found. Treadles would be surprised if the boy, Finney, didn’t have some coal dust on his soles, from fetching enough coal to power kitchen stoves that daily must cook for a staff of eighty.

  But again, this did not look good for Lord Ingram.

  Treadles exhaled slowly, trying to contain a rising panic. Charlotte Holmes had better be quick with exculpatory evidence—Scotland Yard was proceeding at a blistering pace.

  Fowler, satisfied that Treadles had understood the significance of the boots, went on to search the rest of the apartment.

  They left with the boots, which Fowler gave to a constable, since Sergeant Ellerby, according to a most unhappy Mr. Walsh, had gone out with Lord Ingram and Mr. Holmes.

  “I think it behooves us to examine the icehouse one more time, don’t you think?” said Fowler.

  They’d brought mackintoshes, but that did not make the walk to the icehouse much more pleasant. The constable stationed at the icehouse had retreated to inside the first antechamber, where he sat on a stool, huddled over a brazier that the house had provided.

  “Chief Inspector! Inspector!” He leaped up and saluted.

  “Why is it so wet in here?” asked Fowler. “Does the door leak?”