A Question of Holmes

by Brittany Cavallaro

  Oxford had a higher crime rate than many other British cities, but those offenses ran more toward bicycle theft than kidnapping, and in the weeks after Matilda’s disappearance students stopped going out after dark. Especially young women. The newspapers had a field day, interviewing Matilda’s friends back home, her distant family (her parents refused to answer questions), splashing the same haunting photo of her across their front page. Matilda, her lips pressed together, her hand raised as if swearing an oath, her face a mask of fury: it was a stage shot, her in character, but it made her look dangerous, electric.

  It made her look alive.

  As time passed, the consensus changed. No ransom was asked for, no new information came to light, and ultimately, despite DI Sadiq’s best efforts, the case had gone cold. It was decided officially that Matilda was either a runaway, or dead, though there was still suspicion on her tight-knit group of friends, whose stories about the night she disappeared were so uniform that they seemed rehearsed. I searched again for anything interesting in the interrogation notes, but Theo and Rupert and Anwen and Sebastian Wallis’s interviews all read the same: Matilda had been fine when they left her. They’d all gone home together and found out she’d disappeared the next morning. Anwen had sobbed through her interrogation, something I couldn’t quite square with the composed girl I’d seen so far. Rupert had called every day asking for updates. And Theo haunted the police station for the weeks up until his flight home, bringing coffee to the detectives, doing his schoolwork in their waiting room. Desperate, it appeared, for answers.

  I read through his transcript a second time. A third. I should have walked to the hotel, he’d said, over and over. What kind of boyfriend am I?

  He’d never told the police that they had broken up.

  (Watson nodded when I pointed it out. “It makes sense,” he said. “Messy breakup, and then your girlfriend goes missing? You’d be their prime suspect.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him.

  “This is not me sympathizing with him,” he protested. “Criminal psychology! I’m getting into his head!”)

  And though my father’s training taught me to begin with facts and not with theory, I couldn’t help imagining it. Theo, in The Bell and Book with his friends, watching his ex-girlfriend sitting next to another boy. Putting a hand on his shoulder. Stealing sips of his drink. Sebastian? Rupert? A stranger? Them leaving at last call, Matilda splitting off with a wave—and Theo staring after her. Telling the rest that he’d forgotten something at the pub. He’d see them in the morning.

  Running after Matilda. Grabbing her by the elbow, wheeling her around. The two of them arguing—I knew the sorts of things this Theo would say, you should know better, and making a fool out of me, and then—

  There were many ways for a girl to disappear.

  And for his friends, the next day, to circle their wagons, to insist to the police that they walked Theo all the way home. The alternative was unimaginable.

  Of course, I had a very precise imagination.

  As I flipped through the file once more, looking for anything else I’d missed, DI Sadiq returned. “Thoughts?” she asked. “Questions?”

  “Theo Harding,” I said. “He’d split up with Matilda right before she’d disappeared.”

  Sadiq sighed. “We did learn that eventually,” she said. “But only weeks later, when speaking to some of the other theater students. When we returned to Theo, he categorically refused it. This is the sort of thing I’d like for you to look into—you’re in a position to earn his trust.”

  “Noted,” I said, while Watson made an actual note. “Do you remember anything about George Wilkes? The note here said he was frantic, and despite that, still uncooperative.”

  Sadiq frowned. “The girl’s father, yes?” When I nodded, she said, “Parents can be like that when their child is hurt or goes missing, especially ones with money. They treat us like we’re their personal security force. I’d be more upset at the idea if we hadn’t utterly failed him.”

  Watson flipped his notebook shut. “You sound pretty upset.”

  “I am,” she said, straightening her blazer. To avoid looking at us straight, it seemed. “I don’t like unsolved cases, particularly when it’s a child gone missing.”

  I filed that information away. I wasn’t sure if Sadiq had children—she was far too precisely done up for me to read any clues on her clothing, and I disliked looking for such signals on a woman’s body. It wasn’t immediately important. Either way, the moment of vulnerability from her was endearing, and I found myself doing something uncharacteristic: asking for permission. “I’ve taken down George Wilkes’s phone number. I’d like to follow up,” I said. “Perhaps he’s remembered something since last summer. Something his daughter said. Something to help keep this from happening again. Can I use the phone here?”

  But Sadiq was already waving me off. “Whatever you need,” she said. “I need to wrap up, get back to my own business. It’s nice to meet you—Charlotte, Jamie.”

  “Likewise,” Watson said, shaking her hand, blushing a little the way he did whenever he met an attractive woman.

  I called George Wilkes from the telephone on Sadiq’s desk, but he didn’t answer the number listed for his house, or his mobile. On the latter I left a message: “This is Charlotte Holmes, following up from the Thames Valley Police Department. If you could give me a call back at your earliest convenience . . .”

  “This isn’t really aboveboard,” Watson said, after I’d hung up and left a note for Sadiq telling her to expect George Wilkes’s call.

  “It isn’t?”

  Watson scratched the back of his neck. “You’re not a detective. I mean, you are a detective, but you’re making it sound like you work for the police—”

  “I said no such thing. If Wilkes infers as such, that’s hardly my fault.”

  “Holmes.”

  “I just told DI Sadiq what I’m doing,” I protested. “How could I be doing anything wrong?”

  Watson was always this way, some strange jumble of accelerator and brake pedal, and I never knew what line he’d drawn for himself in the morning. This spring, when we were writing back and forth across the Atlantic, I’d pointed out that it didn’t make logical sense to be fine with breaking and entering but less fine with, say, my secretly texting with his then-girlfriend to check in on his well-being; at that, he’d added “emailing Holmes” to the list of things he was decidedly not okay with, and went silent for a week.

  Less often, now, he made excuses for me, was less interested in redrawing his moral landscape so that he could keep me slotted in some Edenic garden, someplace where I would always be the hero. Or the villain. It felt now that we had more of a sliding scale by which to measure the other, as was only fair. Some days I could keep myself together quite well. And other days I would do anything in the name of expediency.

  “I need to prepare for my tutorial,” he said, passing a hand over his hair. “And—don’t you have your poetry tutorial at one?”

  I did. And what I hadn’t told him yet was that I wasn’t planning to go. That I’d made the decision that morning in the kitchen, spreading butter on endless pieces of bread while he slept in the other room.

  “I’ll walk back with you,” I told him. “The tutor said it’s fine if I’m a little late.”

  Twelve

  AFTER I DEPOSITED WATSON AT THE LIBRARY—I DIDN’T kiss him good-bye, it was too much and too light out and I already felt ill about lying—I picked up a sausage roll from a little shop outside the gates and ate it slowly as I walked, running through my monologue in my head.

  How should I your true-love know

  From another one?

  By his cockle bat and staff

  And his sandal shoon—

  It was one of a series of nursery rhymes that Ophelia sang—laughing, crying—after her father’s death at her beloved Hamlet’s hand. Nursery rhymes, and a song about a girl losing her virginity, and the obsessive wishing of goo
dnight. Goodnight, ladies, goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight, goodnight . . .

  If I had disdain for her character, it was in the way Shakespeare used her: a weathervane for everyone else’s wind. She is told by her father to betray Hamlet, and does, and when Hamlet shortly after loses his mind—something, I might add, which is entirely his own problem—Ophelia blames herself. Hamlet will not marry her; he will instead murder her father, and she blames herself for that too.

  Later, she climbs a willow tree, falls from it, and drowns, as one apparently does.

  Though I knew a bit about Shakespeare, it wasn’t as though I had all that much experience with theater. When I was a child, Leander had taken me to see My Fair Lady in the West End, and during a warm, languid summer when my father had been inexplicably even-keeled, we’d watched the Kenneth Branagh film adaptations of Much Ado About Nothing and Othello and As You Like It and Hamlet. I was ten, and I’d been taken with Ophelia, all red curls and white dresses and then, at the end, lovely even in her straightjacket as she writhed on the black-and-white tiled floor.

  My father had seen something in my expression, some flicker of fascination, and he had reached out to touch my shoulder. “She isn’t a girl,” he’d said gently. “She’s a bad idea.”

  Perhaps he’d meant to say she’d been poorly drawn, or characterized. Or perhaps he’d meant exactly what it sounded like. That summer, as I’d known it, only lasted a few weeks longer. We’d make it through Love’s Labour’s Lost and half of some made-for-television Macbeth, and then one night my father wasn’t in the living room when I went down after supper. Some small new indignity had driven the tension back into my father’s body, and he sat like a tensile coil in his study through the waning days of August.

  I had looked out the window, and dreamed.

  A bad idea.

  I arrived at the St. Genesius theater a few minutes before two, even though my audition time wasn’t until much later. The heavy doors were propped open for the occasion; the sun stretched in long, slim branches of light onto the wine-colored carpet.

  I crept in on cat feet. On the stage, a man was pacing to and fro, calling out directions to someone just offstage. A pair of high curtains began to rise, abruptly seized, then lowered all at once. Someone cursed loudly from the wings. Laughter kicked up from just below the stage, a chorus of it, and I refocused my eyes to look.

  The Dramatics Society, all forty-odd of them, clustered together in the first few rows. They leaned on each other’s shoulders, bent forward to whisper in each other’s ears; their bags were flung over seatbacks and left to spill out in the aisles. They were high school–aged, all of them, bright like peacocks, and I heard Americans and Irish and a boy speaking excitedly with a Parisian spin on his words, gesturing with his hands. His friend nodding, slicing an apple with a sharp little knife, sharing the pieces of it between them.

  As I walked down the aisle, not a single one turned their head to look at me, though my boots were making more noise than I’d intended. I felt unaccountably self-conscious. Why on earth was I fussed? I didn’t want them to look at me anyway.

  “Charlotte!” a voice said. Theo. He was sitting front row center, beside Rupert, and when Rupert saw me he began waving as though he were drowning in a paddling pool. I picked my way over people’s legs and backpacks and sat down in the seat Theo cleared for me.

  I glanced at him—his broad smile, his even teeth—and, with an internal shudder, glanced away.

  Thankfully, he interpreted my disgust as nerves.

  “You decided to audition.” At my nod, he leaned in and said, quite matter-of-factly, “Don’t be nervous. Really. You have great presence. And even if you’re shit . . . well, you’re not as shit as what you’re about to see.”

  “What’s that?”

  Before Theo could respond, the man on the stage cleared his throat. “Attention,” he said, clapping his hands. “Attention!”

  To my surprise, no one quieted down.

  He cleared his throat again, and this time I took a better look at him, this man in suspenders and penny loafers, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He couldn’t have been older than thirty, but he was sending his shirts out to be starched, and his suspenders were moth-eaten a bit at their edges. His eyes and nose were far too petite for his face, but his smile, though nervous, was kind.

  He looked, in short, like an easy mark.

  “Attention!” he called again.

  “Shut up, Quigley,” someone said from behind me, and the Dramatics Soc, as a whole, snickered.

  Theo shot me a look—half amusement, half despair. “Someone’s feeling brave,” he said in an undertone.

  “I understand that you are all unhappy,” Quigley was saying. “I know that the events of last summer were difficult for you all—”

  “Where’s Dr. Larkin?” a girl from behind me called.

  “She will be here this evening to give the lecture. As you all know.” Quigley cleared his throat. “And she’s also agreed to assist me in overseeing auditions.”

  A ragged cheer.

  “But, as you are all aware, I will be making up the final cast list on my own.” Into the heavy silence that followed, he said, “Please remember that I once sat in your same chairs. I too participated in the Dramatics Society—well, the full-fledged, academic year Dramatics Society—and I am very pleased to be back here, working with you all.”

  I was fascinated by how he kept reminding the students that not only was he in charge, but that they knew it. I was also fascinated by the way he had casually insulted their program as a lesser cousin of St. Genesius’s undergraduate society. As I watched him fidget onstage, I thought he was on the verge of asking us not to eat him, please, if we would be so kind. He eased himself off the stage with a pasted-on confidence; his hands were clenched into little balls.

  Theo turned to me. “So,” he said with a lazy smile. “This should be a shitshow.”

  “Oh, come on. The man is trying,” Rupert said as we stood, gathering our things. Theo pointed to the back corner of the auditorium, up by the sound booth, and I followed him up the aisle.

  “Yeah, but you can see him try,” Theo said. “It’s sad. You never want to see someone try.”

  “‘There is no try,’” Rupert intoned, the voice of someone quoting something I didn’t know.

  “Still,” I said. “Is there a reason Dr. Larkin is so popular? I mean, she couldn’t stop what happened last year.”

  Theo flung himself down into the seat closest to the wall. “Are you talking about the accidents? Nobody could stop them. They came from everywhere and—and nowhere. But they definitely didn’t come from Dr. Larkin, and she was the one they hung for it.”

  I had more questions, not the least of which was why we had moved to sit so far away from everyone else (and also why there wasn’t any such thing as “try,” when the word was right there, in the English language, for us to use) but Dr. Larkin was hurrying down the aisle, a legal pad in her arms. She settled down in the front row, empty now other than Dr. Quigley, and left a few seats between them. Still, despite this gesture of distance, the two leaned in together to discuss something briefly. Quigley shook his head, but Larkin pressed on, cupping her hand around her mouth to shield her speech.

  Quigley shook his head a final time, and stood. “First up, we have Florence Keener,” he said. The room quieted, and a tall, strong-shouldered girl in the row popped up and ran down to the stage. “Let’s begin with some applause, please. It isn’t easy to go first.”

  Theo clapped heartily. “Florence,” he said, “Florence is terrific,” and it was the first time I’d really seen him like that, glowing for someone else. Of course, he was objectively quite handsome, with his thick blond hair and full mouth. But when someone existed as Theo did, in opposition to everything around them, I spent so much time tracing the invisible lines of their personality out that I never thought to follow them in.

  All of that is to say, I didn’t usually find murde
rers handsome. Was I imagining it, or was his smile not quite stretching across his face?

  “She’s great, right?” Theo asked.

  “What?”

  “Florence. Try to pay attention—it’ll distract you, if you’re nervous about your audition.”

  He’d utterly misread my fidgeting. “Thanks,” I said, but when I focused in, I realized that Florence was, in fact, “great.” She was reading for Gertrude, the role of Hamlet’s mother, and her height and the rich curvature of her voice lent themselves to queenliness, to the suggestion of danger. She would be an excellent choice.

  So would the next girl, and the next.

  That was the tragedy of it: so many roles in Hamlet, and only two written for women. If Quigley and Larkin had any sense, they’d be reimagining some of the male roles for their talented female cast—there wasn’t any reason, say, that Hamlet’s schoolfriends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern couldn’t be played by girls. There wasn’t any reason that the title role couldn’t be, for that matter. But I wasn’t the director.

  I wasn’t fantasy-casting the show, either. The notes I was taking—and I was taking copious notes—had a different aim altogether. I was here, primarily, to solve a mystery. When sleuthing, I refused on principle to theorize in advance of the facts.

  But that meant, of course, that I needed . . . facts.

  Florence was confident, easy in her manners: this meant nothing. It would take confidence to orchestrate a series of “accidents” under everyone’s noses. The next two girls, Keiko and Beatrice, had been at Oxford the year before. (Keiko did an excellently understated Ophelia, all subtle, discordant worry.) The first boy to audition, Asher, hadn’t been, and I noted how short he was, how he licked his lips before he began to speak. His eyes kept fluttering over to Theo and Rupert and me, up in the back corner, which meant everything and also nothing. (Theo was, again, very attractive.) A pair of twins got up and asked shaky permission to perform a scene together, rather than a monologue; I noted their nervousness and was writing new?, when Rupert murmured, “That’s a brave move on Mateo’s part.”