A Question of Holmes

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “Entertaining” maybe wasn’t the best word for what I did for the shivering wrecks who showed up on those Friday mornings. Even when it wasn’t raining, they gave you the feeling of having wandered in the dark and wet for days, waiting for ten o’clock on Friday morning to finally roll around. In the beginning it had been only girls our age, university students and bartenders and shopgirls, the occasional younger one snuck out of her morning classes. At first it galled me to think that there were boys out there who needed Holmes’s skills, but who refused to trust themselves to a mere girl. She read that thought from something I did (my posture, a frown, all those signals I let myself project so that she could pretend to read my mind) and told me that, no, in fact, her name was passed like a secret between girls—you came to this flat if you needed a particular kind of assistance, if you needed your case to be heard. She would decide if she would help you, then if you had to pay, and when that was settled, you’d have your problem solved within the week.

  One girl, still in her work polo, told us of the man who came to her bar every night for months who now was making cameos at her bedroom window. Her boss refused to do anything about it, told her if she called the police in, he’d lose his clientele—and she’d be fired. Another had an ex-boyfriend who was currently still teaching her chemistry lab; he gave her failing marks on problem sets she’d done correctly, but she didn’t want to report him, she was afraid of retaliation. Another had the wrong kind of stepfather. That sort of awful, ugly thing.

  Usually, after listening to the story, she’d come up with a solution on the spot. Something that didn’t require much risk. The lab assistant had a superior, and our client had all of her old quizzes she could bring in as evidence, and after he was removed as her teacher he would be watched, carefully, and if something further needed to be done, all the client needed to do was come back. Sometimes she called her contact at the Thames Valley Police, a colleague of DI Sadiq’s who was discreet, and who didn’t mind, on his off-hours, following a man from a bar to a bartender’s house and making some not-so-veiled threats. Sometimes she loaned out little cameras, taught her clients to record audio on their phones, gave a brief, explicit lesson in Blackmail 101. Once she listened in total silence and then asked a few simple questions about how long and when did it start and how gone do you want him, then said if she showed up the next day in their homeroom or their French club or at their front door dressed in a school uniform to treat her like a long-lost friend and then to let her do what she had come there to do.

  The next week, it came out that her target had committed a number of crimes. This was vigilante justice, of course, and terrifying too, and I didn’t ask too many questions about it. My opinion wasn’t wanted, or necessary, and though I often wanted to know what happened to the girl after her life was turned right side up again, she never returned to the flat by Cowley Road. The clients had their marching orders, and they followed them.

  So did I. She sleuthed on Saturdays, after I had gone back to London, and as much as I wanted to be there and help, a silent line had been drawn between the work I did in her living room and the work she did in the world.

  Her clients’ secrets never came out, not in any way I knew of, but the secret of who was helping them did. It had to. A secret grew in you like a pumpkin seed in the tales, the dark vine of it climbing inexorably up until it spilled out from your mouth in a fury of stem and leaf. It was girls at the door for the longest time, but the guys came eventually. Their problems were often more prosaic, though not always, and she had the same rules for everyone. If she could solve it from her sofa, she would. If the client was in danger, she’d take it; if it interested her, she’d take it; if neither of those things and they could pay and she was behind on her electric bill, she’d raise an eyebrow at me and I’d shrug at her and we’d toss a coin to decide.

  The clients never liked when we did that.

  The man today was that, a man, a few years younger than my dad and nervous in his business suit. I could tell he didn’t like how young we were, though I could also tell he didn’t know exactly how young that was. When my old wire-rim glasses had finally broken, I’d begun wearing a pair of tortoiseshell wayfarers. They’d been a cheap placeholder for contact lenses until I’d arrived at Cowley Road that week to find her looking at me with a warmth I’d almost forgotten. The glasses stayed. The warmth was gone the next Friday, replaced by the calm, kind regard I had grown used to, and I think the both of us were relieved. As for her, she had a few streaks of gray in her dark hair that would be surprising to anyone who didn’t know our past. But then, no one knew the whole of our past except for the two of us.

  No matter. The man was speaking, and it was my job to take notes.

  “She was someone I’d known for a very long time,” he was saying, eyes flitting back and forth between us. Focus on her, I thought at him, until finally he did, settling back into his armchair with studied ease. “Since we were children. I thought she loved me, but she’s seeing someone else behind my back, and I need to find out who, and why.”

  “I need more than that,” she said, rearranging the fringe of her blanket.

  “What do you mean?”

  Her tone was patient. “I need more information than that, or I can’t take on your case.”

  “Like where she goes? Or what she does for a job? That’s easy. She works mornings at the bakery on—”

  “No.” She waved her hand to cut him off. “I meant that I’d like to know the depth of your relationship with her. Why you’re so desperate to keep her, or catch her out.”

  The man looked at me, attempting to find an ally. I shrugged.

  “I haven’t seen anything fit to write down,” I said to her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Miss Doyle,” the man said, pinking in the cheeks. “You’re going to decide whether to take my case based on whether you like my story? I’m sorry, but I don’t know if you have the sort of name recognition to allow you to do that sort of thing. I didn’t even have to make an appointment to see you.”

  Charlotte Doyle leaned forward on her elbows, sizing the man up. It had only been her name since she’d returned from her travels; she’d taken it then as an added layer of anonymity, but she’d legally changed it when she’d returned. Her family name neatly scratched through.

  Though, looking at her now, there wasn’t any doubt whose descendant she was.

  She steepled her fingers under her chin and said, “Other than the fact that you’re a barrister down on his luck with a large dog he can’t control and a number of friends from school that you see often and are hoping to impress today—male friends, I’d imagine, though of course I don’t know that for certain, I’m not a magician—the only thing I can tell you is that, from the way you lingered on the sidewalk for a full twenty minutes before coming up, this case means far more to you than your attitude suggests.”

  He crossed his arms. “How can you possibly know that.”

  “I saw you from the window,” she said impatiently.

  “Not that,” he said. “The other things.”

  “I saw you from the window,” she said again.

  He looked at me mutinously.

  “If she tells you,” I said, “you have to promise not to say it’s absurdly simple.”

  “Do I really have to do this?” she muttered at me.

  “You made your bed,” I said. “Now deduce it.”

  She sighed and turned back to him. “You were up late last night working. That’s the jacket you keep at your office—it isn’t as pressed as everything else that you’re wearing, and though it’s similar to your pants, it’s a half shade darker. You have a good eye; both the pants and jacket are a decent cut, but the material they’re made from is cheap and thin. I can’t tell if the shirt is one you keep at your office, but I rather imagine it is as well—from that, and the shininess of the jacket’s elbows and the ink on the side of your dominant right hand, I can tell that you worked the night through and didn’t get
home to shower. This is a common enough occurrence for you that you’ve laid in spare clothes for it. The clothes are cheap, so you’re not doing well, but your briefcase is beautiful, and it was a present on your law school graduation. Why else would your initials and credential be monogrammed on it? You’d never be so tasteless as to do so, but the bag is very fine, so you carry it. Another point toward your impecunity. As for your being a barrister—you really should know better than to have contracts sticking out of your bag in plain sight. And as for the rest, there’s a lick mark from a large dog on the back of your jacket at about the height that a mastiff could reach—clearly you’re not controlling it, if it’s licking your suit—and at first I thought you were in such a rush because you needed to get home and feed it, or get back to the office, but no, it’s Friday lunch, there’s a pub three blocks from here, and I saw you there last month with a gaggle of bros who clearly weren’t also lawyers. You don’t have time to make new friends. Ergo, from uni.”

  The man looked uncomfortable, as everyone does when they’re called poor. “That was actually quite—er—it wasn’t difficult,” he amended, seeing the look on my face.

  “No,” she said. “But I can’t tell you anything about the girl. You can, however.”

  He looked down at his hands miserably. “I love her. We’re not—we’re not together now, exactly, but we were for a while, and I thought we would be again. But my work schedule is ridiculous, as you pointed out, and I think she got tired of waiting. She says she isn’t seeing someone, but on the weekend, when I can actually get away, she’s never around. I only want to know if she’s telling me the truth.”

  “Have you asked her?” she asked.

  “Yes. I think she’s lying. I thought maybe you could find out for me, so I know whether to move on.”

  She did that thing where she opened her mouth, then went silent. I knew she was trying very hard not to snap at him.

  “There’s the kettle,” I said, jumping up. The kettle was, of course, not whistling. “Tea?”

  “You need to move on,” she told him, and there was a burn in her words. “She doesn’t trust you as a friend—how could she trust you as anything else? I can tell you that now, and save you the cost of me tailing her for two weeks straight. Fix your friendship because you want to be her friend, not because you’re laying the groundwork for some future that only you see. Or leave her be.”

  The man looked miserable. “Thanks, Miss Lonelyhearts.”

  “Cream and sugar?” I called from the kitchenette, but he had already picked up his expensive bag and his cheap umbrella and banged his way out the door.

  At least this time she didn’t call out, That’ll be twenty pounds.

  The kettle whistled after a moment. I fixed myself a cup and got her a glass of water and we settled into the living room to watch, out the window, as our ex-client stomped over to his car.

  “At least this time he didn’t tell me I wasn’t Sherlock Holmes,” she said. “That always happens when you make me explain my methods. I’m getting tired of it.”

  “It’s not that Miss Lonelyhearts is much better, Miss Doyle.”

  She rolled her eyes, as she always did when I used her new name. “The ‘miss’ is the problem. It masquerades as polite. It isn’t; it’s condescending.”

  “Was she actually dating someone else?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “All I can tell you is that he didn’t care about her enough, not in the right way. I couldn’t see traces of her anywhere on him. That doesn’t mean anything, of course.”

  I set my mug on the coffee table and wondered privately if she could see herself anywhere on me.

  She didn’t look me in the eye. “We’re all over each other,” she said, and that was that.

  Over the next few hours, we had a few more clients. I fetched tissues, asked questions, took notes. But they were problems she could solve from her sofa. She made about a hundred pounds, all told, and a promise to follow up on one case the next week, and then we had the afternoon, as always, in front of us.

  Now that it was May and the weather was warmer, we’d taken to wandering the university grounds. It was easy to walk and watch the punters on the water, to buy each other books in the secondhand stores outside of campus. It was a game we had, where she’d pay for some wretched ancient history or a German language primer and slip it into my bag without my noticing. I left her Golden Age novels, puzzle stories, locked room mysteries on the table beside her bed. It wasn’t something we talked about; it was just something we did.

  I was a visitor here, and it made us better with each other. More careful. She was more careful with everyone, now, and though I couldn’t see inside her head—I never could; I’d learned that by then—it seemed to me she treated herself with that same care. There had been a night or two, right when she’d returned, where day had turned to night and I’d stayed over in her bed, but I’d slipped away at dawn while she was still asleep.

  Once, I had loved her so much it was like a needle through my heart. Maybe I still did. Somehow, though, it seemed beside the point.

  Today, we prowled the city for iced coffee, her hand in the crook of my arm. I’d begun drinking it this past fall, and though I felt guilty dragging my aesthete of a friend in search of something she’d sworn off, she didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t touch any of it now, caffeine or nicotine or drugs or booze.

  It was a decision she’d made, in Norway, during the months she was assisting in a chemistry lab. I’d only heard bits and pieces about that year—more often than not, when she’d arrived in a new city, she’d gotten swept up into some investigation. Paris. Kyoto. A long two months in the American West: Lena Gupta had ended up at college in Los Angeles, and the two of them rented a homestead in Joshua Tree. From her letters, I knew that she’d been conducting experiments in the desert and catching up on her scientific journals, while Lena did . . . whatever it was that Lena did. Buying designer clothing? Plotting a coup? Their sublease ended in August, and Lena stayed in California, and Charlotte moved on.

  I went to my classes. I watched my father and mother reconcile, begin dating. They kept separate flats, but Shelby reported finding the two of them on the sofa at night, watching old movies and laughing over popcorn. I suppose my father was the only person who could understand what my mother had been through, with Lucien. It made a strange sort of sense, and so did the way I found myself home again some weekends, in my mother’s old flat, sharing a bottle of wine with my parents while my father told stories about his and Leander’s adventures and my mother laughed a real laugh.

  Had I been twelve years old, it would have been everything I wanted. It was, and it wasn’t. I spent spring break of my freshman year out in Connecticut, visiting Abby, watching her boys so she could have a few nights to herself. I couldn’t atone for anyone’s mistakes, but I had two hands, and I could help.

  In Oxford, Leander and Stephen kept that lovely old flat, and they had my father and me over every now and then, for roast duck and board games. Stephen had a wicked sense of humor, and sometimes, laughing with them all around a candlelit table, I forgot that Charlotte wasn’t just in the next room.

  Her letters came every two weeks. Sometimes through the post, sometimes through email. She often didn’t say where she was, but I could glean it from the postmark, and inside would be a few lines about what she’d been reading, an odd deduction she’d made about a stranger. If she missed me. She always said she missed me. I couldn’t respond; by the time my return letter reached her, she’d often moved on.

  Finally, in December, the night Lucien Moriarty was sentenced to twenty years in prison, she’d called me.

  I’d been at a party and stepped out onto the balcony. “Jamie,” she’d said. She sounded as though she’d been crying. “Jamie. Would you mind it if . . . I came home?”

  “Come home,” I said, closing my eyes against the city. “Come home. Tomorrow. Come home tomorrow,” and she’d laughed wildly, and for
a moment I thought it was going to be all as it had been.

  The flat in Oxford had come around this January. Leander had to travel to China for a case, and though he’d given her the option of accompanying him, she’d taken a place of her own. I think deep down she wanted to be close to the university, even if she’d decided against getting a formal education. She’d made a life here. She had a chemistry tutor, and sometimes she’d mix her witch’s brews in her kitchen. She’d joined a string quartet that was starting to do weddings, and sometimes she played her parts for me to see what I thought. In an attempt to “exorcise some demons,” she’d said, she’d joined a bare-bones production of The Merchant of Venice. Sometimes we’d run her lines in a café overlooking the water. The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven . . .

  Today, I drank my coffee. She took off her jacket and slung it over an arm; the day was growing warmer. Soon I’d have to catch my train. I told myself I was dreading it because of the flat in London I was returning to—five other English undergraduates, us two to a room, a filthy kitchen and no one ever replacing the toilet roll except for me. I could be living at home, I supposed, but I wanted to give my parents’ romance a little space to breathe.

  “I was thinking about a publishing internship for the summer,” I was saying as we picked our way back to Cowley Road. “Finals are next week, so I have to decide soon. And publishing’s writing-adjacent, not writing-writing, but that’s fine, right? I need some kind of job when I finish school. Though maybe I could just do more school.”

  “So the solution to school is school?”

  I grinned. “I guess I like institutions.”

  “You don’t. You have an authority problem and you know it.”

  “I do not.”

  “You can’t even take a correction from me. How many of your teachers do you actually like?”

  “King’s College isn’t Sherringford, H— Charlotte.” It still felt odd in my mouth.