Chief Inspector Fowler’s expression was unreadable. He sent a constable to inform the London pathologist to delay his departure. Then he examined the body and the surrounding area. Lord Bancroft walked about slowly, taking in everything. Lord Ingram leaned against a tree, smoking, seeming to pay no attention to the goings-on.
Half an hour later, they were back in the library.
Fowler wasted no time. “Lord Ingram, why don’t you tell us who that man was.”
“He told me his name was George Barr.”
“Why did you kill him?”
“Last I saw him, he was perfectly alive. I had nothing to do with his death.”
“Very well, then. Tell us how you came to know him at all.”
“It was the day before Mrs. Newell’s guests came to my house, or perhaps I should say the day of, since it was approximately one o’clock in the morning. I was in the tunnel going toward the glass house boilers when he appeared at the end of the tunnel. The electric lights were on and the entire tunnel was lit. He saw me and immediately turned around and started up the ladder.
“I chased after him. Near the icehouse I caught up with him, overpowered him, and tied him up.”
“You carried rope on you?”
“Some good cord.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps you’ve learned from my staff that there had been a fire at Stern Hollow some time ago?”
“I was made aware of that.”
“I am almost entirely certain the fire was started as a distraction—that same night there was an attempt to kidnap my children, which I managed to foil only because I didn’t run toward the fire but in the direction of the nursery.”
“You didn’t tell me, Ash,” said Lord Bancroft, his voice low.
Lord Ingram shook his head. “You had enough to worry about. I didn’t want to add to your burden.”
“So you were already concerned that your children might be abducted?” asked Fowler.
“I did not think Lady Ingram was above such machinations.”
“And that was the reason you sent them away with Lord Remington. You thought they would be safer away from Stern Hollow,” said Treadles.
“Yes. I trusted Remington to be able to evade anyone Lady Ingram might send after him.”
But if the children were far away, then who had slept in the fairy tale cottage? Who had drunk the hot cocoa in the space that housed the boilers? And what had Lord Ingram been doing there past midnight?
Fowler apparently had the same questions. “My lord, why were you in the tunnel in the first place, late at night?”
Lord Ingram shrugged. “I don’t sleep very well these days. So I sometimes walk about the estate at odd hours.”
“All right. You subdued this man and tied him up. Then what?”
“I tried to question him. At first he wouldn’t say anything. Then he told me that his name was George Barr and he lived outside the village, mainly on money his sister sent him. He’d heard that Stern Hollow housed a valuable collection of art. He’d also heard that art theft was both quick and easy.
“A few weeks ago he met a footman from Stern Hollow at the village pub, having a pint on his half day. During their chat he said he’d heard that the manor was locked up nice and tight at night, with no way for anyone from the outside to get in. According to him, the footman, having already had a few pints, declared that if he were trying to break in, he would get into the boiler hut, climb down the ladder, and take the tunnel to the coal cellar. And Mr. Barr decided that he would do exactly that, for instant riches.
“He seemed a genuinely stupid man. But I didn’t dare trust my first impression. So I decided I would verify his story first, before I did anything else. Since we were already near the icehouse, that seemed as good a place as any to stow him.
“I tied him to a tree, gagged him, and went to the head gardener’s shed and took his key to the icehouse. While I was in the shed, I saw that he had a pile of padlocks and decided to take one. I didn’t want the kitchen helper to accidentally come upon Mr. Barr before I could find out whether he was truly the village idiot.
“I put him in the second antechamber and secured the icehouse with the other lock. In the morning I meant to take him some water and food, but the outdoor staff were working nearby and I couldn’t get into the icehouse without being seen. And then the cisterns broke at Mrs. Newell’s and I was faced with an influx of guests who must be looked after. I was unable to get away for the rest of the day. And when I managed to do so after most of them had gone to bed, one of the gentlemen decided to set up his telescope twenty feet from the icehouse.
“I waited for an hour. He showed no intention of leaving. I came out again at three in the morning. He was gone by then. But so was the lock on the icehouse door. This alarmed me to no small extent. I went in and all that remained of the man was a foul smell he had left in the second antechamber.
“You didn’t go deeper into the icehouse?”
“No. My first—and only—thought was that he had been sent by Lady Ingram—and that he had not been sent alone. His partner must have set him free. Since it would profit them not at all to venture farther into the icehouse, I never thought to check the inner chambers.”
“And then what?”
“Then it didn’t matter anymore whether anyone came into the icehouse; I put the old lock back on, returned the spare key to the head gardener’s place, and went back to the house.” He tapped his fingers once against the top of his large mahogany desk. “And that afternoon Lady Ingram’s body was discovered twenty feet from where I’d stood that morning.”
Beyond the windows the sky was blue—the fog had cleared entirely; the day promised to be cold but crisp. The brilliance outside only made the interior of the library, despite its many lamps and sconces, appear somber and unlit.
In the wake of Lord Ingram’s confession, silence reigned—even the fires barely hissed. Chief Inspector Fowler polished his spectacles. Lord Bancroft finished one slice of cake and picked up another. Lord Ingram took a sip of tea, his hand steady, his expression detached, seemingly unaware of his impending doom.
Treadles held on to the edges of his notebook so that his fingers wouldn’t shake. Where was Charlotte Holmes? And where was the exculpatory evidence that he and Lord Ingram had trusted her to unearth?
Fowler, satisfied with the clarity of his glasses, set them back on his nose. His owlish gaze landed on the master of the manor. “Lord Ingram, this is what I believe happened: You killed this man.”
Neither Lord Ingram nor Lord Bancroft betrayed any reaction. Treadles gritted his teeth, wiped his perspiring palms with a handkerchief, and resumed his note-taking.
“It could have happened under two different sets of circumstances, both involving your children,” Fowler went on. “I do not believe your children left with your brother, Lord Remington Ashburton. I believe they are still somewhere here on this estate. George Barr happened to stumble upon one of the places where you keep the children, and possibly their governess—namely, the tunnel between the glass house boilers and the coal cellar. Little wonder, then, that his presence so alarmed you.
“You chased him down and subdued him. This is where possibilities diverge. It’s possible you killed him on the spot. But I am of the opinion that you didn’t. That you told the truth about locking him in the icehouse while you sought to discover whether he truly was the moron he appeared to be.
“And then Lady Ingram arrived in secret. Perhaps things had gone awry with the man of her dreams. Perhaps her return was only for the sake of her children, all three of them. But she knew that you’d explained her absence as a visit to a Swiss sanatorium, which could be easily enough reversed. And she wished now to come back home, mother her children, and raise her future infant in respectable circumstances rather than ignominious exile.
“This enraged you, you who were beginning to consider letting the truth be known, so that you could petition for divorce on grounds of desertion. So
that you could carry on with the rest of your life, preferably with Miss Charlotte Holmes as the next Lady Ingram. You pretended to be amenable to Lady Ingram’s plea, gave her a quantity of laudanum—the pathologist found that in her as well—and then injected her with absolute alcohol.
“Now that the deed was done, you wondered how to turn the situation to your advantage. It would be best if you could manipulate things so that it would appear to the general public that she had passed away while abroad. For that you would need her body to be shipped back in a casket and a funeral held.
“But how to get her to the Continent to be shipped back? Arrangements must be made. In the meanwhile, she must be preserved, in a way that would be convenient to whatever chronology of events you chose to fabricate. You remembered the fellow in the icehouse. The icehouse, you realized, would be the perfect place to keep her from spoiling—or spoiling your future.
“Which then, of course, means that poor Mr. Barr, who witnessed you dragging in Lady Ingram, must now be forever silenced.”
It was with great effort that Treadles didn’t stare at Fowler with his mouth open. This was a ghastly interpretation of the known facts, but the worst thing about it was that he could see a jury being convinced of such a scenario.
“I had no idea Scotland Yard employed novelists these days,” said Lord Bancroft coldly. “Of the penny dreadful variety, no less.”
Treadles, who until now had felt only a respectful wariness toward his friend’s brother, began to harbor warmer sentiments. Lord Bancroft was no doubt the kind who had no reservations about eviscerating men he considered his lessers, but at least now he’d done it on behalf of someone Treadles wished to defend but couldn’t.
Fowler was not chastised. “Truth is often stranger than fiction, my lord.”
“If everything happened as you claimed, Chief Inspector, then why would I put back the original lock on the icehouse, with an estate full of guests and a kitchen that was certain to require ice?”
Lord Ingram’s tone was calm, far calmer than Treadles’s would have been, under the circumstances.
“Sir, with all due respect, we have no evidence at all that you are the one who put the original lock back. It could very well have been someone else who discovered that the wrong lock was on the door and rectified the situation.”
“Ridiculous,” said Lord Bancroft. “You are saying that my brother did all this while the estate swarmed with guests?”
“It is a great deal less ridiculous than the version of events peddled by Mr. Sherrinford Holmes, which would have me believe that outsiders did all this while the estate swarmed with guests.”
Against that, even Lord Bancroft had no proper retort.
Treadles glanced toward the door of the library. Why was Charlotte Holmes not marching in, the true culprit following meekly in her wake? He would declare Sherrinford Holmes’s stupid mustache the most beautiful sight he’d ever beheld if the damned thing would only materialize.
This very moment.
Lord Ingram, too, gazed at the door. Then he looked back at his nemesis. “Are you here to arrest me, Chief Inspector?”
“No, not yet, my lord,” said Fowler, the barest trace of smugness to his voice. “But I ask that you will please remain in the manor, pending further notice.”
Mrs. Watson read Miss Holmes’s telegram, changed in record time, and rushed out of her house. Luck was with her. She encountered no congestion of carriages on the way to Somerset House, where she employed every last ounce of her charm and finished her search in what must also be record time.
She next traveled with breakneck speed to Paddington station, where Miss Holmes was already waiting on the platform.
With her Sherrinford beard on, it was difficult to gauge how close—or far away—she was from Maximum Tolerable Chins, the hypothetical limit at which Miss Holmes began to watch how much she ate. But Mrs. Watson very much suspected that her appetite had not recovered. She didn’t look very different, but she felt slighter—and very, very weary.
They clasped hands briefly.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” murmured Miss Holmes.
Mrs. Watson, who tended to fret even in the normal course of events, had been lying awake every night, well into the small hours, trying to wrestle her mind into some semblance of tranquility. Alas, every time she succeeded, a few minutes later she would find that she had but started down a different path of contemplating how everything could go horribly, irrevocably wrong.
“Well enough,” she said. And that was a truthful answer. Compared to Lord Ingram, they were all faring spectacularly well, cocooned in good luck and blessings.
But perhaps the tide was about to turn for him as well. Certainly the work Mrs. Watson had put in this day must rank among some of the most worthwhile of her life.
“How did you know?” she asked Miss Holmes. “How did you know what I would find at the General Register Office?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t think in that direction until this morning, after I learned that the pathologist, in the course of the autopsy, discovered that Lady Ingram was with child.”
Mrs. Watson gasped. “What—what does that mean?”
“That’s what I hope to find out in Oxfordshire.”
As if on cue, the waiting train whistled.
Mrs. Watson was still reeling. “Does Lord Ingram know? What does he think of it?”
“I imagine he must, by now—Lord Bancroft attended the autopsy. But I have not met him since I heard the news from Scotland Yard.”
“Oh, the poor boy. What an intolerable situation.”
“Well,” said Miss Holmes. “That situation will change soon.”
“I hope so!” Mrs. Watson said fervently.
“Be careful what you wish for, ma’am,” said Miss Holmes, a hint of apology to her voice. “It could change for the worse.”
The past summer, while in Oxfordshire trying to find the whereabouts of one Mr. Myron Finch, Charlotte had passed by Lady Ingram’s ancestral estate. At the time, she and Mrs. Watson had peered in at the gate but not called upon the inhabitants.
Now she did, or at least Mr. Sherrinford Holmes did, on behalf of Lord Ingram.
The house struck Charlotte as well maintained, well decorated, but lacking a sense of history. She could imagine Lady Ingram’s parents, upon being lifted out of decades of penury, getting rid of all their old things in a hurry—the ones they hadn’t been able to pawn, in any case—in order to acquire new and more presentable possessions.
As she waited for the master of the house to be informed of her arrival, she closed her eyes. She was both weary yet uncomfortably alert, an awareness that flooded her with too many sensory details.
This was something she’d learned from a very young age: Her senses sharpened on an empty stomach, occasionally to such an extent that she needed to cover her eyes and stick her fingers in her ears; but a small degree of overeating dulled those senses to a more tolerable level.
As a toddler, she had despised raisins. But the family cook had specialized in plum cakes, which required half a pound of currants apiece. And such had been the palliative effect of an extra slice of plum cake that over time she had come to associate raisins with a feeling of comfort and relief.
After her adolescent years, the oversensitivity had become less intense. A day or two of water and very small quantities of plain toast would not reduce her to a quivering mass of frayed nerves. Still, she had reached a point when a fifteen-course meal would be a pleasure from beginning to end.
If only her stomach would cooperate.
Even plain toast made it mutiny. And along with a sharp nausea would come waves of fear—the dinner with Lord Bancroft had been an exercise in misery.
The fear was utterly unnecessary, she’d told herself. She had prepared; she understood the circumstances; she was determined to be careful and vigilant. She didn’t need any additional fear to channel or guard her.
The fear had roiled on, irrational but palpabl
e. And the only way to reduce its impact was to keep her stomach as close to empty as possible.
She hoped this meeting would help. If it didn’t, the mountain she must climb would become much higher.
“Mr. Holmes,” said the footman, “Mr. Greville will see you now.”
Charlotte shoved aside her discomfort and donned Sherrinford Holmes’s jollity. “Ah, excellent.”
Mr. Alden Greville, the older of Lady Ingram’s two younger brothers, received Charlotte with an anxious keenness. “Please tell me my brother-in-law is carrying on tolerably. I wished to go to Stern Hollow right away after I learned the news, but he specifically instructed me to stay put. He thought it would be too distressing for me to be there. But it’s been awful sitting here biting my nails and waiting for a word, with the papers printing every sort of unkindness imaginable.”
Charlotte accepted a cup of tea, which she drank black—a lump of sugar and a spoonful of cream would have been enough to set off a fresh revolt in her stomach. “He is holding up all right. But I must warn you, any day now he could be charged with your sister’s murder.”
Mr. Greville turned a deathly pallor. “No, that cannot be! He would never have done such a thing.”
“Alas, the body of circumstantial evidence is overwhelmingly not in his favor. And the police will very much desire a conviction in such a prominent case. Our only hope is that they won’t wish to make a mistake in the matter—which would result in a prominent debacle. For that reason and that reason alone, we might still have a little time.”
Mr. Greville knotted his fingers together. “I cannot tell you what a blow that would be. Obviously, it would be catastrophic for Ash and the children. But for Hartley and myself, it would be— I can’t overstate what Ash means to us. I know the one we should be grateful to is Alexandra, who married him to better our lives. But to tell you the truth, my sister never much cared for us, and it was always Ash who took the time to listen and to help, with money yes, but above all with kindness.
“My brother worships Ash even more than I do, if that’s possible. He would be devastated if anything was to happen to him. We were both horror-struck at the rupture between Alexandra and him, when we thought we would lose his affection. It didn’t happen, of course, thank goodness. But to think that now he might lose his—”
The Hollow of Fear: Book three in the Lady Sherlock Mystery Series Page 23
