The Hollow of Fear: Book three in the Lady Sherlock Mystery Series Read online

  At the top of the grand staircase she met Lord Ingram, dressed as if he were about to go for a ride.

  “Miss Holmes,” he said gently, “you already spoke to Scotland Yard, I take it? I hope it wasn’t too taxing.”

  “Oh, I dare say I’ll—”

  She bit back the last word. She’d live. But would he? Or was he already headed for a rendezvous with the hangman?

  “I’ll forget about it by dinnertime, I’m sure. Are you all right? Has Charlotte been able to find out anything?”

  Although what Charlotte could do from her cottage, even Livia couldn’t say.

  “I’m well. And I’m sure Miss Charlotte will be instrumental in putting everything to rights again. Now, is there anything I can do for you?”

  “No, you have so much—”

  “You are mistaken there, Miss Holmes. Other than letting the police deploy as they will, there is absolutely nothing I can do about anything related to Lady Ingram’s death. But if there is some service I may render you, it will take my mind off the situation. And that would be a welcome respite, however brief.”

  “Oh,” she said. “If—if that is the case, then there is something that’s worried me recently.”

  When she had time to worry about anything besides him.

  “Please. Allow me to be of service.”

  “Well, I don’t know whether Charlotte has ever mentioned her, but we have an elder sister who has never moved in Society.”

  Bernadine was thirty years of age and it had been a quarter century since she last stepped out of the house. As far as Livia could remember, her name had never crossed anyone’s lips in a polite conversation. When Livia arrived in London, she was presented as simply Miss Holmes and not Miss Olivia Holmes, indicating that she was the eldest unmarried Holmes daughter, and completely erasing Bernadine’s position. Even Mrs. Newell, who otherwise remembered everyone, always referred to the Holmes girls as a trio and not a quartet as they were in truth.

  She could only hope what she was about to reveal wouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to Lord Ingram.

  “Miss Bernadine?” he said. “Yes, I know of her.”

  Thank goodness. Livia gave a brief account of Bernadine’s change of surroundings, from the Holmes household to Moreton Close, the private institution for women from notable families who suffered from conditions similar to Bernadine’s. “I don’t trust my parents on important matters. I’m not sure I trust my own judgment on this, either. Charlotte has promised to investigate Moreton Close, but she can’t be spared right now.”

  “I will direct my solicitor to make some inquiries, under the guise of representing the prominent family of a young woman who might benefit from their services. That way, we can perhaps gain entrance to the place.”

  “Will you? That would be wonderful!”

  Lord Ingram smiled, as if her relief had gladdened him. “Consider it done. But please know that it might take some time.”

  “Thank you, my lord. Thank you!”

  “No, thank you, Miss Holmes. And that reminds me, I have been tasked to give you a message.” He glanced behind himself. There was no one around, but still he lowered his voice. “Please visit the nursery. A mutual friend wishes to speak to you. Good day, Miss Holmes.”

  The nursery was cheerfully decorated but silent and empty. Livia paced for a good ten minutes before a knock came. She rushed to answer—Charlotte, it had to be Charlotte.

  But when she’d opened the door, a round, peculiar-looking man stood outside, all boutonnière and coiffed mustache, an ornate monocle screwed into one eye socket.

  Disappointment and suspicion snuffed out Livia’s eager anticipation. “May I help you?”

  “You may indeed, Miss Holmes,” said the man gravely. “I came to inquire after your progress on the Sherlock Holmes story.”

  Only three people in the entire world knew that she was working on a story inspired by the Sackville case: Charlotte, Mrs. Watson, and the nameless young man who had recently sent her the moonstone cabochon.

  Could this be him, in disguise?

  Taking advantage of her astonished inaction, the man came in and closed the door. “I see Mrs. Watson and I are not the only ones you told, Livia.”

  This time, he spoke with her baby sister’s voice.

  Livia’s jaw fell. “Charlotte!” she managed a vehement whisper. “Charlotte! What—what— Good gracious— I—”

  She gave up and stared.

  The man—Charlotte—smiled. “You would cut a more dashing figure dressing as a man, Livia. The only way to accommodate my bosom is to create a considerable paunch.”

  “Your mustache . . . and beard . . .”

  “I know. All very good. Mrs. Watson knew where to get the best.”

  Livia pulled herself together. “So how long have you been here?”

  “Since last night. I’m staying on this floor, where there are no other guests.”

  “Have you found out anything? Do you know who killed Lady Ingram?”

  “Alas, even Sherlock Holmes cannot solve everything at a glance.”

  “But you will find out who did this, won’t you? You won’t let . . . you won’t let anything happen to Lord Ingram.”

  Even with all the disguise, Charlotte’s expression was somber. “I will do what I can.”

  Don’t forget, I’ll look after you, Charlotte had told Livia at one point this past summer, not long after she’d established herself as oracle to Sherlock Holmes, fictional sage. The certainty with which she’d said it, the inevitability—it had been a promise, pure and simple.

  Here Charlotte made no promises. And beneath the dignity of her words, did Livia detect a trace of apprehension?

  To Charlotte, fear was but a word in the dictionary—or at least it had always seemed so to Livia. While Livia dreaded and fretted over a thousand ghastly possibilities, Charlotte dealt with only facts and actual events. What did she know, then? What concrete, undeniable particulars could make Charlotte Holmes, she of the nerves of Damascus steel, actually afraid?

  “Is it really that bad?”

  Charlotte looked at her for a moment. “Lord Ingram is not without allies. Not to mention he has resources of his own.”

  Again, an indirect answer. Livia’s heart fell like a dropped stone.

  Charlotte moved to the middle of the nursery. “Anyway, how was your interview with the police?”

  “I met that Inspector Treadles you worked with on the Sackville case. What an awful, sanctimonious man.”

  Charlotte tilted her face in inquiry.

  “The other inspector asked whether Lady Ingram might have been jealous of the friendship between you and Lord Ingram. I said that if she was jealous, it was over nothing, as you and Lord Ingram have always conducted yourselves according to the strictest rules of decorum. And guess what Inspector Treadles said?”

  “Ah,” murmured Charlotte.

  “He said, in almost those exact words, that weren’t you banished from Society because of something highly inappropriate with a different married man.” Livia all but growled. “I despise him. I wonder how Lord Ingram can be friends with someone like that.”

  “No doubt Inspector Treadles wonders the same, how Lord Ingram can be friends with someone like me.”

  “I have some police inspectors in my Sherlock Holmes story. I’ll change their portrayal, make them idiotic and incompetent, and call one of them Treadles.”

  “That might not be the best idea.”

  “Maybe not. But it’s a most satisfying thought.”

  “I see you are all right,” said Charlotte wryly, “which is what I came to see.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’m only a bystander in all this. I hope Lord Ingram . . .”

  Against the stark reality of the situation, her hope seemed too fragile to take shape.

  Charlotte briefly settled a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll do what I can. Now tell me, in some detail, what you discussed with Scotland Yard.”

  When
Livia had finished recounting what had been said, to the best of her recollection, including her charge that someone was deliberately trying to frame Lord Ingram, namely whoever had set Lady Avery and Lady Somersby to uncover a “grand injustice” for Lady Ingram, Charlotte nodded and fell silent.

  After a minute or so, she said, “I must go now. The police will wish to speak to you again. And when they do, will you do something for me?”

  “Uneasy about something, Inspector?”

  Treadles started—and realized that he had been rubbing his temples while pacing the parlor, his strides quick and agitated. The more he thought about it, the more complicated Charlotte Holmes’s presence became. Despite Lord Ingram’s denials, that he might wish to marry her was considered a potential, perhaps likely, motive for Lady Ingram’s murder. If Treadles were to tell Chief Inspector Fowler that Charlotte Holmes was here on the premises, in close contact with Lord Ingram, how would that affect Lord Ingram?

  Disastrously, to say the least.

  Fowler peered up at Treadles. He looked owlish, but an owl was a predator and a damned good one at that. Treadles felt trapped between his professional obligations and his loyalty to Lord Ingram. And the longer he waited before he revealed what he knew, the worse it would look for him.

  “I was thinking about the state of Lord Ingram’s marriage in the past few years,” Treadles said. “Must not have been pleasant living in that household.”

  “That’s the trouble with putting women on a pedestal. You do that, and they always fall off—knocking you over on the way down,” said Fowler.

  Treadles might have laughed, if not for how aptly Fowler’s observation described his own situation.

  The next moment his fingers were at his temples again, pressing hard. His reaction to the crumbling of Lord Ingram’s marriage had consisted primarily of a despondent sympathy. But now a terrifying thought struck. He had met Lady Ingram, not long before the latter allegedly fled with her lover. Granted the meeting had been very brief. But had he received any impression that Lady Ingram was the kind of woman to sacrifice everything for a man?

  To the contrary, the more he thought about it, the more discordant Lord Ingram’s account grew.

  At times he’d considered Charlotte Holmes cold, when Miss Holmes was only unsettlingly neutral. Lady Ingram, on the other hand, had been truly cold, a glacial lack of warmth that made Treadles wonder whether she derived any pleasure from life. He could see her act out of spite, but not love.

  Not love.

  He became aware that Fowler was still observing him. No point pretending that he wasn’t distracted, so he shook his head, as if to clear it. “A deuced business, this case.”

  Now to redirect Fowler’s attention. He pointed at Sergeant Ellerby’s notes on ladies Avery and Somersby, which Fowler had been reviewing. “Something to keep in mind, Chief Inspector: I fear Sergeant Ellerby might have a mistaken impression of Lady Avery and Lady Somersby.”

  “Oh?”

  “He thinks them the town equivalent of a pair of village busybodies.”

  “Sometimes busybodies stumble upon crimes. You needn’t worry that I wouldn’t take them seriously as witnesses, Inspector.”

  “I didn’t worry about it at all, Chief Inspector. But it behooves me to mention that during the Sackville case, Lord Ingram himself had consulted them for pertinent information—though of course he didn’t tell them that he was the conduit through which the information would pass to Scotland Yard.”

  Fowler tapped his fingertips on the desk before him. “So they are to a pair of village busybodies what the Reading Room at the British Museum is to the typical lending library.”

  “Precisely.”

  The Reading Room at the British Museum walked in just then, a pair of alert women in their early forties. Unlike most other witnesses Treadles had faced in his career, Lady Avery and Lady Somersby were neither nervous nor reticent: They came prepared to impart every fact they knew and a few theories besides.

  For most of the interview, what they said did not add much to Sergeant Ellerby’s preliminary report—despite his doubts about their gossiping ways, he had taken copious and accurate notes. But Fowler’s ears perked up when Lady Somersby brought up the encounter between Charlotte Holmes and Lord Ingram near the end of the Season.

  Treadles had seen Lord Ingram and Charlotte Holmes together more than once this past summer. Judging by the location the meeting was said to have taken place, it would have been around the time he and they met by chance outside a house in Hounslow that happened to contain a dead body, a case that was supposedly solved, though never to Treadles’s satisfaction.

  He still didn’t know what they had been doing there. But the ladies, well, at least they didn’t insinuate; they said in so many words that it seemed a distinct possibility that Lord Ingram might have been keeping Miss Holmes as his mistress.

  Treadles didn’t think that had been the case. He thought of the tension between Lord Ingram and Miss Holmes the night of his and Lord Ingram’s first visit to 18 Upper Baker Street. There had been a great deal of genuine disapproval on Lord Ingram’s part. Perhaps sentiments other than censure also fueled that tension, but overall their interaction had not come across as loverly.

  When he’d met them in Hounslow, after the conclusion of the Sackville case, he had been more than a little taken aback—and upset—by Miss Holmes’s sudden and unexpected appearance at a murder site of which he had just been informed himself. But he should still have sensed the difference had they become carnally involved by then.

  That said, he had no way of knowing whether that had changed since the end of summer, especially after Lady Ingram’s departure, if the latter had indeed absconded with her own illicit lover.

  “You wouldn’t know how we could speak to this Miss Holmes, would you, ladies?” asked Fowler.

  Treadles’s conscience twitched. He exhaled, relieved that his colleague wasn’t looking in his direction. But he knew that he was lying by omission—more so with every passing minute.

  Lady Avery snorted. “Good luck with that, Chief Inspector. We have been trying to discover her whereabouts since she ran away from home.”

  Fowler glanced down at his list of questions. “Now, if you don’t mind telling me, madam, did you immediately suspect that Lady Ingram’s departure had something untoward about it, or was it only after you accidentally learned that Miss Holmes had met with Lord Ingram after she became an exile?”

  “Well, to be perfectly honest, neither. Shortly before I set out for the Isle of Wight, where I would meet the maid who had worked at the tea shop in Hounslow, we received a note, asking why we, who have made it our business to inquire into situations that do not seem right, hadn’t paid the slightest attention to Lady Ingram’s absence. Scolding us, one might say, for that lack of animal instinct.

  “We were of a mind to disregard it. We receive a great many anonymous tips concerning all manners of individuals. And we had become proficient at distinguishing those that deserve further investigation from those that are merely pranks—or worse, malice in written form.

  “Lord Ingram was one of the few good ones, we thought, a man whose integrity we need not question, because he was vigilant about it and never self-indulgent. But the meeting with Miss Holmes changed everything. Now he had a reason to want to be rid of Lady Ingram. A reason that could pass for noble sentiments, even: Were he a free man, he could rescue Miss Holmes from her state of exile.”

  Chief Inspector Fowler nodded. He did not ask whether Miss Holmes needed—or indeed even wanted—to be rescued from that state of exile. “There seems to be a gap of a fortnight between when you verified with the maid that the woman with Lord Ingram had indeed been Miss Holmes and when you wrote to him about the matter. Were you further checking the facts during that time?”

  “I wasn’t,” said Lady Avery. “As it so happened, my sister and I both fell ill. Even the most exciting exposé pales in importance when one’s health is at risk.” />
  “I see,” said Fowler, a hint of incredulity to his tone, as if he couldn’t believe that these two women would prize anything above gossip. “I hope you have both recovered satisfactorily?”

  “Yes, very much so.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. And if it’s not too much trouble, I would like to see the note you received.”

  Lady Avery excused herself, left the room, and returned a few minutes later. The policemen inspected the stationery—good but not exceptional, postmarked near Euston Station in London—and the writing—done by a typewriter, every letter regular, crisp, and anonymous.

  “We’d like to hold on to this, with your permission.”

  “You are welcome to it.”

  “And one last thing before I let you go, ladies. Have you heard, by any chance, of a man Lady Ingram might have loved as a girl, before she married Lord Ingram?”

  “We have, but fairly recently. The first we heard was this past summer.” The ladies each opened a large diary and found the record almost simultaneously. The last day of June, as a matter of fact.

  “Do you believe it?”

  Lady Somersby closed her diary. “That’s difficult to say. We had thought, at first, that it made a great deal of sense. But now when we consider everything together, we ask ourselves, as much as it pains us to do so, whether Lord Ingram might not have had a hand in its dissemination.”

  Treadles stiffened, recalling his own doubt about the likelihood of Lady Ingram giving up everything for a man.

  “To what end?” asked Fowler

  “Should people doubt the validity of the initial reason given for her disappearance—her health—he could then fall back on a different one. Much more embarrassing, granted, but believable—that she might have run off with the man she loved—with no hint of wrongdoing on Lord Ingram’s part.”

  This was exactly the explanation Lord Ingram had given. It didn’t mean that Lord Ingram had lied—Treadles prayed that he had not—but it now behooved Treadles to proceed with at least as much skepticism as did ladies Avery and Somersby.