A Study in Scarlet Women (Lady Sherlock #1)(91)
Lord Ingram regarded his friend with a neutral expression—he had become much more opaque in recent years, especially since his estrangement from his own wife.
When Inspector Treadles finished relating the events of the previous evening, Lord Ingram brought out a stack of prints he’d made from the negatives he’d stolen from the Marbletons.
“Is this the man you saw at Baker Street?” he asked, showing Inspector Treadles an image of Stephen Marbleton.
“No, the man had a beard.”
Lord Ingram handed over another photograph, the same young man, wearing the same clothes and standing in the same place with the same pose, only now sporting a luxuriant beard.
This caught Inspector Treadles’s attention. He examined the photograph with much greater attention. “I’ve heard of the manipulation that can be done to photographs, but I’ve never seen it with my own eyes.”
“I used to distribute prints of my brother Bancroft with horns on his head. To date I remain his favorite brother,” said Lord Ingram drily. “But I take it that’s still not the man you saw.”
“No, I don’t believe so.”
“This one?” Lord Ingram handed over yet another photograph of a bearded young man.
Charlotte’s eyes widened. This man had on a lounge suit and was casually posed, beard and all, but his features were those of Frances Marbleton’s.
“Yes, him,” said Treadles.
“I spoke to Mr. Shrewsbury this morning, before church,” said Lord Ingram. “This is also the person he believes to have been driving the hansom cab that his mother inexplicably rode in the night before she died.”
Inspector Treadles studied the photographs again, one by one. “I will have someone show these pictures to the villagers. Do you know yet what might have been their motive?”
“I spoke with Mrs. Watson this morning,” said Charlotte, “and learned that the lover who ruined Sophia Lonsdale was said to be none other than Lord Sheridan.”
Lord Ingram frowned. “He must be a good twenty-five years older than her.”
“She was one of his daughter’s closest friends. Mrs. Watson’s understanding is that their grief drew them closer and one day, mutual comforting went too far,” Charlotte explained. “But let’s consider a slightly different scenario. What if the man who ruined her had been Mr. Sackville instead? If Lord Sheridan took the blame for his brother, that could explain their subsequent alienation.
“Here’s something else I learned from Mrs. Watson: Lady Shrewsbury had been the one to broadcast Sophia Lonsdale’s indiscretion. And if Lord Ingram gets hold of Lady Avery or Lady Somersby, it’s quite possible he could unearth some connection between Lady Amelia Drummond and Sophia Lonsdale, too.”
In this scenario, Sophia Lonsdale would have ample reason to swoop in, cold-blooded murders on her mind, for the wrongs she perceived her victims had perpetrated against her all these years ago. For a fall from grace so complete that decades later she still carried discoloration on her hands.
Lord Ingram cradled his chin in the space between his thumb and forefinger. “This would have been a perfect explanation. Why don’t you sound more convinced?”
“Because I don’t understand Lady Sheridan’s involvement in the present day. I feel we’re still nowhere near the bottom of what she’d been trying to do on that trip to—”
She fell silent. There was something she had learned from Inspector Treadles’s reports—the ones he had handed over for Sherlock Holmes to read during his first visit. What was it?
Her palm struck the tufted surface of the velvet chaise. “Inspector, when you interviewed Dr. Birch, the physician from the next village who was summoned because Dr. Harris was out, he mentioned that he had his dogcart already hitched because he was headed out to the village inn to see to an elderly traveler in need of morphine.
“I believe you can find Lady Sheridan’s picture in recent Bath papers, from the opening of the new YWCA center. And I believe if you were to show her picture to both Dr. Birch and the innkeeper, they would confirm that she is the elderly traveler in question.”
Sergeant MacDonald was dispatched to Devon that same afternoon. By midmorning the following day, he was wiring back reports. The young Marbletons were indeed recognized as the traveling photographer and his assistant who had come through the village. Inspector Treadles sent a pair of constables to Claridge’s, but they telephoned from the hotel, reporting that the Marbletons had already vacated their suite and left no forwarding addresses.
Within a quarter hour, Sergeant MacDonald’s next report came.
Dear Inspector Treadles,
I spoke to Dr. Birch and his sister, Miss Birch. They both identified Lady Sheridan as Mrs. Broadbent, the elderly patient staying at the inn in Barton Cross. Since Dr. Birch had to rush out to Curry House, Miss Birch was the one who took the morphine to the inn and administered it to Lady Sheridan.
When Dr. Birch came back from Curry House and called on Lady Sheridan, she was better, thanks to the morphine, though still in a state of great suffering. As he recounted what had kept him from seeing her sooner, she became more animated and asked a number of questions.
Dr. Birch doesn’t recall whether he used Mr. Sackville’s name in his exchange with Lady Sheridan—he thinks he might have. Miss Birch had this to add: After she administered the morphine, Lady Sheridan asked her to retrieve a framed photograph of her daughter from her reticule. And when Miss Birch reached in, the first thing she felt was not a photograph, but a pistol.