A Study in Scarlet Women (Lady Sherlock #1)(92)
Yours truly,
MacDonald
When Inspector Treadles arrived at the Sheridan town house, Mr. Addison conducted him not to the drawing room, but Lady Sheridan’s bedroom.
“The doctor has just been. She doesn’t have long to live,” said the butler, looking much less spry than Treadles remembered from mere days ago. “Please be brief, Inspector.”
Lady Sheridan lay in a half recline, a hillock of pillows behind her back. Her grey hair was loose, her cheeks waxy, her eyes deeply sunken. At Treadles’s entrance, she signaled a white-capped nurse, who had been feeding her spoonfuls of broth, to leave.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to answer many questions, Inspector,” she said slowly. “I’ve had quite a bit of laudanum.”
“I’ll be quick then, ma’am. How do you explain your presence in the next nearest village to Curry House at the same time Mr. Sackville died?”
“Coincidence. I might die any minute. For old times’ sake, I wished to see my brother-in-law one last time.”
“Why did you choose to do so alone? Why not bring along Lord Sheridan?”
She snorted, a sound of bitterness. “He isn’t about to die.”
“If a social call had indeed been your only purpose, why lie about something so simple and understandable?”
“If I didn’t, Lord Sheridan would know, wouldn’t he?” Her eyelids drooped. When she looked at Treadles again, the simple action seemed to require superhuman effort. “He’d have asked me why I must undermine his proud estrangement from his brother and I hadn’t enough time left to bother with that sort of nonsense.”
“And the pistol you carried with you on the trip?”
This time she closed her eyes, a strange little smile about her lips. “A lady must take care when she travels by herself.”
Shortly after Treadles had been promoted to sergeant, he returned to Barrow-in-Furness to visit his mother. She had been in robust health, but as he said good-bye to her, he’d had a sense of foreboding. That it would be the last time he saw her. She’d died mere weeks later from a sudden and fierce fever. In the hours before his father-in-law drew his last breath, everyone had been convinced that he would fully recover, especially Alice. But Treadles had the same premonition. Mr. Cousin had died that night.
There would be no further questions for Lady Sheridan; their final meeting was at an end.
He bowed. “Thank you, ma’am. Good-bye.”
Upon Inspector Treadles’s return to Scotland Yard, he found Hodges’s written statement at his desk. Treadles filliped the piece of paper. Something about the handwriting snagged his attention, the oddly crooked g’s, the squashed o’s, and the majuscule a’s that were more ambitious than necessary.
Where had he seen this handwriting before?
Then he looked at what Hodges had actually written. He’d been staying at an inn in Camberwell, which was in London, very far from Isle of Wight, the supposed destination for his holidays.
But very close to Lambeth, where Mr. Sackville had visited twice a month for at least seven years running.
Treadles leaped up and pulled open the file case where he kept his official correspondence. Yes, there were those two letters he’d received about the house of ill repute in Lambeth. The exact same handwriting. The first letter was rather vague. The second, which he’d received two months ago, was full of anger and anguish, all but screaming into the void, warning of pure depravity, the exploitation of the most innocent and helpless, etc.
He rushed out to Lambeth, to the lane named in the letter, and stood before the skeletal remains of what must have been a structure big enough for a family of twelve. He’d been there no more than a few minutes before he realized that the house next door had an unusually large number of men hurrying in and out.
Not that news from home is much better, Alice had said on the night of Holmes’s “misfortune,” sitting at the edge of Treadles’s desk and flipping through the evening papers. Recriminations over the failure of the Irish Home Rule bill. Police still looking for suspects in the fire in Lambeth that destroyed a building and killed two.
And what had he said to her? I know about that building in Lambeth. Every last inspector in Scotland Yard got letters about it—and it isn’t even a copper hell, but a bookmaker’s. You close one down and it opens right back up two streets over.
The neighboring house was the bookmaker’s place, and the men who barged in and out the runners who collected bets and settled winnings.
What then had been the depravities committed in the house that had been burned to the ground? What kind of depravities would turn a man like Hodges, who must have seen a fair bit of the seedier side of life, into a rabid crusader?
Treadles ordered Hodges arrested and brought to London. Sergeant MacDonald delivered the valet into Treadles’s keeping late that evening.
This time Hodges didn’t look so natty. There was something about being arrested and put under the power of the Crown that stripped jauntiness from a man. A state of vulnerability that was not helped by the blank, sterile walls of an interrogation room.
“Mr. Hodges, you were the one who poisoned Mr. Sackville. You were outraged at what went on in that house in Lambeth he visited. You gave him arsenic, coinciding with the timing of his trips to London, so that he would suffer and not be able to achieve what he set out to do.”