A Study in Scarlet Women (Lady Sherlock #1)(93)

“You can’t prove anything.”

The absence of jauntiness did not imply the absence of defiance.

“No, but I have here a sample of your writing, and every inspector at Scotland Yard has received letters from you, screaming about the intolerable deeds that went on inside the house. And then the house mysteriously went up in smoke, resulting in two deaths. That is enough ground to charge you with arson and murder, Mr. Hodges.”

Scotland Yard certainly didn’t have any other suspects. The investigation had been ongoing for weeks and the officer in charge still couldn’t be sure how many people had lived inside or what it had been used for before it was reduced to ashes and rubble.

“I didn’t burn down the house,” Hodges answered through clenched teeth.

“You will have a difficult time proving that.”

“I was in Devon.”

“You could have had accomplices in London.”

“I would never do such a thing. There were children inside. Little children!”

Hodges’s outburst ricocheted in the room. His hands balled into fists. And he panted, as if he’d run all the way from Curry House.

Treadles felt as if he’d been picked up, turned upside down, and shaken violently. “Tell me about those children,” he said, his voice sounding curiously disembodied.

“The little girl they brought me wasn’t even nine. She said she’d been in that house for a whole year, at least. And she told me that there were boys and girls at least three years younger than her.” Hodges’s throat worked. “Yes, I gave him arsenic before his next trip. But I didn’t want to kill him—I am not a murderer. I wanted to buy some time for the police to do something. Anything.”

“You had the wrong house number in your letters.”

Hodges dropped his head into his hands.

It had been an easy enough mistake. Of the two houses, only one had its number on the exterior, and though it seemed to be right in the middle, between the two entrances, the number had belonged to the bookmaker.

“When did you decide to change to chloral?” Treadles still sounded dispassionate.

Times like this, it was as if some mechanism deep inside him roared to life and insulated him in a thick layer of numbness.

“I never had anything to do with the chloral. I was gone that week. In London. I went to see if there was anything I could do to close the place down, but when I got there, it had already burned to the ground.” Hodges wiped the heel of his hand across his eyes. “And no one knew what happened to the children. No one.”




The next morning, Treadles returned to 18 Upper Baker Street. He noticed that the manservant who conducted him to the flat was the same one who had opened the door for him the other day at the lurid house where he last met with Lord Ingram and Miss Holmes—on loan from Lord Ingram to keep an eye on Miss Holmes’s safety, no doubt.

Miss Holmes greeted him solemnly. It had been excruciating to come before her at their previous meeting, knowing that her wide-set, innocent-seeming eyes would have remarked every last ounce of his inner distress. But now he barely cared.

Now the numbness reigned.

He stated what Hodges had revealed at Scotland Yard, something his normal self would have tried his best to shield from the hearing of a lady. She listened without moving, not even to pour tea, and remained still for long minutes afterward.

Vaguely he wondered whether it had been too much for her—whether her woman’s mind could not handle iniquities of this magnitude without going to pieces.

“What Becky Birtle said,” she murmured. “It’s so obvious in hindsight. Mr. Sackville was only interested in her because she was small and underdeveloped and he thought her still prepubescent. When it turned out she already had menses, he lost all in—”

She sprang out of her chair. “The Sheridans’ daughter. How did she die?”

He rose hastily. “Sergeant MacDonald looked it up and copied down what had been written on her death certificate. I have it with me.” He opened the document case he carried. “Congestive heart failure, signed by—Dr. Bernard Motley. But he is Mrs. Treadles’s family physician.”

Miss Holmes all but ripped the piece of paper from him. She stared down at it, a fierce frown on her face. “Do you remember the case you had sent me via Lord Ingram, the curious death of a young girl related by none other than this Dr. Motley?”

“The one you believe to have killed herself by smuggling frozen carbon dioxide to her room?” What did that have to do with anything?

“Did the Sheridan household have a ready supply of carbon dioxide?”

“I spoke to the Sheridans’ butler. He mentioned they used to have canisters of gas for carbonating water.”

“It was her. Clara Sackville killed herself.” Her voice was firm, implacable.

The implication of her words at last penetrated past the shield of numbness. “Are you saying that Mr. Sackville did something to his niece? His own niece, when she was a little girl?”

Miss Holmes returned to her seat, lifted the teapot, and poured, her hands perfectly steady while Treadles scrambled to reassemble his protective cocoon. “And Sophia Lonsdale was one of her best friends.”

Treadles was still reeling. “She killed Mr. Sackville for Clara?”

“It would explain the pistol in Lady Sheridan’s reticule, wouldn’t it? She would have done it herself, but he already died before she had the chance to confront him.”