The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(34)

“It isn’t your safety you were sacrificing,” I told him, and he set his jaw.

“So it can’t be Hadrian who has Leander,” August was saying, with palpable relief. “Or Phillipa, the two of them are inseparable. You’re saying they’re not involved?”

“Insofar as I can tell,” Milo said, “no.”

Holmes looked down at her hands. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t upset. For a brief moment, she looked . . . crestfallen. As though she’d known, absolutely known the solution to Leander’s disappearance, and had that surety taken away. I’d wondered why she hadn’t been more outwardly worried about her uncle. Here was my answer. She thought that finding him would be as easy as tracking down August’s brother.

She wasn’t used to being wrong.

Scowling, she leaned forward to study Milo’s security feeds again, as if the answer were there. Maybe it was.

I turned back to Milo. “Hadrian knows the details of Leander’s investigation. And you don’t think he’s responsible for his disappearance.”

Milo sniffed. “Leander wasn’t anywhere near Hadrian’s operation, not until very recently, when he ended up working a source—a dealer who also represented Moriarty interests. Hadrian heard about it, so I heard about it. And as soon as I did, I phoned my uncle up and told him to leave the country. To go stay with my father, who had connections that could shed new light on the investigation from a distance. It was enough time for the dealer to go to ground before Leander returned. Everyone happy. Everyone unharmed.”

“Hadrian could have had agents in England,” I said.

“He wouldn’t dare. I have every inch of our house surveilled.”

“And Phillipa—”

“Lottie has her own plans there. I imagine.” He frowned. “Either way, it’s not as though you’re in any danger. I’ll send along a sniper or two.”

“A sniper or two,” August muttered. “You’re all the same.”

Beside him, Holmes moved her hands up and down in front of the screen. Nothing happened.

“Excuse me?” Milo said. “I’m juggling a number of flaming clubs here, one of which is you. I’m more than happy to find you a position in Siberia, August.”

“Thank you. Really. I’m sure Leander appreciated this kind of meddling, too.”

“Oh, yes,” Milo said blandly. “He was thrilled.”

“Hold on,” I said. “If he wasn’t hunting down Hadrian and Phillipa, what exactly was Leander investigating in the first place?”

With a small sound of triumph, Holmes jerked her wrist to the right. All twelve surveillance screens changed: a series of views of the Sussex home’s front door. Her left hand made a sharp diagonal, and they all began to rapidly rewind.

Milo pursed his lips. “You’re going too fast.”

“I’m not,” she said, and flipped both her hands upside down. The screens obediently stopped. “Those sensors are a ludicrous waste of resources, by the way. Whatever happened to a remote control?”

August coughed. “I designed the math for the sensors. It’s based on a differential of—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” she snapped. With an imperceptible motion, she set the screens going again. “Look here. The night Leander disappeared. We have him and Jamie having what I’m sure was a very touching moment by the woodpile; here they go, one, two, back to the house. Through the window, we see the family assembled at dinner. Leander in his room.” A flick, and the screen changed. “We’re on a time lapse, inside. Milo only had still cameras within the guest rooms. They photograph every ten minutes.”

“An oversight,” he said, “that I’ve now rectified.”

“Obviously. Here: Leander on his phone. Pacing, or at the very least moving about. Now Leander packing his bags. And here, in the front hall. He heads quickly down the stairs, holding his suitcases, and”—she flipped to the camera of the outside of the house, where a man in a black cap took off down the drive—“there he goes. Off screen, to a waiting car.” She leveled a look at her brother. “Where did he go after that?”

With a sigh, Milo snapped his fingers. The screens went black. “We don’t know where he is now. But we know where he was and what he was doing before. According to my contacts, the German government has hired him to infiltrate a forgery ring and compile enough evidence to prove their work as fake. These forgers have been knocking off the work of an artist from the 1930s, Hans Langenberg. The sheer number of paintings that have been ‘recovered’ has raised some alarm bells, so they’re making this a special case.”

A painting appeared on the screen. I blinked. It had that atmospheric quality I loved, all cobalts and grays with flashes of eggshell white. In the painting, a girl sat reading in the corner, bored in a red cotton dress. The man next to her turned a letter opener in his hands. Another looked out a darkened window. They were all clustered together in the painting’s lone splash of light; the rest of the room was muted, unexplored.

“This is his most famous painting—The Last of August, it’s called. He was German, from Munich. Unmarried, no family. Intensely secretive, and thought to be very prolific, though he only ever gave his agent three of his paintings to sell. In the last year, an actual trove of ‘newly discovered work’ popped up on the auction circuit.” The screens were crowded, suddenly, with similar paintings, ones set in attic rooms and garrets, a back garden at night. Always a group of figures somewhere in the background, holding bright objects in their hands, both looking and not looking at each other. “They’ve stumped authenticators. It’s impossible to tell whether these were Langenberg’s work. And if this is revealed to the public, it could look like opportunistic forgers are benefitting off of genocide. Already there are murmurs that the money is lining neo-Nazi pockets. The German government wants this stopped as soon as possible.”