A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(17)

For instance: Why on earth did Watson touching me make me feel so disordered? I had applied rules to our courtship. Rules were, by definition, orderly. And still I felt too hot, that my skin was too tight. In the past when I’d felt this way I’d played something feverish on my violin and exorcized it from my body.

I didn’t think that that would work now.

Part of me recoiled at feeling so out of control; another part examined closely the part that recoiled; another hugged herself tightly and tried not to look at herself in the mirror.

As usual, the muddle of myself was too much to work out, and I arrived at the theater hoping for an easier mystery to solve. The place had a certain charm, I had to admit: like the other buildings on the St. Genesius campus, the white marble was scattered about with light. The front was rounded to incorporate the rows of seats inside, and when I tipped my head back to see the roof, I spied a small white tower that looked as though it had been hot-glued on. A crow’s nest, I thought. I wondered what its purpose was.

The doors were wooden, built into a larger wooden wall reinforced with crosshatched metal, and when I stepped into the vestibule, that small space was as hushed as a Catholic church I visited once in New York. (I’d needed to change my wig in the vestry.) It had a similar smell, too, like cloth and dust, though what I could see was spotless. There was a small ticket office to one side, built an obvious four centuries after the rest of the building, and a coatroom at the other, and when I walked through the second set of doors into the theater itself, I paused for a moment to get my bearings.

Rows of seats leading down to the stage, red velvet and gold leaf, everything oppressive with age and still, in its own way, beautiful. I was coming to notice this about Oxford, the heavy sense of history, how it made one feel important and insignificant in the same breath. I’d been around wealth before, or the appearance of it; my parents had done a very good job pretending they hadn’t lost their fortune. But our own claim to fame could only be traced back a hundred years and change. Before that, we were humble country squires, and before that, I didn’t know.

Subtract another five hundred years, and Oxford would still have been standing.

This was all rather abstract for me, this musing about atmosphere, but it wasn’t as though I had immediate matters to absorb me. Coming to a mystery a year after the original incidents meant that you did a bit of useless wandering before you struck on anything gold. Still, I had some time before I was scheduled to meet Anwen, so I decided to start looking around.

It took forty-five seconds for me to trot to the bottom of the aisle, minimal effort to hoist myself up onto the stage. I stepped into the wings and traced a path past the lighting board to the set of stairs in the back, for the actors and crew to access the dressing rooms in the basement. The stairs were painted black, as Dr. Larkin had said, and the fluorescent tape at their edges looked new. Twelve steps down, a small, spare hallway at the bottom. No other obvious exits other than the one back up through the theater. Anyone who had crept in to deliver orchids to their victims had, on first blush, to have been backstage already to do so.

Still, there was something different about the quality of the air than I expected. Basements, as a rule, were cooler than the floors above, especially basements made of cinderblock, as this one was, and yet I could feel a whisper of hot air on the back of my neck.

I shut my eyes to listen.

A bicycle bell. A man laughing. Not loud, not obvious. For me to hear those sounds in a building whose walls could have happily survived a siege, there had to be another exit to the outside. Perhaps walled off, perhaps hidden, but there.

Later I would have time to investigate further, but for now I had to peer back into the human element of this case. When I reemerged onto the stage, it was just past noon, and I hurried back out the front doors to look for Anwen. I had no intention of upsetting her this early in our relationship.

Well. This early in the case. I wasn’t here to make friends. (Which was something I couldn’t say anymore, as Watson said it made me sound like a reality television star.)

But I pushed through the doors to find the street empty. A family of tourists straggled by, listening to a walking tour on headphones and pointing silently at the imposing building across the square; a girl I recognized from my biochem lecture walked by with a golden retriever on a lead. I was temporarily distracted by this—how was she allowed a dog? Where was she keeping it? It was a bit too large and happy to have been kept in a closet—and then I realized that she was on her way to the Sainsbury’s on the High Street to do her grocery shop (set of canvas bags, water bowl for dog waiting on street). She lived here, as I did.

Ten minutes had passed, and no Anwen. I turned on my heel to see if I had possibly missed her inside the theater (though the aisle carpet had no prints other than mine since it had last been vacuumed). Then stopped short when I came to the second set of doors.

A note. I’m in the sound booth upstairs. Meet me there?

I studied it, a bit bemused. I hadn’t seen it when I’d left, which didn’t mean it wasn’t there—but it was certainly taped up after I’d first arrived. Which left a ten-minute window. We’d just missed each other. The handwriting didn’t look particularly feminine, but neither did mine, and anyway, I was the one who was running late.

I took the note and put it in my bag.

There was another set of stairs here in the vestibule that I had imagined went up to Dr. Larkin’s office, and when I climbed them, they proved to do just that. As well as to a door that read SOUND BOOTH.