A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(48)

Watson’s eyes darted from Rupert to me. I’d never profess to reading Watson’s mind—I am not actually psychic—but I knew him well enough to guess what he was thinking. Wondering if I wanted to take the lead. I shook my head slightly.

“I think I could help you figure it out,” he said. “Unrelatedly, adulthood kind of sucks.”

Rupert set a mug in front of Watson, one in front of me. “I don’t know if our version does, actually. There are so many different kinds of adulthood—only depending on yourself for your survival, or supporting others with a small salary, or doing work you aren’t equipped for, or that you’re far too over-equipped for . . . responsibilities that we most likely won’t see, as Oxford students, for some time. We’re privileged. It’s best to be aware of that. If my worst problem is that I don’t know how to cook . . .”

“Are you close with your parents?” I asked as Watson fetched the popcorn from the microwave, holding the bag at its edges.

“Fairly close,” Rupert said. “Closer with my father than my mother. She runs the bulk of the business, you know. Wasn’t the case when they met—they married while my father was being groomed to inherit the company—but she has a head for it that he doesn’t.”

“So she’s in charge, then?”

“Right. And my father manages more of our day-to-day lives. I mean, I imagine he still does. I’ve been away at school for a while now.” Rupert shrugged. “I’ve never really understood businesses that pass down through a family. Financial reasons, sure. Fine. But it’s almost a kind of erasure, don’t you think? What if you could’ve cured cancer, or something, and instead someone before you were born decided you should make spreadsheets all day?” He jerked the bag open, and steam poured out. “For some reason they think I should step up, when my father got to dodge the noose. Bicker on the phone with bankers. Chase down payments from far-flung members of the royal family. Have you ever tried to get a royal to settle a past-due debt? Speaking of blood from a stone . . . of course it was just oversight, but . . .” His ever-running engine finally ran out of steam. Sighing, he stuffed a handful of popcorn into his mouth.

His interview at the station this morning had rattled him. It was either that, or this is what Rupert was like away from the stifling presence of his friends: a thoughtful, anxious sort, someone whose mouth raced ahead of his brain. Still, I knew something about family businesses and unrealistic expectations and how those things could wear on you. “That’s hard. I hate that feeling. What would you be doing otherwise?” I asked. “If you weren’t working for your family?”

He shrugged, chewing. “Theater?” he said finally. “I still can’t believe that casting. Of course, it’s not like the play will run now, it’s all moot . . . but to think that I could do Hamlet. Here. Last summer, I only helped out in the sound booth.”

“That’s not easy,” Watson pointed out.

“It is if the tech in charge won’t let you do anything. It was clear they’d just made space for me so I could hang around with Anwen and Theo. Kind of them, but a bit condescending.” He pushed the paper bag to the middle of the table, and I picked out a few kernels, held them in my palm. “I hate it, you know,” he said, looking at my hands. “That feeling of being . . . unneeded.”

Sebastian Wallis had said more or less the same thing earlier. What was it, I wondered, about Anwen and Theo, their bright exclusivity, that kept even their best friend on the outskirts? And despite all that, Theo despised something about Anwen, something he couldn’t bring himself to say out loud.

“You’ve escaped them, though,” Rupert was saying. “Your family.”

“Have I?” I asked, with a tight smile.

“Sure,” he said earnestly. “Of course you have. You aren’t studying . . . whatever you would study to be a detective.”

“I’d be at training college,” I told him. “You begin as a uniform. Work your way up. Unless you’re my bohemian great-great-great-grandfather a century or so ago, in which case you do two years at Oxford, leave for unknown reasons, and take cases from Baker Street. But no. I’m not studying any of that. The more time I spend doing detective work, the less that I like it.”

“Really?” Rupert asked, interested. Watson was watching me intently. “What don’t you like?”

I was treading uncertain ground here. This wasn’t new, of course. My work often called on me to be a chameleon—my shape stayed the same while my skin began to shift colors.

I’ve said before that the way to convincingly lie is to be convinced of what you’re saying. In the moment, you need to believe it. Thoroughly. To wit: in order to convince Rupert to trust me enough to come clean about his experience this morning with the police (and in doing so, unintentionally give up information he’d kept from them), I would need to persuade him that I, like him, wanted to escape my family business (detection).

Why was this complicated?

Because, perhaps, after escaping my family, after using my skills to escape Lucien Moriarty (if barely), I was finding that, maybe, I did want to escape my family business. At least this version of it. At least for a time. In order to uphold the law, I had to continually break it, and while I didn’t have personal compunctions about breaking into someone’s dorm room to sack it for clues, or to lie to someone to get them to tell you the truth, the more I did it, the more I started to lose the plot.