A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(68)

She had a small little set of rooms in East Oxford, near Cowley Road, the sort of place with a half kitchen and radiators that hissed and a bedroom that didn’t have a door. But the view from the sitting room window was magnificent—you could glimpse the dreaming spires of the university from her gray velvet sofa, and she sat there in the mornings, her silk blanket tossed over her shoulders, while she saw clients during her business hours. Fridays only, ten to two, and what she made in those sessions covered her rent, because she had to pay her own rent now. Her reputation had gotten round town to her satisfaction in the year since she’d been back. There wasn’t ever a wait to speak with her, but she was never in want of work, either.

I’d rearranged my classes this term so I could sit in and assist where I could. It meant forgoing the Robert Louis Stevenson tutorial I wanted in favor of one on American poetry, but in the end I found I didn’t mind. Mrs. Dunham would be proud of me, carrying John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs around, reading even the ones I hadn’t been assigned. The rhythms of them got into my head, and as I took the stairs two at a time to her door, I ran compulsively through my favorite bits. I don’t know how Henry pried / open for all the world to see survived. A one-two tap, and then I’d call out, “Charlotte?”

There wasn’t ever an answer, but I wanted to give her a moment, in case she was on the phone or wasn’t dressed. Sometimes I thought if we lived in the same city I’d be more comfortable treating her flat as my own, but as it stood, I showed up with my duffel and my train ticket home, and when I got to her door, I knocked.

I was a visitor here.

Inside, I’d find her at her little stove, the electric kettle already going. She made herself breakfast now, two hard-boiled eggs and a green leafy something. Gone were the experiments that she’d made for me in Leander’s kitchen; when she cooked for herself now, it was with the grim determination of a soldier tearing into rations. If the first of her clients arrived at her door during breakfast, she took her meal to her bedroom and let me entertain her visitor until she’d properly finished.

“Entertaining” maybe wasn’t the best word for what I did for the shivering wrecks who showed up on those Friday mornings. Even when it wasn’t raining, they gave you the feeling of having wandered in the dark and wet for days, waiting for ten o’clock on Friday morning to finally roll around. In the beginning it had been only girls our age, university students and bartenders and shopgirls, the occasional younger one snuck out of her morning classes. At first it galled me to think that there were boys out there who needed Holmes’s skills, but who refused to trust themselves to a mere girl. She read that thought from something I did (my posture, a frown, all those signals I let myself project so that she could pretend to read my mind) and told me that, no, in fact, her name was passed like a secret between girls—you came to this flat if you needed a particular kind of assistance, if you needed your case to be heard. She would decide if she would help you, then if you had to pay, and when that was settled, you’d have your problem solved within the week.

One girl, still in her work polo, told us of the man who came to her bar every night for months who now was making cameos at her bedroom window. Her boss refused to do anything about it, told her if she called the police in, he’d lose his clientele—and she’d be fired. Another had an ex-boyfriend who was currently still teaching her chemistry lab; he gave her failing marks on problem sets she’d done correctly, but she didn’t want to report him, she was afraid of retaliation. Another had the wrong kind of stepfather. That sort of awful, ugly thing.

Usually, after listening to the story, she’d come up with a solution on the spot. Something that didn’t require much risk. The lab assistant had a superior, and our client had all of her old quizzes she could bring in as evidence, and after he was removed as her teacher he would be watched, carefully, and if something further needed to be done, all the client needed to do was come back. Sometimes she called her contact at the Thames Valley Police, a colleague of DI Sadiq’s who was discreet, and who didn’t mind, on his off-hours, following a man from a bar to a bartender’s house and making some not-so-veiled threats. Sometimes she loaned out little cameras, taught her clients to record audio on their phones, gave a brief, explicit lesson in Blackmail 101. Once she listened in total silence and then asked a few simple questions about how long and when did it start and how gone do you want him, then said if she showed up the next day in their homeroom or their French club or at their front door dressed in a school uniform to treat her like a long-lost friend and then to let her do what she had come there to do.

The next week, it came out that her target had committed a number of crimes. This was vigilante justice, of course, and terrifying too, and I didn’t ask too many questions about it. My opinion wasn’t wanted, or necessary, and though I often wanted to know what happened to the girl after her life was turned right side up again, she never returned to the flat by Cowley Road. The clients had their marching orders, and they followed them.

So did I. She sleuthed on Saturdays, after I had gone back to London, and as much as I wanted to be there and help, a silent line had been drawn between the work I did in her living room and the work she did in the world.

Her clients’ secrets never came out, not in any way I knew of, but the secret of who was helping them did. It had to. A secret grew in you like a pumpkin seed in the tales, the dark vine of it climbing inexorably up until it spilled out from your mouth in a fury of stem and leaf. It was girls at the door for the longest time, but the guys came eventually. Their problems were often more prosaic, though not always, and she had the same rules for everyone. If she could solve it from her sofa, she would. If the client was in danger, she’d take it; if it interested her, she’d take it; if neither of those things and they could pay and she was behind on her electric bill, she’d raise an eyebrow at me and I’d shrug at her and we’d toss a coin to decide.