A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(70)

“No,” she said. “But I can’t tell you anything about the girl. You can, however.”

He looked down at his hands miserably. “I love her. We’re not—we’re not together now, exactly, but we were for a while, and I thought we would be again. But my work schedule is ridiculous, as you pointed out, and I think she got tired of waiting. She says she isn’t seeing someone, but on the weekend, when I can actually get away, she’s never around. I only want to know if she’s telling me the truth.”

“Have you asked her?” she asked.

“Yes. I think she’s lying. I thought maybe you could find out for me, so I know whether to move on.”

She did that thing where she opened her mouth, then went silent. I knew she was trying very hard not to snap at him.

“There’s the kettle,” I said, jumping up. The kettle was, of course, not whistling. “Tea?”

“You need to move on,” she told him, and there was a burn in her words. “She doesn’t trust you as a friend—how could she trust you as anything else? I can tell you that now, and save you the cost of me tailing her for two weeks straight. Fix your friendship because you want to be her friend, not because you’re laying the groundwork for some future that only you see. Or leave her be.”

The man looked miserable. “Thanks, Miss Lonelyhearts.”

“Cream and sugar?” I called from the kitchenette, but he had already picked up his expensive bag and his cheap umbrella and banged his way out the door.

At least this time she didn’t call out, That’ll be twenty pounds.

The kettle whistled after a moment. I fixed myself a cup and got her a glass of water and we settled into the living room to watch, out the window, as our ex-client stomped over to his car.

“At least this time he didn’t tell me I wasn’t Sherlock Holmes,” she said. “That always happens when you make me explain my methods. I’m getting tired of it.”

“It’s not that Miss Lonelyhearts is much better, Miss Doyle.”

She rolled her eyes, as she always did when I used her new name. “The ‘miss’ is the problem. It masquerades as polite. It isn’t; it’s condescending.”

“Was she actually dating someone else?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “All I can tell you is that he didn’t care about her enough, not in the right way. I couldn’t see traces of her anywhere on him. That doesn’t mean anything, of course.”

I set my mug on the coffee table and wondered privately if she could see herself anywhere on me.

She didn’t look me in the eye. “We’re all over each other,” she said, and that was that.

Over the next few hours, we had a few more clients. I fetched tissues, asked questions, took notes. But they were problems she could solve from her sofa. She made about a hundred pounds, all told, and a promise to follow up on one case the next week, and then we had the afternoon, as always, in front of us.

Now that it was May and the weather was warmer, we’d taken to wandering the university grounds. It was easy to walk and watch the punters on the water, to buy each other books in the secondhand stores outside of campus. It was a game we had, where she’d pay for some wretched ancient history or a German language primer and slip it into my bag without my noticing. I left her Golden Age novels, puzzle stories, locked room mysteries on the table beside her bed. It wasn’t something we talked about; it was just something we did.

I was a visitor here, and it made us better with each other. More careful. She was more careful with everyone, now, and though I couldn’t see inside her head—I never could; I’d learned that by then—it seemed to me she treated herself with that same care. There had been a night or two, right when she’d returned, where day had turned to night and I’d stayed over in her bed, but I’d slipped away at dawn while she was still asleep.

Once, I had loved her so much it was like a needle through my heart. Maybe I still did. Somehow, though, it seemed beside the point.

Today, we prowled the city for iced coffee, her hand in the crook of my arm. I’d begun drinking it this past fall, and though I felt guilty dragging my aesthete of a friend in search of something she’d sworn off, she didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t touch any of it now, caffeine or nicotine or drugs or booze.

It was a decision she’d made, in Norway, during the months she was assisting in a chemistry lab. I’d only heard bits and pieces about that year—more often than not, when she’d arrived in a new city, she’d gotten swept up into some investigation. Paris. Kyoto. A long two months in the American West: Lena Gupta had ended up at college in Los Angeles, and the two of them rented a homestead in Joshua Tree. From her letters, I knew that she’d been conducting experiments in the desert and catching up on her scientific journals, while Lena did . . . whatever it was that Lena did. Buying designer clothing? Plotting a coup? Their sublease ended in August, and Lena stayed in California, and Charlotte moved on.

I went to my classes. I watched my father and mother reconcile, begin dating. They kept separate flats, but Shelby reported finding the two of them on the sofa at night, watching old movies and laughing over popcorn. I suppose my father was the only person who could understand what my mother had been through, with Lucien. It made a strange sort of sense, and so did the way I found myself home again some weekends, in my mother’s old flat, sharing a bottle of wine with my parents while my father told stories about his and Leander’s adventures and my mother laughed a real laugh.