The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(57)

“A wedding reception,” my father said, bemused. “We’re doing a dinner thing in New York. Tonight.”

I was hardly paying attention. “You remind me of someone,” I said to Ted, slowly.

He grinned at me. “I get that a lot.”

“Jamie?” my mother asked. “Are you okay?”

When he smiled my new stepfather looked just like August.

And Phillipa. And Hadrian.

“I’m fine,” I said to Lucien Moriarty. “Really. It’s just so good to finally meet you.”





Eighteen


Charlotte


BACK AT THE FLAT I WAS THROWING THINGS INTO MY SUITCASE, not bothering to fold them. I could hear Leander on the phone, pleading with someone. “Tonight,” he was saying, “it can’t wait,” and had I wanted to I could have gone to the door to listen.

It didn’t matter now what he was saying, not really.

“We’ll regroup from a distance,” he’d told me. “We don’t have the time to bag him when he arrives, and God knows what he plans on doing when he gets here. We’ll find some high ground, girl. Pack your bags.”

There was a kind of relief in it, the giving up. We would plan, and in the meantime Leander would let me live with him. He hadn’t offered, not as such, but for the rest of the walk home he’d been listing places we could go.

As the eldest of his siblings, my father had inherited our house in Sussex; my aunt Araminta had been formally given the cottage and apiary where she’d taken to spending her days; my uncle Julian our flat in London, and presumably leave to never talk to the rest of us again. (A smart decision.) My uncle Leander had been too peripatetic to be given land, the will had read. He’d been granted my grandfather’s money instead, our intelligently invested takings from the life rights of Sherlock Holmes.

In his early twenties, back when he was rooming with James Watson in a tiny flat in Edinburgh, Leander had socked away his inheritance in smart investments and lived like a churchmouse. (My uncle, despite his well-groomed appearance, had always been a frugal man.) When his investments brought him returns, he bought property, and with the income from letting out those, he purchased new places, sold others, tailored his portfolio.

All of this to say, we had some places to hide.

“They’re largely under my name,” he’d said. “The flats in New York and Edinburgh, the house in Provence. Those are the ones I’ve kept.”

“We can’t go there, then.”

“No. We can’t. But London—London is another matter. I bought a flat there a few years ago through a dummy corporation. I was on an undercover case—I needed a bolt-hole for quick-changes, a place to stash my things that couldn’t be traced. I never did sell it. I worried that it might be useful again.” He gave me a grim smile. “And here we are.”

Here we were.

Good-bye to New York, I thought, stuffing my wigs back into their wooden box. Good-bye to Connecticut. Good-bye to America; who knew when I’d have reason to be back here again. Good-bye to picking locks, prying doors with crowbars, to putting on doe-eyed masks to learn what I needed to know. I would help him research. I would help, and I would stay out of the way.

My mother hadn’t called me once since I’d left home. I thought again about the argument she and my father had had in Switzerland, where she pled my case to him for five minutes and then, as far as I knew, never did again. Any love my mother had for me was bound up in the frustrations she had with my father, and now, with him absent, it was as though I’d ceased to exist as well.

There had been so many losses: My parents. August. Milo, gone radio silent during that never-ending murder trial. And while I had always imagined Jamie Watson leaving me bit by bit, he’d instead done it all at once. Pulled the bandage off while the wound was still bleeding.

Had it been wild denial or self-destruction that had sent me running headlong into the jaws of the beast that was hunting me? Why really had I spent the last year chasing Lucien Moriarty, except to put a speedier end to it all? I had diligently photographed my pills each night. I had eaten and bathed and traveled and plotted, I had pretended to be looking to the future, and all the while it looked like I was living.

But the moment I knew I wouldn’t kill Lucien Moriarty was the moment I wrote my own ending. I saw that now. I didn’t know another way to be rid of him, the spider that had built a web over the world. Chasing him down without a gun in hand would ultimately end with my death.

I didn’t want to die. Not anymore.

My box of wigs, my lockpicking kit, my recording equipment, my dress blacks, my casual blacks, the makeup lockbox that held all my other faces. All of it into the suitcase.

I put on a set of old sweats I’d found in the chest of drawers. They were too big on me, but I did them up anyway. I’d leave fifty dollars, more than enough to replace them; I had three thousand dollars to burn. More than enough for a plane ticket across the pond and a dye job when I got there. Enough to pay the fee to change my name, to make myself disappear.

I hauled my suitcase into the kitchen, enjoying the sound of my footsteps on the tile. My boots looked ridiculous with the sweats, I was sure, but after weeks of walking silently, I needed to hear myself move.

“I’m charging your laptop, and the phones I found in your bag.” Leander was rummaging through the pantry, throwing dry goods in a pile. There was quite a lot of peanut butter. “Who lives here? I’ll reimburse them for the food, but I want to have supplies in case we need to hole up before our flight. Ideally, we’d leave late tonight, but if we miss our window, I don’t think it’s safe to try until three or four weeks have passed.”