The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(58)

“Late tonight?” I asked. It was barely four o’clock in the evening. “Why not now? We can go straight to the airport, get the red-eye to London.”

Leander had his back to me. He spread his hands out on the counter. “I’m going say good-bye to James Watson before I go, and you’re going to come with me.”

“You’re what?”

“God help me, Charlotte, don’t argue with me on this—”

“No. I categorically refuse. That man cannot keep a secret to save his life, and the last thing I need is for him to see me when his son—his son—I can’t.”

My uncle bowed his head. “You can do this one last thing for me.”

“This last thing—”

“Dammit,” he said, “I am not leaving you alone in this flat with that man loose in this city.”

I bit my lip. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.” I watched him breathe out.

“If it’s important to you—”

“You should probably change,” he said. “James called it a wedding reception.”

I dragged myself back to the bedroom. At home, in Sussex, we dressed for dinner, but that was an exercise I’d never taken seriously. It was another disguise, one masquerading as the self. Long skirts my mother bought me, elegant and expensive, and dark lips to match their dark colors. Done up like that, I looked years older than I was.

Here, I had nothing that didn’t belong to Rose the fashion vlogger, and I didn’t want to wear her right now.

I flipped through DI Green’s sister’s closet, wondering idly if she’d have anything that would fit me. Cardigans. Blouses with high necks and buttons on the cuffs. And then a row of cocktail dresses. Two were in my size; the second of those was red. I shed my clothes and put it on and walked over to the mirror.

Watson had once described me as a knife. It’s true that I have no “curves.” If we are speaking geometrically, I am a line. This dress didn’t change the fact of my body, but then I didn’t need it to. I took a pair of shoes from the closet and a silver evening bag from the hook on the closet door. I stuffed it with necessities. We would return for our suitcases if we could; if we couldn’t, I would make do with what I had.

“Charlotte,” Leander was saying, almost as though he were being strangled.

I found him bent nearly double over a mobile phone on the kitchen counter.

“What happened?” I asked, panting, and then I really got a look at him. “No. You’re not—you’re laughing. Why do you have my old mobile?”

He’d said he was charging both of my phones. I’d been keeping the one I’d used at Sherringford at the bottom of my bag, turned off so that the GPS couldn’t be used to track my location. It was always a good idea to have a spare.

It was almost always a good idea to have a spare.

“It says you haven’t booted it up in eleven months,” my uncle said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “Eleven months! In that time, you received zero messages. Zero texts. Until today. Until quite literally just now.”

I snatched my phone from his hand.

Four new texts:

Holmes.

Holmes.

Charlotte.

Where are you?





Nineteen


Jamie


Last year, Sussex Downs

CHARLOTTE HOLMES PUT HER HANDS TO HER FACE. SHE was crying. “Milo,” she said. “Milo. Milo, no. No, you didn’t.”

In the distance, a car started up. There was yelling, someone crying out, Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, and then wheels on loose gravel. When I turned to look, a lone figure, a man, was standing in front of the Holmeses’ dark estate. Like someone locked out of their home, or a drifter looking for a place to spend the night.

Holmes’s mother was gone. Hadrian and Phillipa—where were they?

“I—” Milo was shaking. He held the gun out in front of him. “Is August—and Hadrian—God, Lottie, I can’t do this anymore. Lucien disappeared. He disappeared. There’s no footage, no intel, no . . . I can’t keep doing this. How could I, and succeed?”

The master of the universe, asking us this question.

Holmes wrenched the rifle from his hands. Without looking down, she stripped the gun of its clip and dropped it all on the ground.

“Leander’s done,” she said. “August is dead. Is this it for you too? Are you leaving the two of us here to pick up this mess?”

“It’s your mess,” Milo said. “Isn’t it time you did?”

I was only half-hearing it, what they were saying. In the distance, the ocean raged louder. The cold bit at my hands. August Moriarty was spread-eagled, and it wasn’t a dream, I could see the outline of his coat in the snow. I couldn’t look at them, either of them, Holmes or Holmes, two faces of the same terrible god staring out in opposite directions. Passing their judgments. Firing their guns. And the figure in front of the house—he was gone, the field empty now, and the ocean was deafening.

But it wasn’t the ocean. It was sirens, a cacophony of sirens, and by the time the red and blue lights reached the top of the drive, Holmes and I were alone.

Milo had gone. One moment he was there, and the next there weren’t even footprints, as though he’d erased himself where he stood. I looked for them, for a sign. There were animal prints, deer and fox, the low slide of a rabbit, a dog’s muddy paws. Even in the winter this was a place that breathed with life.