A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)(48)

I had to employ rule #9 (sometimes for your own sake you must leave Holmes to his own devices, even if you return to find he’s set himself on fire) when real life began to creep in. The rugby team had asked for permission for me to rejoin in what should have been the last week of my suspension, and gotten it from the school. Holmes had insisted that I go. A number of Dobson’s friends were on the squad, and she’d decided I should ask them, in a roundabout manner, about his last weeks alive. If he was seeing anyone unusual, leaving campus at late hours, taking strange calls. If some blond man had sold him any drugs, and what he’d said. That sort of thing. I’d figured that I could manage well enough.

Holmes disagreed. “You’re a terrible liar,” she said, perched on her lab table. I stood before her, like a schoolboy about to recite his lessons. “More specifically, I can read your thoughts as if they were printed in block letters on your forehead. Really, sometimes you think so loudly that I can hear you in the next room. There’s no way you can approach your teammates in an innocent manner. We need to fix that.”

“I’m so sorry to hear about your unfortunate telepathy,” I snapped.

“See, just there? You’re frustrated, and think I’m being rude.”

“Oh, well done,” I told her. “Really fine detective work. Why are we doing this now?”

She ran a hand through her hair. “Watson,” she said, “we’ve hit a brick wall. We’ve come up with nothing new. Just let’s get you into shape, okay?”

“Okay.” I deflated at the pleading note in her voice.

She smiled. “Let’s start with the basics. How to recognize when others are lying to you, so you can begin to police your own habits.”

She walked me through it—where someone looks when they’re recalling a memory, and when they’re fabricating one; how an honest man stands, and a lying one, how they hold their shoulders (slumped), their hands (behind their back, to hide fidgeting), if they’d prefer to stand or sit (to stand, probably with nervous feet). All of it she rattled off as though reading from a book.

“How young did you learn all this?”

“Five,” she said. “My mum was cross with Milo for teasing me. He kept telling me Santa Claus was real.”

“I’m sorry,” I asked, “was? Don’t you mean wasn’t?”

“No.” She ran her finger down the agenda in her lap and sighed. “Right, so it’s eight o’clock already and you’re tetchy because you have history homework for tomorrow—I can tell by your feet, stop shuffling—so do a practice run or two and then we’ll be finished.”

I stuffed my hands in my pockets to keep myself from fidgeting. “Do you want me to try to lie to you?”

At that, I watched Holmes fight back a laugh. “God, no, that would be pointless. No, I’ll make a series of statements and you can tell me which are true. Thumb up for truth, thumb down for a lie.”

“I’m pretty good at reading you, you know,” I told her.

“That might be true,” she said gamely. “But did you know that my father worked for the M.O.D. for fourteen years before the Kremlin got wind of a scheme of his and tried to have him assassinated? Or that, growing up, I had a cat called Mouse? She’s white and black and very fussy, and once the neighbor boy tried to drown her in a bucket. My mother hates her. Milo joined up with MI5 at age seventeen. No, that’s false, Milo runs the world’s largest private security company. Or no, actually, he’s an enfant terrible preparing a hostile takeover of Google. He’s unemployed. He’s a complete tosser. For years he was my favorite person in the world.”

I held my hand out rather stupidly between us; my thumb hadn’t moved. I’d spent too much time imagining what her life was like, before me, so I drank in all these facts—even the contrary ones—as if they were water.

“Pay attention to my face, Watson. Not my words. Listen to my tone. How am I sitting? Where am I looking?” She snapped her fingers. “I own three dressing gowns. I dislike guns; they cheapen confrontations. I first took cocaine at age twelve, and sometimes I take oxycodone when I’m miserable. When I met you, my initial thought was that my parents had set it up. No, it was that you were dreamy.” Grinning, I put my thumb up; she pushed it back down. “No, I thought, finally what someone wants from me, I can give them. I know how to play to an audience. I liked you. I thought you were another chauvinistic bastard who thought I couldn’t take care of myself.”

“All true,” I said, quietly, before she could continue. “All of it. At one point or another, including the business about your brother. He’s done all those things, been all those things. You thought all those things about me.”

“Explain your method.” Holmes pulled a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it.

“Because, somewhere in that brain of yours, you’ve decided I should know more about you, but you don’t want to do it outright. No, it can’t be simple, you’re Charlotte Holmes. You have to do it sideways, and this is the most sideways approach you could dream up.”

She exhaled in a long stream, head tipped to the side. I suppressed a cough. “Fine,” she said, finally, and I chanced a smile. Grudgingly, she returned it. “But none of those deductions were methodical, Watson. That was all psychology. I loathe psychology.”