The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(31)

Working in a floral-stroke-frame shop in Brooklyn was not a bad deal, all considered.

Hadrian saw my mood soften. He smiled, toothily.

“Connecticut,” I said, squaring my shoulders. “It isn’t worth it. I don’t care what it is you’re actually delivering. Stop while you’re ahead.”

“I have my orders,” he said.

“From your brother. Your brother orders you around,” I said, and watched that one land. “Do you actually want to get back into this game after you’ve escaped it? What, your brother gave you a passport, so now he owns you? Please. You’re better than that. Get out from under his thumb.”

Hadrian set his jaw. “Don’t tell me who I’m beholden to.”

“I’m telling you what’s in your best interest.”

“And what’s that?”

I stared at him, gauging the size of the bluff I was about to make. Despite our shared history I didn’t know him well enough to read a change in his tells or his behavior from the last time I’d seen him. All I knew was that once, he had been a talk show guest all over Britain, discussing art and antiquities with a sort of smart charisma that I saw no sign of now.

The forged paintings that he and Phillipa had sold, the ones that fetched the highest prices, were ones that he had painted himself. He still was painting now. Any child could have told you that from the pigment beneath his fingernails. Through the shop window I’d seen the canvases hung against the back wall—darkly romantic portraits, done as though in a series. The Last of August, I thought. The Thought of a Pocketwatch. August had said that art was his brother’s only passion.

I reached out a hand for Hadrian to shake. He took it. My fingers were dwarfed in his.

“Don’t make the delivery,” I said. He stared at me. “Don’t make it. I don’t care if they’re going to exhibit your paintings. It isn’t worth it.”

Hadrian jerked his hand away, and I knew then for sure what was in the boxes at my feet.

“They’re not worth it, the students there,” I said. I believed what I was saying; it would be pearls before swine. These particular pearls were also made by swine, though that wasn’t the issue at hand.

“I thought you’d be here to get some revenge for that Watson boy.” Hadrian cleared his throat. “You don’t seem here for that.”

I looked at him.

I had brought a small revolver. I had worn a Kevlar vest in case it came to a scuffle over the gun. I had come as myself so he could know, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was my doing, if I had in fact decided to kill him.

I had thought about it for months. Hadrian, Phillipa, Lucien. Remove them as though they were rats that had gotten into the walls of my home. Remove the threat, and then I would let the matter rest. Let my former friend get on with his life, as he so obviously—and wisely—wanted nothing to do with me. I would perhaps go to prison. Prison didn’t scare me; I understood how to handle monotony interspersed with the occasional deadly interlude, and anyway I’d always thought I’d end up there eventually. Perhaps I wouldn’t. I was tidy in my methods, and I might walk away from it all. Perhaps I would finish my formal schooling and take a position in a lab somewhere. Do graduate work in chemistry. I’d have to find a specific topic to pursue, instead of dabbling, but there could be pleasure in specialization. I’d certainly interacted enough with poisons to want to know more about antidotes, and perhaps . . . perhaps I could change my name—a symbolic gesture, but one that might allow for appropriate mental gymnastics. No one had expectations for Charlotte Something. No one directed her Saturdays but her. I thought about it: an apartment overlooking something appropriately scenic, some rain or fog or smog. I could compose again on my violin. I hadn’t written a melody since I was a child. I could, after refining it, of course, perhaps play it for—

For myself. I would play it for myself. It was what I’d always done, after all, and if I was lonely, I could cry myself to bloody sleep.

You need to feel the blood underneath all that reason, DI Green had said. Looking at Hadrian Moriarty, I didn’t feel angry. I felt very, very tired.

I knew, then, that I didn’t want to kill the three of them after all.

“Leave Watson alone,” I said, “and I’ll leave you alone.”

To his credit, he considered it. “If I don’t?”

“Then I’ll see you again soon.” With that, I jumped down from the truck.

I wasn’t a sentimental fool. I didn’t plan on forgiving him, but neither would I gun him down. I had the manifest, the delivery confirmation, the bottle and the hair and the radio presets and my seven-hundred-dollar Kevlar vest, intact. I had seen a moment of doubt in Hadrian Moriarty. It had been a productive afternoon.

As I passed the women in the shop, I saw that they were all painting the Eiffel Tower. The woman I’d been watching had turned her skeleton into a tall, elegant structure. She’d depicted it at night, lit up and twinkling.

Perhaps she hadn’t been fired. Perhaps she’d quit her job, instead, to take a trip to Paris. The evidence didn’t quite suggest it, but perhaps, this time, I’d give her the benefit of the doubt.

I had been to Paris before. I had been to Berlin and Copenhagen and Prague and Lucerne and most of Western Europe, in the name of an education or in pursuit of a crime, and I had seen nothing of what made the world worth looking at.