The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(6)

When they initially refused, Lucien ordered my mother’s home care nurse—a woman under his employ—to poison her.

My parents told me none of this.

Instead they ordered me away to my brother Milo’s offices in Germany, where August Moriarty was working in his employ. There, they imagined, I would be safe.

In the meantime, my mother gained the upper hand on her home care nurse while our house’s security system was off, dressed the nurse as herself, then drugged her. Then staged the scene to appear as though their positions hadn’t been flipped.

This involved wigs and costumes, and in that way (and only that way), it was after my own heart.

Leander hid in their basement while my parents debated their next move.

To reiterate: I knew none of this.

For a long time I used that fact to absolve myself of guilt.

Nota bene: Lucien Moriarty was orchestrating these schemes from abroad, untouchable, unreachable, and soon enough he disappeared from even my brother’s surveilling eye.

In a sick sort of way I admired him for that.

All I had figured, all I had learned, was that Lucien was poisoning my mother, that my family’s finances were in trouble, and that my parents were holding my uncle in their basement. I assumed they had been keeping him captive to demand he hand over his share of the inheritance, thus smoothing over their financial issues.

You see, I’d been given few reasons over the years to believe that my parents could have good intentions.

And still I felt the need to protect them from the consequences of my own mistakes. With the additional bonus of locking up Lucien Moriarty and throwing away the key.

My plan was simple: I would take apart the Moriartys’ forgery ring, then bring back the perpetrators, Hadrian and Phillipa, to our family’s house in England. There, I would frame them for my uncle’s disappearance, freeing my parents from blame. This action would flush Lucien out of hiding, as he would never let his family take the fall for a Holmes’s actions.

My mother’s plan was simple: my uncle Leander would agree to take a nonlethal dose of the same poison Lucien had given to her, then go to the hospital and claim that Hadrian and Phillipa Moriarty had poisoned him. Which would flush Lucien out of hiding. As he would never let his family take the fall for a Holmes’s actions.

You would think, perhaps, from this information, that these two plans would dovetail beautifully.

You would be wrong.

With everything in motion, I dragged Watson back to England with me, and when we all gathered on the lawn outside my house, every two-bit player in this drama—Hadrian and Phillipa loose, having shaken their guard; my father furious at my interference, at my presumption of his and my mother’s guilt; Leander horrified and beaten-down and ill, so ill; and August. His hands up. Pleading for a cease-fire.

When my brother, Milo, arrived rather later than he expected, mistook August Moriarty from a distance for his brother, and from a distance, with a sniper rifle, shot him dead.

Those are the facts.

As far as I understood them. If I understood anything at all.



You see, I had become so used to trusting no one. Being the only one with any kind of plan.

Where did that leave me? It left me left. Leander gone. Milo a murderer. August dead on the snowy lawn, and Watson there, knowing it was my fault, and that was as far as I could go with it, that was as much as I could take.

It was a forced remembering. A penance. It wasn’t meant to dull the ache, but instead to keep the ache alive. It had been so easy for me to isolate that part of myself that felt that I had begun to believe it was natural. I had been wrong. I was unlearning.

You need to feel the blood underneath all that reason, Detective Inspector Green had said. You need to feel it, and not apologize for feeling. Or else, every now and then, it’ll happen anyway, and you’ll be so overwhelmed that you’ll act only on that instinct, and you’ll continue to do very stupid things.

I had disliked the implication that I was stupid, but even if I hadn’t, I knew for myself that my methods had stopped working. Also I was nothing if not a good student. So I set myself to “feeling things” as often as I could. To let my control go, to let whatever small nasty thing that lived in the space behind my heart go free.

I imagine DI Green thought I would begin to make amends with my family, with Watson, with myself, that I would take “advantage” of this opportunity she had granted me. That I would perhaps break down in tears on her sofa picturesquely while she made me a picturesque cup of chamomile tea. How could one blame her for that?

I didn’t blame her. I didn’t cry. I took my fury with me, and fled. I had, as they say, bigger fish to fry.

HENCE, THIS BIT OF CASUAL CRUELTY ON MY SIDE OF THE closet door. The petty kind, the girl you let into your house for two straight weeks was building a case against you for the government kind, unnecessary to the case I was solving, a string of words specifically engineered to pour salt into an open wound. And yet it was human to feel it, to know that this awful man had been aiding and abetting an even more awful man for money, and to want to make him understand the full weight of his stupidity.

He had looked at a girl, his teenage son’s girlfriend, and seen a Shirley Temple where he should have seen poison.

“My God,” he was saying. “You’re disgusting. How old are you? What have you been doing with my boy?”