A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(30)

“I’m aware,” Sadiq said, and for a minute or so she didn’t say anything more. “Matilda—that was a high-profile case.”

“Missing white girl,” Watson said. “The media loves that.”

She gave him a sharp look. “Yes. The media does. But aside from the theoreticals, she’s a person. Not an idea. And she’s still missing.” Slowly, her shoulders relaxed. “I was assigned to her case. Not as the lead detective—I was assisting. Oftentimes, you think you have a kidnapped girl when what you have instead is a runaway, so I was looking into her family. It wasn’t any good, you know. We don’t know where she is. Is that your interest, Charlotte? Tracking down Matilda?”

I shook my head. “Not primarily.”

Sadiq nodded impassively, and there was something to her manner that suggested that I had failed her, so I hurried on. “The adviser for last year, Dr. Larkin, asked for our help now that all of last year’s players are back for the summer. I’m hoping to prevent further incidents from happening this summer. Think of it as a way of conserving police resources.”

“I see.”

She and I stared at each other.

“You’re just consulting for us, then.” DI Sadiq had a glimmer in her eye.

“Something like that.”

She unlocked her drawer and pulled out a file, then slid it across her desk. “Twenty minutes,” she said, not unkindly. “I need to get back to my investigation. He can take notes, but don’t photograph anything. And if you pick the locks on anyone’s desks while I’m gone . . .” She glanced meaningfully up at the camera in the corner of the room. I had clocked it when I’d walked in.

“That goddamn Daily Mail article,” I said. “Is it really my fault if people insist on buying the most basic locks—”

“Yes,” DI Sadiq said, and left.

She’d disappeared on a Thursday. It was more or less as we’d been told. On the night before Earnest’s opening, after their final dress rehearsal, she had gone out with a group of friends—Anwen, Theo, Rupert, and a boy named Sebastian Wallis—for a drink at a pub called The Bell and Book. They’d stayed out later than they intended, and it was one in the morning by the time Matilda made her way home. She would normally have walked with the other students back to their shared housing, but her parents were in town to see her performance the next night, and so she was staying with them at their hotel just outside the city center. She hadn’t taken a cab, despite the hour. She’d wanted to “walk off her two pints,” and the weather was still warm late that night.

It was, ultimately, a mistake.

There hadn’t been a CCTV camera on that final street she had turned down, Waterbury Lane. A brief bit of road, connecting two larger thoroughfares.

The next day, officers had canvassed the area, knocking on doors and asking if any residents had heard a commotion, a scuffle, anyone scream. Two different women, both with bedroom windows facing the street, had told police that they’d heard a heated argument. It had been brief and not particularly loud. They’d seen no reason to call the police. When played a sample of Matilda’s voice (from a video she’d posted to social media, her running a David Mamet monologue), neither could positively identify Matilda’s voice as one that they’d heard.

As for the street itself: there had been no blood. No sign of a struggle. All they had found was one of Matilda’s earrings, a pair of diamond solitaires her parents had given her on her sixteenth birthday. It hadn’t been torn from her ear (at that note in the file, Watson had shuddered); it looked more like it had fallen naturally.

Her father, George Wilkes, had reported his daughter missing at dawn. By the morning, he was at the police station, hounding detectives for information. He was followed by Theo Harding, followed finally by Matilda’s mother, at nearly noon. The latter had taken longer because she’d driven straight back to Kensington—their wealthy London suburb—and returned with a bag of Matilda’s things “that might be important in the investigation.” This had struck the officer as extremely odd; the bag was full of class notes and diary entries that suggested nothing more than your bog-standard teenage girl. When questioned, George said that his wife was “a very nervous woman, not quite right, but desperate to do what she can to help” and soon after provided a letter from his wife’s psychologist and a pair of prescription slips substantiating his claim. CCTV footage of the street outside their hotel showed that she had left when she’d said and not before. The detective chalked up her aberrant behavior to nerves and cautioned her against driving in such a state again.

(“She didn’t go back only for Matilda’s things,” Watson asked, reading over my shoulder. “There had to have been something else. What was she picking up?”

“Or,” I said, “what was she taking home to hide?”)

CCTV wasn’t any help in identifying who else could have been on Waterbury Lane that night. A raucous group had left a venue a few blocks over after an “’80s vs. ’90s” club night, and many of them had taken the same path as Matilda as they left only fifteen minutes later. When tracked down and questioned, none reported any sight of her.

Oxford had a higher crime rate than many other British cities, but those offenses ran more toward bicycle theft than kidnapping, and in the weeks after Matilda’s disappearance students stopped going out after dark. Especially young women. The newspapers had a field day, interviewing Matilda’s friends back home, her distant family (her parents refused to answer questions), splashing the same haunting photo of her across their front page. Matilda, her lips pressed together, her hand raised as if swearing an oath, her face a mask of fury: it was a stage shot, her in character, but it made her look dangerous, electric.