A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(35)

“Don’t worry, Charlotte,” he said, amused. That didn’t do anything to ease my flash of anger. “Everyone has one. The please-like-me voice. Yours went on for so long, I almost thought it was real.”

Behind me, Rupert sighed. “Ignore him. He’s just testing one of his pet theories.”

“Not a pet theory,” Theo said. “Actual fact. You had one too, Rupert, but you lost it pretty fast with me. The shitty thing is, women end up keeping theirs for days after I first meet them. Self-protection, maybe?”

I folded my arms.

“Your body language, too. It’s been almost too open. You keep your arms at your sides. I’m noticing it now because they’re across your chest—sorry, not looking like that—but before, you’ve had this . . . invitation to you. Like you want—”

I had heard enough. “You don’t know anything about me,” I told him, and I pitched my voice still lower, the bottom of its register, scraping out each syllable from its gravel. “You know fuck all, Theo. Stop talking, or I will make you stop.”

“—me to tell you all my secrets.” He looked at me curiously. “But I think I’ve just learned one of yours, maybe? Um. Sorry.”

I had been sitting next to him, ignoring the instincts that had told me to run, because I knew that instincts weren’t logical. Especially mine, which ran so quickly toward self-protection.

My neutral expression is that, neutral, but listening to a stranger wax poetic about my “physical availability” in the years after my rape was nothing close to a neutral experience for me.

Theo straightened a bit. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I can be kind of an armchair psychologist. People just . . . I think a lot about how they tick. It helps my acting.”

“Think about it, then.” I could hear it, the disgust in my voice, the thread of fear. (Matilda on that street corner, Theo reaching for her neck.) “But keep your mouth shut.”

I could hear Rupert shift in the seat behind me.

“I’m sorry,” Theo said again, quietly. “I really am.”

“Everything okay?” a voice said. Watson. He made his way down our row, face smiling, eyes cold. “I saw your audition, Theo. You were great.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I think I just scared Charlotte. Didn’t mean to.”

Watson looked at me for his cue. I nodded, and he relaxed, infinitesimally. We both knew I didn’t need protection, but occasionally, I did need backup. “Everything’s fine,” I said. Asymptote, I thought. But no—that was the word for when I wasn’t acting.

“I watched Theo from the doorway,” Watson said, popping down next to Rupert. “So, he’s Hamlet, right?”

“He’s probably Hamlet,” Rupert said proudly.

“Probably.” It was fair to say as such without seeing the rest of the company audition. There was little chance they were hiding another Theo in their ranks, and even if they were, I didn’t think I could be there to see it.

I was only moments away from crying—a reaction, nothing more, and yet I didn’t want these strangers to see me vulnerable.

Something about this case was crawling underneath my skin.

Swallowing, I pulled out my phone. I need to go home and lie down. You stay here? Take notes.

You’re not okay, Watson wrote back. Let me come with. We’re not going to miss anything.

I was fighting myself. I couldn’t fight Watson too. “I need to go.” My fake voice again, but shaking this time. “I’ll see you all later,” I said, and he followed me out the door and all the way home, a foot behind me, quiet and steady and sure.

I was grateful for it then. I wasn’t later.

One of us should have stayed.

LATER, MUCH LATER, I WOKE IN MY BED FEELING LIKE I’D drunk three whole bottles of champagne and then broken into a government building with a flamethrower.

I hadn’t, though I knew what that felt like. I was a different sort of wrecked.

Watson was propped up beside me, his fingers in my hair, his other hand turning the pages of a book. The Good Soldier, I saw. He was nearly finished; hours must have passed. The sky outside was dark.

“Did you hear something?” I asked him sleepily.

“A knock, maybe?” He looked down at me, pulled a strand of hair from my eyes. “But it’s been thundering outside. Kind of hard to tell.”

There it was again—rap, rap, rap. An argument muffled in the hall.

At that, Watson was on his feet. He opened the second drawer of my dresser, pulled out my knife, and stalked out of the room without bothering to do up his shirt.

People were shouting.

Then I was awake, too, putting on clothes as Mouse dashed for the safe, quiet space under my bed. I picked up a blanket from the floor and threw it around my shoulders and followed.

“—she’s dead,” Rupert was saying in the living room, his hair plastered to his face. It must have been raining quite hard; water was leeching out from his boots into the carpet. “Dead. And I saw it happen. We all did.”

At first I thought he meant Anwen, but no—she was there behind him in a translucent rain slicker, a lace dress beneath it, her face drawn and thin. Theo, behind her, was shutting the door. Under his arm was a bottle in a brown paper bag.