A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(41)
As he slept, I unloaded the scraps I’d collected the last few days—the newspaper pages from the bus, the note from the theater door—touching them only at their edges. Then I went to Anwen’s translucent mackintosh in the closet, and, using my tweezers, retrieved the papers I’d seen in the pockets. Two were receipts, from Blackmarket café and from Pret A Manger, and the last a wrapper from a candy bar. On the coffee table, I lined them up and then turned them over, tweezers in hand.
There. In pencil, on the back of the Pret receipt, a series of numbers. I held it up in the dark: II.ii.87, IV.v.27, III.i.132. Immediately, my brain began running them through as code. Roman numerals corresponding to certain letters? Periods indicating new sentences? Anwen was far more complex than I’d thought.
On the sofa, Theo muttered in his sleep, and I placed an unlit cigarette between my lips and settled in to solve a long, satisfying problem.
It was a full two minutes before I realized she’d jotted down a list of monologues. Act number, scene number, line number—the best pieces to audition for Ophelia, listed out in her spiky hand.
Fine, then. I’d use this list for its intended purpose—squaring the handwriting against the note from the theater. I’m in the sound booth upstairs. Meet me there? it read, so both samples at least used the capital and the lowercase I. But there was no similarity, neither in shape nor in pressure points, the places where she’d set down and lifted her pen as she wrote.
Theo muttered again, and my eyes lit on his messenger bag, toppled over on the rug next to his shoes. But a cursory examination of its contents proved only two things: one, he was a meticulous notetaker in his theater history lectures, and two, he hadn’t left the note on the theater door. The handwriting wasn’t a match in the slightest. I tucked his notebook back in his bag and stretched, feeling a satisfying pop in my shoulders.
The newspaper took only a cursory glance. What I wanted was on the second page of the culture section, in a little column at the bottom. It was an item on this summer’s production of Hamlet—a blurb, nothing more—and a brief profile of Dr. Quigley. Twenty-nine, a London native, educated at St. Genesius (“which makes this new position a homecoming!”), danced, surprisingly, in the chorus of Billy Elliot on the West End straight after university. Then came graduate school, and his new position. “My sister was an actress,” he’d told the paper, “and so I grew up in the theater. There was nothing else I’d rather do.”
Than act? If that had been his goal, his role with the Dramatics Soc was a demotion. That would make him bitter, certainly, but how could that have led to Dr. Larkin’s death?
I became aware of Watson in the bedroom doorway, and looked up. “I can’t sleep,” he said, rumpling his hair.
“I couldn’t either.”
He smiled a little. He was still a bit drunk. “You look so picturesque, out there. The moonlight on your hair. It hurts a little.”
“I’m only working,” I reminded him. “Nothing more.”
“There’s always more, with you.”
Once, Watson had liked to tell stories about the two of us in his head, and in those stories, the girl who looked like me, who had my name, had reasons for her behavior far crueler and more romantic than mine had ever been. When we first met, I had only been trying to survive. And he had snuck in, somehow, when I was at my lowest, and now I didn’t know myself without him. His steady hands, his quick wit. How we were telling a new story, and I was holding the pen.
“Come to bed,” he said, and after a moment, I did.
WATSON WAS STILL SLEEPING WHEN I LEFT TO KEEP MY appointment with DI Sadiq. The morning was colder than I’d expected, and I was thankful that I’d brought along my leather jacket. Unlike in the States, where whatever I’d had on was a notch or two stranger than the camisoles and cardigans the other girls wore, here I felt as though I made sense against the scenery. I paid attention to this sort of thing, to whether I could be picked out easily in a crowd, and oftentimes I’d change the way I presented to more easily maneuver through my day. Girls do this; boys do this; everyone does, really. I monitored how I felt in the world as a sort of barometer for how I felt about myself.
Would a Holmes go out in a moto jacket and velvet loafers? No. Why on earth call that much attention to oneself? I was meant to sketch in the rest of the world, leaving myself a perfect blank.
But still—I liked these loafers.
I made a point to walk by the St. Genesius theater, but the doors were cordoned off with police tape. A lone PC leaned against the railing, scrolling through his phone. While I’d made myself known to Sadiq, I didn’t think that I could talk myself into that theater without a number of tricks that I was too tired right now to try out. Still, I wondered about it as I walked to the police station: the wall by the dressing rooms in the basement, how I could hear the sound coming through. There was another way in, I was sure of it.
I made a quick stop at Blackmarket before I took the bus to the police station. There, I didn’t ask for DI Sadiq. Instead, I said that I had an appointment, that I had been at the St. Genesius theater yesterday (all truths, far easier to sell than lies), and was ushered to a bench outside the squad room.
It wasn’t empty. Three people I recognized from the auditions yesterday sat there, two girls and a boy. One of the girls gave me a walleyed once-over as I sat down; she was Keiko, the girl who had been so excellent at her audition yesterday. I didn’t recognize the other. She was crying into her hands.