Murder on Cold Street (Lady Sherlock #5) - Sherry Thomas Page 0,122

widened behind the glasses she’d just put on again. “All of them? Whatever for?”

“There is a chance that your uncle hid something in this house. Given that he expected you to search the house top to bottom for your present, what are the only places where you wouldn’t have searched?”

“The places we already used before! Because we were supposed to find new hiding places every year and he always played fair.” Miss Longstead’s eyes lit. But just as quickly, excitement faded from her beautiful face, replaced by a fearful dismay. “But what could he have hidden? Do you think . . . do you believe . . . ?”

“Fortunately or unfortunately, I do think the item he hid had something to do with his murder. How directly the two were related, I don’t know. But if we find it, I’d like to take it with me for closer study.”

Miss Longstead braced a hand on the wall, but she needed only a moment to master herself. Opening her diary to a blank page at the back, she took out a pencil from a pocket, and wrote quickly.

“We spent three Christmases in town. So there are six past hiding places we’ve used before,” she said tightly, tearing out the list she’d made.

They started in the study itself, in one of the lower cabinets, then proceeded to the unused nursery. There Miss Longstead looked under a cot and then inside a desk in the small schoolroom. Next, they stopped by Miss Longstead’s floor. In her sitting room, she crouched down and opened the doors under an occasional table, to a space filled with notebooks and various boxes.

“I’m afraid I hang on to odds and ends, too,” said Miss Longstead, her eyes once again darkened by grief. “Except I keep them in boxes, not heaps.”

Charlotte got down on her knees and peered in. Her heart thudded. “That box in the back—do you recognize it? The one with ivory inlays.”

Miss Longstead looked again. “Good gracious.” She pulled out the box. “The pattern on the outside looks like another one of my boxes but the size is completely different.”

The thickness—or the relative flatness of the box—was what had caught Charlotte’s attention. A keyhole was visible but when Miss Longstead lifted the lid tentatively, it gave: The box was not locked.

Miss Longstead, with the lid open half an inch, glanced at Charlotte.

Charlotte nodded.

Miss Longstead bit her lower lip and opened the box the rest of the way. Inside lay a collection of small notebooks, about four inches wide and five inches long. She flipped through one. Its pages were pasted with newspaper clippings and telegrams.

She turned to Charlotte again, her eyes disquiet, her voice hushed. “But these are—these are all in code.”

Charlotte let out a long, shaky breath. “As I said earlier, Miss Longstead, I will need your permission to take this box and its contents with me. For closer study—much closer study.”

Twenty

It was nearly nine when Charlotte returned to Mrs. Watson’s: 31 Cold Street had not been her last stop of the evening.

“Lord Ingram sent a message that you’d be late, so we decided to postpone dinner until you returned,” said Miss Redmayne, pressing a cup of hot cocoa into her hands. “Mr. Bloom, Lord Ingram’s expert, left not a quarter hour ago. He studied those accounts for a good five hours. And . . . he came and went by the back door—said Lord Ingram asked him to do so.”

Charlotte shifted her gaze to Mrs. Watson on the settee, holding tightly on to a glass of whisky.

“We drove all over Reading this afternoon, searching for someone who could tell us something—anything—about the renovation and outfitting of the Cousins factory,” she said, her voice disembodied. “The main contractor of record, a Mr. Fox, had listed an address in an industrial district. When we got there, we found only a place that sold crushed stones. We made inquiries with the owner of the place and in the surrounding area—and learned that Mr. Fox’s office had been a temporary one, there only for the duration of the work.

“That in and of itself is not unusual. But this Mr. Fox, apparently, did not hire any local workers—and that did not go unnoticed. Most of his crew, it appeared, didn’t speak any English—some of those we talked to today thought they were Germans; others thought they were Poles. They came. They did the work. And then they left.”

Mrs. Watson took a healthy draught of her whisky. “The efficiency and precision