Murder on Cold Street (Lady Sherlock #5) - Sherry Thomas Page 0,126
in Cousins’s finances?”
Charlotte popped the next brussels sprout into her mouth, earning her way toward the bûche de Noël. But no one else was eating anymore. All eyes regarded her intently, which made her feel obliged to chew more vigorously—and drink from her water goblet to wash everything down faster.
She coughed a little and slapped herself on the sternum. “I believe he found something by accident. I believe he found this.”
She had brought her reticule into the dining room, and now she extracted the rosewood-and-ivory-inlay box that she had found at Miss Longstead’s and passed it to Mrs. Watson.
Miss Redmayne and Lord Ingram left their seats to stand beside Mrs. Watson. Mrs. Watson had her hand on the lid but hesitated, as if she faced Pandora’s box, and by opening it, she risked releasing great infelicity into the world.
“It’s only notebooks inside,” said Charlotte.
Which Pandora’s box could very well have contained, too.
Mrs. Watson lifted the lid. Carefully and with no small reluctance, as if she were about to handle a sleeping serpent, she withdrew a small notebook. Miss Redmayne and Lord Ingram followed suit.
“Notice that the contents are in code,” said Charlotte. “Each item pasted into those notebooks has a date written beside it. The oldest small notices date from six years ago.”
Lord Ingram slowly set down the notebook in his hand. “When you told us about the Sullivans and their arrangement with Mrs. Portwine, you mentioned that Mr. Sullivan became highly agitated when he realized that Mrs. Sullivan was trying to pick the lock of the study at Mrs. Portwine’s. But later, when a similar incident happened, he no longer cared.”
Charlotte cut a brussels sprout in two and soaked one resultant half more fully in butter sauce. “Indeed. When Mrs. Sullivan and I found a secret drawer in his study tonight, half of the drawer was empty, and the dimensions of that empty space were almost exactly those of this box. I believe that when Mr. Sullivan learned of the Longsteads’ plan to no longer put their spare house up for let, at least not until they departed London, he had the idea to move the box to number 33.
“The Longsteads had not told him that Miss Longstead adored the studio and that it was the reason the house would no longer be advertised for tenancy. To his thinking, 33 Cold Street was perfect for his purposes. It would be vacant for some months, no one would be there, and he could always retrieve his box later, after the Longsteads left town, by booking another visit with the letting agent.”
Mrs. Watson frowned. “It couldn’t have been that easy to hide a box with the letting agent hovering nearby. This isn’t a large box, but to take it out and put it somewhere, all without being seen?”
The butter-drenched half brussels sprout went down rather nicely. “That might explain why the box ended up in the attic. The studio there is the single largest space in the house, but it is two sections connected by a narrow passage. If he could situate himself in one part and the letting agent in the other part, that would have given him enough time to open the door of the storage closet and put this small box into one of the larger boxes of magazines that the previous tenants had left behind.”
“The game!” cried Miss Redmayne. “The gift-hiding game the Longsteads played with each other.”
Charlotte raised her water goblet in Miss Redmayne’s direction. “Mr. Sullivan’s secrets might have remained safe, despite Miss Longstead’s occupancy of the studio, if it hadn’t been for Mr. Longstead’s search for a hiding place for his present. And what better place than the closet in the studio, right next to where Miss Longstead sat every day?
“This is entirely unsupported by evidence, but I think Mr. Longstead, when he first came across this box, believed it to contain Miss Longstead’s gift to him. There is a chance that he took it to a locksmith to get it opened. And there is a further chance that after opening the box, he became even more convinced that it was not only a gift, but a grand gift.
“He’d tried to interest her in cryptography; she never loved it to the same extent he did. But hope springs eternal. It isn’t difficult to imagine Mr. Longstead, when faced with this box of ciphers, happily assuming that, unbeknownst to him, his niece had been practicing cryptography on her own and prepared this tremendous surprise.”