Murder on Cold Street (Lady Sherlock #5) - Sherry Thomas Page 0,52

And if I’d paid attention earlier on, I might be able to tell the women apart by the color and cut of their dresses. But men are nearly indistinguishable to me from that distance, especially if they are of a similar build and attire—as they are usually all wearing the exact same things at an evening function.”

“You didn’t notice what your uncle, Mr. Sullivan, or Mrs. Treadles were doing at all?”

“My uncle I can sometimes find by his mop of white hair. And his girth—he’d put on a bit of a paunch in recent years. Mrs. Treadles was wearing a very conservatively cut gown almost entirely in black, except for a band of lavender around the wrists, I think—she is still in mourning for her brother and probably wouldn’t have come except to support my uncle and me, knowing that I worried about attendance.

“The two of them both checked on me from time to time, or at least Mrs. Treadles did so until she left, because of a headache exacerbated by the brightness of all the candles. As for Mr. Sullivan, our paths crossed very little during the night. He was not seated next to me at the dinner, nor did he ask me to dance. And I couldn’t have differentiated him from the other gentlemen at any distance, so I really do not know what he was doing during the party.”

Her voice turned a few degrees cooler as she spoke of her cousin. Lord Ingram wondered how Mr. Sullivan had earned her dislike. Surely not in the exact same way he had turned Mrs. Treadles’s opinion against him.

The change in her tone could not have escaped Holmes’s attention but she only asked, “How did your uncle seem to you?”

“Both apprehensive and excited—exactly how I felt.” Miss Longstead’s thumb rubbed over the delicate handle of her bone china cup. “I was asked similar questions yesterday by Scotland Yard, about whether there was anything to note during the party. The only thing out of ordinary I could think of then, and the only one I can think of now, was that I saw someone enter number 33 from the back.”

Holmes, who had been studying the array of biscuits on offer, looked up. “Do please tell more. Did you notice the time, by any chance?”

Miss Longstead shook her head. “There was no place on my dress for a pocket watch and I couldn’t see the time on the grandfather clock in the corner.”

“What about your dance card? If we know which dance you left blank, we might be able to estimate the time.”

“We didn’t have dance cards printed. Since we entertained so little, we didn’t think of dance cards until much too late. Mrs. Treadles assured us then that it was not entirely necessary for a smaller gathering. She said she would have a word with the matrons present—they would let the gentlemen know what to do. She also said that the musicians could decide what to play next. So without a dance card filled ahead of time, I didn’t need to worry about keeping my appointments throughout the evening. At one point I simply excused myself and slipped out to the garden to cool off.”

“Do you remember what music was playing while you were in the garden?”

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t have a good memory for tunes.”

Large balls often had a set sequence for the dances, this many quadrilles, that many waltzes, a smattering of galops and polkas. But with musicians left to their own devices, even if Miss Longstead remembered the melody that had wafted out of the house, the musicians might not be able to recall when they’d played it.

Holmes did not appear concerned about this additional difficulty. “Was it not cold in the garden?”

“Quite, but it was very warm inside the house and I was glad for a minute in fresh air. I was standing somewhere in the middle of the lawn, looking up at the sky, when I turned around and saw someone go into the house next door.”

“How far were you from the house?”

“About forty feet.”

“You can see from that distance?”

“Movements and such. My night vision isn’t bad. These houses are white stucco. A dark shape going up to a white wall, I can distinguish that, with the light spilling out from the party.”

“Do you have any idea who it was?”

“Not at all, except to think that it was a woman—something about that silhouette.”

“Did you not think that it was alarming, that someone went into number