Page 99 of The Hollow of Fear
He had already been swimming in anxiety and distress; her statement had perhaps not made quite the impact it ought to have. Now it dawned on him that although his life was at stake, it was possible he still had only the most superficial understanding of the situation.
She looked up from the disassembled charlotte russe. “There’s still something you aren’t telling me. Livia wrote about the ordeal of meeting with you this afternoon. At first she could only bring herself to mention the icehouse. She reported that you appeared weary but steady. It was only when she brought up Lady Ingram’s that you became stunned. Which leads me to ask, did something else happen at the icehouse?”
Trust her to be able to deduce something like that from nothing more than her sister’s account of how he had reacted. He told her then about the man who called himself George Barr, who might or might not have been a common thief, and whom he had kept in the icehouse, pending an investigation into the man’s true identity.
“Lady Ingram must have already been in the ice well when I stood in the second antechamber, wondering how George Barr had managed to escape. But I didn’t go forward because outside each inner door there is a large latch, and the one on the next door was perfectly in place. When Miss Holmes first started to stammer about the icehouse, I thought to myself, what an idiot I had been not to check more thoroughly. If Barr had an accomplice, and if that accomplice thought Barr had become a liability, there was every chance that he would kill the man and put him deeper into the icehouse to delay discovery. Instead...”
She pressed down at the ruins of the charlotte russe with the back of her spoon. He grabbed her wrist. “Stop that. Iamterrified now.”
He felt the tension in her arm, as if she might yank away. But a long second later, she set down the spoon and flexed her fingers.
He exhaled and let go. “I’ve told you everything. Now you tell me whatyouhave kept back.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Of everything that’s happened today, the most inexplicable has been your reaction. You are never so terrified that you are unable to eat. What is going on?”
“Can I not simply be concerned for you?”
“Holmes, you ate half a dozen macarons while you told me that my wife had become an agent of Moriarty’s.”
“Yes, I did, didn’t I? They were excellent macarons.”
“And this”—he pointed at the dessert carcass—“was an excellent charlotte russe, something you would have had two helpings of, on any other day,afteryou’d had the cake Mr. Walsh served.”
She stared at the blight on her plate. “Very well. There are a few things I don’t understand yet, but I would say, on the main, that someone is trying to frame you. Had it been anyone else in the icehouse, the suspicion would have immediately fallen upon Lady Ingram—at least among those of us who know the truth. In fact, even though you tell me it’s Lady Ingram herself in there, I daresay that a part of you is still convinced that she has somehow masterminded all this.”
She was exactly right about that.
“I know you wonder whether she hated you enough to spite you this way. I am more than convinced that she wouldn’t have minded seeing you dead, but not enough to throw her own life into the bargain. So we must take her out of the role of the mastermind.
“She was a pawn—the most important piece on the board, perhaps—but this is someone else’s game. Which leads me to ask, what is the ultimate objective of this game thatLady Ingramwas used as the opening sacrifice?”
He had been eating as she spoke—he hadn’t had any food since luncheon. But now the game pie congealed in his stomach, as heavy as a cobblestone. “What?”
She rose from the table. A kettle of water had been provided for the room. She swung it into the grate. “That it’s Lady Ingram in the icehouse muddies the waters. But if I must name a motive for this scheme, I would say it’s Mr. Finch.”
“Your brother, Mr. Finch?”
She nodded.
Mr. Myron Finch had once been an underling of Moriarty’s but had chosen to leave the organization. Lady Ingram, pretending to be Mr. Finch’s star-crossed lover, had asked Sherlock Holmes to find him, knowing that he was Charlotte Holmes’s illegitimate half brother.
“Don’t you think this is a bit extreme, simply to get back a renegade?”
She came back to the table. “It depends on what he stole from Moriarty.”
Holmes had told him that according to Stephen Marbleton, when Mr. Finch left, he had taken something of great value from Moriarty.
“What can it be? Plans to assassinate the queen at next year’s Jubilee celebrations?”
“Mr. Finch was Moriarty’s cryptographer. I think he left with something he was deciphering, which might have been more personal in nature.”
She took a strand of her hair and let it fall through her fingers. At its current length, her hair was just long enough to begin to curl. He would have thought, if he were asked to imagine how she looked shorn of most of her locks, that she would appear somewhat boyish. Instead, the paucity of hair only seemed to emphasize her eyes and her lips.
“I didn’t have the opportunity to tell you this yet,” she went on, “but on the day I last saw you in summer, I also met Mr. Finch.”
“You found him after all?”
