Page 52 of Murder on Cold Street
The back of the brooch, which should have had the name and the dates of birth and death of the departed, or at least initials andthe date of death, had been filed to remove the identifying information.
Charlotte handed the brooch to the housekeeper. “Have you ever seen this item before, Mrs. Coltrane?”
Mrs. Coltrane turned it over in her hands. “No, I’ve never seen it. I have seen this pouch of stones before—I believe Miss Longstead gave it to him quite some time ago.”
At Charlotte’s request, Mrs. Coltrane took the brooch to Miss Longstead, only to return shaking her head. “Miss Longstead says this is the first time she has ever come across this brooch.”
“Have you any idea who this might belong to?”
Mrs. Coltrane shook her head again. “The hair inside is dark blond. Of those close enough to Mr. Longstead in life that he would have wanted to keep a lock of their hair after death, I can only think of old Mr. Cousins as having had hair like this. But that was when he was young. His hair, or what remained of it, turned white years before he died.”
They persevered through the rest of the drawers. Afterward, as they escaped Mr. Longstead’s study at an unladylike speed, Charlotte asked Mrs. Coltrane whether she knew where Mr. Longstead kept his set of keys to number 33, which Charlotte had not seen either in his desk or as part of the evidence collected by the police. Mrs. Coltrane didn’t.
She also didn’t know whether Miss Longstead would know, but implored Charlotte not to trouble her mistress again so soon. “Please let her have a little respite from all this talk of the murders.”
It seemed unlikely to Charlotte that Miss Longstead’s mind could stray far from thoughts of the murders, but she acceded to Mrs. Coltrane’s wish and followed the housekeeper to her small, trim office in the basement of the house for tea, coconut biscuits, and Mrs. Coltrane’s account of the night of the party.
As the senior servant in charge, Mrs. Coltrane had been terribly busy, making sure that everything went off properly and that thefootmen hired especially for the evening knew what they were supposed to do. She, like Miss Longstead, had thought Mr. Longstead had gone to bed—he’d told her that he might not last the entire night.
“The main thing I remember feeling, after the guests had departed, was that I was both relieved the fog came in, forcing everyone to leave, and truly sorry that it happened. The party could have been legendary, the kind where people still dance at five o’clock in the morning. That would have been rough on the staff, as we still had to get up in the morning for the next day’s duties, but I would have liked that for Miss Longstead. I would have liked for everyone to always remember that on the night of her debut, the guests were so taken with her that they made merry as if there was no tomorrow.”
Charlotte gazed at her a moment. Mrs. Coltrane was not a handsome woman, but her kindness made her lovely. How much better Charlotte would feel about Livia being stuck at home if she had a Mrs. Coltrane in the household, looking after her.
“So you barely slept that night,” she said softly.
“I’d just lain down, in fact, when I heard the doorbell ring. I was peeved when I got to the door and couldn’t believe a word the policeman was saying. In fact, I marched right up to Mr. Longstead’s room and banged on the door, convinced that he would be just as vexed as I’d been to be woken up. But I had to drag him downstairs to show him to the copper.
“My knocking brought no response. And when I opened the door and saw that there was no one inside—my blood congealed. Miss Longstead, when I woke her up, had precisely the same reaction. She didn’t believe me and rushed to her uncle’s room.
“In the end we went together to the next house. The horror of it. The carnage.” Mrs. Coltrane inhaled deeply. “Afterward, in the entrance hall of number 33, I saw Inspector Treadles. I almost lunged at him. We hosted him. We respected him. I couldn’t believe he would do this to Mr. Longstead. To his wife.”
After her interview with Mrs. Coltrane, Charlotte also spoke to the other servants, one by one, in the servants’ hall. All had been run to ground the night of the party, and none had had enough interactions with the master of the house to tell her anything useful.
The one exception was Miss Longstead’s maid, Owens, who was also black. Unlike her spectacular mistress, Owens was rather plain looking and shy of demeanor. But she declared firmly that in the days leading up to the ball Mr. Longstead had been more silent than usual.
On edge, it felt to her.
“He wasn’t an aloof gentleman,” Owens said, looking up from a stocking she was mending—her mistress’s stockings, Charlotte assumed. “He didn’t need the servants to keep their eyes down and be quiet as ghosts. If he saw you, he’d ask how your family was getting on, or if you’d done anything interesting on your half day. He knew that I’d been sitting with Miss Longstead in her studio and that Miss Longstead’s been having me learn some algebra, so he’d ask if I’d learned how to solve for equations with two variables. Once, we talked about factoring polynomials and I told him that I didn’t mind factoring them—I liked when I got them correct. But I couldn’t see for the life of me what they were for. He had a right old laugh at that.
“But in the last few weeks, it felt as if he never even saw me. As if he even had to make an effort to see Miss Longstead—and he’d always been wonderful attentive to her.”
“I see,” murmured Charlotte.
What exactly had Mr. Longstead been doing with his new routine, that he’d been too distracted to pay attention to his beloved niece?
Owens bit her lower lip. “Please don’t tell Mrs. Coltrane I said that. She wouldn’t have us speculate about the master.”
“Did she say this to you after he died?”
“No, no, she didn’t. She just doesn’t like us to gossip in the servants’ hall.”
“I won’t tell her anything,” Charlotte promised. “And you did the right thing. If nobody gave us any information, my brother andI wouldn’t be able to be of any use, as we are strangers and only come in after disasters have taken place.”
“Will you—” Owens hesitated. “Will Mr. Sherlock Holmes really be able to find out who killed Mr. Longstead, if it’s not Inspector Treadles?”
Mrs. Graycott, the Treadleses’s housekeeper, had asked Charlotte whether Sherlock Holmes would be able to bring Inspector Treadles back home soon. Charlotte had given a noncommittal answer, as she sincerely had no idea whether she could do anything for Inspector Treadles.
Owens, however, asked a very different question.
