Page 58 of Murder on Cold Street
“Mrs. Treadles!”
Mr. White’s interruption came exactly when she expected it to.
And so it begins.
“Yes, Mr. White?” she said coolly, even as her throat turned dry.
“I confess I cannot believe what I am hearing, Mrs. Treadles. Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Longstead were murderedby your husband, and you sit here as if nothing has happened.”
There was a collective intake of breath, including her own. The men’s faces swiveled from Alice to Mr. White and back again.
She felt the force of his words in her solar plexus, but she wouldnot let him see it—or hear any change in her tone. The projection of power mattered almost as much as power itself. Mrs. Watson, for all that she had told Alice not to worry about her appearance, had then proceeded to make sure that she looked as well as possible under the circumstances.
“Mr. White, Inspector Treadles has been temporarily detained by Scotland Yard for questioning. The investigation is still very much ongoing and I caution you not to assign guilt prematurely, especially when he could be released at any moment.”
Mr. White looked as if he wished to throw something. At her. “He was caught with the murder weapon in his hand.”
Members of his clique appeared excited by his aggressiveness. Several other men shifted uncomfortably.
“Appearances can be deceiving,” said Alice. “Men who are caught with murder weapons in their hands may simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Much as men who appear friendly and helpful may be nothing of the sort.”
An unsubtle reference to Mr. Sullivan. She was speaking ill of the dead when he was barely cold. Granted, he had been a despicable man, but she had never expected to trot out the truth before his cohorts.
A muscle worked in Mr. White’s jaw. He, too, had not expected such a thinly veiled dig. “Nevertheless, Mrs. Treadles, I had expected you to announce that you would recuse yourself from Cousins.”
She placed a hand on the notebook she had brought with her. Mrs. Watson had counseled having one or two props to give her hands something to do. “Why, pray tell?”
“Because your husband has been arrested on suspicion of murdering two of our finest!”
She wanted to shout, too. Instead, she made her reply softer, more unhurried. “And that makes Cousins Manufacturing a lesser concern for me? Or does it somehow make the firm less mine?”
Mr. White’s face flushed with anger. “Have you no sense of propriety, Mrs. Treadles, to be abroad at such a time?”
Her hand moved to the fountain pen that lay beside the notebook. The notebook was from a stock in her office, but the pen had been given to her by Robert, the day before he had left to the “Kentish” countryside.
They had yet to speak openly of their estrangement. She knew she dared not disturb the fragile sweetness of their recent reconciliation by dredging up the pain and mistrust of the only slightly less recent past. Perhaps he feared the same. Which had made his gift of the pen, engraved with the Cousins crest and her initials, an even more poignant gesture.
I have an engraved service revolver, he’d told her,you should have something similar.
And it had not escaped her that by saying so, he’d equated her work with his.
She rubbed a thumb over the engraving. “My sense of propriety is dictated by my sense of duty, Mr. White. Wherever I have duty, there my presence is appropriate. Given that I am ultimately responsible for its well-being, I have every duty to Cousins.”
“It is an insult to Mr. Sullivan’s memory, to have the wife of his murderer here.”
A bead of perspiration rolled down her back. She made her voice cold. “Mr. White, kindly remember that you are speaking to the late Mr. Sullivan’s employer. Your employer, too, I’ll remind you.”
With a loud scraping of chair legs, Mr. White rose to his feet. “That is a travesty! Mr. Sullivan did more for this company than anyone except its founders. And he was a kinsman of Mr. Longstead’s. It is an injustice that the company did not belong to him.”
Another bead of perspiration rolled down her back. Inside her boots, her toes clenched hard. And her heart pounded as if she were Philippides, sprinting from Marathon to Athens.
She smoothed a finger along the edges of her notebook. “Mr. Longstead sold his stock in the company to my father when he left. He chose not to give it to his kinsman. It matters not at all whatyou think of that decision, Mr. White. Mr. Sullivan was not a stockholder but an employee. As such he was well compensated, and there was nothing noteworthy about his status as an employee while the company remained in my family’s hands.”
Mr. White gritted his teeth. “I hope what I say doesn’t surprise you, but you don’t deserve to be here.”
Despite everything—all that Mrs. Watson had told her, all of dear Mr. Longstead’s encouragement, and all she knew to be true—she almost agreed with him.
So much contempt in his face, so much dismissal.
