BACK AT THE FLAT I WAS THROWING THINGS INTO MY SUITCASE, not bothering to fold them. I could hear Leander on the phone, pleading with someone. “Tonight,” he was saying, “it can’t wait,” and had I wanted to I could have gone to the door to listen.
It didn’t matter now what he was saying, not really.
“We’ll regroup from a distance,” he’d told me. “We don’t have the time to bag him when he arrives, and God knows what he plans on doing when he gets here. We’ll find some high ground, girl. Pack your bags.”
There was a kind of relief in it, the giving up. We would plan, and in the meantime Leander would let me live with him. He hadn’t offered, not as such, but for the rest of the walk home he’d been listing places we could go.
As the eldest of his siblings, my father had inherited our house in Sussex; my aunt Araminta had been formally given the cottage and apiary where she’d taken to spending her days; my uncle Julian our flat in London, and presumably leave to never talk to the rest of us again. (A smart decision.) My uncle Leander had been too peripatetic to be given land, the will had read. He’d been granted my grandfather’s money instead, our intelligently invested takings from the life rights of Sherlock Holmes.
In his early twenties, back when he was rooming with James Watson in a tiny flat in Edinburgh, Leander had socked away his inheritance in smart investments and lived like a churchmouse. (My uncle, despite his well-groomed appearance, had always been a frugal man.) When his investments brought him returns, he bought property, and with the income from letting out those, he purchased new places, sold others, tailored his portfolio.
All of this to say, we had some places to hide.
“They’re largely under my name,” he’d said. “The flats in New York and Edinburgh, the house in Provence. Those are the ones I’ve kept.”
“We can’t go there, then.”
“No. We can’t. But London—London is another matter. I bought a flat there a few years ago through a dummy corporation. I was on an undercover case—I needed a bolt-hole for quick-changes, a place to stash my things that couldn’t be traced. I never did sell it. I worried that it might be useful again.” He gave me a grim smile. “And here we are.”
Here we were.
Good-bye to New York, I thought, stuffing my wigs back into their wooden box. Good-bye to Connecticut. Good-bye to America; who knew when I’d have reason to be back here again. Good-bye to picking locks, prying doors with crowbars, to putting on doe-eyed masks to learn what I needed to know. I would help him research. I would help, and I would stay out of the way.
My mother hadn’t called me once since I’d left home. I thought again about the argument she and my father had had in Switzerland, where she pled my case to him for five minutes and then, as far as I knew, never did again. Any love my mother had for me was bound up in the frustrations she had with my father, and now, with him absent, it was as though I’d ceased to exist as well.
There had been so many losses: My parents. August. Milo, gone radio silent during that never-ending murder trial. And while I had always imagined Jamie Watson leaving me bit by bit, he’d instead done it all at once. Pulled the bandage off while the wound was still bleeding.
Had it been wild denial or self-destruction that had sent me running headlong into the jaws of the beast that was hunting me? Why really had I spent the last year chasing Lucien Moriarty, except to put a speedier end to it all? I had diligently photographed my pills each night. I had eaten and bathed and traveled and plotted, I had pretended to be looking to the future, and all the while it looked like I was living.
But the moment I knew I wouldn’t kill Lucien Moriarty was the moment I wrote my own ending. I saw that now. I didn’t know another way to be rid of him, the spider that had built a web over the world. Chasing him down without a gun in hand would ultimately end with my death.
I didn’t want to die. Not anymore.
My box of wigs, my lockpicking kit, my recording equipment, my dress blacks, my casual blacks, the makeup lockbox that held all my other faces. All of it into the suitcase.
I put on a set of old sweats I’d found in the chest of drawers. They were too big on me, but I did them up anyway. I’d leave fifty dollars, more than enough to replace them; I had three thousand dollars to burn. More than enough for a plane ticket across the pond and a dye job when I got there. Enough to pay the fee to change my name, to make myself disappear.
I hauled my suitcase into the kitchen, enjoying the sound of my footsteps on the tile. My boots looked ridiculous with the sweats, I was sure, but after weeks of walking silently, I needed to hear myself move.
“I’m charging your laptop, and the phones I found in your bag.” Leander was rummaging through the pantry, throwing dry goods in a pile. There was quite a lot of peanut butter. “Who lives here? I’ll reimburse them for the food, but I want to have supplies in case we need to hole up before our flight. Ideally, we’d leave late tonight, but if we miss our window, I don’t think it’s safe to try until three or four weeks have passed.”
“Late tonight?” I asked. It was barely four o’clock in the evening. “Why not now? We can go straight to the airport, get the red-eye to London.”
Leander had his back to me. He spread his hands out on the counter. “I’m going say good-bye to James Watson before I go, and you’re going to come with me.”
“You’re what?”
“God help me, Charlotte, don’t argue with me on this—”
“No. I categorically refuse. That man cannot keep a secret to save his life, and the last thing I need is for him to see me when his son—his son—I can’t.”
My uncle bowed his head. “You can do this one last thing for me.”
“This last thing—”
“Dammit,” he said, “I am not leaving you alone in this flat with that man loose in this city.”
I bit my lip. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.” I watched him breathe out.
“If it’s important to you—”
“You should probably change,” he said. “James called it a wedding reception.”
I dragged myself back to the bedroom. At home, in Sussex, we dressed for dinner, but that was an exercise I’d never taken seriously. It was another disguise, one masquerading as the self. Long skirts my mother bought me, elegant and expensive, and dark lips to match their dark colors. Done up like that, I looked years older than I was.
Here, I had nothing that didn’t belong to Rose the fashion vlogger, and I didn’t want to wear her right now.
I flipped through DI Green’s sister’s closet, wondering idly if she’d have anything that would fit me. Cardigans. Blouses with high necks and buttons on the cuffs. And then a row of cocktail dresses. Two were in my size; the second of those was red. I shed my clothes and put it on and walked over to the mirror.
Watson had once described me as a knife. It’s true that I have no “curves.” If we are speaking geometrically, I am a line. This dress didn’t change the fact of my body, but then I didn’t need it to. I took a pair of shoes from the closet and a silver evening bag from the hook on the closet door. I stuffed it with necessities. We would return for our suitcases if we could; if we couldn’t, I would make do with what I had.
“Charlotte,” Leander was saying, almost as though he were being strangled.
I found him bent nearly double over a mobile phone on the kitchen counter.
“What happened?” I asked, panting, and then I really got a look at him. “No. You’re not—you’re laughing. Why do you have my old mobile?”
He’d said he was charging both of my phones. I’d been keeping the one I’d used at Sherringford at the bottom of my bag, turned off so that the GPS couldn’t be used to track my location. It was always a good idea to have a spare.
It was almost always a good idea to have a spare.
“It says you haven’t booted it up in eleven months,” my uncle said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “Eleven months! In that time, you received zero messages. Zero texts. Until today. Until quite literally just now.”
I snatched my phone from his hand.
Four new texts:
Holmes.
Holmes.
Charlotte.
Where are you?