That she was having a difficult time helming Cousins would have become known upon interviewing, if not the men standing in her way, then the secondary actors, the clerks and secretaries, etc.
That Inspector Treadles hadn’t been where he was supposed to be was, at this point, probably already known to the police.
And her candor with regard to the service revolver? His guess was that someone else—a maid in her household, perhaps—had already noticed its absence, which made it futile for Mrs. Treadles to lie.
“I know you don’t wish to think unkind thoughts about your friends,” said Holmes, “but we must ask why Mrs. Treadles has been so suspicious of her own husband.”
The worst part was that he didn’t disagree with her, which made it even more disturbing to hear her speak those misgivings aloud.
“But she said she believes the truth will help him.”
“Allow me to rephrase: It behooves us to ask why she was so worried that others would think he did it. After all, if it is as she said, that Inspector Treadles and Mr. Longstead only met twice, and that the inspector considered Mr. Longstead a good man and a good ally, then even news of his arrest shouldn’t have made her as frantically fearful as she was.”
His shoulders slumped. Holmes was right. In Mrs. Treadles’s place, another woman’s first reaction would not have been to think of where her husband might have been when he had written her those letters. Nor would she have been rooting about in his dressing room.
That woman would have been stupefied by the turn of events, but she would have then marched directly into the office of his superior to ask for the misunderstanding to be cleared, rather than pretending to be a tourist at Scotland Yard, craning her head for a better view of the proceedings.
“But it’s not entirely irrational to overreact when your husband has been arrested for murder,” he still argued. “There is always the chance that there will be a miscarriage of justice, that an innocent person will be convicted of crimes he didn’t commit.”
She rose and brought back a glass of whisky for him. “True. But Inspector Treadles is a respected and respectable man. He is considered one of the more promising young officers at Scotland Yard. Not to mention, he is married to a woman in control of a considerable personal fortune: He is assured of the most formidable barristers for his defense, should it come to that. He even has Sherlock Holmes in his corner.
“All these advantages, and she was still petrified with fear. At this point it would be irresponsible not to assume that she is hiding something. Something that in her eyes, at least, is hugely incriminating.”
His hands around the glass of whisky, he suddenly remembered. “Wait. I meant to ask this earlier. When she said Mr. Longstead’s house was on Cold Street, you recognized that location, didn’t you?”
“I did,” she said slowly. “You know I have been keeping track of the small notices in the papers since summer.”
He nodded. Lieutenants of Moriarty, a dangerous enemy, had used the papers to communicate with their minions, though those notices had ceased at the end of summer. But she still kept an eye out, not only for any movement on Moriarty’s part, but also for any news from Mr. Myron Finch, her half brother, now on the run from Moriarty.
“I don’t have my notebook with me now—it’s in the other house. But yesterday morning there was a coded notice in the papers that said, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, on Cold Street one finds a wife no longer true.’”
He sucked in a breath. “Do you think Mrs. Treadles knows about it?”
“She doesn’t strike me as the kind with time to decipher small notices in the papers—certainly not these days. And something tells me the notice was aimed not at her, but at her husband.”
“So . . . a young woman in distress, a chivalrous older man, and a husband made suspicious by a notice in the papers . . .” His words came reluctantly, even though it was not the first time he’d had the thought.
“She admitted that her husband was not enthused about her new responsibilities at Cousins. And now we know that the situation at Cousins was difficult. We can be sure that she would have felt isolated both at work and at home. But as for what exactly transpired under those circumstances . . .” Holmes shrugged. “It may be something as simple as her drawing closer to a man who should have remained only a father figure. Or it may be something else altogether.”
His pulse quickened. “And what might that be?”
She took a sip of tea and finished her slice of cake. “The nature of what exactly transpired almost doesn’t matter, only that it’s something that she believes would lead a man to kill.”
* * *
A silence fell.
After a while, his attention shifted from the problem at hand to the silence itself.
Their interactions had always been full of silences. The leisurely, almost opulent silence of entire afternoons spent together as adolescents: he busy with his interests, she with hers. The inexplicably awkward silences after she’d first propositioned him—inexplicable only to him, too young to understand that he’d refused her not out of virtue, but out of fear of what she and her autonomy represented—rejection of the very hierarchy he was still trying to embrace.
Then there had come years of silences extraordinary in their complicatedness. He’d been unhappy in his marriage yet clinging on to his vows, and any moment alone with Holmes had been a pleasure so dark and bittersweet it was at times indistinguishable from pain.
Lately, however, things had changed again. His marriage had effectively ended in summer—and soon it would end entirely, with a divorce to be granted by the High Court in the first half of next year. And the silences between him and Holmes, well, sometimes, like now, they could almost be called comfortable.
Almost.
If he were not so keenly aware of her presence, her soft, even breaths, the wisp of golden hair that had escaped the confines of her lace cap, the slowness with which her fingertip traveled the circumference of her now-empty plate.
“Have you been well, Ash?” she asked.
At her quiet question, he tensed: She would not have forgotten that he’d arrived at her doorstep out of the blue. “Well enough,” he said. It hadn’t been long since they last saw each other. Only days. And those had been peaceful days, spent in the company of his children. “You?”
“Very well. Girding myself for the onslaught of Christmas baking Madame Gascoigne is about to unleash.”
He smiled a little. She had recently fended off an aggressive approach of Maximum Tolerable Chins, a natural consequence of her typically robust appetite, and must find it vexing to have to practice self-control again so soon.