A Study in Charlotte

“No,” Holmes said, grabbing my arm without looking at me. “Stay here.”

“You’ve solved it,” I told her. “You don’t need to haul her in. Let the police do that.”

“I still have more work to do. I need to figure out what part she plays in this. How the Moriartys have been using her.” She held on tighter. “This isn’t some jewel robbery. This is the woman who’s killed one person and tried to kill another. Not to mention trying to ruin our lives, if not end those too. So yes, I will bloody well haul her in.”

I should have pressed my case. I should have insisted. But I was exhausted, and she was exhausted, and so I didn’t try.

Jamie Watson. He didn’t.

I sat back down on the floor and put my head against the mattress. The hours passed that way, day slipping into night, until I fell asleep kneeling by her bedside like a pilgrim before some entombed saint.

There wasn’t the barest hint of sun coming through the window when Holmes shook me awake, hustled me into my clothes and down to my father’s car. I hadn’t spoken a word. “Tea,” she said, pressing a mug into my hands from the passenger seat. “Now drive, before anyone realizes we’ve gone.”

As I blearily gripped the steering wheel, reminding myself that I needed to be on the right side of the road, not the left, that this wasn’t England, Holmes kept up a low unending monologue, sorting the last few months through this lens of Bryony’s guilt. Well. Probable guilt. If it turned out that an entirely different English Bryony was our school nurse, I’d be the first to pack it in and just go home.

“She’s only gotten more desperate as she’s gone along. She’s dropped the conceit of hanging us with our own history, which, personally speaking, was the only part of her campaign that I found at all interesting. Come on. Explosions, really”—at this point I was parking the car—“there is nothing interesting about explosions. She ruined a perfectly good lab that I had painstakingly assembled, bit by bit, from things I’d taken from Mr. Lamarr’s biology room—oh, don’t look at me like that, I’ve seen you toast marshmallows on those burners, you’re just as guilty as I am—and really the only thing I’ll miss were my copies of your great-great-great-grandfather’s stories. Categorically worthless.” She led me down Sherringford’s main drag to the side street that held Bryony’s flat. “Honestly, I think they’re being given away for free on Kindle, but I did love them. And she has footage of you naked, most likely, which I can’t even begin to unravel the child pornography laws on that one—”

I was having trouble understanding Holmes’s relentlessly chipper mood. We’d spent the day before in hell. And, okay, we were about to engage in a little breaking and entering (which, honestly, I was pretty excited for too), but we hadn’t even acknowledged anything that had happened the day before. No apologies, on either side. No real conclusion to the fight. No acknowledgment of whatever it was that had passed between us under the porch. And here she was, arm tucked in my elbow like the day—it felt like years ago—I first introduced her to my father.

I turned to say something, I don’t know what, and I saw her face. Relief. She was relieved. Somewhere, deep, deep down, she had suspected August Moriarty; she’d been too well trained to ignore it. And now she had good reason to pull her focus away from him and put his fiancée in her crosshairs instead.

I quickly debated with myself how I should react to this realization—jealousy? disapproval?—and decided I was tired of feeling like shit. I might as well cheer up too. Maybe she’d let me pick the lock.

“Holmes,” I said. We were standing on the corner of Market and Greene, peering down the block at Bryony’s flat above the flower store. It was all very picturesque, with its painted window boxes and iron scrollwork. It didn’t look like the flat of someone who had killed a boy in cold blood. “Were you going to tell me why we’re here so early? Her interview at the station isn’t until ten, and it’s just eight now.”

“Bryony will be out the door by eight thirty, hair all done, looking like a starlet. She’ll stop by the Starbucks outside town. She’ll maybe go shopping. She thinks this is a routine set of questions, not an all-day event. Anyone who uses a vanity font on a death threat is far too confident to think they’re under suspicion.” She was almost bouncing on her heels. “I got into the police database this morning and got the make and model of her car. Registered to Bryony Downs, one black 2009 Toyota RAV4, license 223 APK. Or, that car right there.” It was parked on the street outside her flat. “In the meantime, we are going to sit very inconspicuously in the café here until she leaves, and if all goes well, we’ll have you to your ten-thirty appointment to collect your things, because those jeans are beginning to smell a bit ripe.”

I wasn’t sure I could survive cheerful Holmes any more than I could her junkie alter ego. All the same, I let her drag me by the arm into the café, where she set us up with two teas by the window.

It all happened as she’d predicted. Bryony emerged, in red lipstick and sunglasses like an old movie star. Holmes told me not to be so obvious, but I couldn’t help but stare at her as she drove past—that shining blond hair, the way she was singing along to the radio. I almost could have believed she wasn’t guilty, then, because it was clear the consequences of her actions hadn’t made the slightest impression. She’d put an innocent girl in the hospital. She’d taken Dobson’s life. Even someone as disgusting as Dobson deserved the chance to grow up and become a better person. Bryony Downs should be lying on her bathroom floor, racked with guilt, and instead she’d decided she was the star of her own romantic comedy.