A Study in Charlotte

Milo arched an eyebrow. “Is this your bulldog?” he asked Holmes. There wasn’t any venom in it, but that didn’t make it better.

“This,” Holmes said, “is James Watson, my friend and colleague, and you will give him an answer.”

I stood up a bit straighter.

“My sister asked me a question yesterday,” Milo said. “Do you know the last time that happened? November 2009. Lottie doesn’t ask questions. She deduces and decides for herself. That alone would be enough to get me on a plane, particularly when that question has to do with a Moriarty. Thankfully, I was headed to New York already. And as for her things? This—this nurse?” He said nurse the way you’d say gelatinous slug. “This bank of flats has a very nice little alley behind it, and we sent away her possessions by armored car right as you walked in. My men at Greystone HQ in the city will sort through them, determine the appropriate angle, and return them to your Detective Ben Shepard.”

“By the city, he means New York,” Holmes said, not taking her eyes off her brother. “And by Greystone, he means the mercenary company currently razing the Middle East. Which he owns—Greystone, that is—and which apparently works as his personal honor guard, if the breakfast knights back there are any indication.”

“Glad to be of service,” Peterson called. The other one grunted.

“You know, none of this explains the Moriarty agent practicing your handwriting,” Milo said conversationally.

“No,” Holmes said. “But my ruining August’s life does. His fiancée’s decided to play avenging angel on his behalf.”

“Two separate people out to get you,” he mused. “You really are popular. I’m just not sure why you won’t come to the obvious conclusion—that the two of them are working together. That this Bryony Downs creature is in August Moriarty’s employ.”

Holmes set her chin.

“Fine, Lottie,” Milo sighed. “We’ll focus on the nurse, at least for now.”

“How is any of this efficient?” I asked him, changing the subject. “What is this woman going to do when she returns and finds out her things are gone?”

Milo coughed politely to hide his laugh. “We’ll have proof enough before her interview with Detective Shepard is over to have him charge her with murder.”

“And you know the facts of the case,” I said. “You know what you’re looking for, in her things.”

“Obviously,” he said.

“Will you come up with real proof?” I asked. “Or manufacture it?”

Milo spread his hands wordlessly.

“Do you have to ask?” Holmes said to me.

“Well, now that that’s settled. Take this,” Milo said, handing me his cigarette. “I want to text Uncle Leander the adorable thing you just said about James.”

“Watson,” she and I said together.

“Of course,” he said. “Friend and colleague. I love it.”

Holmes snatched the phone away.

“So that’s it?” I asked, grinding his cigarette out on the floor. “Is this the end? Detective Shepard gets a confession out of Bryony Davis-Downs, and you take her stuff off to be freelance policed, and . . . what, roll credits?”

“It appears so,” Holmes said. Already she was beginning to slump into herself, something I identified now with back porches and mud and pain-pill misery.

I put a hand on her shoulder. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

She looked at it, and then up at me. Slowly, the color returned to her face. The corners of her mouth pulled up into a smile, one that stayed.

“Peterson,” she called, “won’t you tell your colleague there—yes, you, with the Persian cat and the basement flat in Berlin—to call the armored truck and have them turn around. I want everything back in this room just as it was. I suppose you took photographs of the original, or you’re a bigger fool than I’d imagined, disrupting the crime scene as you have. Really, why on earth would you have moved it to your headquarters except to allow this would-be Orson Welles—sorry, Milo, you’re not handsome enough to be Olivier—to pose in an empty room? How dull.”

I bit my lip against my smile.

“What I could have told you from the dust trails alone would have solved this case,” she continued. “As you’ve utterly ruined that possibility, I want any powders or creams you find brought straight to me. Cosmetics, of course, but do look for jars marked as protein powder. Any wires or tools, anything to suggest a bomb. And I want the receiver for whatever tracker you’ve affixed to Bryony’s car. Give it to me. No. Bring it here.” She held out an impatient hand. “I want to make sure that she’s actually arriving at her appointment and not, oh, dashing to the airport and then on to Fiji and thereafter, gone. Have I missed anything, Watson?”

As she examined the tracker she’d been handed, I made a show of surveying the room. “Were you going to tell him about the molted snakeskin under the chair cushion he’s sitting on, or should I?”

With an undignified yelp, Milo leapt to his feet.

“Oh, yes,” Holmes said blandly. “That. Peterson, do check the walls for a rattlesnake.”

THE TWO GREYSTONE GRUNTS BUSILY REARRANGED THE FURNITURE to Holmes’s specifications. Milo watched the proceedings, arms crossed, with a faint air of distaste.

That is, he appeared to, if you didn’t look closely. I did. I’d learned to do that much. Whenever Milo’s hard gaze fell on his sister, it softened the slightest bit. He could’ve stopped Peterson and Michaels at any point, ordered Bryony’s place stripped bare again, frog-marched Holmes onto the nearest London-bound plane.