casting a guilty glance at Watson, he fixed her with the look of a schoolmaster asking his student to recite lines, then his face softened. “What is the matter?”
“Imogen and Lady Bancroft are in a sorry state this morning. I’m worried for them.” She could have added Holmes to that list, but he wouldn’t have appreciated being included with two frail women.
“I have looked in on Lady Bancroft,” Watson said. “I prescribed a dose of laudanum. The sleep will do her good. I offered the same to Miss Roth earlier this morning, but she declined.”
Evelina nodded. “Thank you.”
“I would think,” said Holmes, “that a speedy resolution to this affair would be the best medicine. The longer it drags on, the more of a toll it takes upon a delicate constitution.”
He was right. Worry alone helped nothing. She cleared her throat, picking a place to start her report. “I had a thorough look at the grounds before the police arrived this morning. There was a single set of footprints leading to and from the sundial in the garden to the back wall. The shooter approached by the back alley and used the sundial to hide while he took his shot.”
“Anything else?”
“There was no litter or debris left behind. The prints looked to be from a fit adult male.”
“The weapon was most likely a handgun,” Watson offered, “judging from the size and velocity of the bullet.” The doctor looked up at Evelina, his expression somewhere between fondness and exasperation. “You are looking lovely, my dear, although it pains me to find you mixed up in this gruesome affair. Really, you’re too pretty a young lady to concern yourself with violence.”
Evelina remembered a girlhood crush she had nurtured for the doctor and consoled herself with the knowledge that had the romance flourished, she would have eventually been obliged to smack him over the head. She sat down, smoothing her skirts. “This matter may be unpleasant, but the sooner it is solved, the sooner we can put it behind us.”
Sherlock gave a razor-thin smile. “Just don’t develop a taste for murder.”
“Solving murders, you mean.”
Watson heaved a tired sigh. “There are days I begin to think they are one and the same thing.”
“There is one other piece of new information,” she offered. “I have solved the cipher.”
Her uncle’s eyes lit up. “Indeed?”
Evelina pulled a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and reread it. “Cannot copy chest. Please advise,” she said aloud to Sherlock and Watson. “I’m not sure what it means by copying.”
“Ah,” Holmes replied with a feline smile. “This grows interesting.”
“I would have thought we were talking about someone melting down valuables for gold,” said Evelina cautiously.
Holmes gave her a sharp look. “Perhaps theft is but half of it.”
The doctor took the paper from her uncle and read it over. “How did you determine the key?”
“The clock on the landing uses one, and I knew both Magnus and Lord Bancroft knew it. The key is the name Helen. Dr. Magnus is obsessed with Helen as the personification of divine truth.”
Watson handed the paper back to Holmes and gave her an avuncular smile. “Very observant.”
“Excellent.” Holmes tapped the fingers of his good hand on the chair.
“A lucky guess,” she countered.
Her uncle gave a brief shake of his head. “Luck is percentages. Good percentages are aided by good deduction. The value in this is not the message but the key. I entertained the notion that Keating might have been at the heart of this matter after all, but it appears that is not the case. And again, the cipher could have been added to this stew of intrigue by Magnus, but my guess would be our host.”
“Let us go over the facts again.” Holmes said, a touch irritably. “Then we can decide what Lestrade does and does not need to know.”
Her heart lifted a little at that, though it was hardly a guarantee. “The fact that he slept with Grace doesn’t prove anything.” But it implied a lot, and she could see from her uncle’s face that he had already considered that.
And then that sense of hope crashed when she thought about the cipher. “Nonetheless, Imogen came to me with information this morning that I’m afraid does her father no good.”
“Do tell.”
So she did. Holmes listened carefully. “What an unfortunate burden for so lovely a young lady. But how do you think it fits with what else we have learned?”
She knew very well that he had already made his conclusions, but spoke anyway. “If Bancroft was giving the owner of the warehouse instructions, there is little doubt that he is involved. To me it sounds as if whoever sent Grace with the gold was seeking instruction from His Lordship, since the note came in the same package.”
“Quite. And I would suspect that receiving no answer, the author—most likely this Harriman—acted on his own and so set the cat among the pigeons.”
“But what exactly was going on in the warehouse?” Not even Magnus had been sure. “Was it more than just melting down Keating’s gold as shipments arrived?”
“Indeed it was more. First and foremost, this was a very elaborately staged theft. There are a half dozen criminal masterminds in London who will be jealous of our host’s acumen once they read it in the papers.”
Panic surging, Evelina shot to her feet. This was exactly why she hadn’t wanted her uncle involved. “That can’t be done. Exposure would ruin his family, and they are my friends. There has to be another way!”
“I have been shot,” her uncle said sharply. “I am not in the mood for you to make excuses on behalf of a man who just last night was doing his best to cast aspersions on your character.”
Evelina bit her lip, searching for a way to distract him. “I have a theory about why they haven’t found the casket.”
“Later. I will listen to it all when I am ready to do so. Right now I want to hear everything from the top,” Holmes snapped.
Evelina bridled at his tone, but held her tongue in a mutinous silence.
“My pipe, Watson.” Her uncle held out his hand irritably. “You brought it, I hope.”
“Of course, Holmes.”
There was no way to pack and light a pipe one-handed, so the dutiful doctor searched the mantel and picked up a briar pipe. The ritual of preparing it took a moment, so Evelina closed her eyes, searched her memory, and began once again with the night she was surprised by the grooms in the attic.
Watson paused at the fireplace, lighting the pipe from the perpetual flame that burned in the mouth of a carved stone dragon. The feature had been installed just days ago, a gift from the Gold King. Holmes accepted the pipe from Watson and nodded to Evelina to continue.
She went through the investigation, step by step. Apart from smoking, Holmes appeared asleep. Watson, however, listened carefully, and she realized this was the first time he had heard it—which was no doubt why her uncle was having her recount it all again. He would have remembered every scrap.
She had just reached the part about Magnus’s death, when Sherlock raised a hand to halt the flow of words. “I want to talk to Lestrade, and I want to see your friend Nick. They will have the last pieces of this puzzle.”
“Nick!” Evie’s hug damn near killed him, but he forced himself not to whimper like a beaten puppy. The embrace was worth the pain. She was soft in all the right places, the brush of her sweet-smelling hair reminding his body he’d slept alone too long. But she backed away before they sparked magic from each other.
He took off his hat, his hand over the cracked spot on the brim. His wardrobe and daylight weren’t good friends. “Your bird found me. I came. It said someone here wanted a word.”
She looked up at him with wide eyes. He looked a sight, he knew, with black eyes and bandages and more bruises than skin. He wasn’t going to be performing for a few days, that was for sure—and that would be hard on his purse.
