A Study in Charlotte (28 page)

That was when I realized that she was talking about him as if he were dead. Holmes noticed, too—her eyes finally drifted up from Bryony's boots to her cruelly smiling face. But Holmes kept her immaculate poker face. Either this wasn't a surprise, or her composure was even better than I'd thought.

“The last time I saw Augie alive,” Bryony said, “was the day before the drugs bust. He'd come up to London for a few days, to visit me. It was beautiful. He took me to this gorgeous restaurant. White tablecloths. We talked about our wedding. It was going to be small, intimate. In his family's backyard, wildflowers, his mother's wedding dress. We were so happy
.
We didn't need anything but each other.” She lost her dreamy look, then. “He went back to your house the next day. I reckon you could smell me all over him. Made you crazy with jealousy. Just a little girl, but with such big-girl appetites. He told me all about your crush, you know. He thought it was
adorable.
”

So much for composure. Holmes flinched, as if she'd been hit across the face.

“The day after, you called the law down on him. After the police left, after they found Lucien and dragged him away to jail—oh, you look so
surprised
,
what the hell did you think happened to him?—I drove all over creation, looking for him. The police couldn't find him; he'd made his confession and run. Oxford had expelled him. No other school would have him, not with that record. He'd panicked. Gone home. And he'd taken his father's pistol into his childhood bedroom, and he shot himself in the face.”

I didn't understand. I didn't understand at all—I'd thought August had been hauled away to jail, and when he'd been paroled, had gotten a job at Greystone working for Milo. I racked my memory as best as I could. What had Holmes said, exactly, when she was telling me the story?

August stayed to take the blame, as I suspected he would . . . he
got a job, finally. Works for my brother in Germany.

There wasn't anything about what happened in between.

Even in my feverish haze, I began filling in the blanks.

August Moriarty had faked his death, most likely with his parents' help. I don't know how I hadn't seen it before: he'd confessed to selling hard drugs to a minor, and the sentence for that would have been much longer than the timeline Holmes had laid out for me between his crime and his new life. His parents had given him up, Holmes had said. They would have had to cut off all public contact to maintain the fiction of his death. But they'd buried the news of it, too. I hadn't found
any obituaries when I was researching him, any mention of a funeral. It was as if August Moriarty had simply stopped existing. Frozen in time as a wonder boy, working on the intricate mathematical patterns in the Arctic Circle, his thick blond Disney hair blowing in the frigid wind.

And Bryony Downs didn't know.

It would have been difficult for her to accompany him in his new life, but had he really loved her, he would have found a way, I thought. He was a brilliant man. Too brilliant, maybe, not to see the hint of fanatical darkness in his fiancée. The obsession, the wild selfishness. The willingness to do anything to achieve her own ends.

Maybe August Moriarty saw this as his opportunity to escape her. An understandable decision. Despite it leading to where Holmes and I found ourselves now.

“You,” Bryony said, edging still closer to Holmes, who regarded her coolly. “You have his death on your hands. So you'll do time for a death. I'm just the middleman.”

And Lee Dobson and Elizabeth Hartwell the sacrificial lambs.

Though she hadn't mentioned Elizabeth at all.

“Who were you working with?” Holmes asked.

Bryony flicked her hair. “Who said I was working with anyone?”

Holmes stared her down until, shifting uncomfortably, Bryony spoke.

“The man who convinced the judge that he'd no idea of the contents of his car's boot and served a minimum sentence.
You didn't forget who drove the car to your house to get you your fix, did you? Lucien Moriarty, you stupid child. God, the best part of all of this has been feeding you from my hand. I offered you warnings. Touched them with ungloved hands, in case you'd manage to lift my fingerprints. Printed them in the font that I write all my medical reports in. Made the spellings English, instead of American. It was a paint-by-numbers murder, and you were too dumb to learn to pick up the paintbrush. I did everything but hand myself over to you. Knowing, of course, that the moment you found me out, Lucien would close the bear trap. You do know what Lucien does for a living, yes?”

“He's a fixer,” Milo murmured.

“Precisely,” Bryony said. “Gold star, you. Except for the part where he's a Moriarty
first. They have connections you can only
dream
of. Tell Lucien you want a rattlesnake as window dressing for your little scene, and he'll make an untraceable one appear. Tell him you want a beautiful little suitcase bomb, and he'll hire a professional to make you one. Tell him you want a plastic jewel shoved down a girl's throat, and she'll choke on it. Tell him you want a new identity, a passport, a job at Charlotte Holmes's boarding school, and he'll give it to you wrapped in a bow. God, the very
lack
of evidence should have been a clue. I gave up my dreams of being a doctor for this. Do you hear that?
I gave up my dreams to make you serve the sentence you deserved.
I'd nearly all the credits necessary for a nursing degree, and if that could get me here and to you faster—well. For once, sweetie, you were the hottest ticket in town.”

She knelt down before the ottoman, put her hands on
Holmes's knees, leaned right into her face. “This is why I'm a better person than you. Are you ready? I could kill you right now. No”—she held a finger up to Holmes's lips—“that suitcase bomb was never intended to kill you, don't be stupid. I was just
disgusted
by the thought of you and the Watson boy playing house in there. Acting out your roles. Do you want to know why I set up Dobson's murder as a remake of ‘The Speckled Band'? It's a reminder. They're stories. They're stories, and this is real life.
You
are not Sherlock Holmes
,
and you won't ever be.”

Holmes stared straight down her nose at Bryony's sneering face. And then she turned her head to me and, slowly, unmistakably, blinked her eyes twice.

Play your last card,
she'd said. What card could I possibly play? Only sheer force of will kept my eyes open now. I could barely speak, much less get to my feet and make a stand. If I was supposed to be the muscle in this operation, I was totally out of commission.

But she knew that. So what could she mean?

Last night—a hand on my forehead, a deliberate, closed-mouth kiss. Roses. And her smile as she walked out the door, telling me not to die before I could use it as a bargaining chip.

Oh.

I let my eyes fall closed. I willed my breathing to slow. And I fell, heavily, out of the chair onto the thick pink carpet.

“Watson!” Holmes cried, a perfect parody of the last time she'd thought I was dead.

Stumbling. Footsteps. Bryony saying, “Oh,
damn
,” as she
crouched above me. I could smell the Forever Ever Cotton Candy. A man's cold fingers on my cheek, then moving to my neck to take a pulse.

“He's alive,” Milo announced. “He's alive, but barely.”

“Don't move him,” Holmes said. “I'll get the blanket from the bed.”

I opened my eyes to slits. Bryony was still crouched over me, an unexpected look of concern on her face. “Jamie,” she said. “It'll be okay. This will be over soon, as soon as your girlfriend agrees to let me go.”

I was actually beginning to think that wasn't the worst idea.

More footsteps. Milo saying, “Couldn't you take a look at him, Bryony? For his sake?” Bryony's bit lip as she took her eyes off the bedroom door and fixed them on me.

The sound of a handgun being cocked.

“Get up,” Holmes snarled. “With your hands behind your head.”

Nurse Bryony got to her feet, stiffly.

“You're wearing a wire,” Holmes said. “It's wrapped around your handgun holster, which is in and of itself very clever, as most of us would notice the gun and then instantly avert our eyes. I am not most people, as you well know. So yes, hello Lucien, I'm happy to know that you're well and having your crony deal drugs to the Sherringford milieu, and as I've said in the many letters I sent you in prison, I am very sorry for my part in your two months' incarceration, though I'd wager that one of the dozens of other children you sold coke to would've
ratted you out eventually. I hope that you've enjoyed being an accessory to murder.”

She walked forward, the gun steady in her hands. “I'd suggest that you don't attempt to blow the suitcase bomb that I found in the linen closet, as I've already defused it. I didn't even need to take to Google for that one. But then, thanks to my father, I imagine I've forgotten more about designing explosives than you've ever learned.”

She was close enough now that she and Bryony were eye to eye. With wild eyes, Bryony opened her mouth, and Holmes lifted one black boot and stomped the heel of it onto the nurse's foot.

“Now, now. Speaking out of turn. I'm afraid that I'm not as tolerant of that as you. I really should be taking lessons.”

Bryony whimpered against the pain, her hands still tucked behind her head. Swiftly, Holmes pulled the pistol from under Bryony's coat and tossed it to Milo, who caught it neatly.

“Bryony Downs,” Holmes mused. “What can I say? If I could apologize to August, I would.”

I noticed that she was still maintaining the fiction that August Moriarty was dead, even now, when throwing the truth into Nurse Bryony's face would be the ultimate punishment.

But Holmes was still speaking. “I've been through three separate rehabilitation programs. I may, in fact, simply be a terrible person at heart, but the difference between you and me is that I
fight
it. With every single atom of my being I fight against it. I might be an amateur detective but you are a bloody psychopath, and I would rather put this gun in my mouth than
let you skip away to St. Petersburg where you can prey on teenage boys on my brother's blood money. You orchestrated my
rape
, and you call me a whore? No. This is the absolute end of the line.”

“And you're just going to leave your friend to die,” Nurse Bryony said in a harsh whisper.

It was what I'd asked her to do, after all. To keep herself out of jail at any cost. I tried to breathe through the panic clenching my lungs.

Holmes sighed. “No, of course I'm not,” she said, and I almost died right there from relief. “My brother's men are retrieving the antidote from Watson's dorm room as we speak. It's a clever place to hide it, isn't it? The same place where you infected him? Wanted us to really be
kicking
ourselves when we found it. But it was easy enough to deduce from the university keys sticking out of your pocket, and not your handbag, and the glass shards embedded in your boot soles. Those, I confirmed when Watson here so obligingly fainted and you got to your knees to examine him. Shards of one-way glass, specifically. Any second now, Peterson will text me that he's found the antidote.”

As if on cue, her phone chirped.

“How could you know that,” Bryony said. “How could you know that for sure,” and I was surprised to hear an element of jealousy in her voice.

“Because, right now, you look furious,” Holmes said. “So thanks for the confirmation.”

Nurse Bryony spat on the floor.

Holmes rolled her eyes. “It was a bloody stupid place to hide it anyway, far too close to your flat—which is perfectly awful, by the by. So close, in fact, that we'd have fetched it and injected Watson before you had proper time to make your getaway. Why, really, would we let you abscond with three million dollars' worth of my brother's money when you had no further cards to play?

“Though I suppose you had Lucien as a last resort. Hello again, Lucien.”

Milo's phone rang.

He startled. It was like seeing the Sphinx jump. “No one is supposed to have this number,” he muttered, picking it up, and then, into the phone, “Yes. Fine. I'll put you on speaker.”

Lucien Moriarty's voice crackled into the room.

“Hello again, Charlotte,” he drawled.

Bryony's eyes flickered back and forth. “This wasn't part of the plan,” she hissed.

“No, no, darling,” he said. “Your part in this is done. Hush, now. Dear Charlotte. You had a question? I'll give you one answer. As your consolation prize.”

“Consolation prize?” Holmes laughed. “I won. Lucien, I am quite literally standing here, holding the gun.”

“So there's nothing you want me to clear up. Nothing at all. No questions about the drug dealer”—and here, his voice changed to a dark snarl—“who stuffed a plastic gem into that little prize turkey? Who was so obliging as to hang himself to break any remaining links between him and his employer? No questions about that employer who is, even now, calling you
from Russia?” A laugh. “That's me, by the way. In case you're as slow as you seem.”

I tried to swear, but I couldn't force out any words. Holmes's hand shook. It was almost imperceptible, but I saw it. She'd taught me to notice things, after all.

“Fine,” she said. “You win. So tell me. Why did you make it so easy for us to catch Bryony?”

“I never wanted you in
jail
,” Lucien purred. “That was never the plan. The plan was to torment you, and how can I do that from within a jail cell? Oh, you could lose yourself within weeks in a juvenile penitentiary, but you could also start a riot. Or break yourself out. No, this was a practice round. I wanted to see what was important to you. I wanted to see how much this foolish boy trusted you. I threaten him, and you kiss him. Cue strings. Cue the applause.”