Murder on Cold Street, page 20
“I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” she said in a rush, before he had even sat down across from her.
“I was at the home of some party guests not far from here,” he said, knocking on the roof of the vehicle to signal the coachman to start. “And Mrs. Cousins’s is on the way to the next house I need to call on. So it’s no inconvenience at all.”
“Still—”
“And I’m happy to see you again.”
It wasn’t so much the words—he’d said similar things to her before—but the ease in his voice, the unreserved candor.
And she had no idea how to respond, either in speech or in sentiment. He did not compel her but he had changed, and that change . . . it was as if she were a seed of many winters set in warm soil and generously watered. Something swelled and burgeoned inside her. And that put stress on her, a great pressure from within.
She gave him an account of what Mrs. Treadles had told Mrs. Watson in the morning, as well as what she’d learned from Mrs. Cousins just now.
He was silent, a grave silence. “I have met such men in my life. But that I am a man of a certain station in life makes me nearly immune from the worst they can do. Not so much the Mrs. Cousins and Mrs. Treadles of the world. And it pains me to think of all the women who have far less wealth and standing than they do, and all the Mr. Sullivans they must face.”
She gazed at him. To him, power was synonymous not with the subjugation of others, but with care and responsibility. He looked after those in his life, sometimes to the detriment of himself.
“You don’t think of Mrs. Cousins as having encouraged Mr. Sullivan?”
He shook his head firmly. “She is human and displayed foibles. But foibles are not the same thing as ill will. I can fault her for having made questionable choices, if I must, but I will not use her mistake to justify Mr. Sullivan’s predation.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
He glanced outside the carriage window, a pensive expression on his face, and looked back at her. “I have said this to you before: You are the reason I have questioned many things that I would otherwise have happily accepted as given. But I have not told you that I’m glad of it. I would have been a different man, a lesser one, were it not for you.”
It took Charlotte a moment to understand the strange, expansive, yet somewhat uncomfortable feeling in her heart. She was humbled.
Their gazes held. The carriage turned. The light from its lanterns swung. Somewhere on the street a hawker loudly advertised his fresh, fragrant Christmas wreaths.
She felt as if she ought to say something. But what did one say to such a monumental confession? She moistened her lips, opened her mouth, and out came, “I . . . I wonder what manner of woman is Mrs. Sullivan.”
* * *
Mrs. Sullivan was a small, plump woman who gave the impression of being easily startled, with her large, darting eyes and fingers that kept lacing and unlacing in her lap.
Mourning attire did swallow her whole. In the ornate padded chair she occupied, she seemed less like a widow than a bundle of clothes left behind.
In fact, the entire drawing room overwhelmed her, packed as it was with grandiose furnishing. Not an inch of the walls could be seen for the paintings, large and small, that had been fitted onto them like pieces of an ambitious mosaic. Nor was much of the wood used in the construction of the furniture visible, obscured by the ivory inlay, ormolu motifs, and gilded caryatids that had been heaped onto all the surfaces.
Charlotte had seen a more wildly outfitted house, which Livia had described as both “a brothel and a circus.” Mrs. Sullivan’s drawing room did not make one think of a bordello with greater aspirations, but rather the warehouse of an auction house, on the night before its biggest public sale, packed pell-mell and stuffed to the gills.
Charlotte liked it, this room, the gaudiness of which could not be entirely muted even by the black crape draped over windows and mirrors. And she could not help but think of the smile that would have animated Lord Ingram’s lips, had he been on hand to intuit her enjoyment of the décor.
Alas he had not accompanied her to this house but gone on to the next set of guests he needed to speak to, though he’d said he’d meet her on Cold Street, where she would have her last scheduled appointment of the day, if he finished soon enough.
“Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. Sullivan,” Charlotte said. “I apologize for taking up your time in your hour of grief.”
“It’s quite all right,” answered Mrs. Sullivan. She must have been in her late twenties, but her voice sounded girlish, almost childish. “They don’t let new widows do much. My sister has taken charge of my children, my mother handles the callers, and Mr. Sullivan’s cousins will be making all the arrangements for the funeral. Other than mourning—and being fitted for more mourning attire—I have no other duties in my moment of grief.”
Charlotte raised a brow—people who were this candid to strangers usually wished for a reaction. “I see,” she said, calibrating her tone to make it sound as if she was trying not to betray how taken aback she was.
Hers seemed to be the correct reaction. Mrs. Sullivan leaned forward. “So what can I do for you, Miss Holmes?”
“Ah . . . right. I am here as a representative of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, my brother, who has agreed to help Mrs. Treadles find out the truth of the case.”
“Yes, I know that. The note Mr. Holmes sent around made that very clear. I hope you will be more thorough in your work than the police. That Sergeant Howe who came barely asked any questions of anyone in the house, me least of all, as I didn’t attend the party.”
As Charlotte had thought, here was a woman who needed attention. And given her husband’s interest in other people’s wives, it seemed reasonable to assume that he hadn’t paid his own wife as much mind as she would have liked.
“Perhaps Sergeant Howe didn’t want to be indelicate at a time such as this.”
“Pfft.” Mrs. Sullivan waved a dismissive hand. “He wasn’t considerate. He was uninterested. And he only asked questions I couldn’t answer, such as when Mr. Sullivan left that night and whether he knew Inspector Treadles.”
Interesting. “You didn’t know when Mr. Sullivan left that night for the party?”
“He didn’t come home that evening, so he must have gone directly from work.”
“Was that a common occurence?”
Mrs. Sullivan shrugged. “It wasn’t unusual for him to socialize without me. He found me too gauche, I’d guess, not suitable for the kind of crowd he wanted to be associated with.”
Gauche was not exactly the word Charlotte would have used for Mrs. Sullivan, but she could see how Mr. Sullivan might have been disdainful of her need for attention, when she wasn’t beautiful enough to draw all eyes.
“Mrs. Sullivan, you said you didn’t know whether Mr. Sullivan had met Inspector Treadles?”
“He never mentioned meeting the man. But my husband didn’t tell me much,” said Mrs. Sullivan plaintively. “If I’m already gauche, you’d think he’d at least want me to be less ignorant, wouldn’t you?”
Charlotte was considering how she ought to respond when Mrs. Sullivan sighed dramatically. “Then again, maybe Sergeant Howe didn’t ask any questions because it was perfectly obvious my husband was killed for coveting another man’s wife.”
Charlotte had been generating varying expressions of astonishment and dismay at Mrs. Sullivan’s remarks. Now she let her jaw drop.
It was not so easy to hold other people’s attention. If Mrs. Sullivan meant to do so with personal confessions, then naturally she needed to give away details of an increasingly private nature. Still Charlotte was a little surprised at how quickly they had arrived at this point.
She made small noises of distress for Mrs. Sullivan to feel that her declaration had had its intended effect. “Surely—surely Mr. Sullivan didn’t tell you himself that he ‘coveted another man’s wife’?”
“Oh, yes, he did,” said Mrs. Sullivan, as unexceptionally as another woman would confirm that indeed her husband had brought home a bouquet of flowers the evening before. She picked up an embroidery frame and jabbed a needle through the white handkerchief it held. “He was a very sinful man, my husband. And extraordinarily proud of his sins, no less.”
Charlotte pulled at the cameo brooch at her collar and cleared her throat. “And by ‘another man’s wife,’ we are speaking of Mrs. Treadles, yes?”
“That is correct. But she didn’t want him, so he told her that he would bear false testimony before her husband.” From the other direction, Mrs. Sullivan again jabbed her needle through the handkerchief. “I always did tell him that he would get himself killed one of these days, because he wouldn’t leave well enough alone. Wouldn’t remain within the boundaries of holy matrimony, his or anyone else’s. I told him that God would punish him in the form of a wrathful husband that he had wronged.”
Despite the pathos of the scene, Charlotte did not believe that the relationship between the Sullivans was as simple as that of a helpless wife wringing her hands at her husband’s rapacious misdeeds. How was it that Mrs. Sullivan had not had her energy and sense of self destroyed by a man so skilled at preying on the vulnerability of others?
She cleared her throat again. “Did you not think, Mrs. Sullivan, that perhaps you ought to have warned Mrs. Treadles that your husband did not mean her well?”
“But he doesn’t mean anyone well. Should I have warned the whole world?”
Charlotte widened her eyes to what must have been a comical extent.
Satisfied, Mrs. Sullivan carried on. “Not to mention, he lied. Whenever he met an attractive married woman, he always told me that he was going to have an affair with her. It took me years to realize that it amused him to see my reaction. Sometimes he tried to have that affair; sometimes he didn’t. And seldom did he succeed. So whom should I have warned ahead of time, before I myself knew for certain whether he was acting in malice or only speaking so?”
Charlotte had seen her share of bad marriages, but none remotely similar to the Sullivans’, at once repellent and riveting.
She made her tone tentative. “Mrs. Sullivan, are you not concerned that what you say will damage Mr. Sullivan’s reputation?”
Mrs. Sullivan snorted. Her needle stabbed. “My husband did not have a wonderful reputation. I almost laughed out loud when I read what the papers wrote about him. Handsome and popular, eh? He might have been handsome once, when he was still in school. And he was popular only if you mean people disliked him but feared what he might do, so they didn’t dare cross him openly.”
Charlotte made another face, feeling the muscles of her cheeks tiring. “If I may ask, Mrs. Sullivan, was your ‘gaucheness’ the only reason your husband didn’t want you at the party?”
“He said that Mrs. Treadles would be there without her husband, so my presence would only hinder him in his quest to drive a wedge between Mrs. Treadles and her husband.”
A black geometric border was beginning to take shape on the white cloth in the embroidery frame—Mrs. Sullivan was making a mourning handkerchief.
“When did you realize he hadn’t come home?”
“I don’t sleep very well without laudanum. With laudanum . . . I sleep a little too well. There wasn’t much for me to do that evening. He was gone. The children had been bathed and put to bed. I had a plate of supper in my room, read for a while, and took my laudanum—no point staying awake on a night like that and tormenting myself with thoughts of what he might or might not be up to. He would tell me soon enough, when he came home.
“But instead I woke up to my maid banging on the door of my bedchamber because the police were below, asking to speak with me.”
“Did you tell the police any of what you told me?”
Charlotte would have dearly loved to see Sergeant Howe’s expression. Then again, being an experienced officer of the law, he might have barely batted an eyelash.
“Only that my husband didn’t like Mrs. Treadles, which is all I know for certain, in any case. He didn’t care for her and said she shouldn’t have been at Cousins, trying to run things.”
A calculating look crossed Mrs. Sullivan’s face as she gave her answer—Mr. Sullivan might have considered his wife gauche, but she knew how to choose her audience.
And now they came to a question that Charlotte was beginning to be highly curious about. “Mrs. Sullivan, are you grieved by your husband’s passing?”
The new widow’s eyes shone. “I feel no sorrow that he’s gone. Maybe grief will come later, but for now I’m only shocked. I thought wicked men such as my husband always lived to ripe old ages, their malice somehow acting as their lucky charm in life. That he has been cut down in his prime? Perhaps God has been paying attention after all. Perhaps all wicked men should be afraid.”
Twelve
Charlotte’s next appointment—thankfully, her last of the day—was at 31 Cold Street to test Miss Longstead’s vision. But after she left Mrs. Sullivan’s house, she still had some time. So she called on Mrs. Treadles.
Mrs. Treadles was not home, but Mrs. Graycott, her housekeeper, pointed Charlotte to a nearby park. The park was a small green space, enclosed by a wrought iron fence. At this hour, in the intermittent rain, Mrs. Treadles was the only person inside, clad in a mackintosh, walking on a narrow path. Cockerill, her groom and coachman, stood beside a gate in the fence to keep an eye out for her safety.
“Miss Holmes!” she cried, startled, when she saw Charlotte. “Is everything all right?”
“Nothing is amiss,” said Charlotte, falling into step beside her. It felt good to move, for a change, after having spent so much of her day sitting either in carriages or in drawing rooms. “Congratulations on your decisive action today at Cousins.”
The light from nearby street lamps was just enough to illuminate Mrs. Treadles’s slightly tremulous smile. “I will not deny that it was a relief to at last wield some authority. I can’t thank you enough for sending Mrs. Watson my way. In fact, it was she who told me that I ought to have a vigorous walk after reaching home. She said my body would need the exercise to properly expel the tension of the day.”
“Mrs. Watson is an invaluable ally indeed,” said Charlotte wholeheartedly. “When I left her this afternoon, she had already begun a preliminary review of the Cousins accounts she’d brought back.”
Mrs. Treadles’s pace increased, as if propelled by a surge of inner turmoil. “Will she have enough time? Inspector Brighton told me that—that he planned to formally charge Inspector Treadles before Christmas.”
“We are working as fast as we can.” Charlotte briefly rested a hand on Mrs. Treadles’s arm. “Would you show me a few items from your house?”
Mrs. Treadles breathed heavily a few times. “Shall we head back there then?”
They left the park, Cockerill trailing a respectful distance behind.
“I also need to ask you a few more questions about the night of the party,” said Charlotte. “I understand that it is an unpleasant subject, but can you recount for me what exactly facilitated your escape from number 33 that night, after Mr. Sullivan accosted you?”
Mrs. Treadles coughed. She glanced back at Cockerill, who was out of earshot. Still she lowered her voice. “There was a loud noise, which startled Mr. Sullivan. That was how I got away.”
“What kind of noise? Can you be more specific?”
“Ah . . . if I must guess—please remember that I was completely distraught at the time—but if I must guess, I would say that it sounded more like a door slamming on an upper floor than anything else. The house very nearly shook with it.”
“You are certain of it?”
“As certain as I could be of anything under those circumstances.” Mrs. Treadles’s brow creased. “I have wondered more than once what—or who—could have made that noise. I do ask myself if it was my husband, as I’d gone into the house in the first place because of him. But I . . . I . . .”
“But you don’t want it to have been your husband, because that would give further credence to Inspector Brighton’s hypothesis that he killed Mr. Sullivan in a rage.”
Mrs. Treadles pulled her mackintosh tighter about her body, as if she felt cold. But her voice was firm. “In the end I don’t believe it was him. Had it been him, and had he known that it was me, he would have come and found me at Mr. Longstead’s house to make sure that I was all right.”
She was capable of great faith, this woman.
As was Lord Ingram.
Charlotte hadn’t realized this before, because she was not accustomed to thinking in such terms, but he had placed his faith in her, who did not always understand the full spectrum of human emotions.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said. “Was that the last you saw of Mr. Sullivan?”
“Yes.”
The relief was evident in Mrs. Treadles’s voice, even though Mr. Sullivan would never be able to prey on her again.
“And Mr. Longstead—when did you last see him?”
“After I returned to his house I came across him speaking to Mrs. Coltrane, his housekeeper—they were near the cloakroom where I hid for some time.”
“Before or after you went into the cloakroom?”
“Before. I remember thinking that I didn’t want them to see me, and they didn’t. Or at least Mr. Longstead didn’t.”
Silence fell. The heels of their boots clicked on wet pavement. A gust blew, shaking bare branches all along the street. As they walked past a house with a blazing Christmas tree by the window, someone inside began to play “Silent Night” on a piano, the notes faint yet crystalline.
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