Page 73 of The Vanished Sister

Mrs. Watson exhaled, for reasons she didn’t quite understand.

Miss Holmes asked some questions about the mother and daughter. Then she said, “I’m curious, Miss Brownstone. You said you didn’t see much of the old gent during his stay, but the first time we spoke, you told us that he painted very nice watercolors.”

“Oh, that. I was in the back of the inn, hanging up some washing, and saw him on the bridge. He was packing up his easel and his supplies to come back to the inn. I happened to be at the front when he reached the door and helped him carry everything inside. That was when I asked about his watercolors and he showed me this lovely one of our bridge that he’d done.”

“And this was?”

“The day after he got here.”

“At what time of the day?”

“A bit after eleven. I remember because I told him what we’d be serving at luncheon and he said everything sounded delicious—but then I didn’t see him until the next day around ten in the morning, when he came to return the key.”

The day after the old gent took a room at the inn was the day the Gregorys left. And Mr. Gregory had pegged the time he spoke to Mrs. Whitehill on the bridge to approximately half past ten in the morning. The old gentleman, had he completed a watercolor representation of the bridge, would have been in Mr. Gregory’s and Mrs. Whitehill’s vicinity that morning as the two conversed.

Mrs. Watson’s viscera tightened unhappily.

Miss Charlotte and Inspector Treadles exchanged a look. The police officer smiled at the innkeeper. “Miss Brownstone, Scotland Yard will need some guests’ names and addresses, to help us in our investigation.”

Inspector Treadles went downstairs with Tilly Brownstone and soon returned with names and addresses he had copied from the inn’s guestbook.

The older gent was a Mr. T. Eddington of Chamberlain Street, Sutton Coldfield.

“Is that not on the outskirts of Birmingham?” murmured Miss Charlotte.

Inspector Treadles shook open a map of the greater Birmingham area. “It is, indeed.”

Mrs. Watson recalled being told that Sutton Coldfield was where all the rich people of Birmingham had moved to, to be farther away from the factories.

With a look at Miss Charlotte and Mrs. Watson, Inspector Treadles laid the map down on the table, pointed out Chamberlain Street on the map, in the far northeastern quadrant, then slid his fingertip two streets over and tapped. “And this is Equerry Street, where resides one Mr. Chester Broadfield.”

Mrs. Watson felt stunned and disoriented, as if she feared falling into a pit but slammed into a wall instead. “Could—could this be a coincidence?”

But even as she said so, she was suddenly looking at the matter from a different perspective. What if Mrs. Osmond had called Mrs. Whitehill to her deathbed not to entrust some delicate matter about herself, but to inform her about the scandalous closeness between her son and Emaline Carstairs?

After all, they had only Chester Broadfield’s and Emaline Carstairs’s word that until recently, they had done nothing more than correspond with each other. What if they had done more than that? And what if Mrs. Osmond had somehow learned of it and felt it her duty to warn Mrs. Whitehill before she departed this earth?

That would certainly explain Mrs. Whitehill’s extremely solemn mood.

Could it be Mr. Broadfield, then, who had stolen into his mother’s house after his return from the Devon coast and made away with a potentially incriminating letter?

Inspector Treadles carefully folded his map back into a neat rectangle. Mrs. Watson half expected Miss Charlotte to reach for a biscuit—the inn did produce excellent victuals—but instead she picked up the three bundles of letters from Mrs. Whitehill’s suitors to place them back into the red lacquered box.

After she did so, however, she paused for a moment, and took the letters out again.

“Was there something we ought to have examined in greater detail?” asked Mrs. Watson, trying to recall, from all those hopeful, lovesick passages she’d read, what might constitute a clue.

“Possibly,” said Miss Charlotte.

But she was not looking at the letters, but at the lacquered box itself.

Inspector Treadles’s eyes widened. “There’s a hidden compartment?”

Miss Charlotte slid the box to him. He pulled out a multipurpose pocketknife to use its three-inch ruler.

“The inside is just slightly shallow for a box of this dimension,” he said after he passed the box to Mrs. Watson. “The hidden compartment, if there is one, can’t be more than a quarter inch in height.”

Which might prove inadequate for the storage of valuables, but more than enough if one only wished to conceal one more letter.