Page 84 of The Vanished Sister

She moved so that she now sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Mrs. Watson. Where their sleeves touched, a gentle warmth flowed into Mrs. Watson.

Inspector MacDonald slapped himself on the thigh. “Dawkins, Mrs. Carstairs’s maid, in her interview said that she found some of Mrs. Carstairs’s clothes gone but not any of her travel satchels. My current travel bag, a going-away present from Inspector and Mrs. Treadles when I transferred to the West Country, is almost as indestructible as a saddle. I must assume Mrs. Whitehill’s to have been of a similar quality. It doesn’t burn easily. It won’t decompose in the ground. And it probably had Mrs. Whitehill’s initials emblazoned somewhere.

“The best thing to do? For Mrs. Carstairs to take it with her when she left. And then, after she filed off the initials, she could abandon it somewhere. But Mrs. Whitehill’s clothes would be left behind at High Burrow—and Mr. Carstairs burned them for her, under the guise of burning her things in a fit of pique.”

He exhaled and said in something close to marvel, “He’d been a rock for her.”

Mrs. Watson only frowned. Not that she couldn’t accept that was what her brother-in-law had done, only that it didn’t make her feel any better—when it should have at least improved her view of Justina’s marriage.

“Had she—or the two of them together—dug up the pit again and buried Mrs. Whitehill,” said Miss Charlotte, “they would have needed to get rid of the clothes they were wearing, too. So it was possible the bonfire had been scheduled in advance, only the things that were burned changed.”

Their carriage stopped. Mrs. Watson started until she recalled that their first destination upon leaving Villa Inglese was the nearby hamlet of Lynton. Or rather, its post office.

Inspector MacDonald opened the carriage door, then turned around to Miss Charlotte. “Miss Holmes, with the letters from Mrs. Osmond and Mrs. Whitehill, we already had sufficient reason to question Mr. Carstairs again. Do you believe that now we can also arrest him as an accomplice to murder?”

Miss Charlotte handed him her umbrella, as the rain had increased in intensity and hers was greater in diameter than his. “You can if you wish to. But there is no concrete evidence to link Mr. Carstairs to the killing of Mrs. Whitehill. We can speculate all we want, but if we were to bring Mr. Carstairs before the Brownstone sisters, the innkeepers in Ludlow, I doubt those good women would be able to say with any certainty that he had been their elderly gent. Without that, we cannot prove his hand in Mrs. Whitehill’s eventual fate.

“Also, the time we have tentatively affixed for Mrs. Whitehill’s murder? Mr. Carstairs did not arrive in Devonshire until the next day. Perhaps Scotland Yard can pin down his whereabouts at that exact time, but I am almost certain you will find him otherwise occupied, with eyewitnesses.”

Again, though she shouldn’t, Mrs. Watson felt Justina’s terror and loneliness, a woman with a comatose victim on her hands, an inconvenient arrival outside the front door, and only herself to rely on.

“Perhaps Mr. Carstairs had been a pillar of strength for his wife during this time,” continued Miss Charlotte, “but you will find, Inspector, that he had also insulated himself most effectively from any connections to her crime.”

Twenty-Six

Lord Ingram swore as Everett Carstairs walked back into his hotel in Lisson Grove. He very nearly swore again when he learned from one of his periphery watchers that Everett Carstairs had not alit from a cab within view and therefore they could not question the cabbie on where he’d picked up this particular fare.

The attic of the house diagonally across from the hotel was stuffy and reeked of age and water damage. But the smell and the discomfort were only minor nuisances. Lord Ingram gave instructions; they needed more pairs of eyes to catch Everett Carstairs leaving his hotel.

Mrs. Carstairs was probably somewhere in the vicinity, in one of the discreet villas of St. John’s Wood, for instance. Otherwise her husband could have stayed at their town house, with the rest of the family.

At least he didn’t appear to suspect that he was being actively surveilled—or he wouldn’t have returned to the same hotel. Lord Ingram prayed that this time Everett Carstairs had simply been lucky, slipping out of an unguarded service entrance or leaving just when a watcher had to answer a call of nature.

And he prayed that next time, he himself would be the lucky one.

The districts west of Kensington Gardens were, in former times, countryside well beyond the limits of the City of London. A large swath of that land, once held by the owners of Holland House, became available for residential development in the middle of the century.

The tree-lined street on which the Carstairses lived during the London Season resulted from that development, as did the four-story Italianate villas that sprawled along the pavement, each with its own large private back garden.

Inspector Treadles left his men at the curb and knocked on the Carstairses’ door. Once admitted, he asked to see every member of the family.

Emaline Carstairs was the first to rush into the drawing room. “Inspector Treadles, is everything all right? Is—is—”

“Please take a seat,” he said.

She complied, staring at him with wide eyes. Above her, on a large oil tableau on the wall, a young woman in a decorous stola gazed down from a white-marble terrace.

A strapping young man arrived in the drawing room. Emaline Carstairs introduced him as her brother-in-law, Mr. Charles Carstairs.

“What can we do for Scotland Yard today, Inspector?” asked Charles Carstairs cautiously, but not with either fear or hostility.

Treadles felt a surge of sympathy for this open-miened young man. Everything he knew about his mother—possibly both of his parents—would soon be turned upside down. “Certain crucial evidence has surfaced. We need to search this town house and would like its current occupants to remain here, in the drawing room, as we conduct the search.”

“What evidence?” puzzled Charles Carstairs. He advanced a step. “Wait. Inspector, do you mean to search our place to help with the case of the lady who drowned? Mrs. Whitehill?”

“That is correct.”

At this Emaline Carstairs also turned agape.