Page 92 of The Vanished Sister

For some reason, Mrs. Watson thought that by guest quarters he meant some sort of temporary holding cell inside Scotland Yard. Not until she was back in the carriage with Miss Charlotte and Lord Ingram did she learn that guest quarters meant exactly that: simple accommodations for police officers from the provinces visiting on official business, where Inspector Paulson and the constable from Lincolnshire would be spending the night.

Miss Charlotte gave an account of the interview. Everett Carstairs adhered very closely to the story he’d already told. He had never heard of Mrs. Whitehill before she washed up in Combe Martin. He had not visited Ludlow in recent memory. And he vehemently disputed any attempt to cast aspersion on his wife.

I have heard of Mrs. Osmond, he’d said. Never from my wife’s lips, she is—she was above such petty gossip. But the late Reverend Robinson and the first Mrs. Carstairs had been family friends and during his visits to Noble House, he’d been known to express his exasperation with this not-terribly-steady cousin of his, Mrs. Osmond.

In fact, ask any of her friends. Ask her children. If they speak the truth they would admit to her frequent flights of fancy and habitual lack of dependability. If she weren’t already dead I would undertake legal proceedings for defamation of character. My wife is—was worth a hundred of her, and she well knew it.

It was jealousy and madness, nothing more.

But if Justina had been willing to kill Cordelia Carstairs, what was one more spouse standing in the way?

To that Everett Carstairs’s answer was even more emphatic: Pure hogwash. He might not have loved his first wife, but he’d admired and respected her. She had died of childbed fever, nothing less, nothing more.

As for the purported cipher on his wife’s wedding petticoat, had anyone ever seen her work on it? And had anyone seen her place those embroidered strips—those supposed keys to solving the code—into the drawer in High Burrow’s library?

How had he known where to find his wife? He’d decided to look in on the house in St. John’s Wood and there she was. She’d in fact been rather vexed that he’d taken as long as he had, and he’d had to explain about Mrs. Whitehill’s body having been mistaken for hers and the brouhaha that had ensued.

Lord Ingram wrapped one arm around Mrs. Watson’s shoulders and rubbed her arm with his other hand. Mrs. Watson forced herself to slow her bellows-like breaths and unclench her clawed hands. “But what made him dash off to Noble House all of a sudden? Did he have an answer for that?”

“Yes,” said Miss Charlotte. “He said his wife had wanted to reread some of his old love letters to her, so he’d made the trip.”

And with Justina dead, who could gainsay him?

From deep inside the Carstairs town house rose harsh, turbulent notes—someone was smashing keys on a piano with all his might—followed by a few soft despondent bars, then again a jagged crescendo of despair. Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor.

“That’s Charlie. He’s taking it hard,” said Emaline Carstairs, who was pale with shock herself. “I still can’t believe what happened. I just can’t.”

The music ended abruptly. Footsteps pounded down the stairs. Charles Carstairs burst into the drawing room. “Aunt Watson!”

Mrs. Watson rose and crushed him to herself. “I’m so sorry for you. For everyone.”

And he didn’t even know the whole story yet. She shuddered to think what awaited him in the next few days.

They stood holding on to each other, her nephew racked with silent sobs. But after two minutes, he said, his face still buried in her shoulder, “You probably didn’t come just to be our kindly aunt, did you, Aunt Watson?”

Mrs. Watson wiped away tears of her own. “I would have preferred to have come just to see how you’re getting on. But yes, you’re right. Scotland Yard has become very interested in the whereabouts of Reggie and Rebecca—they’ve chosen to absent themselves at a most sensitive moment.”

Charlie took a step back and jabbed his fingers into his hair. “I’m petrified myself. This is not like them at all. They don’t disappear without a word to anyone.”

Fear flashed in his eyes. His mother, too, had not been in the habit of doing that. And look what had happened to her.

He clutched at the front of his shirt. “Dear God. Do you know when I’ll be allowed to move about again, Aunt Watson? I have to find them and make sure that they’re all right.”

“I don’t know when you’ll be cleared to leave London, but I’m free to travel,” said Mrs. Watson. “I can help you find them if you have an idea where they are.”

Twenty-Nine

Charlotte set down her pencil, closed her notebook, and stood up, spreading her feet apart to balance against the motion of the train. She raised her hands over her head, clasped them together, and pulled to her right until she felt a satisfactory stretch in the muscles of her left lower back.

Across from her, Mrs. Watson slept, laid out on her side on the padded longitudinal seat, her legs bent, her booted feet atop an old newspaper. Charlotte had bought first-class tickets for this exact purpose, as the seats in those railcars were larger and more comfortable, more conducive to an hour or two of solid rest.

When they’d shared a room of late, more often than not, she’d been aware of the dear lady sitting up in bed at night, or hunched in a chair, wrapped in her dressing gown. Or gone from the room entirely, in order not to disturb Charlotte. Even now she frowned in her sleep, her lips working as if trying to speak.

But the toll the whole affair was taking on Mrs. Watson was not the only thing on Charlotte’s mind. She rotated her hips a few times, then picked up the copy of The Times from her side of the compartment, and scanned through the small notices again, to make sure she hadn’t omitted any in her prior scrutiny.

After Charlotte had deciphered the note Mrs. Carstairs had sent to Tobias Hedge in a tentative exploration of further association with “de Lacey,” she had decided to drop off the letter again, in a new envelope with handwritten address forged by Lord Ingram, from a postbox that would have resulted in the same postmark.

But so far, there had been no acknowledgment in The Times—or the other major daily papers—either in plain text or in the Playfair cipher suggested by Mrs. Carstairs.