Chapter Text
CASE 1: The Case of Dr Viktor Kane
Saturday, 17th July, 1897
512B BAKER STREET, MARYLBONE
The morning breeze carried with it the smell of horse and coal that the city of London perpetually wore like a second skin. All around her, the city was waking from its slumber. The air already giving hints of the summer heat awaiting the city and its people as noon drew closer with each passing second. Somewhere down the connecting road the cart she used to arrive here was already moving to its next destination, its wheels loud on the cobblestones. Baker Street itself faced outward onto that broader artery. Merely one of the city's many essential but overlooked paths, the kind that moved people and commerce without being notable enough to appear on a visitor's atlas
Caitlyn looked at the apartment before her. 512B occupied the middle of a modest pair of adjacent apartments, its face rendered in the muted palette of a city that had long since stopped trying to be pretty and settled instead for being practical. The brickwork had weathered to the colour of the mud on the street. The window trim was a hue somewhere between cream and depression, though it was evident that it was, at one point, pristine while. It was not a building that announced itself. It sat with the quiet solidity of something that had been there for forty years and intended to remain for forty more.
Caitlyn’s eyes dragged over the structure from the top. First thing that came to sight was the pair of windows on the top floor. They were small yet functional, she could barely make out the room inside from her position on the ground. Below the windows, jutting from the elevation of the building with a certain geometric confidence, was a bay window of three panes that caught the morning light and distributed it unevenly across the pavement below. Beside the bay was a door. Painted Black, it was in better condition than the trim. The brass knocker had been polished within the last week.
She noted all of this without appearing to study it. To a passerby she was simply a young woman standing on the pavement with a single leather suitcase at her feet, looking at a building. This was not an unusual thing to be doing on Bleecker Street at half past seven in the morning. Nobody looked twice. She picked up the suitcase and went inside.
The hallway was narrow, as she had expected from the frontage. It smelled of beeswax and old wallpaper with the scent of food being made in the house next door. A hat stand occupied the left wall. The rug was worn to threads at the centre and intact at the edges, the sign of a household that used its hallway consistently rather than ceremonially. The hallway went on, but a door on the side led to the room Caitlyn was currently in. The woman who led her through was already talking at length.
Mrs Matilda, the homeowner, was of the age that Caitlyn estimated at somewhere between sixty and “It’s impolite to ask a woman her age.” Mrs Matilda the particular energy of someone for whom silence was an active discomfort. She had the keys on her wrist and an opinion about each room before they entered it, and she delivered it like a woman who had conducted this tour before and found it improved by her narration.
"...and of course I've had the sitting room repainted since Mr Aubrey left, that was three years ago now, a perfectly pleasant man though his wife had opinions about the curtains which I found somewhat excessive, the curtains were perfectly adequate before she arrived and I expect they will be adequate long after, though I've replaced them regardless since in any case we conform to the comforts of the tenant"
The sitting room was of a reasonable size. A fireplace on the interior wall. The bay window she had assessed from the street admitted the morning in three portions, each falling across the floorboards at slightly different angles. An 1886 Oetzman & Co model Settee occupied the space before the fireplace with authority. Two chairs, no branding or unique style apparent, were present. A writing table beneath the window. She measured it by eye and found it adequate for the purpose.
The door on the opposite wall was closed. Through it, she understood, was the secondary room. She made a note of the door's position relative to the staircase and the fireplace and found the geometry practical.
"...and through here is the kitchen, mind the step, Mr Aubrey never minded the step either but his wife caught it twice in one fortnight which I maintain says more about her gait than the step itself."
The kitchen was compact and honest. It was at the end of the hall way as it turned inward of the property in an L shape. The corner itself held a door which likely led to another bedroom. A range, currently cold. A basin with a pump. A window above it that faced the rear of the property. The back door opened onto the small yard. It was fenced with wood and had a tree that occupied the center. It was a plain old common London yard tree. It’s branches spreading out and one even reached close to the top floor room Caitlyn was yet to examine.
“...the tree has been a point of discussion with the previous tenants, one or two of them felt it blocked the light which I think rather misses the point of a tree, but of course I understand that some people have particular feelings about light” said Matilda.
Caitlyn came back inside and walked the hallway into the seating room. She climbed the stairs in the corner of the far wall and reached the top floor room. She moved to the back window with the quiet efficiency of someone completing a known task and looked down into the yard. The tree resolved correctly from this angle. The branch she had noted was within reach of the sill by a single unremarkable leap. While the two windows on the opposite wall led to a beautiful view of Baker Street.
She descended down and found Mrs Matilda was waiting at the foot of the stairs with the expression of a woman who had more to say about the curtains. Caitlyn looked at the sitting room one more time. At the bay window and the fireplace and the closed door. At the staircase and the hallway and the distance from the front door to the street.
"It's practical," she said. Her voice, when she chose to use it, was precise and unhurried, with the residual trace of French vowels that seven years in Paris had deposited without her permission. "Accounts for all my needs and should more than suffice."
A pause. She looked at the bay window once more with the expression of someone completing an arithmetic problem they had already solved.
"I'll take it."
“Now, the rent is due on the first of every month,” Mrs. Matilda said, folding her hands atop the desk. “Utilities are included, except for heating during the winter months.”
“I understand,” Caitlyn replied. She already knew the terms; they had been explained twice before.
“And the deposit, of course, is non-refundable if you leave before the end of the lease.”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Matilda nodded, though it was clear her attention had drifted elsewhere entirely. Her expression softened with sudden interest.
“I do feel for you, dear,” she said. “Having to arrange all of this on your own.”
Caitlyn offered the polite smile expected of her. “Thank you.”
“A widow, at your age,” said Mrs. Matilda, with the particular emphasis of someone who found the details of other people’s lives more interesting than those people generally intended. “And so recently.”
"Indeed" said Caitlyn.
"You must have been so devastated… how long were you and the gentleman together for?"
"Tthree years," said Caitlyn. The number arrived without hesitation. "It was rather brief."
"And nothing to remember him by? No portrait or anything?" Mrs Matilda cast an eye over the single suitcase with the professional attention of a woman who has furnished many rooms and found this one's contents wanting. "You travel rather lightly for someone establishing a household."
"I don't require much beyond my clothes and my paperwork."
"No mementos? No small things? The menfolk always leave small things behind"
Caitlyn considered the question for precisely the length of time required to make the answer seem considered rather than prepared.
"I'm not the sentimental sort," she said pleasantly.
Mrs Matilda received this with the expression of a woman who found it slightly implausible but had no grounds on which to dispute it. She began instead to say something about the arrangement for the monthly rent, and then about the water pump in the kitchen, and then about a neighbour on the left side of the terrace who kept unusual hours and ought to be mentioned.
Caitlyn listened to all of it with the patient attention of someone extracting useful information from a larger volume of less useful information, which was, she was finding, a skill that generalised well.
When Mrs Matilda paused for breath, Caitlyn said: "You mentioned you're familiar with this part of the city."
"Forty years," said Mrs Matilda, with satisfaction.
"Then perhaps you could direct me to the nearest Employment Registry." Caitlyn picked up her suitcase.
LABOUR EXCHANGE OFFICE
MARYLEBONE
The Employment Registry on Marylebone occupied a building that had clearly been designed for a different function than the one currently being asked of it. From the street, it announced itself with the restrained confidence of a civic institution, containing a narrow antechamber. Beyond the antechamber, the main hall extended perhaps forty feet, its ceiling higher than the exterior suggested, its walls lined with benches that had been designed to seat twenty people in reasonable comfort and were currently accommodating somewhere in the region of sixty with no comfort whatsoever. The sweat and heat from the breath and bodies of the crowd was straining.
Caitlyn took all of this in from the antechamber before she had fully entered the building, adjusted her assessment of the wait time from twenty minutes to considerably longer, and proceeded inside. Coal smoke had followed everyone in from the street and settled among the more immediate smells of working clothes and nervous perspiration and the particular staleness of a room whose windows had not been opened wide enough to make any meaningful difference.
At the far end of the hall, behind a partition of thin glass interrupted at its centre by a semi-circular aperture barely wide enough to pass a document through, sat the one of the men responsible for the proceedings. He was of middle age and the particular complexion of someone who had arrived at his desk disenchanted and found nothing in the subsequent years to revise that position. He did the same as all his peers in the adjacent rows; processed each visitor with the mechanical efficiency of a man who had stopped hearing the individual content of requests and now responded primarily to their general shape.
A numbered ticket system operated from a dispenser near the door. Caitlyn collected her ticket, it showed forty-three, and noted that the board above the partition currently displayed twenty-seven, and found the least obstructed position in the room from which to wait.
She had come for employment.
This was not a situation she had anticipated to find herself at any point in the near future, her intent was to try and stay afloat as a consulting detective, an unorthodox job, but still one she desired to follow. The practice would generate income but it required cases first. Cases required a reputation first. And in the interim, she required the rent on 512B Bleecker Street to be met on the first of August by some means other than optimism.
She was a competent typist. Paris had seen to that, among other things. It was not what she intended to do with her life, but it was what she intended to do with her Tuesday through Friday until something more permanent presented itself, and an employment registry on a Saturday morning was a reasonable place to arrange it.
She took her position near the centre of the room and waited for number forty-three to be called.
It was a Saturday, which explained the volume. The Registry observed Sunday closure, as most of London's civic infrastructure did, and the working population of the city operated on the reliable calculation that a spare penny found on a Saturday was worth two theoretically available on a Monday. They were here in their coats and their working clothes and their Sunday best pressed into weekday service, men, women, mothers with children old enough to stand, there was no greater indication of London’s metropolitianism.
She moved her attention methodically through the room, not dwelling on any individual long enough to be noticed doing so.
The woman by the leftmost bench; domestic service, recently and not voluntarily departed, the quality of the coat inconsistent with the condition of the boots, severance rather than resignation. The man standing near the partition; skilled trade, a joiner by the callus pattern on his left hand, here about a certification rather than employment, the leather satchel containing documents he had checked twice since she had been watching. The older gentleman near the door; not here for himself, the wedding ring and the quality of his hat inconsistent with the building's general population, waiting for someone, a daughter perhaps, the way his attention moved toward the door each time it opened.
But then something caught her ears, a voice. It was not raised. That was what distinguished it. In a room of accumulated anxiety, where most voices either negotiated loudly with the glass partition or murmured with the compressed patience of people trying not to take up more space than they had been allocated, this voice was doing neither. It was controlled with the specific deliberateness of something that wanted very much not to be controlled and was being held in place by an act of continuous effort and desperation.
She turned toward it. Finding the source required reorienting her expectations, because the first thing she registered was wrong. Her eye moved past the figure once before returning to it. Her eyes having categorised and discarded the masculine figure for it conflicted with the feminine voice. But on the second pass she noticed the truth.
The hair was the most obvious feature. Even through the crowd, even in the muted light of a hall whose windows faced northeast and received the morning sun at an angle that flattered nothing, the colour was its own argument. Her hair was a shade of red. the particular shade of red that comes from Irish descent but far removed from its source.
She was not tall, and yet she occupied her portion of the room as though it were more than it was. The shirt was a man's, another reason for her initial misreading. It was white, or had been once, the collar open, the fabric faded to the particular off-white of something that had been laundered past the point where laundering makes a material difference. Black suspenders. Work trousers of a grey that had faded unevenly. The form itself was slightly large at the shoulders and arms, but got narrower near the waist. The whole ensemble had been worn by someone of a different build before it reached her, and she had not attempted to adjust it to fit.
Caitlyn became aware that she had been, for some seconds, comparing this to her own dress, and found the comparison neither unfavourable nor favourable but simply factual. They occupied the same room and different registers of it entirely. She looked more carefully now, with the portion of her attention that she reserved for things that had decided to be interesting. The arms were exposed below the rolled sleeves. The left forearm carried what the distance and the light allowed her to identify as scarring. Not accidental, but repetitive, the accumulated evidence of physical work carried on past the point of safety for long enough to leave permanent record. The right showed similar. The musculature beneath was inconsistent with the general population of women in this room or indeed most rooms she had entered in London. This was not the incidental strength of domestic labour. This was something trained, or at minimum something that had been asked repeatedly to do more than its proportions suggested it should be capable of.
She adjusted her position in the crowd with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had identified a better vantage and was moving toward it without appearing to do so. From here she could see the face. The features were sharp. The jaw, the cheekbones, the quality of attention in the eyes, all were focused and primed. Whatever softness the face might once have offered had been replaced with a toughened exterior. The eyes themselves were a light colour of greyish-blue.
There was no cosmetic preparation on the face, despite the fact that it held factors which most people would want to mask. The upper lip carried a scar. A split that healed long ago, running diagonally through the lip in the way that suggested a blow rather than a blade. Her hair was also worn in an undercut. Her sides shaved to the scalp. A scar on the left side indicated why. Hair was likely not growing there so an unorthodox hairstyle was likely better than a bald patch of hair. Below the left eye, partially visible at this angle, was a tattoo.
Roman numerals.VI. She looked at it for two seconds, which was sufficient to deduce their origin. Prison. The numeral placement and the style of the work was far from professional, and pointed to self-application or a fellow inmate with a steady hand and access to rudimentary materials. The VI was not decorative but applied to a place she could not see it herself but could ensure that others would. Likely her initials or maybe a symbol of some significance.
Caitlyn shuffled closer and she was close enough now to hear the words the girl was speaking clearly, even though the crowd. The fingers of the woman's hands were pressed together at their tips and then released, pressed and released, with a rhythmic regularity to them that suggested anxiety. She was leaning slightly toward the aperture in the glass, but not aggressively, which was the first interesting thing, because everything about her physical construction suggested aggression as an available option to most walks of her life. Her facial wrinkles suggested that a frown adorned the face most often.
"I understand you've searched recent files," she was saying, with the care of someone choosing each word for its load-bearing properties. "I'm asking about records from further back. Twelve years, give or take. A child. She would have been approximately ten or eleven at the time of registration, if she was registered at all."
"No files on anyone named Powder," he said, in the tone of a man describing paint drying.
Something moved across the woman's face. It was even reflected in the brief stillness of the fingers before the pressing and releasing resumed. Almost as if she considered breaking in and looking herself but decided not to do it.
"How about Powder Lanes," she said. "Or Watson."
"Listen, lady." The man's voice had acquired the particular weariness of an institution reaching the end of its patience. "I searched the past six months. There's no one named Powder in anything recent. I'm not going to search a twelve-year gap when there are people here who actually need work." He was already reaching for the next ticket. "I've got a queue."
A pause. The woman looked at him with the grey eyes for a moment that was precisely as long as it needed to be and not one second longer. “Fine… I’ll take the Library assistant duty”
Then she took a ticket from the man though the opening in the glass pane and she stepped away from the partition. Caitlyn watched her find her way out of the building as she moved with frustration. The VI below the eye. The library job. The name Powder, which the woman had asked about with the specific persistence of someone who had been asking about it for considerably longer than this morning.
Curious, Caitlyn thought, the woman didn’t offer an easy direction as to who she was. From her clothes to her inferred pass and her supposed goal, all felt like a mismatched puzzle.
She was directed to Manchester Square under the job of a typist as she hoped. The technology and profession were both new in London hence it offered an uncontested and reliable source of income.
As Caitlyn stepped out of the building, her eyes were drawn yet again to the peculiar lady. She assumed the woman must be long gone but she was still nearby, accompanied by a trio of police. Caitlyn identified the man in the center as Inspector Marcus Lestrade. The man appeared to be, to place in layman’s terms, bullying the woman. The woman herself looked as if she was holding back with considerable effort to not punch the men.
Still it wasn’t much for Caitlyn to worry so she just walked by. Still her curious ears caught the last few exchange of words once she was in range.
“There was a clerical error during your batch of releases.” said Marcus, “The man in this photograph was released one year early under a sentence that doesn’t offer parole-”
“And I haven’t met him in my life” said the girl, interjecting the officer. But by that point Caitlyn had already moved out of range to her much more.
Saturday, 17th July, 1897 — Late Afternoon
The office on Manchester square had been exactly what she expected. A functional, undemanding environment, staffed by two junior clerks who had spent the better part of the afternoon stealing glances at her as though a middle class woman operating a Remington at forty words per minute was a phenomenon requiring repeated confirmation.
She had typed their correspondence, corrected three spelling errors and declined tea twice, accepted it on the third offer when it became clear that declining again would consume more social energy than drinking it. She had been released at half past five with three shillings in her pocket and the implicit understanding that she was welcome to return on Monday.
She would consider it. At three shillings a day, she would make around fifteen a week, which equated to two weeks of work for a single months rent, manageable but she would prefer if someone else could go halfsies with her. It will be hard to find another single woman in need of lodging however.
The evening was being cooperative, holding the warmth of the day at a temperature that made the city briefly pleasant rather than merely endurable. The streets between Manchester Square and Baker were familiar enough by now that she walked them with the portion of her attention that navigation required and left the remainder unoccupied, which employed towards her abode. She was working through the geometry of the sitting room at Baker Street, specifically, whether the writing table could be repositioned to catch the bay window light from a different angle without compromising the sightline to the door and hall.
"Caitlyn." She stopped as she heard her name being called.
He was standing outside a pawn shop with the relaxed confidence of a man whose size rendered loitering entirely natural, as though the street had simply arranged itself around him. He was large in the specific way of someone born with it rather than made into it. Broad through the shoulders in a manner that his shabby jacket acknowledged without accommodating, the fabric pulling slightly at the seams. His trousers were denim, worn and honest. Around his head, knotted at the side with the casual permanence of something that had been there long enough to stop being a decision, was a length of red cloth that might once have been a handkerchief and had since been promoted to headkerchief.
She knew the face immediately. It had acquired lines since she had last seen it, and the jaw carried several days of dark stubble that Grayson's programme would not have permitted, but the eyes were the same warm and slightly amused orbs, as though the world were a joke he had decided not to explain to anyone.
"Loris," she said.
He crossed to her in two strides and extended his hand. She took it. The handshake told her several things in the two seconds it lasted, the palm was roughened in the layered way of multiple kinds of work, the webbing between thumb and forefinger carrying the specific callus of rope-handling, while the knuckles showed the harder, deeper marking of something less forgiving than rope. Stone, possibly. Or quarry work. The smell that reached her when he moved was salt and river, predominantly, with the secondary note of something mineral underneath.
Dock work for the income. Something heavier on the side or recently prior.
She looked at the shabby jacket. At the cloth around his head. At the absence of anything on his person that connected him to the Metropolitan Police, whose cadet programme had put them in the same room when he was in his twenties as an instructor, and she was fourteen. The corridors she had last navigated with him at sixteen, the year everything became complicated in her life.
"You left the force," she said.
He laughed loudly, entirely characteristic of him.
"Around three years ago," he said. "Couldn't stomach it anymore. You know how it gets." He looked at her with the particular attention of someone recalibrating. "You look well. Well… different"
"Paris," she said.
"Wow? Here to meet the family?"
"No. I'm back on a more permanent basis" She glanced at the pawn shop behind him. "Were you going in, or were you coming out after providing something for a few pence?"
He grinned and fell into step beside her, which required a minor adjustment on her part as her stride was approximately half length of his and he had not yet recalibrated for.
"How long have you been back?" he said.
"Five years."
"Five years and I haven't seen you once."
"You weren't looking," she said, "Neither was I, particularly."
They walked in the comfortable silence of people who had known each other at a formative age and discovered, upon reunion, that the intervening years had not made them strangers. The city moved around them, carts returning from the day's trade, shop boys pulling in their displays, the particular shift in street noise that came with the hour turning toward evening.
"So," Loris said, with the air of a man approaching a subject from a comfortable angle. "Paris. Five years back. What have you been doing with yourself, Kiramann?"
"Jones," she said.
A pause.
"Jones," he repeated, with the careful neutrality of someone who had noted the correction and its implications and decided to leave both where they were for the moment. "What have you been doing with yourself, Jones."
"Travelling, initially. Then.. uh.. a period of adjustment." She considered the phrasing. "I married. Briefly."
"Briefly."
"He died."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be," she said, and then, aware of how that sounded, added to it, "It was some time ago. I've adjusted.".
"And now?"
"Now I'm in London. I've taken a house on Baker Street. I moved in this morning, in fact." She paused. "I'm establishing a private inquiry practice."
Loris looked at her sidelong with the expression of a man who was not surprised and had not been surprised since approximately the moment he had recognised her on the pavement.
"Of course you are," he said.
"It's a reasonable application of what we learned from Grayson."
"I didn't say it wasn't." He stepped around a woman with a perambulator with the automatic courtesy of a large man who has spent years being aware of how much space he occupies. "Is it going well?"
"It's going," she said. "The practice requires cases. A cases demand a reputation" She said this with the same brisk practicality she had applied to it earlier, in her own head, at the employment registry. It sounded better out loud than it had then, marginally. "In the interim, the rent requires addressing."
"The house is expensive?"
"The house is reasonable. My current income is less so." She looked ahead at the street. "I had thought. If I could find another woman to share the space, it would make the immediate arithmetic considerably more manageable. Someone working, respectable, who wouldn't object to the irregular hours that investigative work occasionally produces."
Loris was quiet for a moment. She recognised the quality of the silence, he was thinking, which he did slowly and thoroughly, like a man turning something heavy over to examine its underside.
"Irregular hours," he said. "So not a seamstress who would not appreciate losing sleep for a companion’s erratic workings."
"Ideally not."
He nodded slowly. Then a short sound escaped him that was not quite a laugh. He scratched the back of his neck, which was a gesture she remembered as preceding a suggestion he wasn't entirely sure about. "I might know someone."
"Go ahead."
"She's in a bit of a situation."
"All your friends are."
"She needs somewhere to stay. She’s clean otherwise… well" He amended this with the slight adjustment of a man choosing accuracy over comfort. "Mostly clean. She's a good person, Cait. She's had a rough go of it and she's not the type to make it your problem."
Caitlyn considered this. "What kind of situation?"
"The kind where sleeping arrangements are currently a rope at a common lodging house." He said this without embarrassment, it was simply information. "She's looking for work. She's capable. Stronger than most men I know at the docks, which is saying something."
"She works the docks?"
"She's been doing whatever's available since she got out. She's…" He paused again. "She's been through some things. Prison, if you want the plain version."
"I know how that sounds," Caitlyn said. "What was the charge?"
He looked at her steadily. "Murder. They say she killed her Pa around twelve years ago."
"Twelve years ago?" Caitlyn asked
"She was fifteen back then. She's not dangerous," Loris said. "I can promise that much."
"She visits a coffee house in the mornings," Loris continued. "There's a place on Dorset Street. Nothing fancy, but it opens early and the woman who runs it doesn't ask questions. She's there most mornings, I think. If you wanted to…" he spread one large hand in a gesture that was simultaneously a suggestion and a disclaimer of responsibility for whatever came of it. "I could tell her to expect someone."
Caitlyn was quiet for a moment.
"What's her name?" she said.
"Vi," said Loris. "Violet Watson."
Caitlyn looked at the middle distance with the expression of someone adding a small piece of information to a calculation that had already been running quietly in the background for several hours.
"Tell her," she said, "that I'll be there at eight."
Loris smiled. It was the smile of a man who had just done something he was reasonably confident was correct and was choosing not to say so.
"There's a fellow of ours still on the force, by the way," he said, as they reached the corner where their directions diverged. "Steb. You remember Steb right? So if the private detective ever needed anything official…" he shrugged one massive shoulder "try and give him a holler."
"I'll keep that in mind," she said.
"Right." He looked down at her with the warm, slightly amused expression that had apparently survived everything intact. "It's good to see you, C.K"
"Jones," she said.
"Yeah, sorry, Jones," he corrected, and went one way while she went the other, back toward Baker Street and the writing table that needed repositioning and the rent that needed addressing and the name Vi Watson which had now appeared in her life twice in the same Saturday and showed no signs of being done with her yet.
The suppliers on Harley Street Street kept their doors open until six on Saturdays, which Caitlyn had confirmed before leaving Manchester Square and which proved accurate to within two minutes when she arrived, slightly warm from walking and carrying a list she had composed in her head between Loris and the corner of Harley Street.
The shop was the kind of establishment that did not advertise its contents from the outside beyond a small painted sign reading [Hargreaves & Son’s Laboratory Sundries, Chemicals, & Optical Instruments]in lettering that had weathered their original color away. Inside it smelled with the sharp mineral bite of acids and the underlying sweetness of organic compounds, the dusty neutrality of glassware arranged in rows behind a counter staffed by a boy of perhaps seventeen who was in the process of closing the ledger and looked up with the expression of someone who had been hoping the door would stay shut.
She set her list on the counter. He read it. His expression moved through several adjustments.
"Some of this," he said carefully, "is…”
"I'm aware of what they are," she said pleasantly. "I need it for analytical work. Forensic application, primarily." She paused. "Your father is the chemist here, I assume? Is he available?"
The senior Mr Hargreaves was, in fact, available, and proved considerably more useful than his son, a compact man in his fifties with ink-stained fingers and the particular enthusiasm of someone who did not often receive customers who knew the difference between sulphuric and hydrochloric acid and simply thought all acids did the same thing. He filled her order with the brisk competence of a man in his natural environment, narrating as he went, with the enthusiasm of someone who found a like minded soul.
“Now this,” Mr Hargreaves said as he reached for the first bottle, “is proper work. Most people come in asking for things they ought not touch unsupervised.”
Caitlyn offered the faintest smile. “I imagine the burns improve business.”
“They improve stupidity statistics, sadly.”
He selected a dark glass bottle from the shelf behind him and handled it with practiced care.
“Sulphuric acid,” he said. “Oil of vitriol, if one insists on the old terminology.” He glanced at her over his spectacles as he decanted the liquid carefully. “You listed metal analysis and a Marsh test. Arsenic?”
“Potentially.”
“Mm.” The sound carried approval rather than alarm. “Nasty business, arsenic. Elegant poison though. Popular because people mistake subtlety for cleverness.”
He sealed the bottle tightly and wrapped it in cotton wadding before setting it into a wooden carrying case produced from beneath the counter.
“Hydrochloric next,” he continued, already reaching for another shelf. “Dissolution work, I assume?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so. Your quantities are sensible.” He lowered his voice slightly, conspiratorial. “Unlike the university boys who come in requesting enough acid to dissolve their Chemistry professor’s Safety bike”
“I imagine they would require considerably more.”
Mr Hargreaves barked a laugh at that.
“Oh, excellent. Someone with a proportion for chemistry and humour” He measured out the hydrochloric acid with brisk efficiency. “And nitric acid as well, smaller quantity.”
“For aqua regia preparation,” Caitlyn said.
“Yes, yes, I saw that.” He pointed at her order sheet with obvious satisfaction. “Most people have no idea what aqua regia even is”
Another approving noise escaped him. The nitric acid was sealed and wrapped individually like the others before he arranged all three bottles securely into the case.
“There we are,” Mr Hargreaves declared, dusting off his hands. “Properly packed so your carriage driver doesn’t accidentally melt himself through the floorboards.”
He nodded with the satisfaction of a man whose customer was not going to waste his materials. The copper foil followed. Then potassium permanganate, deep purple crystals in a wide-mouthed jar, and silver nitrate solution, two grades, one for general analytical use and one of higher purity for photographic application.
"You're developing your own photographs," he said. Not a question.
"Pocket Kodak. I need the full darkroom set."
He assembled it without further commentary. Pyrogallol for the developer — a brown powder she would dissolve in solution herself, the reducing agent that would pull the latent silver image from the exposed film. Sodium thiosulphate for the fixer, crystalline, to arrest the development and clear the unexposed silver halide. Potassium bromide as restrainer, to keep the shadows clean. A small bottle of glacial acetic acid for the stop bath between developer and fixer.
"Red safelight?" he said.
"I'll manage with a lantern and red cloth for now."
He wrote the total in the ledger and named the figure. She paid it without negotiation, which caused him to look at her with the brief assessment of a man recalibrating.
The poisons last, and these required a different register, not his enthusiasm, exactly, but his professional seriousness, the manner of a man who sold these things regularly and had learned to read the people who bought them.
Arsenic trioxide, small quantity, for reference standards. Strychnine sulphate, likewise. A solution of hydrogen cyanide, sealed with his own mark and a quantity caveat written on the label in his own hand. Aconitine, the alkaloid from monkshood, which she wanted for its specific colour reaction rather than its other properties. Chloral hydrate.
He looked at the list, then at her.
"You know the Marsh test," he said.
"I know the Marsh test, the Reinsch test, the Mecke reagent, the Vitali reaction, and Dragendorff's for alkaloids," she said. "I studied analytical chemistry in Paris under Professor Lacassagne's published methodology, and I have a working familiarity with Taylor's Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, second edition." She met his eyes. "I'm not going to poison anyone, Mr Hargreaves. I'm going to detect when other people have."
Hargreaves laughed, turning to the list to double-check. “Oh dear” Hargreaves said, with the slightly apologetic air of a man remembering something he should have mentioned earlier, "I ought to flag ya lass, the potassium ferricyanide. I don’t have enough of it"
She looked at him.
"Had a fellow in two days ago," he said, already beginning to straighten the counter with the habitual tidiness of a man who kept his shop in a particular order. “Bought rather more than I'd normally sell in a month to a single customer. Cleared most of what I had in stock." He reached for the ledger without looking at it. "I've noted what I could fill of your order. The remainder I can have for you by Wednesday, if that suits."
"What was he buying it for?" she said.
"He didn't say specifically. Asked about working concentrations though." A small pause. "Metal application rather than photography. I assumed metallurgy of some kind." He adjusted his spectacles. "He asked one or two questions that suggested he knew the theory but not the practice. A book-learned chemist rather than a working one."
She looked at him for a moment.
"Wednesday is fine," she said. "Thank you, Mr Hargreaves."
She picked up the carrying case and left.
Outside on Harley Street the afternoon had moved into early evening and the air had cooled enough to be pleasant. She walked toward home with the case in both hands.
The hallway at 512B was dark when she returned. Mrs Matilda had retired to her room at the end of the hall, or gone wherever Mrs Matilda went when the day was done, and the house had settled into the particular quiet of a building that had not yet decided what it was going to be.
Caitlyn set the case down in the hallway and stood for a moment. Then she made two decisions
The first was the room.
The upstairs bedroom was the obvious choice. Larger, more private, the room windows establishing a household would naturally take. She stood in the doorway and looked at it for several seconds. The window that faced the street and faced the backyard. The distance to the staircase. Then she went back downstairs and opened the door adjacent to the parlour.
The ground floor room was smaller. A single window facing the side passage. But it shared a wall with the parlour, which meant she would hear the front door from her bed, and it connected, through a low door, to the space beneath the staircase. Mrs Matilda had mentioned it was primarily used for storage. The area was exactly the right dimensions for what she intended.
She set her suitcase in the ground floor room. The upstairs bedroom, which was larger and more comfortable and had better light, remained empty for now. The lower room was preferred. The stairwell storage was adjacent. The acoustics of the ground floor were preferable for security purposes.
The second decision was the stairwell. She spent forty minutes in it with a candle and a length of shelving she found leaning against the wall, which she secured horizontally using two brackets she located in the same area and a screwdriver from her suitcase. The chemical case went on the shelf, each bottle positioned by frequency of anticipated use. The acids on the left, the photographic chemicals on the right, the poisons in their sealed bottles at the back where they would not be inadvertently reached for in dim light. And the arrangement still left enough room for a cramped but functional darkroom.
DORSET STREET
The morning was met with a light shower of uncharacteristic rain for the weather of July.
The streets between Baker and Dorset wore the particular vacancy of a city that had agreed to rest as per the populus and its Protestant Sabbath influenced observance. The shops were shuttered. The omnibus routes ran at half their usual frequency, the reduced service led to the wider gaps between vehicles and the slightly longer patience required of anyone waiting at a stop. Factories spewed less smoke into the air, the delivery boys were absent. The general industry of a Saturday morning had been replaced by the specific quiet of people who were either at church or pretending that they had been.
The cobblestones were damp from the morning shower which luckily, did not hinder her pace. She had left Baker at quarter to eight.
Dorset Street was south of the river, which meant the walk crossed the London Bridge and descended into the working neighbourhood beyond. The streets here were narrower and dirtier than the ones she had come from, the buildings closer together, the evidence of daily labour was more immediate in the texture of the walls and the worn-down kerbing and the smell of the river which.
The coffee house on Dorset Street announced itself by being the only establishment on the street with its door open. It was not a large place. A former ground floor of a terrace building, its front window displaying a handwritten card that read Bernie’s Coffee House in letters that suggested the proprietor valued function over presentation. The door stood wide, propped with a brick, releasing the smell of roasted coffee and bread into the Sunday morning air.
The interior was simple in the way of places that have long since resolved the question of what they are. Six tables. Plain wooden chairs. A counter at the back where a woman of indeterminate middle age was doing something purposeful with a coffee pot and not looking up. The walls held nothing decorative except a calendar from 1895 that had not been taken down and a single shelf bearing three cups that appeared to be there permanently rather than in service.
Four other patrons. A man near the window reading a folded newspaper. Two men at the corner table speaking in low voices with the ease of a long-established habit. And at the table nearest the back wall, angled away from the door in the position of someone who sat with their back to the room and sporting unruly red hair.
She was sitting with both forearms on the table, a sandwich held in both hands, eating with the manners of someone who respected food more than they respected proper English etiquette. She wore a man's shirt again, a different one, or the same one laundered, the white somewhat more white than yesterday. The only change appeared to be a tan coat that hung over the back of her chair with the weight of something in its interior pocket that pulled the fabric slightly to one side.
Caitlyn crossed the room. She stopped at the table's edge. The woman did not look up immediately. It was the unhurriedness of someone who had registered an approach and was choosing their own moment to acknowledge its pace, because right now, the food in her mouth mattered more.
She looked up. The grey-blue eyes. Definitively more grey in this light. Caitlyn held her gaze for exactly the length of time required to communicate that she was not uncertain about being here, and then spoke
"Excuse me." A pause of one beat. "Miss Violet Watson, isn't it?"
PENNY ROPE LODGING HOUSE - DORSET STREET
The rope was not, strictly speaking, uncomfortable. That was the most generous thing she could say about it, and she’d been saying it to herself for three nights running with diminishing conviction but still under the present circumstances having a place to sleep without getting arrested for vagrancy was already a big luxury.
Vi opened her eyes.
The hall was long and low. On either side of the central rope, which was strung at chest height for a six foot tall standing man had therefore been approximately at forehead height for her when she'd arrived last night and folded herself over it, the other residents of the penny rope lodging house were in various stages of negotiating with consciousness. To her left, a man of considerable circumference was producing a sound through his nose that suggested his respiratory system was similarly hanging on a rope like him. To her right, a younger man had slid forward far enough along the rope that his chin was nearly touching it, his coat bunched under his head in the optimistic approximation of a pillow.
Around her, in every direction the hall extended, men were packed with the dignity and density of people who had long since resolved that a proper sleep was priced above their current means. The smell was what it was. Vi had stopped registering it sometime during the first night, which was either adaptation or defeat on behalf of her nose.
She straightened up. Rolled her shoulders. Retrieved her boots from where she tucked them and laced them with the practiced speed of someone who had learned not to leave boots unattended anywhere, ever, under any circumstances. She did not want to walk around London barefoot. Once all done, she stood up and went to find a basin.
The washroom at the end of the hall had four basins and a mirror that had cracked diagonally sometime in the past decade and never been replaced, so that every reflection came back at you in two slightly misaligned pieces. She took the basin on the far left, furthest from the door, away from anyone’s way and started on her teeth.
The other basins filled and emptied around me in the Sunday morning rhythm of men making themselves presentable. She kept her eyes mostly on the cracked mirror, which gave her the room behind her in two bifurcated reflections.
It was in the mirror that she caught the three men near the door. Not at the basins. Not moving toward them. Just present, in the way of things that are present for a reason that has nothing to do with washing their faces. Not one of them was looking at anything that could reasonably explain why they were standing in a washroom at half past seven on a Sunday morning. Because no matter what, their eyes always loitered back to her.
Then a fourth figure filled the doorway behind them. Filled was the ideal word. Because Loris, even without any theatrics, had a nasty stage presence of a man who could be called a dwarf giant. He wasn't doing anything specific. He just had a knack for sensing trouble. The three men saw Loris and found somewhere else to be with a promptness that suggested they'd always known this option existed.
Loris took the basin next to Vi’s.
“Good mornin?" he said, reaching for the soap.
"You are up early, looking out for me huh?"
"Oh heavens No… I wasn't saving you." He worked the soap between his palms with the thoroughness of a man whose hands needed real cleaning, not the social performance of it. "I was saving them."
"From me."
"More or less." He said.
Vi spat, rinsed, looked at him in the cracked mirror. His large frame was bisected neatly at the shoulder by the diagonal fracture, which gave him a slightly surrealist quality he didn't need help achieving. "You're up early for a Sunday."
"Wanted to catch you before you headed out." He glanced sideways at her without turning his head. "Maybe even give you a heads-up"
"Okay.. go ahead" I said.
"Good." He dried his hands on the cloth by the basin, examined the cloth, decided it had done what it could. "She's… look. She's a good person. I want to be clear about that first."
"Okay."
"But she's…" He made a gesture with one large hand that seemed to be reaching for a word and not finding it. "Peculiar. She notices things. A lot of things. All the time. Things you'd rather she didn't, maybe, or things you didn't know were noticeable. And she’s not really subtle about how she talks about them"
"What? You afraid I’ll punch her if she speaks weird to me?"
"I'm just saying it can take some getting used to."
She picked her coat off the hook on the wall, and draped it on her, the familiar weight of the cloth settled over her bones. "I appreciate the warning," she said. "But I figure putting up with this friend of yours will be better than sleeping on a rope for another day"
DORSET STREET
The coffee house on Dorset Street was the only door open on the street.
She walked from the lodging house through the specific quiet of a London Sunday morning. The streets through Marylebone were clean in the way they only got after rain, the cobblestones darker than usual, the air carrying the mild dampness of a shower that had done its work and gone. She crossed into Dorset Street and was soon at her destination. Inside it was warm and close in the pleasant way of a room where something has been cooking since early, and the woman behind the counter was small and moved with the deliberate care of someone whose joints had begun to ache.
The bread was thick and there was mustard in it and she was most of the way through the sandwich and feeling, for the first time since being out of prison, a degree of normalcy. Then the door opened again.
Vi didn't look up. She heard the footsteps of someone who knew exactly where they were going. They crossed the room without hesitation. They stopped at my table. She was younger than what Vi expected, mostly because she assumed someone close to Loris in age. Her dark hair was straight and fell like plaid curtains. A coat that was so old it showed its veteran status and still looked mighty sharp. She held her look for exactly long enough to say something without saying it.
Then she said "Excuse me." A single beat of pause. "Miss Violet Watson, isn't it?"
She had half a sandwich in her mouth. So she held up one finger. Chewed. Swallowed. Gestured at the chair.
"It's just Vi," The words came out the way they always did. Shaped by things Vi had no say in, a father's Irish in the vowels, an American somewhere underneath that, south London on top of everything, occasionally mixed with German accents to boot. "And you must be Mrs Jones."
She sat. "I assume Loris told you about me," Vi said
"Loris told me your name," she said, "and that you needed somewhere to stay. He was rather less specific than I would have preferred."
"Okay." I set down what remained of the sandwich. "So what do you know?"
She looked at me steadily.
"I know you were at the Labour Exchange yesterday morning," she said. "I know you asked after records for someone named Powder, and when that produced nothing, Powder Lanes, and then Powder Watson. Mostly because I was there. I know the undercut is a practical accommodation for something that happened some time ago and left a mark that doesn't grow back. I believe the tattoo below your left eye is likely self-applied" She paused. "I know you were released on parole recently after a considerable period of incarceration. And I know you haven't slept properly since that"
Vi looked at the woman across the table from her. She looked back. It was the most thorough accounting of her current situation she had received from another person in twelve years. The previous record had been held by a prison chaplain who'd got about halfway there before the scripture started.
"Hm, Loris did warn me of this… has anyone ever told you that’s kind of creepy? And rude?”
“I hoped so… It’s a habit I have tried to break and am not fully able” she said. “Although what just happened was more performative so you know what you ought to be dealing with”
"And I suppose you know what YOU… ought to be dealing with?" Vi said, "sharing a house with a murderer and all."
She considered this. Not in the way of someone deciding whether to be frightened. In the way of someone checking whether the question contained any variables she hadn't already accounted for.
"I tend to tackle things on a day-to-day basis," she said. "I prefer my past to inform my judgment rather than dictate it."
Vi looked at her for a moment longer. Then picked up the other half of the sandwich and finished it.
"Good," Vi said, when she was done, dusting her palms off. "It's best we keep things clean. Where's the apartment?"
"Baker Street. 512B." She stood, straightened her coat. "It's a reasonable walk from here, or we could take the omni..."
"I'll walk," Vi said. “Lead the way Mrs Jones”
512B BAKER STREET
The hallway was narrow and smelled of beeswax and something faintly chemical. A hat stand on the left. A rug down the centre, worn to threads where feet had agreed to go for decades. Mrs Jones closed the door behind them
"Mrs Matilda; the landlady, I've sent for her," she said. "She shouldn't be long. She lives just down the street from here."
She moved into the sitting room and Vi followed her in.
It was a decent room. The three-pane bay window Vi had clocked from outside admitted the morning in sections, each one falling across the floorboards at a slightly different angle. A fireplace on the interior wall. A settee in front of it and two chairs. A writing table positioned under the window and on the opposite wall, a closed door.
Vi looked around the room. Looked at the staircase next to the door on the opposite wall. Looked at the closed door again before going close and opening it. Mrs Caitlyn Jones meanwhile stood there spectating. The room was smaller than the sitting room. A single window facing the side passage. A suitcase in the corner, opened and partially unpacked with the methodical neatness of someone who had a system. A coat on the hook behind the door. Her room. Vi looked at another room in the same room. It likely led to what was evidently a storage space under the stairs.
"I see you took the ground floor,"
"Yes," said Mrs Jones, from the sitting room doorway.
"My bedroom's upstairs."
"It is."
“May I know why?”
She looked at me with the level expression of someone who had anticipated this line of inquiry and was not inconvenienced by it.
"The stairwell," she said. "The storage space beneath it. I needed it for a darkroom."
Vi looked at the low door under the stairs. Then back at her.
"A darkroom?"
"For photographic development. I have a Pocket Kodak. I intend to use it for my work, document things. The chemicals require a controlled environment. The stairwell storage has no natural light source, which makes it suitable." She paused. "I've already set up the thnings"
A darkroom. Under the stairs. The woman had moved into this house yesterday morning. She knew that much from Loris. And by last night she'd had a chemical shelf installed under the staircase for a photography setup. Impressive.. Vi thought.
"A Pocket Kodak? But You develop your own photographs… I thought Kodak offered a rather cheap service"
"It's more practical than relying on a commercial service when the subject matter is…." she paused, selecting the word "...sensitive."
Peculiar, Loris had said.
"Huh," It came out sounding more impressed than what Vi intended, which she didn’t attempt to change. "Will Mrs Matilda be much longer?"
Caitlyn looked at her pocket watch. “She should have been here before us… I think we should wait on her. Or we can maybe visit her instead”
“The latter” Vi said quickly. “I prefer let the homeowner know before I move in”
The walk had been brief and silent by the time they found Matilda. She was standing on the pavement outside a terraced house that shared the general character of Baker Street's buildings without quite matching its specific address. The building looked old, but also parts of it appeared to have been renovated or fixed.
Beside Matilda stood a man.
He was tall, but not Loris tall, but tall enough that he had to incline his head slightly to address Matilda at a conversational register, which gave him the permanent appearance of politely paying attention. His age was somewhere in his early thirties. Dark hair, somewhat disordered, in the way of hair that had been combed that morning and had since been run through by its owner's fingers several times in rapid succession. He was leaning on a walking stick with the body language of someone who needed the cane for function more than fashion. His coat was good, but not a wealthy man's coat, it was a careful man's coat, the kind that had been selected for durability and had delivered on the promise. His eyes, when they moved to the two women as they approached, were the particular sharp brown of someone who notices things and has the vocabulary to describe what he's noticed.
Matilda saw us and her expression did several things simultaneously to be much legible as anything to Vi.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, Mrs Jones, thank goodness. And…" she looked at Vi with the brief confusion "...and your… associate is?"
"Miss Watson," said Mrs Jones. "She's to be staying at Baker Street, that’s why I asked for you to come. Matilda, what's happened?"
"I came to collect the monthly," said Matilda, in the tone of a woman establishing that she had done nothing wrong and wished this to be on the record. "You see Dr Kane here is a man of erratic schedule so I had to grab him while I could"
"Hello.. Dr Viktor Kane" said the tall man, in a voice that carried the faint trace of somewhere central European underneath the English, smoothed almost entirely flat by what sounded like a long time in British institutions. He said it with the absent confirmation of someone whose mind was partly elsewhere.
"Professor Kane," said Mrs Jones, with a small inclination of her head.
"Mrs Jones." He looked at her with the sharp brown eyes for a moment. "The most dastardly sort of thing has occurred and I’m sorry to have been a hurdle to your plans”
"What sort of thing has occurred?" said Mrs Jones.
"Someone has been in my rooms," said Viktor Kane, with the precise flatness of a man delivering a fact he found both intellectually interesting and personally irritating. "Several things are disturbed. And my gold ring is missing."
"His grandmother's ring," said Matilda, with the emphasis of someone who wanted the gravity of this to be properly registered. "Which he says was keeps on his cupboard"
"Which I kept on my writing desk," Viktor confirmed, in the tone of a man correcting a tense.
"There's a constable inside," said Matilda. "He arrived about ten minutes ago. He's been examining the rooms." She looked at the front door.
As if to confirm the words, the front door opened and the constable appeared in the frame. He was young, younger than Vi, the boy was at most 24. It was a thing Vi was still adjusting to, the discovery that authority came in sizes she had outgrown, or more tragically, the entirety of her youth had been spent behind bars. The constable, however, had the slightly uncertain look of a man who was thoroughly unprepared for any of this.
He looked at Mrs Jones and me with the brief assessment of someone categorising new arrivals.
"Mrs Matilda?" he said, to Matilda.
"Yes."
"I'd like you two inside, if you don't mind. I have some questions." He looked at Mrs Jones and me again. "And you are…"
"Mrs Jones," she said. "I'm Mrs Matilda's tenant at another property. This is Miss Watson, also a resident. We were coming to meet Mrs Matilda when we encountered the situation." She said this with the pleasant efficiency of someone providing exactly the information requested and not a syllable more.
The constable considered this. Nodded. “I… Uhh… I guess…. You come to then.. Or should you?? Uhh…”
“We would be happy to help sir” voiced Vi
"Oh.. thanks.. Uh.. Inside, then," he said. "All of you."
INSIDE THE HOUSE
The hallway was narrower than Baker Street's and darker, the single window above the door admitting light with the reluctant quality of a house that had been closed up for several days. The constable led us through to the main room on the ground floor.
It was a sitting room that had been comprehensively colonised by academic life. Every available horizontal surface held books, papers, instruments, or some combination of all three. A microscope occupied one end of the writing table with the settled authority of a permanent resident. Beside it, a brass compass, silver utensils, even what looked to be a Vacheron Constantin watch and two notebooks open to different pages, and a glass specimen jar containing something preserved in liquid. The shelves on the far wall held more books than the shelves had been designed to accommodate, the overflow stacked horizontally on top of the vertical rows with the pragmatic creativity of a man who had long since made his peace with the impossibility of the situation.
The far end had a staircase going up, but not like in 512B. The stairwell appeared to have been filled with wooden walls. In the middle of all this considered disorder was a different kind of disorder. A large cupboard against the back wall. Around it, on the floor, several items that had presumably been on top of or beside the cupboard were displaced. a stack of journals, a hat box, a wooden case of the kind used for scientific instruments.
The constable positioned himself near the fireplace with his notebook open and looked at Matilda.
"Mrs Matilda," he said. "If you could tell me again what you found when you arrived."
Matilda set her carpet bag on the nearest chair and drew herself up to the particular posture of a woman giving testimony.
"I arrived at quarter past eight" she said. "Mrs Jones here had requested my presence at her place at half past eight." She paused. "But on my way I ran into the professor as he was returning from the University. I've been meaning to get his rent for the month but he is a man of erratic schedules. So I decided to make the most of the encounter.”
"And then?" said the constable.
"And then as we approached we found the door open. That’s when I screamed.. I.. I mean made my presence known." She said this last part with the directness of a woman who had no intention of being embarrassed about it.
The constable then asked “And I notice that the back door is stuck. How long has that been?”
Mrs Matilda chimed in. “A few weeks now, But the Professor said it wasn’t a pressing concern so I have been a bit lax about getting it fixed”
The constable made a note. Looked at Viktor. "Professor Kane…”
"What she says is true" Viktor was standing slightly to the left of the writing table, his weight on the stick, his sharp eyes moving around the room with the systematic attention of a man taking inventory. "I had intended to remain at the university until this evening. A problem with one of my experiments resolved itself earlier than anticipated, which left me without productive occupation, so I came home. Mrs Matilda filled the rest and we came in together and I confirmed that my ring was missing from the cupboard"
"Can you describe the ring?"
"Gold. Twenty-two carat. The band is plain except for an engraved inscription on the interior initials and a date, in German. It belonged to my Professor, Dr Heimerdinger." He paused. "It has considerable sentimental value and some monetary value. I don't wear it because the work I do makes wearing rings inadvisable, but I keep it on my cupboard, in plain sight whenever I require my tools or references"
The constable wrote this down. Vi was standing near the doorway. Mrs Jones was standing near the centre of the room. She hadn't said anything since they had come inside. Though Vi could see that she was paying attention to the dialogue. Her eyes moved around the room. The cupboard. The displaced items. The writing desk. The window. The walls.
The walls and floors and doorframes particularly.
"Mrs Jones," said the constable, without looking up from his notebook, in the tone of a man tying off a loose end. "You said you were coming to meet Mrs Matilda. What time did you leave Baker Street?"
"Shortly after half past eight," she said, without shifting her attention from the left-hand wall. "We walked for close to ten minutes or more”
"And you noticed nothing unusual on the street outside as you arrived. Perhaps someone running or looking tense or suspicious?"
"No.. Nothing" Vi answered to which Caitlyn simply nodded in agreement. But she was still observing the floor and the pavement outside. The constable nodded. Made another note. Looked around the room with the expression of a man who had gathered his information and was now preparing to do something official with it.
Vi also noticed that she hadn't looked at the cupboard again since her first survey of the room. Everyone else, including Vi herself, kept returning to it. It was the obvious thing. The displaced thing. The thing that announced the problem. But Caitlyn Jones was looking at everything except the cupboard.
The constable finally straightened up. “Okay… I believe I have enough of an idea. Someone who likely knows you personally, Professor. And also knows the value of the ring. They expected you to be absent here. Lockpicked the front door, searched the cupboard to find the ring, and then left out the front door”
“Wrong” Vi’s head whipped to Mrs Jones as she announced it loudly, the constable boy, instead of being angry, looked absolutely nervous. It was cute.
Mrs Jones was looking at the left wall, then the right wall, then the ceiling, then back to the left wall, with the systematic attention of someone measuring something that couldn't be measured with a tape. Then she looked at the pavement outside the house again and then returned inside, walking to the left wall.
She looked around and then turned to Mrs Matilda. “Mrs Matilda, how long have you been the owner of this house?”
“Close to five years now”
“And I notice that there are some parts of the house that appear to be mismatching the surroundings. Was the place renovated?”
Matilda appeared to be lost in thought. “Well not by me, but the previous owner might have. I received the house from the bank after a widower left it when her husband was arrested for fraud. He was always shady. I don’t much details. I heard he bought his own crew for the renovation”
Vi saw Mrs Jones calculate something in her head before returning to the cupboard finally. “The thief wasn’t after the ring. He was after whatever is behind this cupboard.”
Vi was intrigued. “What do you mean?”
“The sitting room has plenty of things here to pocket. Silver utensils, There’s even a Vacheron Constantin watch right there” she said, pointing to the brand. “If the objective was theft, there’s already a lot more that should have been lost”
She then turned to the cupboard itself. “This also has been emptied in an orderly manner. Top to bottom, It suggests that someone was trying to decrease its heft to move it. Which is what we see here.”
Vi looked at where Caitlyn was pointing and saw that there was about an inch of space between the cupboard and wall and marks on the floor where dust was moved due to the cupboard. Vi and the constable helped to move the large furniture and Caitlyn Jones leaned over the wall. About two feet from the floor, slightly right of centre. It sat fractionally proud of its neighbours.
Mrs Jones reached forward and pressed the brick at its left edge. It moved. Not much. But enough. She worked her fingers around it, eased it forward, and set it carefully on the floor. Behind it was a cavity and Inside the cavity, a lockbox.
Black metal, latched but not padlocked. She lifted it out with both hands and set it on the writing desk. The constable was beside her immediately. He opened the latch and lifted the lid Inside, in neat stacks separated by paper sleeves, banknotes. A considerable number of them. Slightly dry at the edges, the paper with the particular stiffness of currency that has been waiting rather than circulating.
Viktor looked at the lockbox and then at the cavity behind the cupboard with the expression of a man substantially revising his understanding of his own study.
Nobody said anything for a moment. Matilda then made a sound that was not quite a word. “Uh… as the homeowner, I presume they go to me?”
“I would advise against it Mrs Matilda, these notes are likely ill gotten gains and should be handled as such”
Viktor meanwhile turned to Caitlyn. “But then where is my ring”
“A likely mishap, the thief did not intend to steal it, he likely pocketed it on accident” said Caitlyn. “But do not fret Professor, your ring and it’s thief are both still here”
Mrs Jones looked at the skirting board at the base of the staircase wall. Then at the wallpaper seam nearest her right hand. Then she pressed two knuckles lightly against the wall's surface. She tapped the wall twice. The second about a shoulder width away from the first. The first knock produced the solid sound of plaster over brick. The second produced the sound of tapping against hollow wood.
She lowered her hand. Straightened up. And then, in the same tone she'd used to tell Vi the apartment was a reasonable walk from Dorset Street, she said "...I think we can dispense with the investigation, Constable. The person responsible for the disturbance is currently occupying the space behind this section of wall.”
Complete silence. The constable's pen had stopped moving. Matilda's mouth had opened without producing anything. Viktor Kane and Vi both stood perplexed. The constable moved in to search for himself. “Anyon-Ughk!!”
He came out fast, with the specific desperation of someone who has decided that any outcome is better than the current one, his shoulder hitting the panel hard enough to crack it back against the inner frame as he drove himself forward into the room.
He caught the constable with a forearm across the side of the head and the constable went sideways into the writing desk with a crash that sent two of Viktor's notebooks to the floor and the compass spinning. Vi saw Caitlyn step back from the sudden jolt.
Matilda screamed, which was reasonable. Viktor Kane stepped back against the far wall with the quick economy of a man whose mobility was limited and who knew it and had already decided that getting out of the way was the correct application of that knowledge.
And then there was only Vi between him and the hallway and the outside.
He rushed at Vi. Expecting to barrel past her. Vi let him get close enough that his momentum was committed, close enough that changing direction was no longer an option available to him, and then she dropped her weight and drove her right fist into his sternum.
The sound it produced was not pleasant. He folded forward, which brought his face to approximately the right height, and Vi punched him in the jaw with a downward hook that dropped him to the floor in an instant. The constable, blood from a cut above his ear running into his collar, came through and dropped onto him with the practiced weight of a man who had done this part before even if everything preceding it had been somewhat outside his experience.
The handcuffs went on.
512B BAKER STREET — SITTING ROOM
The Man’s name, Vi learned, was Chandler. He used to be a conman charading as a broker. But six years ago, a plan went awry and he lost everything, including his wife and son who disowned him. He also lost his house in the process, the same one now inhabited by Professor Viktor Kane.
The constable had taken Chandler away. Matilda had recovered sufficiently to inspect the cavity in the wall with the expression of a woman recalculating her property's history. Viktor Kane had retrieved his ring from Chandler's coat pocket during the arrest. He'd looked at Mrs Jones before Vi and she left and said, in that precise way of his, "I imagine we'll encounter each other again."
She'd said she imagined so too. Mrs Matilda had appeared at some point in the early afternoon, wanting to discuss the cavity in the wall and what it meant for the property's structural integrity and whether she ought to have known about it and several related topics that she worked through thoroughly over two cups of tea before deciding she felt better and going back to her end of the street.
Then it was just the two of them in the sitting room. A privacy that Vi clearly admired after the debacle of the day. Mrs Jones was at the writing table with a newspaper open in front of her as she read and Vi was on the settee.
Vi now recognized Chandler as the man the police were pestering her about yesterday. A man who'd hidden money in a wall, gone to prison, come out to find the house sold and a tenant in it, tried to get back what he'd left behind and pocketed the ring by accident in the chaos of the cupboard. That part was straightforward enough once you had the pieces.
What Vi couldn't reconstruct was how Mrs Jones got the pieces.
"Mrs Jones," Vi said.
She looked up from the writing table.
"The wall," Vi said. "How did you know he was in it?"
She looked at Vi for a moment in the way of someone deciding how to approach a translation problem. Then she set down her pen, turned the chair to face the room, and said: "Where would you like me to start."
"The beginning," I said. "If you could."
She was quiet for a second.
"The entry," she said. "The constable said that there was likely a lockpicking. Which is reasonable, but last night, I had visited a chemist’s shop closeby." She paused. "I learned that someone had taken quite a lot of potassium ferricyanide along with a host of other chemicals. Now if you don’t know, that chemical can be used for forging fake keys"
Vi listened with apt interet.
"I knew the entry was clean. No forced lock, no disturbed frame, no broken latch. Either the lock was picked by someone of considerable skill, or the door was opened with a key. The probability that it was someone who already knew of the lock could fashion a pick is something I shelved in my mind the moment I saw the door" She looked at the window for a moment. "But I didn't know who yet. Not then."
"Okay," I said. "What next."
“When Matilda spoke of a conman it just made things even more likely, but not an absolute. So I had to keep pushing. But even before that, the pavement had a bigger clue”
"The pavement??"
"As you know, there was a light shower this morning. It made the pavement quite wet and the road muddy. It also had the effect of leaving footprints on the pavement. The Officer had a pair of uniform boots, while the good Professor wore distinguished bespoke Oxfords. Mrs Matilda wore small high heels." She said this without judgment, just fact. "But I also noticed another pair of boots. They were larger than any of our three people who entered the house that day after the rain."
“You can tell that just by looking at them?” Vi asked.
“It takes practice, but sometimes, even with practice, I might need a Magnifying glass and some luck”
"Then what?” Vi said. “I’m assuming you didn’t see those footsteps leaving the house so you knew he had to be inside because the back door had been stuck for weeks?”
"Yes," she agreed. "But I couldn’t find where he was with just that. The constable, in his efforts to be thorough, had walked all over the house during his initial search, making it hard for me to distinguish footprints inside." She waved her hands. "But luckily, I did not need that. Thanks to the renovation work done by Mr Chandler, it was evident which part of the house didn’t mesh well with the rest. A house of that age and size would typically have either a storage cupboard beneath the stairs or a bricked void. This one had neither. It had a wooden panel, framed in the same newer timber, plastered over to match the surrounding walls"
"The renovation wood," Vi said. “How could you tell it didn’t match?”
She nodded. "I'd noticed it when we arrived. Two distinct periods of construction, the original Victorian fabric of the house and then something later. Newer timber, different grain, different finish, and sparse. Not a comprehensive renovation. Specific interventions in specific places. When Mrs Matilda told us the previous owner had done work on the house with his own people rather than standard contractors, and that he'd subsequently gone to prison for fraud..” she paused "... It just made sense to assume there was something to be hidden, especially after we found the lockbox"
“Clever bastard" I said. “He was likely betting on staying hidden and then maybe waiting for another opportune moment. Getting caught would have been bad for him but by the time you found him, he only had the choice to make a run for it”
"Indeed” she said. "People who hide things tend to build the hiding places themselves, or supervise closely enough that the result is the same. And people who build hiding places in houses they own tend to build more than one." She looked at her hands briefly. "The cavity behind the brick was one. The question was whether it was the only one."
“So now you wait for him to get convicted?” Vi asked.
“Hardly” said Mrs Jones. “I prefer knowing the truth and helping those I can. The legal nonsense of London is hardly my concern. You of all people should know it first hand. Twelve years in prison for a crime you did not commit”
Vi looked up suddenly at Caitlyn. “How.. how did you know?”
“Mostly a hunch. I just tried to see if you will bite to verify said hunch” Caitlyn said. “Which since you did just bite… I’d say I was quite on the mark”
Vi chuckled rightly, the audacity, she found amusing. "Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo”
Caitlyn looked at Vi, frowning slightly as if she didn’t expect the girl to quote a Latin phrase randomly. “What was that?”
Vi stood, smiling to herself as she walked towards the stairs. “I expected you to know that… but since you don’t appear to.. I shall consider it a win on my part then”
"Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo” Vi said again. “Ipse domi simul ac nummos contemplor in arca"