“Suicide?” This was Soong Li, looking confused, as if he wasn’t sure he understood the English word.
“Oh come on, Raji,” Cartfield said. “Holmes didn’t make any suicide attempts.”
“Reichenbach Falls was suicide. Even Conan Doyle understood that.”
The room erupted with argument, and Kate sat back, watching the participants: Jeannine Cartfield, protective of Philip’s memory, although she did not appear particularly devastated by his absence; Tom Rutland, assuming an authority in the group that several of the others did not want to give him; Ian Nicholson, warmly regarded by all and probably able to assume the mantle of leadership if he was interested; Pandi and Venkatarama, relishing the debate, contributing to it by the citation of one passage after another—and, going by how the others took the passages, the words were correct. Unlike Wendell Bauer, who offered a passage in support of something—what were they talking about, anyway?—only to get shot down instantaneously and corrected by three of the others. Even Soong Li caught up with the flow and tossed a reference to Conan Doyle into the fray, which was acknowledged by Rutland and incorporated into the discussion. Geraldine O’Malley appeared to belong to the more liberal wing of the group, quite happy to criticize Holmes as if she were talking about Gilbert; Alex Climpson wavered, unwilling to commit himself to either side.
Suddenly a voice cut through the room, saying, “I have to say, I really could understand it if Philip had committed suicide.” The gleeful tumult faded away, replaced by an uncomfortable silence. Several people glanced at Kate, but no one took the floor from Geraldine O’Malley.
She asked Kate directly. “It couldn’t have actually been suicide, could it?”
Kate considered her answer, before saying, “Death itself was caused by a blow to the head, although there was no such object where he was found.”
“I believe what we are wondering, Inspector,” Cartfield said, putting a deliberate emphasis on Kate’s title, “is if Philip could have rigged things somehow to look like murder.”
Rutland interrupted angrily. “Why the hell would he do that?”
“We all agreed that he wasn’t himself lately,” O’Malley told him. “And you’ve got to admit that it would be like him, to do a version of Thor Bridge on us.”
“What’s ‘Thor Bridge’?” Kate asked.
Rutland explained, “It’s one of the stories where a mentally unbalanced woman kills herself and makes it look as if another woman, a rival, has murdered her. The solution has to do with weighting a revolver so it falls into the water after she shoots herself.”
“No,” Kate replied. “I don’t think that’s a possible scenario here.”
They seemed, if anything, relieved. A part of that, no doubt, was the relief in knowing that Gilbert had not been driven to take his life when friends might have intervened, but Kate thought it was also gratitude that Gilbert hadn’t been vindictive enough to have pointed a dead finger at one of them.
Which indicated the possibility, in their minds, that Gilbert might have been capable of such a thing.
“I have another question,” Kate told them. “I gather Ian has told you about the story that had come into Mr. Gilbert’s possession?”
Their faces lit up and a murmur of agreement rose up. Before one of them could question her about it, she said, “Not that it matters, but do any of you know how Leah Garchik might have heard about it?”
“I knew it wasn’t about the Doyle archives,” Climpson blurted out, sotto voce, but that was the only reaction. None of the nine, it would appear, had made the phone call to the newspaper columnist.
But now that the story itself had been brought up, talk turned to it: namely, when could they see it?
Without looking in Tom Rutland’s direction, Kate said, “That’s not up to the police. That’s a decision to be made by the executor of the Gilbert estate, who has the responsibility of deciding what is best for the estate as a whole, whether that’s keeping it under wraps for a while longer or letting the contents out. I’d say it probably won’t be too long now.” She stood up. “Thank you all for your hospitality, and if I haven’t said it before, I am sorry for your loss.”
But before she could push back her chair, Ian Nicholson was on his feet. “Kate,” he said—and his use of her first name sent a small jolt of triumph through her, which she was careful to keep from her face—“I think I speak for the rest of the Diners when I say thank you for coming and talking to us. And I hope I’m not being forward when I add that if you’d ever like to join us in a more permanent manner, you need only submit your name for membership.”
A quick survey of faces made it clear that the other Diners were not quite as eager as Nicholson—most were noncommittal, although Jeannine Cartfield looked frankly apprehensive, and Thomas Rutland verged on the appalled.
“Thank you, Ian,” Kate replied, “I’ll keep it in mind.”
She finished with her usual line of calling her if they thought of anything further that might have a bearing on Philip Gilbert’s death, and escaped before they could recall the topic of the Holmes manuscript and gang up to demand her copy of the story.
The pause lasted just seconds; as she went out of the door, she could hear their voices rise, aimed at Nicholson: “Ian, there’s really no reason—” and “For God’s sake, Ian, you’re not going to—” The last thing that reached her ears was the imperious voice of Tom Rutland, declaring, “All right, yes, I’m the executor, and as such I don’t see why you shouldn’t—”
The street outside seemed very quiet and normal.
SIXTEEN
Kate woke to fog on Thursday morning. She trotted downstairs to liberate a cup of coffee from the machine, and took it back up to shower and dress—choosing clothes designed for hiking rather than for interviewing witnesses. She carried her boots and her empty cup back down to the kitchen, where she found Lee making French toast, Nora making a drawing of the family, and the radio making music.
Beautiful, charming, normal family.
(She found herself wondering, Could Jack Raynor have envisioned anything remotely like this, when he was looking at wedding rings?)
Hawkin arrived, wearing his normal clothes and carrying his leather work binder, and sat down to a cup of the coffee Lee made freshly for him. Kate left them in conversation while she walked Nora down the street to her preschool, and when she got back they were talking about his daughter’s boyfriend.
“I really wouldn’t worry, Al,” Lee said, standing up to clear the table. “Jules is very level-headed, and she still talks to both you and Jani. This boy may be older, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to dominate her. Not Jules.”
“Yeah, you’re right. And actually if he wasn’t hanging around my girl, I’d probably like him. You ready to go?” he asked Kate.
“Let me just make one call.”
To her amazement, Kate reached Leah Garchik at the Chronicle offices. She explained what she needed, details about the Conan Doyle piece that had appeared on January 16.
The woman scratched her metaphorical head for a minute before telling Kate that she’d have to look through her log to be sure, but she thought the paragraph about the manuscript was based on a phone call that had come in a few days before she went off on her two-week vacation. “I would have saved it for when I got back, since I’d already laid out my final column, except there was a paragraph I had to pull at the last minute. I was practically out the door, so I just grabbed whatever looked the right size and stuck it in instead.”
“What was the original paragraph about?” Kate asked, automatically wary of any faint odor of coincidence.
“I don’t remember,” the reporter said, an equally automatic response: She did remember, Kate thought, but she was leery about revealing the contents of a pulled item. After silence had laid there a while, the columnist relented a bit. “It concerned an incident involving a local society figure’s marriage. I was all set to leave when someone came running in with a news relea
se saying that the woman had just been diagnosed with cancer, and it would’ve looked really tacky to bad-mouth her just at that point. So I replaced it.”
“Who was the phone call from?”
“I don’t know. Really, I didn’t know him.”
“You talked to him? Personally, I mean?”
“Sure. He sounded fine, not like he was trying to be Deep Throat or anything. You wouldn’t believe people.”
Kate, a cop, probably would. “Do you generally publish unsubstantiated rumors like that?” She tried not to sound disapproving, but Garchik didn’t sound offended.
“Depends. If there was any meat to it, I might—like the piece I pulled, I’d checked with three people who’d been at the party where the incident had taken place. But a general rumor, especially if I make clear it’s just a rumor, that’s a different matter.”
“The caller, did he have any kind of an accent?”
“Not really. He might have been English, but it wasn’t strong. More like he’d lived there for a while, you know?”
Or like he was using the inflection as a disguise. “Okay, thanks.”
“Do you mind if I put something into the column about this?”
That was a poser. “I’d appreciate it if you’d wait for a few days, Ms. Garchik. In fact, if you hold off, I should have something more solid to add to your story.”
It was a red herring, but the newspaperwoman allowed herself to be distracted, and promised not to publish anything about Kate’s call, at least for a few days. Kate thanked her and trotted downstairs.
THEY took Kate’s car this time. Kate pulled into traffic and said, “So, what did you think of that story?” No need even to ask if he’d finished it: Al Hawkin would not have fallen asleep with pages unread.
He thought for a minute, then replied, “As investigations go, it was fairly solid. Given a complete lack of modern techniques.”
She shot him a sideways glance; no, he was not making a joke. Although now that she thought of it, if you approached the tale as a piece of investigation rather than a story about people, his comment was valid. She chuckled, and said, “Of course, considering how backed up the labs are these days, we’re not really much ahead of the Twenties in terms of using forensics to solve a case.”
Parking outside the Gilbert house was simple on this weekday morning. Kate stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking up and down the street: a gardening crew, a cyclist crossing three streets up, a woman rushing out the door and diving into her car. Once the woman had accelerated around the corner, not a soul moved for blocks; even the balding busybody across the street was absent.
“Not many families here,” she said to Hawkin.
He looked around and nodded. “Quiet.”
They let themselves in and Kate stepped forward to flip the pen-and-ink drawing to one side and hit the sequence, disarming the security system. She pulled on a pair of gloves and followed the line of framed sepia-colored photographs that marched along the right-hand wall to the stairs. One of those showed a large stone manor that might well have been Windsor Castle: On closer examination, she could see the hinge that held it to the wall. Using the tip of a pen, she lifted the picture and saw a neat silver switch, currently up in what was generally the on position. She let the picture fall shut, and went to see what Hawkin was doing.
He was standing in the sitting room, taking in his surroundings, a quizzical smile on his face. The room was utterly silent, and the mixed fragrances of the other day had faded to a memory—even the pipe tobacco was gone, with a rising mustiness in its place. All those horsehair sofas, Kate thought.
“My grandmother used to have this kind of furniture,” Al said. “She had this chair that used to prick little holes in the backs of your legs, we always had to sit in it to take tea with her. Her whole place smelled like mildewing books.”
“When we got here the other day, it smelled like lavender and furniture wax.” She moved past Gilbert’s chair and the now-cold fireplace to the far wall, then turned to look back at the hallway. She took a step to one side, then another, and when the angle was about what she remembered, she craned her neck at the wall behind her.
“There it is,” she said. Knowing it was there, a person could easily see the small hole just above the picture rail. She thumbed her flashlight on and shone it up; sure enough, a tiny glimmer of glass betrayed the camera’s minuscule lens.
Hawkin grunted, but was more interested in the wall over the fireplace.
“What do you suppose happened here?”
“It’s a Holmes thing,” she told him. “V. R.: Victoria…something. In one of the stories Holmes shoots the queen’s initials into the wall. Apparently Gilbert thought it was too cute to pass up.”
“Dangerous lunatic.”
“Chris thought Gilbert hammered the marks instead of shooting them.”
“Well, since Gilbert wasn’t missing any fingers, I take it he didn’t pound actual bullets into the wall.”
“I imagine he hated having to fake it.”
“I think you’re right,” he mused, picking up the wire net–covered bottle from among the nest of cut-glass decanters.
“That’s a soda spritzer, I think,” Kate told him.
“A gasogene, if memory serves. They tend to blow up on a hot day.” He put the thing down gingerly, examined the bone-handled jackknife sticking up from the mantelpiece, then touched the small embroidered shoe that had been nailed up to one side.
“He had a pouch of tobacco in that,” Kate said. “Only tobacco, as far as I could tell.”
“No hypodermic needles with cocaine in them?”
“Hey, I forgot about that.” A self-medicating bipolar. “No, we didn’t find any needles.”
He passed into the kitchen, running his eyes over the archaic fittings. “An odd thing to overlook. I’d have expected absolute verisimilitude.”
“Right. Well, maybe he had his drugs hidden in the cut-out pages of one of the books. We didn’t take them all off the shelves.”
She’d meant it as a joke, but to her alarm, Hawkin eyed the laden shelves speculatively. However, in the end he turned away to climb the stairs.
The bell in the hallway began to clatter and dance furiously in the silence, and Kate went to let Lo-Tec Freeman in. The crime-scene inspector held out a piece of paper. She took it, and he shouldered his way past her without a word, leaving Kate to puzzle over the sheet.
It was the DNA results of the blood found on the chair upstairs, a match to Gilbert’s blood.
“Thank you, Lo,” she said fervently.
He shrugged, his print kit already in his hand, no classic rock tunes being sung today: Humiliation deadened the songs. Not only had Lo-Tec missed the scrap of porcelain, but she had scooped him in the webcam business, and moreover, he had missed this hidden button. Which was fine with her, if it brought her results, but she didn’t want him permanently disgruntled.
“There was no reason to suspect this was here,” she told the back of his neck. He said nothing. “I didn’t even know about the webcam until late on Monday.”
He peered at the job. “I saw the hookup on the computer, I should’ve known.”
“Well, when you develop clairvoyance, Lo, you might put in for a raise.”
He grunted, but from the angle of his shoulders, Kate thought he was somewhat mollified.
His next grunt was one of disappointment. He brushed the rest of the frame to be sure, and lifted a number of prints, but said, “These’ll be the vic’s. The print on the button itself is nothing but smear, most likely from a glove. I’ll check these others and see, but don’t hold your breath.”
She thanked him and let him out, then worked the deadbolt handle a couple of times, thoughtful. If you had this kind of self-locking door, you probably would get in the habit of not bothering with the deadbolt unless you were going away for the weekend. Probably why builders stopped using them, to force people to attend to their security by the actual turn of a key. br />
On the top floor, she found Al in the doorway to the study, holding the photographs Kate and Williams had taken when they first arrived. The dried liquid in the bottom of the glass on the table had smelled like brandy, the contents of the marble ashtray all appeared to be pipe scrapings, the DVD in the machine had been the reproduction of a 1927 movie about, inevitably, Sherlock Holmes.
A name Kate was getting pretty sick of, by this point.
“It looks like he was sitting with a glass of brandy and a pipe,” she told her partner, “getting ready to watch this old movie, maybe to make notes about it—there’s a file in the cabinet full of notes about old movies, and his prints were on the glass, the pen, and the TV remote—when someone walked up behind him and knocked him out with this missing statue. He must have heard them because his head was turned slightly toward the door—the blow hit on his right temple instead of the side of his head. He bled onto the chair, but just a little—the perp probably grabbed a towel to wrap his head in. The killer cleaned up the pieces of the statue, except for one that ended up under the filing cabinet near the door. And as soon as it was dark, he put him in the car and drove him across the bridge.”
Hawkin dropped the photos onto the low table and sat down in the tufted leather chair. He reached back with his right hand to feel the chair behind his head. “Gilbert was six feet?”
“Just a little over.”
“I guess it’s possible. Anyone shorter, I’d wonder.”
Kate eyeballed the distance from Al’s skull to the chair, and nodded. “Anyone under about five eight couldn’t have bled on that spot, even if the perp managed to hit his head above the back of the chair. But I’d say Gilbert was just tall enough.”
Al put his shoes onto the edge of the table, then said, “Where are his slippers?”
“What?”
“He was found with bare feet. Was he the sort to sit around in a silk dressing gown, pajamas, and nothing on his feet?”
“There’s a pair under his bed on the second floor,” she remembered. “And maybe one in the closet. I’ll go see.”