Chapter Thirty-Eight

Isla and I catch a hansom cab to McCreadie's police office. As tempting as it is to leave a letter while we're in the cemetery, we need to discuss it with McCreadie and also to have him assign someone to watch that spot.

We reach the police office just as Gray is coming out, preparing to return home. He ushers us back inside and updates us as we walk through the station.

"Lord Muir's man confessed," Gray says as he shows us into an empty room. "It was not an easy process, but once he heard that the earl had attempted to murder a young woman, he began to have second thoughts about protecting him. Hugh pretended we believe this fellow was an accomplice to the attempt on your life, which could put him on the gallows. A jury would take one look at such a rough fellow and decide that you were mistaken and clearly he was the one who strangled you."

"Good call."

"Hugh is now speaking to his superiors. But, of course, that does not solve the murder of Sir Alastair. I am hoping that whatever you have to tell us will help with that."

Isla and I tell Gray what we learned. As we explain, his brow furrows.

"And what does all that mean?" he says.

"I'm still working it out," I say. "We presume that whoever killed Sir Alastair took the remains and tried to sell them as mummia. But that's only a theory. Could someone else have found and taken the mummified remains, realizing their worth? Could it be sheer coincidence that someone reached out to the White Lady looking to buy mummia the day after Sir Alastair died? According to Emmett King, someone also reached out to Sir Alastair, but the penmanship and style were entirely different. For now, I can only suggest that we leave a letter at the cemetery along with police to apprehend anyone who comes for it."

"All right then," Gray says, his expression troubled. "I suppose that is indeed all we can do. Let me speak to Hugh. Do you wish to stay for that?"

I shake my head. "Isla and I should head back to the town house and think this through."

"I will join you shortly. Please tell Mrs. Wallace that I may not arrive in time for supper."

Gray doesn't make it back in time for dinner. He does make it for dessert, though, and I'll let him pretend that is accidental. It might even be accidental, given how distracted he is when he arrives. He settles in with Isla and me—McCreadie being busy at the police office—and proceeds to eat his lemon cake without a word to either of us.

"Hungry, I see," Isla says. "Would you like another piece?"

Gray blinks up at us. "Hmm?"

He's not hungry. He's just so wrapped up in his thoughts that he's eating on autopilot. Or maybe he's ingesting sugar to fortify himself for what is to come, because after a half-dozen bites, he says, "I fear I have a new suspect, and I do not like it. I do not like it at all."

"Florence King," I say softly.

His eyes meet mine. "Yes."

"Isla and I came to the same very uncomfortable conclusion. Florence knew what mummia was used for, and she is a woman with the medical knowledge to pen that letter."

"Mrs. King seems guilty of trying to sell the remains," Isla says. "And we hope that is all she's guilty of. We cannot find a strong motive for her to murder Sir Alastair. I know Lord Muir accused her of doing it to stop Sir Alastair's campaign against the female students, but as Mrs. King herself said, that is only stopping one person of many who oppose them. She would need a stronger motive."

Gray wipes his mouth with his napkin, the move slow and deliberate.

"And you have one," I say. "Damn, what did I miss?"

"A piece of evidence I had access to and you did not. One that has been troubling me since I first deciphered it."

"The study notes? The ones her husband… Wait, the penmanship suggested it was written by a woman. I completely forgot that."

"Because her husband took the blame for both the note and the key. Also, you did not see the deciphered notes, and even if you did, the significance might not be clear to someone who was not a medical student. As I said, it was a list of questions, the sort one might use for self-study."

"Right. I used to do that. I'd write questions on one side of index cards and answers on the other so I could test myself. If Mr. King wanted something to practice his cipher with, he might use whatever was at hand, and that could be a list of self-study questions. As for why he'd hide it under his mattress—" I stop. "Shit. Was it only questions? No answers?"

"Only questions."

"The sort one might expect on an exam?"

"Yes," Gray says.

"A list of medical-exam questions, written in a cipher, hidden under the mattress along with a key to Sir Alastair's office. Sir Alastair, who is a professor at the medical college. Wait. No. Mrs. King isn't taking medical classes yet. She only did the matriculation exams last month with the others."

I turn to Isla, who seems puzzled. "That list of questions could have been stolen from Sir Alastair's office. The last thing we'd want is to discover that one of the Seven was cheating."

"What about Mrs. King's husband? He's a year ahead of her, is he not?"

"He is," Gray says, "and he is an inferior student. My fear is not that Mrs. King stole the questions to cheat on her own exams."

"She stole them to help her husband."

"That would explain why she had them in a cipher."

"Using them to help him without him realizing it," I say. "Focusing his studying on the right questions."

"That would be a more laudable explanation than cheating for herself," Isla says.

"Unless it led to murder," I say. "Sir Alastair figures out that Florence stole exam questions for her husband. He threatens to kick Emmett out. As Florence has said, that's a problem—one of them needs to be a practicing doctor. She goes to Sir Alastair's house to speak to him. She slips in during the chaos of preparing for the party and finds him in the artifact storage room. She begs mercy for her husband. Sir Alastair refuses. In a panic—or fury—she kills him. Hides him in the mummy wrappings so the body won't be discovered until she's long gone. She already confirmed that she knows mummia is worth something. So she takes the remains—their apartment suggests they are typical starving students. Only she's worried about what will happen when Sir Alastair is unwrapped and finds an excuse for being nearby during the party."

Isla nods. "She then reaches out to the White Lady to sell the mummia, knowing of her association with a former medical student. And then, when the key and cipher are revealed to have been stolen, her husband leaps in to claim responsibility, with an awkward explanation for both."

Gray takes another slice of cake. "Yet that means that her husband either knew or suspected what she had done."

"Did he figure out that she'd stolen the exam questions?" I say. "Did he also know about the mummia? He claimed to have found that letter in the trash—the one from someone looking for mummia—which is awfully coincidental. Was that an awkward attempt to divert attention again—this time to some uneducated third party who might have the remains?" I shake my head. "Damn it. I'm stuffing square pegs in round holes. This felt like a solution, but Florence doesn't seem to fit much better than Selim Awad."

"Perhaps because we are looking at it wrong," Isla says. "At the wrong culprit, based solely on penmanship."

I stare at her. Then I let out a string of curses. "Of course. The cipher seemed to be in a feminine hand and so did the letter to the White Lady. For the one found at the King apartment, the obvious writer was Mrs. King. For the one sent to the White Lady, Mrs. King also fit. But we're basing all that on deciding that a woman wrote it because it looked like a woman's writing."

"When it could very well be a man with more typically feminine penmanship," Gray says. "One who fits the criteria otherwise and already took credit for the cipher."

"Emmett King."

As a suspect, Emmett King does indeed work better. I still don't like suspecting a pleasant young man who supported the pioneering efforts of his wife and other women. But otherwise, it works.

Emmett takes the key—which he already confessed to. He uses it to steal exam questions. He's caught, and he goes to speak to Sir Alastair, who winds up dead. This would be the same scenario we'd contemplated for his wife—he goes to beg for leniency, Sir Alastair refuses, and there is a fight, during which Emmett kills Sir Alastair.

Realizing what he has done, Emmett unwraps the mummy and wraps Sir Alastair so he won't be discovered until that evening. Then, seeing the unwrapped remains, he remembers that mummia was believed to have medical uses—he only pretended to have missed that part of medical history.

He also knows of an upperclassman who had a sweet deal selling body parts to a trader woman. That makes more sense than Florence knowing the White Lady's former contact. The majority of the male students won't exactly be tossing back a pint with their new female classmates, especially not while gossiping about selling human remains in a side gig.

Does Florence know what her husband did? Is that why she was outside the party? Possibly, but when I consider that more, I realize it's a dangerous ploy, one that initially brought her into our pool of suspects.

No, I think Florence had already been planning her protest, and her talk about the unwrapping party led her husband to realize Sir Alastair would be home that day and the house would be in chaos, giving him a chance to sneak in and speak to the man.

Emmett must either know about the tunnel or had discovered it. He enters that way and then exits that way, only to encounter Selim and knock him out. His stature fits the description Selim gave of the person he saw in that tunnel.

When we arrived at Emmett's door the next day, he must have had a heart attack. To his relief, we were there for Florence, whom he knew was innocent. Then we returned to ask about the key and cipher, and he made up a story.

Why claim to have found a letter about mummia in the trash? Diversion, if clumsily done. After all, he knows the mummified remains are missing, which hasn't been made public. Set us looking for some poorly educated scoundrel who might have killed Sir Alastair for that mummy. As for why the fellow wanted it?

Mummia? Never heard of it. You were right there when I said so.

I don't expect McCreadie will have any problem convincing the police to bring Emmett in. After all, he's not nobility. Or I certainly hope he's not.

I leave that to Gray. What I want now is to compare Emmett's handwriting with that cipher—and see whether it matches the White Lady's recollection—but all that will need to come after Emmett's arrest.

Once again, I'm trying to occupy my time, feeling as if I'm stalled. I'm satisfied with this solution, but I still feel sidelined… even though I put myself there.

I need to find my footing and solidify my position, personally and professionally. I can't step on McCreadie's toes, and I can't become a cop myself. I need to accept that I have chosen a life where being a woman will raise more barriers than it did in my old one.

Would I have felt better seeing Emmett arrested? No. In fact, I might have felt worse, watching a young man dragged away from his trailblazing wife.

I feel bad for Emmett and Florence, but this is justice, and maybe, in the end, I only wanted to be there because not watching his arrest feels like cowardice. But it isn't my place to witness arrests, and doing so would feel ghoulish. I'll be here if anyone needs me, but until then I'll change my mood by reading the latest installment of The Mysterious Adventures of the Gray Doctor. It might make me laugh, and it might make me want to spit nails, but a distraction is a distraction.

I settle in with the pamphlet Jack dropped off earlier. It's the first installment in our mummy mystery, beginning with the scene I already read, where I unwrap the face of the mummy and nearly faint into Gray's arms. That makes me smile again.

From there, the party scene devolves into pure fictional chaos, which is entertaining. Or it's entertaining up to the point where the chaos comes from McCreadie's inability to control the scene, when in reality, he handled it like a pro. For that, I'm outraged on his behalf, which is also usefully distracting.

On to the next scene, where Selim is discovered unconscious in the basement tunnel…

Wait, that never made it into any news reports.

Still, everyone at the Christie house knew. Someone must have talked.

I flip to the next scene and—

"What the hell?" I say, pushing to my feet.

I've been reading alone in the library, and when I hear someone outside the door, I freeze, hoping I didn't say anything too un-Victorian within Lorna's hearing. Instead, it's Isla who walks in.

"Ah," she says, seeing the pamphlet in my hand. "The cause of the outburst, I presume."

"Have you read this?" I say.

"I have," she says calmly. "And I am handling it."

"At first, I figured the Selim-tunnel bit came from a leak in the Christie house, but then I got to the scene where Lord Muir interrupted our breakfast the next morning. The details were spot-on. Same as the details on my dress the night of the party."

"I know, and I am handling it."

"Someone inside this house is supplying…" I trail off as the answer hits. The only possible answer. My gaze shoots to the door.

"We are safe to speak here," she says placidly as she takes a seat. "We no longer need to worry about Lorna listening at keyholes."

I curse as I remember how many times I'd found Lorna hovering outside a door, as if nervous about interrupting. How often she'd offered to help. How often she found an excuse to linger.

Alice had complained about Lorna being nosy, and like Mrs. Wallace, I brushed it off as Alice being protective of her employers' privacy.

"You've fired her," I say.

"Not yet. I want proof, and I am working on obtaining it. Until then, I have informed Mrs. Wallace, who agrees with my assessment. She is helping me keep Lorna busy at tasks that do not allow her to eavesdrop or follow us."

"Which is why you wouldn't let her go to bed when she had a headache. You figured she'd read the letter she brought and hoped to follow us."

"Yes, the letter was clearly unsealed, and if I had any further doubt, her sudden headache erased it."

I wave the pamphlet. "You think she wrote this?"

"Sadly, no. I say ‘sadly' because, if she did, I would feel obligated to commend her resourcefulness and ingenuity. It would be hard to fire a young woman who took such efforts to fund an independent life. No, I am convinced she is only being paid to spy on us for the actual writer, who is likely Jack's rival, Joseph McBride, based on my analysis of the word choices and writing style. I have been working with Jack to confirm that."

"You've been busy."

"More like you were busy—you and Duncan—and I recognized these serialized adventures pose a threat to your investigations. I decided to delve deeper while you were otherwise occupied. It was only after reading this latest installment that I realized we had a spy under our own roof."

"Another housemaid gone, then."

"I am afraid so."

"Annis warned us. She said Lorna was too normal to work out… and the fact she did work out should have suggested something was up. Guess I'll be picking up my dustrag for a while longer."

Isla shakes her head. "I will speak to Annis and borrow one of her girls while I find another maid."

I don't argue, but I know that won't work. The Gray household—with its scientist siblings and former-criminal staff—can't have just anyone working here. That's why they kept Catriona for so long. As difficult as she was, she'd never been frightened off by the blood spatter or sold gossip about her employers.

"What we need—" I begin, when Gray comes tromping down the hall, the sound of his boots unmistakable.

I pop into the hall. "How did it go?"

"Hmm." He passes me and heads straight for the bottle of whisky on the desktop.

"That well, huh?" I say. "An ugly arrest?"

"No arrest at all. The Kings were not at home." He lifts a glass and waves it from me to Isla.

"Yes, please," we both say.

He pours three glasses and passes us ours. "The police are stationed at the apartment, as well as at the cemetery, in hopes Emmett King returns looking for a response from the White Lady. In the meantime…" He reaches into his pocket and withdraws a packet of tied papers. "You wished to see the cipher. I have brought that, along with the solution."

I take the pages. "Whoa. You traced out the cipher instead of bringing the original. I'm impressed."

"It was a bit of work, but it saved me from that noise of deep distress you make when we handle actual evidence."

"Thank you."

Seeing the cipher page again, it still looks like feminine handwriting, which only makes me kick myself for making such a gendered presumption. Yes, the penmanship is very small and pretty, with the sort of loops associated with women, but that would be like seeing a six-foot-tall figure and presuming it was male. I should be the one to question judgments like that, and I didn't.

I read over the list of deciphered medical-exam questions and then pass it to Isla. I don't blame Gray for mistaking them for study notes. That's the obvious answer… until you ponder why they were written in cipher. Emmett stole the questions for a medical exam, which he wanted to study without his wife knowing what they were, so he wrote them in a cipher, inspired by a conversation they'd had about ciphers.

"I'd like to get a copy of this to the White Lady," I say. "It'll need to go through Queen Mab, which could take a bit of time. I'd also like to compare it to a known sample of Emmett's handwriting. He confessed to writing this, but once it becomes evidence he may withdraw his statement."

"He might even blame his wife," Isla murmurs. "Claim he was covering for her."

"Let's hope not, but yes. I'd also love to help Hugh by proving this is Emmett's writing even before he's arrested. Where would be the best place to get a verified sample? The university?"

"It should be easier than that," Gray says. "The police are guarding the Kings' apartment, which means we will have access to it." He checks his watch. "It is getting late, but we could go now if you like."

"Please."