It was where he also made his own scientific inquiries with specimens in jars or under a microscope, and on occasion hadremoved a bullet from a wound. I could personally attest to his skills as a surgeon.
His assistant, Sara, greeted me as I arrived. She was quite young, but wasn’t at all put off by the sight of wounds, broken bones, or other ailments among those who sought Mr. Brimley’s care. She would make a good surgeon, he had declared, with a natural curiosity about the human body.
Mr. Brimley was in the back of his shop, hislaboratoryas he called it, with that shelf the length of one wall for his microscopes, pill-press machine, and camera that he had previously acquired.
“Ah, Lady Forsythe,” he greeted me, looking up from a steel tray before him on the counter opposite, wearing magnifying goggles and looking much like an enormous bug seated on the stool before the counter.
“I was hoping to speak with you or Mr. Brodie today.”
“You have something regarding the thread you discovered?” I had been hopeful although fully prepared that the thread might have been too small to reveal anything that might be useful.
“Indeed.”
He removed his goggles, very similar to the ones my aunt wore when she was driving about London, terrorizing people on the streets in her automobile.
These goggles were quite different as Mr. Brimley had explained. The lenses were actually magnification glass, to provide him a means of studying something other than through the much smaller lens of a microscope. It worked quite well when studying body parts, he had informed Brodie and me.
“Something important?”
“That would be for you to determine,” he replied. “I have it here for you to take a look.” He pulled out a stool before the countertop, checked the viewer of the microscope, then stood back.
I sat atop the stool, removed my hat, then peered through the microscope onto the glass slide below. With the magnification of the lens, it looked as if I was staring at a large log, which in fact was the fiber Mr. Brimley had retrieved.
“You might want to focus it,” he suggested pointing out the knob at the side of the microscope.
I adjusted it for a clearer look at the fiber.
“It’s dark blue,” I commented.
He nodded. “What else do you see?”
“It’s quite smooth.” I looked up from the microscope.
“You have a keen eye, Miss Forsythe. What might those two things tell you?”
“The garment was dark blue, possibly wool, perhaps high quality by the smoothness of the fiber, possibly from a cut or tear in the fabric. From our examination of the body at the mortuary, Charlotte Mallory was wearing a burgundy-colored gown with jacket over, not dark blue.”
“My guess would be that it is a very fine worsted wool, and with the color, the sort found in a gentleman’s very fine coat,” he concluded.
Fine gentleman’s clothing.
“Mind you, she could have come by it before her encounter with the murderer.”
It might mean something, or nothing. I thought of her fiancé, Daniel Eddington, or possibly another student she had called on before going to the print shop, or any other possibility where she might have come in contact. Except for that one glaring detail.
“Under one of her fingernails, Mr. Brimley?”
“There is that, and quite firmly lodged there was well. Almost as if…”
I finished the thought. “As if she had reached out when she was struck down, in an attempt to defend herself, or clutching at her attacker’s coat after he struck.
“And one more small detail,” he replied. “Take another look. Most particularly at one end.”
As I did, he reached out and turned the knob at the side of the microscope. It gradually emerged, something I had not noticed. A small sliver of something embedded in the end of the fiber.
“The remnants of silk thread,” Mr. Brimley said then. “Whoever the man was who wore that coat, is most definitely a gentleman of some means.”
I made my notes before leaving his shop. I had no idea yet what any of it might mean, if anything, about Charlotte Mallory’s murder. It was possible that the fiber and thread were from a coat she had thought of wearing then decided against it. Or possibly from that of her fiancé, Daniel Eddington. I needed to know more.
