“I did meet with the man. He was not particularly accommodatin’. He reminded me that I had no authority as I was no longer the MET, and threatened to have me arrested.”
“For what?” I inquired.
“It might have been about enterin’ his office before he arrived. It is most usually locked.”
I could imagine how he had managed that.
He had left particularly early. It seemed that he wanted to make certain he was not turned away again.
“Arrested for picking the lock to his office.” I concluded the obvious.
In typical Brodie response, he brushed it off.
“I don’t suppose that put Judge Cameron in a particularly cooperative attitude.”
“It was a most interesting conversation,” Brodie replied.
“I expressed my condolences over the death of his daughter,” he continued, “and explained that we were making inquiries on behalf of afriendof Charlotte Mallory.”
“He claimed no knowledge of anything that might have upset her, and explained that she was anticipating her forthcoming marriage to Mr. Eddington.”
I was not surprised, considering the secrecy that Mrs. Mallory had undertaken in meeting with me. Either he had spoken the truth that he had no knowledge of any upset, or chose not to acknowledge that there had been.
“Out of curiosity, I then inquired about that murder case that her ladyship recalled.”
“What was he able to tell you?”
“That is the ‘less’ part of the conversation. He claimed only a vague memory of it, an unfortunate situation, he called it. And he inquired who our client was. He was most insistent.”
“What did you tell him?”
One corner of his mouth lifted in smile. “I told him what a lawyer might say, that it was confidential.”
I could only imagine what Judge Cameron’s reaction might have been to that.
“You sensed there was more that he wasn’t saying,” I concluded.
Brodie had that way about him, that sense of something from working countless cases for the MET and then in his private inquiries. And as I had discovered, almost always correct.
I would have pointed out that it was very much like a woman’s intuition about things—a frequent discussion between us, however I kept to the matter at hand.
“Whatdidhe tell you?”
“He remembered that Sir Mallory represented the suspect at the time. It seems that Daniel Eddington was a young lawclerk and had presented the initial defense to the court that the accused had spent the day and evening at his club.”
“What about a witness to the crime mentioned in the newspaper articles?” I inquired.
“He remembered that the witness disappeared and the court was forced to dismiss the charges, not something that usually happens.”
A witness to the murder, a man by the name of Walmsley, by what I was able to find in the newspaper archive. And that same name on the letters sent to Charlotte Mallory!
“What were ye able to learn?” Brodie then asked.
I went over everything I had been able to find in the film archive of the newspaper.
“You have told me there is no such a thing as coincidence.” I turned from the board where I had been adding my notes as I spoke.
There was more that I had learned, that I still struggled to understand.
