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Miss Decima steepled her fingers. ‘I will put forward a theory. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that Chief Constable Cartwright is the man responsible for the murder of Constable Watts.’

‘Why?’ asked Temperance instantly.

‘Because he wished to prevent Watts from revealing information about the death of Sir William Crace,’ said Miss Decima, raising the police file. ‘A motive which may well be proved or disproved in the fullness of time. For now, we shall imagine it is true. Cartwright planned and committed the murder, with the intention that the blame should fall on the suffragettes. What, then, would be his means and opportunity?’

Temperance and I looked at each other again. It felt weird, being back in a three like this. It’s hard to go back to a crime-fighting trio when one of you tried to kill the other two.

‘Well, the opportunity’s obvious,’ I muttered. ‘He organized the police plans for the demonstration. He lives on the road where the murder happened, too. If he needed to set up anything in advance, he could have done that easily.’

‘Such as …’ said Miss Decima.

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. But in my head, I was thinking: the sunken area outside the basement windows. The dead pigeons. The policeman in the sewer.

‘He had plenty of means, too,’ said Temperance. ‘He has access to a network of police officers and he can instruct them to do what he wants. He could have got any one of them to go into Lavinia Welford’s room and steal the murder weapon in the weeks before.’

I thought back. ‘He has a watertight alibi for the night of the murder, as well. He was meeting with the Chief Commissioner that evening – no one’s going to argue with that, are they? He could have got someone else to kill Watts and made sure that he was nowhere near Kensington Gore when it happened.’

‘Who?’ said Miss Decima.

‘Peter, obviously,’ said Temperance. ‘That’s why Cartwright had to kill him afterwards.’

I shook my head. ‘No, Peter covered for me. It had to be someone else.’

Temperance frowned. ‘Then why would Cartwright kill Peter?’

I thought about Peter’s face, when he found me in the basement. He had been so, so desperate to hide something. What was it he’d whispered to me on those steps? What had he been so afraid of?

‘Maybe … maybe Peter found out about Cartwright planning the murder,’ I said. ‘So Cartwright had to kill him, before he told me. With poison.’

Temperance shrugged. ‘Easy enough for a chief constable to get poison from an evidence locker.’

Miss Decima’s eyes flicked between us, following our thread of thought. ‘Quite. Perhaps that is why Peter was emptying my trunk room: perhaps, he was instructed by Cartwright to find something in my personal effects. Maybe it was at that point that Peter began to suspect the true nature of what was going on.’

I frowned. ‘But what would Cartwright want in your trunk room?’

Miss Decima didn’t reply. It was a silence I knew all too well, one that meant it had something to do with her secret investigation.

She broke her own silence by clapping her hands. ‘Very well! That is good enough for me. Chief Constable Cartwright is our current chief suspect. From now on, we must act with extreme caution. I have every Ivy on the books combing the borough, searching for houses which recently employed Irish maids who have inexplicably disappeared. I shall go home and await their findings. Temperance, find the post-mortem report, please, and send it on. As for you, Stephen, you have rather a lot to be getting on with! You need to discover what it was Peter was hiding from you: difficult enough when he was alive, and certainly no mean feat when he’s dead. You shall start by thoroughly searching his quarters.’

I frowned. ‘But how am I going to …’

I turned and saw – with a miserable sense of fate that was fast becoming familiar – that Miss Decima was holding out her set of lock-picks.

42

Wednesday, 21 June, 11.08 a.m.

If I ever get my hands on the man who invented lock-picks, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. First, I’ll glue a chopstick to each of his fingers. Then I’ll shut him in a locked room and set the carpet on fire. Then I’ll hand him a set of keys greased up with lard and say, come on, then, sunshine, let yourself out – go on, it’s simple, anyone can do it.

I dropped one of the flipping hooks for the hundredth flipping time, cursing under my breath. I was angry at myself, really. Angry for not standing up to Miss Decima, angry for having to break into the bedroom of a dead man who’d been nice to me, angry for wanting to be a detective’s assistant in the first place. Most of all, I was angry for forgetting to ask Miss Decima how to use lock-picks, because it was absolutely – pardon my French – bleeding impossible.

I glanced over my shoulder. I was crouched in the basement of Number 88, pressed up against Peter’s bedroom door. I’d crawled past the porter’s office to get down here, but it was taking much longer than I’d expected. I was starting to panic. It was surely only a matter of time before someone found me trying to break into the room of a recently murdered man, and that never looked good, let me tell you. I gritted my teeth and had another crack. ‘Open, you, you stupid effing –’

I dropped the hook, again. This time it bounced under the door to Peter’s bedroom, beyond where I could reach.

Nan always believed in the power of words. She believed that language was mankind’s gift from God Almighty, and that to use coarse language was to affront the Lord Himself. Maybe that was the reason I found Miss Decima’s … indelicate vocabulary so trying. But sometimes in life, you just have to swear.

‘Biscuits,’ I hissed.