A Study in Seduction Read online

  “All right,” Charleston said, rubbing his hands together. “I’ve laid out the scenario. Now why don’t I give the rest of you a chance to weigh in? Would anyone like to volunteer what they would glean from the evidence offered so far?”

  A hand shot up in the front row. I couldn’t see the woman’s face, and her casual blouse and slacks set a very different tone from her dress at the reception last night, but her flame-red hair and delicate build made her easy to identify. Yesterday’s events had proven she wasn’t as delicate as she looked. She’d thrown and pinned a man who had to weigh nearly twice what she did.

  The reception had been all astir after that, even John and Garrett, as if they’d never witnessed an example of excellent physical conditioning before. You wouldn’t think training in martial arts would be all that uncommon among the enforcers of justice. When dealing with criminals, it was careless not to be prepared for a situation to come to blows.

  Several other hands lifted in the audience, but Charleston’s face lit up when his gaze rested on the young woman in the front. He motioned for her to speak.

  “What you were saying about the tire marks,” she said in a voice that was soft yet precise enough to carry through the room. Her American-esque English was faintly accented with what sounded like a variety of mild influences rather than a single source I could pinpoint. “The obvious conclusion from the depth of the impressions and the drops of oil is that the perpetrator sat in the car for several hours waiting for the victim—not knowing her well enough to guess when she’d arrive.”

  I suppressed a sigh. Yes, that was the obvious conclusion, and the one almost anyone here could have drawn. It took real observation and insight to—

  “I’d suggest that answer is misleadingly easy,” the woman went on, to my surprise. She motioned to the photos. “In my opinion, it’s more likely that the perp did know the victim and had parked there to visit her many times in the past, resulting in deepened impressions.”

  Charleston’s eyebrows leapt up. “How would you support that conclusion?” he asked.

  I found myself tilting forward slightly to make sure I caught every word of the woman’s response.

  “It’s a very narrow turn into the driveway,” she said confidently. “You can see the post has been scraped often—but there’s no fresh marking, as though any recent visitors were practiced at avoiding it. The treads themselves look like the type to support an older car that might leak a few drops of oil in a short time. If I were investigating, I’d take soil samples to determine if the same oil lingered deeper in the earth and check the victim’s friends and associates for anyone owning a leaky older car.”

  “Well.” The professor blinked, and his lips twitched with amusement. “I’ll have to give that take some thought. Anyone have another angle to offer?”

  He called on some fellow farther down our row, but I was still watching the woman ahead of us. Her attention to detail and the swift leaps of her deductions—they almost reminded me of my own line of reasoning with...

  I turned to John. “Did you write up any public accounts of the Yardsley murder?” Perhaps she wasn’t particularly swift but merely remembering past investigations not her own.

  John shook his head. His puzzled expression faded after a moment. “Her approach was quite a bit like yours there, wasn’t it? She couldn’t have read about it through any public channel that I know of.”

  The police records wouldn’t have laid out my process either. She’d followed a similar train of thought through the adeptness of her own mind.

  My gaze settled back on her bright hair. This conference might turn out to be more than mundane after all.

  “You know,” our little detective inspector said, trailing behind me as I strode into the hotel’s library, “some people might call this stalking.”

  I dismissed Garrett’s comment with a wave of my hand. “I’m merely looking to talk with a colleague of sorts. We’re at a conference meant for the sharing of ideas. And I think you are just as interested to learn more about her as I am.”

  He didn’t argue that point. John nodded toward a table at the back of the room just as I spotted that head of flaming red hair. We made our way over, past gleaming modern bookcases that held mostly recent volumes and none of the scent of stale binding glue and aged paper that belonged in a proper library.

  The woman was poring over the contents of a folder, several photographs on one side and what looked like a police report on the other, glancing up only briefly to tap a few notes on a propped tablet. She was so absorbed in her study that she didn’t notice our approach immediately, which gave me a moment to study her.

  Other than that stark red hair, her eyes were her most striking feature: deep-set and the irises darkly ringed in a hue I couldn’t determine at a distance. The rest of her pale face contained a mix of contradictory features. Her upturned nose and sharp chin gave an almost childlike impression that contrasted with those eyes and full lips and her overall bearing, which spoke of maturity beyond her apparent years. The set of her shoulders said they’d carried a lot but were prepared for more, as the chips fell.

  Not a countenance one would soon forget.

  Beyond her bearing, everything about her spoke of care and exactness. She kept her fingernails neatly trimmed and clean. Her clothes showed not the slightest stain or tear. She wore no accessories other than a simple but elegant silver ladies watch, not designed to draw attention but to keep time impeccably.

  The entire effect revealed little about her history. She was unmarried and, to the best of my judgment, unattached. There were difficulties in her past she’d risen above—but what precisely I couldn’t determine. Intriguing.

  We were only a few feet from the table when she registered our footsteps. Her head jerked up, her slim hand automatically moving to flip the folder closed. Ah, that response I could read. She wasn’t supposed to have brought the file here.

  “My apologies for interrupting your work,” I said, coming to a stop beside the table. “I’m Sherlock Holmes, and these are my colleagues, Dr. John Watson and Detective Inspector Garrett Lestrade. We were quite impressed by your analysis in the trace evidence seminar this morning. I was hoping we might get to know each other a little better.”

  The woman considered me for a moment, her hand still resting protectively on her folder. Her eyes were gray—the pale shade of a frozen lake bleeding into an outer ring that was dark as a thunderstorm. I’d imagine many men found them difficult to look away from.

  After a few seconds, her shoulders eased down a smidgeon. “Jemma Moriarty,” she said. “You… want to get to know me?”

  She clearly recognized me, or at least my name. Whatever fame I’d earned could perhaps have its downsides if it intimidated her.

  I propped myself against the table. John took the seat across from her, and Garrett stayed on his feet, gripping the back of the next chair over.

  “I’ll be honest,” I said. “Even the experts assembled here tend to fall into the same tired patterns of thinking. You have a rare ingenuity. I like to cultivate as many inspired associates as I can.”

  “You were pretty impressive giving that gunman the smackdown,” Garrett put in. “A bit of a firecracker, aren’t you?”

  “I guess you could say that.” She flashed a smile. “I do my best.”

  “What made you focus on those details in the scene Professor Charleston laid out?” I asked.

  “They were the details that were there,” Jemma said matter-of-factly. “I’ve never believed in accepting the obvious answer from the most obvious evidence. You get to the truth faster if you take every available factor into account.”

  A spark of electricity raced through my nerves like it had when I’d listened to her speak in the seminar. She did have a mind, all right.

  “I couldn’t have said it much better myself.” I dropped my gaze to her file folder, an itch of curiosity chasing the eager spark. I’d developed numerous strategies for coping with b
oredom in recent years, so no danger lurked in that area now, but I found it vastly more satisfying to avoid the sensation altogether.

  It would be the perfect irony if the most stimulating part of this conference had nothing to do with the conference at all.

  “What are you working on?” I asked.

  Jemma tucked the folder a little closer to her. “Just a case from back home that’s basically closed.”

  I judged her reaction. “But not solved.”

  She shrugged awkwardly. “We—I—ran out of leads. I thought being here in this atmosphere, something might click. No luck so far.”

  Her hesitation only made me more intrigued. I nodded to the folder. “I’ve yet to meet a case I couldn’t crack. Why don’t you let me put my mind to it and see if I can’t shake something loose?”

  “Well, I…” A bit of color rose in her pale cheeks. “I’m not actually supposed to have printed off the documents or brought them with me.”

  “I can manage discretion,” I said.

  “He isn’t just full of himself, as much as he might sound like it,” John said with a warm grin. “If there’s a problem in existence Sherlock can’t work out, I haven’t seen it.”

  “Those of us at Scotland Yard have started to rely on him for our most complicated cases,” Garrett added, more grudgingly.

  Her hand stayed tensed on the folder. “We only just met. I couldn’t ask you for a favor like that.”

  I waved off her concern. “You’d be doing me a favor. Alleviate the boredom of this humdrum symposium. What could it hurt? I swear I won’t mention it to your superior officers back in…?”

  “Freising,” Jemma said. “It’s a small city just outside of—”

  “Munich,” I filled in. “Are you German, then?” That could explain the softness of her Rs, but not much else in her accent.

  In that moment, her smile looked almost sly. “For the time being. I wasn’t born there.”

  The woman was a puzzle, but I could unravel that mystery soon enough. For now, I wanted to keep my primary goal in sight. I tapped the edge of the folder. “Five minutes. You can kick me off the case if I don’t find anything.”

  Her eyebrows rose. She hesitated a second longer, and then she released the file to me. As I opened it, she crossed her arms over her chest, tension lingering in her shoulders. Garrett leaned over and John got up to peer at the folder’s contents with me.

  A city councilor had been found dead from a head wound on the side of a road on the outskirts of Freising—but one glimpse at the photo told me it hadn’t been an encounter with a car. The side of the poor fellow’s skull had been bashed open with a blunt rectangular instrument, the rest of him uninjured.

  John grimaced. “With a hit like that, he’d have been gone so fast he wouldn’t have suffered much.”

  “He was moved there,” I said, glancing over the surroundings. “The murder happened at another site.”

  “We determined that,” Jemma said quietly. “But not where.”

  Following that trail would be rather difficult at this distance. I considered the photograph again. “The assailant knew him—it was personal.”

  “How can you tell that from one picture?” Garrett said.

  I pointed at the wound. “I expect John could follow my reasoning.”

  My friend considered the photograph. He’d struggled to piece together the blatant clues when he’d first begun assisting with my investigations, but in the past two years he’d proven himself a quick study.

  “It was a crime of passion,” he said. “You don’t bludgeon someone that close up and that hard unless you’re in the grip of strong emotion.”

  “Rage, most likely,” I said with a satisfied nod.

  Garrett grimaced. “Maybe this councilor was such an arsehole he could provoke rage in a stranger.”

  I ignored the off-the-cuff remark and flipped through the other photos from the scene. My fingers stilled around one near the back that showed what appeared to be a torn fragment of another photo.

  “What’s this?” I asked, setting it on the table.

  Jemma peered at it and frowned. “We found that in his jacket pocket. Chances are it had nothing to do with his murder. Even if it does, it’s impossible to determine what it was a picture of from just that piece.”

  A smile curled my lips. “Not at all,” I said. “I can tell you exactly where you’d find that bit of stonework. It’s just a quick jog across town. The real question is, why was your murdered councilor carrying a torn photo taken in London when he died?”

  Chapter Three

  Jemma

  It was a thrill to watch Sherlock Holmes at work—even more so because he clearly didn’t suspect how much I’d engineered his current quest. I had to admit I hadn’t expected him to identify the location in the scrap of photograph so quickly and from memory.

  Now he strode briskly along the posh West London street without any concern that he was leaving John and me at his heels, taking the buildings and people around us in with his sharp gaze from beneath the fall of his dark hair. The crisp early spring breeze stirred the messy waves, and his trench coat billowed behind his lanky frame.

  He thought he saw everything, picked up on every clue. He had no idea how much horror lurked at the edges of this world, hungry and conscienceless. Would he and his regular companions have believed that the things I knew even existed? Doubtful.

  “From the way you handled the gunman at the reception, you’ve obviously done some combat training,” John said to me, managing to keep up a pretty good pace and to still look relaxed about it despite his mild limp. His walking stick tapped against the pavement in an upbeat patter that fit his whole demeanor. “Do you have a preferred style?”

  “I wanted to learn a variety of methods so I could apply whichever works best in any given situation,” I said. “I started with Judo and Muay Thai and worked up to Krav Maga.”

  Holmes—well, Sherlock; we were all on a first name basis now—hummed to himself. He glanced back at me for a second before leading us across the street. “I’d have said there was some American military influence in your form as well.”

  Oh, he did see a lot, didn’t he? An eager prickling ran through me at the thought of all those wits at my disposal.

  “Funny you should mention that,” I said, as if surprised. “While I was training, I’d often do some sparring with a friend of mine who served in the American army. I guess a few tics rubbed off on me.”

  A smile curled the corners of Sherlock’s lips. That was how he got off: noticing and interpreting details other people didn’t or couldn’t. Every moment I spent in his presence was further confirmation of what I’d guessed—that his greatest point of weakness was his pride in his intellectual strengths. Did he care about my stakes in this supposed investigation? Not a chance. He’d come this far because of his need to show off his abilities at every turn.

  He had an ego as big as an anaconda and equally difficult to shake. Play to that, and he’d dance, thinking it was all his idea. Like he was right now.

  Arrogance aside, he had recognized exactly where that photo had been taken. He drew up short and pointed farther down the street to a stately bank building with a textured arc of stone along its top.

  “This isn’t the only building in the world or even this city designed in that style,” he said. “But the combination of the texturing and the wear and the quality of the stone told the story clearly enough. Your dead councilor’s photograph was taken within a foot of where we’re standing right now.”

  Delight at the problem solved rang through his firm tenor. We’d only made it to the start of the trail, though. I peered at the bank building, choosing my words with care. If I gave him too large a shove in the right direction, he’d pick up on my intent, and then I’d be nowhere near getting him to the real goal.

  “I can see it,” I said. “But there’s no way to tell what was in the rest of the photo—or whether it was something that led to the murde
r.”

  “We can tease out the possibilities and test our hypotheses.” Sherlock steepled his hands together in front of him as if to hold his enthusiasm in check. “If it did prompt the murder, we have to assume it contained some sort of incriminating material, most likely as a point of blackmail. A photograph taken from this angle would have caught some of the neighboring buildings. Which of these do you think would be most likely to produce illicit behavior?”

  I had to make it sound as if I were working through the options right now. “I suppose a bank robbery would be too convenient—and conventional. I don’t notice anything particularly provocative about the boutique next door. And then…” I tipped forward to peer at the next sign. “Cavalier’s. What kind of business is that?”

  “I believe it’s a gentlemen’s club,” John said in a wry tone.

  “Indeed,” Sherlock said. “One of the old-fashioned ones that still doesn’t allow any gentlewomen as members.”

  “Exclusive clubs can be a hotbed for activity that skirts the law,” I said. “I suppose if I were investigating I’d start there.”

  Sherlock’s smile grew. “As would I. So, let us investigate. I’d like to get a look at their membership file to determine if any of those ‘gentlemen’ have recently been in the vicinity of Munich.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “I don’t have any jurisdiction here, and you’re not even supposed to know about the crime. They aren’t going to hand over their members’ names to anyone who asks.”

  “Who says we’re going to ask?” Sherlock said. “Sometimes bringing about justice requires a little bending of the law.”

  I’d already known he held that philosophy—no doubt it was another reason that Garrett Lestrade of Scotland Yard had begged off this little expedition, citing an appearance he was expected to make. But it wouldn’t do to sound eager myself.