"27 Clement Street…"
Charlotte's gaze rested on the file in her hands, and she read the address aloud without quite meaning to.
Then her brow creased slightly, as though something had occurred to her.
Ever since coming back from Fleet Street, she had not felt entirely like herself.
Charlotte sat in the armchair, the file on Emily Collins pinched between her fingers, her eyes on that address — 27 Clement Street.
Except the girl's eyes were not actually focused on it.
Her gaze was loose, unfixed, her whole self adrift somewhere else, only her brain still ticking over on instinct, sorting the information in her field of vision at the most rudimentary level.
27 Clement Street was one of the more respectable streets in the Southwark District, with a few cafes nearby and a rather good bookshop.
It was where Emily Collins had last worked. Which was to say, Hannigan's residence.
Her mind was pulling up everything it held about that district, but the retrieval kept snagging on something else.
Scenes from yesterday's interview replayed themselves over and over — Miles's questions, Russell's answers, that cup of black tea gone cold.
And her own closing remark.
A necessary nuisance. A catalyst.
At the time the words had felt perfectly sound.
The metaphor was apt. Airtight.
Yet recalling it now, for reasons she could not name, it brought a strange flush of embarrassment.
Charlotte touched her own ear without thinking — cool.
And still she was certain something there was burning.
Her frown deepened.
Why those two words in particular?
What exactly had she been thinking?
Once again her thoughts spiralled into recursion.
She tried to take apart her own state of mind with the deductive method she prided herself on, to analyse every minute expression, every motive and logical thread behind every sentence.
And the harder she tried, the more tangled her thinking became.
Because the observer and the observed were the same person, which violated the most basic principle of science.
It was like being lost in a labyrinth built of countless mirrors.
Every corner showed her herself, and every one of those selves regarded her with the same expression, leaving her nowhere to run.
And the culprit behind all of it, it seemed, was the fellow currently sprawled across the sofa.
Charlotte's eyes drifted over of their own accord, the vague stare slowly sharpening into focus.
Russell lay sprawled on the sofa opposite her, holding an aged dossier concerning Pilsen and reading it with evident relish.
He was so absorbed that he hadn't registered her gaze at all.
Flames leapt in the fireplace, and the warm orange halo of light traced the line of his profile, soft and distinct at once.
She watched him for a moment, her gaze sliding down from his profile to those long fingers with their clean, defined knuckles.
Pale hands. Very clean. The nails trimmed neatly.
These were the hands that made her a cup of warm milk when she stayed up too late, that made her breakfast, that cradled her head so gently when she fell asleep without meaning to.
…
Charlotte snatched her eyes away, drew a deep breath, and pinched the bridge of her nose.
This was getting worse.
She lowered her hand and picked the file up again.
27 Clement Street.
Southwark District. A cafe nearby with a blue signboard, the owner a middle-aged man past fifty who liked to set a pot of lavender by the door.
She had gathered those details during her earlier canvassing. They had nothing to do with the case; she simply remembered everything out of habit.
Russell would probably like that cafe.
He seemed to enjoy the atmosphere of little places like that — chatting idly with the owner, watching passersby while he waited for someone.
Wait.
Charlotte's frown tightened further.
Why was she thinking about what he liked?
She was working a case.
She was analysing where Pilsen might be hiding, considering what the address 27 Clement Street signified.
None of that had anything to do with Russell.
Yet her thoughts ran like a horse off the rein, bolting in that direction no matter how she pulled.
And for no reason at all, she remembered again the list her mind had generated on its own yesterday in the interview room, when she was asked what she thought of Russell.
She remembered spending she didn't know how long filling that invisible logic diagram with arrows, sealing off every possible path, until only one door remained.
The door she had not opened. The door she would not open.
Because that conclusion was wrong. It had to be wrong.
She must have missed a variable, overlooked a premise, or — or she was simply off form today and needed rest.
Yes. Rest.
Charlotte set the file down, stood, and crossed to the window.
Outside, London lay under the thin sunlight of a winter afternoon.
Baker Street was sparse with pedestrians. Now and then a carriage rattled past, its wheels grinding over the flagstones with a dull, heavy sound.
On the roof across the way a flock of pigeons had settled, dusty grey, necks drawn in, huddled together for warmth.
She pushed the window open.
Cold air poured in, carrying coal smoke and damp.
She breathed deeply, letting the clean, biting chill fill her lungs, hoping it might clear her head.
It didn't work.
The cold drove nothing away. If anything, it sharpened certain memories.
Such as an earlier occasion when she had fallen asleep in the sitting room and woken to find herself lying in her own bed.
Such as yesterday morning, when she woke to find her face that close to his.
His eyes had been on her, those black eyes carrying a trace of amusement, and something like resignation.
She should have sat up at once. Should have looked away. Should have said something.
She hadn't.
She had simply held his gaze.
Why?
Because she had only just woken and her brain wasn't fully engaged yet. That was the most reasonable explanation.
But if she truly hadn't been fully awake, why did she remember his eyes so precisely?
…
Charlotte shut the window, turned, and walked back to the evidence board.
She stood before that wall plastered with maps, photographs, clues and red thread, her eyes travelling over the pins she had driven in with her own hands.
The regions she had linked with black elastic. The key locations she had marked in red ink.
This was a world she had built herself.
Clear. Ordered. Controlled. Comprehensible at a glance.
Every line had its logic, every pin its place, every case its solution.
This was what was right.
And yet her mind kept straying to another world entirely.
A world with no pins, no elastic, no key locations circled in red.
A world with only one person in it.
And a heap of details that possessed no logic whatsoever, and no meaning worth excavating.
He hummed while he made breakfast. He warmed the cup with hot water before he brewed coffee. He rubbed the edges of the pages between his fingers while he read.
When he smiled, fine creases gathered at the corners of his eyes. When he had cradled her head in the carriage, his hands were light, careful, as though he were afraid of waking something.
Something precious. Something easily broken.
Charlotte's breath caught for an instant.
She raised a hand and pressed it over her heart.
Something in there was beating.
A little faster than usual, though not obviously so.
If she didn't deliberately attend to it, she might not have noticed at all.
But if she did attend to it — then it was almost impossible to ignore.
And it was precisely then that Charlotte heard Russell's voice behind her.
"What have you been doing over there this whole time?"
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