Chapter 25: Two Rational Men in an Irrational Room

Pemberton was quiet for eleven seconds. Holmes counted them.

Not the silence of a man composing a lie — Holmes knew that silence by its texture, the small preparatory movements around the mouth and eyes, the breath held half a beat longer than comfort required. This was the silence of a man setting something down. A professional adjustment, the kind made not under duress but by choice. The deliberate decluttering of a workbench.

When Pemberton spoke, his voice had shed approximately forty percent of its warmth and none of its precision.