A Stranger in Mayfair clm-4

by Charles Finch

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He’s in Parliament, a genial cove, quite sociable. One of his footmen went missing last night.”

  “I call that careless of Starling.”

  Lenox frowned. “It would be funnier if this unfortunate lad, Frederick Clarke, hadn’t been found dead in a nearby alley.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Quite. I was just over at the scene.”

  “Oh?”

  Lenox described Constable Johnson, Ludo’s strange behavior, and finding the murder weapon.

  “Well spotted,” said Dallington at the conclusion of the story. “The brick, I mean. Does it really help us, though?”

  “In a sense, yes. As I just said, I believe it means the murderer is local. Impatient, too-or in hot temper, though that’s a debatable point. It also means that the Yard won’t waste time searching for a weapon.”

  There was a knock at the door, and Graham entered, followed by Thomas McConnell.

  “Hullo, Charles!” said the doctor. “Welcome back to England. And Dallington, excellent to see you.”

  “The baby is imminent?” Lenox asked.

  “It’s all very close,” answered McConnell. He looked, as ever, slightly worn, with his battered heather coat and lined eyes, but he seemed happy as well. The two worst moods of his past-manic amiability and morose depression-were neither of them to be seen.

  “Do you have time to look at something for me? It’s why I wrote you.”

  “With all the pleasure in the world.”

  Lenox ran over the details of the case for McConnell’s benefit, and then the three men sat and discussed how to handle things. In the end they concluded that Dallington would delve into matters on Curzon Street and McConnell would go have a look at the body. This left Lenox with the rather dry task of sending a note to Grayson Fowler and asking him to share information, always a tricky business. They agreed to reconvene the next evening with their findings.

  Though Lenox had a day full of meetings tomorrow to look forward to, he felt a slight pang. Was this as close as he would get, from now on? What about the midnight chase and the hot trail? Were they left to Dallington now?

  Little did Lenox know how involved he would soon become, and how close to home danger would strike.

  Chapter Six

  Lady Jane returned that evening at half past eight. At nearly the same time, so did her butler, Kirk. He had been visiting a sister in York for two weeks (“Who knew that butlers had sisters?” Dallington had said when he heard the news) but had come back by the evening train. With him and Graham both below stairs, it was critical that the issue of who would be the house’s butler be resolved once and for all. Doubly so, Lenox felt, because of how unprotected he had felt at the day’s meeting without a personal secretary.

  He and Lady Jane discussed this, and their respective days, over lamb and preserves, and afterward retired into the cozy sitting room in what had been Jane’s house before the merger. It seemed funny to walk to it without leaving his own house-but then, Charles realized even as he thought that, it was all his own house now. How strange.

  “Do you find yourself still going to your own door?” asked Lenox.

  “Sometimes. I came to yours so often anyway that the change isn’t so great.”

  Despite the fusion, this room had retained entirely Jane’s personality, and he adored every part of it-the old letters tied with ribbon on the desk, the deep sofas, the rose-colored and white wallpaper (his own study had a brooding mahogany), the pretty curlicued mirror over the dainty bureau. Gradually, he knew, his own ways would suffuse her rooms, and hers would suffuse his. For the moment, it reminded him how special, how lucky, his new life was, and how intimate an act living together could be. In his fortieth year he was learning something entirely new.

  They retired early, laughing lightly and holding hands, to bed. The next morning was bright and wet, with a big wind shifting all the trees on Hampden Lane. Lenox ventured out for another day of meetings (Graham was noncommittal all morning, and Lenox sensed he wanted some time) and arrived home late and soaked to the bone from the short walk.

  Apparently McConnell and Dallington had been busy, too; freshly arrived, they had towels and were patting their faces dry.

  “Hullo, both of you,” said Lenox. “I bet you had a more exciting day than I did.”

  “What about corridors of power and all that nonsense?” asked Dallington, lighting his cigar. The usual neat carnation sat in his buttonhole, and despite the rain he looked well put together.

  McConnell, on the other hand, looked weary but had an unmistakable glow on his face-the pleasure of work.

  “It can be exciting,” said Lenox thoughtfully, “but at the moment all I want is to sit in the chamber itself, rather than listen to a long, haranguing lecture about taxes.”

  “Be a brick and make them lower, all right?” said Dallington.

  Lenox laughed. “Yes, all right.”

  “Good chap.”

  There was a pause, and all three men waited expectantly. “Shall I go first?” asked McConnell after a moment.

  “By all means,” said Lenox. “No, wait! In all the activity of the day I plum forgot to write Inspector Fowler. He keeps late hours, though, so perhaps a note will still catch him. Just a moment.”

  The detective went to his desk and scribbled down a few lines, then rang the bell for Kirk.

  “Take this down to Scotland Yard, would you?” he asked.

  Kirk, looking taken aback, said, “Shall I leave it with the morning post?”

  “I’m afraid I need it taken now.”

  “At this hour? If you please, of course.”

  Lenox had forgotten for a moment how used Graham was to all of his idiosyncrasies, and how different life would be without that luxury. “Wait a minute, though-perhaps Mr. Graham could take it.”

  “Certainly, sir,” said Kirk, looking relieved.

  Graham came and took the note, and in due course Dallington, Lenox, and McConnell were all seated again.

  “Now, Thomas. I apologize.”

  “Not at all. There’s not much to say, really. I went down and took a look at Frederick Clarke’s body this afternoon, as we agreed. It wasn’t a pretty sight. His wound was on the right side of the back of his head, and it was consistent with the corner of a brick as far as I could ascertain. I conferred with the coroner, and he agreed.

  “I did notice one thing, however, that he hadn’t picked up. There were barks and scrapes on both of his fists. I’m not entirely sure what that means. Perhaps it’s unrelated to his death. At any rate they were a day old or so-scabbing up a little, not fresh.”

  “So he had been in a fight the day before he was killed?” Dallington asked.

  “A day or two, yes.”

  Lenox made a note on the small pad he took from his jacket’s breast pocket. “Dallington, if you go to the house on Curzon Street-hold on a moment, have you already?”

  “Not yet.”

  “If you do, keep an eye out for anybody with similar markings. I should have told you before, by the way, always look at hands. It was Thomas who brought to my attention the importance of fingernails when we were working on a case together some years ago. The dead woman had pink soap under her fingernails, and from that fact we deduced her unfaithfulness to her husband.”

  “How?” asked Dallington.

  McConnell chuckled bleakly. “She was a poor woman. Scented soap would have been well beyond her means. I should far more easily have believed it if she had lice. She worked in a tavern, quite a successful one in Ealing, and after we found the soap under her nails we began looking at every sink we could find in the owner’s rooms over the pub. He had pink soap of the same scent on it. A bit of a dandy, I suppose. We couldn’t prove anything based on that, but it was our first hint.”

  “After that it all came tumbling down around the man’s head. Josiah Taylor. He hung for it, I’m afraid.”

  Dallington looked taken aba
ck. “Goodness.”

  “It’s something I try to avoid, but occasionally…at any rate, hands and fingers. A valuable tip.”

  The young lord took out his own notebook and jotted a few lines in it. “Thanks,” he said. He was always on the lookout for these informal suggestions.

  “What about you, then? You didn’t go to the house?”

  “Not yet, no. I didn’t know whether Ludovic Starling would appreciate it.”

  “I told him you would come.”

  “Yes, but I thought it best to be forearmed. I compiled a list of all the house’s inmates.”

  “Ah-excellent,” said Lenox. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Starling himself. He’s forty-two and an MP. Spends much of his time at the Turf Club. Wife Eliza or Elizabeth, thirty-eight, son of a Scottish lord whose borough Ludovic sits for. So far none of this is new, of course. At the moment his children are home. There’s Alfred, who is nineteen.”

  “The same age as Frederick Clarke,” said McConnell.

  “Alfred is at Downing College, Cambridge, doing Greats. A second year.”

  “It’s just called classics there, you know, not Greats,” said Lenox. “That’s Oxford terminology.”

  “He’s home for the summer holidays but leaving in two weeks to go back. Then there’s his younger brother, Paul. He’s seventeen, and he was at Westminster until two months ago. He’s going up to Downing, too, at the same time as his brother.

  “Rounding out this chummy household is an old man-Tiberius Starling, Ludo’s great-uncle. He’s eighty-eight and apparently deaf as a post. His best friend is a cat, which he apparently calls Tiberius Jr. From the sound of it he doesn’t greatly esteem his niece-in-law, or even his nephew, really, but they keep him around because they want his money. They’re afraid he’ll leave it to the cat-no, really. I swear. No children, and he made a mint in the mines about a thousand years ago.”

  McConnell laughed. “How did you find all this out?”

  “Asked acquaintances of mine, snooped around the neighborhood.”

  “What about below stairs?” asked Lenox.

  “Five live in-it’s quite a large house. There were two footmen, though now of course there’s only the one. Aside from Frederick there’s a chap named Foxley, Ben Foxley, a huge strapping fellow. I’ll be sure to look at his hands.”

  “Could you tell anything about the assailant’s height from Clarke’s body?” asked Lenox of McConnell.

  “Yes-we can identify him as being of roughly the same height as Clarke, give or take three or four inches in either direction. The blow didn’t come from a sharp angle, up or down.”

  “So anyone of virtually any height,” said Dallington wryly.

  McConnell shrugged. “I wish it were more conclusive.”

  “Who else, John?”

  “Sorry. Two footmen. One housemaid, Jenny Rogers; one cook, Betsy Mints; and a butler, Jack Collingwood. I couldn’t find out much about these three. In addition there are a scullery maid and a stableman who don’t live in but are at the house most days.”

  “Seven in all, then. Six now.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Plus five family members. That’s eleven suspects,” said McConnell.

  “Old Tiberius couldn’t lift a feather over his head, much less a brick,” said Dallington.

  “And Ludo was at cards at the time of the murder. The rest of them, Dallington?”

  “All at home, strangely enough, except the scullery maid, who was at her own home in Liverpool Street.”

  “Then we can safely discount her. Still, that leaves eight. Without even mentioning the possibility that it’s someone entirely outside of the Starling circle.”

  Just then Graham came in, trailed worriedly by Kirk, who looked ready either to stop him or announce him. Graham informed the group that Fowler had gone home for the evening. After a few minutes’ further discussion, the three men stood up and parted, agreeing that they would meet again soon-or at least when Dallington had discovered anything worth looking into further.

  Chapter Seven

  The next morning Lenox woke feeling for the first time as if he were truly back in London. It put him in a happy mood, and he traipsed downstairs softly whistling. A little while later he sipped his morning coffee, standing with his cup by the second-floor windows and gazing out over the gray, blustery day, wearing his familiar old blue slippers and crimson dressing gown. For a fleeting moment his absence from home felt almost like a dream. Had it really been he who walked across Austrian heaths and Paris boulevards? Had it really been he who got married in that chapel three months ago? The displacement from his old life was jarring-and wonderful. He thought with a smile of Jane, still sleeping upstairs.

  He was up earlier than she because it was an important day for him. In six days exactly he would attend his maiden session at the House of Commons, taking a seat for the first time along the green baize benches of that hallowed chamber. Today he had to move into his new offices, which were tucked into an obscure upper hallway of Parliament. He felt like a boy going to his new school.

  It had always been his dream to sit in the Commons, though it was still, for all its modernizations, an exceedingly idiosyncratic institution. For one thing, different seats varied wildly in how they were won; most were fair and democratic, but some were almost insanely corrupt. Since the reforms of 1832 there was no longer any place as bad as Old Sarum (the town that had infamously elected two Members despite the notable handicap of having only eleven voters) or Dunwich (whose own two Members remained in the House for many years even after the town had literally fallen into the sea), but there were plenty of rotten and pocket boroughs that could be dispensed without so much as a single vote being cast. Ludo Starling held one of these, in fact.

  Another strange thing about Parliament was that, though being an MP was one of the most prestigious and important jobs in the empire, it was entirely unpaid. Only men with cabinet assignments received any stipend, and as a result there was fierce competition for the undersecretaryships of obscure departments in government (Welsh affairs, municipal corporations). Lenox was fortunate, like many of the people who would be his colleagues now, in having private means, but there were also valuable and good gentlemen who were forced to quit Parliament when they couldn’t pay for their own lodgings or food. Generally these men were found decent sinecures by the friends they had made, but what charm did supervising a distant Scottish county have compared to being in the House of Commons?

  It was the scullery maid who had brought Lenox his coffee in the parlor, but now Graham entered.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said.

  “Good morning. I say, you’re dressed for a day in London. Why have you got your city togs on?”

  “With your permission, I intend to go to your new office in Parliament shortly, sir.”

  For an instant Lenox was puzzled, and then with delight he cried out, “Graham! You’ll do the job!”

  “Yes, sir, with the provision that you understand my grave doubts ab-”

  “Never mind that, never mind that! This is terrific news. Yes, head over there. Or would you rather wait for me?”

  “I think it would be advisable were I to precede you there, sir, and begin cleaning and preparing the office.”

  “Cleaning? Leave that to someone else. I need you to take over my appointment book, for one thing. It’s been driving me mad. You’ll need to register with the guards. I believe you can go in through the Members’ Entrance, or if not then you can get in through that garden to the west of the buildings. This is wonderful news, Graham.”

  “Shall we call it a probationary assignment, sir, pending our joint approval?”

  “Call it whatever you like. Have you told Kirk?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Excellent.” Then Lenox’s brow furrowed. “Mind you, he’s not what I call an ideal butler. Still, the trade is more than worth it. I’m going upstairs to tell Jane that you’ve accepted. Are you pl
eased at least?”

  The butler-former butler now-allowed himself a smile. “Yes, sir. Very,” he said.

  “Good. I’ll see you at our new office, Graham.”

  An hour later, after Lenox had done a few chores, the two men stood in the empty office, looking at it. A tiny window in one corner provided a very little light, but it was a dim set of two rooms, one, slightly larger than the other, with a fireplace, bookshelves, and a large desk. This would be Lenox’s. The outer room, through which all traffic would arrive, had two desks that faced each other. These would be for Graham and a new clerk, whom he would soon have to hire.

  “Here we are,” said Lenox. “Let’s go over the appointment book.”

  For twenty minutes they sorted through various notes asking Lenox to attend meetings of businessmen, railway chiefs, committees from the House of Lords (from which the Commons had truly begun to wrest power in the last thirty years), and a hundred other bodies of men. Graham promised to categorize the notes and respond to them, which lifted a weight off of Lenox’s shoulders.

  “But first you have your tour,” said Graham.

  “Have I?”

  “A Mr. Bigham will be by shortly to give it to you, sir. He’s the assistant to the parliamentary historian and generally guides new Members through the House when they arrive. Since you were elected at a by-election, however”-that is to say, a special, one-off election-“you will be the only person on the tour.”

  “We all have our trials.”

  There was a rap at the door, and a cheerful face, similar to Lenox’s but slightly fatter and jollier, perhaps less pensive, popped through the crack. It was not the tour guide but Sir Edmund Chichester Lenox, 11th Baronet of Markethouse and Member of Parliament for the town of the same name. Charles’s older brother.

  Edmund was a genial soul, happier at Lenox House in the country than in town, but he was also an important and reliable member of his party, who took his duties seriously and refused credit for much of his work-to the extent that his importance in the House had been unknown to his own brother until two years before.