The Vanishing Man

by Charles Finch

  It was scarcely an exaggeration. Hundreds of thousands of acres of that county were the duke’s. Lenox had only asked to be sure there was no sudden, secret embarrassment in his finances.

  What in all creation did this have to do with a stolen painting of a forgotten duke? What did it have to do with William Shakespeare?

  “What are your men doing?” Lenox asked Mayne.

  Mayne glanced up Pall Mall. “No tracks to follow, unfortunately. Cobblestones on this street; no recent rain regardless.” He tapped the note against his knuckles distractedly. “I don’t like the blood, obviously. Anyhow, why had you been consulting with the duke?”

  Lenox, suddenly alert, said, “Do that again, would you?”

  “What?”

  “Hit your hand with the card, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  The superintendent looked at him as if he belonged in an asylum, but bounced the thick notecard lightly against his knuckles. “Like this?”

  “Yes.” Lenox looked away, reaching for his tobacco in his waistcoat pocket. “Good. Thank you.”

  “Why?”

  “Nothing. I was wrong,” Lenox said. He had learned better than to tell the gentlemen of the Yard anything before he was obliged to do so. Motioning discreetly with his tobacco pouch, he said, “Is that the duchess?”

  Ward followed his hand. “Yes,” he said. “Her cousin is next to her.”

  This was a tall, older man who himself was very upright, with white hair and a clean-shaven face. “Perhaps I might have a word with her?”

  “Better be a cautious word,” Sinex put in, giving him a mirthless smile. “Don’t want to be playing about in matters like this, Lenox. Liable to spill your own blood.”

  “Enough of that,” said Mayne sharply. “Lenox, I’ll walk you to Her Grace.”

  They left Ward and Sinex by the carriage doors. Their boots clicked on the cobblestones as they walked. “You received my card yesterday?” Mayne asked.

  “I did. I had planned to call on you this morning, Sir Richard.”

  “Dorset wrote me to ask—well, commanded me, I suppose, to come to the Lords. He asked if you were reliable.”

  Ah, so that was why Mayne had sought him out.

  “Did he?” said Lenox, who had lately learned, in conversations such as this one, too, the value of saying little.

  “I asked him why he wanted to know. He would not tell. At last I gave him my reluctant recommendation.”

  “Reluctant on my behalf, or reluctant because you didn’t know the reason it was requested?”

  “The latter,” said Mayne. “Mixed with some of the former, if I’m candid. You are, of course, not a police officer.”

  “No.”

  “I was also going to tell you this morning to be careful of him, Dorset. I have had cause to run across him in Parliament. He can ruin any man he pleases, and he has a streak of—” Mayne looked at the immaculate façade of the Carlton Club as they walked toward the duchess. “Not unkindness. But he believes that God made Victoria the Queen, then made him the Duke of Dorset.”

  “I see.”

  “If you feel you can tell me what he wanted I would be grateful.”

  “I need time to think, if you could permit it, Sir Richard. The duke entrusted me with a secret he held very close.”

  Mayne looked at him warily. “Very well. But if he winds up dead and you have held something back, it will go badly for you. I say that with sincere regard, Charles. I was fond of your father.”

  “Thank you, Sir Richard.”

  “Here is the duchess.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The duchess was, to an almost unsettling degree of accuracy, a duchess.

  Which was to say, first, that she had the cool self-possession of her position; second, had the odd ability to look downward at a person of any height whatsoever; and third, was very elegant and unruffled, even in these circumstances. Her dress was conservative and self-evidently expensive, dark blue with a very wide, graceful bell-shaped crinoline spreading out from her waist, just the fashion at the moment. It must have been the devil of a time to get through doorways.

  As well as her cousin, two attendants stood at her side.

  She greeted Lenox with little more than a nod when she heard that he had been working for her husband, until Ward mentioned his name.

  “Oh,” she said, rather surprised. “Charles Lenox. I know your mother, Lady Emma.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Lenox, nodding.

  His hands were clasped behind him, in deference both to her title and her situation. “I would go so far as to call her a friend,” the duchess added.

  “I will remember you to her, with your permission, Your Grace,” he said.

  She put out her hand, and Lenox took it. She applied a gentle pressure. “Please do.”

  Ward asked the duchess if Lenox might pose her one or two questions, and she nodded. “Has your husband mentioned Shakespeare to you recently?” he said.

  She looked at him with a surprise that would have been difficult to feign. “Shakespeare. No. Why?”

  “I ask for no important reason—a misplaced thought, Your Grace,” said Lenox quickly and apologetically. “Had he done anything out of the ordinary recently, may I ask?”

  This was what Lady Jane called his Victoria question. He fell back upon it whenever he needed to buy time to think. Every morning, in the course of her usual business, Queen Victoria gave the orders that her chefs make a serving of curry for forty-eight.

  This was despite the fact that she herself despised curry. She did it because she wanted to be prepared in case a visiting dignitary of Asian descent called upon the Palace at random.

  Or forty-eight of them, Lenox supposed. The forty-ninth would have to eat whatever the Queen herself ate. All he remembered from when he had dined at the Palace as a boy was that she had eaten with incredible speed and that everyone had to stop the moment she set down her fork, which meant that nobody would have gotten enough if there hadn’t been, blessedly, twenty courses.

  His question to the duchess was a catchall, but being both intelligent and exceedingly private, she swatted it away. “He has hired you, evidently. Otherwise, no.”

  He had been raised not to contradict any woman, much less one who outranked him, but he could not let this pass. “Not hired, Your Grace,” Lenox said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I am an amateur.”

  Her cousin Sir Japheth Miles, whom Ward had introduced secondarily, said dryly, “How comforting.”

  Lenox had already pegged Miles—a clubman. His acerbic tone in those two words confirmed him as such: worldly, neatly dressed, faultlessly connected, probably a bachelor with voluminous memories of the gay ’20s. No doubt working on a memoir. Inwardly, Lenox sighed.

  “Just one more question, Your Grace,” he said. “Is the duke left-handed or right-handed?”

  She looked at him oddly. “Right-handed. Why?”

  “Another failed thought,” he said, bowing his head deferentially. “Thank you for your time.”

  He left the duchess and spoke to the porter at the Carlton, celebrity of the moment, who confirmed that the carriage into which the duke had been forced had four horses and was colored black, with no markings. He added that the men were cloaked in black, too.

  Their behavior toward him had been undeniably violent, the porter said—no chance he went willingly into their carriage.

  The duke’s own driver, who was in disgrace for his failure to intervene, confirmed that.

  “Why didn’t you follow them?” Lenox asked.

  “They knocked me clear off the box when I was getting down for to assist ’is Grace, didn’t they!”

  The young detective saw a developing lump on the driver’s forehead now. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, yes! And in the scrumble to get out from under the wheels—’orses may always bolt, and a man kilt like the snap of your fingers—I’ve seen it, Your Lordships—sirs—they was gone. My goodness,�
�� he added, shaking his head in wonder. “An innocent chap can’t find an ounce of sympathy.”

  Lenox looked through the carriage itself. He asked the driver whether there was anything missing—all he had found was a top hat, in a box beneath one of the benches—and the driver said no, there was never anything kept in the carriage. He himself cleaned its bits and bobs out completely twice a day.

  Lenox thanked him, then took a step away. He put one foot up on the steps of the Carlton Club and looked down St. James’s Street in the direction of Piccadilly Circus, the busiest thoroughfare in London. A quick left or right turn there and the kidnappers could have melted into traffic without any trouble.

  As he contemplated this, he vaguely listened to Ward engage in an increasingly fractious discussion with Sinex about their next steps (neither had any intelligent plan for what to do, and each was ferociously committed to it), and Mayne ordering the slow and probably hopeless but necessary process of having his constables spread about the neighborhood to question the populace.

  Sir Japheth was just asking when they could expect some action, the kind of question only a man without specific experience of action could ask, when a thought came to Lenox.

  He interrupted authoritatively. “We need to speak to that fellow Jacob who sells apples outside of Savile’s. It will be fastest to reach him on foot.”

  Everyone looked at him. “What?” said Sir Richard after a moment.

  “He is a simpleton—”

  “Well, that’s ideal, then,” said Sinex. “You two should be able to converse on an equal plane.”

  Lenox gave him a dead-eyed stare. “But, as I was going to say, he has perfect recall. We are in possession of one piece of information of any value aside from the ransom card: that the carriage had four horses.”

  “And?”

  “He is always on Jermyn Street. He will know whether a carriage with four horses has passed him today.” Lenox pointed. “That is the only street between here and Piccadilly, the largest street in London, where if they went, of course, they are lost to us. If they took Jermyn, however, we have a chance of witnesses.”

  “How do you know this simpleton?” asked Sir Japheth.

  “It is my job to know something of crime in London,” said Lenox curtly.

  “Fine,” said Mayne, siding with Lenox. “Let us go.”

  It took only a minute or so to reach Jacob, a popular, hulking man who sold hot chestnuts and apple cider in the winter, quinces in the summer. He greeted Lenox with a grin and a touch of his hat.

  He had seen twenty-three carriages that morning (he reported), and only two had no markings and only one had four horses, and all four were dark, though one had a white diamond on its nose and another white socks, and he was sure two were mares, and certainly the driver had been wearing a cloak. He had also seen—

  He would have gone on endlessly, but Lenox stopped him to ask where that particular carriage had gone, the unmarked one with four horses.

  “It took a right on Bury Street,” said Jacob promptly.

  A little breath went through their small group. This was the first right off of Jermyn Street, and Bury Street was the opposite of Piccadilly—tiny.

  Lenox started to feel a tingle of excitement. “Well done, Jacob, thank you,” he said.

  The duchess, from her seat in the carriage, handed over a pound note. “Please give this to him.”

  Lenox did so. Jacob took the pound note happily, then tried to give a basket of quinces to Lenox, who plucked just one for himself from the top and said good-bye. He got back into the duchess’s carriage (a light conveyance with two horses and two doors, prettily designed) and asked its driver to turn down Bury Street.

  There were five people here, Mayne, Lenox, Ward, Japheth Miles, and the duchess. The first three men were all squeezed along the bench with their backs to the horses, since the standard etiquette was that no man who was not a relative ought ever to sit alongside a woman in a carriage.

  “What now?” Miles said.

  Lenox had a small map of London in his pocket, folded so many times that it was white and illegible at the creases.

  He took it out and spread it over his knees. “If they took Bury Street, it can only mean one thing—they wanted to get into St. James’s Park as soon as possible. And the only reason for that must be that they wanted to go down Birdcage Walk and cross Westminster Bridge.”

  “So they would have passed directly by Parliament,” said the duchess grimly. “The Duke of Dorset trundled past the House of Lords itself like a sack of grain.”

  She seemed angrier at the impudence of this than worried.

  “What is across Westminster Bridge?” asked Ward.

  “A great deal. South London,” said Mayne.

  He and Lenox exchanged glances. The two of them knew very well what South London meant: crime.

  “I would have a look in the opium dens,” Lenox said.

  “The opium dens!” said Sir Japheth.

  “It is the easiest way of keeping a man sedated.” This was something Lenox had learned in the course of his self-education. “It is not an uncommon method—stuff a wad of opium in a man’s mouth, hold it shut until he blacks out, then leave him in a supervised daze.”

  “That really happens?” the duchess said.

  “All the time,” said Mayne, who was looking at Lenox, surprised perhaps to find him acquainted with this rough practice.

  Lenox nodded. “If they have headed south, I believe it is our best chance.”

  And if the duke was still alive—he did not add.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They failed.

  It was wretchedly hot in London by that night. Though it had been a warm, pleasant day, the evening papers reported that when the sun set the temperature was at a record high for London. This would have been bad enough, but the streets were also peculiarly breezeless, leaving the heat to radiate into the eerie air, unsoftened, from every city stone, every iron gate.

  Lenox tossed and turned in his bed. He was uneasy. That afternoon at three, several dozen constables, assisted by thirty-five members of the Grenadiers sent by the Queen herself, had simultaneously raided the large and small opium houses of Battersea.

  They had gone nine to each, cutting off front and back entrances, striking all at once so that nobody would be tipped off. But they hadn’t found the Duke of Dorset.

  Nor had any of the dozens of minor thieves or opium fanatics they’d turned out known anything—nothing at all, returned the reports to Mayne, at Scotland Yard, one after another after another, despite immense promises of reward and reprieve.

  There was also a huge population of minor criminals in the clumped low-slung drinking holes that clung like gray old seashells around the south side of Westminster Bridge, respectable boatmen and bargemen, too, and not one of them had seen a carriage of the description they were seeking pass at any time around nine o’clock. Nor thereafter. Despite this being quite literally the only place besides Parliament or his own house to which Bury Street could have most quickly transported the kidnapped duke.

  At eleven o’clock, Lenox gave in to his wakefulness and lit a candle. He felt as if he were baking—his windows open, but the air outside utterly dead, the leaves as still as statues.

  Suddenly he realized somewhere within that it was going to rain before the night was out, one of those pieces of natural insight, left over from his childhood in the country, that he never quite knew where he stored. He wondered if a dozen streets away his brother Edmund felt it, too.

  He paced the bedroom by candlelight, thinking. The block of ice in the basin on his bedside table was a pool of tepid water now. He dipped a small towel in it nevertheless and wiped his brow.

  Finally, at midnight, he went downstairs. There he discovered that he was not alone in his sleeplessness.

  “Hullo, Graham,” he said.

  “Good evening, sir,” the butler said. He rose from the chair by the door, tucked into a miniature alcove, th
at he often used as a discreet way station. Despite the heat he was in a proper suit. He laid his book aside. “May I get you anything?”

  “Oh, no, I’m just awake.” Lenox’s mind felt a little overheated by the weather, and by his doubts. “Awake, awake.”

  “Is it anything specific, sir?”

  “Primarily the duke being kidnapped.”

  Graham, in the low light of the hallway, smiled. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  Lenox sat down opposite Graham, on one of the chairs that lined the hallway. “You know you can read in my study if you’re up at night,” Lenox said.

  “Thank you very much, sir,” Graham said, in a way that firmly rejected the notion.

  Lenox sat for a moment, chin in his hand. “It’s the matter of the carriage going down Bury Street that bothers me so much,” he said. “Piccadilly was fifty yards ahead of them, and instead they turned right. Piccadilly would have meant certain safety. Whereas Jermyn Street, then Bury Street—either could have been blocked, and Bury Street brought them within sight, through the alley, of the Carlton Club, the very scene of the crime! Madness!”

  “You believe the apple seller, sir?”

  “Oh, without a doubt. I have tested his memory pretty thoroughly.” He sighed. “It’s such an odd decision. The only reason they would have made it is to get to the other side of the river, Battersea. And nobody there saw them. Someone should have.”

  “You feel sure of that?”

  “Absolutely sure. Yet the constables were relentless, according to Mayne. Nobody south of Westminster Bridge saw a thing. They have turned over every rock.”

  “Perhaps the carriage didn’t cross Westminster Bridge, then, sir,” said Graham.

  “Perhaps.” Lenox sat there, contemplating this. “But nothing this side of the river is closer by Jermyn Street. It would have to have been someone who didn’t know London in the slightest.”

  Saying this, he thought of Pendleton.