An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries)

by Charles Finch

  He tipped his cap, and there was a chorus of good-byes, Padden lifting a hand. “I’d better go myself, then,” he said to Lenox, glancing up at the clock. “I don’t like to leave it quite so late.”

  Lenox stood. “Thank you,” he said. “Please call upon me as soon as you can. I shall be in Parliament after two, perhaps even earlier. I owe you a cup of tea. Or I’m happy to return here, if you send word round.”

  “I fancy seeing the inside of Parliament,” said Padden, smiling slightly. He put his conductor’s hat on. “This afternoon.”

  “I’ll have one of the runners give you a tour after we speak. Only be quick about it, please.”

  As Lenox left Charing Cross he checked his own watch, before realizing that of course he knew what time it was—just far enough shy of 8:38, anyhow. He had, as ever, a great deal to do in Parliament, but he decided that he could put it off for another few hours. With any luck Audley and LeMaire would both be at work already; unlike Dallington (who had given him their addresses), they had proper offices, not far from each other in the West End.

  As he walked out of Charing Cross Lenox pondered what the conductor had said about the young woman—that she was more agitated, on the train trip the previous week, than he had seen her before. For the dozenth time he pondered as well the motivations of the man calling himself Archie Godwin, and what he might have to do with her.

  It was useless to speculate. Better to keep his mind clear of possibilities, and hope that he received more information soon.

  As he walked toward the mall he saw flutters of spring everywhere. Flower sellers on the pavement, sweet little blossoms dotting some of the trees outside of Charing Cross, rather wind-shaken but sturdy enough to have survived to their bloom. Patrols of red squirrels were outside and vigilant again, after their sleepy winters.

  He associated all of these things in his mind with the London season, which was to begin very soon now—always the Monday after Easter, just a week or so away. In every part of the country, young girls, accustomed to the drear of fox hunts and country balls, would be packing excitedly for the grander stages of the capital, trading letters with each other about how it would be, preparing to stay in town for the first time, and soon they would be crowding into the ballrooms of London to look for husbands, as gallant young fools nearby worked up the nerve to ask for dances and stodgy whiskered men looked on at them fondly from the dim corners, murmuring to each other over the punch in their cups. The London girls would feign boredom and superiority. In the first week there would be twenty engagements, a fifth of which would be tactfully canceled in the second, and in the third still more, the very plain girls and the very beautiful ones, settling and picking respectively. Though the season lasted until August, this first burst of activity was the brightest.

  Lenox didn’t know what would be on his own docket, aside from their supper for Disraeli, but it would be crowded, with several parties starting at each hour of the evening, mothers imploring Jane, a great arbiter in these matters, for her presence. They had gone to just as many last year as ever, despite Sophia. It was tiring to contemplate. Still, he enjoyed a glass of punch, and it was pleasant to be one of the older men in the corner. There was not all that much joy in aging—his back creaked quite often now—but he felt glad that at any rate he was beyond the age of wife picking. He thought of Jane as he walked and smiled to himself.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  He went to LeMaire’s first. Halfway down Brook Street was a gray house, much like all of its neighbors save for a discreetly gleaming brass placard near the bell, which read J-C.LM, letters that stood for Jean-Claude LeMaire’s name.

  Lenox rang the bell. A handsome lad, very tall and with jet black hair, answered the door. “Have you an appointment?” he asked in a strong French accent.

  Lenox sent in his card, perching himself patiently upon a small chair in the front hall to wait after the assistant disappeared. There were cards in the silver card stand of very grand personages, or at least one was intended to surmise as much—the names themselves were blacked out, in a flawed bid for confidentiality, leaving only the titles, Monsieur Le Duc de___, Lord___of___, The Honourable___, Member for___. Lenox wondered with some dismay if his own card would be superadded to this heap of distinction. Without even examining the stand’s contents closely he had already spotted the card of that fool Lord Sharpley, whose crest was unconcealed. No doubt Sharpley had hired LeMaire to investigate the disappearance of his two prized hunting dogs, though everyone this side of Northumberland knew his own ne’er-do-well brother had stolen them from him and sold them to a Scottish baronet.

  The fellow who had greeted Lenox at the door reappeared and with a bow requested that Lenox follow him. LeMaire’s office was at the end of a small, dark corridor. The detective himself met Lenox at the door.

  “Mr. Lenox! A remarkable pleasure, this!”

  The old Vidocq touch, Dallington had called it, and he was precisely correct. LeMaire was a distinguished-looking fifty-year-old man, dark hair shagged down below his collar, a gallant small pointed beard descending from his chin, a twinkle in his eye. He was the Englishman’s idea of a canny Frenchman—and no doubt he was very intelligent; one could gather as much from his face. Of course, one could be intelligent in different directions. No doubt there would be a small surcharge at the foot of each bill for that twinkle.

  It would be gratefully paid, for it was Vidocq who still held the most powerful hold on the British imagination of any police officer, at least this side of Sir Robert Peel. Vidocq had been first head of the French Sûreté, work he had described at length in his bestselling memoirs. Lenox was skeptical of the humility of anyone who felt the need to discourse about himself for fully four volumes, but they were rattling reads, enlivened considerably by the fact that before joining with the forces of justice, Vidocq had been one of the leading forgers and jailbreakers in France.

  After he had reformed, he had also been the country’s first private detective—indeed, might have been the first in the world. His innovations had been legion: indelible ink, plaster molds for footprints, an index of the unalterable physical traits of known criminals, all the equipage that Lenox and Dallington and their kind now regularly employed. Lenox had narrowly missed meeting him many years before, when Vidocq was in his eighties and near death. It would have given him pleasure to look the shrewd old chap in the eye. Even after his celebrated reform Vidocq had not given up the old ways entirely, and in his seventies had briefly returned to prison, on a charge of fraud; when he died, not long after, eleven women came forward claiming to be the sole heir of his estate.

  “How do you do, Monsieur LeMaire?” asked Lenox.

  “I flourish badly, sir.”

  “In that case you do not flourish at all, I fear!”

  LeMaire smiled. “My English is not up in snuff, I am sure. To use your parlance.”

  “It seems very fine to me.”

  “How may I help you?”

  “You may have heard that I was once a detective—like yourself,” Lenox added, thinking with an unbecoming note of pride that it was the other way around.

  “Yes, of course. We are grateful you have cleared the field, though I read with very great ardor the account of the murders upon the Lucy.”

  At the last moment he transmogrified the last word into Lucys, willfully it seemed to Lenox. He suspected the Frenchman of shamming his awkward English, and had since the words “up in snuff” passed his lips. It was no doubt beneficial to be underestimated, and of course nobody disdained a funny accent like the British. “That was a hairy business,” was all Lenox said.

  “I thought you did capitally well.”

  Lenox inclined his head to acknowledge the compliment, then went on. “Once in a rare while, I do take on a case. I have one at the moment.”

  “I am impatient that I might help you,” said LeMaire. “What is the case?”

  Lenox had told the story of his encounter in Gilbert’s not forty minu
tes before to Padden, and now he had the points of the matter set in his mind and told LeMaire with decisive efficiency about the entire sequence of events. The French detective listened with great interest, all the way forward over his forearms on his desk, at the very edge of his seat, occasionally looking down at his hands and twisting his little beard with two fingers when Lenox came to a puzzling detail.

  He waited until Lenox had finished and then said that alas, no, no such woman had come to him, that his only cases at the present moment concerned a vanished husband and a stolen ruby necklace, that while he kept his “ear in the ground” and tended to hear from his spies of much of the private detective work in London, he had not heard of this woman, he was so sorry, he was a thousand apologies. He begged of Lenox his card and promised to call upon him the moment he learned anything relevant, anything at all.

  Lenox thanked him warmly and accepted the offer of a cup of coffee before he left. It was a loss of fifteen minutes in his crowded day but gave him a further chance to study the Frenchman. They discussed old crimes, on both sides of the Channel. He was a sagacious fellow, this LeMaire. By the time Lenox departed he was still not entirely sure whether that sagacity was complemented by honesty.

  If LeMaire’s office had been very fine, ormolu and sterling, Robert Audley’s was all oak and brass. It stood not far away on Mount Street, near the fine old pile called the Prince of Saxe-Coburg Hotel—named for the Queen’s prematurely dead love, Prince Albert, for whom she still, by all accounts, mourned deeply. Indeed, Audley was the house detective at several of the grand hotels in London, including besides this one the Langham and Claridge’s, responsible for any minor matters that their august guests brought to management. He had been on the police force until about six or seven years before; Lenox had known him then, a sturdy young man, impatient of nonsense.

  He was also, according to Dallington, a committed alcoholic.

  Audley greeted Lenox at the door himself, gruffly acknowledged the card he received, and said that he did remember their previous encounters, though from his tone you wouldn’t have guessed the memories were altogether fond. In the plain, banker’s-style office there was no whiff of spirits. Certainly he had no assistant.

  There was another telltale sign, however, one that Lenox had observed in about a third of the alcoholics he knew. Audley kept a great deal of food on hand, none of which, Lenox would have guessed, he touched, beyond a biscuit every day or so. It was, as so often in these cases, too much food, betraying in its very ubiquity the illusion the drinker aimed to preserve.

  Or perhaps not—Lenox reminded himself that Dallington had been wrong before. He tried to stem his judgment of the man.

  “What brings you here?” Audley asked. “I don’t have time to talk shop.”

  “No, certainly not,” said Lenox.

  “Well?”

  Audley’s bluntness, perhaps like LeMaire’s bumbling Frenchness, was likely a reassurance to the customers who sought him out—though in this case it was an unaffected trait, accidentally useful to him in his profession. “I am worried about the safety of a young woman who came to me for help.”

  “In your capacity as a Member of Parliament?”

  “No. Her information was out of date, apparently, because she believed me still to be a detective. It happens half a dozen times a year.” This was true in general, if not in this particular case; Lenox simply didn’t want to bring Dallington into the matter. “In the end she convinced me, against my better judgment, to help her.”

  “Why couldn’t His Drunken Lordship do it?” asked Audley. “You usually pass your work on to him, from all I hear.”

  Lenox looked at Audley sharply. “I suggest you watch your words. In particular when you’re with his friends, of whom I consider myself one. John Dallington is a very fine detective.”

  Audley hesitated for a moment, a bit of fight in his eyes, but then held up his hands in apology. “Withdrawn. It’s a vice I can’t abide, drinking, and my temper sometimes overruns my mouth.”

  “I can assure you that he has no problem with drink now, if ever he did.”

  “I hope that’s the truth. They’re clever at hiding it.”

  Lenox was half-inclined to leave—but this was his best chance, short of Padden offering some revelatory information, of finding the young woman he had seen at Gilbert’s. So he stayed and told his story. In the end he was glad he did.

  “Light-haired, you say?” Audley asked.

  “Yes. With a black-and-white striped umbrella, at least when I saw her.”

  “Her name is Laurel Wheeler.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Laurel Wheeler,” Lenox repeated, his attention complete, his pulse quickening—but his voice cautious. “You seem very sure of that name.”

  He looked more closely at Audley. The man’s face was difficult to read; behind him was a high bank of windows, showing the gray day along this quiet slice of Mount Street, and this faded light cast Audley in shadow.

  He nodded. “Yes, I’m quite sure.”

  “Could you elaborate?”

  Audley shrugged. “I’ve given you the name of the young woman in question. She left no address, so I cannot offer you that. And since she may yet need the services of our profession—”

  “Your profession,” said Lenox.

  “Our profession. Since she may still need one of us, I don’t see the advantage to me in telling you more.”

  “Yet the advantage to Miss Wheeler may be very great indeed.”

  “That remains to be seen,” said Audley. There was a slight throb or shiver in his right hand, which he did his utmost to master. “For the moment that will have to be enough, Mr. Lenox.”

  “Tell me, at least, how you are so sure of her name.”

  “She left a card behind her.”

  “I don’t quite understand you, Mr. Audley. She has come to see you, left her card behind, and yet you still wonder whether she might be your client? Surely it is beyond dispute now?”

  “Evidently you were her first pick.”

  It was a fair point. “Then why give me her name?”

  “The case she offered me was limited in scope. There may be other avenues you wish to explore, and if she is truly in danger I wish you luck with them. For my part I mean to consult her later this afternoon.”

  “Listen here, what if I tell you that I will take her case on myself, but you can keep her fee? In fact, I’m happy to match her fee—I can hire you.”

  This had been a misstep, Lenox saw immediately. Audley’s face darkened with professional disdain. “I have my own agency, Mr. Lenox. In Whitehall word may no longer reach you about your profession—your former profession, let me grant your point—but my agency is rather a successful one. Successful enough that I have no need to subordinate myself to an out-of-practice society gentleman who once dabbled in the art to which I have dedicated my life.”

  A silence hung in the air for a moment. Then Lenox said, “As you please. Thank you for the name, at any rate, and if it can be of any benefit to Miss Wheeler, she may reach me at the address upon this card.”

  Audley took the card that Lenox proffered and studied it for a moment. Perhaps he felt he had been harsh, because he added, in an explanatory tone, “On top of it all, a new client is always a boon to me. She will have friends, she might recommend me. It is how I earn my bread.”

  It was a just point, as far as it went. “Quite so. Good day, Mr. Audley.”

  “Mr. Lenox.”

  As Lenox closed the door behind him and ventured into the street, he could almost sense a bottle opening in the room he had just vacated. A strange man, Audley. Hopefully he had steered Lenox closer to the truth.

  It was drizzling outside now, the street dark except for the jolly sparkle of light in the Queen’s Arms public house on the corner. Lenox turned up his collar and ducked his head, looking up and down to see if he might hail a hansom cab—but without success. He had to get down to Parliament. It was just far en
ough from Mount Street to make the prospect of walking it in the rain an unpleasant one. He sighed and soldiered on.

  Soon the rain intensified, however, and when he came to another pub, this one called the Bear and Pony, he couldn’t resist it. He pushed open the door and went inside.

  It was warm and dry. Crowded, too—evidently others had the same idea of escaping the rain. Still, there were a few empty seats at the bar, and he went and took one, asking for a hot whisky and water, just a small one. The brisk young ginger-haired man in his apron nodded and went off to prepare the drink.

  “That you, Lenox?” asked a voice nearby.

  Lenox turned to look, and when he saw the face to which the voice belonged he smiled. It was a man named Joseph Baltimore. “Hullo, Baltimore. Stand you a drink?”

  “Brotherly of you, but I have a fresh one.” The older man held up his tankard. “Is this your regular drinking house?”

  “No, I just came in to get out of the rain. You?”

  “I live two doors down. Liza sends me here when I’m underfoot. Today she’s seeing about the season. Boring as all hell.”

  “Are you very busy?”

  “Only averagely, three dozen parties a night. I wish it were already over.”

  “Give it a skip.”

  “No, I shouldn’t hear the end of it.”

  Baltimore was an American, raised in the northeastern part of that country, of an old family; his first ancestor in the country had been the bell ringer of Boston when there were fewer than eight hundred people there. Shipping had brought the family a fortune, and on his tour of Europe Baltimore, then less gray, his face less lined, had met Elizabeth Winston. He was handsome and rich, she plain and poor, though very wellborn, and yet it was said in the West End that there was not a couple more in love with each other. They had nine children. Four were in America, where their father had insisted they study. The remaining five were girls—and for all he cared they might study in Transylvania, he had once told Lenox.

  Baltimore didn’t work, precisely, and yet he was useful to many men, and it would have been surprising if he hadn’t earned a great deal of money, through the years, by his intelligence. He was London’s expert on America. He helped politicians, businessmen, and also parents, who felt both the risk and the allure of the American fortunes that courted their sons and daughters. (“There’s a lot of money over there, you know,” people had taken to saying in the past year or two at parties, with shrewd, naive eyes, as if they were discussing dragons’ teeth; great rumblings of rail and oil fortunes had begun to reach the island.) Baltimore’s discretion was supreme, nearly unexampled in the hurly-burly of London society, yet paradoxically he was known for putting in a soft word at the right moment, in time to avert mischance.