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

by Charles Finch

  “The Queen’s social secretary provided me with that information, Mrs. McConnell,” said Lenox with dignified superiority, then, coming out of this pose, smiled lightly at her. “And how are you?”

  “Miserable—but who cares, why were you with Mrs. Engel?”

  “Yes, Charles, what took you to the palace?” asked Jane.

  He had gone to the sideboard and now was fixing a weak whisky and soda—in truth he did not think he could remain upright for very long if he had a strong one. When he was finished, he carried it to the armchair near them. “The case that John Dallington and I are working on.”

  He told them about his day in broad outlines: the paintings at Buckingham Palace, the East Gallery, Mrs. Engel’s desk. Toto looked as if she welcomed the distraction, but Lady Jane seemed unhappy. “Hadn’t you better leave it all to Inspector Jenkins? A murder!”

  “That used to be my profession.”

  “Then you married, and had a child.”

  “If there’s any danger I will dodge behind Dallington. He’s nearly in a coffin already, poor fellow, he’s so ill.”

  “You won’t, and you oughtn’t to make such jokes.”

  “It’s been another very long day. What were you speaking about when I came in?”

  Toto sighed and waved a hand. “Thomas.”

  Nothing had changed, apparently. McConnell was puzzled by his wife’s coldness but did not inquire, and in the meanwhile he seemed, otherwise, still unusually happy, absent from the house every day, looking in on George in the evenings but not, as he once had, in each hour of the day.

  Gently, Lenox said, “And has he been in Hyde Park?”

  “No. Evidently he and Polly Buchanan have tired of making a spectacle of themselves. Perhaps they found somewhere more private.”

  “Toto,” said Lady Jane reproachfully.

  “I’m sorry—you’re right,” said the younger woman and leaned on the sofa toward Jane, taking her hand. “But it is cruel upon me, I swear it is.”

  As Lenox was readying himself for bed he saw a telegram from Jenkins, which had been left upon his bedside table.

  The body is Archibald Godwin’s STOP confirmed by sister STOP sending constables to shops in the morning to confirm story STOP ab TJ.

  So. Confirmation.

  Usually when he had a case like this one, Lenox’s thoughts as he lay in bed were occupied with its specifics—but now, exhausted, he fell immediately into the black null of near-consciousness and then, after only a few moments, into a profound sleep, which carried him through to morning.

  Miss Emanuel was away the next day—she had a day off each week of her choice, and the first half of each of Saturday and Sunday as well—which meant that it was Charles and Jane’s turn to look after Sophia.

  They took the child into the dining room, where she crawled around the floor, inspecting the robed legs of the furniture, while they flipped through the newspapers and ate eggs with toast. Bright sun streamed through the windows. Once in a while Lenox would rise to refill his coffee cup at the sideboard, preferring as he did to take a quarter or a third of a cup at once, so that he could have it hot, and on these short voyages he would stop and greet his daughter. By the time the footmen had cleared the food, Sophia was involved in an intense examination of an old piece of tartan ribbon she had found under the sideboard. Lenox sighed: How much pleasanter it seemed just at the moment to sit here and let the lingering hours pass slowly by than to run back and forth across London, but he knew his brain would begin to itch after the solution before too long.

  The papers were full of Archibald Godwin. The Times headline read FARMER MURDERED IN KENSINGTON, which seemed inaccurate, while the Evening Star of the night before—a paper that members of Lenox’s class usually called, with derisive smiles, the Heevening Star—declared GRAVES HOTEL LIVES UP TO NAME. The most accurate story was in the Telegraph. It relayed the essentials, and Lenox, reading between the lines, suspected that Inspector Jenkins, solicitous of the good opinion of the press, might have fed the story to the reporter. Well—he did have to look out for his own advancement, and there was a place at the top to be had.

  Lenox looked at the police report in each paper, searching specifically for the crimes that had occurred in Kensington. Aside from the murder, they all reported a grocer’s robbed at knifepoint, a horse stolen when a hansom cab driver stopped for a cup of tea, a homeless man who had gone missing (he always thought such notices paradoxical, and yet they kept appearing), and an active pickpocket along the Gloucester Road. Nothing easily linked to their suspect, though it might be worth speaking to the driver of the hansom cab.

  When all that remained on the long table was a single coffee cup, Lady Jane’s, Lenox picked up Sophia and set her on his lap. “Are you tired?” he asked his wife. “You were up earlier than I was.”

  “A bit.” She paused, looking out at the fine day. “I do worry about Toto.”

  “She is hale enough.”

  “Last night she mentioned divorce, for the first time.”

  Lenox raised his eyebrows. This was somber news indeed; there were only two hundred divorces a year in England, often fewer. All of them were among couples of Toto’s own rank, the very rich, who could afford the moral disgrace—and, in extreme circumstances, tolerate its public nature. The same papers now jumbled in an untidy pile on a chair would report, with breathless excitement, every detail of the case. Very often the woman suffered more than the man in the opinion of the public. Lady Violet Lesslock had moved to Baden after her divorce, because of the press’s intrusions a broken woman—though it was known among her friends that her husband had used her violently, cruelly, and had been entirely in the wrong.

  “She cannot be serious,” said Lenox.

  “You know her. She is impulsive and stubborn. A difficult blend.”

  “Her father would never permit it.” This was a small, kindly man, who doted on his daughter but had never in his life become accustomed to any variety of contradiction. “He would sooner see them both move to India.”

  “I pray it doesn’t come to that.” She reached her hand across the table to his. “Could you speak to Thomas? More directly this time?”

  “I could not—I’m sorry, Jane, but I could not. It would be a terrible affront to his self-respect. Certainly I should not forgive him if the situations were reversed and he came to speak to me.”

  She sighed. “I know.”

  It was half past nine now. Lenox went into his library. In the night Graham had neatened his desk and left for him a sheath of documents to sign. Lenox was a Junior Lord of the Treasury now—nothing to do with money at all, as it happened, but a position within the hierarchy of the party—and a great many papers passed under his hand. There was also a new blue book to read about the tax on breweries, a subject of particular interest to Lenox’s constituency, up north in Durham. (It was unnecessary—some would even argue undesirable—for Members of Parliament to have a geographical link to the districts for which they stood. Lenox himself had never set foot in Stirrington before he traveled there as a candidate.) He signed the papers and then took the book to a comfortable armchair, recessed between two bookcases in the wall, its arms a comfortable height, with glasses and a decanter of water on the small hexagonal side table next to it. For some time he read.

  Thomas McConnell had made a morganatic union for himself, one in which his rank and wealth could not match his wife’s, and he had never since seemed entirely happy. The terrible moment had come early: when Toto’s family had pushed him, with kindly intended pressure, to sell his practice, medicine skirting too close to physical labor for their liking.

  Was it entirely surprising, then, that he had sought happiness elsewhere?

  If he had, if he had, Lenox reminded himself internally, gazing out at the spring day. The bookseller across the street was doing a brisk trade.

  Yes, of course it was surprising, because in recent years McConnell had been so delighted by his daughter, Georgianna
. It had seemed enough.

  Divorce: such a far-fetched notion that it was almost impossible for Lenox to grant the possibility of it in his own mind. Still, Toto dug her claws into ideas and wrestled them until they died or she forgot she held them; she was the daughter of wealth, and of almost limitless parental love. It was a dangerous combination—one that imperiled even Sophia, perhaps, though he and Jane tried not to indulge her.

  He sighed and looked away from the window, back toward his book, unsettled in his mind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  As Lenox ate his breakfast, constables from Scotland Yard were spreading out across London in every direction, armed with a description of the man they suspected of the murder of Archibald Godwin: tall, light-haired, dressed well, platinum watch chain, trimmed whiskers and mustaches, an “arrogant” bearing and gentlemanly accent, possibly though not probably in the company of a nondescript dark-haired gentleman of average size. They conducted interviews at West End hotels, restaurants, and clubs and revisited the places they positively knew that he had been—the tailor’s, Parson’s, Gilbert’s.

  Lenox knew that this was a unique moment in the case. If the Yard didn’t meet with immediate success, its overseers were unlikely to commit similar manpower to the investigation in the next days, even if this murder, by virtue of its affluent geography and affluent victim, had more press attention than the average gin-mill killing in the East End.

  Between eleven and two o’clock, Lenox had meetings, but between two and the session that evening, he was free, and he decided to conduct his own small search.

  The Oxford and Cambridge Club stood on Pall Mall, a wide building coated in the same cream-colored paint as all the rest in its row. Lenox climbed the wide steps up to the front doors, one of which was swung open.

  “Good afternoon,” said the porter.

  Lenox didn’t come here often—he more often visited the Athenaeum, down the road—but always felt welcome. He handed over his hat and his light coat and made his way upstairs to the library.

  He had felt sure that the O&C, as members called it, would stock the college directories—each student at Oxford or Cambridge belonging to one of these constituent colleges, and thus to the university. (Lenox himself had been at Balliol, a quick stroll down Broad Street from Archie Godwin’s college, Wadham.) He was not wrong. There was a whole wall of the leather volumes, the Oxford set bound in dark blue, the Cambridge in light blue, all of the most recent vintage.

  Here he found the directory for Wadham, 1875, it said on the spine, which meant it couldn’t be more than a month or two old. (He still wasn’t used to living in such a modern-sounding year: 1875! It gave one pause. Three-quarters of Victoria’s century had passed now. As vaguely, as indefinitely, and as certainly as a lighthouse flashing across a fogged channel, the year 1900—so madly advanced, so futuristic—stood on the horizon.) He pulled the book down and took a seat at one of the desks in the center of the room.

  There was an inkwell close to hand, and a stand full of paper embossed with the club’s sigil. Wadham, he wrote as a header upon one sheet, and then settled back with the book.

  It was no difficult task to find Archibald Godwin’s name. Lenox began looking in the class of 1862 and finally alighted on his quarry in the class of 1865. Underneath each name was a terse biographical sketch. Godwin’s repeated the details of his entry in Who’s Who, down to the Chepstow and Ely.

  Slightly chilling to think that in the next issue of this book Godwin’s name would appear in the necrology.

  Each class at Wadham had roughly fifty members; Lenox was willing to wager that if the fair-haired friend was from Oxford, he was from Wadham, a famously insular college.

  It was easy to rule people out. Many were propping up, in small backwaters, England’s imperial edifice, local wallahs with twenty native servants, who even upon retirement would never be quite fit to live in England again—the heat got into their blood, or so it was said. Another half dozen were professors at the two universities, and outnumbering them two to one were the religious men, scattered across the parishes of the isles. Before he had started trying, Lenox had rid himself of thirty names.

  Now came a greater challenge. Could Arthur Waller, of Swallowtail Lane, be the man? Or Anthony Brinde, who lived not three blocks from Lenox himself? Still, there were names to cross off the list. The head of a large tin concern in Manchester was not likely to moon about London for weeks on end, buying guns in another man’s name.

  Lenox finished with eleven candidates he viewed as strong, most of them Londoners. Then, with a dutiful sigh, he pulled down the volumes for the matriculating classes on either side of Godwin’s year and did the same task.

  An hour later he stood up, having covered three sheets of club paper with names, addresses, and occupations. In all there must have been nearly fifty.

  It was a job for someone with more time than he had.

  Fortunately he knew the man. Lenox put the books away and nodded to the old gentleman who had been sleeping underneath his copy of the Times for the last hour, before waking up with a flustered start and feigning deep absorption in an advertisement for women’s headache tonic. Then he went downstairs to the club’s telegraph office and sent a wire.

  Two hours later, as Lenox was sitting in his office at the Commons, this wire produced its recipient in person. “Fellow called Mr. Skaggs!” said Frabbs rapidly, poking his head around the door, then beckoning the visitor inward.

  When Lenox had been a detective, he had often used Skaggs—a large, bruising man, once a fearsome boxer, now tamed into domesticity by a lovely wife and three children—as an auxiliary investigator. Though he was a physical specimen, his skills of detection were, in fact, primarily cerebral.

  “How do you do, Mr. Lenox? Back in the game, based on your message?”

  “It has been some time! I hope you’re well?”

  “Quite well, quite well, sir. Lord John Dallington hires me every so often, and then of course I get a number of lesser cases on my own.”

  There was a small ruby ring on Skaggs’s left hand; Lenox suspected this self-accounting of modesty. “Does the Yard ever ask for your help?”

  “They haven’t yet, sir.”

  Lenox sighed. “I’ve told them they ought to. At any rate—are you free for a day or two? I’ve a job for you.”

  “Delighted for the work. Though my rates have gone up.”

  “I would be surprised if they hadn’t, seeing that it has been, what, four years? But the job—let me tell you about it.” Lenox offered a quick outline, omitting the role that Grace Ammons had played in the affair, and then described in close detail the man they were all seeking. Finally he handed over the list he had made. “I would like you to rule out as many of these men as possible.”

  “An achievable goal, sir.”

  “Ideally I would like you to find our man—or a candidate I could lay eyes upon myself.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “In most cases a glance should be enough. How much time do you think you need?”

  Skaggs read through the addresses on the pages Lenox had handed him, then said, “Why don’t I check in tomorrow evening?”

  “That will do splendidly.”

  “Here, or Hampden Lane?”

  Lenox laughed. “Here, unfortunately. If I am in the Commons you can leave word with Graham, or write me a note—or wait, since there are frequent breaks, and possibly I could step out during a lull in the debate.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “We might even scoop the Yard, Skaggs.”

  Skaggs smiled. “Touch wood.”

  It was still shy of suppertime, and Lenox decided he would call on Jenkins, to see what progress the police had made. First he went to see Dallington, however; the young lord was fitter today, after sleeping late into the morning, and came along willingly. Lenox told him about his researches into the graduates of Wadham College.

  “I cannot imagine one Oxford man murdering
another in cold blood.”

  “Then you are missing out on a whole class of villains you might study. Nobody goes bad faster than a gentleman, and we know that it was a gentleman who stole from Godwin, defrauded him. Murder is not a very long chalk further.”

  Dallington shook his head. “No, but the kinds of friends Godwin—someone as quiet as Godwin—would have made at Oxford … do you not imagine them all curates, or perhaps butterfly enthusiasts, dipping toast into weak tea? This daring adventurer you’ve described—I cannot credit Godwin with such an interesting companion.”

  Lenox laughed. “We shall see if I am wrong soon, anyhow. Skaggs has always worked quickly.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Dallington felt well enough, after his day of rest, that he asked the driver of Lenox’s carriage to stop a few streets shy of Scotland Yard, that they might walk there in the evening air. It was the season for walking: warm enough to be pleasant even after the sun had gone down but not, as in the summer, so hot that the smell of London became hard to bear, women carrying nosegays to hold to their faces, and anybody who could fleeing for the country or the seaside.

  A constable led the two men down a gaslit corridor. Jenkins had left their names at the desk.

  “Has an arrest been made in this Graves Hotel business?” Dallington asked the bobby.

  “I’m not sure, sir.”

  “No matter. We shall hear it all soon enough.”

  In the past twelvemonth Jenkins had achieved the dream of all of the Yard’s inspectors, an office in the upper south corner of the building, with a distant view of the Thames. When they reached his office, however, Jenkins’s back was turned to the river’s evening splendor, and he was hunched over his desk, reading reports. He smiled with tired eyes when Lenox and Dallington entered.

  “I have an account of every light-haired fellow who ever walked down the Strand since the reign of Aethelwulf. Too much hay, not enough needles, sadly.”

  “No progress at all, then?” asked Lenox sympathetically, sitting down across the desk from Jenkins. Dallington took the other chair.