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

by Charles Finch

  “None that I can discern, though it is possible that we have interviewed the fellow eight different times. I had high hopes that they might know something of him at Cyril’s, the restaurant where he ate every night—perhaps even that they would remember Godwin coming in to confront his impostor—but it is a large place. Nobody there recalled him particularly. I hope that you gentlemen have devised some alternative line of inquiry. Tomorrow I have an appointment to speak with Grace Ammons, but beyond that I am at a loss.”

  Lenox described his trawl through the Oxford annuals, and the results.

  That brightened Jenkins’s mood slightly. “Certainly we have a list of names to cross-reference against yours. I exaggerated their quantity—it wouldn’t take one of these young fellows an hour to check the lists against each other. Let me know when you hear anything.”

  “Our best lead is still Miss Ammons,” said Dallington. “Whether we believe her tale or not, she is the beginning and end of it all.”

  “What do you take to be her role?” asked Jenkins.

  Dallington glanced at Lenox, then back at the inspector. “Allowing that it is purely hypothesis?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I take the situation thusly: A gentleman finds that he has fallen on hard times. Let us call him Smith. This Mr. Smith is not a person of many scruples. In some previous walk of life—perhaps at Oxford, perhaps in some manner of business, perhaps, who knows, with the beaglers of the Clinkard Meon Valley—he encountered Archibald Godwin, and learned that Godwin is at once extremely retiring and extremely rich. Also perhaps that he orders from shops in London. That is an enticing combination. He wonders, in his own mind, whether the vendors a man of Godwin’s stock would frequent—Ede and Ravenscroft, for example—would even be able to identify this country gentleman by sight.

  “Then, one day, perhaps Mr. Smith is desperate, perhaps merely venal—he decides to try it. He visits a small shop. Which shop did he visit first?”

  Jenkins squinted down at a list on his desk. “Shipp’s. The hatmaker.”

  “Mr. Smith walks into Shipp’s. Looks at hats. Finally plucks up his nerve and orders one—and finds that they are more than happy to accept that he is Mr. Godwin. He can call round next Tuesday to pick up his order. So it’s begun. Inspector Jenkins, I suppose you and your fellows compiled a list of everything he purchased?”

  “We did.”

  “Were all of his acquisitions grouped close together?”

  “Within a week of each other.”

  “Very well.” Dallington was looking off into the distance, settling into his vision of the crime. “Mr. Smith begins to think very highly of himself. He is dressed finely, he is eating at wonderful places—and he is a handsome fellow; he gains access by chance to one party, and then another. Or perhaps he has picked up with old friends, whom he had dropped out of shame when he couldn’t afford to keep up with them, and while he is Archibald Godwin in Jermyn Street, he becomes Mr. Smith among his friends again.”

  “He must have known that it was going to catch up with him quickly,” said Jenkins.

  “He would have hoped that Godwin received the first bill ten minutes after Smith picked up the last suit at the tailor’s, of course. It is not hard to vanish back into London—easy as the waters closing over one’s head. Anyhow, it did not work out that way, as we know. Godwin discovered the truth, came to London, and confronted Smith. Perhaps Smith pled with him, particularly if they had once been friends. He would return the goods, if Godwin spared him from the ignominy of the police courts.”

  “But Godwin refused,” said Jenkins. “Listen here, though, Dallington—what about Grace Ammons?”

  Dallington shrugged. “He had bullied his way into one happy situation—why not another? Perhaps he had bragged to his friends that he would be at the palace. Perhaps he had overheard George Ivory’s name and story at a club.”

  “Or perhaps Grace Ammons was selling entrance to the Queen’s parties,” said Jenkins, shooting them a canny look. “That was the suggestion of a bright young fellow we have, Finnering. What if she had taken Mr. Smith’s money, been unable to place his name on the list, and then, when she saw him, feared exposure?”

  Lenox had been silent throughout this long exchange, and now both men looked at him expectantly. He shook his head. “I cannot entirely imagine that scenario, Inspector Jenkins, simply because she went to the effort of writing Dallington to hire him.”

  “If she felt threatened, would that not be wise? Keep the police out of it, but get help?”

  “Dallington isn’t in the business of protecting criminals.”

  “She might have lied,” said Dallington.

  “I suppose. To what end, however—to gain your indefinite protection? To frame Smith? You couldn’t have extricated her from such a situation.”

  “Dallington is from a well-known family. Perhaps she hoped that he would offer the money.”

  Lenox waved a hand. “This is all speculation. John, I enjoyed your story, and in truth it is very similar to the one I had in mind—and no doubt you, too, Inspector Jenkins. Nevertheless, hearing it out loud, there are points within it that I cannot reconcile with the facts of the case.”

  “What are they?”

  “Well, first, I do not understand why our Mr. Smith would have dined out at restaurants under Archibald Godwin’s name. Surely Godwin would not have had a line of credit at restaurants, when he was so infrequently in the city, and dined either at White’s or his hotel when he was?”

  Jenkins frowned and made a note. “We will ask whether Godwin had an account at any of these restaurants.”

  “I imagine you’ll find he did not—and no restaurant would have given Smith a meal simply on Godwin’s name, as Shipp’s or Ede’s would have given him a hat or a suit.”

  “Mm,” said Jenkins, still writing.

  “By the same token,” Lenox continued, “why give me his name as Archibald Godwin, that morning at Gilbert’s? What could it have benefited him? Better he should have told me his name was Aethelwulf—or Mr. Smith, anything.”

  “Perhaps he had grown used to the lie.”

  “Very well,” said Lenox, warming to his subject, “even granting these points, temporarily, there is still no accounting for Smith’s behavior toward Grace Ammons.”

  “Except that we do not know what his behavior was, precisely—her word having already proven unreliable.”

  “Still, we may assume that he somehow gained access to the palace. She is a bright girl—in truth I would even believe her a good one, based on our conversation, though I have been misled before—and I do not think she would claim that she had put his name on the list for these affairs of state if she knew we would not find it when we looked. Which, incidentally, you might do tomorrow, Jenkins, just as confirmation.”

  “What, look up Archibald Godwin’s name?”

  “Yes, on the attendance lists of the two gatherings to which he was apparently admitted.”

  Dallington brought the conversation back around. “Why is his behavior toward Grace Ammons unaccountable, Lenox? Do you think it far-fetched that he merely wanted admission to the palace, and found through the example of Godwin that he was now able to take what he wanted? Certainly you and I have seen that moment before—when a law-abiding fellow tips into crime and then realizes the full possibilities of his choice?”

  Here Lenox paused. “Yes,” he said at last.

  “What is it?” asked Jenkins.

  “No, nothing at all. Only, on that particular subject, I am in agreement with Dallington. I think this Mr. Smith had realized he might do more than order a suit and a hat.”

  “How, exactly?” asked Jenkins.

  “I have a growing fear that he intends to steal from the palace—or, worse yet, has already.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Both men looked at Lenox blankly for a moment and then simultaneously shook their heads and began to speak. It was Jenkins whose voice won out.

/>   “My dear fellow,” he said, “there are so many places in London, so many thousands, from which it would be easier to steal.”

  “Can you point them out to me?” asked Lenox. “There is great risk in entering a private residence, and no guarantee that it will hold much treasure, even at the finest address. The museums and societies keep everything of value under lock and key. By contrast, Dallington, consider the paintings we saw on the wall—or the medieval Bible stand in the East Gallery, with gold and rubies in it, with which we were allowed to remain alone for twenty minutes.”

  “With guards on every side of us.”

  “At a party of eight hundred, would they be such a problem? Heaven alone knows the value of the jewels in the Queen’s vaults. Think of the boy Jones, gentlemen.”

  The example of the boy Jones silenced the other two men. Three decades before, Jones, a lad of not more than fourteen or fifteen, had gained entrance to Buckingham Palace, disguised as a chimney sweep. Guards caught him after only a short while, with an eccentric collection of the Queen’s personal items, garments, letters, and knickknacks, none of it very valuable.

  They expelled the boy and warned him not to return. Not much later, he scaled the walls of Buckingham Palace and wandered it for hours, sitting on the throne, lying in Victoria’s bed, and stealing food from the larder. One of the wits of the age had dubbed the child “In I Go Jones.”

  At any rate, the palace was not unimpeachably secure.

  Jenkins rose from his seat. The light was declining into shadow outside, and he lit a lamp recessed into the wall, making the room brighter. “But then we come to Grace Ammons,” he said. “No intelligent thief would leave behind such a trail. If he merely wished access to the palace as a social matter, this light-haired gentleman could deny Miss Ammons’s story. That would be very much harder if he stole something.”

  “Perhaps he counted upon her intimidation.” Lenox saw that it was a fair point, and he fell into silence for a moment, as the other two men contemplated him. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “There are too many questions—why our Mr. Smith gave his name out as Godwin beyond the shops at which he used it, whether and why he killed the real Godwin, what he wanted to do at the palace.”

  “The behavior of Miss Ammons,” added Dallington, eyes narrowed in contemplation. “Until we are sure of her story we are sure of nothing at all.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Lenox softly.

  It was this problem—Miss Ammons’s character, her honesty—that preoccupied Lenox all through the remainder of the evening. Soon he and Dallington left the Yard, agreeing to reconvene with Jenkins the next afternoon. (Hopefully Skaggs would have finished his canvass by then.) Lenox dined alone at the House that evening, and as he ate his chop and mashed turnips and read about the mining crisis, by the flickering candlelight at Bellamy’s Restaurant, his mind kept circling back to her, to Miss Ammons. Even as he sat upon the benches of the house she entered into his thoughts—true, not when he was trying to catch the eye of the Speaker, or as he spoke, or for any of the insensible moments after he sat down, his heart still thumping even after these many years of speeches. In the slack moments, though—for instance, when someone with whom he agreed was entering upon the sixteenth minute of a speech, every word of which the bored scribes in the journalists’ box could have written themselves—it would be Grace Ammons who returned to Lenox’s mind.

  There were several important votes that evening, and he didn’t return to Hampden Lane until well after one o’clock. Even then, however, as his tired head fell to the pillow, its last conscious thought was of Grace Ammons.

  In the morning it came to him.

  In haste he dressed and ate, then hurried over to Scotland Yard, hoping to catch Jenkins before the inspector left for his visit to the palace. By great good fortune he managed it—the Yard’s brougham was sitting outside its entrance, horses warmed, waiting for Jenkins, when Lenox arrived.

  “Mr. Lenox!” said Jenkins, surprised, when he met the older detective in the hallway. “Are we not meant to see each other this afternoon?”

  “With your permission I would like another word with Grace Ammons, before you speak to her. I think I know her motives.”

  “Do you, though? Perhaps you might explain them to me, if we ride to the palace together?”

  It was not difficult to convince Jenkins, who agreed to wait in the carriage for half an hour. Soon Lenox found himself following Mrs. Engel once again down the small hallway toward the East Gallery, and once again Grace Ammons was waiting there. Her mood before had been fearful. Now she seemed puzzled.

  “I am to see Inspector Thomas Jenkins of Scotland Yard shortly,” she said, rising as Lenox approached her, “despite my sincere desire not to involve the police in this matter. Is it necessary that you and I should speak again?”

  “I’m afraid it is,” he said. “Please, sit. As for the police—once there is a death, their involvement is no longer a matter of personal discretion. I apologize, Miss Ammons.”

  They took their seats on one of the couches along the wall. “How may I help you, then, Mr. Lenox?”

  “I have decided that I believe your story.”

  She looked lovely in the wan morning light, with her chestnut hair falling around her pale throat. “Certainly there is no reason you should not.”

  “Believe you, that is, despite the barefaced falsehoods with which your story was filled.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I think that for the most part your story is true—that this light-haired gentleman, this murderer, bullied and threatened you—and I think it has taken courage on your part to tell us of it. The trouble is that if you lie once, your whole story is thrown into doubt. Until we are sure of you, it is difficult to proceed.”

  “I really cannot imagine what you mean,” she said.

  So Lenox told her what they knew: that George Ivory had nothing to do with the Chepstow and Ely company, that he sincerely and apologetically was forced to doubt her tale of a Yorkshire youth, that, in short, it was impossible to parse what was true and what was false in her story.

  She began to offer a faltering rebuttal of all this, but the truth told in her face. She seemed to sense that Lenox could read her, and changed tacks. “Whether or not you think I was lying, it is no matter. I have hired Miss Strickland to assist me in this matter, not Mr. Dallington, nor, certainly, you.”

  Lenox sighed. “I had a lengthy conversation with Inspector Jenkins this morning. He plans to place you under arrest.”

  “He would not.”

  “Your position here is no shield, ma’am. He believes you to be in league with this fair-haired gentleman—the murderer of Archie Godwin.”

  She gave out an involuntary and anguished cry. “In league with him?” she asked. “Of all people you must be the least likely to believe that. You saw how I reacted to him that morning.”

  Part of Lenox’s belief in Miss Ammons’s story, that morning, had been secondhand—he trusted Mrs. Engel’s evident and sincere good opinion of the young woman—and now, looking into her eyes, he felt sure that at heart she was true. Still, he said, “It might have been a show, specially designed for me, or for Dallington.”

  “I had no idea whatsoever that you were present,” said the young secretary.

  “If you make a clean breast of it, I’m sure I can persuade Jenkins not to arrest you.”

  She hesitated—and then said, “No, he will have to do as he sees fit. Time will exculpate me.”

  Lenox admired her fortitude, and it was with a reluctant heart that he said, “He may have to arrest Mr. Ivory as well, in that case.”

  “George? Why?”

  “As another accomplice.”

  It was here that her resolve broke. She stared at him for a moment, then said, quietly, “No, that will not do. I will tell you my story—my very shameful story—and then pray that you show me mercy, for I could not stand for any of that shame to cast a shadow over George.” />
  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Often in the course of his career as a detective, Lenox had done things that he would never have dreamed of doing outside the context of his vocation. He had picked locks, climbed fences, lied to witnesses—sacrificed many bone-deep integrities upon the altar of an inexact but higher good. These actions almost never cost him any unease.

  This one did. When he heard Grace Ammons’s story, the shame she had claimed for herself passed into his ownership. It had been necessary to extract the truth from her—but this was an ugly thing.

  She had begun with a heavy sigh. “I was not born in Yorkshire, you are correct,” she said.

  “The western part of Sussex, if I had to hazard a guess.”

  She inclined her head, in no mood to offer admiration for his deductions. “Yes, in western Sussex, though I thought I had shed my accent. I never knew my parents. My father was a shopowner there, and my mother a woman of gentle birth, rather come down in the world. Both of them died in a fire when I was not three months old. They had scattered the old ashes from their fireplace on the kitchen countertop to scrub it clean, and there was a live cinder among them, which caught on one of the wooden boards there.”

  “Where were you?”

  “At my grandmother’s house. She took me when there was too much work in the shop. It was she, too, who took care of me after my parents were gone. She was a wonderful woman, my father’s mother, though I just barely remember her. She died when I was seven, my second-to-last living relation. Would that she had lived longer.

  “After her death I passed to my father’s sister, my aunt Lily. She was a quiet woman, kind enough when she had the opportunity, but she lived in horror of her husband, my uncle Robert. He was a pious, sober man, with a prosperous farm, but he was a devil—still I believe him to have been the very devil, Mr. Lenox. I will pass over my time in that house, with your permission. I stayed there only until I was fifteen, and that history is not relevant to my current predicament.”