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

by Charles Finch

  “It’s a great deal.”

  “She could treble that amount and I would happily pay it.” The young lady had paused and then gone on. “I was always very careful with my money in France, after that week when I was abandoned. I husbanded it. George does not know the extent of the fortune I mean to bring him.”

  Though their talk already seemed long ago after the work of the day, it lingered in his mind. He was curious about Miss Strickland, and certainly very curious about the man who had tormented Grace Ammons and impersonated Archibald Godwin.

  As the sun fell that evening, ten hours after the conversation, Lenox remained in his office in Parliament, and at half past eight he went down to the Members’ Bar, leaving word with one of the porters at the gate that if any visitors should arrive—he was thinking of Skaggs—he should immediately be fetched back. Opening the door of the bar he sighed, wondering what Miss Strickland was making of the case, wherever and whoever she was. He was impatient for new information.

  The bar was teeming with gentlemen, many of them taking a break from the evening session. (On Friday these were always sparsely attended, the benches not a quarter full.) Some of them hailed Lenox. He paused and shook hands but didn’t stop for long. He had a specific target in mind: Willard Fremantle, the least discreet man in London.

  Fremantle was the third son of a Northumberland marquess, most recent in a very ancient line. Willard’s older brothers had both stayed close to home, but Willard, brighter and more restless, had strayed in the direction of the stock market, losing disastrous sums of money until his father, tired of underwriting these losses, found him a seat in Parliament to occupy his time.

  There are gossips the world values and gossips the world despises. Willard, sadly for himself, fell into this latter category, and one felt that he could almost sense it; instead of driving him to reticence, it seemed to induce in him an even greater volubility, as if in desperate defiance of other men’s opinion. Certainly it had been many years since anyone told him a secret. While his amiability assured that he had many friendly acquaintances in the House, one or two of whom could be counted upon to stop for a drink with him on any given night, he had no true friends. He was a plump, rapidly graying gentleman, unmarried.

  Lenox found him near the end of the bar, drinking a shandy and perusing the court circular in the Times. “Anything interesting?” asked Lenox.

  “Parties at the palace the next three nights, then a night for the Queen to rest, then the whole retinue makes for Balmoral.”

  “So early in the season?”

  “Only for a week, however.”

  Lenox nodded. Unsurprisingly, the one way to quiet Fremantle was to make a direct inquiry of him. Then he would tap his nose, implying that he had a great deal of knowledge on that particular subject but couldn’t possibly share it. Lenox started elsewhere, therefore. “Did you hear that Millwood’s secretary resigned?” he asked. “Passed on if he might obtain Ursula Millwood’s hand in marriage, no less!”

  This was the stalest piece of tattle in London, and Fremantle treated it with appropriate disdain. “I hear she’s said she’ll run off if her papa doesn’t consent.”

  Lenox smiled. “Count us lucky to have our chaps—Graham and Mollinger.” Mollinger was an old Fremantle retainer, the gamekeeper’s grandnephew. Like Graham, he was one of the very few parliamentary secretaries not to come from the ranks of the aristocracy. Rumor said that Willard had to draw his allowance from Mollinger. “Not above themselves.”

  Willard pursed his lips doubtfully. “Not Mollinger.”

  “Eh?” said Lenox.

  “Well, your chap, Graham…” He trailed off as if no more needed to be said.

  “What about him? Excellent fellow.”

  “The business with the trade unions.”

  “Oh, that,” said Lenox scornfully. “What’ve you heard? I’ll guarantee you I know more, and that it’s wrong.”

  “Wrong!” said Fremantle and laughed heartily to himself, taking a sip of his shandy. “When he’s been seen accepting cash from Whirral and Peligo? And others before them?”

  “Who else?” asked Lenox.

  Fremantle paused—perhaps he heard the urgency in his interlocutor’s voice. “Well, if it’s all false it can make no matter.”

  “Of course.” Lenox took his watch from its pocket and looked at it, then said, sighing, “I suppose I’d better go into the chamber?”

  “I wouldn’t advise it, my dear chap. Twinkleton had just begun to expatiate on the state of the glue industry when I left five minutes ago. He won’t rest until the whole country is covered in a thin layer of glue, you know.”

  Lenox smiled; in spite of it all he rather liked Fremantle. Perhaps he would ask Jane if they could have him to their supper—but then he remembered Disraeli and the onions (now famous in his mind) and thought that perhaps he had better reserve Fremantle for a less important evening. “I say, thank you. That was a near miss. Well, good evening, Fremantle.”

  Willard beckoned in Lenox close and said, “Before you go, a word. They do say that Cross has heard your secretary’s name in a meeting—yes, Cross, and even Gladstone. I think you had better be shot of him, you know.”

  Lenox felt a faint dread, but he masked it, smiling knowingly at Fremantle as he made his farewells.

  That was the slur, then: that in the negotiations over the Public Health Act, Graham had extorted the two great union leaders, Whirral and Peligo, for the support of his master, Lenox. It was a grave charge, and, Lenox knew, false.

  So why hadn’t Lenox himself been implicated in this corruption? Why was Graham’s name the one on every tongue? Certainly Edmund would have told him, and perhaps even John Baltimore or Willard Fremantle—as well as a dozen other friends he could name, who would have come to speak to him the moment they heard any slander against him, and not his secretary.

  Graham did have the power of scheduling. He could place a petitioner in a room with some of the most powerful men in the country, earning that ability in the last twelve months, when he had begun to arrange many of the meetings those in the upper hierarchy of the party took, coordinating his efforts with their secretaries. The charge was that Graham was selling access—and since Graham was not of the same class as most of the men in these hallways, it was easy to believe in his avarice.

  Lenox knew he would have to take steps quickly to repudiate these whispered accusations. Already, he feared, it might be too late.

  His heart heavy and mind preoccupied, he wandered almost inadvertently into the Commons—and there, indeed, was Twinkleton, upon his feet, a tranquilizing dullness in his voice.

  Fortunately, a messenger came to fetch Lenox from the benches almost immediately. He had a visitor.

  He walked to the small, comfortable room where visitors to the Members could wait. It was paneled in rosewood, with a green carpet, and always had a cozy fire running in every season, a tray of tea and sandwiches, and all the current papers and journals. The room was empty save for a lad in uniform waiting to deliver a telegram, and in the meanwhile eating his fill of biscuits, dunked in a cup of tea.

  Skaggs must have gone upstairs; Lenox turned and then heard, behind him, “Just a moment of your time, Mr. Lenox.” He turned back, and the delivery boy, shorn of his cap and kerchief, had become a middle-aged man—Skaggs himself. “Weren’t you curious about my report?”

  “Skaggs, you devil.”

  “Apologies, sir. Thought you might like to see the costume I wore when I approached most of the gents on your list.”

  “I had no conception of your dramatic talents,” said Lenox, smiling. “Well done. Shall we go up to my office?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Skaggs asked if it would be all the same to Lenox if they stayed there. “I’ve been in such a lather, rushing about London,” he said, “that I’ve barely managed a meal, and there’s such a lot of food here.”

  “We can offer you more substantial fortification than this.” Lenox t
urned back into the hallways and hailed one of the many runners who waited at each gate. “Bring us a horseshoe gammon and a pint of porter from the Coach and Horses. As quickly as possible, up to my office. Will that do for you, Skaggs? It’s the best thing they do at the pub.”

  “Perfectly, sir, thank you. I’ve run myself five-fifths empty.”

  Skaggs was large, and Lenox wondered what constituted starvation for such a creature—but there was no doubt that even if it would have composed a hearty day’s meals for Lenox himself, Skaggs looked pale and ragged.

  Parliament’s runners were very pushing at the pub, because they provided so much business, and the gammon nearly beat them upstairs. Skaggs took a bite and then another, and within a minute much of the color had returned to his face. After he swallowed the meat he took a prodigious draft of porter, nearly three-quarters of the pint pot in one gulp, and then set it down, settling back into his chair with a look of bliss on his face.

  “How did you get along, then?” asked Lenox.

  “Not badly. Here is the list.” Skaggs pulled a much-consulted piece of paper, battered into softness at every crease where it had been folded, from his breast pocket. “You gave me forty-seven names. Of these, forty I eliminated by a simple test of sight.”

  “Well done.”

  “I approached most of them in the disguise I was wearing when you saw me. About half at their homes, and for the other half it wasn’t very difficult to find their offices. I would tell the maid that I had a telegraph for Mr. Harrison, or whatever the gentleman’s name might be, that must only be delivered directly into his hands, and then when he finally came to the door of his house or office, I would feign where I had lost it, you see. There were a great number of exasperated men—some downright angry. I told them I would be back around with the telegram soon.”

  “And when you never appear?”

  Skaggs shrugged. “Life is full of mysteries.”

  “Are you dead certain that none of these fellows could have been the man I’m looking for?”

  “Of those forty, none had light hair as you described except one, and he was both very stunted and very unfortunate-faced, not at all the handsome type you described.”

  Lenox nodded. “The remaining seven, then.”

  “Those were harder, but I think I have eliminated three of them. I mean to try again tomorrow, but I am fairly sure I glimpsed all three—call it nine-tenths sure—one coming out of his club in Pall Mall, one at his residence in Belgravia, one in his office in the city.

  “That leaves four men. Three of these are tall, fair-haired, relatively handsome gentlemen. One I cannot recommend as your suspect, Mark Troughton. He is a man with a family of six, extremely pious, and would not, in my opinion, sir, be especially compelling to a female eye.”

  Lenox nodded. “Good. Go on.”

  “The other three gentlemen are worth a visit. Of course, neither may be your man—your man may not have come from Wadham at all, as I understand it—but here are their names and addresses. Troughton’s is there as well, if you want to have a look at him.”

  Lenox took the piece of paper and looked at it, wondering whether at this late hour Jenkins would still be at the office. Even if he had left for home, he was not the sort to consider his Saturday morning sacred. “What about the forty-seventh fellow?”

  “He is an enigma. He would not answer his door. I staked it out for some time, and nobody emerged.”

  “What is his profession?”

  “He listed none. His address, as you can see at the bottom of that sheet of paper, is a good one—the forwarding address he left at his last residence, which was where I visited first, a lodging house.”

  “He has perhaps had a rise in fortune, then?” asked Lenox.

  “I thought that might intrigue you, sir. He has only taken his new rooms in the past two months. Mitchell, the fruit-and-vegetable man across the way, keeps close track of all the houses in his street and says this fellow is tall and fair-haired. But I fear Mitchell saw the prospect of a coin, and might have picked up on my suggestions to please me.”

  Three names, then, perhaps four. Lenox felt a quickening of excitement. It was just possible they were circling closer.

  Skaggs finished his supper then, and the two men spoke, offering up conjectures back and forth as to the motive of Archibald Godwin’s murder. When he was finished with his last potato, his last dab of gravy, Skaggs thanked Lenox and took his leave, reminding Lenox as he went that he was available for any further work.

  When he was alone, Lenox sent a wire to Jenkins and Dallington. In it he suggested that, with a few constables for support, they all might call upon the four gentlemen whose names he listed at the foot of the telegram. For his part, Lenox added, he could do it tomorrow morning.

  Jane wouldn’t like it, the chance of his coming face-to-face with a murderer. Lenox looked at his watch when he had finished and saw that it was now past nine o’clock. The season began on Monday; she would be among her dresses, finding nothing to wear, or sitting to plan out in her tidy script their schedule. It seemed ages since he had laid eyes upon Sophia. He looked at the mess upon his desk and decided, rather suddenly, to leave, standing up and taking his cloak and hat down from the stand at the door. Within half an hour he was sitting by the fire at Hampden Lane.

  Lady Jane seemed particularly tired after the social exertions of her day, which she had spent moving between the houses of friends and commiserating with them about plans gone awry, servants who had given notice, daughters who refused to wear the proper dresses, all the gravely important trivia of the season.

  “Are we at least finished planning our own party?” he asked her as they sat on the sofa, each reading a book.

  She marked her spot with her thumb. “I find that word ‘we’ exceedingly droll, Charles.”

  “You’ll recall that I had very definite opinions in the great debate about meringues or ices for dessert.”

  She smiled. “And that your side was routed in the end. Even your own brother took against you.”

  “I consider that sort of loyal opposition essential to a successful party, however. In fact, to any communal endeavor whatsoever. When we first married, you might recall, I wished to paint this room blue. No, don’t shudder. Anyhow it was a thought.”

  “To answer your question, the planning for the party is all but finished,” said Lady Jane. “Kirk has been a saint. The silver will be polished on the morning of the party, and the tablecloths laundered, the food delivered, but everything else is ready—where people will sit, the menu, and of course all the invitations have gone out. Have I forgotten anything?”

  “What will you wear?”

  “My yellow dress, with the gray trim.” She smiled. “Have you begun to take an interest in my wardrobe?”

  “A very slight interest, perhaps.”

  “At any rate I won’t be wearing any roasted onions. I warned everyone in the kitchen that if I saw so much as one upon the table I would turn them out into the streets. I hope they are suitably afraid. Kirk will look at each plate as it goes out, and of course the Prime Minister’s own plate will be the most strictly examined.”

  “Thank you, my dear.”

  “I only wish Coleridge had accepted.”

  “Oh! I’ve forgotten to tell you! Graham has arranged for me to lunch with him!”

  “He hasn’t.”

  “Yes, it’s true.” Lenox thought for a moment about telling his wife of the defamations circulating against Graham but decided that he would rather not burden her with another anxiety, at least not yet, not until he could set it straight. She was already preoccupied. Toto had been around earlier in the day. “I don’t know how he did it.”

  “What a coup!”

  “Yes—I was very surprised. I don’t know exactly how to thank him.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  In the morning Jenkins replied to Lenox’s telegram that he was occupied for much of the day but would be available in the
late afternoon. (Alas, none of the names on Lenox’s list matched the names Jenkins’s men had gathered.) Lenox wrote back, promising to be at the Yard at four, and sent a telegram to Dallington to inform him of the new plan.

  His morning suddenly free, Lenox dawdled around the nursery with Sophia for a while, chatting affably with Miss Emanuel as both of them observed the child’s awkward and endearing feats of coordination.

  At ten, however, Graham asked for a word in Lenox’s study, and there suggested that since they were both free, they might take a round of the charities.

  “We have been putting it off,” said Graham.

  “Yes, and there will never be a better opportunity,” said Lenox forlornly.

  “I will put the word around—if you would be ready to leave in half an hour?”

  “Just as you wish.”

  Since he had become a Member of Parliament, and especially since he had risen into the higher echelons of his party, Lenox had found himself an object of deep interest among the charities of London (and indeed beyond). For one thing, the imprimatur his name lent to the list of a board of directors was a valuable tool in raising new funds; for another, his attention might one day mean, however glancingly, the attention of the House of Commons.

  In the first flush of his electoral triumph, Lenox had accepted every such invitation. It had become apparent very quickly how calamitous a policy that was. There were a great many sham charities, badly run and, truth be told, meriting the investigation of criminal authorities, and only narrowly did Lenox avoid involvement with several of these. As his circumspection increased, he had reduced his commitments to a half-dozen or so charities.

  There were always new requests, however, and Graham now insisted—wisely—that they visit each, preferably on very little notice, to make their selection.

  The first visit they made was a mere formality, one with which Lenox would happily have dispensed. Graham was more cautious and had insisted they visit Mr. Soyer’s establishment in person. Soyer had been a great man, but he was dead, after all, and one couldn’t rely upon the integrity of his successors.