The Inheritance

by Charles Finch

  “Can I ask what time Mr. Leigh left this morning, if you were here?” he said to the clerk.

  “I was, sir. It was just after eleven o’clock.”

  “Alone, was he?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you are absolutely certain he hasn’t returned? I only ask because I was meant to dine with him.”

  “All but certain, sir. His room key is still behind the desk. I could check his room, however, if you liked?”

  Lenox nodded. “I would be extremely grateful.”

  The clerk gave a signal to the bellman by the door that he would be gone a moment, took the key to 29, then left. He returned very quickly, without ever giving the slightest impression of haste—very good at his job, indeed. “He is out, sir.”

  “But his things are still there.”

  “Oh, yes, sir. He is booked with us for several more nights.”

  Lenox thanked his stars that this clerk’s professionalism didn’t make him closemouthed—but then, he didn’t know he was speaking to a detective, and Lenox was a gentleman and had given his name. “Thank you very much. Please do tell him I’m sorry to have missed him.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  Lenox went back out to his waiting carriage in an unsettled state of mind. As Rackham led them slowly away from the hotel, Lenox thought that he wished he knew more of Leigh’s habits, his circle of acquaintance.

  He was briefly distracted from these contemplations, as the carriage turned onto Hampden Lane, by an unfortunate list in its posture. Lenox tapped hard on the roof of his small chamber to wake Rackham up—the driver being an unrepentant dipsomaniac, who had concealed within his cloak and breeches at all times, like a pirate with never fewer than thirteen knives stowed away upon his person, various bottles of alcohol. He was completely safe from the sack, too, because he had once, his most glorious moment, flown into action when some scoundrel tried to rob Lady Jane as she stepped from the carriage, thrashing the fellow and then standing on his supine form until a constable arrived.

  “Thank you, Rackham,” said Lenox dryly when they were in front of the house again.

  “Not at all, sir.”

  Having survived this ride and come into his front hallway again, Lenox took off his cloak and hat in a brooding mood. Kirk greeted him; Lenox returned his word with a clipped hello, then went off to his study. He sat there late into the night, nursing a glass of ruby port, without hearing anything from Leigh.

  The next morning he awoke early, dressed quickly, and set out into the streets on his own, stalking heavily through the drifts of snow upon the pavement. It would be quicker to walk back to the Collingwood himself than to wait for the horses.

  On the corner of Hampden Lane was Pargiter, the newsman. “Out again after the blizzard?” Lenox asked.

  “I was out yesterday, wasn’t I?”

  “Were you, though? I’m amazed.”

  “Sold seven bleeding papers in two hours and called it quits.” Pargiter shook his head moodily. “Even the regulars not about.”

  Lenox smiled. “I’ll take the four usual, at least. Anything worth reading?”

  “No,” said Pargiter firmly, pulling copies of each of the morning newspapers from his small wooden stand, which had two wheels. He couldn’t read and was deeply biased against the practice. Somehow he always knew the contents of the papers, however. “A little pother at the Parliament, that’s your lead in three of’m. Broken window. Vandals suspected, ’n’all.”

  Lenox frowned. That was a matter of some professional interest to him, as it happened. “I didn’t see it in the Times.”

  That was the paper he subscribed to, and Pargiter shook his head. “I always tell you if you want the final edition you have to come here, Mr. Lenox. I’ve told you that up and down, you know.”

  Lenox handed over a few small coins. “So you have, yes. I have myself alone to blame.”

  He scanned the headlines as he walked toward the Collingwood, then, realizing that he was cold, folded the papers over and began to walk more briskly. It took him fifteen minutes to reach the hotel. Despite being heavily enfolded, gloved, booted, scarved, he was freezing. It gave him a new feeling of tolerance for Pargiter’s habitual gloominess.

  He entered the hotel. There was a small group of gentlemen in the armchairs this time, each with a pipe and a cup of tea, each positioned comfortably behind a newspaper.

  None of them Leigh, as Lenox took in at a glance. He approached the desk—a different clerk this morning—only to perceive, with an unnerving jolt of recognition, that his letter was still waiting in the pigeonhole of room number 29. The key was there, too. Apparently Leigh hadn’t returned to his hotel since writing to his old friend for help.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lenox’s concerns, which had been pressing insistently but lightly upon his conscience, suddenly felt more serious.

  The new clerk confirmed that Leigh hadn’t returned while he was on duty. It had been no night to remain out abroad, either. Lenox was nearly tempted to ask if he could see the room Leigh had been staying in, but he knew that the answer would be no, and that he would only alarm the clerk with the request.

  And yet what was his next step to be?

  By the time he had returned home he had at least one or two ideas. He’d eat breakfast; wire to let Polly and Dallington, his partners at the detective agency, know that he wouldn’t be by until the afternoon; then head outdoors once more, though it was already beginning to snow again.

  As he approached the house, however, he saw that he would be spared at least the sending of the wire. A figure stood in front of his door, a young woman in a slim gray coat, her hansom still waiting at the curb.

  This was Polly Buchanan, one of the agency’s two other partners.

  “There you are,” she said. “I’ve just been speaking to Mr. Kirk, who told me that you were away. I asked him what could have taken you out on a morning like this before breakfast, but he didn’t know.”

  “I don’t tell him all my secrets, believe it or not, schoolgirls though you think us. Please, though, come inside, you must be a block of ice. Is Anixter in the cab?”

  This was Polly’s enormous and taciturn dogsbody, implacably loyal and also implacably silent, a hulking fellow who in all weathers wore the same peacoat. “He is—but he doesn’t mind. He fell into the waters of Newfoundland once when he was in the navy and he says that he’s never been cold since, though when I asked him to explain how freezing half to death keeps you warm he couldn’t explain it. In fairness, he isn’t a biologist.”

  “Dead nerve endings, perhaps.”

  “I say, there’s a jolly thought.”

  They had come into the front hallway. There was a small brazier burning its hot coals on the floor next to the coatrack, and Polly warmed her hands and face over it, the flakes of snow in her light brown hair melting quickly into wetness, invisibility.

  “What brings you?” Lenox asked.

  “I wasn’t sure if you intended to come to Chancery Lane later today. I’m on my way there myself. Did you see the papers?”

  “Yes, I did,” said Lenox, hanging his coat.

  The headline Pargiter had dismissed—the broken window at Parliament, and the possible break-in it meant, though nothing had been reported missing—might in fact prove extremely meaningful to the agency, as Lenox had known right away.

  The reason for this was that the agency was on retainer there. It was the crown jewel of the many businesses and organizations that paid them an annual sum in order to remain on call should any trouble arise.

  So far it had involved tasks both great and small. There were minor, niggling problems, problems that were either of too little consequence or too much confidentiality to involve Scotland Yard. Small missing amounts of money, misplaced documents, even disputes over bar bills. The agency had handled all of these on behalf of Parliament.

  “I was calling to see if you wanted to go and see Mr. Cheesewright with me.”

 
; Jacob Cheesewright was their point of contact, an officious, pedantic fellow with proudly fat muttonchop whiskers. “Let’s discuss it—I can give you a decent breakfast, I’m sure, even without Jane here, though it will have to be a quick one for me before I go back out.”

  Polly looked at him curiously. “Out again already? Is it a case?”

  “I’m not sure, to be honest. Come have a bite and I can explain.”

  He led her to the small paneled breakfast room at the back of the house. It was filled with bright snowy daylight, the sun gleaming more fiercely against the windows than it did in the streets. On the sideboard there was a large pot of coffee with steam rising from it. Lenox poured a cup and would have offered it to Polly, if he hadn’t known she took tea.

  As he sat, gesturing for her to join him at the round table, he took a grateful sip. Kirk must have heard him enter, for at that very moment he came in carrying a tray laden with plates of eggs and kippers and buttered toast, as well as a porringer full of hot oats under a small mountain of dark sugar. Without betraying any surprise, he inclined his head toward Polly, set down the food, and laid a second place on the table from the drawers of the sideboard.

  “I’ll bring more eggs shortly, sir,” he said, “and strong tea, ma’am.”

  “Oh, thank you, Mr. Kirk,” she said. “I found him after all.”

  “Very good, ma’am.”

  “Yes, I thought so. I am a detective.”

  That Kirk knew what she drank showed the intimacy of Polly’s connection to Lenox’s home, despite the fact that two years before he wouldn’t have known her from a stranger in the street.

  She was a young widow, with a pink coloring that seemed to reflect some certain recklessness of spirit, the same quality that led her more quickly than other people into impatience, even combativeness—perhaps because she was so often smarter than those other people. It was a trait that had gotten her into trouble after her husband’s death, when she spoke pertly in one too many drawing rooms, and gained a slightly gossiped infamy, without any real cause.

  She had ignored it, and, needing money and spying what she thought was an unfilled space in the marketplace, had opened a detective agency that catered to women. She had called it Miss Strickland’s. It was a success from the first—she had proven herself a pragmatic, sharp-eyed detective, with a gift for finding lost jewelry, missing beaux, all the small cases that came her way.

  She had taken the great gamble, then, of joining her career to Lenox’s and to that of Lenox’s protégé, John Dallington—and it had paid off. Indeed, she had become their leader, they would both likely have admitted, first among equals. She had the greatest gift of the three of them for organization, for seeing the longer arc of the agency, sensing when they ought to increase their staff, when to cut it back, which cases to take, which rooms. Her own small custom hummed along, and the few larger cases she had taken on she had handled well.

  Already, Lenox considered her family. Certainly there were not many young women of less than thirty with whom he would speak so freely as he already had that morning, or dine alone—and he respected, too, her character, which was open and yet reserved, passionate but with some suffering behind it, originating, he would have guessed, though he rarely mentioned the subject, with the loss of her husband.

  After inviting him to start his food, an offer he happily accepted, she asked what he had meant about the case. “I had a letter from a friend, and he promised a visit to follow it up—except that now he seems to have disappeared.”

  “Disappeared!”

  “Perhaps that’s too dramatic a word.” He recounted his two trips to the Collingwood. “I would like to chase him down.”

  “Is it anyone I know?”

  “No, I’ve barely seen him myself in the last thirty years. He’s lived abroad nearly the whole of that time. A fine fellow, though. Gerald Leigh.”

  She frowned. “And where do you suppose he’s gone?”

  His morning walk had made Lenox ravenous, and having dispatched an egg in five bites he pulled the oats toward him, lifting a spoon, his cheeks still tingling from the bracing air outside. “I wish I knew.” Kirk, his stately bulk somehow always graceful in its motion, reappeared with more eggs and with tea. Lenox thanked him, and added, “Please have them get the horses ready, too, would you? Quickly, if possible.”

  “Of course, sir. A telegram for you, as well, sir.”

  Lenox accepted the paper with a thanks and tore it open. He scanned its brief contents, while Polly, raised by a scholarly country clergyman and his aristocratic wife, attended with scrupulous politeness to a piece of toast.

  “There, what do you think of that for an inventive daughter,” Lenox said, passing over the telegram. He realized that there was relief flooding through him—the tone of the note so friendly, once more so intimate, as Jane’s usually were, after the unwonted coolness of their last day together in the country.

  Polly read it out loud.

  Weather heavy here STOP imagine we shall be another day while they clear the tracks STOP Sophie three uninterrupted hours of snow angels STOP much love to you don’t wither in absence STOP Jane

  She smiled—but Lenox thought he caught, fleetingly, a look of sadness in her face, and realized that perhaps he had been selfish to show her the message. Her family was mostly gone; she had no person with whom to share her life, or from whom she might receive a telegram like this one. She lived alone in her small, elegant house. Anixter happily roomed, like a sailor in quarters, in the smoky fug of the cellar.

  As they were bundling themselves back into winter clothes in the entrance hall, Polly, having received a full summary on Gerald Leigh, returned to the subject of the smashed window at the Parliament. “You do not wish to go to the House with me, then?” she asked.

  “In the normal course of things I would.”

  “No, I can handle it. The police must already be in,” said Polly. “From the accounts in the papers, it sounded serious enough that I think Cheesewright would have called them.”

  Lenox nodded. “Yes.”

  “And so of course we ought to be there. It’s one of our most lucrative contracts. As you know.”

  “Of course.” He hesitated. “Cheesewright hasn’t called us then?”

  “No. I had Anixter run over to the office earlier and check. No wires, no letters.”

  “I would go, but really I am worried for my friend Leigh, you see.”

  The understood subtext of this conversation was that Cheesewright, an old country Tory, loathed dealing with Polly; indeed, would have released the agency from their obligations without the intervention of Graham, Lenox’s friend, who was a sitting Member of the Commons.

  He loved a lord, on the other hand, Cheesewright. “Let’s have Dallington go and speak to him. And then you can help me find Leigh. I could use a hand.”

  She looked doubtful. “Dallington seemed slightly—”

  He interrupted. “He’ll be fine now.”

  Their third and final partner, Lord John Dallington, was a wry, handsome young fellow of thirty, youngest son of a duke and duchess, who in his earlier years of adulthood had earned a terrible reputation as a rake—but had mostly reformed of drinking and late nights now, and possessed a tremendous innate gift for detection, even if he was prone, still, to the occasional lost night. At their meeting two mornings before—the morning following New Year’s Eve—he had seemed barely aware of their conversation. But deeply aware of even the softest ray of sunlight that happened to pierce the cover of clouds, wincing sharply at each.

  They fetched Anixter, however, and went to find Dallington. It was four days past the celebrations, and their partner could summon up his strength and go to the House of Commons on their behalf, Lenox thought, and if he felt ill afterward he could full well have barley water to drink until he improved.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  As it happened, Dallington was in excellent fettle. When Lenox’s carriage slowed before the building in Half
Moon Street in which he had his rooms, the young lord leaned from his window and called out a hello. He was dressed, his jet black hair smoothed down, and a small white flower in his buttonhole to match the city’s glistening shell of snow.

  “What do you two scoundrels need now? Bail money again?” he called.

  “LORD JOHN!” cried an anguished voice from within—his landlady, an extremely proper widow.

  “Apologies, Mrs. Lucas! Apologies! Come up, Lenox and Polly, come up.”

  He met them at the top of the stairs and ushered them into his rooms with a smile. There was breakfast on his table, the newspapers spread out among the plates. Polly accepted a second cup of tea. “You’re reading the papers,” she said.

  “Well spotted.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I only meant—you saw the story.”

  “Yes. ‘Vandals.’ Not so dramatic a culprit, but it’s a slow day for news, I suppose.”

  “There were one or two intriguing details, were there not?” asked Lenox, who had looked at the papers on the way over. “That it was so close to the main chamber of the Commons, for instance. We came to see if you would talk to Jacob Cheesewright for us.”

  Dallington nodded. “I thought you might have. But wouldn’t he prefer to see you?”

  Because Lenox had been a Member, Cheesewright was extremely deferential toward him, even more so than toward Dallington. If the Yard was being difficult—territorial—it was Lenox who stood the better chance of putting the agency on the inside of the investigation.

  He explained, briefly, about Leigh, Dallington’s face becoming more solemn as he attended to the details. When Lenox had finished, the young lord stood up and said he was ready to go to the Commons immediately.

  “Thank you,” said Polly. “I would do it myself, but—”

  “Oh, I understand, of course,” said Dallington, and in his polite reply there was almost even a bow, a ghost of a bow in the angle of his head.

  This was their usual interaction: teasing, until there was any point of consideration that they might pay to each other, at which time it became entirely respectful.