The Inheritance

by Charles Finch

  “We share a clerk, Larkin, who is here on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays. As you know, today is Tuesday, so he wasn’t in the chambers.”

  When Beaumont had left, Middleton had been drafting a will for one of his clients, a brewer from Lambeth. Lenox asked how acquainted the two men would have been with each other’s work, and the solicitor answered that they knew each other’s major clients—they kept joint books, each the other’s insurance against a down year, and with enough trust between them to share equally in their partnership—but that they rarely consulted each other in much detail, due to their separate fields of legal knowledge.

  When Beaumont had returned to the office, just after three o’clock, he had immediately noticed that something was amiss. The door was shoved in, the handle broken. Lenox looked over and saw that the wood around the jamb was splintered.

  “I proceeded inward with some caution,” said Beaumont, “calling out Middleton’s name. He did not reply. Soon enough I saw why.”

  “Was the door to his office open?” asked Lenox.

  “Closed,” said Beaumont.

  “And you went in?”

  “Yes. I took his pulse—nothing, alas. That was when I whistled for the constable. Both of us are older men, and we keep a whistle on the door. Neither of us has criminal clients, but people grow restive, you know, and in Maltravers Street you do have the criminal element come through occasionally.”

  Lenox nodded. They were men of extreme caution and conservatism, obviously, Beaumont and Middleton, their practice well and solidly maintained, perhaps not astronomically profitable, he would have guessed, because of an aversion to risk, but certainly successful.

  “Moss mentioned that things had gone missing,” said Frost to Beaumont.

  The solicitor nodded. “Yes. I looked with Constable Moss and saw that a set of gold pens Middleton received from a client were gone, along with his watch chain and watch, the former of which was set with rubies. I would have to look more thoroughly to see if anything else is gone.”

  “Did either of you keep ready money here?” Frost asked.

  “No.”

  “Was anything missing from your office?” Lenox asked.

  “No,” said Beaumont.

  “Perhaps we ought to go in and look at the body, then,” said Frost. “Mr. Beaumont, we’ll be with you again shortly if you prefer to remain here.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Middleton had been tall and bony, with a thin face and close-shorn hair. His head rested on its left cheek on his desk, his face not unpeaceful in its appearance despite the small bullet hole, with a trickle of dried blood descending from it, in the center of his forehead. A small snub-nosed pistol, Lenox guessed.

  His desk was extremely tidy, nearly empty.

  Lenox and Frost stood before the corpse for a moment in respectful silence. They had left Beaumont in the outer office with one of the constables. The landlady—all aflutter herself—had brought him a brandy and soda.

  “Give me an account of how you came to hear Middleton’s name, then, if you would,” Frost said.

  As Lenox offered a summation of Gerald Leigh’s inauspicious visit to London, both he and Frost combed through the office, careful not to disturb anything.

  When Lenox had finished speaking, Frost straightened and said, “Rum business.”

  “Yes, indeed.” Lenox turned around once, and then said, as much to himself as to Frost, “Where did he keep his files, I wonder?”

  There was no cabinet in the room, and the drawers of the desk were largely empty. Frost stepped to the door and asked Beaumont if they might have a word—then, realizing that he might not want to converse in the presence of the body of his partner, suggested that they might use Beaumont’s office.

  “His files?” Beaumont said, when they were in his own room, a slightly less refined but homier chamber. There was a rack of wooden pipes and an alepot over the fireplace. That red complexion had been fairly and squarely earned, Lenox thought. “He kept his current files in a valise which he brought between his office and his home. The rest are in a small locked room downstairs.”

  “With your own?”

  “No, mine are in here, as you can see.” He gestured toward a large cabinet. “Middleton didn’t like to have estates upon which he wasn’t currently working at hand, though. If something came up he went down to the locker.”

  This reply precipitated a trip down to the locker, to which Beaumont had a key, though he had to hunt it down in his desk. It appeared undisturbed. The door was locked, all of the cabinets of files locked, too.

  But of course the valise was gone.

  Frost and Lenox looked around the offices for another twenty minutes. Nothing of real interest presented itself; when Lenox had conferred with Frost, agreeing that they ought to meet with Leigh together that evening, he left. He wanted to return to the offices in Chancery Lane and think.

  On his carriage ride—the sky dark now—Lenox realized that it was a case richer than usual with possibilities. There were no fewer than four potential points of assault upon its hidden truths: the mysterious benefactor of Leigh’s schooldays; the attacks on him by Anderson and Singh; the unexpected legacy left to him; and now the murder of Middleton.

  Where to begin?

  The murder, Lenox thought—always the murder.

  Though it was past the normal work hours, the office was busy. Their various investigators were nearly all occupied on behalf of one or more of the businesses the agency represented, which meant that in turn the clerks were busy—and also that the partners were, by and large, free to take on cases.

  This was fortunate, both because it meant he could concentrate on Leigh and because when Lenox found Polly and Dallington, they were having an intense discussion about Parliament, from which they had just come. Evidently that case was more complex than it had sounded, too.

  They were in Polly’s office, she behind her desk, Dallington perched on its edge, flipping a small unlit cigar in his fingers.

  They greeted him and asked whether he had any news about Middleton.

  “The details are emerging,” Lenox said. “But I would guess it’s connected to Leigh. It must be. What happened at the House?”

  Polly shook her head seriously. “It’s a more interesting matter than the papers let on. Cheesewright was fearfully agitated.”

  It seemed ages since Lenox had read about the smashed window that morning, and seen his two partners off to visit with Mr. Cheesewright, their point of contact at Parliament.

  “I thought his head would spin off his shoulders,” Dallington said.

  “What happened?”

  Dallington gestured toward the desk. “I drew the scene.”

  This was a new practice that Polly had introduced. It was useless for Lenox, who could barely draw a circle, but she herself was a meticulous draftsman, or, he supposed, draftswoman, and Dallington had a light, loose, telling hand. One of their clerks had also proved eminently useful; in fact, Lenox had asked him on his way into this room to go over to Middleton’s chambers to draw the scene there.

  He picked up the sheet. It showed a row of six large windows, squared at the bottom and ascending to a curved triangle at the top, with a long stone bench running beneath them. One of the windows was broken, an ugly jagged hole in it more than large enough to admit a man or woman.

  Lenox had walked down this narrow hallway many times himself. It connected the famous chamber of the House of Commons to a secluded back office that was the privileged refuge of members of the cabinet, and anyone they might choose to invite—a most convenient bolt-hole. On the other side of the windows was a small flowering courtyard with a low fence, which then led out into the streets of Westminster. Certainly a vulnerability.

  “The person was trying to get into the Commons?” he asked.

  Dallington shook his head. “No—the other end of the hall, actually. Someone had tried to force the door of this back room.”

  Something was bot
hering him about the drawing, as he studied it. But he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.

  “What was in the office worth stealing?” he asked.

  Polly answered. “That’s the trouble—nobody will tell us. For that matter nobody will tell Cheesewright. The staff of the various ministers will only confirm that their masters had been in the office recently, but not what else might have been. We had a free hand to look around, but it was no different than stepping into any room at a gentleman’s club. Soft armchairs, old newspapers, the usual detritus. Nothing that looked worth stealing. And nothing that was stolen, at least nothing blatantly gone.”

  “How does Cheesewright want you to proceed?”

  “We were just debating that when you came in.”

  “How he wants you to proceed?”

  “No, sorry—how we interpreted his request. He very definitely wants one of us on the spot tonight.”

  “Let Harding go,” said Lenox. “Or I’m sure Pointilleux would only be too delighted.” These were two of their agents. “Better still, have them station the night porter in that hallway. They must have reserve forces.”

  “They only have two watchmen for the entire vast building overnight. We’re the reserve forces,” said Polly.

  Dallington nodded. “And I don’t want to send Harding. I think something pretty nasty may be afoot, and we don’t have a more important client. Look at all the business that their hiring of us put in our way. Short of the Queen there couldn’t be a better endorsement. I’d like to go myself.”

  “But so would I,” said Polly.

  “Which I say is out of the question.”

  She smiled. “To which I reply that I am not interested in Lord John’s opinions on the matter of my personal safety.”

  “To which I then reply that—”

  Lenox pointed a finger at the drawing. “I see it.”

  “See what?” asked Dallington.

  “Look at the glass of the window. Is this accurate?”

  The young lord frowned, coming over to glance down at the picture he had drawn in the light of the gas lamp. “I think so. At least it’s as accurate as I could get it. Why?”

  Lenox tapped the image of the broken window. “Was there glass on the bench beneath the broken window?”

  “No.”

  “Just as I thought. Look. The glass is broken outward. Someone was going out through the window, not breaking into the building through it.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The three partners of Lenox, Dallington, and Strickland spent a long while discussing the significance of this fact. (“Is that how you finally managed to get out of Parliament?” Dallington asked Lenox.) According to the two of them there hadn’t been any other illicit entrances observed at Parliament the day before, which made this unusual exit all the odder. Was the criminal someone who had been there with permission? A Member, even? A lord, heaven forfend?

  At last Dallington agreed that they could both return to Parliament that night. There, they could coordinate their efforts with the night watchmen and lie in wait for the vandal to return to the hallway.

  Once Dallington realized that he was going to spend the night in close work with Polly, his mood abruptly changed—he sent his secretary out to Fortnum’s with instructions to bring back a hamper of food and with it in particular a flask of very, very strong tea, “hotter than the devil if you please, and twice as strong.”

  The idea of a night sitting up with tea made Lenox realize how tired he was. When his younger colleagues’ course of action was settled, he took his leave with a few quiet words, nearly fell asleep in the taxi on the way home, ate and read a novel, and then, feeling melancholy in the empty house for a fleeting moment after his head fell on the pillow, passed the next ten hours sound asleep.

  He was woken only by the soft, discreet cough of Kirk outside his door. The butler would return in a moment or two. Lenox glanced at the clock—past eight. How indolent he became without Jane and Sophia here!

  He stretched, rose, and dressed. When Kirk came again, Lenox was halfway into his warmest heather-gray jacket. “Good morning,” he said. “Still snowing?”

  “No, sir—but it is the coldest day yet. And you have a visitor, sir. Mr. Graham.”

  Lenox was surprised but pleased. “Graham!”

  “Yes, sir. I have left him in the breakfast room with a cup of tea.”

  “We can do better than that—give him a bowl of oatmeal if you would, glutton that he is, and tell him I’ll be down shortly.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  In truth there were few less gluttonous men in London than Lenox’s quiet, watchful friend. An uncommon friendship, to be sure; for many years Graham had been Lenox’s butler, though that word scarcely covered the variety of his roles, which also included those of assistant and cocounsel in his investigations.

  Then, when Lenox had entered Parliament, he had been unable to find anyone he trusted to assume the role of his secretary, only to realize that the ideal candidate was in fact Graham. The trouble was that parliamentary secretaries were universally men of the upper class, bred into high families and educated amid old stones; and yet Graham had proven himself so adept at the battles of government, so brilliant in his maneuvers, that it had been only mildly shocking to political society when, upon Lenox leaving Parliament, he had himself run for a seat.

  After a tough defeat, he had won, and now for two years had been a Member, still snickered at for his low birth, still invited almost nowhere, but with a sure and growing reputation among the serious men of the body.

  He rose when Lenox entered the breakfast room. He was a compact, sandy-haired person, with a servant’s natural impassivity in his face, a face that was now, after many years, minutely scored with wrinkles.

  They shook hands. “How do you do?” Graham asked, in his inflection the word “sir” somehow still suspended just invisibly.

  “My wife and daughter are snowbound in outer Romania and one of my oldest friends has two of the worst gang members of East London after him.”

  “Roughly as I last found you, then,” said Graham.

  Lenox laughed. “Yes, roughly as you last found me.”

  “Outer Romania?”

  “Well—Sussex. And you? Are you quite well?”

  “Quite well, yes.” He looked tired, Lenox thought. “The House does become discouraging, time in time.”

  “How is that?”

  “Oh—slow.”

  Lenox nodded sympathetically. “I remember.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “How weary I grew of the accustomed pattern,” Lenox said, pouring himself a cup of coffee and joining Graham at the table. “First a terrible story comes to light, be it the state of the orphanages or the children in the mines up north. Old soldiers starving to death for want of income. There is an outcry, a long article detailing the problem. The novelists get a hold of it. Then the philanthropists and the charitable societies. And only then does Parliament creak into motion.”

  “If then. The pheasants and the foxes will not shoot themselves,” said Graham.

  “And then a year or two later you might pass some laughably weak law, funded the Lord alone knows how, and if you’re lucky six years later something begins to happen, perhaps—people will stop being poisoned because their milk is made mostly of chalk. And for all that things get done, eventually.”

  Graham nodded. “There is no other way, I suppose.”

  “It’s like running a team of twenty horses. You have to turn them slowly.”

  “You ought to be able to go faster in a straight line, though. There are matters we should all agree on.”

  “I recall my own father working on the Factory Act. It was passed in 1802 to ensure that children worked no more than twelve hours a day—twelve hours! not all that generous a reprieve—and it was enforced for the first time in 1833, when they finally came around to appointing a few inspectors. Thirty-one years. Think of it.”

&nb
sp; For a long while they discussed Graham’s efforts, thwarted by the Tories and by some in his own party too, to extend the vote to debtors. The story of their century had been that of the vote, in some ways, from only a select few possessing the franchise to tens of thousands more by now. About a decade before, when Parliament passed its gargantuan and far-reaching Reform Bill, John Stuart Mill had even proposed a motion to change the language to allow every “person” to vote, rather than every man—that is, to give women the vote. He had been mocked and scorned and derided, but now, very, very slowly, the idea was moving into the outer fringes of respectability. Among the political class it was considered very savvy to predict the coming of the women’s vote—though likely not for a hundred years or so, they all agreed.

  Kirk came in quietly with a pot of oatmeal and a bowl of brown sugar, then after a moment with a small glass of ale for Graham, a testament to the many years they had known each other as peers.

  When Graham had been there half an hour, a messenger arrived with a note. Lenox recognized him as one of the McConnell footmen.

  “If you’ll forgive me, this might be important,” Lenox said, opening it.

  It was from Leigh.

  My dear Lenox,

  After a night’s restless sleep I have decided to return to France after all. My heart is with my work there. I will also feel safe—the university is a fortress, and I rarely leave its grounds. Indeed my valet, whom they provided, was a member of their army’s special services. So I beg you not to worry, Charlie. Please convey to Mr. Middleton’s successor, whoever he may be, that I relinquish entirely my claims to the fortune that was left me. Should I need to have that statement notarized or somehow recorded by a solicitor, there are British attorneys in Paris.

  With many reservations I have agreed to return in a week’s time to address the Royal Society. If the police need my help then, I will be happy to give it. But my hope is that the whole matter will be behind me.

  Even in these circumstances it has given me joy to see you again; will you allow me to invite you and Lady Jane to dine with me upon my return?