The Inheritance

by Charles Finch

  Before he retired for the night he went into his study and jotted down a few notes. The next day he would find Townsend’s son and he would go to the Blue Peter, dangerous though it might be, and see Anderson and Singh.

  He wanted it all resolved before Leigh returned to London.

  When he finally went up to their bedchamber, he started telling Jane about something Sophia had said. She didn’t reply immediately, and he looked more closely toward where she sat, in front of her tall oval mirror, and realized, with a shock, that she was crying.

  He went over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “What’s the matter, my dear?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  She had been upset over Christmas. They had fallen out. With a sinking feeling he saw that it wasn’t over; and he still understood no better why. “Jane.”

  She shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

  It was so rare for her to be anything other than the most composed person in a room—his sweet, kind, acute wife, whose emotions generally ran highest for other people. “I wish you would tell me at last.”

  She looked up at him in the mirror. “I don’t want to, because you’ll think less of me.”

  “You have my word that I won’t.”

  She hesitated, and then looked down at the silver brush in her hand. “No, Charles. It’s fine. A good night’s sleep at home will set me right.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The next morning there was a thaw in the air, a blurred vivid sun. Across the city the sound of ice dripping away its existence. Lenox and Frost were both in greatcoats; but the day was sunny enough that these threatened to become warm.

  They were walking along Cheshire Street, in the East End of London. This more modest part of town was dominated by an endless row of tiny specialty shops, which sold their wares primarily to larger and more refined places in brighter neighborhoods. There was a lace dealer, a broom and brush maker, a snuff seller, a yeast merchant, a hatter, a gunsmith, a shroud maker, on and on and on. They passed several anonymous black doors with small white ribbons tied around their handles: midwives.

  Their destination was a pub. It was the Blue Peter, situated on a bustling corner of Chilton Street, and it was the central clearinghouse of all the business of the Farthings.

  In spite of that grim fact, it was a jolly paneled place, with its draft beers chalked on the wall and the maritime flag that gave it its name—a white square at the center of a larger blue square—flying above its door.

  Lenox’s stomach fluttered as they went in. Without Frost alongside him, his life would have been forfeit when he entered the Blue Peter. He had put at least three Farthings away. They would never come to the West End for revenge—it would bring too much attention to them—but if he walked into their midst, he might easily make too tempting a target to resist.

  The man they sought was as close as the Farthings had to a spokesman. He was a rather well-educated chap named Spencer, who stood behind the bar now, wiping it down with a rag.

  “Inspector Frost,” he said, without the slightest discomposure.

  “Hello, Spencer.”

  “What brings you into these lawless and wicked and god-mostly-forsaken parts?”

  “Anderson and Singh.”

  “Mr. Anderson and Mr. Singh!” Spencer grinned, revealing a gleaming white smile. Fake, of course. “Have they been paying calls at the Yard? Gentlemanly in them, I say, after how they’ve been treated there past times.”

  It wasn’t Spencer that Lenox wanted to speak to. It was Anderson and Singh themselves. Frost knew that, and asked, “Are they here?”

  “Here on Chilton Street? Those layabouts? No. Not for ages and ages.”

  “If they are, they can avoid hanging by talking to us.”

  “Not improved at listening, have you, Inspector Frost! Tut! I told you it’s been ages. Now, then, let me lay you down two pints in the little room, sirs—I don’t know you, but any friend of—yes, along through there—be in shortly.”

  They were hustled toward a back room. Lenox knew what that meant. Anderson and Singh would be offered the chance to speak to them; they might accept, might decline.

  Frost and Lenox waited there for the greater part of an hour. Because they couldn’t discuss the case—who knew what methods Spencer and his cronies might have of eavesdropping on them—they were forced to fall back upon general conversation. Fortunately Lenox found that he liked Frost, a Londoner bred in the bone, fond of noise and soot, suspicious of the countryside, and utterly at home in a pub like this one, adversarial but respectful toward its inhabitants. His great passion, it emerged, was codes and cyphers of all kinds. He corresponded with other amateur codemakers across England, and had even petitioned the Yard to allow him to form a task force dedicated to them. Approval was pending.

  Spencer, meanwhile, kept bringing them fresh pints. Lenox was pouring his in the grating; he knew the barman was being so hospitable because he wanted them sluggish.

  And then, suddenly, looming in the doorway, was an enormous barrel-bellied chap in a checked suit, with a bright red beard and a fleshy pink face.

  Anderson. Lenox felt the menace of the man immediately. He had small, cold eyes.

  “Yes? What do you want of me?” he asked.

  There was no pretense in his voice, or any of Spencer’s camouflaging amiability. “Did you kill a solicitor named Ernest Middleton?” Lenox asked, hoping to catch a reaction.

  “Who are you?”

  “A consultant with Scotland Yard,” Lenox answered. “Did you?”

  “I have no idea who the man is, but seeing as I have not killed anyone this side of the equator, I doubt it. On that occasion I did it for Her Majesty.”

  “Where is your friend Singh?” Lenox asked.

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  “We’re asking you,” said Frost in a hard voice.

  “Much good may it do you. Is that all?”

  Frost shook his head. “No. We wish you to know that Gerald Leigh has our attention.”

  “Don’t know the name.”

  “He has powerful friends—and should any harm come to him, the full force of the Yard might finally be borne in upon the Farthings. You may tell your superiors that.”

  Anderson studied them for a moment, and then turned without a word and left.

  Frost and Lenox exchanged a glance. He had gone, no doubt, thinking that he had given away nothing. What they knew, however, and he didn’t, was that from the moment he stepped outside the Blue Peter a constable would be shadowing him, and would continue to do so until Leigh returned in three days. Most of the Farthings lived in the crowded streets around this Chilton Street epicenter of their activity, but it was impossible to say where on a given night any of them might be. This had been their chance to find Anderson before he found Leigh. They had taken it. Not a bad morning’s work.

  Frost and Lenox took the underground west, then, climbing from it in the leafy middle-class precincts of Pimlico, home to much of London’s professional class, an altogether less threatening part of town. They were here to see Middleton’s lodgings.

  It had taken a surprisingly long while to discover their whereabouts. Beaumont—his own partner—had never laid eyes on them and only vaguely knew their location. They weren’t identified in any of the papers at the solicitor’s offices.

  That morning, however, a woman had written in to the Yard to say that she believed the man in the headlines had been the inhabitant of the second story of her house.

  A constable awaited them outside the door there now. It was a wholly respectable street, the houses each clad in the same staid gloss of outward gentility as their inhabitants no doubt were, curtained attic windows exchanged for bowler hats.

  “Hello, Chips,” said Frost to the small, alert constable. “What have you found?”

  “Name on the letterbox, sir.”

  Lenox had immediately noticed the same. “Very good. Well—shall we go in?”

  Chip
s held up the key, which he had obtained from the owner.

  The rooms were what Lenox had expected. There were four of them. One was a dark, fuggy sitting room, certainly a bachelor’s—cigar ash was strewn liberally over the arms of the sofa and the floor, a heavy tranche of old newspapers on the settle, hunting prints on the walls—and the remaining three lay behind it, two of them bedrooms and one a small study.

  Even a cursory examination showed that these were Middleton’s rooms, but unfortunately a more thorough one didn’t uncover the missing valise, which might have offered confirmation that Townsend was indeed the person who had left Leigh his fortune.

  There were other prizes, however. “Here is his daily planner,” Frost called from the study, flicking through a ledger. Lenox came and looked over his shoulder. “He was scrupulous about recording his appointments.”

  “A great deal of shorthand—abbreviations,” Lenox murmured. “But it could be useful. I wonder if I could keep it for a night or two?”

  “By all means—only let us take first crack at it, and we’ll give it to you Friday or Saturday.”

  That was fair. Lenox nodded his thanks.

  There were a few more useful finds—Lenox discovered two angry letters from a former client in a pigeonhole in the desk, which in a normal murder case would have vaulted their author, one Calum Aldington, into the top tier of suspects—and Chips followed them assiduously, double-checking everything they looked into. Also in Middleton’s desk was a sheaf of letter cards engraved with his name and the address 24 Aldershot Place. That was curious: a second address, perhaps.

  “Or an old address?” said Frost.

  “Perhaps. He has been here nine years, however, according to the landlady. Would he keep them in his desk? It’s a very tidy one. Worth sending a man to that address, if you can spare one.”

  Frost nodded, looking at the stationery. “Yes. We will.”

  It was in the spare bedroom that Lenox found something even more interesting, he thought. “Frost,” he called out, “come have a look at this.”

  The inspector popped his head around the doorway. “What is it?”

  Lenox held open a fitted pistol case, leather on the outside, blue velvet on the inside. “Empty.”

  “That’s something. Do you think it signifies?”

  “We didn’t find a pistol in the office, nor have we here.”

  “He lost it, then.”

  “A pistol! Well, perhaps—or perhaps he felt that he was in danger, and removed it for his own protection.”

  “But in that case we would have found it.”

  Lenox raised his eyebrows. “Or else it was the weapon that killed him, and it lies at the bottom of the Thames. You’ll note that the size of the pistol that was stored in this case matches that of the bullet found in Middleton’s brain.”

  Frost’s expression darkened. “Yes.”

  “Did you observe as we entered the dead bolt above the regular lock on the door?”

  “No.”

  Lenox nodded. “Unlocked, of course, since he wasn’t here—but new, I would guess, from the shine on the brass. The other doors don’t have them.”

  Frost looked at him with an air of reappraisal, perhaps of appreciation. “Well spotted.”

  There was a call from the sitting room. Frost and Lenox went and found Chips by the door, with the landlady. She was holding a packet of letters. She wanted to see if they needed the mail she had held for Middleton.

  Frost took the chance to ask her about the dead bolt. She had already said that she hadn’t noticed anything unusual about her lodger’s behavior—but now she said that yes, he had had a locksmith in at his own expense to fortify the door, about eight or nine days earlier.

  As Frost questioned the woman further, Lenox flicked through the mail. Most of it was of the common sort—circulars, bills—but there was one unfranked envelope that merely said Middleton in a fine cursive.

  He opened it, and something dropped to the floor. The envelope was otherwise empty. Chips stooped down and picked up the object. “What is it?” Lenox asked.

  “A coin,” Chips answered, holding it up for all of them to inspect. “But only a farthing.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The case was suddenly gathering momentum. After another hour and a half of examining Middleton’s rooms, he and Frost separated, agreeing to be in touch later that day, earlier if necessary. Frost knew that Lenox was pursuing Townsend’s son, Leigh’s competition for the father’s inheritance. For his part, the man from the Yard was going to speak with his bosses about the Farthings—since unmistakably now, by that coin, the unsuccessful attempt on Leigh’s life and the successful one on Middleton’s were linked, two known members of the gang pursuing the former, their very symbol appearing at the home of the latter.

  A stubborn problem remained for Lenox, though: Why would the gang indicate their intentions with this letter and coin? Neither of them had been able to offer a satisfactory solution to that question.

  He headed back toward the agency’s offices. For some reason the streets around Chancery Lane were crammed, nearly impassable. At the little wooden soup stand run by his friend Ames, Lenox stopped, touching his hat.

  “What is all this commotion?” he asked.

  “Do you read the papers, sir?”

  “From time to time. Why?”

  “It’s the Post Office, sir. Which, they’ve announced themselves so pressed in the need for telegraphs in the instrument gallery that they’ve said they’ll accept women now.”

  Lenox glanced around. It was nearly all young women in the neighborhood, he realized. “There are hundreds.”

  Ames brandished a fresh copy of the Star. “A thousand, it says here. They accepted seven hundred of them. Salary a hundred pound a year, sir.”

  “Not bad.”

  “Well, the women are kicking up, because the gentlemen make a hundred sixty—but they were let go, the ones that fussed. And it only makes sense, as they’re gentlemen.”

  “It’s overdue,” Lenox said. “They take ages now, the wires. And women can tap their toes just as well as men can. I have been at enough concerts to know that.”

  As he walked on, he watched the people milling around him. Nothing had changed life quite as the telegraph had. All of them were utterly dependent on it now. In America the change was even more dramatic—before the telegraph, it had taken ten days to send a message from the east coast of the country to the west, by the Pony Express; with the completion of the transcontinental line, fifteen years before, it now took about ten seconds. They were still to see how this closeness to distant parts of the world changed them all.

  When Lenox returned to the offices, he found that Polly and Dallington were back. They had been at Parliament three nights successively, taking the days to sleep, and as far as Lenox could ascertain had accomplished quite literally nothing in that time, unless you believed they had acted as a deterrent. (He did not.) Whenever they were in the office they were laughing together, heads close, full of plans.

  “I think it might be time to pass Parliament down the ladder,” he said, when they were closeted together. They had come in to hear about Leigh and Middleton.

  “Why?” Dallington asked.

  “It’s taking up all of your time, and unless I’m mistaken you still have no idea what happened. At this point I think we ought to call it a one-time event and devote less time to it. In fact, it’s overwhelmingly likely that whatever was in the back room is gone now.”

  “We do have one lead,” Dallington said.

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s a naval negotiation to begin in Belgium Tuesday next,” he said. “To see the British government’s plans for it in advance would be a serious strategic advantage.”

  “To France, Russia, any number of countries,” Polly added. “And according to one junior minister, several conversations had taken place in the room.”

  This was serious indeed, a plausible motive. Lenox nod
ded philosophically. “I suppose you had better carry on after all.”

  Relief flashed imperceptibly across Dallington’s face. “And what of Middleton, and Leigh?” he inquired.

  Lenox told them about the morning’s findings. Both expressed alarm about the farthing in the envelope; and like Lenox and Frost could offer no account for the brazenness of the symbol.

  “If it was a warning,” said Dallington, “they ought to have given him the chance to be warned before they killed him.”

  “Just so.”

  Soon enough they left Lenox’s office—looking more like conspirators than colleagues—and the older detective was free to begin looking over the brief dossier Pointilleux had given him on Townsend’s son.

  His name was a peculiar one: Salt. Salt Andrew Townsend. He was just over thirty and had lived in London since leaving grammar school at the age of seventeen, acting first as a factor for his father’s various business concerns, and then, after their falling-out, apparently living on a portion that his father had settled on him in happier times.

  “Salt,” Lenox muttered to himself, as he read this.

  He sent out for lunch and continued to puzzle through the timeline of Leigh’s case, jotting notes down as he went. Pointilleux dashed in at a little past two o’clock, only long enough to tell Lenox that he thought he would have run Salt Townsend to ground by six o’clock.

  “Come to my house when you have, would you?” Lenox asked.

  “Your house? Why, of course.”

  He thanked Pointilleux and waved him off. It was an unusual directive, but Lenox wanted to check on his brother. He left, directing his carriage to his town house.

  Sir Edmund Lenox was a great man in Parliament now; he was in conference despite having only just returned to London, and though he greeted Charles with an expression of delighted surprise, he immediately warned him that he could spare but a few minutes.

  “I had hoped I could give you tea somewhere,” said Charles.

  “If only. Two hours off the train, and I am somehow four hours behind schedule. Would that you could explain that to me.”