“Was there any difference to him in recent weeks?” asked Dallington.
Smith looked up, thinking. He had refreshingly little of the reticence one found in most household retainers; it was clear that he bore Wakefield neither much loyalty nor much malice, and that his professional scruples were sincere but not limitless. “Now that you mention it, sir, Lord Wakefield has entertained more often than was usual with him, this month or so. He had four or five different visitors. Though only a single visitor came more than once.”
“Who was that?”
“We addressed him as Mr. Francis, sir.”
“Addressed him—was that not his name?”
“I don’t know, sir. I phrase it that way only because I recall that Lord Wakefield called him Hartley, when they spoke one to one.”
Nicholson said, “So his name might be Hartley Francis, or Francis Hartley.”
Lenox frowned. “How often did he visit?”
“Three or four times a week in the last month, sir, often for several hours in the evening.”
“Was he someone who might have been in Lord Wakefield’s employ? Or was he a friend—a gentleman?”
“Oh, no, sir, he was a gentleman. He and Lord Wakefield met on quite equal terms. Mr. Francis even chaffed His Lordship, now and then.”
“When was the last time Francis was here?”
“He was here just last night, sir, very late, after midnight. He asked to see Lord Wakefield, but as you know His Lordship had been gone by then for some time. He left a parcel.”
“Mr. Francis did? Or Lord Wakefield?”
“Mr. Francis, sir, last night.”
“Do you have it still?” asked Lenox.
“Yes, sir, in the front hall.”
“Could we please see it?” said Nicholson.
For the first time Smith looked doubtful. “I think I had better return it to Mr. Francis—or perhaps to Lord Wakefield’s heir.”
“Your master was mixed up in some very bad business, Mr. Smith,” said Lenox. “Your interests no longer lie with his. We really must see that parcel, if you don’t mind.”
Smith hesitated, and then acquiesced. “Very well, sir. If you wait a moment I’ll fetch it.”
As they waited, Lenox, Dallington, and Nicholson sipped at cups of tea, which the footman had brought in and the butler had silently poured for them as they asked their questions. They conferred in low tones about their interviews with the other four staff members—nothing particularly pertinent, they concurred, though all five servants had agreed that Wakefield had seemed preoccupied in recent weeks. According to the footman he had thrown a plate of turtle soup across the room and stormed out three nights before. That was the worst tale any of them could tell of him. Perhaps, however, that was because all were relatively new to his employ. Smith had been at Portland Place the longest—only a year.
The butler returned with a parcel bound in brown paper and tied with string. It was covered all over with stamps. “I thought you said he delivered it by hand?” asked Lenox.
“He did, sir,” said Smith. He looked at the package. “Oh, the stamps, sir. No, I cannot explain those.”
“They aren’t canceled,” said Dallington, running his eyes over the parcel as he took it.
“Perhaps he intended to send it by post and changed his mind, sir?”
“Hold it with this, if you don’t mind,” said Lenox to Dallington, drawing out a handkerchief. “McConnell may be able to make something of the fingerprints.”
Dallington passed the parcel over, and Lenox studied it. He could remember the stamps of his childhood so vividly: fourpence for the first fifteen miles a letter was to travel, eightpence the next eighty, seventeen the next even hundred. In those days, of course, the recipient had paid. Poor people had often sent each other empty envelopes, which the addressee rejected, simply as a message to let each other know all was still well. Then Rowland Hill had invented the postage stamp, and it had all changed …
“Shall I open it?” asked Lenox.
“Carry on,” said Nicholson.
Lenox had a small pair of silver-handled scissors in his breast pocket and took them out to cut the sturdy string. He tried, on principle, not to untie knots in his detective work, since they were occasionally as distinctive as fingerprints.
Within the package was another small wrapped parcel, in a box, and a note. Lenox opened the note first and read it aloud.
Travers-George—here it is back for you. Tomorrow just before midnight at York’s. Urgent that we tie up loose ends. Hartley.
“Tomorrow—that means today,” observed Nicholson.
“What’s in the box?” said Dallington.
Lenox was busy opening it—a small box, not quite large enough to hold a quarto. Despite experience inuring him to surprises, he gasped when he saw what it held.
“What is it?” asked Nicholson, leaning over to get a look.
Lenox lifted the object with his handkerchief. “A pistol,” he said.
Nicholson paled. “A .422 Webley. The kind of gun that killed Jenkins,” he said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The three investigators and the butler sat there in silence for a moment, and then Nicholson said, very pointedly, “What else can you tell us about this person—Francis, Hartley, whatever the hell he’s called?”
Unfortunately Smith knew very little. He was more than happy to recapitulate the few small details of dress he recalled—a crimson dinner jacket one evening, for instance, as if he had come from or was going to attend some fashionable event—but he couldn’t offer a great deal else. To Lenox the most interesting thing the butler told them was of the variable nature of Hartley’s visits. He sometimes came for ten minutes, sometimes three hours. It suggested either close friendship—or business.
It was an odd feeling to hold in his hand the gun that might have killed Jenkins, with its very slight heft, its small size a kind of final insult.
“We must go and meet this fellow tonight,” said Dallington at last, glancing up at the wall clock. “I suppose York must be a friend of theirs.”
“Yes. It’s not all that common a last name, either. The first thing to do is check the rolls of his clubs,” said Lenox. “Smith, what clubs was Lord Wakefield a member of?”
“Too numerous to mention, sir—many lifetime memberships came down to him from his father—but the two he regularly visited were the Cardplayers and the Beargarden. He almost always took his luncheon at the Beargarden and his supper at the Cardplayers, and then stayed on after supper for his cigar and his glass of port, playing whist.”
That made sense. Both were clubs devoted to drinking and gambling, dominated in their membership by young men. Wakefield wouldn’t have found the clubs along Pall Mall congenial, in all probability, with their staid dining rooms and older members snoozing above the Times. “We’ll start there,” said Nicholson.
“But if I might suggest—” said Smith.
“Yes?”
“One of the entrances to Regent’s Park is called the York Gate, sirs. Might the reference in the letter be to that?”
They exchanged a look. “That’s rather helpful,” said Dallington. “Why did that pop into your mind?”
“I must pass it half a dozen times a day.”
“You aren’t very secretive, Mr. Smith, I suppose, on Lord Wakefield’s behalf?”
The butler shrugged very slightly. “Lord Wakefield has not been what I wished he might as an employer, sir. You may ask my former master—Jarvis Norman, of Turk’s Crescent—and he will tell you that I have recently asked for a reference, hoping to find a new position. I was deceived by a title, I suppose, sirs. It does not surprise me that Lord Wakefield came to a bad end. Private habits are often the truest sign of a man’s morals.” Smith hesitated. “And my father was a constable with Sir Robert’s first peelers, sir. I have always felt very great loyalty to the Yard.”
“Was he never!” said Nicholson, brightening. “What was his name?”
“Obadiah Smith,” said Nicholson, thinking.
“He died in the year ’71, sir. Born dead on the stroke of the new century, January 1 of 1800, so he was seventy-one himself when he went. His area of patrol was near the Inns of Court.”
“I think I recall the name. Bless him, anyhow. There are few enough of that old guard left.”
“Indeed, sir.”
“If you ever want a change of career, your father’s service could help you find a place on the force. You spotted York’s Gate quickly enough. It might be a line of work that suits you.”
“I’m very obliged, sir, but it was my father who pushed me into service. One too many knives he’d seen, he always said. ‘Better polish ’em than dodge ’em,’ he’d say. And I must admit that by and large I’ve been happy.”
“You mentioned private habits,” said Lenox. “Wakefield’s were bad?”
Smith hesitated again. “I wouldn’t wish to speak ill of my master, nor of the dead, sir,” he said. “So I am doubly compelled to keep my thoughts to myself, you see.”
“Anything you say will remain very strictly within our confidence,” Nicholson said. “And it may help us stop a very dangerous man.”
Smith looked doubtful. His resistance before had seemed pro forma, but now he looked disinclined to speak. “I really feel I must wait until Lord Wakefield’s son—someone from the family, that is, anyone … in short, it is not my place, sir.”
Lenox had half-forgotten Wakefield’s son, the Earl of Calder. Somewhere in a room at Downing College, in Cambridge, without knowing it, the lad had inherited a marquessate and Hatting Hall and this London house and who-could-say what else. His own title, at the very least—his current one being borrowed from his father, as was customary among the old aristocrats, because they had so many titles that they could give the lesser ones to their children; it was by this method, in fact, that the Prince of Wales was so called, borrowing the honorific from the monarch, his mother or father. Lenox wondered how young Calder would hear the news. He hoped not from the papers. Would the perfunctory relationship the father and son had had make this death harder to bear, or easier?
“Mr. Smith,” said Lenox.
“Sir?”
An underrated quality in a detective was charm. You might also call it charisma. Charm could persuade a witness to speak more openly; it could redress the imbalance that was inevitable when one person had all the information and the other none. It could make a witness want to speak, want to go on speaking, when otherwise he or she might not have. Jenkins had had it. Nicholson didn’t, quite, though he was affable, which was a different kind of strength—a more comforting one.
Lenox didn’t have inherent charm, either, but over the years he had cultivated a certain tone of voice for use on recalcitrant witnesses. It contained a mixture of superiority, amicability, and confidentiality. It was a performance.
He spoke in this voice now. Wakefield had been a bad man, he explained—that was the unfortunate truth. By contrast their friend Inspector Jenkins had been a good one, indeed a very good one. If it had just been Wakefield’s death they were investigating, they might well have been happy to wait for Smith to speak with the marquess’s family, to take his time. But there was Jenkins. Lenox described Madeleine Jenkins and her three children. His voice grew more urgent as he spoke. In all it took only a minute or so to make his case, but by the end of that time Smith was nodding. His face was serious.
“I see, sir, I do. I hadn’t realized the death of Mr. Jenkins—the one in the papers—well, I didn’t know, sir, that it was related.”
“May be related,” said Nicholson. “We—”
But Smith, whose manners throughout the conversation had been very deferential, was now impatient to speak, and cut in. “I hadn’t put it together, you see, sir, but Inspector Jenkins was here. He called upon Lord Wakefield, sir.”
The three investigators exchanged glances, all interest in Wakefield’s private habits set momentarily to the side. “Jenkins was here?” asked Lenox. “When?”
“He called twice, sir. I hadn’t even linked his visit in my mind with the fellow in the headlines, oddly enough. But it was him—or at any rate it was an inspector from the Yard named Jenkins.”
“There was only one,” said Nicholson.
Dallington had a folded newspaper in the inner pocket of his jacket. He pulled it out and unfolded it. “Is that him? The picture there?”
“Yes!” said Smith eagerly. “That was the man who visited—I’m sure of it.”
“When?” asked Lenox again, more urgently.
The butler’s eyes were raised to the ceiling in concentration. “The first time was two weeks ago,” he said. “He called when Lord Wakefield was out. He waited here for fifteen minutes.”
“He gave a name? A card?” asked Lenox.
“No, sir, and I thought it was odd at the time. I would never have known his name if he hadn’t called again, four or five days ago.”
“How did he introduce himself, on his second visit?” asked Lenox.
“He didn’t. But Lord Wakefield said to me, ‘Smith, have some tea sent up for Inspector Jenkins. It’s not every day we receive the very great honor of a visitor from Scotland Yard.’ He was being ironical, I mean to say, sir. And it was the very profound honor, now I recall, sir. ‘It’s not every day we receive the very profound honor of a visitor from Scotland Yard.’”
“How long did they sit together?” asked Dallington.
“An hour, perhaps longer.”
“Did you overhear anything they discussed?”
Smith shook his head. “No, sir. They were silent whenever I came into the room.”
“Did they seem agitated? Angry?” asked Lenox.
“Only silent, waiting for me to be gone I’m sure.”
“There weren’t any raised voices?”
“No, sir.”
“What did Wakefield do after Jenkins had gone?”
“He immediately called for his coach and went out.”
“How long was he out?”
“An hour or so, sir.”
“And he returned alone?”
“No, sir. He returned with Mr. Francis. They were closeted together for several hours, late into the night, that evening.”
Dallington looked at Lenox. Neither man needed to speak to understand the other’s thought: that they were now getting very close to the truth indeed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
After they had finished interviewing Smith, the detectives split apart. Nicholson had a fleet of constables arriving to help him, ready to comb the house for clues about Wakefield’s activities in the past few weeks. Another group of constables were investigating the Asiatic Limited’s offices, to see if they might learn anything further about aft hold 119 on the Gunner. An inspector and now a marquess: the full mechanism of the Metropolitan Police had been triggered into motion. No case could conceivably have a higher priority.
That left Lenox and Dallington with a job that Nicholson agreed they might do more quickly than the Yard could—to find out what they might of Mr. Francis, preferably well before he was waiting by the Duke of York’s Gate at Regent’s Park that evening at midnight to meet Lord Wakefield.
“That’s if he even comes,” said Dallington.
“Why wouldn’t he?” asked Nicholson.
“I can think of two reasons. First—he’s heard of Wakefield’s death somehow. Second—he killed Wakefield himself.”
Lenox nodded. “Very fair. Nevertheless I think we had better be there, watching.”
“Damned right we better had,” said Nicholson. “I also want to know if Bryson or either of Jenkins’s constables knows that he met with Wakefield last week. Though I doubt it.”
“So do I.”
Lenox and Dallington walked out into Portland Place. It was warm now, the middle of the day. Lenox looked left and right and saw that there was a line of cabs by Regent’s Park, to their rig
ht. He had sent his own carriage home when they arrived here, because his driver hadn’t liked the look of one of the horse’s forelegs. “Shall we go see York’s Gate for ourselves, quickly?” suggested Lenox. “Then we can find a cab.”
“To where?”
“I’m not altogether sure. Are you a member of either the Beargarden or the Cardplayers?”
“The Beargarden,” Dallington said, with an abashed smile. “I scarcely go.”
“You can go all you like, of course,” said Lenox. He thought of Polly. “At any rate we can begin the search for Francis there. According to Smith he was a gentleman, which makes it seem at least possible that he and Wakefield shared a club, if they were so close. I take it you don’t know the name?”
Dallington shook his head. “Not from the Beargarden. My mother once had a maid called Mrs. Francis. I think she’s dead. And of course she was a woman. So I doubt it’s the same person.”
Lenox laughed. “Don’t jump to conclusions too swiftly, I’ve always told you that.”
As they walked toward Regent’s Park, with its high line of trees just coming back into leaf above the nearer houses, they passed the convent, the one with the towering black gates. There was an old woman in a nun’s habit standing behind them, staring out, a rather fattish person, puffed out by age, her skin gleamingly healthy given that she must have been seventy-five or so. She was the same woman who had been gazing at them as they stood near Jenkins’s body.
On impulse, Lenox stopped. She looked at him quizzically. “Do you spend much time here, in front of the convent?” he asked through the narrowly spaced black bars.
The woman shook her head, not to answer the question but to signal her incomprehension. Then she took a card from a fold of her habit and passed it to Lenox, who read it.
The nuns of St. Anselm’s operate under a vow of silence.
Additionally, if the box below is checked,
the bearer of this card does not speak English.
The box was checked, and next to it someone had written Sister Grethe, Germany. Lenox nodded, showed it quickly to Dallington, then passed it back, holding up his palm toward Sister Grethe to indicate that he understood and to thank her. She nodded. She didn’t seem perturbed by the interaction.
The Laws of Murder: A Charles Lenox Mystery Page 9
