An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) (17 page)

It was easy to rule people out. Many were propping up, in small backwaters, England’s imperial edifice, local wallahs with twenty native servants, who even upon retirement would never be quite fit to live in England again—the heat got into their blood, or so it was said. Another half dozen were professors at the two universities, and outnumbering them two to one were the religious men, scattered across the parishes of the isles. Before he had started trying, Lenox had rid himself of thirty names.

Now came a greater challenge. Could Arthur Waller, of Swallowtail Lane, be the man? Or Anthony Brinde, who lived not three blocks from Lenox himself? Still, there were names to cross off the list. The head of a large tin concern in Manchester was not likely to moon about London for weeks on end, buying guns in another man’s name.

Lenox finished with eleven candidates he viewed as strong, most of them Londoners. Then, with a dutiful sigh, he pulled down the volumes for the matriculating classes on either side of Godwin’s year and did the same task.

An hour later he stood up, having covered three sheets of club paper with names, addresses, and occupations. In all there must have been nearly fifty.

It was a job for someone with more time than he had.

Fortunately he knew the man. Lenox put the books away and nodded to the old gentleman who had been sleeping underneath his copy of the
Times
for the last hour, before waking up with a flustered start and feigning deep absorption in an advertisement for women’s headache tonic. Then he went downstairs to the club’s telegraph office and sent a wire.

Two hours later, as Lenox was sitting in his office at the Commons, this wire produced its recipient in person. “Fellow called Mr. Skaggs!” said Frabbs rapidly, poking his head around the door, then beckoning the visitor inward.

When Lenox had been a detective, he had often used Skaggs—a large, bruising man, once a fearsome boxer, now tamed into domesticity by a lovely wife and three children—as an auxiliary investigator. Though he was a physical specimen, his skills of detection were, in fact, primarily cerebral.

“How do you do, Mr. Lenox? Back in the game, based on your message?”

“It has been some time! I hope you’re well?”

“Quite well, quite well, sir. Lord John Dallington hires me every so often, and then of course I get a number of lesser cases on my own.”

There was a small ruby ring on Skaggs’s left hand; Lenox suspected this self-accounting of modesty. “Does the Yard ever ask for your help?”

“They haven’t yet, sir.”

Lenox sighed. “I’ve told them they ought to. At any rate—are you free for a day or two? I’ve a job for you.”

“Delighted for the work. Though my rates have gone up.”

“I would be surprised if they hadn’t, seeing that it has been, what, four years? But the job—let me tell you about it.” Lenox offered a quick outline, omitting the role that Grace Ammons had played in the affair, and then described in close detail the man they were all seeking. Finally he handed over the list he had made. “I would like you to rule out as many of these men as possible.”

“An achievable goal, sir.”

“Ideally I would like you to find our man—or a candidate I could lay eyes upon myself.”

“Of course, sir.”

“In most cases a glance should be enough. How much time do you think you need?”

Skaggs read through the addresses on the pages Lenox had handed him, then said, “Why don’t I check in tomorrow evening?”

“That will do splendidly.”

“Here, or Hampden Lane?”

Lenox laughed. “Here, unfortunately. If I am in the Commons you can leave word with Graham, or write me a note—or wait, since there are frequent breaks, and possibly I could step out during a lull in the debate.”

“Very good, sir.”

“We might even scoop the Yard, Skaggs.”

Skaggs smiled. “Touch wood.”

It was still shy of suppertime, and Lenox decided he would call on Jenkins, to see what progress the police had made. First he went to see Dallington, however; the young lord was fitter today, after sleeping late into the morning, and came along willingly. Lenox told him about his researches into the graduates of Wadham College.

“I cannot imagine one Oxford man murdering another in cold blood.”

“Then you are missing out on a whole class of villains you might study. Nobody goes bad faster than a gentleman, and we know that it was a gentleman who stole from Godwin, defrauded him. Murder is not a very long chalk further.”

Dallington shook his head. “No, but the kinds of friends Godwin—someone as quiet as Godwin—would have made at Oxford … do you not imagine them all curates, or perhaps butterfly enthusiasts, dipping toast into weak tea? This daring adventurer you’ve described—I cannot credit Godwin with such an interesting companion.”

Lenox laughed. “We shall see if I am wrong soon, anyhow. Skaggs has always worked quickly.”

Dallington felt well enough, after his day of rest, that he asked the driver of Lenox’s carriage to stop a few streets shy of Scotland Yard, that they might walk there in the evening air. It was the season for walking: warm enough to be pleasant even after the sun had gone down but not, as in the summer, so hot that the smell of London became hard to bear, women carrying nosegays to hold to their faces, and anybody who could fleeing for the country or the seaside.

A constable led the two men down a gaslit corridor. Jenkins had left their names at the desk.

“Has an arrest been made in this Graves Hotel business?” Dallington asked the bobby.

“I’m not sure, sir.”

“No matter. We shall hear it all soon enough.”

In the past twelvemonth Jenkins had achieved the dream of all of the Yard’s inspectors, an office in the upper south corner of the building, with a distant view of the Thames. When they reached his office, however, Jenkins’s back was turned to the river’s evening splendor, and he was hunched over his desk, reading reports. He smiled with tired eyes when Lenox and Dallington entered.

“I have an account of every light-haired fellow who ever walked down the Strand since the reign of Aethelwulf. Too much hay, not enough needles, sadly.”

“No progress at all, then?” asked Lenox sympathetically, sitting down across the desk from Jenkins. Dallington took the other chair.

“None that I can discern, though it is possible that we have interviewed the fellow eight different times. I had high hopes that they might know something of him at Cyril’s, the restaurant where he ate every night—perhaps even that they would remember Godwin coming in to confront his impostor—but it is a large place. Nobody there recalled him particularly. I hope that you gentlemen have devised some alternative line of inquiry. Tomorrow I have an appointment to speak with Grace Ammons, but beyond that I am at a loss.”

Lenox described his trawl through the Oxford annuals, and the results.

That brightened Jenkins’s mood slightly. “Certainly we have a list of names to cross-reference against yours. I exaggerated their quantity—it wouldn’t take one of these young fellows an hour to check the lists against each other. Let me know when you hear anything.”

“Our best lead is still Miss Ammons,” said Dallington. “Whether we believe her tale or not, she is the beginning and end of it all.”

“What do you take to be her role?” asked Jenkins.

Dallington glanced at Lenox, then back at the inspector. “Allowing that it is purely hypothesis?”

“Of course.”

“Then I take the situation thusly: A gentleman finds that he has fallen on hard times. Let us call him Smith. This Mr. Smith is not a person of many scruples. In some previous walk of life—perhaps at Oxford, perhaps in some manner of business, perhaps, who knows, with the beaglers of the Clinkard Meon Valley—he encountered Archibald Godwin, and learned that Godwin is at once extremely retiring and extremely rich. Also perhaps that he orders from shops in London. That is an enticing combination. He wonders, in his own mind, whether the vendors a man of Godwin’s stock would frequent—Ede and Ravenscroft, for example—would even be able to identify this country gentleman by sight.

“Then, one day, perhaps Mr. Smith is desperate, perhaps merely venal—he decides to try it. He visits a small shop. Which shop did he visit first?”

Jenkins squinted down at a list on his desk. “Shipp’s. The hatmaker.”

“Mr. Smith walks into Shipp’s. Looks at hats. Finally plucks up his nerve and orders one—and finds that they are more than happy to accept that he is Mr. Godwin. He can call round next Tuesday to pick up his order. So it’s begun. Inspector Jenkins, I suppose you and your fellows compiled a list of everything he purchased?”

“We did.”

“Were all of his acquisitions grouped close together?”

“Within a week of each other.”

“Very well.” Dallington was looking off into the distance, settling into his vision of the crime. “Mr. Smith begins to think very highly of himself. He is dressed finely, he is eating at wonderful places—and he is a handsome fellow; he gains access by chance to one party, and then another. Or perhaps he has picked up with old friends, whom he had dropped out of shame when he couldn’t afford to keep up with them, and while he is Archibald Godwin in Jermyn Street, he becomes Mr. Smith among his friends again.”

“He must have known that it was going to catch up with him quickly,” said Jenkins.

“He would have hoped that Godwin received the first bill ten minutes after Smith picked up the last suit at the tailor’s, of course. It is not hard to vanish back into London—easy as the waters closing over one’s head. Anyhow, it did not work out that way, as we know. Godwin discovered the truth, came to London, and confronted Smith. Perhaps Smith pled with him, particularly if they had once been friends. He would return the goods, if Godwin spared him from the ignominy of the police courts.”

“But Godwin refused,” said Jenkins. “Listen here, though, Dallington—what about Grace Ammons?”

Dallington shrugged. “He had bullied his way into one happy situation—why not another? Perhaps he had bragged to his friends that he would be at the palace. Perhaps he had overheard George Ivory’s name and story at a club.”

“Or perhaps Grace Ammons was selling entrance to the Queen’s parties,” said Jenkins, shooting them a canny look. “That was the suggestion of a bright young fellow we have, Finnering. What if she had taken Mr. Smith’s money, been unable to place his name on the list, and then, when she saw him, feared exposure?”

Lenox had been silent throughout this long exchange, and now both men looked at him expectantly. He shook his head. “I cannot entirely imagine that scenario, Inspector Jenkins, simply because she went to the effort of writing Dallington to hire him.”

“If she felt threatened, would that not be wise? Keep the police out of it, but get help?”

“Dallington isn’t in the business of protecting criminals.”

“She might have lied,” said Dallington.

“I suppose. To what end, however—to gain your indefinite protection? To frame Smith? You couldn’t have extricated her from such a situation.”

“Dallington is from a well-known family. Perhaps she hoped that he would offer the money.”

Lenox waved a hand. “This is all speculation. John, I enjoyed your story, and in truth it is very similar to the one I had in mind—and no doubt you, too, Inspector Jenkins. Nevertheless, hearing it out loud, there are points within it that I cannot reconcile with the facts of the case.”

“What are they?”

“Well, first, I do not understand why our Mr. Smith would have dined out at restaurants under Archibald Godwin’s name. Surely Godwin would not have had a line of credit at restaurants, when he was so infrequently in the city, and dined either at White’s or his hotel when he was?”

Jenkins frowned and made a note. “We will ask whether Godwin had an account at any of these restaurants.”

“I imagine you’ll find he did not—and no restaurant would have given Smith a meal simply on Godwin’s name, as Shipp’s or Ede’s would have given him a hat or a suit.”

“Mm,” said Jenkins, still writing.

“By the same token,” Lenox continued, “why give me his name as Archibald Godwin, that morning at Gilbert’s? What could it have benefited him? Better he should have told me his name was Aethelwulf—or Mr. Smith, anything.”

“Perhaps he had grown used to the lie.”

“Very well,” said Lenox, warming to his subject, “even granting these points, temporarily, there is still no accounting for Smith’s behavior toward Grace Ammons.”

“Except that we do not know what his behavior was, precisely—her word having already proven unreliable.”

“Still, we may assume that he somehow gained access to the palace. She is a bright girl—in truth I would even believe her a good one, based on our conversation, though I have been misled before—and I do not think she would claim that she had put his name on the list for these affairs of state if she knew we would not find it when we looked. Which, incidentally, you might do tomorrow, Jenkins, just as confirmation.”

“What, look up Archibald Godwin’s name?”

“Yes, on the attendance lists of the two gatherings to which he was apparently admitted.”

Dallington brought the conversation back around. “Why is his behavior toward Grace Ammons unaccountable, Lenox? Do you think it far-fetched that he merely wanted admission to the palace, and found through the example of Godwin that he was now able to take what he wanted? Certainly you and I have seen that moment before—when a law-abiding fellow tips into crime and then realizes the full possibilities of his choice?”

Here Lenox paused. “Yes,” he said at last.

“What is it?” asked Jenkins.

“No, nothing at all. Only, on that particular subject, I am in agreement with Dallington. I think this Mr. Smith had realized he might do more than order a suit and a hat.”

“How, exactly?” asked Jenkins.

“I have a growing fear that he intends to steal from the palace—or, worse yet, has already.”

Both men looked at Lenox blankly for a moment and then simultaneously shook their heads and began to speak. It was Jenkins whose voice won out.