An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) (23 page)

He knocked at it. “Delivery!” he announced in a confident voice.

There was no answer. “Try again,” whispered Dallington.

Jenkins repeated the ruse. “Delivery!”

“See if the door is open,” said Lenox.

It was. They crept inward, single file, down a shadowy front hall, closing the door behind them. Jenkins had his small revolver out. The smell of cordite was strong here; there was no noise inside, nobody moving toward or away from the door.

“He’s killed again, and fled,” said Jenkins.

Suddenly there was a hammering on the door that they had closed behind them, and all three men jumped, startled, at the same time. “Hellfire below,” said Dallington. “What was that?”

“Delivery!” a voice called out.

Lenox’s heart was racing. “We look inside before we go to the door,” he said and, seeing that Jenkins wavered, strode with a purposeful step down the hall.

“Delivery!” shouted the voice again, and there was a fist on the door.

They came into a large living room, blue with evening light. Nobody was in it. In the corner of the room was a door, leading to a bedroom. “Follow me,” said Lenox.

Here, where the smell of gunfire was so intense that it might have been only moments old, they saw it: the body of Leonard Wintering, long and lean, flung back on the unmade bed, one leg dangling off, a small bullet hole in its temple. Leonard Wintering—or, as he had called himself in Gilbert’s, that day, Archie Godwin. He had not killed again; he had been killed, this time.

“My God,” said Jenkins.

It was Dallington who had already looked away, back down the hallway. “Do we wait it out? Or do we go to the door?” he asked.

“We go to the door,” said Lenox.

As they walked with quiet steps down the hall, Lenox’s mind was racing: Their chief suspect was dead, shot in the temple, and their surmises about him would have to be adjusted. He thought of Whitstable’s plain, honest face; thought of Grace Ammons; tried to move backward through his ideas about this whole business.

It was Jenkins who—bravely—threw open the door, all three of them pressed with their backs against the wall in case of a violent greeting, but none came. Instead an enormous, bristle-bearded fellow in a peacoat, hair black as night, barreled into the room. “Where is Wintering?” he demanded. “Tall, light-haired fellow.”

“Who are you?” asked Jenkins.

“Who are you, for that matter?” said the man, eyes glinting dangerously.

“I am Inspector Thomas Jenkins of Scotland Yard, and I repeat my question: Who are you?”

“The Yard, eh? Is Wintering here? Let me see him.”

“I am asking for the final time, before I place you under arrest. Who are you?”

The man looked at Jenkins, Lenox, and Dallington, perhaps reckoning his odds of outmuscling all three of them, and then said, “Alfred Anixter. I’m here from Miss Strickland’s Detective Agency. I want a word with Wintering.”

The three men looked at each other.

“Wintering is dead,” said Lenox. “How did you come to hear his name?”

“He was harassing one of our clients.”

“Yes, Grace Ammons. My question stands.”

Anixter looked as if he might remain silent, until Jenkins, irritated, said, “Unless you answer Mr. Lenox, we will have to consider you the chief suspect in this murder.”

That drew him out. “I was following you,” he said.

There was a pause, and then Dallington burst out laughing. “I rather like this new detective agency,” he said.

“Which of us were you following?” Lenox asked.

He nodded toward Dallington. “Him.”

“How did you know Wintering’s name?”

“It was on the door.”

“Then why not wait until we had gone to speak to him?”

“I wanted to see his face before you arrested him and hid him away. Miss Strickland has a portrait artist who can draw a wonderful charcoal likeness from a description. Takes him about six minutes. We could match it to Miss Ammons’s description that way.”

That was ingenious, Lenox thought, though he didn’t say anything. Jenkins, tone officious, pointed to a chair in the living room, “You may sit here until we decide whether we need to speak to you further.”

“Why not let me help you?” asked Anixter.

“No, thank you. Don’t think about leaving, either.”

Dallington, Jenkins, and Lenox had a brief conversation. The first thing they had to do was to examine these rooms, then speak to the residents of the building. After that they had to learn as much as they could about Wintering—as they now knew him to be.

Jenkins went downstairs with his whistle between his lips, planning to blow for a constable, who could offer immediate assistance; in the meanwhile he could send Lenox’s carriage to the Yard with word that help was required.

Dallington and Lenox went back into Wintering’s bedroom. Lenox looked down at the body. It seemed infinitely long ago that he had spoken to this gentleman at Gilbert’s. How much pain might have been avoided by detaining him then and there? If only there had been a reason to do so at the time.

“Quickly, John—you and I must search as rapidly and thoroughly as possible, for all I trust Jenkins.”

Dallington looked at him and nodded, and they began.

Fortunately the flat was small, three rooms. There was the sitting room, with a gas stove and a crimson sofa, where Anixter was sitting and tapping his foot, restless; the bedroom, where the body lay; and the kitchen, which had a small breakfast table in the corner. Lenox took the bedroom, Dallington the kitchen.

The bedroom was small and unadorned. In it were a narrow bed and a bookshelf; Lenox turned his eye to the latter first. It was crowded with randomly shoved-in volumes of
The Gentleman’s Magazine,
a digest for educated Englishmen (and the first publication to use the word “magazine,” French for “storehouse,” which was now becoming more and more common—although now, oddly, the word had migrated back to Paris from London and come to mean “journal” there, too). Lenox sifted through these as quickly as he could. There were no books on the shelves. Not a reading man. A few trinkets—a silver watch fob, a hinged pine box with
LW
carved into its top and tobacco spilling untidily out of it, a jar of loose coins. On top of the bookshelf were a number of bills and a book of checks—he banked at Barclay, Bevan, Barclay, and Tritton—and Lenox looked through both. All of the bills were invoiced to Leonard Wintering, none to Archibald Godwin. It made sense. He wouldn’t have given out this address when he used a false name.

“Lenox!” called Dallington from the kitchen.

“I’m not quite finished.”

“You had better come in here anyhow.”

Lenox went to the kitchen and saw Dallington sitting at the table there. “What is it? I’ve yet to even look at the body.”

“Look.” Dallington gestured at the small piles of paper and the other objects that covered the table in front of him, and Lenox looked more closely. There were newspaper clippings and a soft black cap. Dallington picked up a half sheet of paper. “Look at the dates that he circled.”

It was the court circular from the
Times,
the very one Willard Fremantle had been reading when he informed Lenox that there were parties at Buckingham the next three nights, and then the party was off to Balmoral.

Wintering had circled two of the nights: tonight, tomorrow.

With dawning interest, Lenox began to sift through the other objects on the table. “What else have you found?”

“Look at this.”

Dallington was holding a small square of red wax. Lenox took it and asked, puzzled, “What is its significance?”

“You have to open it in half.”

He did this, and saw that in the soft wax there was a perfect impression of a key for a mortice lock. He whistled. “A proper housebreaker—and tomorrow was the third party he asked Grace Ammons to get him into.”

“What better occasion to steal from the palace than during a crowded party, too? Ten to one it belongs to one of the doors at Buckingham Palace.”

Lenox shook his head. “No—look at the size of the key. It belongs to a window. I would guess they left the keys in the windows during the party, in case it grew too warm. It’s the season of unpredictable weather.”

“And look at the rest of this.” Dallington held up the newspaper clippings. “An account of the last party, the rooms that were used. The Queen’s social calendar, and here is an odd little shorthand list of some kind or another—but it’s placed with the things I think he meant to take, the wax, the cap, and this knife.”

Dallington held up the knife. It was a short, ugly, efficient object. “This looks like the kit of a serious thief. It’s hard to believe the fellow in the bedroom put it together,” said Lenox.

“We must learn more about him. Perhaps he even has a criminal record.”

“Yes, it could be.”

There was a noise in the hallway and Jenkins came in, trailed by a constable. He found them in the kitchen—Anixter stood up at his arrival, and again offered to help, an offer the three men declined in unison—where Dallington reported on all they had found.

Jenkins blanched. “Thank God somebody got to him before he could steal from the palace.”

“But who?” asked Dallington.

Almost at the same moment, Lenox said, “I’m not at all persuaded that the palace is safe even now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Arthur Whitstable described three men walking up the Gloucester Road that morning. Now two of them are dead. Who was the third?”

Thirty-five minutes later they were in the Blue Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace. A grim-looking lieutenant stood watch over them. The Queen was on her way.

Jenkins paced the room nervously; they had left a passel of constables behind at Wintering’s, to take care of the body and search the rooms, but he would have preferred to do the job himself. Meanwhile Dallington and Lenox sat on two uncomfortable chairs near the door. Despite its name, the color of the Blue Drawing Room was almost entirely gold—too sumptuous for Lenox’s taste, though undeniably spectacular, with its long rows of high columns and its vast acreage of glossy royal portraiture.

“Have you met the Queen?” asked Lenox in a quiet voice.

“Several times as a child.”

It was sometimes easy to forget that Dallington was the son of a duke. “Of course. You must have been a page.”

“Yes, I still have the costume. Fearful bore.”

“Come now, be respectful.”

Dallington grinned, but when the door opened a moment later, he was just as quick to his feet as Lenox.

What was one supposed to feel, meeting one’s monarch? She came in with a rollicking bustle of spaniels around her feet, four or five of them, tan, white, and black in coloring. (Lenox still remembered Dash, her first and favorite, who had been memorialized in the newspapers as if he were an officer in the Guards.) The most striking thing was her size, always—she stood just under five feet, a crumb of person. There was a reason the people called her “our little queen.”

In public and social life Lenox had occasion to see Victoria relatively often, sometimes as many as six or seven times a year. He always felt the same complex blend of emotions. There was reverence, first, then incredulity that so much power and meaning resided in one rather inconsequential-looking person. There was even something comic, faintly disappointing, in her plain, rather portly personage, but this recognition was always succeeded by a great wave of affection and wish to protect her.

Perhaps this was because of Albert. On the day in her eighteenth year when she took the crown, she had once said, she watched two of the greatest men in the realm—her two ancient uncles—bow before her, and at that moment it had been borne in upon her that she would never again have a true equal. She had been wrong, however. In Prince Albert she had found both love and mutual respect. When he had died, fourteen years before, it was widely acknowledged that the world had grown dark for her—that even now she only went on out of a sense of duty, without any pleasure in life, even, somewhat shockingly, in her children.

Albert had been something of a laughingstock, in truth, a derision encouraged in part by Victoria’s overfondness for him. When he had arrived she had been less kind: She had banished his childhood friends from his retinue, back to the Continent, permitting him to keep only his beloved dog, Eon, for whom she bought a silver collar, which in itself seemed a gesture of proprietorship.

Albert had handled his submission gallantly. He was exceedingly gentle and loving with the Queen from the start, until soon she came to depend on him utterly. She had made him a consort when the public took against him—they feared a war with the continent—and would have made him a king, if she could have.

After his death, nobody in London had seen her face for three years.

She emerged a statelier woman, her own sorrow close to death itself. She had strength, certainly. Often Lenox remembered the story, much whispered in his childhood, of her first days as Queen. During all of her adolescence she had shared a bed with her arrogant, domineering mother, but upon taking up residence here at Buckingham she had banished that woman, furious, to a distant suite of rooms. Yet she had kept through an adjoining door her childhood governess, who, until the day of her death, brushed Victoria’s hair every night.

As she entered the room now, gray of hair and lined of face, that arrogant, vulnerable child-queen seemed both unreachably gone and at the same time visible in her lineaments, her expressions. Time had shaped her. It took no courage to be a nobleman, or even a prince, but to be a monarch for thirty-eight years, as she had been, took mettle. Privilege was no bulwark.

“Gentlemen,” she said, as all four men in the room bowed, “I am told that someone may mean to make mischief here this evening.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Jenkins, who was the official presence of their trio.

She had insisted upon seeing them herself, apparently. “You are Charles Lenox,” she said now, reaching down to scratch a dog’s ear. “And you are James Dallington.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they both said, Dallington apparently willing to let her slip pass unremarked.