Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
The Money Trail
Davenport did not wish to be found.
I had called at his Belgravia townhouse twice.
The first time, the butler informed me that Sir Nigel was not at home.
The second time, the same butler delivered the same message with a rigidity that suggested his employer was very much at home and had given explicit instructions to the contrary.
I left my card both times. Neither visit produced a reply.
On the third attempt, I changed tactics.
Marchmont had told me that Davenport managed Hale’s financial affairs from offices on Threadneedle Street. A man could avoid his home. He could not indefinitely avoid his business.
The offices occupied the second floor of a narrow building wedged between a discount house and a solicitor’s firm.
The brass plate beside the entrance read Davenport & Associates in polished letters.
But the air drifting from the open window above carried the unmistakable scent of burning paper—sharp, acrid, and voluminous enough to suggest that whatever was being destroyed, there was a great deal of it.
I took the stairs two at a time.
The anteroom was in disarray. A young clerk stood beside an overturned stack of files, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, his collar loosened, his expression that of a man caught between panic and obedience.
Behind him, through the open door to the inner office, I could see two more clerks pulling ledgers from a filing cabinet with the frantic energy of men racing a clock.
A fire roared in the grate—far too large for a June morning—its flames choked with curling pages that blackened and crumbled into the coals.
It was not enough. A metal wastebin beside the desk glowed with its own contribution, ash drifting upward in lazy spirals toward a ceiling already hazed with smoke.
The young clerk saw me and froze. His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
I didn't bother with a polite greeting. "Where is Sir Nigel?"
He looked toward the inner office, then back at me, his face draining of what little color it possessed. "He's not here, Sir."
I stepped past him into the inner office. The two clerks at the filing cabinet turned, arms full of ledgers, and went rigid. One of them—older, with the harried look of a senior man who had been given an impossible order—clutched a leather-bound volume to his chest as though it were a shield.
"Stop," I said. "All of you. Put those down."
Nobody moved.
"I am the Duke of Steele." I let the title carry its full weight—the centuries of authority, the implicit promise that disobedience would have consequences these men could not afford.
"You will put those ledgers down. You will step away from the cabinet.
And you will tell me what in God's name is happening in this office. "
The older clerk set his burden on the desk with the careful movements of a man who understood he had just reached the limits of his loyalty to an absent employer.
The others followed suit. Papers settled.
Ash continued to drift from the wastebin, and the fire in the grate hissed as a fresh curl of paper blackened at its edges.
“We were told to destroy them, Your Grace.” The older clerk’s voice was hoarse—from smoke, or from the strain of the morning, or both. “All records pertaining to the Hale account. Every ledger, every letter, every receipt. Sir Nigel’s orders. Given this morning, before he—” He stopped.
“Before he what?”
The clerk exchanged a glance with his colleagues. The younger one in the anteroom had crept to the doorway and stood there, twisting his hands.
“Before he left, Your Grace,” the older clerk said carefully.
“Left for where?”
Silence.
“Gentlemen.” I held the older clerk’s gaze.
“A man has been murdered. Sir Edmund Hale was stabbed in his box at the Royal Opera House not four days ago. Your employer managed the dead man’s financial affairs—arranged his investments, structured his accounts, handled every transaction that passed through this office.
He has now ordered the destruction of every record connecting his firm to a murdered client.
You may explain this to me now, in the relative comfort of this office, or you may explain it to Inspector Graves of Scotland Yard in rather less comfortable surroundings. The choice is yours.”
The older clerk’s resistance collapsed like a dam giving way.
“Sir Nigel arrived at half seven this morning. Two hours before his usual time. He was—” The man searched for the word.
“Distraught, Your Grace. I have worked for Sir Nigel for eleven years, and I have never seen him in such a state. His hands were shaking. He could barely hold his pen.”
“What did he say?”
“He called us into his office. All four of us. He said the Hale account was to be closed immediately and all associated records destroyed. Every document. He was very specific—correspondence, transaction ledgers, routing instructions, bank transfers. Everything was to be burned before noon.”
“And then?”
The young clerk spoke from the doorway, his voice thin. “He packed a valise. Took everything from his personal safe—I saw him emptying it. He told Mr. Pratt”—he nodded toward the older clerk—“that the office was to be locked after the burning was complete and that we should not expect him back.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
Pratt hesitated. The young clerk did not.
"Victoria Station, Your Grace. He told the cabman Victoria Station.
" The words tumbled out with the reckless relief of a junior employee who had decided that the Duke of Steele outranked an employer who had abandoned him.
"I heard him through the window. He was in a terrible rush.
The cab nearly ran down a crossing sweeper pulling away from the kerb. "
Victoria. The Dover Express. The packet boats to Calais. A man with no wife, no children, no ties that would slow his flight—only the urgent need to put the English Channel between himself and whatever had driven him to this desperate act.
Davenport was not merely frightened. He was running for his life.
I turned my attention to the damage. The fire in the grate had burned low, its coals thick with the pale ash of consumed paper, and the wastebin beside the desk held its own drift of blackened curls. Whatever had been fed to either was too far gone to salvage.
But the clerks’ efficiency, mercifully, had not matched their employer’s urgency.
They had been working for barely an hour before my arrival interrupted them, and the Hale account, it appeared, had generated a great deal of paperwork.
It would have—Davenport had managed Hale’s financial affairs for the better part of a decade, and every investment, every transfer, every piece of correspondence had passed through this office.
“How much has been burned?”
Pratt surveyed the wreckage with the pained expression of a man whose professional instincts rebelled against the destruction of orderly records.
“Perhaps a third, Your Grace. Sir Nigel began with the most recent files—the last six months. Those are largely gone. But the older records—the original account establishment, the early transactions, the correspondence from the first year—those are still in the cabinet.”
“And these?” I gestured to the ledgers the clerks had been carrying when I arrived.
“Transaction records. Deposits, withdrawals, transfer instructions. The ones we hadn’t yet reached.”
“Show me.”
Pratt opened the nearest ledger and turned it toward me. Columns of figures in a neat, clerkly hand. Dates, amounts, account numbers, and destination banks. I was not an accountant, but I had spent enough years managing the Thornburn finances to read a ledger with reasonable fluency.
What I saw was suggestive, if incomplete.
Regular payments drawn from an account designated only as the Dorado Trust—the consortium's operating name, apparently—and routed to a correspondent bank in Marseilles.
The amounts were substantial and had increased sharply over the preceding months.
Smaller, regular transfers appeared alongside them, directed to institutions in Constantinople and Trieste.
The pattern was consistent: money flowing out to the Continent in volumes that far exceeded what any legitimate shipping operation would require.
On the revenue side, large deposits arrived at intervals that corresponded roughly with Hale's shipping schedules.
The sources were London auction houses—Christie's, Stevens', Debenham & Storr—but the ledger recorded only lot numbers and sums, not what had been sold.
Whatever the goods were, they commanded extraordinary prices.
The returns were three, sometimes four times what the declared cargo should have produced.
Something valuable was being transported on those ships. Something worth far more than machine parts and dry goods. And the money flowing out to Marseilles, Constantinople, and Trieste suggested it was being acquired through channels no legitimate merchant would use.
I did not yet know what. But the shape of it was forming—dark, angular, and dangerous.
“I am taking these,” I said, closing the ledger. “All of them. Every document that remains. Mr. Pratt, you will assist me in assembling everything that has not been destroyed.”
“Your Grace, Sir Nigel’s instructions—”
“Sir Nigel is fleeing the country. His instructions are no longer your concern.” I held Pratt’s gaze. “What should concern you is ensuring that you and your colleagues are seen to have cooperated fully with the investigation into Sir Edmund Hale’s murder. Do I make myself clear?”
“Perfectly, Your Grace.”
It took the better part of two hours. Pratt proved invaluable—he knew the filing system intimately and could identify at a glance which documents pertained to the Hale account and which did not.
By the time we had finished, two large crates of ledgers, correspondence, and financial records sat in the anteroom, awaiting transport to Steele House.
The fire in the grate had died to grey ash, and the wastebin beside it held nothing but cold embers.
Six months of the most recent records—the months that would have shown the consortium's operation at its height—were gone.
Whatever those pages had contained, Davenport had ensured they would never be read.
But I had the earlier records. The establishment of the Dorado Trust. The first tentative transfers to Marseilles.
The correspondence from Antwerp that Pratt could not explain and that bore no connection to any declared supplier.
The revenue that told its own story in numbers too large to be innocent.
It was not enough to see the full picture. But it was enough to know there was a picture to be seen—and that whatever Sir Edmund Hale had been involved in, it was worth killing for. Worth fleeing the country for. Worth burning an entire office’s records to conceal.
Davenport’s terror made a particular kind of sense now.
This was not a man who had merely observed irregularities from the remove of a boardroom.
He had built the financial architecture himself—every trust, every transfer, every routing instruction bore his firm’s name.
If the consortium collapsed, it would not be Hale’s ghost that faced consequences.
It would be the man whose signature appeared on every document.
I sent for several footmen to transfer the crates to Steele House, with instructions that they were to be placed in my library and that no one was to touch them before I returned.
And then I had one of the footmen deliver a note to Whitfield, the forensic accountant I’d forewarned to expect a summons from me.
I stood on Threadneedle Street in the late morning light, the smell of burnt paper still clinging to my coat, and considered what I knew.
Davenport was running. The records were partially destroyed. And somewhere between the columns of figures and the ashes of what had been burned, a conspiracy was taking shape—one that had already claimed the life of Sir Edmund Hale and might well claim more before it was done.
I needed Finch. I needed Rosalynd. And I needed to find out what the Dorado Trust had been shipping before someone ensured that no evidence remained.