Chapter 32
Chapter
Thirty-Two
Dead Ends
Iwas in my study, reviewing Whitfield’s latest summary of the Dorado Trust accounts, when Milford appeared in the doorway.
“Inspector Graves, Your Grace. He says the matter is urgent.”
Graves did not wait for the invitation. He was already crossing the threshold, his lean frame carrying the particular tension of a man who had been up since before dawn and expected to remain so for some time.
“Your Grace.” He did not sit. “We arrested a Belgian national in the early hours of this morning. Caught inside Hargrove’s auction house with three hired men and a set of pry bars. They were attempting to remove a number of ivory pieces from the storeroom.”
I set down my pen. “The Hale consignment.”
“The same. Ivory tusks and carved pieces that came in on Hale’s last shipment from East Africa.
They’ve been sitting in Hargrove’s storeroom awaiting sale since before the murders.
I’d posted lookouts as soon as you sent word about the cargo Hale’s ships had brought back.
” Graves paused. “The Belgian gave his name as Lucien Verstraeten.”
I was on my feet before I was conscious of standing. “Where is he?”
“Scotland Yard in a holding cell. The three men he hired are locals—dockside muscle, nothing more. They claim they were told it was a simple removal job and they’d no idea it was theft. That may even be true. Verstraeten is the one who matters.”
“Has he talked?”
Graves snorted. “He has done nothing but talk. In French, in Flemish, and in English when he remembers we don’t speak the other two. He is frightened, Your Grace. Not of us. Of something else entirely.”
I reached for my coat. “Take me to him.”
Graves held up a hand. “Before we go. You should know what I’ve determined.
” He chose his words with care. “Verstraeten is not a man who kills with a stiletto. He is a man who hires thugs with pry bars to break into auction houses at three in the morning. The precision of Hale’s murder, the calculation of Davenport’s—that is not his method.
He is crude. Desperate. And very much afraid of whoever is responsible for the deaths of his two partners. ”
I had arrived at the same conclusion, but hearing Graves articulate it stripped away the last thread of hope that Verstraeten might be our man.
“Why was he still in London?” I asked. “He could have been back in Belgium weeks ago.”
“Money. He believes he’s owed payment for the final consignment of weapons he brokered before Hale was killed.
Hale is dead. Davenport is dead. There is no one left to pay him.
The ivory in Hargrove’s storeroom was the only asset he could reach.
He intended to take them to America, where they would fetch outlandish sums.”
A man owed money for a shipment of weapons, reduced to breaking into an auction house to steal ivory.
It was sordid and desperate and entirely plausible.
And it meant that the third leg of the stool—the man I had spent the better part of two days preparing to hunt—was not a killer.
He was a thief caught in circumstances that had spiraled beyond his control.
“I need to question him,” I said. “Today.”
“I can give you an hour with him before the magistrate expects the paperwork.” Graves permitted himself the ghost of a smile. “We never had this conversation.”
“Of course.”
Graves departed with the understanding that I would follow within the half hour. I stood at my desk for a moment, absorbing the implications.
Verstraeten was not the killer. The man who had brokered the arms deal, who had confronted Hale and Davenport at the consortium dinner, who had threatened them all—was a desperate criminal, not a calculating murderer.
Which left the father. The shadow. The man Finch was hunting through regimental records.
As if summoned by the thought, Milford appeared once more. “Mr. Finch, Your Grace.”
Finch entered with none of his usual energy. He looked tired in a way that went beyond sleeplessness—the weariness of a man who had done the work and found the answer, and the answer was not the one anyone wanted.
He sat down without waiting to be asked, which told me what I needed to know before he opened his mouth.
“The regimental records,” I said.
“Done. Every officer who served alongside Colonel Ashford in the 14th Hussars during his Indian posting. Took me and two assistants the better part of thirty hours.” Finch withdrew his notebook from his coat and opened it to a page covered in his cramped, precise handwriting.
“Twenty-three officers in total. Fourteen are accounted for—still serving, retired to known addresses, or posted abroad. Six are deceased. Three I could not trace, but none of them had sons.”
“And the ones with sons?”
“That’s where it falls apart.” Finch ran a finger down his notes.
“Of the twenty-three, only four had sons of the right age—old enough to have gone to East Africa in the last few years. Three of those four are alive and accounted for. Their sons are also alive and accounted for—one in India, one in the Home Counties, one at a desk in Whitehall.”
“And the fourth?”
“Captain James Hadley. Served with Ashford in India from ’60 to ’71.
Had one son, born in Calcutta in ’62. Hadley died out there in ’71—fever, from what the records say.
” Finch looked up from his notebook. “After Hadley’s death, the wife and son vanish completely.
No passage home that I can find. No forwarding address.
No entries in any directory, parish record, or military pension file. It’s as though they ceased to exist.”
“Both of them? The wife as well?”
“Both. The wife disappears from the records at the same time as the son. I’ve checked every avenue I can think of—shipping manifests, pension rolls, church registers. Nothing. Wherever Mrs. Hadley and the boy went after the captain died, they left no trail.”
I turned this over. A woman and a boy who vanish from all records after a husband’s death in India.
Either they had died as well—and there would be records of that, which Finch would have found—or they had gone somewhere that made the paper trail disappear.
Remarriage would do it. A new name, a new household, a new identity for the widow and her son.
But that was speculation, and speculation without evidence was useless.
“Could there be someone you missed?” I asked, though I knew the answer.
“I went through every name twice. My assistant went through them a third time.” Finch’s voice was flat with certainty.
“There is no living officer from the 14th Hussars who served with Colonel Ashford, who had a son, and who is unaccounted for. Hadley is the only one who fits—and he’s been dead for eighteen years. His widow and son are ghosts.”
I sat down. The chair felt harder than it had before.
Verstraeten was not the killer. He was a desperate man who had tried to steal ivory to cover a debt. The grieving father of a dead son did not exist. Both leads—the Belgian and the shadow—had collapsed within the span of a single hour.
I wrote a quick note to Rosalynd—the essential facts, nothing more. And then I rang for a footman and dispatched it to Rosehaven House.
“So where does that leave us?” Finch asked.
I did not answer immediately. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked in the silence—steady, indifferent, measuring out the seconds of an investigation that had just lost its footing entirely.
Two weeks. Two dead men. A weapons pipeline stretching from Liège to Zanzibar.
A consortium of terrified investors. A queen demanding resolution.
And I was sitting in my study with no suspect, no theory, and the growing, unwelcome conviction that I had been looking at this from the wrong angle entirely.
The masked man at the masquerade had told Rosalynd she was pursuing the wrong thread. I had dismissed it as manipulation. But what if he had been right?
What if we had all been looking at it wrong?
“Leave your notes,” I said to Finch. “All of them. I need to go to Scotland Yard to question Verstraeten.”
“They have him?” Finch asked.
“He tried to rob the auction house. Was planning to steal the ivory and sell them in America. Graves doesn’t think he killed either man.”
“Blimey. So where does it leave investigation?
“Nowhere. When I return, I will go through everything again. From the beginning.”
Finch set his notebook on the desk. “You think we’ve missed something.”
“I think we’ve been told a story,” I said. “And I think we believed it because it was a good one.”
Finch regarded me for a moment with the expression of a man who had worked enough cases to recognize the particular quality of silence that preceded a shift in direction. Then he nodded and left.
I reached for my coat and went to question a man who was not a killer about two murders he did not commit.
It was not the most productive use of an afternoon.
But Verstraeten had been at the consortium dinner.
He had seen the faces around that table.
And a man who trafficked in weapons along the East African coast might know things about the people connected to that trade—things that even he did not yet realize were significant.
The answer was in the details. It was always in the details.
I simply had not found the right ones yet.