Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
A Name Without a Face
Aduke does not walk the corridors of Scotland Yard at will.
He is known at the door, remarked upon at the desk, and his errand guessed at before he has gained the stair.
So while I conducted my covert investigation, I had kept away from the Yard, meeting the men I needed in a back room in Villiers Street, above a chop-house whose proprietor asked no questions of gentlemen who paid for the use of his upstairs room.
But today I came through the front. In daylight, in my own name, for shadows do not get doors opened on the record. And the record was precisely what I had come for: the name of the man found dead at Kew Gardens, with Cosmos's pistol set beside it.
“The Duke of Steele," I told the sergeant. "For Inspector Graves."
His pen stopped. A title would do that. He sent a constable off at a trot, leaving me in the vestibule with the smell of coal smoke, lamp oil, and damp stone.
Graves came down the corridor himself rather than send a man for me.
He was a spare, careful man, in his fifties, with a habit of looking at a thing twice before he spoke of it once.
We had taken each other's measure across other investigations, including the opera house business, and arrived at something I could not call friendship but would not, in honesty, call it less.
"Your Grace." He did not offer his hand in the vestibule. "We'll want my office."
I nodded.
His office was a narrow room with one barred window and a desk buried under working papers. He shut the door behind us and gestured to a chair in front of his desk.
I sat. "You've heard?”
"Yes.” He came to stand behind his desk.
"A body found at the Palm House in Kew Gardens, and the Earl of Rosehaven brought in to account for his pistol found beside it.
The whole Yard has it by now. Dodson is never quiet about his catches.
" A pause. "As soon as I heard about the earl, I expected your presence. "
"How very wise of you. Tell me his name."
"Whose?"
"The dead man's, Graves. Dodson would not give it to the family."
The inspector weighed that against whatever loyalty he owed a colleague's case.
Dodson was widely disliked at the Yard, so the weighing did not take him long.
But Graves lowered his voice all the same.
"Sir Basil Crane. Baronet." He watched my face as he said it.
"Lives in a Belgravia house his income shouldn't support and turns up in drawing rooms where he has no business being.
We hold little enough on him. I had a constable pull the file while I waited to learn if you'd come. "
The name found no purchase. My mind went first to the House of Lords out of habit, though no baronet would sit there, and then through the clubs and the drawing rooms and the names a man in my position files without meaning to.
Crane. Nothing answered to it. No face, no debt, no scandal worth the keeping.
That troubled me more than recognition would have.
"It means nothing to me," I said.
"Nor to me, before this morning."
"And Rosehaven?"
"Being questioned by Dodson and a sergeant. No charge.” Graves gave it plainly, neither softening it nor sharpening it.
"He went in willingly, which Dodson dislikes.
It is harder to frighten a willing man. As of half an hour ago he had granted that the pistol was his, that it ought to have been in his desk, and that he had no notion how it came to be at Kew.
Dodson will worry the how until he tires of it or finds a thread to pull. "
"I want to see him."
"You can't. It is Dodson's room and Dodson's man. A duke at the door would do your earl no good and a great deal of harm." He let that settle. "If a charge is laid, Your Grace, I will let you know before the ink is dry. You have my word."
He would keep it. I could not say as much for many men who wore the same coat.
I crossed to the barred window. The yard below held a wagon and two constables and the ordinary business of a building full of other people's catastrophes. I gave Graves the shape of the thing. He had earned that much. Besides, a suspicion spoken aloud is the surest test of whether it bears weight.
"The pistol was not lost months ago," I said. "It was taken. By the man you and I have spent three weeks trying to put a name to."
Graves's eyebrows climbed a fraction. "The river man?”
"The same. He has had it since the Thames affair. He kept it. He waited. And this morning he set it down beside a corpse with the Earl of Rosehaven's name all but cut into the grip."
Graves came around the desk to lean back against it. "Why Rosehaven?"
I turned from the window. "Cosmos is Lady Rosalynd's brother.
The oldest. The one who carries the title, manages the estate, holds the fortune.
Put him in a cell, and there is nothing on earth she will not do to take him out of it.
No door she will not walk through. No hand she will not take, if the hand swears it can save him. "
The room went still. Below the window the wagon rolled out through the gates.
"He is not hunting Rosehaven," I said. "He is hunting his sister. The earl is only the price he means to make her pay to have him back."
Graves took a few moments to weigh my words.
And then, "When I was asked to lend you men—quietly, off the books, for the public good, as it was put to me—I did it, and I asked little in return.
A peer is not a man one questions." He met my eyes.
“For weeks, I have sat across from you wearing the face of a man who has not slept since June.
I will say now what I have thought since the second week of it.
Whatever this covert investigation is, it has never been only the public good for you. It is personal. It always was."
The strategic answer would have been to deny it. I had built all those weeks on denial. One more would have cost me nothing. But the man had given me Crane's name across the grain of his own department, and a man who trades only in lies soon finds no one will trade with him.
"It is personal," I said. "I will give you that much, but nothing more. I arranged that investigation to keep her out of this man's path. I would as soon leave it as arranged."
He inclined his head and let the matter rest.
"Here is how I would have it run," I said.
"Two tracks, and they do not cross anywhere a watcher could see them meet.
The Kew Gardens case officially stays with Dodson.
I cannot touch it, and I will not try. Unofficially, you keep your eye on it.
If you learn anything—a charge, a witness, a name that turns up twice where once would do—you send it to me. "
"And the second track?”
“Mine. I will put Finch onto Crane today, and Whitfield onto his accounts.
Finch will tell me where Crane went. Who he dealt with.
Who he served. And whether he ever crossed the Earl of Rosehaven's path.
Whitfield will tell me how he paid for it.
" I took up my hat. "If there is a thread between the dead man and Cosmos, Dodson will hang the whole case from it.
I mean to find it first, and learn what it is worth, before he does. "
Graves saw me to the door. "You'll have what crosses my desk.
" He paused with his hand on the latch. “A word of warning, Your Grace. Dodson has a small mind and a long nose. If he finds the seam between your two tracks, he will not stop at your earl. Keep your two tracks apart. For Lady Rosalynd’s sake. "
"I intend to. Good day, Inspector."
I went out by the front, as I had come in.
On the step I stopped a moment while the city went about its midday.
Behind me, in a room without a window, Cosmos was answering questions most of which he did not know the truth of.
At Grosvenor Square, a woman from whom I had spent weeks apart sat waiting for me to send her a name.
And somewhere in this same gray city a man with no face was watching to see what we would do.
He would not have her. Whatever it took, whatever it cost me—and it would cost me—he would not have her. Not while I still drew breath.
I raised my stick to my coachman, who had been waiting for me to emerge, and gave him the Hatton Garden address where Caleb Finch kept irregular hours and men's inconvenient truths.