Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
A Matter Best Managed
Finch worked out of a ground-floor office in Hatton Garden, with a diamond merchant on one side of him and a man who mended watches on the other, so that the passage always smelled of tobacco and ink beneath the cold mineral edge of the jewelers’ trade.
No duke should have business at such an address, which was one of the reasons for its worth to me.
I rapped twice. Before I could lower my hand, the door opened.
“Your Grace.” Amusement flickered behind Finch’s eyes. I had sent no word ahead, and still I hadn’t caught him unaware. But then I rarely did.
“Finch.” I stepped into his office, which lay in the usual disorder—the single desk, the pair of mismatched chairs, the old filing cabinet, and the tide of newspapers, directories, and loose paper that were the enquiry agent’s working stock.
London hung in pieces on the wall, a map for every quarter.
On the sill a teapot kept its low warmth, and at its elbow stood a bottle of whiskey I knew by sight, being my own.
Milford sent it over from my private reserve at intervals, along with whatever the kitchen had in surplus.
Finch took both as he took most kindnesses, glad they’d been offered but never presuming upon them.
He lifted a stack of directories from the nearer chair and set them on the floor. I remained standing.
“You’ve the look of a man who has had a morning,” Finch said, settling into the chair behind his desk.
“I have had a body at Kew Gardens and an hour at Scotland Yard.”
“I heard about the first. The Earl of Rosehaven’s pistol, beside a dead man in the Palm House.” He weighed me a moment. “I do not yet have the dead man’s name. I take it you do.”
“Sir Basil Crane. Baronet. A house in Belgravia beyond his means, and—if I have his measure—debts to match. I want everything you can find on him.”
Finch reached for his notebook and pencil. “The same terms as the other work?”
“The same. But this is not the other work. It runs beside it, and it must never once be seen to touch it. Two enquiries, Finch. The man in the mask is one. Crane is the other. They do not meet on paper, they do not meet in conversation, and no soul living is to know that I commissioned both.”
“Because if a man can be shown to be hunting your river ghost and the Kew murder together,” Finch said, “then your river ghost and the Kew murder are admitted to be one thing. And the whole shape of it stands revealed.”
He rarely needed a thing explained twice. “Just so.”
“I’ll need more men.”
“Before we add to your burdens, tell me where the first enquiry stands.”
He turned a few pages back in the notebook, though I doubted he needed to.
“When we uncovered the drug operation during the Trinity Lane murder inquiry, we both knew arresting one man would not end the trade. There was too much money changing hands. Whoever financed the operation would simply find another source.”
He glanced down at the open page.
“That is precisely what happened. Within a fortnight the sellers were back in the courts off Ratcliff Highway. Same customers. Same prices. Fresh supply.”
“So you started with the sellers.”
Finch nodded. “We watched them for several days before one of the runners replenished their stock. Rather than have him arrested, we let him lead us to where he obtained his supply. He took us to a warehouse along the river.”
He tapped the notebook with one finger.
“The shipments arrive aboard merchant vessels, whether from the Continent or America we cannot yet say.
Hidden among legitimate cargo, I'd wager.
Once they're unloaded, they're carted to a warehouse. That is where Pyke comes in. He receives the shipments, checks the quantities, signs the ledger, and keeps account of what leaves the warehouse. From there the runners collect the packets for the sellers working the courts off Ratcliff Highway and for the Limehouse house where the drug is served.”
“And Pyke?”
Finch closed the notebook.
“Pyke is frightened of something above him. We have offered money. Others have tried drink. He will not speak, which tells me whatever stands over him inspires more fear than either.”
“Then whoever stands above him has no name yet,” I said.
Finch nodded. “The trail goes black. Whoever controls the warehouse never meets the street sellers, and whoever commands him has been careful never to set foot near the trade at all.”
“And the Thames business?”
“The woman's found. She goes by Mother Lync.
She's the one who procured the girls for the Floralia.
Working girls, servants, the occasional runaway—young women she believed no one would miss.
She'll talk, for a price, though I'd not trust a word beyond what we can prove.
But she's the lowest rung on the whole ladder, Your Grace. She took her orders through a go-between and never once laid eyes on the man who paid her. One rung above her was another creature very much like herself.”
“The mastermind is too clever to dirty his own hands. He has others do the work, and each knows only the one rung above. We climb the ladder one rung at a time.” I let a breath go. “Which brings us to Crane. How do you mean to handle him?”
“Easier than the other, Your Grace, and quicker.” Finch’s pencil moved.
“Since he was a baronet, he would have left the ordinary tracks a baronet leaves. Accounts with a tailor, a bootmaker, a wine merchant. He belonged to a club, and very likely to more than one. I can have the tradesmen inside a week. An unpaid bill loosens a clerk’s tongue faster than a settled one.
A man who lived as you describe will have left bills standing unpaid all over Town. ”
“He lived beyond his means according to Graves.”
“Which means he did not stop at his tailor.” A thin smile from Finch.
“A man in those straits sits down to cards. Baccarat, if he ran with the fast set; whist or piquet if he had any care for himself. Crane does not sound to me like a careful man. So somewhere there is a club with his name in the book and men in its passages who carried his coat, brought him his brandy, and know to the shilling how deep he went and who he went to. Hall porters. Waiters. The night men who lock up after the play. They see everything and they are paid as though they see nothing. For a coin and a sympathetic ear, they’ll tell me which tables he favored, whether he settled his losses across the cloth or wrote his vowels, and into whose hand those vowels passed. ”
“And the man who holds his vowels—”
“—holds a rope, and may pull it as he pleases.” Finch set the pencil down.
“A debt at the tailor’s ends in a summons.
A debt of honor ends wherever the man who’s owed cares to take it, for it cannot be sued for in any court.
If Crane owed past what he could meet, he could be made to do a great deal of work to keep the owing quiet. That is a thread worth the pulling.”
“There will be moneylenders as well,” I said.
“There always are. Whitfield can start there.
Banks, discounters, post-obit bonds—anything that leaves a paper trail.
He's better at following money than I am. If Crane found money where he shouldn't have, Whitfield will tell us how." He tipped his head toward the window and the diamond houses beyond it. “And sitting where I sit, I’ll know inside a day whether Crane ever carried a jewel into this street that he’d have done better to leave at his wife’s throat, if he, in fact, had a wife.”
“A man who lives past his means and goes on living past them is finding money from somewhere. That task will belong to Whitfield.”
Finch wrote it all down. “I’ll find his valet as well. That one I’ll keep for myself. If his master is dead, the man is out of a place, with a quarter’s wages owing and no character to show for it—the most talkative creature in all of London. He’ll know secrets a banker never sees.”
“Good.” I had what I came for, or the better part of it. “What else?”
Finch was silent for a moment before answering.
“I can put men on the tradesmen, clubs, and whoever holds his paper.
I'll have a word with the valet about the more personal matters. But there is one world my men—and I—cannot enter.” He met my eyes.
“The drawing rooms. The dinner tables. The musicales and house parties. That is where Crane truly lived, and where the people who knew him best will speak most freely.”
He paused.
“You are not going to like my saying so.”
“Then perhaps do not say it.”
He pinned me with a steady stare. “It must be raised, Your Grace.”
“Go on, then.”
“Crane spent his life reaching above his station,” Finch went on, untroubled, because the day Caleb Finch was intimidated by a duke’s tone had not yet dawned.
“The house, the club, the company he kept—he wanted the rooms a baronet of no fortune is never asked into, and he spent what he hadn’t got to stand at the edge of them and be tolerated.
A man like that leaves his truest tracks in drawing rooms, not in ledgers.
Who received him and who merely suffered him.
Whose invitations he chased and whose never came.
What was murmured about how he came by his money, or the want of it.
None of it opens to me, or to any man I’d hire, because we are not asked into those rooms.” He let a beat go by. “It opens to Lady Rosalynd.”
I had braced for it. “No,” I said all the same.
Finch did not so much as blink. “Your Grace—”
“She is to be kept clear of this. I have arranged a great deal, at no small cost, so that she stands as far from this business as she can be made to stand. I did not arrange it only to hand her a part in it now.”
“I know what you’ve arranged.” Finch’s voice did not rise to meet mine; it went the other way, lower and unhurried, the tone of a man gentling a horse that has taken fright at its own shadow.
“I’ve watched you arrange it while wearing the face of a man who hasn’t slept in all that time.
” He folded his hands on the directory. “May I ask you something plainly, the way you pay me to?”
I said nothing, which he took, correctly, for assent.
“Do you truly believe you can keep her out of it?”
Rosalynd had demanded a part in this, and I had agreed to it. But there were ways to set her a task without setting her in danger, and I meant to use every one of them. “Yes. I bloody well do.”
“With respect, Your Grace, you are a fool to believe it.”
The retort rose, scathing, and I held it between my teeth. The man was giving me an honest opinion. And I needed him.
“You’ve a notion,” Finch continued, “that if you name no thread, point at no door, hand her some nonsense to chase, she’ll stay safe.
It runs the other way. Keep Lady Rosalynd in the dark and she will not sit in the dark.
She’ll light her own candle and go looking, alone, down whatever passage she pleases, with no man—not you, not one of mine—anywhere near to mind her, and no word of where she’s gone.
” He met my eyes. “And unless you’ve forgotten, she walked into a house full of men hungry for sport, willing or not, and came out of it whole. ”
“Not quite, Finch. She was almost—” The word would not come.
“That is why you give her the work. Give it, and you’ll know the ground she stands on. Withhold it, and she’ll find ground you’ve never surveyed. You can ask her not to venture out alone.”
As though that had ever stopped Rosalynd. I crossed to the window before I said something unforgivable. For years I had paid this man for the truth. He had never once had the grace to make it comfortable. But then truth rarely was.
“Best manage it, Your Grace,” Finch said behind me, quietly. “Else she might come to harm.”
I turned on him. “I know it. Damn you.”
Rather than take offense, Finch rose, filled a none-too-clean glass with my whiskey, and put it in my hand. I drank it down in one swallow.
After a moment I asked, “What do you suggest?”
“Men outside her house. One front, one back. They follow her wherever she goes.”
“She’ll know.”
“She won’t.”
“Very well. The next time we meet I’ll hand her a true assignment, one that will play to her strengths. I’ll send a note to let you know.”
“You’re doing the right thing, Your Grace.”
“Am I?” I held the glass out for more and turned back to the street below.
A clerk hurried past the window with a sealed packet pressed to his chest, something valuable, I supposed.
But nothing in this diamond district was worth more than Rosalynd—the woman I loved, the woman I could never have.
I swore I would keep her safe, whatever it took.
“Your Grace.” Finch returned with the whiskey.
I sipped it this time, then lowered myself into the rickety chair. It creaked, then thought better of pitching me to the floor. “Now—tell me what else you mean to do.”