Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
A Ghost in Good Standing
The room above the Villiers Street chop-house had been my parliament while we’d hunted a ghost. It was the last place in London a duke would be sought, which was the whole of its merit.
Three men waited for me at a table scarred with the rings of other men’s suppers and four chairs that did not match. A single lamp was turned low against the one window. Below us the perpetual clamor of the grill and the smell of mutton fat worked its way up through the boards.
Finch had the chair by the window, notebook open.
He gave me a small nod. Beside him sat Graves, out of his Yard coat and into a plain one.
It did not make him look less like a policeman, only made him look like a policeman in disguise.
At the table’s far end, a leather case open before him and his papers squared to the grain of the wood, sat Whitfield, the accountant I had worked with on previous matters.
He was a soft-spoken man of fifty, round at the middle.
Within easy reach of each of them sat tankards of the chophouse’s best brews.
“Gentlemen.” Taking the fourth seat, I turned first to Finch. “Where does the street stand?”
“As you and I discussed two days ago, Your Grace, we have made some progress. Pyke remains the keeper of the ledgers at the Limehouse house and signs for deliveries, but he is no more than a steward. He never retains the money.”
“Have you managed to discover who does?”
“I have. A collector named Renton. On the same evening each week he visits three establishments under our observation, gathers the takings, and carries the whole to a courier waiting near the river.”
“Only three houses?”
Finch nodded. “At least three. I suspect there are more.”
“And the courier?”
“He receives the money and boards a small boat almost immediately. My men followed as far as they dared.” Finch took another swallow of ale.
“One of them had worked the river for years before entering my service. He recognized the launch at once. It belongs to Mallow and Company, a wharf concern on the Surrey side.”
“Did they follow it?”
“At a distance. The boat tied up at Mallow's wharf, and the courier disappeared into the counting house. He did not emerge again while my men watched.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Someone higher still.”
“Precisely.” Finch's voice remained calm. “The courier answers to someone within Mallow and Company—or perhaps only passes the money onward again. We do not yet know. Each man knows only the one above and below him. Should one be taken, he cannot betray the whole.”
“A ladder with its upper rungs hidden.”
“Exactly so.”
“Cagey devils,” I muttered. No wonder we had not managed to lay hands upon the man who truly mattered.
Finch inclined his head. “Just so. But there is another difficulty. There is no reason to suppose the money remains at Mallow's. It may leave again by another hand before ever reaching its final destination.”
“Then we'll have to find another way.”
“If I may, Your Grace,” Whitfield said.
“Go on.”
The accountant settled his spectacles upon his nose and laid two fingers upon his uppermost paper. “Mr. Finch was kind enough to provide me with the name of Mallow and Company. That gave me a lead to follow.”
“I gave him permission to do so. Proceed.”
“A man who runs a wicked trade suffers a difficulty an honest tradesman is spared. His money comes in small coin and in darkness. He can no more spend it as it stands than he can wear muddy boots to a court presentation. It must be washed—made to appear as though it came from some respectable enterprise.” He permitted himself the smallest smile.
“And the washing leaves marks of its own, if one knows where to look.” He tapped the paper. “I have found them.”
Finch grinned into his tankard. “I'm impressed, Mr. Whitfield.”
The accountant inclined his head, accepting the compliment as his due.
"Mallow and Company keeps a wharf, lands goods, pays its men, and is in every outward respect a dull little business of the river.
Yet its receipts bear little relation to the scale of its trade.
Within days of the courier's arrival, unusually regular sums are deposited into Mallow's account at a modest bank in the City.
" He looked up. "The firm's books describe an ordinary wharf. Its banking describes something else."
“Does it now?” Graves asked, smelling the scent of a trail that could be followed.
Whitfield continued. "Honest trade rises and falls with the seasons, the weather, and the fortunes of commerce.
One week a vessel founders, another a strike delays cargo, a third the river freezes.
Yet Mallow's receipts scarcely vary at all.
Week after week, the same handsome sums appear with almost mathematical regularity.
" He folded his hands. "That is not how the river pays a man. "
I found myself smiling despite the subject. "How then?"
"It is how a man pays himself when he is dressing dirty money as clean and lacks the imagination to make the figures breathe."
"A front," I said.
"Precisely. A laundry disguised as a wharf.
" He turned the top paper face down, a small tidy gesture.
"And from Mallow the money does not rest. Each quarter the surplus is swept up and paid to a firm of solicitors—Pell and Hartwright, of Bedford Row.
A sound old house that has done nothing in its hundred years to deserve the company it now keeps. "
I regarded him for a moment. "Mr. Whitfield, I begin to wonder how an accountant comes by such remarkably confidential information."
The faintest suggestion of amusement touched his mouth. "I have my ways, Your Grace."
Finch chuckled into his tankard. "Leave the man a few mysteries of his own."
"Can we compel them to tell us who owns the account?" I asked.
Whitfield's answer was immediate. "No. A solicitor's client account is a wall built by Act of Parliament. They hold money for a client. They will not name him, and they cannot be made to."
The lamp hissed. Below us a plate rang upon stone.
"Then we are stopped," I said.
“We are walled, which is not the same thing.” Whitfield permitted himself the ghost of satisfaction. “A wall cannot be built without leaving a little mortar exposed. I have found three such places.”
I leaned in. So, I marked, did Graves.
“The first.” Whitfield raised a finger. “A structure of this kind requires a man to stand at the front—to sign where signing must be done, to be a name upon a lease and a director in a book, so the true owner need never write his own.
There is such a man. He guarantees Mallow's account at the bank and signs as though he owned the lot.”
He glanced down at his papers. “His name is Walter Marsh. A respectable nobody who appears nowhere a man truly lives, only where a man must sign. He is a man of straw, hired to lend a name and shield the one behind it. But a man of straw is still a man. He was paid. He can be found, frightened, and made to say who pays him.”
“The second,” I said.
“A club. Marsh was put up two years since at the Argosy, in St. James's, and his subscription is paid—not from his own pocket, which would not stretch to it, but from this same dressed money.
Why elevate a nobody and buy him admission to a gentleman's club? Because the man behind him wished to walk in and out of the Argosy under a borrowed name, meet whom he chose, and have no member ever learn that the quiet fellow at the long table and the master of a trade in women and drugs were one and the same.”
His mild gaze met mine. “A club is the one place in London where a gentleman may sit for hours beside another and never once be asked his business.” Whoever he is, he sat in that house, ate its dinners, and was bowed to by its servants.”
“And the third,” he said before I could ask, “is ground. The structure pays a ground-rent, through Pell and Hartwright, on land held to the west of the town, beyond Hammersmith and near the river. A good deal of land. The lease runs through the wall, so I cannot see the purpose of it, only the rent and the size.”
He consulted his papers.
“There are buildings upon it. Warehouses, sheds, and some sort of riverside landing, if the assessments are to be believed. Too much land and too much expense for a common wharf, yet producing no outward trade sufficient to justify either.” He folded his hands.
“It is the one holding in the whole affair that is not a paper but a place—somewhere that exists, that has walls and doors and a key in someone's pocket.”
He looked from one to the other of us.
“That is as far as the figures will take me.
A wharf that is a laundry. A wall of lawyers.
A man of straw with a borrowed name and a gentleman's club. And a riverside estate in the west for which someone pays dearly, though the books cannot tell me why.” He permitted himself the smallest smile.
“I have given the ghost a shape. I have not given you his face, because his face is the one thing he has spent this entire enterprise to keep.”
For three weeks I had hunted a man who was little more than a rumor—no name, no face, only the outline he had left in other men's fear.
Now there was an architecture to him. He banked.
He hid behind a wall of lawyers. He sheltered himself behind a borrowed name.
He held land beyond Hammersmith. The ghost had acquired substance.
More importantly, it had acquired an address.
“Then we have three roads before us,” Graves said.
“Four,” I said.
“No,” Graves replied. “Four gets men killed.”
Finch laughed softly into his tankard. “The inspector's right.”
Graves leaned forward, his hands folded upon the scarred table. “We do not touch the estate. Not yet. The moment we do, the game is up. Papers vanish. Boats move. Men disappear. If this fellow has built walls around himself in money and law, he will have built warnings around the place as well.”
“Then we watch it,” I said.
“We watch it,” Graves agreed. “Quietly. From the river if we can, from the road if we must. But no constable knocks on that gate until we know what waits behind it.”
Finch nodded. “I can put two men on it. Men who know how to look idle.”
“That leaves Marsh,” I said.
“Mine,” Finch replied. “A man of straw still drinks somewhere, sleeps somewhere, and fears someone. I'll find him.”
Whitfield smoothed the edge of his papers. “I shall continue with Mallow and Company, and with the land beyond Hammersmith. Rates, assessments, leases, old conveyances. If the place has ever changed hands, someone wrote it down.”
“I will make a few quiet inquiries along the river,” Graves said. “Not as an inspector asking after a crime. As a man asking whether trouble has ever come out of that gate.”
“And I shall call upon the Argosy. A gentleman asking after another gentleman excites little notice. The porters carried his coat. The waiters served his dinners. A steward may remember which chair he favored, which wine he ordered, and with whom he took his meals.”
Finch smiled.
A man. A club. A place. It was more than we had possessed an hour before. Not enough to seize him. Not enough to name him.
But enough to begin.
For three weeks we had hunted a ghost. Now the ghost occupied land, kept accounts, dined at a gentleman's club, and paid lawyers to conceal his face. He was still invisible.
But invisible men could be found.
Beneath our feet the chop-house roared on, all knives and voices and ordinary hunger, while above it four men divided the hunt between them and set out to give the ghost a face.