Chapter 17
Chapter
Seventeen
A Council of Five
The study had not improved in our absence. The cheese was gone, and the bread, and most of the cold beef. Finch presided over the wreckage with the contentment of a general who has carried the field. Inspector Graves stood at the window with a glass he did not appear to have troubled.
Both men turned as we came in. They looked at my hand, which lay in the crook of Steele's arm, and they both smiled.
Steele drew a chair close to his desk for me—not next to the men, beside his own.
A knock, and Milford brought in the accountant. Mr. Whitfield was round and spectacled and mild in manner, his collar a fraction off true, and his ears—there is no other honest word for it—were pink.
"My apologies for the delay," he said, squaring his case to the table's edge. "I was otherwise occupied."
"Course you were," Finch murmured into his ale.
The corner of Steele's mouth twitched, there and gone. He knew something, he was enjoying knowing it, and he had no intention whatever of sharing it.
"Lady Rosalynd, may I introduce Mr. Whitfield." Steele waited until the man had settled before moving on. "Lady Rosalynd and I held a discussion in the library, and an agreement has been reached.”
That was one way of putting it.
“There are no longer two inquiries,” he continued. “The man in the mask and the murder of Sir Basil Crane are one matter, and from this hour we work them as one matter—inside this room. Outside it, nothing has changed. To every eye at the Yard, the two inquiries remain strangers."
"Exactly so, Your Grace," Graves said. "If Dodson finds the seam between them, he will conclude there is a conspiracy of dukes and inspectors got up to pervert his case, and he will take it out on Rosehaven—begging your pardon, my lady—because the earl is the only one of us within his reach."
No one argued.
"Finch. For the lady's benefit."
The enquiry agent turned back through his notebook, though I would have wagered he did not need it, and gave me his three weeks entire.
With Vale out of the picture after the Trinity Lane affair, the enterprise had to find a new drug source.
They had found one. It was shipped in from somewhere—the Continent, America—and delivered to a frightened clerk called Pyke, who took it in and signed for it.
From there it went out two ways: to the sellers working the alleys and courts off Ratcliff Highway, and to the Limehouse dens where the stuff was served on the premises.
A collector called Renton gathered the takings from three such dens and sellers and passed them to a man on the river, who was away downstream before anyone could follow.
On the Thames affair, a procuress who went by Mother Lync found the girls for the boats, took her orders through a go-between, and had never once laid eyes on the man who paid her.
"Every rung of the ladder knows the one rung above it and the one below it,” Finch finished, “but not a soul on it has seen the top. That is not luck, my lady. That is design."
Three weeks. While I had been dressing for musicales and calling it intelligence work, Finch and his men had been climbing through Limehouse in the dark.
“Let’s have Crane now,” Steele said to Finch.
"A ruin, as we supposed. The Belgravia house, the tailor, the wine merchant, and baccarat played badly. Vowels out all over Town."
“Where did his money come in from?” I asked. “A man cannot live three stories above his income on air.” Surely it could not all have come from Claire.
Finch's pencil stopped. "There, my lady, is my puzzle.
Because money did come in. Small sums, even sums, arriving regular as quarter-day, only oftener.
No rents behind them. No dividends. No wins at the tables; the man lost." He shut the notebook.
"I cannot tell you whose money it was. I can tell you it was steady, it was tidy, and it was invisible—and honest money is none of those three things. "
"How far back?"
"Two years at the least."
Two years. Not four months of a widow's terror handed over in a drawing room. Two years of somebody paying Sir Basil Crane a wage.
“Whitfield. Pick up where Finch’s trail grows cold.”
The accountant drew out his papers. The pink-eared latecomer was gone. In his place sat a man wholly at home.
“The man on the river sails down to a wharf concern on the Surrey side trading as Mallow and Company, dull in every outward respect, earning the same handsome sum every week of the year. That is not how the river pays a man. It is how a man pays himself. From Mallow, each quarter, the surplus is swept away to a firm of solicitors in Bedford Row, Pell and Hartwright, and into a client account I cannot reach.”
"So the trail ends at a lawyer's door,” I said.
"The trail is walled, my lady, which is not the same thing as ended.
" A dry satisfaction came into his voice.
"I found three edges.” He raised one soft finger and gave me the first. “An enterprise of that kind wants a name at the front of it, to sign leases and guarantee accounts, so that the true owner need never write his own hand anywhere. Walter Marsh is that man. A respectable nobody who appeared on every document a man must sign and in no place a man truly lives. But a man of straw is still a man, and this one has been paid.”
“And the second?”
“A gentleman’s club. The Argosy to be exact.
Marsh was put up two years ago. His subscription paid to this day—not out of his own pocket, but out of the same dressed money.
Why dress a nobody and then buy him a club?
Because the man behind him wished to walk in and out of that house under a borrowed name.
To dine there. To sit at the long table and meet whom he chose.
A club being the one place in London where a gentleman may sit for hours beside another gentleman and never once be asked his business.
And that gave me pause.
The room went on without me. Whitfield was raising a third finger—leased ground west of the town, beyond Hammersmith, warehouses and sheds and a landing, too much of all of it for any trade the assessments could show—and Graves was asking after the rent, and their voices had moved a long way off, because my pulse had grown loud in my ears.
A respectable nobody. A man who appeared on every document a man must sign and in no place a man truly lives. That was one way to build a man nobody looks at.
There was another. A fourth if you will.
One might take an elderly gentleman with a ruined chest and a bad leg, and set him in an armchair by the window at every musicale in London, and let a respectful circle of empty space form itself around him out of nothing but good manners.
Nobody counts their words in front of a man they pity. Nobody wonders what he can hear.
I had stood not six feet from that chair last night.
"Mr. Finch." My voice came out level, which was a wonder. The room stopped. "The money coming into Crane's account. Can you do better than two years?"
He turned back a leaf. "Two years and some months, near as the bank will give me. The run begins in the spring of the year before last."
The same season Walter Marsh had been put up at the Argosy.
I had the whole of it then, or enough to be dangerous with.
Benson led to the potion, the potion led to Claire, and Claire led to a coroner's question about how a tired heart had come to stop.
From there it was three short steps to my brother's fist in a man's face.
Motive, laid out neat and unasked for, in front of Graves—a serving inspector of the Metropolitan Police. And that could not happen.
"Inspector Graves. Would you be very good and give us the room. You as well, Mr. Whitfield." I turned to the enquiry agent. "Mr. Finch, I would like you to stay.”
Whitfield blinked over his spectacles. Graves did not blink. He set his glass on the edge of the desk with great care and looked, not at me, but at Steele.
"Do as she asks," Steele said.
He said it without a question in it anywhere.
Whitfield calmly gathered his papers.
Graves came to his feet. "I understand, my lady. A man cannot be asked to give evidence of a conversation he was not present at. I would say only this. When the hour arrives that I can be told, I should like to be told before Inspector Dodson tells me."
"You have my word," Steele said.
The door closed behind the inspector and the accountant.
Steele inclined his head toward me. “Go on.”
"What I am about to tell you, Mr. Finch, does not go into your notebook, and it does not go to the two men who have just left this house."
Finch closed the notebook, set it on his knee, and put his hand flat upon it. "Then it don't exist, my lady."
So I gave it to him. Lord Edmunds, old and vain and married to my dearest friend.
The potion fetched from a chemist and prepared each evening by the man who dressed him.
The night he took more of it than he ought and his heart stopped in the middle of the doing.
The inquest in Hampshire, the verdict of natural causes, the coroner who was never asked the other question.
And Sir Basil Crane, four months ago, naming the price of his not asking it.
Finch heard the whole of it without one flicker of emotion in his face. “The valet," he said, when I had finished.
"Benson. He fetched the potion and made it up himself.
There was nothing in that household he did not know.
After Edmunds died he asked Claire for a reference.
She gave him one, because he had been faithful and her husband had been fond of him.
He entered service again almost at once.
With Sir Reginald Harcourt." I let it sit for a moment. "Crane attached himself to Sir Reginald. It has been remarked upon in a drawing room this week. A hanger-on shopping for some secret worth having. He found it at Harcourt’s house from a servant—Benson.”
"He weren't shopping." Finch said it slowly. "He were collecting his wages and being handed his orders."
"But he was blackmailing Claire. That money came to him."
"Did it, my lady? A man with four months of a lady's money in his pocket don't leave his tailor whistling for it.
" He shook his head. "The bank shows a wage.
Small, even, regular as quarter-day. What he had off Lady Edmunds went up, and he kept whatever they saw fit to let him keep.
He weren't in business for himself. He were the face they sent, because a gentleman can call at a lady's house and ask her for money, and the man who found out her secret can't." He was up before he had finished saying it.
"Two years and some months. Bought first, pointed after. "
"Benson tonight," Steele said. "Not the front door."
"Not the front door," Finch agreed. "There's a public house behind every great man's kitchen, Your Grace, and a valet in it by nine."
He went. His feet were quick on the stairs.
“How long have you had this?" Steele asked.
"Since two o'clock."
For a moment he seemed likely to say a thing we would both have to live with afterward. The corner of his mouth moved instead, very slightly, and did not become anything.
At Lady Pembury's musicale, an old woman had said that Crane knew everybody.
Another corrected her: he knew somebody who knew everybody.
I had never discovered what she meant by it because a coughing fit took the room before she could—deep and rasping, the sort that empties a man's lungs and turns every head in the place—and the circle broke apart to murmur over poor Sir Reginald and his dreadful chest.
Last night he had coughed the answer at me across a drawing room full of people. Every one of us had turned to look at him, and not one of us had seen a thing.