Chapter 19
Chapter
Nineteen
A Reliable Witness
Two days had passed since the council in my study, and the machine we had assembled that night had begun to turn.
Finch came at breakfast, which was his custom now. A place was laid for him before he rang the bell. The coffee was strong, the kidneys, ham and eggs hot, and a second rack of toast stood within reach.
"Benson first," he said, "because Benson is where I've got nothing, and the nothing is worth more than the something."
"Go on."
"I've had two men at Harcourt House, a residence built for twelve, since last we met.
Wimpole Street. Respectable, quiet, professional sort of street.
" He salted his eggs. "There are four servants in it, Your Grace. A cook. One parlormaid. And a man who does butler and footman both, which no house of that standing has done in my lifetime. And Benson, of course.”
"Four."
"Four. And here's the part that's kept me awake. There's no housekeeper."
I set down my cup.
"You take my meaning." Finch was not eating now.
"A gentleman with Harcourt’s money keeps eight indoors at the least, and a housekeeper over the women.
No housekeeper means every servant in that house answers to the master direct.
And there's not one housemaid in the place—not a girl to do the grates, not a girl to carry water.
Which means there is nobody in that household whose business it is to go into his rooms."
“There’s more, I gather.”
“Years I've been at this. Every house in London leaks somewhere.
A dismissed maid with a grievance, a footman with debts, a cook who hates the butler.
There's always a seam." He shook his head slowly.
"That house has none. Four people who all eat at the same table and none of whom has ever been anywhere else.
There's no hall to gossip in and nobody's left to go bitter.
I can't get at Benson because there's nothing to get at him through. "
"And Benson himself?"
"Came out twice, both times behind his master, both times to hand him into a hired carriage. Never alone. Never on a half day I can find." He returned to his eggs, without appetite. "I'll have him in the end. But it’ll take a month and a stroke of luck."
I turned it over. A household of four in a house built for twelve, arranged so that no servant had occasion to climb the stairs. Economy, said one reading. An invalid who no longer entertains and has let his establishment go, which is a sad thing and a common one.
I filed it under sad and common.
"And Marsh?"
“Worse than Benson." Finch pushed his plate away, which I had never once seen him do. "Marsh is gone."
"Gone how?"
“He has a furnished house off the green in Camberwell, taken two years since, rent paid quarterly by banker's draft.
Wife. Three children—two girls and a boy.
" He turned back a leaf. "Housekeeper comes by the day.
She let herself in on the morning after they found Crane at Kew.
The house was empty. No word to her. No notice given.
Nobody in that family has been seen since. "
“Empty,” I said.
"He read the papers, or he was told. Either way, I wager Marsh was out of that house before the body had cooled." Finch shook his head slowly. "And here's my difficulty. I can't tell you which sort of leaving it was."
"Explain."
"Her wages were left on the kitchen table in an envelope, which is a decent man running. The clothes press upstairs is half empty, which is a hasty pack. The beds were made, but there was food in the larder going off. No carrier in Camberwell moved a trunk out of that street last week. I’ve asked all four of them.
" He set the notebook down. “The boy was at a day school two streets over.
A father who bolts writes to the school, if only to stop them asking.
Nobody wrote. He simply stopped coming, and they've been wondering about it ever since. "
I said nothing for a moment.
"So either a frightened man got his family out of London in a hurry and was careless about the school," Finch said, "or somebody removed five people from a house and made it look like a frightened man. I've been at this thirty years and I couldn't swear to you which."
“Somebody thought Marsh could be bribed into naming his master."
"Aye. But someone got there first." Finch's mouth was flat. "One other thing, and I don't like it either. He hadn't shown at the Argosy since Crane died."
"And the club staff?”
"Slower. But a waiter's memory improved for half a crown. Marsh dined there a dozen times in the last year—always midweek, always the same private room, and never alone. The same gentleman each time. Arrived before him, left after him. The staff know the man by sight but not by name, which in a gentleman’s club that prides itself on knowing everybody takes some doing. "
A gentleman with no name, in a club built on names. Above Marsh, then, the ladder held at least one more rung, and the rung declined to be counted.
"Whitfield?"
"Elbow-deep in bank transactions and happier than I've ever seen him. He asks another week and promises a pattern at the end of it."
Another week. It was sound work, patiently done. I could find no fault in it—except that it moved at the pace of honest men, and the man we hunted did not.
Finch came to his feet. “I’ll let you know what else I find.”
“The sooner the better.”
I had my proof of the enemy's pace by noon.
"Inspector Graves, Your Grace,” Milford announced.
He came into my study but did not take the chair I offered. Some news a man delivered standing, especially if it were the kind that would not be welcomed.
Milford closed the door with hardly a click.
I came to my feet. “You have news?”
“I do, Your Grace. Yesterday morning a witness presented himself at the Yard and asked for the officer in charge of the Kew matter.
Dodson had him sworn within the hour." His voice was flat.
"His name is Loftus. Retired out of the India trade, comfortable fortune, a house in Bayswater.
Not a debt nor a stain on him that anyone can find.
A member of the Argosy these eleven years. "
The Argosy. Of course it was the Argosy. “Go on."
"On the evening of the quarrel, Loftus was in the club's small library, which shares a wall and a badly fitted door with the private dining room. He heard raised voices. Crane, whom he knew, and a second gentleman whom he did not.” Graves paused.
“He heard the word blackmail followed by a lady's name.
Lady Edmunds. And then he heard the second gentleman say the payments would end that day, a sound he took for a man being struck, and a chair gone over.
The last thing he heard was Crane telling the other gentleman he would regret it. "
He let it sit between us while he looked at me. If he was waiting for me to respond, he would be disappointed.
"He didn't know the second man at the time.
When it went quiet, he came out into the passage and saw a tall red-headed gentleman going down the stairs.
Some days after, he mentioned the business to another member.
The member named the red-haired gentleman as Rosehaven.
" Graves turned the hat once. "He thought no more of it until he read in the papers that Crane had been found at Kew with the Earl of Rosehaven's pistol beside him.”
"He’d held his tongue out of delicacy—a club matter, with a lady's name in it—until murder made silence a weight his conscience wouldn't carry.
He came in of his own accord. Asked for no consideration.
Dodson's men couldn't shake a detail of it.
" He let out a breath. "Having read the statement, Your Grace, I don't believe the man is lying. "
Neither of us said more. There was no need.
It might be nothing. A man's conscience can turn over on its own. But I didn’t believe it for one moment.
"He needn't be." The words came out level, which cost me something.
"An honest man can be encouraged toward his honesty.
A word at the club. A paragraph pointed out over a newspaper.
A friend's murmur that the law is being made a fool of and decent men owe it better.
He arrives at the Yard burning with conscience, swears to every true syllable, and there is nothing in his manner to shake—because nothing in his testimony is false. "
The man we sought did not buy witnesses. He grew them.
"Which leaves us one thread," I said. "Somebody put that newspaper in front of him. A member, a servant, a friend. Loftus will remember the conversation."
“Maybe so, but you'll not get near him. Dodson has him wrapped in wool."
The way he said it told me that wasn’t the only thing he came to report. “Is there more?”
“Unfortunately.” Graves did not sit for this either.
"Armed with the lady's name, Dodson spent yesterday on the rest of it. Rosehaven’s carriage in Lady Edmunds's street at hours when a carriage is remembered.
The two of them side by side at every ball of the season.
An afternoon this spring, before witnesses, walking the gardens at Kew.
" He drew breath. "Weapon, quarrel, blow, motive, and now the woman who ties them together.
The warrant is being drawn, Your Grace. He's dotting every i, because he means it to hold. A day. Two at the most."
"Thank you, Inspector."
Once he had gone, I went to the window to stare across the way. The obvious thing—the human thing—was to cross the square and tell her.
But she could not stop what was coming. Nobody could. The witness was honest, the warrant lawful, the machinery already turning. A warning would purchase her nothing but a sleepless night.
Rosalynd does not sit quietly with dread.
She spends it. Given a day's notice she would be at the Yard by morning, laying the pistol's history in front of Dodson to draw the fire onto herself, and ruin herself to no purpose whatever.
Or she would tell Cosmos, and Cosmos—who would stand in a cart to the gallows sooner than see Claire touched—would do something protective and fatal that Dodson would read as consciousness of guilt.
The Rosehaven family was supremely gifted at fatal acts of love. I was in no position to sneer. I had spent a month committing one.
But there was something I could do to ease their pain.
I called for my carriage and went to Lincoln's Inn Fields, to Gathorne and Pryce, who have kept the Thornburn affairs longer than I have been alive.
The Fields lay green and orderly, full of clerks eating late bread and butter under the plane trees, every one of them serving somebody's quarrel.
Old Gathorne received me himself, heard what little I could tell him, and asked none of the questions a lesser man would have needed answered. He had served my father and, more usefully, survived him.
"Within days a client will require this firm's whole attention. A gentleman of consequence. I can give you no name and no further matter. I ask that you hold yourselves ready, and that when the name comes, nothing in this office precedes it."
"Criminal or civil, Your Grace?"
"Criminal."
A silence in which a careful man revised his week. "We shall be ready."
"One thing more. A barrister shall be needed. I should like Sir Hugo Rennell instructed. Today, if it can be done."
Gathorne's pen did not pause. "Then I shall come with you."
We went to the Temple together, which is the only way such a thing can be done, and Rennell’s clerk performed the small theater of consulting a diary that all three of us understood would be rearranged.
Rennell's chambers smelled of old calf and older arguments. He heard Gathorne out with his fingers steepled, which took very little time, there being very little to hear.
"You won't give me the name."
"Not today."
"The charge?"
"When it is laid."
He studied me over the steeple of his fingers, and I let him. A man about to clear his table for a stranger is owed a good look at whoever asks it.
"Then I'll ask the only question I need," he said. "Is he innocent?"
"Entirely."
"You would be astonished, Your Grace, how few men say that word without blinking." He drew the diary toward him and struck two lines through the coming week. "Send to my clerk the hour you know anything at all."
I left retainers with both of them—paper promises for a nameless man against a nameless day—and came out into the late afternoon sun with nothing further to do.
That was the whole of the trouble. There was nothing further to do.