Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
A Full and Frank Disclosure
Milford had the library ready by half past seven. Lamps lit, the long table cleared, the maps carried down and weighted flat, and a cold supper laid on the sideboard: ham, roast beef, a raised game pie, bread and cheese, pickles, and a pot of mustard.
Whitfield came first and squared his papers to the grain of the table. Finch went to the sideboard the way a man goes to his own front door. Rosalynd arrived at eight exactly, having crossed the square in front of whoever cared to watch her do it. Graves came last.
Once everyone had arrived, Milford brought in the drinks. Ale for Finch and Graves, whiskey for Whitfield and me, and a glass of claret for Rosalynd. He asked none of us what we wanted.
I began by apologizing to Graves for the promise I had not been able to keep three nights ago.
Then I gave them, with her permission, Lady Edmunds's business obtained that afternoon.
Four months of Crane bleeding her over her husband's death, and Rosehaven learning of it and striking him at the Argosy in a room he believed private.
That was the motive Dodson had spent two days assembling out of carriage wheels and ballrooms.
"You saw her?" Rosalynd said.
"She is well, and asks you not to worry. But let us move on. Inspector, let us have Rosehaven first."
Rosalynd's hands went still in her lap.
"He is well. Mr. Gathorne saw him this afternoon.
Sir Hugo Rennell went with him, which is not usual at this stage and is worth something.
Regarding Loftus, the witness who overheard the club quarrel, he cannot be broken because he is telling the truth.
That is Rennell's opinion, by way of a clerk who should not have given it to me.
Rennell will not stand in the House of Lords and call an honest gentleman a liar, and he is right not to.
" Graves turned his glass of whiskey a quarter turn on the blotting paper. “Nothing we learn of Crane will save your brother, Lady Rosalynd. Only one thing gets an earl out of Holloway, and it is a different man with a name and a reason for murder. That is my opinion, not Rennell’s.”
"That is what we are here for," I said. "Finch."
He put down his knife and fork and opened the notebook slowly, which he does when the news is poor.
"Marsh kept a furnished villa off Camberwell Green.
Wife, two girls, a boy of nine. The day after Crane was found at Kew the housekeeper let herself in and the house was empty, her wages on the kitchen table.
A week since has bought me nothing. No trunk out of that street, no passage from any dock in England.
" He closed the notebook on his thumb. "And nobody wrote to the boy's school.
Not a line. They're still wondering about him. "
"There is always a trace," Graves said, to the blotting paper. "Unless they were taken, that is. If they were, they will not turn up."
Rosalynd had gone white. She did not look away from him, and she did not speak.
"Keep looking, Finch. Mr. Whitfield. Hammersmith."
He set his spectacles and laid two fingers on his uppermost paper.
"Eleven acres of leasehold ground on the Middlesex shore. Warehouses, a counting house, a wall and gate, and a private landing on the tideway. The lease runs through Pell and Hartwright, solicitors. And stops there. But there are other threads to pull.”
"Explain."
He turned the paper face down. "A building may hide behind a solicitor.
It cannot hide from the parish that rates it, the fire office that insures it, or the Thames Conservancy, which licenses no landing without a person answerable for it.
Three registers, none speaking to the others, all open with a small fee to a patient man.
" He looked up over the spectacles. "The same name in all three.
Not Marsh. Not Mallow. Not Bedford Row."
“Who?”
"Mercer."
The name crossed the table and nothing happened, because there was no reason for anything to happen. It was a name none of us had heard.
“Is there a Christian name attached to Mercer?”
“None to be had. I went back ten years. Directories, births and deaths, bankruptcies, wills. I can find no man who belongs to the name. Mr. Mercer signs for eleven acres on the river, insures them, stands answerable for a landing stage, and does not otherwise exist.”
“That is Marsh again,” Rosalynd said.
“The opposite of Marsh, my lady. Somebody built Marsh a life so the name would bear looking at. Mercer has no life to look at. No address. No family. No bank account I can trace. Nothing beyond the ground he manages.”
“How many men?”
“Between eleven and fourteen on Mallow and Company’s wages. At a wharf that lands no cargo and pays no dues to the Port of London.”
Finch stopped chewing. “So Mercer’s not his name.”
Whitfield looked at him. “I would be very surprised if it were.”
Finch set down his fork and sat back. “Now that is interesting.”
“What is?” Graves asked.
“Marsh dined at the Argosy a dozen times a year. Same private room, same gentleman every time.” Finch looked at Whitfield. “I checked the visitors’ book. Five entries in two years, all in Marsh’s hand, all for the same guest.”
“Mercer,” Whitfield said.
“Mercer.”
For a moment, no one spoke.
“So the man managing the wharf,” Graves said, “is the same man Marsh was meeting privately at the Argosy.”
“Looks that way,” Finch agreed.
“And Mercer is the man who does the work,” Graves continued, “so the man above him need never leave his chair.”
“But we have yet to know who that is,” Whitfield said.
“I do,” Rosalynd said.
She gave it to them as her grandmother had given it to her, plainly.
A knighthood in seventy-one or seventy-two that nobody could recall the occasion of.
City money, no land, no wife, no heir. Then the chest three years ago, the physician of thirty years let go, the shooting given up, Torquay for the sea air, and a return worse than he went, the household turned out and replaced.
“My grandmother can seat every family in England three generations deep, and this morning she could not name one living soul who knew Sir Reginald Harcourt before the illness and knows him now.” She let it sit.
“Not one. He shed them himself, including his physician. None thought it worth a second thought, because that is what a long illness does to a man.”
Graves leaned forward. “How do we prove the man who came back from Torquay is the man who went there?”
Whitfield took off his spectacles and began to clean them, which he does when he wants to make a point. “Signatures.”
We all looked at him.
“A man ill for three years signs less and less. His secretary signs for him. His solicitor acts on instruction. His bankers accept what they have accepted before. But somewhere there will be documents only Harcourt himself could sign.” He replaced his spectacles.
“I want fifteen years of them laid out in order.”
“Can you get them?” Graves asked.
Whitfield’s expression suggested the question had offended him.
“Yes.”
“There is one thing more,” Rosalynd said. “We have been looking at the illness as the means by which Harcourt concealed what he could do. I think we have been looking at only half of it.”
Finch stopped eating.
“My grandmother could find no one who knew him before the illness and knows him now. Not his physician. Not an old servant. Not a friend. Not even a shooting companion. Everyone who might have looked at Sir Reginald Harcourt three years ago and said, That is not the man I knew, was removed from his life.”
Graves sat very still.
“The illness did not merely explain why he stopped going into society,” she continued. “It gave him the reason to change everything. His habits. His household. His acquaintances. Even the distance at which people were expected to stand from him.”
“And once they accepted the illness,” Finch said, “they stopped looking at the man.”
“Yes.”
I looked at the names spread across the table. Marsh, who had been given a life on paper. Mercer, who had been given only enough of one to do his work. And above them a man who had spent three years making certain nobody came close enough to question his.
“Harcourt,” Graves said.
“Harcourt,” I agreed. “We know where the road leads. But we cannot tie Harcourt to any part of it.”
Nobody argued. Whitfield had money with Harcourt's name on none of it. Finch had a house that would not leak. Rosalynd had a coughing fit, an absence of witnesses, and a waltz. I had a conviction, which is worth nothing in a court and less in front of a magistrate.
"I can get a warrant on a shape," Graves said. "I cannot get one on a silhouette."
"Then we look where men are fastened to things," Finch said.
Rosalynd set down her glass of claret. "Who dressed him before Benson?"
Nobody spoke.
"The whole household was turned out. So there was a valet before Benson, who bathed and shaved and dressed Sir Reginald Harcourt every day for as long as he had the place." She looked around the table. "No one is left who knew that man closer than ten feet. Except that once there was."
"Vosper," Finch said. “His name was Vosper.”
"You have him?"
“Yes, and the registry office that placed him as well.” He opened his notebook.
“One-and-twenty registry offices in London place upper servants. Every recent servant in Sir Reginald’s employ came through the same one.
And Vosper before them all.” He turned the notebook flat.
“But Vosper’s no good to us. He went to Torquay with his master and died there two years since.
Sir Reginald paid to bury him. The clerk at the registry office told me twice, being fond of the story.
A kind master burying his own man. That’s how the place fell vacant for Benson. ”
“A dead end, then,” Whitfield said.
“The man is. The office isn’t. Wigmore Street, four streets from Sir Reginald’s own front door.
Whoever owns a house like that decides which pair of eyes goes into which household in London, and is asked for a character on every servant in Mayfair, and nobody thinks twice about it, because it’s the dullest lawful trade in England. ”
I had come out from behind the table without noticing. “The proprietor.”
“That’s where I stopped, and I stopped on purpose. The plate says A. Drayton, and the directory says no more. I’ve not got the Christian name and I’ve not asked, because the moment a stranger asks after the proprietor of a registry office, that is a thing the proprietor is told.”
“Get it. Quietly, and from somewhere else. A rate book, a license, a lease. Mr. Whitfield will show you where such things live.”
“The rate book first,” Whitfield said. “Then the lease. One of them will give us more than an initial.”
Finch nodded. “I’ll have it tomorrow.”
Graves lifted his head. “Wigmore Street. Now that is odd.”
“Say it.”
“It will be nothing. It generally is.” He rubbed the side of his jaw.
“Six or seven years back, there was a house in Cadogan Place.
A manservant helping himself—plate, chiefly.
The family were sore about it and wrote letters, so I remember he'd been placed through an agency, with a character. The agency was in Wigmore Street.”
“What happened to him?” Finch asked.
“He never came to trial.” Graves reached for his glass at last. “He was held at Newgate for the Old Bailey. Three weeks in, he got into an altercation with another prisoner, was stabbed, and died of it that night.”
The fire settled. Whitfield’s pen had stopped moving.
“Over what?” Rosalynd asked.
“Nothing anybody could establish. The other man never gave a reason, at the inquest or after. He was already serving a long sentence, and it cost him seven years more.” Graves set the glass down and did not appear to hear the room at all.
“I remember thinking he took those seven years very calmly. Like a man who considered them a fair exchange.”
Nobody said the thing.
Rosalynd did not look at me, and I did not look at her, and Whitfield turned his top paper face down.
“Find me that case, Inspector. The date, the agency, and the name of the man serving the long sentence.”
“Monday.”
I gave them their work, because there was nothing else to give them. Whitfield to the signatures. Finch to the proprietor in Wigmore Street, by way of any office in London that was not that one. Graves to a seven-year-old file. Rosalynd to visit her brother the next day.
They went a little before eleven. Finch took the last of the ham with him in a napkin. Whitfield gathered his papers into their case. I offered to see Rosalynd across the square; she declined, and accepted a footman instead.
Graves left as he had come, and gave me a look on his way out.
A man three weeks from the Old Bailey does not die in a quarrel nobody can name. The killer gave no reason because there was none to give, only a price, and it was paid by a man who never came nearer than the outside of the wall.
Cosmos was useful alive only while his conviction looked certain. We were at work making it look otherwise. Every yard we gained would shorten the time he was worth keeping alive.
Rosalynd had not followed it that far. Graves had, and had not said so, and neither had I.