A Stranger in Mayfair (5 page)

Exhausted and pleased, he left the room six hours after he had first entered it, feeling firstly that he had a new understanding of the British colonial position (to think that in the last fifty years the empire had added two hundred million souls and five million square miles to its purview! What astonishing numbers, which none of the dustmen and bankers in the street thought about for more than a passing moment!) and secondly that he had a new collegiality with the men who ran the Colonial Office. Lenox had no intention of becoming a backbencher. He would wait his turn, to be sure, and could be patient—but what effort could win him in power and influence, it would.

It was understandable, therefore, that Frederick Clarke and Ludo Starling were far from his mind as he arrived in Hampden Lane. But no sooner had he turned the door handle than he remembered that McConnell and Dallington would likely be there. Supper with Jane would have to wait half an hour.

In fact it was only the younger of the two men who was there; Jane, according to Graham, was still out, but Lenox found John Dallington sitting in one of the comfortable armchairs in the study, feet propped up on the rail of the fireplace, a thin cigar in hand, and a huge smile on his face. This last because he was reading
Punch.

“Mr. Punch’s Book of Birthdays,” Dallington said in response to Lenox’s querying look. “But please!” He stood up. “Let me welcome you back from your honeymoon! It was the handsomest wedding I ever attended, I swear. I had to jostle with about a dozen cabinet ministers and fifteen dukes just to get a look at you. They were turning away mere viscounts at the door, the poor devils. Pretty hard on them.”

Lenox grinned. “Was it as pompous as all that?”

“Pompous—never. Justly well attended, I would say. I swallowed two buckets of champagne at the breakfast and asked Lady Jane to elope with me. She said no, which was probably wise of her.”

“She told me. You said something about letting the better detective win?” Lenox chuckled. “Have you surpassed me already?”

“Never. Still, I was intrigued by your note.”

“Yes, thanks for coming. Drink?”

“Rum and soda if you’ve got it.”

Lenox went to the drinks table and poured them each a tumbler. “It happened down by Curzon Street. Did you ever hear of someone called Ludovic Starling?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He’s in Parliament, a genial cove, quite sociable. One of his footmen went missing last night.”

“I call that careless of Starling.”

Lenox frowned. “It would be funnier if this unfortunate lad, Frederick Clarke, hadn’t been found dead in a nearby alley.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Quite. I was just over at the scene.”

“Oh?”

Lenox described Constable Johnson, Ludo’s strange behavior, and finding the murder weapon.

“Well spotted,” said Dallington at the conclusion of the story. “The brick, I mean. Does it really help us, though?”

“In a sense, yes. As I just said, I believe it means the murderer is local. Impatient, too—or in hot temper, though that’s a debatable point. It also means that the Yard won’t waste time searching for a weapon.”

There was a knock at the door, and Graham entered, followed by Thomas McConnell.

“Hullo, Charles!” said the doctor. “Welcome back to England. And Dallington, excellent to see you.”

“The baby is imminent?” Lenox asked.

“It’s all very close,” answered McConnell. He looked, as ever, slightly worn, with his battered heather coat and lined eyes, but he seemed happy as well. The two worst moods of his past—manic amiability and morose depression—were neither of them to be seen.

“Do you have time to look at something for me? It’s why I wrote you.”

“With all the pleasure in the world.”

Lenox ran over the details of the case for McConnell’s benefit, and then the three men sat and discussed how to handle things. In the end they concluded that Dallington would delve into matters on Curzon Street and McConnell would go have a look at the body. This left Lenox with the rather dry task of sending a note to Grayson Fowler and asking him to share information, always a tricky business. They agreed to reconvene the next evening with their findings.

Though Lenox had a day full of meetings tomorrow to look forward to, he felt a slight pang. Was this as close as he would get, from now on? What about the midnight chase and the hot trail? Were they left to Dallington now?

Little did Lenox know how involved he would soon become, and how close to home danger would strike.

Chapter Six

Lady Jane returned that evening at half past eight. At nearly the same time, so did her butler, Kirk. He had been visiting a sister in York for two weeks (“Who knew that butlers had sisters?” Dallington had said when he heard the news) but had come back by the evening train. With him and Graham both below stairs, it was critical that the issue of who would be the house’s butler be resolved once and for all. Doubly so, Lenox felt, because of how unprotected he had felt at the day’s meeting without a personal secretary.

He and Lady Jane discussed this, and their respective days, over lamb and preserves, and afterward retired into the cozy sitting room in what had been Jane’s house before the merger. It seemed funny to walk to it without leaving his own house—but then, Charles realized even as he thought that, it was all his own house now. How strange.

“Do you find yourself still going to your own door?” asked Lenox.

“Sometimes. I came to yours so often anyway that the change isn’t so great.”

Despite the fusion, this room had retained entirely Jane’s personality, and he adored every part of it—the old letters tied with ribbon on the desk, the deep sofas, the rose-colored and white wallpaper (his own study had a brooding mahogany), the pretty curlicued mirror over the dainty bureau. Gradually, he knew, his own ways would suffuse her rooms, and hers would suffuse his. For the moment, it reminded him how special, how lucky, his new life was, and how intimate an act living together could be. In his fortieth year he was learning something entirely new.

They retired early, laughing lightly and holding hands, to bed. The next morning was bright and wet, with a big wind shifting all the trees on Hampden Lane. Lenox ventured out for another day of meetings (Graham was noncommittal all morning, and Lenox sensed he wanted some time) and arrived home late and soaked to the bone from the short walk.

Apparently McConnell and Dallington had been busy, too; freshly arrived, they had towels and were patting their faces dry.

“Hullo, both of you,” said Lenox. “I bet you had a more exciting day than I did.”

“What about corridors of power and all that nonsense?” asked Dallington, lighting his cigar. The usual neat carnation sat in his buttonhole, and despite the rain he looked well put together.

McConnell, on the other hand, looked weary but had an unmistakable glow on his face—the pleasure of work.

“It
can
be exciting,” said Lenox thoughtfully, “but at the moment all I want is to sit in the chamber itself, rather than listen to a long, haranguing lecture about taxes.”

“Be a brick and make them lower, all right?” said Dallington.

Lenox laughed. “Yes, all right.”

“Good chap.”

There was a pause, and all three men waited expectantly. “Shall I go first?” asked McConnell after a moment.

“By all means,” said Lenox. “No, wait! In all the activity of the day I plum forgot to write Inspector Fowler. He keeps late hours, though, so perhaps a note will still catch him. Just a moment.”

The detective went to his desk and scribbled down a few lines, then rang the bell for Kirk.

“Take this down to Scotland Yard, would you?” he asked.

Kirk, looking taken aback, said, “Shall I leave it with the morning post?”

“I’m afraid I need it taken now.”

“At this hour? If you please, of course.”

Lenox had forgotten for a moment how used Graham was to all of his idiosyncrasies, and how different life would be without that luxury. “Wait a minute, though—perhaps Mr. Graham could take it.”

“Certainly, sir,” said Kirk, looking relieved.

Graham came and took the note, and in due course Dallington, Lenox, and McConnell were all seated again.

“Now, Thomas. I apologize.”

“Not at all. There’s not much to say, really. I went down and took a look at Frederick Clarke’s body this afternoon, as we agreed. It wasn’t a pretty sight. His wound was on the right side of the back of his head, and it was consistent with the corner of a brick as far as I could ascertain. I conferred with the coroner, and he agreed.

“I did notice one thing, however, that he hadn’t picked up. There were barks and scrapes on both of his fists. I’m not entirely sure what that means. Perhaps it’s unrelated to his death. At any rate they were a day old or so—scabbing up a little, not fresh.”

“So he had been in a fight the day before he was killed?” Dallington asked.

“A day or two, yes.”

Lenox made a note on the small pad he took from his jacket’s breast pocket. “Dallington, if you go to the house on Curzon Street—hold on a moment, have you already?”

“Not yet.”

“If you do, keep an eye out for anybody with similar markings. I should have told you before, by the way, always look at hands. It was Thomas who brought to my attention the importance of fingernails when we were working on a case together some years ago. The dead woman had pink soap under her fingernails, and from that fact we deduced her unfaithfulness to her husband.”

“How?” asked Dallington.

McConnell chuckled bleakly. “She was a poor woman. Scented soap would have been well beyond her means. I should far more easily have believed it if she had lice. She worked in a tavern, quite a successful one in Ealing, and after we found the soap under her nails we began looking at every sink we could find in the owner’s rooms over the pub. He had pink soap of the same scent on it. A bit of a dandy, I suppose. We couldn’t prove anything based on that, but it was our first hint.”

“After that it all came tumbling down around the man’s head. Josiah Taylor. He hung for it, I’m afraid.”

Dallington looked taken aback. “Goodness.”

“It’s something I try to avoid, but occasionally…at any rate, hands and fingers. A valuable tip.”

The young lord took out his own notebook and jotted a few lines in it. “Thanks,” he said. He was always on the lookout for these informal suggestions.

“What about you, then? You didn’t go to the house?”

“Not yet, no. I didn’t know whether Ludovic Starling would appreciate it.”

“I told him you would come.”

“Yes, but I thought it best to be forearmed. I compiled a list of all the house’s inmates.”

“Ah—excellent,” said Lenox. “Let’s hear it.”

“Starling himself. He’s forty-two and an MP. Spends much of his time at the Turf Club. Wife Eliza or Elizabeth, thirty-eight, son of a Scottish lord whose borough Ludovic sits for. So far none of this is new, of course. At the moment his children are home. There’s Alfred, who is nineteen.”

“The same age as Frederick Clarke,” said McConnell.

“Alfred is at Downing College, Cambridge, doing Greats. A second year.”

“It’s just called classics there, you know, not Greats,” said Lenox. “That’s Oxford terminology.”

“He’s home for the summer holidays but leaving in two weeks to go back. Then there’s his younger brother, Paul. He’s seventeen, and he was at Westminster until two months ago. He’s going up to Downing, too, at the same time as his brother.

“Rounding out this chummy household is an old man—Tiberius Starling, Ludo’s great-uncle. He’s eighty-eight and apparently deaf as a post. His best friend is a cat, which he apparently calls Tiberius Jr. From the sound of it he doesn’t greatly esteem his niece-in-law, or even his nephew, really, but they keep him around because they want his money. They’re afraid he’ll leave it to the cat—no, really. I swear. No children, and he made a mint in the mines about a thousand years ago.”

McConnell laughed. “How did you find all this out?”

“Asked acquaintances of mine, snooped around the neighborhood.”

“What about below stairs?” asked Lenox.

“Five live in—it’s quite a large house. There were two footmen, though now of course there’s only the one. Aside from Frederick there’s a chap named Foxley, Ben Foxley, a huge strapping fellow. I’ll be sure to look at his hands.”

“Could you tell anything about the assailant’s height from Clarke’s body?” asked Lenox of McConnell.

“Yes—we can identify him as being of roughly the same height as Clarke, give or take three or four inches in either direction. The blow didn’t come from a sharp angle, up or down.”

“So anyone of virtually any height,” said Dallington wryly.

McConnell shrugged. “I wish it were more conclusive.”

“Who else, John?”

“Sorry. Two footmen. One housemaid, Jenny Rogers; one cook, Betsy Mints; and a butler, Jack Collingwood. I couldn’t find out much about these three. In addition there are a scullery maid and a stableman who don’t live in but are at the house most days.”

“Seven in all, then. Six now.”

“That’s right.”

“Plus five family members. That’s eleven suspects,” said McConnell.

“Old Tiberius couldn’t lift a feather over his head, much less a brick,” said Dallington.

“And Ludo was at cards at the time of the murder. The rest of them, Dallington?”

“All at home, strangely enough, except the scullery maid, who was at her own home in Liverpool Street.”

“Then we can safely discount her. Still, that leaves eight. Without even mentioning the possibility that it’s someone entirely outside of the Starling circle.”

Just then Graham came in, trailed worriedly by Kirk, who looked ready either to stop him or announce him. Graham informed the group that Fowler had gone home for the evening. After a few minutes’ further discussion, the three men stood up and parted, agreeing that they would meet again soon—or at least when Dallington had discovered anything worth looking into further.

Chapter Seven