A Sinister Establishment

by Lynn Messina

  Naturally, Bea was not at all worried that Mrs. Mayhew would allow herself to be diverted from her objective by the pleasures of Paris, as she knew the woman would not be visiting the city anytime soon—at least not in the company of her husband.

  That Mrs. Mayhew’s spirits had been dulled by the specter of murder that had hung over the house was apparent by how buoyant they were now that it had been removed.

  Well, that and Kesgrave’s deposit of fifty thousand pounds.

  Those twin good fortunes had made her almost lightheaded with happiness. Knowing how fond Bea was of macarons, she held out a plate spilling with them at regular intervals, and she kept offering to refill the duke’s glass of arrack even though he had barely taken two sips of the liqueur.

  Although Mrs. Mayhew was grateful for Kesgrave’s vindication, she remained convinced that Beatrice had been correct in her actions and opinions. Even if le peu guillotine was responsible for Monsieur Alphonse’s death, the duchess’s suspicions were entirely justified. “And I’m not just saying that because I shared them too,” she had said graciously before turning the conversation to a less chastening topic such as her trip to France.

  “I am sure you are wondering how one finds a new chef in the vast city of Paris,” Mrs. Mayhew continued, “and you are right to ask. Mr. Mayhew will begin by consulting with his friend Mr. Rothschild, who also oversees a large financial concern.”

  As she suspected that this was another topic on which the banker’s wife could expound endlessly, Bea decided she had indulged the Mayhews in enough benign conversation. Launching into their scheme, she timorously interrupted her hostess to ask if she may have her help in a troubling matter. Then she looked at Mr. Mayhew and said that she would need his assistance as well. “If you would deign to give it.”

  “Of course, of course, your grace,” he replied robustly. “You need only ask.”

  “It is a sensitive subject and one my husband does not want to hear another word about,” Bea said, casting a brief, defiant look at Kesgrave, whose expression remained inscrutably blank at this statement. “He is, you see, still displeased with my misunderstanding of Monsieur Alphonse’s death and wants me to avoid awkward questions, as he is determined to make amends for intruding on what was a tragic episode for your household.”

  Mrs. Mayhew, drawing her brows together sympathetically, murmured soothingly, “You poor dear, I can positively feel your anxiety from where I am sitting. You are new to marriage and not used to husbands, so let me be the first to assure you they are often churlish. You must pay it no mind and do what you think is best according to your own conscience. Now how may we help you?”

  Although the other woman’s voice was even and gentle, Bea could detect her excitement beneath the surface. Even if she didn’t say another word, the Duchess of Kesgrave had already revealed several uncomfortable things about her marriage—an indication that Mrs. Mayhew had indeed managed to forge an intimate relationship with the new peer.

  “You are so kind,” Bea said, then pulled the ledger sheet from her pocket and held it up. “You see, the problem is this.”

  Mr. Mayhew, unable to recognize his own handwriting from several feet away, furrowed his forehead. “What is that?”

  But his wife, who was only one chair over, gasped in recognition.

  “It is a page from your ledger recording your employees’ salaries,” Bea said simply. “Mrs. Wallace had it.”

  Mr. Mayhew’s utter bewilderment would have been funny if the situation itself were not so serious. “Mrs. Wallace? I don’t know any Mrs. Wallaces.”

  “Mrs. Wallace is our housekeeper at Kesgrave House,” Bea said.

  Alas, the information only baffled him further, and he stared at her with a distracted air, as if trying to work out a very complicated equation in his head. “Your housekeeper was at my bank?” he said.

  As he seemed to find the prospect of Mrs. Wallace among the regal statues and noble pediments of Mayhew & Co. to be particularly upsetting, Bea rushed to assure him that his understanding of the situation was wrong. “She did not travel to One Fleet Street. She and Monsieur Alphonse had a little romance, of which you are perfectly ignorant, for why would you know about a flirtation among the servants? When he decided to leave your employ and return to France, he asked Mrs. Wallace to accompany him as his wife. She declined the honor. At that time, he concealed this sheet from your bank ledger in her office. It was hidden under a vase whose water she changed earlier today. She had no idea it was there, so imagine her surprise when she found this list of names.”

  Bea paused to allow her listener to do just that, and it appeared to her that Mr. Mayhew actually made an effort to visualize the expression on the unknown woman’s face.

  “She could not conceive what it meant,” Bea added, “so she gave it to me. Naturally, I was perplexed as well because it is a very strange thing for one’s housekeeper to find under her flower vase. I could not figure out its meaning until I came across a familiar name. I trust you know which one I mean.”

  Alas, he did not. “A familiar name?”

  “Mr. Bayne,” she said.

  Comprehension, finally!

  But even as awareness glinted in his eyes, his demeanor remained calm as he said without a hint of self-consciousness, “Oh, I see, you found the list of my employees’ salaries.”

  His placidity was, she believed, further proof of his cunning nature. A less sly creature would have revealed a measure of apprehension at learning that his elaborate scheme to defraud his brothers out of thousands of pounds per annum had been discovered. But by all indicators, Mr. Mayhew minded it not one wit, and realizing that, she decided to alter their plan slightly in hopes of disorienting him in another way.

  “As soon as I read the name, I perceived the truth,” she said. “Mr. Bayne killed Monsieur Alphonse at your behest.”

  As the statement was patently absurd, she was hardly surprised when Mr. Mayhew responded with amusement, first gurgling gently and then guffawing riotously. Doubling over, he clutched his stomach as if trying to contain his humor, then recovered his sense to look at Kesgrave. His voice brimming with compassion, he said, “Women indeed, your grace! You warned me of your wife’s flights of fancy, and yet I was still unprepared for her outlandish conclusion. My dear duchess, I fear you are wildly off the mark. Mr. Bayne could not have possibly killed Monsieur Alphonse at my behest for the very simple reason that Mr. Bayne does not exist. I am sure I told you this already.”

  “That is a lie!” Bea declared hotly. “You are lying about Mr. Bayne to hide your guilt. If I cannot interview him, I cannot discover the truth. You are determined to block my investigation.”

  Again, he regarded Kesgrave sympathetically and shook his head, deeply saddened by the display. “To what investigation do you refer? The one your husband apologized for this afternoon? My dear duchess, you are mortifying yourself with these outrageous accusations. Come, let us have no more talk of it. Mrs. Mayhew and I are planning a trip to Paris to find a new chef. I am sure a man of your distinction, Kesgrave, is well traveled. What do you advise for first-time visitors to the city?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Mayhew said, joining the conversation, for she was as eager as her husband to smooth ducal feathers, “do give us advice, your grace, for we are eager to take instruction. Being without the comforts of home can be challenging. How do you mitigate that influence?”

  “No, no, no,” Bea cried angrily, stamping her feet in excessive frustration because she believed that was what the banker believed silly women did. “Mr. Bayne has to exist. He draws a salary from your bank. I demand to be introduced to him at once.”

  “I must ask you to calm yourself, your grace,” Mr. Mayhew said harshly, then immediately apologized to Kesgrave for his presumption. “Of course it is not my place to admonish the duchess, but getting worked up over a fictitious character is not how we behave in the best drawing rooms.”

  Graciously supplying the banker with the length of cor
d he required to hang himself, Kesgrave assured him that it presented no problem for him. “You must act according to your conscience.”

  Fervently, Mr. Mayhew agreed. “I must.”

  “If Mr. Bayne does not exist, how can he be on a list of employers who get paid regularly?” Bea asked, her tone piercing and shrill. “I’ll tell you the answer. He cannot. It is impossible. A phantom cannot draw a salary!”

  “It is simple, your grace,” he said calmly. “I draw Mr. Bayne’s salary.”

  It was a measure of his ingenuity that he could own his guilt whilst smiling innocently.

  His wife, who did not possess her husband’s steely nerves, leaped anxiously into the conversation to ask the duke about the Luxembourg Gardens. “Tell me, your grace, is the Medici fountain worth a visit? I have heard conflicting reports. Apparently, it fell into disrepair, but Napoleon diverted some funds to restoring it?”

  But the mention of diverted funds was not quite the sweeping subject change Mrs. Mayhew had hoped for, and she fell silent, pressing her lips together almost painfully.

  Bea ignored her entirely and looked accusingly at the banker. “You drew the salary? But that is theft!”

  “My dear girl, I own the bank. I cannot steal from myself,” he explained with a look of amused condescension that he directed at the duke. “I am not surprised you cannot understand that. You are female, after all, and limited in your ability to think through complicated matters. It is not your fault that numbers confuse you. Nevertheless, I would beg you to cease humiliating your husband.”

  Ah, yes, her husband.

  Did Mr. Mayhew not find it curious that the duke had yet to intercede?

  Surely, if he was embarrassed by his wife’s intractability, he would put an end to it. He had certainly proved himself autocratic enough.

  Bea continued to argue. “You are stealing from the bank’s other owners, your own brothers!”

  Somehow, he managed to retain his calm, dismissing this charge as easily as the others. “My brothers draw a nice living from Mayhew & Co. and have no cause to complain.”

  How confidently he spoke! How assured! How secure!

  But Bea couldn’t believe it.

  No, she could not. It simply wasn’t possible that four members of the same family—brothers, no less, with all the attendant rivalries and jealousies that relationship entailed—would blithely shrug off the theft of thousands of pounds per annum.

  “Oh, but would your brothers agree?” Bea asked, making her last play, determined to pierce his mask of cool indifference. He exuded calm composure, but surely inside he was trembling with apprehension at the revelation of a scheme so nefarious he had killed to keep it secret. “Would they really believe they have got their fair share and to begrudge you a little extra would be churlish? I don’t think so, Mr. Mayhew. I don’t think so at all. I think they would be irate and remove you from your position at once. Would they take criminal action against you? I don’t know. That would depend on their appetite for scandal. But I do know whatever measures they took would be devastating to your comfort. You would lose your house, your staff, your horses and memberships. You would lose everything, and that is why you killed Monsieur Alphonse. Because he was about to send a letter to your brothers alerting them to your mismanagement and you were terrified of losing everything.”

  Mr. Mayhew laughed.

  Delighted with her tirade, utterly gleeful, he laughed and laughed, and Bea, observing the seeming sincerity of his amusement, decided he was the most diabolical villain she had ever encountered. She did not expect all murderers to crumble like Wem at Lord Stirling’s ball, to admit what they did while reverting to some childlike state, but nor did she anticipate a wall of obfuscation so immense she could not scale it.

  Eventually, after a great long while during which his wife glared at him with impatience, Mr. Mayhew gained control of his amusement and turned to Kesgrave with a gleam in his eyes.

  And it was such a gleam—such a bright, eager, voracious, predatory glow—that it caused everything in the room to shift. Like a portrait slightly askew, the view had been tilted for a long time and now suddenly it was straight and she could see the image for what it was.

  Bea inhaled sharply and felt the pervasive relief that came with clarity.

  Triumphant in his good fortune, Mr. Mayhew said to the duke, “Your wife is accusing me, your grace. I cannot imagine what kind of amends that will require.”

  But in fact he could, for if the investigation itself had warranted a deposit of fifty thousand pounds, then a charge of murder in his very own home had to be worth double that.

  No, triple.

  Maybe quadruple.

  On and on the numbers spun in his head, growing impossibly higher as he contemplated the duchess’s folly, and Bea could not understand how she had considered him a viable suspect for so long. The face he presented to the world—slack, leaden-eyed, uncomprehending—was the only face he had. There was no Machiavellian schemer plotting in secret behind the dull facade. No, it was dullness all the way through.

  That was why he had no reaction to the threat of Monsieur Alphonse’s letter—he genuinely lacked the intelligence to imagine how a report detailing his managerial malfeasance might negatively affect him.

  It was horrifying now to see how she had altered reality to make it align with her assumptions. Over and over again she had contorted the truth to squeeze it into a box labeled “genius,” like when she had assumed he misidentified the use of a cleaver to throw off suspicion.

  But why would he know cleavers and skewers—that one chops, the other pokes and neither pinches? The minutia of the kitchens was entirely irrelevant to his existence. He never even went belowstairs. All meetings with Mr. Réjane were conducted in his study.

  Mrs. Mayhew, keenly aware that another Parisian landmark would not alleviate the awkward vulgarity of her husband’s display, tried a more forthright approach. “Darling, one does not receive reparations by seeking them,” she chided gently with a contrite smile at Kesgrave.

  Her husband, instantly alive to her game, all but winked at her as he apologized to Kesgrave for his faux pas. “Of course I would never expect you to increase your deposits just because your wife accused me of murder in my own drawing room. That would be dreadfully gauche. But if you do decide to make an alteration, Mayhew & Co. would have no objection.”

  It was comical, Bea decided, the disparity in the two spouses, for even though they both liked to blather, Mrs. Mayhew perceived the undercurrents of a conversation as well as their implications.

  She would have no difficulty in recognizing the problem a letter from Monsieur Alphonse would present.

  No, she would not, Bea realized pensively, her gaze sliding to the banker’s wife to also consider her in a new light. To be sure, she had a firm alibi in her lady’s maid, but what if she did not? What if Annette had been compelled to lie or was deceived in some way by her mistress? The perpetrator of the last murder she investigated had also appeared free from suspicion, and he turned out to be a villain through and through.

  Mrs. Mayhew’s motive was just as strong as her husband’s—stronger, actually, because she understood the problem in a way her plodding spouse did not. For one thing, she realized his brothers were not satisfied with the “nice living” they drew from Mayhew & Co., for she made several comments about their competitiveness. The more likely situation was that each brother was on the constant lookout for an opportunity to overcome the advantages of primogeniture and seize control of the London bank. Nobody was ever satisfied with running a modest provincial concern when there was an influential establishment in the capital to oversee.

  Furthermore, Mrs. Mayhew, who made a habit of visiting belowstairs whereas her husband did not, had witnessed one of the kitchen maid’s outbursts. Unaware of her illustrious audience, Gertrude had stomped angrily around the kitchen wielding a cleaver threateningly.

  If she wanted to implicate someone else in her crime, Mrs. Ma
yhew could not have found a better sacrificial lamb than Gertrude Vickers. Regularly, as if by clockwork, she provided fresh fodder for any Machiavellian schemer determined to cast suspicion in a different direction. Of course Monsieur Alphonse was viciously beheaded by the kitchen maid—she had been telling you of her intentions for months!

  And how had she described her?

  Bea briefly closed her eyes to recall: Gertrude is a rough-seeming creature but very capable.

  Did that, finally, explain the wrenching brutality of the murder? Because Mrs. Mayhew believed that was the way a rough-seeming kitchen maid would end a life?

  ’Twas a horrifying thought.

  But if that was the way of it, how had the banker’s wife managed it?

  Mr. Réjane was no hulking giant, but nor was he an unusually small man. Subduing him would require strength Mrs. Mayhew decidedly did not possess.

  She would have had to incapacitate him first.

  How?

  With the shovel, she wondered, recalling the way Mrs. Blewitt had brandished it threateningly. It had been conveniently left in the courtyard, and someone had put it away.

  Could Mrs. Mayhew have knocked Mr. Réjane over the head with it?

  It was possible, yes, but given its heft and Mrs. Mayhew’s slight frame, it would have required all her effort. If she had to struggle unduly with the implement, Mr. Réjane would have time to notice the attack and disarm her.

  Why take that risk?

  Better to employ a method that did not rely on strength.

  A drug of some sort?

  Bea herself had spotted laudanum on Mrs. Mayhew’s vanity. Could she have used a tincture of laudanum to render him unconscious?

  Possibly.

  But how would she have convinced him to ingest the drug? She could not simply adulterate a glass of wine and serve it to him. As the lady of the house there would be no precedent for sharing a drink with one of the servants.