The Vanishing Man

by Charles Finch

  Lenox suspected him simply of being shrewd; this was one of the most popular shops in London, its stock replenished just often enough to be endlessly fascinating.

  Bergson was not telling—he barely deigned to speak to his customers—but he did sell Charles and Jane a variety of items: bars of pine soap, bags of sifted brown sugar, rough lumps of silver, a woven fishing creel that Lenox thought he might give his brother, Edmund. Lady Jane bought a handsome leather cap for her husband, who was due back from India with his troops in August. Lenox considered a tinderbox before buying Lancelot an arrowhead, silvered with mica.

  “See, you do like having Lancelot,” said Lady Jane as they left.

  “In fact I do not, but I love Eustacia very dearly.” This was Lancelot’s mother, Lenox’s first cousin. “As for Lancelot, he’ll slit my neck with this arrowhead tonight.”

  She mulled this over. “Better than the tinderbox, then, all things considered, since our houses are side by side. Look, it’s eleven forty, Charles. You had better go and see about your duke.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  He arrived at Dorset House twenty minutes later, taking off his hat in the doorway and listening very attentively to Theodore Ward, the duke’s private secretary, who was leading him inside.

  “Just to clarify once more, our expectation, His Grace’s expectation, is that we may trust in your absolute discretion, Lenox. Really, your absolute—well, you understand. You do, don’t you?”

  “I’m scarcely liable to change my answer the ninth time you ask, Theo.”

  Ward’s brow darkened, and for just an instant they were two boys on the cricket pitch at school again, arguing over whose turn it was to bowl. “I say, Charlie, it really is the most highly—”

  Lenox held up a hand. “I’m sorry. You have my word. My absolute word. My rock-solid bottom-of-the-ocean heaven-swear-it word. Honestly.”

  Ward was mollified. “Good. It’s only—I don’t think I have ever even seen the duke perturbed.”

  “I understand.”

  He did. In his work, Lenox had seen people of all stations experiencing the most frantic moments of their lives. Having encountered wrongdoing or violence, none of them, from scullery maid to stiff-chinned major, could stay unchanged.

  “Just wait here a moment, then, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  Lenox smiled. “I could live here comfortably enough for a while if you like.”

  The secretary followed Lenox’s gaze across the enormous entryway. They had just come in from the noisy streets of London, but the cavernous silence made it like stepping into a house recessed deep in the pine-tree countryside: the vast checkerboard marble floor, the curling staircase, the high arched ceiling, a mahogany settle with the proportions of a dinghy.

  “It’s something rather else, isn’t it?” said Ward.

  “They would have slept thirty of us on that stairwell at Harrow.”

  Ward laughed. “They did cram us. At any rate, stay here. Find a chair if you like.” He gestured toward a row of twelve of them. “Have a gander at the paintings. I’ll be back when I’ve made sure His Grace is prepared to see you now.”

  Ward left, and Lenox looked around the hall.

  He had seen paintings before—most of them, in his limited experience, seemed to be of streams, cows, or fine personages, and these were no exception—so instead he turned back to the entrance through which they had just come.

  On either side of the heavy front door was a large vertical window. He stood close to one and looked out at the Thames, which glimmered gold under the summer sun.

  He was in what some people reckoned London’s most beautiful house. It was a white marble citadel built four hundred years before, sitting not all that much more than a thousand yards or so west of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, the only private residence on this stretch of the city. The Thames faced its front door; Buckingham Palace was a five-minute walk from its back one.

  Standing there, Lenox was perhaps just conscious of a slight feeling of fraudulence. He had dressed in too warm a gray wool suit and a somber maroon tie—serious clothes, to indicate his seriousness, though in his sober face was a betraying trace of self-doubt. He was only twenty-six, and while he was passionately interested in this work, the number of serious crimes he had investigated could still be counted on one hand.

  After perhaps five minutes, Ward returned, and Lenox strode back to the center of the entrance hall. He was shorter and sturdier than Lenox, Ward—a boxer in the deepest places of his heart—and there was no levity left in his manner.

  “Just this way,” he said. “His Grace will see you at the place of the—in his private study. His real private study.”

  “Is there a made-up one?” Lenox asked in a quiet voice, because now they were proceeding up the stairwell.

  “There is a public private study, where he takes large meetings,” Ward replied, equally quietly.

  “I see.”

  And he was a duke, after all. Even Jane, whom very little impressed, the daughter of an earl, some distant day destined to be the wife of one when her husband’s father died, had given Lenox a second look when he said the name Dorset. Aside from a handful of people—the Queen, Prince Albert, the old heroic red-faced Duke of Wellington, still just alive—there weren’t many more powerful inhabitants of England. The Archbishop of Canterbury? Probably not. If you took the whole power of Oxford University it might compete with the duke’s.

  But not with his wealth.

  Theodore Ward (a well-born commoner, son of a squire, which is to say a sort of untitled baronet, and grandnephew of a marquess, bound someday for Parliament in all likelihood—hence this prestigious post) was conscious of this, it was clear. He led Lenox down a red-carpeted hallway of Dorset House as carefully as if they were bound for St. Peter’s gates.

  When they reached the duke’s study, he tapped gently upon the door. “Your Grace?”

  “Come in,” a voice called after a moment.

  Lenox wondered again, briefly, whether there had really been any crime at all. A duke seemed a prime candidate for a cry-wolf. In they went, however.

  “Charles Lenox, Your Grace,” said Theo, bowing slightly.

  His Grace looked up from behind his desk. His face was impassive. “Good afternoon, Your Grace,” said Lenox.

  “Come in,” Dorset said. “You may sit.”

  It was a spectacular little room. One wall was entirely covered in windows, which overlooked the river and the bankside. Two others were taken up with bookshelves, which held innumerable small treasures; Lenox saw a scored and battered Anglo-Saxon broadsword laid along a velvet runner.

  The final of the room’s four walls, directly behind Dorset’s immaculate French desk, was the scene of the crime.

  Lenox and Ward sat in two ebony chairs, upholstered in pale green, facing the duke.

  “Ward tells me you have set up as a private sort of police officer.”

  “Well—after a fashion, Your Grace, yes, I suppose that’s correct.”

  The duke studied him. “He also tells me you are trustworthy.”

  There was no point in modesty here. “Yes, Your Grace.”

  The duke paused once again. He was thin, aged about fifty-five, Lenox would have said, and wore a navy suit with a gray waistcoat, like a schoolboy. He had trim gray hair, firmly set blue-gray eyes, and a mustache. He held a gold pen in one hand.

  There was something ethereal in his lined face, as if a lifetime of holding his position had somehow insubstantiated him individually, his personality absorbed partially into his station. And his expression was the expression of a man who has heard the word “yes” many, many times in his life, and expects to hear it many more still, yet who is also trained to the strictest self-discipline. It was the expression of a man with dozens and dozens of servants whose existence was dedicated to him and of whose individual existences he was only loosely aware.

  “I knew your father in Parliament before his death.”


  Lenox was a stoic, like all of his class, and only said, “Did you, Your Grace,” without a question mark in the reply.

  “He was a man of principle.”

  “He certainly was, Your Grace.”

  “Yes, I liked him very much. I dislike it when the ministries are out of the House of Lords, but I would have been happy to see him in a cabinet.”

  “He declined several posts, I know, Your Grace.”

  The duke barked a laugh, as if Lenox would have to dig much deeper to surprise him. “Yes, I know.”

  “My apologies, Your Grace. Of course you do.”

  Dorset gave him one final, appraising look, as if he were a horse up for a prize at a county fair, then nodded. “You had better leave us, then, Theo,” he said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When the private secretary had left, the Duke rose and walked to a discreet stand of variously shaped crystal decanters. “Whisky?” he said.

  Lenox’s father’s guideline flashed through his mind: Upon a first meeting, always accept the offer of a drink from a man lower in rank than yourself, never from a man higher in rank than yourself.

  “Thank you, no, Your Grace,” Lenox said, still sitting.

  “As you like it.” The duke stoppered the bottle he had opened. He turned back to Lenox. “How do you generally proceed in this kind of matter?”

  “Ward told me very little.”

  The duke strode back to the desk. “Good. He knows very little.”

  “Given that, Your Grace, perhaps it would be best if you began at the start and told me as much as you could.”

  Lenox expected some further cavil or hesitation, but instead, after resuming his seat, the Duke launched directly into his story. Once he had taken a decision, he moved forward without reservations, apparently. Lenox stowed that away as a potentially valuable piece of knowledge.

  “It’s about a painting,” Dorset said.

  “So I had guessed, Your Grace.”

  The duke looked at him sharply. “Mr. Lenox?”

  “The one piece of information I had from Ward was that you were missing a possession you valued.” Lenox nodded to the wall behind the duke. “There are normally eight paintings on your wall, four on each side of you. At the moment there are seven. The empty space is conspicuous.”

  “I see. But for all you know it’s been taken away for cleaning, and what’s missing is a string of diamonds.”

  Lenox shook his head. “No, Your Grace. One of the two nails upon which the painting was hanging is ripped halfway out, the other is gone, and there is a fresh wound in the wood where it was. You can see raw wood under the varnish.”

  The duke turned back to look once again. “So you can.”

  “Not even your most careless footman would handle a painting from your study that way. Or the wall’s paneling.”

  The duke looked at him, neither impressed (as perhaps Lenox had hoped he would be) nor displeased.

  “This is your trade, then,” he said curiously. “Observation.”

  “It is, Your Grace.” Lenox hated that word, “trade,” but of course it was his trade. Still, he couldn’t help but add, “I believe that one must take money in exchange for services or goods for work to be properly considered a trade, if one wished to be technical, however.”

  Dorset looked surprised. He pulled a gold case, engraved with his coat of arms and clasped with a ruby, from his waistcoat pocket. He drew a small cigar from it and closed the case again. “You don’t take money?”

  “No, Your Grace.”

  “I see. You are a hobbyist.”

  “No, Your Grace. My practices are professional. But I am—”

  He hesitated. How to explain it, quite?

  But the duke understood. “No, I see.” He lit the cigar from a safety match struck against his lampstand. “Be that all as it may—you are correct that it is a painting that has been stolen. You may also wish to know that I want to know who took it very badly.”

  “Naturally, Your Grace.”

  “No, not naturally.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Who, I said. I only care about the who of the thing. The painting itself is of little consequence to me.”

  Lenox nodded. That was unusual. “May I assume that the painting is”—he gestured at the seven pictures still on the wall—“also a portrait?”

  “It is. A portrait of my great-grandfather, the fourteenth duke.”

  “I would imagine that you might value the object itself in that case.”

  Dorset shook his head. “There you would be wrong. He had his portrait painted oftener than most. We have a dozen more scattered here and there. One is hanging in my club, where I see it every day, and another in the Lords.”

  Lenox squinted at the paintings. There was something wrong about them, though he couldn’t yet put his finger on what.

  He returned his attention to the duke. “Perhaps you are worried about your safety, then?”

  “I am not,” said Dorset. “New locks have been installed on the windows and door of the study, and the staff is on alert. Listen here, however. What were you looking at? Just now, behind me?”

  What had he been looking at? He stared at the paintings again.

  Then he realized: One of them was wrong.

  From left to right the pictures might have been numbered one through eight. With, as Lenox had said, four on either side of the duke’s desk. The missing one would have been numbered six in the sequence.

  The first, all the way to the left, hung closest to the large windows overlooking the Thames. Lenox’s inexpert eye dated it roughly to Elizabethan times. Going left to right, the paintings grew one by one slightly more modern, concluding with what he felt sure was the current duke’s own father.

  But one of the paintings was wrong.

  “I take it that these are other of your predecessors, Your Grace,” he said, pointing to the four paintings on the left.

  “They are, yes. Dukes of Dorset.”

  Then Lenox’s eyes looked past the duke and to the right side of the room, where the missing painting had hung. “And the last two are, as well—like the missing one.”

  “Yes.”

  “The farthest to the right, next to the whisky you very kindly offered me from the bookcase”—the one that Lenox had numbered eighth in his own mind—“being, I would hazard, of your own father.”

  “Yes,” said the duke again.

  “But that one.” Lenox pointed to the painting just over the duke’s left shoulder. Number five. Just next to the missing painting, number six. “That one is very different, Your Grace.”

  “Different.”

  “The other six, I can see, are all almost exactly the same in size. This one is half as large. It is also darker, and it is less—I suppose the sitter looks less distinguished than your other ancestors. Forgive me for saying so, Your Grace.”

  The duke looked a shade amused for a moment, and then more serious. He gazed at Lenox for a long time.

  At last he spoke. “But that painting is not the one that’s missing.”

  “No,” said Lenox. Then he added, “My instinct with crime is always to look for anything that seems off. The painting merely seems off. We needn’t discuss it if you prefer.”

  “No. It is quite bound up in why you are here. But it is—well, I was unwilling to call in Scotland Yard for a reason. The matter is too serious. And it has to do with exactly this painting, the fifth.”

  So he thought of it as the fifth, too, and the stolen one as the sixth, perhaps. “I am very curious, Your Grace.”

  The duke leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs with the shush of very expensive cloth. “Very well. Today is Wednesday.”

  “Yes.”

  “On Monday, that is June first, the Duchess and I had planned to depart for Ireland. I have a house on Lough Leane. My son, however, who was to travel with us, fell ill that day with a fever. Out of an excess of caution—he is my only son and my heir—we delayed the da
te of our proposed departure to yesterday, Tuesday. He refuses to see a doctor, the stubborn fool.”

  Lenox took a notebook from his pocket. “The second. Might I take notes?”

  “If you wish.” The duke went on, his straight, slender body standing over the chair, as if he himself were posing for a portrait. “It was then, the second, yesterday morning, that I came into my study. It was just before seven o’clock. The painting was gone.”

  “Did you come in for any specific reason? A noise?” asked the young detective.

  “No. I generally breakfast alone here, answering letters.”

  “What did you do when you saw the sixth painting was missing?”

  The duke smiled enigmatically. “Looked at the fifth and heaved a sigh of relief.”

  “And then, Your Grace?”

  “Rang the bell, and quickly questioned every servant I could find. None of them had seen or heard anything. My manservant, Craig, has questioned them all at greater length, and confirmed the same.”

  Lenox nodded, pondering this. “When was the last time you had been in the room?”

  “Late the previous evening. Everything was in order then.”

  “Was anyone from the household in the room after you, Your Grace?”

  “Only Craig. He is a Scotsman who has been with me thirty years. Before that he was in the army. He tells me that the room was in perfect order when he left, after tidying it.”

  “Was there any sign of how the thief might have gained access to the room?”

  “Nothing could have been clearer. The door was locked when I came in yesterday morning, but the thief left a window open. They had very definitely been shut.”

  Lenox looked over at the windows, which were locked now, with thin curtains tied away from them to either side. He nodded. “I see. Did the missing painting have any value?”