The Vanishing Man

by Charles Finch

  “I think it probably the least valuable painting on the wall,” said the duke, with an odd satisfaction. “Even if it were not stolen but freely sold by its owner, myself, its worth would not exceed fifteen or twenty pounds at auction.”

  “Is that all?”

  “If more, only because its sitter is a Duke of Dorset, perhaps. Its painter has been forgotten. Next to it, you see, is a Joshua Reynolds of my grandfather, which would obviously be a different matter.” Even Lenox knew Reynolds. “Nor was my great-grandfather—who was in the sixth portrait, the missing one—a great political leader, like his own father. Or mine. He was a quiet man.”

  Both of those men had served in the cabinet of Parliament with relatively little distinction, Lenox knew, though that was not an opinion he would share in this proud household, where they were evidently remembered as Ciceros of the Embankment.

  His eyes returned to the much smaller, smokier painting. Number five.

  It was in a wood frame, not gilt like the others, and its sitter wore a plain dark shirt, open at the neck. He had a small gold earring, in the fashion of the 1810s. But the painting looked a bit older than that to Lenox’s (untrained) eye. The sitter held a delicate flower carelessly by its stem, and his gaze was directed at the viewer.

  There was an intelligent watchfulness to him. In the empty space by him on the canvas were a few lines of cursive writing, as you sometimes saw in old French pictures of Christ.

  “Who is this, then?” Lenox asked, nodding toward the painting.

  Dorset smiled, at last. “There you ask to know something that Ward does not know—that, if I am not mistaken, three people on earth know. I suppose you think I may rely upon you to be the fourth.”

  “I will keep it a secret, Your Grace.”

  It was a half-truth. He would tell Graham—of course. But the duke needn’t know that.

  “Very well,” Dorset said. “That is the only existing oil painting from life of the writer William Shakespeare.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Some hours later, at twilight, Lenox stood in the doorway of a very different sort of room than the beautiful little study by the Thames. He paused, surveying the grizzled inhabitants along their low-slung deal benches, their pint pots of ale in hand, their amiable conversations gathering into a low indistinct rumble, until a pair of heavy sailors pushed through the door and past him, carrying him partway inside.

  This was a pub in Cannon Street called the Dovecote, and he was in search of a fellow named Bonden.

  The sinewy, angular old landlord walked out from behind the bar to one of the pub’s tables, holding four pewter jugs in each hand, foam rocking tautly atop each of them, then placed them on the table with a thud, spilling nary a drop. He returned with the table’s empty tankards and laid them in a pan of sudsy water. When he was done, he looked at Lenox, who asked whether Thaddeus Bonden was there.

  “Tad Bonden? I can check.”

  Lenox nodded. “Thank you.”

  The Dovecote sat squatly near London Bridge, where, being close to two dockyards, it served primarily a naval clientele. A naval clientele, at that, drawn from before the mast, the hammock rather than the officer class, rough, rough-tongued, easy with their money, generous to those they liked, violent to those they didn’t.

  Presumably those characteristics were also possessed by Bonden, and Lenox was on his guard.

  “How’d you hear of him?” the proprietor asked eventually.

  A stool at the bar had been vacated. “Could I have a pint of bitter, please,” said Lenox, taking it.

  The old server briefly smiled. “Lock-jawed, then,” he said. “Fair enough.”

  As he spoke he was already turning toward the tap with a jug in hand, as automatically as if he were only a large piece in some large mechanical contraption designed to serve beer and gin to men.

  “Your bitter.” The old man looked at him levelly for a moment. “Well, Bonden, he’s here, or he ain’t, if you catch my meaning. You’ll know which in five minutes. Find a table if you like.”

  Lenox followed these instructions and watched the barman disappear from sight, then return without looking at him. He waited nine minutes, and when that much time had elapsed, he stood, lifted his hat to the proprietor, who nodded back without a change in countenance, and left.

  He was a bit disappointed, a bit relieved. Bonden would have been a risk.

  It was a long westward trek back across town to Mayfair, but Lenox walked it, the six-odd miles. He had a good deal to consider.

  London was a very different place at this hour. The business of the day was done, and everyone but the few lone souls upon the streets had returned home from the diligent, hectic, forgetful city. Yet the late pale violet light made the houses—whose quality improved just perceptibly from street to street over the course of his walk to his own neighborhood—look so sad, cold and alone, the world an arcing, skybound, unknowable place. Those who remained outside were thrown back, with every shop shuttered, every street hawker headed to their hearths, upon little but their own thoughts.

  Lenox didn’t quite mind that melancholy feeling; and he needed the thoughts. The Romans, in their phrasemaking way, had hit upon it: Solvitur ambulando, all problems are solved by walking. In the times when Lenox had been most puzzled during his short career, it was often a long walk that had suddenly galvanized his mind.

  And the duke’s problem was a significant puzzle, both in itself and because it belonged to the Duke of Dorset.

  The walk took him a little more than ninety minutes. His own tall, handsome home came into view when he turned off Grosvenor Square and onto Hampden Lane.

  “Graham?” he called when he had reached it and unlocked the front door. “Graham, are you there?”

  Nobody answered, but he heard a footstep on the stair. Then he felt a sharp crack on his face, as sudden as a bee sting. He lurched backward.

  “Ha!” cried a triumphant young voice.

  “You fiend!” Lenox shouted. He had been the victim of this same peashooter four times thus far. “Lancelot! Come here! I’m going to thrash you, I swear on your life!”

  But this was apparently insufficient enticement; Lenox’s young cousin was already thumping up to his lair on the third floor.

  It was hard to conceive of a person belonging less to his name, this Lancelot being, down to his deepest essence, an instrument of mischief. Lenox loved—truly loved—his cousin Eustacia, Lancelot’s mother, who had married a fine country-souled man named Stovall and led a loving, charitable, and blameless life in the far west reaches of Cornwall, near the sea.

  But Lancelot made it difficult to remember that. He was a child of twelve, with continually dirty knees, brown-blond hair that spiked in every direction regardless of the ministrations it received, and a face that looked mostly innocent, but from time to time flashed a deep cunning. It was just the week before that they had celebrated his twelfth birthday, Lancelot gorging himself that day on chocolate torte in a way that would have made a French courtesan blush.

  “Lancelot!” Lenox shouted up the stairs.

  But the only response was silence. After these attacks the boy liked to hole up in his room, which was tactically intelligent, given that, alas, it locked from the inside. According to Graham, he had turned it—the best guest room!—into a midden of discarded clothes and lurid illustrated magazines about the bloodiest subjects imaginable, werewolves, vampires, unrepentant murderers. (Lenox had swiped a few of the last. He had research to conduct.)

  Lenox shook his head and hung up his hat, rubbing the welt on his cheek and scanning the floor for the projectile.

  He found it. A pebble! That was hardly sporting. Really, now. As he examined it there was a far quieter footstep on the stair, and Lenox looked up to see the house’s butler, Graham, a compact, sandy-haired man of roughly his own age.

  “Good evening, sir. I heard a noise.”

  “Did you! What hearing you must have!” said Lenox bitterly. He shook his h
ead, removing his jacket. “What does the law say about killing your cousin?”

  “It’s illegal, sir.”

  “Still!”

  “I believe so, sir.”

  “And they call this a civilization.”

  Graham held forth a patched, smoky tweed housecoat, into which Lenox deposited himself, arm by arm. “Your supper is in your study, sir,” Graham said.

  “Oh. Thank you. Would you care to sit with me while I dine?”

  Graham tilted his head. “With pleasure, sir. The Dorset case?”

  “Yes. It’s a good one.”

  Graham would not smile, indeed would not inquire further than he already had, but Lenox had known him for eight years, and from a very minor compression of the valet’s lips could tell that he was extremely glad to hear it—that they had a case—for from the starting gun they had been strange, friendly partners in this business.

  Passing, in the long hallways from which his study branched to the right, the table that bore his silver card-stand, Lenox saw that several people had left their calling cards while he was away that afternoon.

  One of them was Sir Richard Mayne, the head of Scotland Yard.

  “Mayne didn’t come here himself?” he said to Graham.

  “No, sir. The card was left on his behalf by a constable.”

  “Did he have a message?”

  “He said that Sir Richard would appreciate a call when you have spare time. There is no rush.”

  This was mere politeness. Lenox needed the goodwill of Scotland Yard, and he would go to Mayne in the morning. He was in a position that required him to treat his few allies respectfully.

  Lenox’s career as a detective had been, thus far, a mixed success. The first obstacle to overcome had been the lack of work, but he had chipped steadily away at that. There were long stretches when he had nothing to do, not a case in sight, sometimes until he was very near indeed to the brink of despair. He satisfied himself during such periods with carefully designed courses of study—on poison, firearms, fraud, every criminal subject—but they never felt a substitute for a real case.

  Still, something always arrived at last, as it had now. Harder to manage, and harder to bear, was the ridicule visited upon him by members of his own class.

  In truth he understood their attitude. Had he been to Harrow and Oxford for this absurd shamming police work? Had he been raised to the manners of the aristocracy, ridden horses with royalty, been invited to the balls of the great metropolis and England’s immortal country houses, been flattered by the mothers of young women who knew he had money and position, had he been Charles Lenox, only to throw it away?

  No, it was agreed, by all but his close friends. Perhaps even some of them secretly agreed.

  And on his other flank there was the ridicule of the police. They considered him a mere enthusiast, an amateur; a nuisance.

  This was despite the two notable successes of his three-year tenure in London. The first was the case of the Thames Ophelia; the second, the bizarre matter of the businessman in Maida Vale who had gone into a top-drawer butcher’s shop, come out with a pound of mutton wrapped in wax paper for his family, and upon reaching the outdoors again immediately taken a pistol from his pocket and shot himself.

  Lenox alone could claim credit for solving that one.

  He wondered why Mayne wanted to see him. It might well be about the duke.

  There was a knock on the front door. Lenox turned, curious, having come about twenty feet into the house. He felt a sharp hunger—he could smell the cook’s fragrant leek-and-potato soup, and it had been a long six miles—and hoped the caller would make no very determined demand upon his time.

  Graham answered the door, spoke a few words, then closed it gently. “It is a gentleman named Mr. Bonden, sir. He asks if you’ll meet him in the street.”

  Lenox felt a prickle across the back of his hairline. He had been followed home.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Tell him I’ll be with him in a moment.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In the instant this exchange took, Lenox and Graham came to a quick, silent understanding: Graham should follow them if he could.

  Lenox looked into the ancient brass stand by the door, scrolled with lions, where a walking stick and two black umbrellas stood in loose order. He took up the scarred calabash walking stick, which had been his grandfather’s. Then he looked outside.

  On his steps, with one foot higher than another and his hands in his pockets, was a man of an age very near the duke’s, but in all other respects completely different.

  He had a weathered face and wizened, piercing eyes. Despite the warmth he wore a long sealskin jacket. He held a pipe.

  “How d’you do,” he inquired in a low, powerful voice.

  “Mr. Bonden?” Lenox said.

  “I understand that you wanted a word with me.”

  Lenox noticed that Bonden had not used his name. Likely he didn’t know it, then. But it would not be hard for him to learn it now that he had Lenox’s address.

  “I did,” he said, putting out his hand. “I’m Charles Lenox.”

  Bonden returned his handshake, then stood back and considered this information unemotionally. The embers in his pipe glimmered faintly orange, as if they, like he, were cool on the outside but very much alive inside.

  “It’s not a name I know.”

  Lenox closed the door behind him, Graham on the other side of it.

  “There’s no reason it should be.”

  “Yet you know mine,” Bonden said. “That is an uncomfortable situation in some lines of work.”

  “Listen—shall we take a walk?” Lenox asked, gesturing up the street toward the square.

  He was thinking of Lady Jane next door, the odds of running into her and her giving away their closeness, something that would put him and, worse, her in Bonden’s power. Not that he had cause to think Bonden a bad man. But he was an unknown one and, perhaps given the way he had followed Lenox here, had something menacing to him.

  They started west down Hampden Lane. Lenox’s walking stick was clamped tightly under his right arm. He had no idea what to do with it if the cause arose, except swing as hard as he could. That would have to do.

  He wondered if it had been unwise to seek help. In the Maida Vale suicide attempt, one of the two cases he could claim to have solved for Scotland Yard, he had worked alone. He’d only been invited in because the police had decided he was merely mad, the gentleman, Quentin Wilkie, who had stepped outside of the butcher’s and shot himself. (He had lived somehow, Wilkie, but was still comatose.) But Wilkie’s wife had insisted that he was quite sane. It was she who had sought out Lenox’s help.

  Lenox, believing her, had painstakingly reconstructed the scene in the street from eyewitness accounts. One figure had slowly emerged out of those murky overlapping memories: a fellow with a diamond ring on each thumb and a bone-deep tan. Not a typical pedestrian.

  Lenox had tracked him down based on the description; he was one Everett Botham, diamond miner from Cape Town.

  Thereafter the story came together quickly. During a cave-in, Quentin Wilkie had chosen to haul a fortune in diamonds out of the mines with him rather than Botham, his partner, whom he left for dead. Wilkie returned to London, a rich man. But Botham had reappeared five years later, a still-richer man, and bent on either justice or revenge.

  Wilkie must have known instantly when he stepped outside of the butcher’s that his life would end either at Botham’s hand or on the gallows.

  Something like that, at least—police were still untangling the details. Among the men on the case was Mayne, who had been openly grateful to Lenox in a way none of the Yard’s inspectors had.

  Bonden and Lenox walked in silence for perhaps two hundred steps or so before Lenox said, “I have been wondering about the Dovecote. Why would a naval pub call itself that?”

  “Before we venture onto the terrain of etymology,” Bonden replied, “perhaps you could tell me wh
y you were looking for me there.”

  There was a muted authority in his voice.

  Lenox stopped and looked at Bonden in the shifting gaslight. They had reached the corner of Hampden Lane and Brook Street, a busy thoroughfare.

  “I have been told that you are an expert at finding things, and I need something found.”

  “Could you please be more clear, on both counts?”

  “I have heard your name twice, once from a friend inside Scotland Yard, once from a shipping officer on a case in which I was involved.”

  “A case?” Bonden looked up at the alabaster houses surrounding them, a smile on his face for the first time. He had taken his pipe in his hand. “You are the highest-living police constable I have met.”

  “I am in private business.”

  “Private business,” Bonden repeated. He studied Lenox. “You do not have a criminal face.”

  “Ha! That is convenient to me, since I am not a criminal.”

  “Are you not? A valuable thing to know.”

  Lenox laughed shortly. “Listen, Mr. Bonden, we have gotten off to a poor start. I am a practicing detective, with a client who is willing to pay you for your time. My own circumstances have been mine since birth—you may ask after my identity if you wish to verify that—and I am not living on Hampden Lane as the result of any lucrative criminal enterprise. I am interested in police work, yet I am not suited for Scotland Yard. It’s as simple as that.”

  “I see.”

  “What’s more, I’m not after any trouble. I am looking for a specific object and hoped to enlist your aid. That is the whole of it.”

  Bonden again set his unnerving gaze upon Lenox.

  Charles was himself headstrong at times—he was young and bright, after all, and he could have been in Baroness Lieb’s parlor at that moment, with amiable company around him, or at the theater with his friend Hugo, or dining quietly with Lady Jane. He only tolerated this inspection now because of what he had heard of Bonden.

  Both men—Sir Richard Mayne at the Yard, Willoughby Clark in the navy—had described him as a fellow with a nearly magical ability to locate the mislaid, the stolen, the long forgotten. Neither could account for his abilities; only swear to them. Bonden had once been a seafarer, Clark had told Lenox, but was now settled in London and possessed a reputation, at least in the strange overlapping criminal and official spheres that were conscious of his existence at all, for achieving the impossible. At last Bonden seemed to come to a decision. “Not this time, Mr. Lenox,” he said. “But thank you for your interest.” He glanced back down Hampden Lane. “You needn’t have had your valet follow us. I intend you no harm.”