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The Vanishing Man

Page 17

by Charles Finch


  Nor did he have any grasp of the duchess. His thoughts ran to her supercilious cousin, Sir Japheth Miles, standing with her at the scene of the “kidnapping.”

  Back at Hampden Lane, the young detective heard a thumping on the staircase when he opened the door and found himself waylaid by Lancelot.

  “Could I have ten pounds?” the boy asked.

  “Ten pounds! What? Have you lost your mind?”

  “Please could I though?”

  “What in all the fires of hell are you talking about? That is a month of Clarissa’s wages!”

  Clarissa was one of the chambermaids. Lancelot nodded, his thin face as sincere as Lenox had ever seen it, to indicate that he understood this. “But Mr. Templeton knows about a horse than cannot lose in the fifth race at Anglesey. Cannot possibly lose.”

  “Mr. Templeton the curate?”

  “Yes.”

  “MRS. HUGGINS,” Lenox shouted.

  “You can have some of the winnings.”

  “Shut up, Lancelot. Mrs. Huggins!”

  “I would need it this morning.”

  “You would, would you?” said Lenox. “In that case let me go find my billfold.”

  “Oh, lovely, really?”

  “No! Not really! You could stand here until the end of time and you wouldn’t have ten pounds out of me.” He paused for a second. “Why did you settle on ten pounds anyway?”

  “The horse is ten to one, and I want a hundred pounds.”

  Lancelot explained that as if it had a Euclidean clarity of premise. Who wouldn’t want a hundred pounds? “Oh, a long shot, perfect. What could go wrong. Mrs. Huggins, would you—”

  Finally the housekeeper appeared, and Lenox told her about the curate’s apparent plan to introduce his three boys to the pleasures of the turf. He asked if he could rely upon her to find Lancelot a minder who wouldn’t actually take the boy to a casino, until he could find someone at the prison to take over the job.

  “You don’t mean that,” said Lancelot.

  “I can take the three boys to the zoo today, sir,” said Mrs. Huggins worriedly.

  “Fine. They’ll fit in marvelously. You know where the other boys are?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know where I keep my ready money. Take whatever you need. Tell Templeton he is fired, unless he can prove to me that Lancelot is lying. Actually—Lancelot, are you lying?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Lenox stared at him. “Well, then fire Templeton, and watch the three boys even if you have to tie them together. One of them must have a mother in London, or something similar. I am trying to solve a murder.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “If Templeton comes to fetch Lancelot, tell him that I know every police officer in this city. Is he even a curate?”

  “Oh, yes, he went to Cambridge, sir.”

  “That explains part of it, anyway,” Lenox muttered—young and highly loyal to Oxford, he held Cantabrigians in roughly the same esteem as Etonians—and stamped out of the door into the gray day.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  He took his carriage to Dorset House, studying his notes on the way. When he arrived, a servant led him into the small drawing room. She informed him that Lord Vere was just departing.

  “Where is he going?” Lenox asked the housekeeper.

  “To dine, sir,” she said very bluntly, and she was well within her rights to be abrupt—it was an impertinent question.

  “Where?” he said, pushing his luck.

  When she replied, the “sir” was gone. “Out.”

  Lord Vere agreed to see him, however, and it was the job of this churlish housekeeper to lead Lenox to a large library that he had not seen before, on the east side of the house (it was a mansion of the sort that seemed to multiply with new rooms every day, as if breeding), where all the papers had been ironed and laid out upon an enormous oak table, just as usual it would seem—as if the oak table’s owner were not in their headlines.

  Lord Vere was waiting in a chair. He rose, buttoning his jacket. “Good morning,” he said.

  Lenox had not yet had the chance to study the young heir at close range. He was a fine specimen of his kind, perhaps four or five years the detective’s senior. He wore a black frock coat; a brilliant white shirt; a paisley cravat; high-waisted checked trousers; a green waistcoat with gold buttons; and a signet ring with his seal on it. To his left was a black top hat, shining silkily under the lamplight. He was consummate: all that should be in a young gentleman.

  The room was lined with shelf after shelf of books, stretching twelve feet high, a rolling ladder affixed to each wall. Dominating the center of the room was a marble of Christ and Mary Magdalene that Lenox could see was of the highest quality. He would have believed it was by Donatello.

  “Lord Vere,” he said, and dipped his head.

  “Please, now, call me Corfe. I know your name.”

  “You are lunching out?” Lenox asked.

  “Eh? Oh, yes. Good to get on one’s feet again. Her Majesty has invited me to the Palace. To commiserate.”

  Good Lord, the Queen. For a moment there Lenox had nearly forgotten how high the altitude of this social sphere was, having moved into it so easily as an aide. “That is kind of her.”

  “Yes, she sent a considerate note. I thought after that I would toddle over to the Beargarden and scrounge up a drink.”

  “Ah, of course. I’m a member there myself.”

  “Are you! Well, we shall have to dine when this business is all over.”

  Lenox nodded at this queer politeness. “Of course. But for now, I wanted a quick word about your father and Mr. Craig.”

  Vere shook his head, face filled with consternation. He gestured for Lenox to sit. “Yes, a right collieshangie that.”

  Lenox, sitting and thinking of what to ask, had a fast feeling of displacement, as he sometimes did. What on earth was he doing here, playing at police like a child? But he persevered: He thought that probably everyone felt like a fraud now and then. Perhaps even the Queen.

  “I wonder if you know a Maggie McNeal, Lord Vere?”

  “Call me Corfe, as I said. No, I don’t think I do.”

  “Perhaps just Maggie? She has been a servant here.”

  “Has she? No.” He waved a hand around the room, which, though empty, did a fair job of making his point—that there were dozens of servants about. “Is she mixed up in this? Do you want her called in?”

  “That won’t be possible—your sister told me that the young woman hadn’t been to work in a few days and hadn’t given any notice.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes, that seems bad.”

  “But you don’t recall her.”

  “Very sorry. No.”

  “Are there still footmen in your father’s study?”

  “No. It’s locked inside and out now. New locks today. Only he has the keys, in the Tower. He entrusted an outside chap with the job. I hope it will make him feel better.”

  “So do I.”

  Corfe looked vaguely troubled to have said so much, as if he sensed that it was a bit unbecoming that his father had shot a man.

  He leaned forward. “You don’t care to tell me what’s in there, do you? The Holy Grail, one would think, from the care he’s taking.”

  “I don’t have that information myself,” Lenox said. He paused. Then he said, “I have something rather delicate to ask you.”

  “Anything.”

  “The missing painting—it was recovered last night by one of your father’s servants.”

  “But that’s splendid news!”

  “It was recovered from your room.”

  Vere did an extremely credible—indeed, an almost unfakeable—show of surprise. “My room?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “But where? What on earth?”

  “The underside of your bed.”

  “My bed? You’re joking.”

  “No,”
said Lenox.

  The handsome young lord sat back and studied the books. Then he turned to Lenox. “So it must have been Craig.”

  “The trouble there is opportunity,” Lenox said. “You were in bed with fever. When would he have done it?”

  Corfe frowned. “I was asleep much of the time. There was one morning I ventured out onto the terrace for a few minutes in a chair, hoping the sun would do me good.”

  Lenox nodded. “I see. Of course. Can I ask you about Craig, then? What do you make of him?”

  For the first time something like human feeling came onto Corfe’s face, which till now had been like his clothing—perfectly composed, a pose available for the world’s scrutiny.

  “Craig, poor chap,” he said. “I hate that people will think of him as a thief. He was always very stern, but very kind to us.”

  “Us?”

  “Violet and me, when we were small. It was always he who accompanied us to see our grandparents for Christmas. Our favorite time of the year, that, while our parents traveled to the continent.”

  “Can you imagine any reason for Craig’s betrayal of your father?”

  Corfe frowned. “Money, I suppose. It’s usually money, isn’t it?” He checked his watch. “Unfortunately I’ll be late to meet my friend, Mr. Lenox. Could we possibly continue this conversation another time?”

  Lenox hid his annoyance. The friend to whom he referred was—the Queen of England. “Of course,” he said, and both rose from their seats.

  He left Dorset House in a welter of emotions, confused and frustrated. He didn’t know where he was going; he didn’t know enough to know quite what he knew. All the facts were there. None of them would hang together in his mind. He walked in a terrible kind of anger for five blocks, then stopped.

  “What have you to say for yourself,” he muttered, pulling the little book of quotations from his pocket and letting it fall open to a random page.

  We have seen better days.

  —Timon of Athens

  That was the quotation his eyes settled on. He stared at it for a long time. Then he felt something that he hadn’t, in the eighteen months since his father died: tears coming into the backs of his eyes.

  He blinked rapidly, and looked up at the dark gray clouds, letting his hand fall to his side. He felt a constriction inside. His face softened. Suddenly it all seemed full of meaning, the vast empty sky, its sorrowful leaden color, the world’s inability to answer for itself.

  He turned back toward the street and hailed a hansom cab. Though it was not in his plans, he directed it to a small boathouse by the side of the Thames.

  Its keeper, Wilkins, greeted him with a nod. In thirty seconds he had Lenox’s feather-light scull in the water, rain sprinkling the dock around them. Lenox changed in the small dark room off the boathouse, shook hands with Wilkins, and boarded the scull. Then, his back to the west, he eased into the Thames. Wilkins gave him a short salute of farewell, and he started a hard pull.

  He had bought the scull four years earlier—from his and Ward’s old school, Harrow—and it still pulled like a dream. For forty minutes he lost himself in the rhythm of the exercise, his mind emptied of all but the exertion.

  At last, breathless, he glided onto the shore of an old hunk of rock in the middle of the Thames, Peanut Isle by name. A few trees stood high upon it, alone and old, undulating patiently in the soft wind. There was a tun of water here that the boathouses took turns filling, and Lenox pulled to, pried the lid off, took the ladle off the side of the barrel, and poured some of the fresh water gratefully over his body, the chill of chipped ice a glorious sensation on his reddened skin.

  He pulled back steadily but more slowly, the rain heavier; he watched the city grow higher as he came nearer to Parliament.

  Wilkins greeted him at the boathouse with a cold towel to wipe himself down with, a hot one to scrub off the sweat, and his pullover.

  “Thank you,” said Lenox.

  “It had been a time.”

  “Work, you know.”

  “Aye,” said Wilkins.

  As he was changing back into his clothes, he saw the draw for the doubles race next month, a bracket of sixteen duos, eight on each side seeded by strength, thousands of possible outcomes among the matches.

  It was at that moment—perhaps because the exercise had freed him from this terrible business of thinking—that everything clicked into place.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  It was a matter of numbers. Lenox had never been much of a fist at maths, but it would have looked something like 3 + x + y, the equation he had in his mind.

  He had taken on faith the duke’s word that only three people knew about the painting of Shakespeare: in fact it was three plus the number those three people had told, and the number those people had told. 3 + x + y: It might equal 3 + 0 + 0, to be sure, as the duke was confident, but it might just as easily be 3 + 2 + 9, or 3 + 1 + 600. Who knew?

  Or perhaps—and this was what he really suspected—the original number was not three at all. Perhaps it was four.

  When he arrived at the duke’s rooms this time, everything had a markedly different feel. There were numerous men in the hallways outside, and several inside as well, all of them solemn, and all of them very busy. Lord Aston’s work.

  The duke saw Lenox and dismissed them with a quick word; they looked at Lenox resentfully but left. The bailiff closed the door behind them.

  “My apologies, Mr. Lenox,” said the duke. “Solicitors, and men from the House of Lords, and the Palace, and all that.”

  And all that. “Of course, Your Grace.”

  They sat near the window again. The day wouldn’t give in—still dark, still intermittently wet, and gusting with wind. They could see the ships rocking on the Thames, the taut flags on Tower Bridge.

  “I have been contemplating the poem,” said Dorset.

  “I have been contemplating the missing picture,” said Lenox.

  “Yes, of course. Naturally. Where is it now?”

  “In my house, Your Grace, safe under lock and key. I can have it sent back to you any time you choose.”

  “Where was it?” the duke asked curiously, as if it were a matter of academic significance to him, not germane to his primary interests.

  Lenox took a deep breath. Here was where he felt his youth; he couldn’t fluff this opportunity. “It was nailed to the underside of the bed of your son, Lord Vere.”

  The duke looked at him, taken aback. “Corfe? His bed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The part of Lenox that had wondered whether the duke himself might be concealing something more gave way. No. His face now was unmasked and raw, his bafflement real.

  “How strange that Craig would place it there. What can explain it?” said the duke.

  Lenox held steady. “You mentioned to me, once, your gratitude that your own father lived to a good age, long enough to grow close to his grandchildren.”

  Corfe had said the same that morning: Christmases with the old duke. “Yes,” said Dorset. “Why? Speak plain, Lenox.”

  “Very well, Your Grace. It is this way.

  “When your great-grandfather’s portrait was stolen, the windows in your study were open and it was locked. That led us to believe that it was a thief from outside who took the painting. I believe now that that was misdirection. It would have been nearly impossible to gain access from outside the house. Which means that the thief came from inside the house.”

  “Yes—Craig.”

  “The key was his, certainly. Was he loyal to Lord Vere?”

  The duke put together what Lenox’s questions implied. “Are you accusing my son of something?” he asked. “You had better be very sure of your facts if you are.”

  And so Lenox explained the facts as succinctly and linearly and impassively as he could to the duke, who sat opposite him, intimidatingly silent:

  first, that he believed that Corfe had been feigning his fever; he had rejected doctor’s visits more than once
without any rational explanation, according to separate, equally exasperated accounts from Dorset and from Lady Violet;

  second, that he believed Corfe had done so in the hope that he might be alone in the house, but had been thwarted when his parents had delayed their visit to the country to look after him;

  third, that he had decided to attempt the theft of the portrait anyway;

  fourth, that he was doing so because—and here was the crucial step in the chain of speculation—his grandfather, with whom he had been so close as a child, had told him the whole truth about the Shakespeare, old men being famously careless with their confidences, reckoners, totters-up of debt, and above all, among dukes, in love with their eldest grandsons;

  fifth, that Craig had been Lord Vere’s accomplice in all matters, first offering him the key to the study, then, apparently, going to fetch the second portrait, the Shakespeare, too;

  and sixth, that his motive in this must be one of two things—either, Lenox said, a maniacal interest in Shakespeare, which he could not disclose to his father without betraying his grandfather’s trust, or (and privately Lenox thought this much more likely) a matter of money.

  The duke took each point as a blow, wincing slightly as Lenox spoke. When the detective was done, he stood and walked away across the cell.

  When he turned back, something defiant remained in his face. “Corfe has all the money he could ever need—his allowance would put the full income of most households on your street to shame,” he said, with, to Lenox, a remarkable lack of delicacy.

  “No doubt that is true.”

  “Moreover, he and I are close. If it was the portrait of Shakespeare he wanted, he would have told me. You are wrong, Lenox. I don’t doubt your good faith, but you are wrong. It must be Craig.”

  “Perhaps. There is one point I find telling.”

  “Well?”

  “That Lord Vere was back on his feet the moment you were taken away. Fever gone.”

  The duke hesitated. “Fevers come and go.”

 

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