An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries)

by Charles Finch

  With Lenox were Jenkins and Shackleton; standing by the door was one of the Queen’s guards. Godwin was, as had been reported, a short, fat person, with a face of dreamy innocence and a fringe of brown hair. The only evidence of his evening’s activity was a rapidly swelling cut near his left eye and a matching one upon his upper lip.

  His nose was fat.

  “I had a letter from my friend Peter Hughes this morning,” said Lenox, “in which he described Mr. Godwin. One of the details he provided was that Godwin had a bulbous nose. Yet the corpse at the Grave Hotel had a thin nose—I remember that specifically, and remarked upon it at the time, when we were looking at the body.”

  Dallington and Jenkins looked at the prisoner. “Mr. Godwin, who was it?” asked Jenkins.

  The prisoner gave no indication that he heard the question, but Lenox thought he knew. “That suit of clothes you left behind in the wardrobe of your room at the Graves—I don’t think it belonged to a farmer, as we originally speculated. I think it belonged to a homeless man. A vagrant. You found one who looked adequately similar to you, in shape and size, and somehow enticed him up to your room at the hotel. Was it with the offer of a new suit? A new suit and a hot meal?”

  “A homeless man?” asked Shackleton curiously.

  Lenox told them about the note in the crime column, during the last week, about the vagrant missing from the area near Gloucester Road—near the Graves.

  “I don’t know how they were sure he was missing,” said Dallington. “Mightn’t he have found another bench?”

  “Yes, I wondered the same thing.”

  Jenkins shook his head. “These bobbies know their streets amazingly well—every brick, every face, every shop window. If an itinerant always slept upon a certain grate, or begged at a certain corner, his absence would be noticeable. Perhaps even alarming. Some of them are figures of quite popular local character.”

  Godwin still hadn’t spoken, but a certain hardness in his eyes, or perhaps around his mouth, told Lenox that this conjecture was correct. “We wondered why the body at the Graves—your body, we thought—had been so thoroughly stripped. Hat, watch, everything in the pockets. It could not have been for the purpose of forestalling identification, since of course the body was lying across the threshold of your room, and looked like you. Those things were gone for a very simple reason, I suppose: because you needed them.”

  Godwin said nothing. Jenkins added, “The overnight bag the bellboy carried upstairs for you upon your arrival was gone, too, as I recall.”

  Lenox smiled faintly. “The suit the dead man wore—was it one of the suits that Wintering bought at Ede and Ravenscroft? We should have checked the sizes in which he ordered them. We would have found, I expect, that the tall fellow I met in Gilbert’s was ordering clothes of a very different measurement than their customer Mr. Godwin usually did.”

  Dallington, frowning, said, “And Wintering? Where does Wintering enter into the picture? He was there that morning.”

  Shackleton banged the table with his palm. “Never mind this nonsense! Why were you trying to kill the Queen, you bastard?”

  Godwin’s interrogators let a moment pass, in case their subject chose to answer this angry query. When he didn’t, Lenox said, “I’m guessing the two men with whom Whitstable saw you out upon Gloucester Road were Wintering and the homeless man.”

  “Whitstable,” muttered Godwin.

  It was the first word he had spoken. “You used him to place Wintering at the scene of your ‘murder,’ correct? Wintering thought he was still your accomplice at that stage. I don’t know when he realized he was only your pawn.”

  Recognition dawned in Dallington’s eyes. “Ah. I see it now. Somehow you convinced Wintering to impersonate you—then, when you died, the suspicion would fall upon him.”

  “What I don’t understand,” said Jenkins, “is why he needed an accomplice at all.”

  Lenox shrugged. “He needed someone to lay the groundwork—to meet with Grace Ammons, to buy suits and guns and hats, to go to Buckingham Palace. He couldn’t do all that from Hampshire, and anyhow I’m sure he preferred to lurk in the background. It was intelligent. We spent days chasing a tall, fair-haired man around London, never suspecting that the real threat came from a different source entirely.”

  “But why kill anybody?” asked Shackleton. “Simply to frame Wintering?”

  “Yes,” said Lenox. “Why did you need so badly to be found dead, Godwin?”

  The murderer—the would-be assassin—looked at them strangely and then said, with sudden decision, “What time is it?”

  Lenox looked at his watch. “It’s nearly midnight.”

  Godwin again stared at them and then, somehow, seemed to soften, relent. “Yes, I framed Wintering, the poor fool. He was always a piggy little fellow. His mother starved herself, gathered rope at that shambles of a curacy, so that he could play the tassel cap at Wadham. Back then I found him rather amusing. It was funny to order an expensive drink on his round and watch him pretend not to sweat out the arrival of the bill.

  “Nobody wanted anything to do with either of us. I have my own ways, and Wintering … he was raised a gentleman, but he tried too hard to please other people. He was never comfortable in his own skin. One could always play upon his greed. I told him I had hatched a plan to rob Buckingham. He didn’t believe me at first, because I’ve always had a great deal of money, but I persuaded him it was gone. And then of course my people have a grudge against the Queen.”

  Something blazed for an instant in Godwin’s eyes. “What for?” asked Lenox.

  Godwin was silent for a long time, perhaps a minute, staring into the damp upper corner of the stone room. Then he said, lightly, “Oh, no reason.”

  “Why did he use your name?” asked Jenkins.

  “I told him to order himself suits, clothes, anything he liked—to use my name. I wanted him to for my own purposes, as you have guessed.”

  “It was an error to give it to me at Gilbert’s,” said Lenox.

  Godwin shrugged. “I suppose he had become habituated to the alias, and no doubt he believed you to be a simple lovestruck fellow. Not a private detective. It was an error, to be sure—I wonder whether I would be here if he had told you that his name was Jones or Robinson. And yet here I am.”

  There was something sanguine, something troublingly calm, in Godwin’s face as he delivered this statement, and suddenly Lenox wondered. Why was he being so forthright, so helpful? Why did he seem unperturbed by his predicament?

  Then the answer came to him: It wasn’t over. He felt a lurch of panic. “Shackleton, where is the Queen?” he asked.

  “In her bedchamber, I hope, safe.”

  “Who is with her?”

  “Her guards.”

  “You must go back—you must take her from the palace. There’s going to be another attempt.”

  Shackleton frowned, half-standing. “By whom?”

  “Hetty Godwin. Jenkins, someone must go and arrest her.”

  Suddenly there was a crack like the report of the pistol. It was Godwin’s hand, slamming down on the table. “No!” he said. His face was transformed, hideous with fury.

  “Jenkins, Shackleton, go—as quickly as you can, for the love of God, go.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The two men flew from the room, as behind them Lenox, Dallington, and Shackleton’s subordinate restrained Godwin—a small and fat man, but strengthened all out of proportion to his physique by emotion—from pursuing them. When at last Godwin was exhausted by his struggles they shoved him unceremoniously back into his chair. Lenox stood back, breathing heavily, as Dallington, still recovering, slumped into one of the other chairs. The palace guard kept his head better. He knocked at the door, and the keeper of the cells, a fellow named Matthew Almond, came to see him.

  “Shackles,” was all the palace guard said. He, too, was rather panting.

  Almond nodded and left. Godwin was giving his captors a look of sheer malevole
nt hatred. “She’ll get there in time,” he said at last.

  “What does that mean?” asked Lenox.

  Then, as if remembering himself, Godwin modulated his voice and said, “She’ll get there, back to Hampshire, in time that you’ll miss her. They’ll miss her. Then you’ll look pretty foolish.”

  In his face Lenox saw that this was an effort not of weeks or months that Godwin had made, but of years, perhaps decades.

  My people have a grudge against the Queen …

  “What time was your sister supposed to follow in your footsteps?” Lenox asked. “Did Wintering take a third wax impression, at a different window?”

  “We cannot leave the keys in the windows for garden parties any longer,” muttered the palace guard, who seemed to take it all as a personal affront. “They’ll have to roast or freeze by their own lights, the buggers.”

  “What made you suspect Hetty Godwin?” asked Dallington.

  “Godwin’s behavior in this past hour has been too strange for my liking—silence, followed by volubility. Then when he asked me the time … I didn’t think anything of it at first, but it was followed by his change in attitude. It made me wonder if perhaps he was stalling.”

  “The only reason to stall would be to let someone else get on with the job,” said Dallington.

  Lenox nodded. “As soon as that occurred to me, I started thinking about the people involved. Then I remembered the body.”

  “What, Wintering’s?”

  “No. At the Graves Hotel.”

  “The homeless man.”

  Lenox shrugged. “That’s only a theory, for Mr. Godwin here to affirm or reject—but that body, yes. You’ll recall that the corpse had a single small bullet hole at the temple. It was not enough to interfere with the person’s facial features.”

  Dallington snapped his fingers. “You clever fellow, Lenox. She identified the body.”

  The older man smiled, feeling a little surge of pride. It was quickly poisoned by the memory of the Queen telling them they had failed—and now the possibility that they had failed her again. “Yes, she went with Jenkins and positively said it was her brother on the slab. It strains credulity to think she could make an honest mistake in identifying her nearest relation, the person with whom she spent every day of her life at Raburn Lodge.”

  Dallington turned to Godwin. “What was the plan? If the news hadn’t emerged by midnight that the Queen was dead, she was to follow you into the palace?”

  Godwin didn’t speak. “It was cunning,” Lenox said. “At every step it was cunning.”

  Dallington was leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, studying the floor. At last he said, “She seemed cool, during that first meeting. Perhaps too cool.”

  “She knew her brother wasn’t dead.” There was a moment of silence, and then Lenox thought of something else. “Do you recall the one moment when she seemed surprised? When we said that Godwin had been seen in a group, out upon Gloucester Road. By Whitstable. She asked who the third man was. She seemed nonplussed, actually nonplussed. We weren’t supposed to hear about anything other than Godwin and Wintering asking Whitstable for that penknife.”

  They asked Godwin a few more questions, receiving only blank stares. Almond came in and shackled the prisoner, using long medieval-style chains that extended from his ankles to a steel ring bolted into the wall. When the small drama of their binding was concluded, the whole room fell into a morose, tense silence. Three of the men were saying quiet prayers for the Queen; one, for his sister.

  A few minutes later Dallington added another piece to the puzzle. “It’s been troubling me that they didn’t remember the name Godwin at Cyril’s, too,” he said abruptly.

  “The restaurant?”

  “Yes. If Wintering ate there every night, someone would have had some recollection of him. Now I remember that it was Hetty Godwin who gave us that information.”

  “But why?” said Lenox.

  They both glanced at Godwin. Dallington shrugged. “She needed a compelling reason that Godwin would have come to London. He was corresponding with his tailors and his hatmakers and his gunmakers from Hampshire. Why would he have come to London?”

  “True,” said Lenox. “It also planted the idea in our heads that he was going to confront the tall, fair-haired gentleman, the impostor. We didn’t look far when his body turned up.”

  “It’s true. And then our whole sense of Godwin was confirmed by her, established in part by her—retiring, nervous, shy. She played that up, I suppose. For herself, too.”

  “Yes. She said she wished to retire at six, or whatever absurdly early time it was.”

  Lenox thought of Henrietta Godwin’s determined, gaunt face. It was possible, he supposed, that it had been she who pulled the trigger at Wintering’s apartment. They ought to have kept better track of her while she was in London.

  But a woman! He ought to have known by now that women were capable of murder. Just think of Ludo Starling’s wife. Still, somehow there was always a lag in his mind, a hesitation at the idea. It was a flaw of his detective’s brain.

  The next hour passed with excruciating slowness. Every so often one of the two men—and after a while the third, too—would throw out some question at the prisoner, perhaps taunting, perhaps conciliatory. There was never a response. Both sides had played out their strategy. All that remained to be seen was who would win—and when Lenox, intermittently, remembered the stakes, the life of the Queen, he would almost gasp, and then say a silent prayer.

  “You will hang for this, you know,” Lenox quietly told Godwin at one point.

  “I hope not.”

  At length Almond the cell keeper came in with a pot of tea for them and water and a crust of bread for Godwin, who ignored the provisions. Almond took a message from Lenox for Lady Jane. The palace guard perked up considerably under the influence of the hot tea, and Dallington and Lenox, who had declined, changed their mind. Dallington looked as if he would rather have a glass of whisky, so etched was his face was with anxiety.

  Just after a quarter past one, Almond came in. “DCI Jenkins has returned, gentlemen,” he said.

  Lenox turned automatically toward Godwin, who greeted this news with a look of wild hope. “What’s happened?” asked the prisoner.

  Almond smiled faintly. “The Queen sends her regards.”

  A powerful emotion—more than relief, closer to love—flooded through Lenox, corporeal. Thank God. He turned and saw that Dallington was experiencing the same thing.

  Godwin looked stricken.

  Jenkins and Shackleton were out in the small office Almond kept. A boy of fourteen or fifteen was there, too. “My son,” said Almond.

  “What happened?” asked Dallington.

  “We took her as she was leaving her hotel. She had a bag with a pistol, a key, a rope … everything she needed. She kicked up every kind of wrath when we arrested her, and went for the pistol.”

  “And the Queen?”

  “She has started early for Balmoral,” said Shackleton. “We deemed it safer, until we can be sure nobody else will crawl out of the woodwork. The castle there is extremely isolated. Easier to defend.”

  Lenox shook his head. “Hetty was the last gambit, I think. Where is she, Jenkins?”

  Almond answered. “In her own cell in a different part of the Tower.”

  “We will keep them separated,” said Jenkins.

  “Of course,” murmured Dallington.

  There was a pause. On the desk was a plate of biscuits, and Shackleton and Almond’s son reached for the last chocolate one at the same time. Almond’s son won the race—offered it to Shackleton—was politely rejected. There was a funny feeling in the little office: The Queen had been saved, just like the song said, and the capital was ignorant of her salvation. The brother and sister were secured. It felt a strange night in London.

  Almond was a large, bright-eyed fellow, with a bushy black and gray mustache. He reached into his pocket. “I don’t generally drink on
the job, gentlemen, but in this flask there is a quantity of whisky, which I propose we take turns in. To the Queen,” he said and took a sip.

  “To the Queen,” said Shackleton, who was next in the half-circle and took a solemn sip, too.

  Dallington, his face shadowed in the shifting dim lamplight, took it next. “To the Queen.”

  Then Jenkins, then Almond’s son. Then finally Lenox. “To the Queen.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Neither of the Godwins would talk. Each of the detectives—Dallington, Lenox, Jenkins—shuttled back and forth between Henrietta and Archibald Godwin, trying to cajole them first into confession, then into conversation, and finally into any speech at all. Both were as silent and watchful as animals.

  Henrietta seemed to Lenox the more likely to break down, because it was plain that she became upset when he mentioned the possibility that Archie might end at the gallows. Even after they learned this, making her offers and promises to the contrary, however, she remained stubbornly quiet. The two had made a plan, evidently, in the event that both were caught.

  At last Jenkins had to let them see their solicitor. He could prevent them seeing each other—though there was no way of preventing them from communicating through this third party. He was an acute white-haired man with owl-like eyes, taciturn, no friendliness in his manner at all; immediately he called in a barrister from the Inner Temple to consult upon the case. Soon thereafter Jenkins told Lenox and Dallington, with regret, that they would no longer have access to the prisoners.

  “If it’s a consolation, they aren’t talking anyway,” said Jenkins.

  Dallington shook his head. “We know the facts. I’d like to know the story.”

  “The story’s in Hampshire, if we want badly enough to find it,” said Lenox. “For my part I cannot go. There is too much to occupy me in Parliament, a fearful amount.”