The Inheritance

by Charles Finch

  Leigh

  Lenox showed the letter to Graham, and their conversation shifted over to the troubles of Leigh and the murder of Middleton.

  Tapping the note where it lay on the table, Lenox said, “My fear is that he will not move so easily beyond the reaches of the men pursuing him.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Foul creatures. Anderson and Singh, they’re called. They first met in India, where as I understand it Singh came from a decent family. Anderson is from London. He was abroad with the army, and they somehow fell in together. When they came back they found their way into the Farthings as a team.”

  Graham raised his eyes. This was perhaps London’s deadliest street gang. “How on earth could they have come to be concerned with an inheritance like your friend’s?” he said.

  “That’s just what I don’t know. And a clean, tidy murder, like that of Middleton—that doesn’t look like them, either. They got their name, as perhaps you know, because it was said they would put a knife between your ribs for a farthing.”

  They went on discussing the case, their hot coffee going cold, until at last Graham said that he had better be on his way.

  Only after he had gone did Lenox pause to consider why he had come. The two men often dined together, but it was usually lunch they had. The month before, Graham had mentioned that he hoped to make a proposal of marriage soon—and now, reflecting on his glum mood about Parliament, Lenox wondered whether perhaps it hadn’t gone as his old friend had hoped it would.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The next several days were busy. Lenox spent them closely tracking the developments in the investigation of Middleton’s murder, consulting frequently with Inspector Frost. The death had been an attractive one for the newsmen: a safe and respectable street, a safe and respectable victim, and the tantalizing possibility of an upper-class killer. As a result many of the locals in and around Maltravers Street were eager to be interviewed by the police. Their exhaustive canvass produced no tangible leads, however.

  Lenox had been in touch with Leigh by wire; he was again safely ensconced at the University of Paris, he said. Lenox tried to insinuate to him the lurking danger of his situation, without mentioning the Farthings outright. But Leigh either ignored or missed his hints.

  In the meanwhile Pointilleux, their young French associate, had been picking up a far older inquiry: the MB.

  He spent the better part of two days away from the offices in Chancery Lane. He returned on Wednesday evening, his enthusiasm undimmed by the frigid winds—he was only twenty after all—and eager to impart his findings.

  Lenox was in his office, studying a maddeningly incomplete list of Middleton’s and Beaumont’s clients. (“Why Beaumont’s?” Frost had asked. “It wouldn’t be the first time a man was mistaken for someone else and killed,” Lenox replied.) When Pointilleux came in, he pushed the list aside.

  “The prodigal investigator! Welcome back. Have you struck gold?”

  Pointilleux frowned. “I have struck snow. There is snow every place of this metropolis.”

  “On the case, I mean.”

  The lad patted a folio under his arm. “I think only silver. I can exclude one among the candidate.”

  “Which one?”

  “Mr. Leigh’s uncle, the Earl of Ashe.”

  “On what basis?”

  “If this gentleman would to have twenty-five thousand pounds sterling, many, many parties would be interest,” said Pointilleux, in his customarily roundabout English. “Not least Her Majesty Government—merchants up and down Jermyn Street and within the county of Cornwall—”

  “Duchy. It’s a duchy, not a county.”

  “What is the differentiation?”

  Lenox started to speak and then stopped, checked by his own ignorance. “I say, I’m not sure I actually know.”

  “Well, people all over this duchy will wish to speak to Lord Ashe—should he have twenty-five thousand pound within his possession.”

  “Is that the sum of your evidence?”

  “No. There is his will, as well. I have it here. It is of public record. The house and lands entail to his son. Any remaining monies are belonging to his sons equally. They should be able to have a frugal meal of chickens and potato, I suppose, ha, ha.”

  “Very amusing,” said Lenox.

  “In total it is probably no more than a few hundred pounds to each of them. How they will keep the house I cannot say.”

  Lenox felt a sorry sinking emotion—not for Ashe’s sons, but because this meant that Townsend, the object of loathing for Leigh’s entire youth, the man who had killed Leigh’s father with his recklessness, was also in all likelihood his benefactor. And not once, now, but twice.

  And at the same time, this news introduced the faintest glimmer of doubt in Lenox’s mind. Could his friend Gerald Leigh have killed Middleton, somehow, if his fury toward Townsend was sufficient? Certainly not, he thought—and yet, were it any other case, it was an idea that Lenox granted to himself that he would be forced to entertain. Covington’s was not far from Maltravers Street. There had been a window of an hour or so in which Beaumont had been absent from the offices that day, and also before Lenox, McConnell, and Polly had finally run Leigh to ground.

  “And what of Townsend?”

  “That is a harder fish to fry,” said Pointilleux. As was his custom when he deployed any English idiom, he hesitated proudly, with a very serious, distracted air to conceal it, before carrying on. “I think though—I think it is him.”

  It seemed the reason the young Frenchman had been absent from Chancery Lane was that he had traveled to Truro, the chief seat of Cornwall, a good four-hour train journey outside of London. For his troubles he had been firmly rejected in his attempts to see Townsend’s will.

  He had learned something of Townsend’s circumstances, however. Since Leigh’s boyhood, it appeared, the man had grown only wealthier. Before his death he had controlled several disparate businesses with, altogether, a few hundred employees.

  What was more, he had fallen out with his only son, who lived in London, mixing in fast society. The general opinion was that Townsend hadn’t left his money to the young man, particularly because upon his death, according to locals more confiding than the courthouse officials, there had been several unusual legacies, including a thousand pounds to a disreputable old gambling friend, a few hundred to a local schoolteacher who had been cruelly jilted, and the very great sum of ten thousand to a former valet.

  “No rumor of twenty-five thousand pounds to a scientist, I suppose.”

  Pointilleux shook his head. “I’m afraid not. But he was not local.”

  “Is there anything to tie Townsend directly to Middleton?”

  “In the year before he has died Mr. Townsend has made several trips to London, of obscure purposes,” Pointilleux said, squaring off the papers he was reading where they lay on the desk.

  “Whom did they hear from about their inheritances—the old gambling friend, the local schoolteacher, the former valet?”

  “A local solicitor,” conceded Pointilleux. “But the affairs of Mr. Townsend were complex of the extreme. There are several attorneys involve alone in the disbursal of his firm, for instance, and I am suspecting his estate is much the same. This solicitor will answer only for a few legacies that he received the assignation to make.”

  “Assignment,” Lenox said automatically.

  “Yes, if you prefer, assignment.”

  They talked a bit more. Pointilleux had further lines of investigation to pursue. But Lenox felt sure already that he had the truth in his hands. Beaumont had confirmed that Middleton had become busy with a large estate about two months before, which coincided precisely with the time Townsend had died, and what was more, Beaumont recalled Middleton saying it was a tricky one. It was some severe wasting disease that had taken Townsend, apparently. He would have seen his death coming in time to make a will.

  And suddenly a stray thought came to him: The letter lef
t for Leigh with the legacy had said that it wished its author could have had a greater opportunity to know him. That implied some previous relationship, if only a slight one.

  Lenox stood up from his desk. He had been feeling thwarted by the case, which presented so many features that it ought to have been easy to solve—except that the strands kept separating, each mystery refusing to tie into the others.

  But now he was heartened. “Congratulations, Pointilleux. You have given us our first real suspect.”

  “Have I? Who?”

  “Townsend’s son.”

  “Why him?”

  “If Leigh forfeited his claim to that money, it would by law descend to Townsend’s closest living relative. His son. What have you discovered about him?”

  Pointilleux consulted his notes. The fellow’s name was Andrew Townsend. He lived in Soho, along a rather racy strip of territory around Lexington Street. That reference to fast company had been vague for a reason, however: Pointilleux knew no more than that several people in Truro had shaken their heads darkly when referring to the young man, and made oblique references to the racetrack and to women of loose morals.

  “Do you have an address?” Lenox asked.

  “I can locate it,” said Pointilleux.

  “Good. We’ll go and see him in the morning, after I speak to Inspector Frost.”

  They discussed Townsend further as Lenox gathered his hat and his gloves, preparing to go home. He would have stayed longer on another day—but tonight was the night that Jane and Sophia were finally returning home, and he wanted to meet them at Charing Cross.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  On his way from the office Lenox picked up McConnell in his carriage, for Jane was traveling together with McConnell’s own wife, Toto, and their daughter, Georgiana.

  The physician was waiting outside of his house, bundled tightly in a cloak and carrying a parcel. “What is that?” Lenox asked.

  “The fossilized excrement of an African elephant. I need to post it to a colleague in Manchester when we arrive at the station. I think I shall just have time.”

  “What an exciting life you lead, Thomas.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “I’m not sure how I can thank you adequately for blessing my carriage with such an exciting delivery.”

  “It’s very well sealed. There is no odor—practically no odor.”

  Lenox hadn’t seen McConnell since Leigh bolted for France, and it was this that they discussed as the carriage rolled through the West End and toward the train station. According to McConnell, Lenox’s old friend had been philosophical about his position at supper, only to wake up having reversed himself.

  “It was all I could do to make him stay for breakfast,” said McConnell. “But how glad I am that I did! I owe you a profound thanks for introducing me to him. The Englishman who works with Pasteur.”

  The name rang a faint bell. “Pasteur,” Lenox repeated. “Remind me who he is?”

  “Louis Pasteur?” McConnell said. “No, I suppose his name has not penetrated into the wider world. A very great man. There can be no doubt of that. According to Leigh too he has a mania for his work. Which is significant, as Leigh pointed out, because many of the geniuses in our field are idle to the bone.”

  “In my field, too,” said Lenox.

  McConnell looked curious. “Oh?”

  “The most brilliant criminal mind I ever encountered belonged to a fellow named Partridge, who never shifted from the corner seat of a pub in Clapham. As far as I know he slept there. Certainly he delivered his orders from there. Jenkins and I spent hundreds of hours trying to catch him out in his schemes, mostly extortion, but we never did. In fact the only thing that stopped him was his own weight. He had a heart attack and died at his table.”

  “Pasteur is the very opposite case from the sound of it—scarcely sleeps or eats. And he has been rewarded. It wouldn’t surprise me if he saves a million lives a year between now and the end of the century.”

  Lenox gave McConnell a look of astonishment. “A million!”

  “Yes. Vaccination. He’s not a doctor, you know, and people kicked up very hard about that. But on the other hand I have seen the studies myself. It all comes down to this theory of germs.”

  “Germs,” Lenox said. “Those tiny invisible particles? Was that not disproven?”

  “You could not be more wrong,” McConnell said. “They’re not invisible, and Leigh is the one among all of us who has done the most to discover their properties. Even Pasteur acknowledges that, and he is not renowned as a generous collaborator.”

  They had come within a few turns of Charing Cross, and Lenox asked how Leigh had been enticed to return to London in a week’s time. According to McConnell, among the possessions Anixter had recovered from the Collingwood Hotel had been the calling cards of the two joint presidents of the Royal Society, Lord Baird and Mr. Alexander Rowan, begging half an hour of Leigh’s time.

  McConnell had persuaded Leigh to call on them at the Society in the half hour before his train for Dover departed. The doctor had gone along with him, and Rowan, he said (Baird had been away) could not have been more courteous, or more ardently committed to arranging Leigh’s speech. This was flattering, given Rowan’s own fame—he was only thirty-two, and his rise within the scientific community of England had been meteoric, paper after brilliant paper, a chair at Cambridge younger than anyone before him, but also, to go with it, a personable temperament, a handsome face, a fine fortune.

  The entreaties of even someone so distinguished might not have tempted Leigh on their own, but he had also been offered, in exchange for his lecture, the foundation of a scholarship in his name for a Cornish boy of the board schools to either of the universities. Leigh’s pick. A graceful touch by Rowan, and the one that had won Leigh over in the end.

  “Is that usual?”

  “On the contrary, very unusual. But then, so is a scientist who has no interest in addressing the Royal Society.”

  “I’m not happy about the idea,” said Lenox. “Will he be safe?”

  “I cannot say that. But at least I know he will never be alone. Already every man of scientific interests in London has canceled his plans for that week, hoping to be invited to the supper afterward. I myself feel fortunate that Leigh arranged my tickets. Men are coming from Oxford, Cambridge of course, even Edinburgh.”

  For Gerald Leigh! Lenox shook his head.

  He couldn’t help but feel surprised. When they had been boys at Harrow, in between their investigations into the MB, they had sometimes talked about the future. What had they envisioned for themselves? Lenox would later find that he had one burst of unconventionality in him—the impulse to become a detective—but at the time he had not credited himself even so far as that, imagining that he would go to university, marry, and then enter politics. His dreams then had all been about travel.

  Leigh, on the other hand, had been a fidgety dreamer. One hour he would see himself making for America, the next he fancied becoming a farmer in Cornwall and studying the behavior of bees.

  How had he come to be so highly reckoned? From McConnell’s descriptions, perhaps by following that very restive instinct—the high seas, birds, then flora, then microbes, at each stage pursuing whatever interested him most, regardless of how many years he had dedicated to the last project. Perhaps that was one definition of genius: a willingness to surrender to obsession.

  At Charing Cross, McConnell posted his parcel. When he was done, the two men went to platform 8 to wait for the train. The porter informed them that the first-class carriage would be the last car, so they walked down toward it, three abreast, the porter with his luggage cart, to wait. They were rigid in the extreme, the carriages of a British train: It was known that men who had made vast fortunes still almost always traveled in second class. Sometimes one had to acknowledge that theirs was a strange country.

  “On Leigh, then—what progress have you made?” McConnell asked him, as they waited.

 
; Lenox shook his head doubtfully. “It’s difficult to say. On the murder of Middleton we are nowhere at all. But I believe we may be on the track of the fellow who left Leigh the legacy. I have a suspect. And we certainly know the men who attacked him.”

  A bright pair of lamplights appeared far down the darkness of the track’s curve. “There they are,” McConnell said, leaning forward.

  Lenox’s heart rose. “Yes.”

  The train slowly wended its way into the station, labored chuffs coming from its stovepipe—and then all at once the platform was furious with activity, and there they were! The two wives, the two daughters.

  Lenox bent down and Sophia flew into his arms in a fashion that would, alas, be considered unladylike when another twelve months or so had passed, but which he could still enjoy now. She squeezed him tightly around the neck and he buried his scratchy face in her thick, curly hair, feeling the wholeness of a parent reunited with a child. Lifting Sophia to his side, he greeted Jane with a smile and a kiss, then made a cheerful greeting to McConnell’s own arrivals. Governesses descended, servants, luggage. Somehow they sorted themselves out. Sophia had urgent news to convey, which was that there had been Scotch eggs on the train.

  “Were they good?” he asked.

  “They were better than cook’s.”

  “That wouldn’t be nice to tell her.”

  “It would be nice to have the train eggs all the time though, Father,” she said passionately.

  “Life is not all train eggs.”

  She seemed to accept the justice of this—or perhaps was just tired—because she laid her head on his shoulder, and fell silent.

  When they were back at Hampden Lane it felt, all at once, like home again; he was watching Jane nervously, but she seemed herself, and they chatted late into the evening after Sophia had gone to sleep, describing the last few days to each other, eating a late supper prepared by their mediocre cook. They were in the drawing room, where all of Jane’s touches came alive with her presence—the little portrait of her by Molly, Edmund’s wife, the small porcelain birds in flight along the mantel, even the intricate white-and-wintergreen wallpaper.