The Inheritance

by Charles Finch

  Singh, apparently, had fallen for the ruse completely, racing off the train. Meanwhile Leigh was on his way to London—a few precious hours bought, at least. Lenox’s firm and the Yard were going to provide a full retinue for his remaining time in London. And there were several people now tracking Singh.

  Lenox still worried, however. Even if Leigh relinquished his claim to the money that was the cause of all this—how were his pursuers to know? Greyscale hadn’t found a will. There would be one registered in Cornwall, he said, but Lenox wanted to convey to the person who had hired the Farthings that their quarry was retiring from the game. Evidently his and Frost’s threat of attention for the gang hadn’t been enough.

  Which meant that in the morning it would be time to speak to Townsend’s son. It had been some thirty years; it was time the mystery of Leigh’s anonymous benefactor be solved, once and for all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  An increasing intimacy had sprung up in the past few days between Lenox and Frost. Before the murder of Middleton they had certainly been friendly acquaintances, but now they trusted each other.

  The next morning—Leigh having spent the night in an anonymous Clapham hotel, chosen by Cohen entirely at random after the supper, a stratagem designed to avoid pursuit by the Farthings—the inspector again appeared in Hampden Lane.

  It was the warmest day since the snowfall, and the city was dripping, the sound of thousands of drops making a sunny melody, people’s gazes gradually unfreezing too.

  Frost accepted the offer of a cup of tea. “I’ve had a note,” Lenox said, pouring for him. “My man has found Salt Townsend’s address at last. I mean to go and see him this morning.”

  “Just in time for a second suspect.”

  Lenox looked up sharply. “How’s that?”

  Frost had arrived with Middleton’s oversized appointment book under his arm, and he laid it down on Lenox’s dark, highly polished hexagonal breakfast table. “This is yours now, for the moment at least—we’ve looked through it exhaustively.”

  “And found something?”

  “In the days leading up to the murder, Ernest Middleton had several meetings with a person initialed TF. The first reference is about three months old, and it has a full name, which is repeated once or twice: Terence Fells. You’ll find it on the flagged pages.”

  “Does the name mean anything to you?”

  “No. There is an Anthony Terence Fells living near Mornington Crescent, however, according to our records at the Yard. Three years ago he was arrested for public drunkenness, which is how we came to have his address.”

  “I see.”

  “And how’s this—in the last reference to him, there is an arrow drawn directly from his name to Gerald Leigh’s.”

  Lenox frowned and took a sip of his own tea. “Hm.”

  This was new information to absorb. Worse luck. The narrative in his mind had been fairly straightforward: Salt Townsend had hired Anderson and Singh to intimidate Leigh—possibly, or even probably, worse—and Middleton. The solicitor had refused to give them the relevant papers from his valise. Perhaps he had pulled out the pistol he was carrying to protect himself. The fatal shot had been delivered. Anderson and Singh had vanished with the valise.

  Anthony Terence Fells didn’t fit into this tale.

  “Who shall it be first, then?” he said. “Your suspect or mine?”

  “Yours, I think,” said Frost. “We can see if he gives himself up.”

  Fells. The name rang a soft and distant bell. It niggled at Lenox, though his memory wouldn’t quite resolve into legibility. “Very well. Give me a moment to bolt an egg and a rasher and I’m your man.”

  Soon they left, with Pointilleux’s note in hand. This offered little more than an address, though the young Frenchman added that he had not yet personally confirmed that Townsend lived there.

  It was in the East End. “It’s in Abbot Street,” Lenox told Frost as they went outside to his waiting carriage, reading from the paper. “Number 34, third story.”

  Frost looked surprised. “Abbot Street. Interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s in Whitechapel. Not far from the Blue Peter.”

  Lenox hadn’t thought of that connection. “Curious,” he said.

  “Yes. And therefore also not far from Anderson and Singh.”

  When they arrived, Lenox saw that Abbot Street was a part of what constituted the more respectable part of the East End. The traffic was hectic, but temperate. Many of the men wore silk hats, none of the women walked alone, the truants were few enough. It was a spirited little avenue, too. A busy trade of newspapers and food was taking place up and down the pavement.

  Still, Abbot Street was also visibly rakish in its edges—tiny alleyways with lanterns over doorways, men lounging on the corners and occasionally offering a subtle word to passersby—“ponces,” the word for them was, men who lived on the earnings of their women. It was easy to imagine the avenue becoming more debauched without the sanitizing influence of the mild sun that passed above them in the sky.

  They found number 34. In their company was the street’s constable, whom Frost had spotted and enlisted in case Salt Townsend proved violent. His name was Esau Wakeman.

  “Any notion that this chappie might hoof it?” Wakeman asked.

  “I suppose it’s possible,” Lenox said.

  “More’n possible. It happens about three of four times a day in these parts.”

  “Tell me,” Lenox said, as they went into the building, “who lives in them, these parts?”

  Wakeman thought for a moment. “I grew up two streets north, so I should have a readier answer. I suppose it’s your honest poor; and then your less honest less poor.”

  Lenox smiled. “And what do you make of this building? More in the line of the former or the latter?”

  Wakeman merely glanced at him with raised eyebrows. They had all taken in the glossy new paint on the building’s rails, its well-kept shrubbery out front.

  They climbed the stairs in single file. On the third story, with Frost leading the way, they met a man of roughly the age Lenox knew Townsend to be. He was a tubby person with a piggish, hard-set, suspicious face. “Mr. Townsend?” Lenox said, just in case.

  “Yes,” the fellow replied warily. “Why?”

  As the timing would have it, Wakeman came around the switchback of the stairwell just at that moment, and of course he was unmistakably a bobby, in his high hat and blue uniform, whistle, torch, and blackjack hanging from his belt.

  Townsend blanched. After an exceptionally lengthy second, he pushed past them and ran.

  “Oh, hell,” said Frost.

  The two policemen darted ahead of Lenox—damnably slow reflexes, he thought even as his feet began to move, too much time behind a desk—and ran out behind Townsend in chase.

  Their quarry turned right up the street, moving with surprising velocity for someone who didn’t look as if he had ever declined a second helping at supper.

  “Townsend!” Frost called. “Stop!”

  That didn’t work.

  “Stop!” cried Wakeman, also to no avail.

  People all around stared on, though without making any move to intervene. Then Lenox tried. “It’s about the murder of Ernest Middleton!” he called.

  All at once Townsend drew up to a juddering halt, and turned. He stood there, panting, hands on his hips. When they reached him, he shook his head and said, “The what?”

  “The murder of Ernest Middleton,” Lenox said—panting himself, to be fair.

  “You’re under arrest, you wretch,” Frost said in a choked voice.

  “I haven’t murdered anyone. Much less anyone named Ernest Middleton.”

  “Then why on earth did you run?” Frost asked.

  Townsend’s eyes shifted right. “I had an appointment I forgot.”

  “Yes, that seems likely,” Frost said, half bent over.

  “An appointment with whom?” asked Lenox.


  “That’s for me to know.”

  “Will you come to the Yard and speak to us?” asked Frost.

  “No. I want to see my attorney.”

  “We only have a few questions.”

  Townsend shook his head. “I know my rights.”

  Wakeman, who hadn’t heard of Salt Townsend fifteen minutes before, took this as a deep personal affront. “And I’ve the right to stove your face in,” he said.

  But Townsend, with the air of a man who had been threatened by larger and more frightening men than Esau Wakeman, shook his head. “Take me in if you will, but I’ll be seeing my attorney or I’ll be clabbered.”

  Frost sighed, and he and Lenox exchanged looks. “Very well,” said Frost. “You can while away your time in the station the whole week for all that I care. Wakeman, secure him in your handcuffs, if you please, while I whistle for a cab.”

  Wakeman clamped his man in handcuffs, and began the slow procedure of shifting him back to the Yard and fetching him his solicitor; Lenox and Frost agreed that they would use the time to move on to their second suspect.

  Thus, a little more than an hour later, they were standing in front of Terence Fells’s small, handsome house in Mornington Crescent.

  He was absent—but worked in the City, according to his next-door neighbor, who said that he generally returned home between five and six o’clock. There was one fleeting point that stuck with Lenox: To the side of the house, a workman was installing new copper piping. Expensive and handsome, and perhaps not entirely within the range of affordability one might generally expect to find in this middle-class quarter.

  “I wish I could remember how I knew the name Fells,” he said to Frost as they left.

  They had agreed to return at six, warning the neighbor and the workman both to say nothing of their visit. “As do I.”

  The answer would have to wait; an hour having passed, Frost was going to see how Townsend had gotten along in his quest to meet with his attorney, and whether he would now deign to speak to them.

  Lenox, for his part, returned home for lunch. He opened the door and halloed loudly, hoping Sophia would be there. She wasn’t, but in the dining room he did find Lady Jane, Toto, and McConnell.

  The doctor was beaming. “What is it?” Lenox asked immediately.

  He glanced at Toto, and then said, overflowing with the happy tidings, “We’re going to have a second child, it would seem, God willing. In May, they believe.”

  “My dear McConnell, how wonderful,” said Lenox, “shake my hand.”

  As he strode forward, he caught from the corner of his eye a glimpse of Jane’s face. In that flash, he saw that the news had already been known to her, and for the first time understood why he had found her crying the week before, at Edmund’s.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Kirk brought a bottle of champagne up from the cellar, and Lenox raised a toast to their friends, who were quite obviously dumbstruck with happiness. Toto had been to her physician that morning for confirmation.

  “Part of me does hope it’s a boy,” Toto said, her hand falling unconsciously to her stomach. “We’ve got George after all and we’re not the Elizabeth Bennets.”

  “You’re very far from the Elizabeth Bennets,” Lady Jane said.

  “My enemy Duckworth is on her seventh child already, and won’t ever stop talking about it.”

  “To be fair I’m not sure I would either, if I had seven children,” said Lenox.

  “Two should at least quiet her down to a murmur, I hope.”

  Lenox glanced at Jane.

  There were facts in life; there were things you couldn’t help; it had mathematics in it. Jane was forty-three. Not quite too old to have another child, but not either young enough to have faith that she could do so without difficulty—and their particular era, Lenox had thought once or twice, was such a cruelly fertile one, families of ten and twelve and twenty, pouring into all the crevices of enormous houses. Never had a capital city been richer or more rudely healthy. To have one child could seem faintly feeble.

  And how lovely it would have been to watch Sophia meet a baby brother, a baby sister.

  He was suddenly struck by a long-forgotten memory of Lady Jane, perhaps because it dated to the same period of time that Leigh’s sudden reappearance in his life had dredged up in his mind.

  Even as a child, Lady Jane Houghton, she had been self-possessed, with an affect of slight irony. Most children would laugh at anything whatsoever—but not she, five years younger than him then as now, even when such a gap had seemed perfectly enormous.

  Home from Harrow once, he had seen her at a country ball. Perhaps it had even been her first—too young by a few years for London society, but allowed to dance in Sussex, as long as it was with a cousin or close friend.

  She had come up behind him in the hall as he was leaving, just before supper, and at her call he had stopped, bowing slightly and greeting her. She was slender, with brown hair that fell in long pretty curls. “We didn’t have a chance to speak,” she said.

  “Yes! I’m sorry for that. How are you?”

  She had smiled and said not very badly. “And they say you will go to Oxford, as your brother has done?”

  “I hope so,” Lenox replied.

  “Will you give me tea if I come there?”

  “Any time.”

  “I’ll hold you to that, Master Charles,” she had said. “I know my father wouldn’t mind, as it’s you—and I’ll die if I have to spend another winter here in the country. He’ll let me go when I turn fifteen, I think, with Mother.”

  “Are you so bored?”

  “Yes. How I wish they would let us go off to school, as you do! Or failing that, I don’t see why we can’t go to London and live there.”

  “Your father is important in the county,” Lenox pointed out.

  “I suppose.” A maid had come in then, looking for Jane. “I think I ought to go. Good luck at Oxford!”

  “And good luck leaving Houghton. You look very lovely this evening.”

  She had blushed and thanked him, and Lenox had realized, with true amazement, that she had perhaps some romantic admiration for him—that perhaps, as in a novel, he was her faraway ideal, a slightly older chap, away at Harrow.

  He had forgotten that for all these years. He would have to ask her if she remembered.

  They gave McConnell and Toto lunch. Just as they were drinking their small glasses of sweet wine afterward, Sophia emerged from the nursery, bleary-eyed and tender following her nap, to say hello. When Lenox went off into the afternoon again it was with a feeling of warmth for all that he did have.

  Leigh had spent the morning at the Royal College of Surgeons, delivering an informal lecture on his experiments on certain victims of alkali poisoning a decade before, near the Strait of Magellan; with him for protection were Cohen and a constable of Frost’s. Lenox met them at around two o’clock. There had been nothing peculiar about their day, fortunately.

  “Have you seen Anderson?” Lenox asked Cohen when they had a private moment.

  “No. No large red-haired fellows at all, sir.”

  “Singh?”

  “One Indian gentleman—a valet here, it would seem, brought back from the East by a scientist who trained him as an assistant. He’s widely known, however. Not Singh.”

  “Good. Keep your eyes open. And after the talk tonight—”

  “A hotel I’ve never heard of, neighborhood randomly chosen. Yes, sir.”

  Lenox nodded. “Good.”

  Having checked in on his friend, Lenox hailed a cab and directed it to Scotland Yard, where he met Frost.

  They walked together along an inner corridor, returning from the front courtyard to Frost’s office. “Has Townsend consented to speak to us?”

  “Yes—with his attorney present.”

  “I suppose we could do worse. Are we going there now?”

  “I thought we might.”

  Townsend was waiting for them in a holding cell, t
he remains of a desultory lunch on a tray nearby—half a bottle of wine the only thing that looked to have been consumed entirely. With him was a small, ferret-faced sharp in a cheap suit, one of the jobbing attorneys who lurked around the courts, none of them stupid. He introduced himself as Chisholm.

  “You understand that your presence here is a courtesy?” Frost asked him.

  “I suppose so, sir,” said Chisholm. “Then again I could tell my client to hold his tongue and we could wait you out.”

  Frost gave him a hard look. “And we could come and have a look at your other clients, and instruct the bailiff not to let Mr. Townsend order such luxurious foodstuffs—if you want to play that game.”

  Chisholm shrugged, as if it was a matter of very little consequence to him, and then with a calculated degree of insolence began to pick at his teeth. Frost looked black with anger, but Lenox, sensing the futility of playing an attorney’s game with an attorney, said, “We are concerned solely with the death of Mr. Ernest Middleton of the Temple Bar. It occurred on the fourth of January. Does your client have any knowledge of it?”

  “None,” said Chisholm.

  “You may answer yourself, Mr. Townsend, if you have nothing to hide,” said Lenox.

  Townsend glanced at his attorney and then said, echoing him, “None.”

  “The name is unfamiliar to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were never in the offices of Beaumont and Middleton in Maltravers Street?”

  “Never.”

  “Mr. Middleton was not your father’s solicitor?”

  For the first time Townsend looked thrown. “My father?”

  “Did he not execute your father’s estate?”

  “My father’s estate! What in heaven are you on about?”

  Lenox looked at him narrowly. “Let us retreat farther back. Did your father die in 1876, sir?”

  “He did, but I cannot see what that has to do with the price of tea in China.”