The Inheritance

by Charles Finch

  Lenox was as good as his word to Rowan, returning in time to catch the toasts to Leigh. At the end of them, the honoree rose and gave the audience a well-placed joke, and thanked them. Thus the evening was concluded.

  Rowan urged them to come to his club for a whisky. “It’s only two streets away,” he said, a last effort after his offer had already been declined several times.

  Leigh smiled ruefully. “I still have that faint buzzing in the base of my skull that I get after speaking to a large group of people. Anyhow it is late, and I am pleased with the evening’s work.”

  “Oh—so am I,” said Rowan gamely, though he looked disappointed.

  “And there is always lunch tomorrow,” Leigh added.

  “Yes, true,” said Rowan, acquiescing. “Still—it did go well, I think.”

  Lenox walked downstairs with Leigh and Lady Jane, their coats waiting for them in the arms of a porter. He saw Leigh and Cohen into a cab—the fourth or fifth at the cabstand, chosen at random, a usual precaution—and then, with an unburdened feeling, found his own carriage, ready to return home with Lady Jane.

  It was late, and she laid her head against his arm as they rode through London, shutting her eyes. For most of the journey he let her rest, but then, when they were close to Hampden Lane, he said, “Tell me, did you know Toto was going to have another child when we were in Sussex?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And is that—”

  “Yes,” she said, and after a beat squeezed his arm, as if hoping that he wouldn’t pull away.

  He put his hand over hers. Trying to think what he could say, at last he came up with a commonplace. “Sophia will be five this year!”

  “Astonishing, isn’t it?”

  “I wonder what she shall be like when she’s our age.”

  “Better at spreading jam on toast than she is now, I expect.”

  He thought for a moment. “It will be 1917.”

  She smiled, eyes still closed. “Imagine that.”

  “And we shall be very old.”

  “Or gone.”

  “No, not gone,” he said decisively. “But very old. And she will have her own family. Probably with uncountable numbers of grandsons and granddaughters.”

  “That’s true,” said Lady Jane, struck by the thought. “I wonder where they’ll live. Heaven preserve us from a military husband. I cannot imagine having to wait for them to post home on holiday from Calcutta.”

  “No, she’ll marry someone a street or two away.”

  Lady Jane laughed. “Now you are daydreaming.”

  “And you and I will still live in Hampden Lane.”

  “Will we?”

  “Oh, yes. We shall be there in 1917. And I will love you and Sophia just as much on that day as I do on this one.”

  “Will you?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Possibly more.”

  They were turning onto the very lane under discussion. She opened her eyes, and kissed him on the cheek. “That’s a nice thing to know.”

  “I think so.”

  “And if we aren’t here?” she asked, looking into his eyes.

  He smiled. “Then I shall love you wherever we happen to be.”

  “All right,” she said. “Good.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  At just before eight the next morning, Frost and Lenox stood in Scotland Yard’s long tearoom, the former moodily stirring a cup of charred-black tea that he had just poured himself from a tall polished urn. Lenox followed his lead—there were stacks of chipped cups and chipped saucers next to it, as well as a colossal tray of biscuits, underneath a sign that said, WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE WOMEN’S RELIEF SOCIETY.

  Lenox took a custard cream, silently blessing the Women’s Relief Society. “The hellish thing about it is I was so sure Townsend was our man,” said Frost.

  “He’s still in custody?”

  “No. We had to let him go. Chisholm was threatening all manner of suits against us. Noisy enough in the end to have Townsend sent home. With a strict warning not to leave London, but—you know.”

  Lenox did, and for a moment he wondered whether they had merely been fooled by two accomplished actors the day before. “And Anderson and Singh?”

  “Choirboys. The jig is up after Dover. Neither has moved from the Blue Peter. All we’ve done is give them a vacation.”

  “And kept them from murdering Leigh, in fairness.” Lenox thought for a moment. “We had better think of who their next team is, the Farthings.”

  Frost brightened. “That’s a stroke. You’re quite right. It would probably be the Pole, Wasilewski. An ugly character. English mother.”

  “What does he look like? I’ll warn Cohen and Leigh.”

  “Very pale, watery pink eyes, rather like a rabbit, fair hair. Dresses inconspicuously.”

  “And after him?”

  They went through a roster of possibilities, Lenox taking notes. At last, sighing, he said, “And then, Fells.”

  Frost sighed, too. “Yes. Fells.”

  The inspector had arrived at the house of Terence Fells at six o’clock sharp the night before, while Lenox was at the Royal Society. Fells had been home, according to Frost’s description a tall, curly-haired fellow whom one could spot from a mile as doing what Londoners called “black-coated work,” something in the clerking or bookkeeping or accounting or banking lines, respectable, not manual.

  Frost had mentioned Middleton, and Fells had denied any knowledge of the name.

  Even from the last week’s papers? Frost had asked.

  Fells replied that he didn’t read the papers.

  He had never brought Middleton business?

  Never.

  But Frost had seen something in the young man’s face, and had begun to hammer away at him, asking over and over in every way he could think to ask whether he might have run across Middleton and not remembered it. He offered Fells all the dates from Middleton’s ledger that were marked with his name—though without mentioning this fact—and waited patiently as Fells got his own datebook and answered for his whereabouts on those days.

  Then Frost had begun expanding the reach of his questions, asking about Leigh, about Anderson and Singh, about the East London gangs. Here Fells had seemed genuinely perplexed.

  “Though it is possible,” said Frost, stirring his tea morosely, “that by this stage he had merely braced himself for all my lines of questioning.”

  “Just so,” said Lenox, who could sympathize.

  At that moment someone behind them called out Lenox’s name from a distance of fifteen or twenty feet, and both he and Frost turned to look who it was.

  “Oh, hell,” Frost muttered.

  Lenox turned fully and smiled at the young gentleman who approached them, a chipper fellow named Huntington. “Hello, Huntington,” he said.

  Huntington looked delighted. “Lenox, my dear chap, what brings you into these quarters—this prosaic old place!”

  “Oh, a case, as usual.”

  Huntington shook his head with good-natured consternation. “It really is beastly, isn’t it? And the swill they serve as tea. Hullo, Frost.”

  Lenox, in his Harrow days, had been unique among his acquaintances in his obsession with the police and with crime. Now he had been joined by a more generously peopled younger generation of enthusiasts—Dallington was not the only junior aristocrat in England who wished to be a detective, a change that Lenox attributed to the enormous spike in popularity of detective fiction, following Mr. Poe’s innovations. In particular the novels of Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, had made every impressionable young adolescent of the 1860s a connoisseur of the detective novel.

  Now they were beginning to pop up around the metropolis. Huntington was one example. The son of an unimpeachably lineaged Hertfordshire nobleman, he had been to Eton and Cambridge and then at the age of twenty had arranged, through high-powered friends, to be placed in a favorable position at the Yard, and more egregiously still on w
hat was called, within these walls, the murder squad, which was generally home only to the most accomplished inspectors.

  On the one hand this was an admirable choice—Huntington hadn’t any need to work at all, and had very probably wagered his annual salary from Scotland Yard on a single hand of whist at the Beargarden only the night before. On the other hand he was incompetent, lazy, and grandstanding, and worse yet never let go of the fact of his astonishing choice to become a detective, moving about in perpetual awe at his daring, reminding everyone he met of it, most particularly the new colleagues to whom he condescended so impossibly.

  Lenox had hopes that he might grow—he was young—but at the moment this particular young aristocrat was not a credit to his class’s involvement in police work, alas.

  “Tell me,” Huntington asked confidentially, “is it about Middleton?”

  “Can’t say,” Frost replied quickly. “Forrester’s orders.”

  That was their chief. “Ah, too bad. Tell me, Lenox, has Johnny Dallington left Parliament yet? I heard he had pitched up there with your—other partner.”

  Lenox felt a flash of irritation at the intonation of those last two words, which Huntington delivered as if Polly was somehow disreputable. “I’m not sure. I’ve been occupied with other matters.”

  “Mm, yes, Middleton.” Huntington sighed. “A nuisance, no doubt, in and out of the courts where he worked, all of that. Say, Frost, are you close?”

  This was the single worst question you could credibly ask a fellow detective, of course, and Lenox saw, with a mixture of mirth and pity, that Frost was hard-pressed not to give Huntington an earful. “Very close,” Frost said with bitter irony. “A matter of hours. Possibly minutes.”

  “That’s excellent!” Huntington was generous, at least—he wanted to like and be liked, he enjoyed good news, he wished nobody failure. “Let me know if I can help. I’m on rather a run of form, I fancy.”

  “I’ll be sure to knock on your door.”

  “Good, good.” Huntington had poured himself some tea, and sighed again. “Well, no rest for the weary, gentlemen. A milliner in Hampstead has been stabbed. Off I go, if I can choke this down first.”

  Frost looked after their departing friend murderously, then turned to Lenox. “Tell me, are we ‘close’?”

  Lenox laughed. “Close to getting Leigh out of England. I shall be happier then.”

  Frost shook his head. “I would find it funnier if he were assigned to a department that didn’t matter.”

  In fact, though, Huntington had given Lenox a thought. “I do wonder about what he said, though—the courts.”

  “What do you mean?” Frost asked.

  “Twenty-five thousand pounds is an enormous sum of money. Middleton cannot have been responsible alone for its passage from one person to another. What happens to it when he’s gone? Who’s in charge of it? For that matter where is it? Where are the documents pertaining to it, other than in that blasted valise?”

  “Hm.”

  When Lenox thought of the chancery courts, he pictured an enormous, cathedral-sized archive, with hundreds and hundreds of rows of shelves, each hundreds and hundreds of feet high, all of them stuffed with hundreds and hundreds of spilling files and records, paper, paper, paper, and occasionally some hapless and benighted fellow worriedly wandering the aisles, taking snuff to steady himself in his search.

  And yet it couldn’t possibly work so inefficiently as that. “You know what—I’ll have one of our fellows go over to the court and look into it.”

  “A sound idea,” said Frost. “I feel stupid not to have thought of it myself. I wonder if I ought to send one of ours, too—to give it an official gloss.”

  “Yes, perhaps. They could work in concert. Though I don’t know that the court is obliged to turn anything over.”

  “My junior can be persuasive. Nobody likes to be on the wrong side of the Yard.”

  They paused, contemplating this, as they watched Huntington, across the room, give some earnest advice to a man of three times his age and thirty times his experience, then depart. “You had better catch him if you have any questions about how to proceed,” Lenox said.

  Frost scowled. “I have some ideas.”

  “What do you intend to do?”

  “For some reason I haven’t been able to track down Beaumont for a day or two,” he said. “I’d like to ask him a few more questions about Middleton’s last days. He might have remembered something else. I suppose I’ll go to his home, since he hasn’t been appearing in his chambers.”

  “Mm.”

  “Then I’m going to visit the Blue Peter again, if only out of sheer frustration. I want to rattle the cages of Anderson’s and Singh’s superiors. They know something. Would you care to come?”

  Lenox shook his head. “I’m going to send someone to the courts—you can push your person along with me if you want—and then I’d like to take a look at that ledger of Middleton’s. I know you looked at it already, but—”

  “No, no, two sets of eyes are always better.”

  “After that Leigh has his luncheon at the Royal Society. If we can get him through that without being attacked, he may leave these shores safely after all.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Their lines of inquiry had been thwarted, and yet Lenox felt a certain familiar vitality which he knew, from long experience, meant that he was getting closer, not farther, from the truth. Back at Chancery Lane he sent Pointilleux to the nearby courts, in company with Frost’s junior inspector, Phelps.

  When this was done he went to Dallington’s office, whose door was shut tight and from which voices had been emerging at a muffled but loudish volume for some time.

  They came from Dallington and Polly, facing each other across a desk. They looked up when Lenox came in. “Ah,” said Dallington after an awkward moment. “How are you getting along?”

  There was an aspersive atmosphere in the room. Lenox paused for a moment, then said, “What is on your ankles?”

  Polly burst out into an unkind laugh. Dallington reddened, and glanced down at the twinned gaiters hanging daintily over his shoes. “These are my spatterdashers, thank you.”

  “Your spatterdashers?”

  “It’s as muddy as the road to Canterbury outside, and my tailor tells me these are very fashionable. Spats, he called them, for short. Why, look at your shoes!”

  Lenox looked down at his boots, and saw that it was true they had been cleaner. “Never mind,” he said. “How are you two getting along with the matter in Parliament? The broken window, and the naval treaty?”

  The tension, which had dissipated a little bit after he came in, quickly returned. “We think we’ve discovered what happened,” said Polly. “The only trouble is that we now disagree on what course to take.”

  Lenox was curious. “What happened?”

  “It’s no great affair of state, I’m sorry to say. Only the usual sordid mess.”

  The truth, it emerged as Dallington and Polly told him about their previous several nights’ work, was that the small room at the end of the corridor had been in semiregular use by one of the cabinet ministers as a place of assignation.

  “Who?” Lenox asked.

  The answer was Lord Beverley, Polly said. Lenox knew him, a junior minister with a wife and seven children. Polly said that the woman had been, alas, the wife of a colleague, Mr. James Winslow. According to what they had pieced together from the charwomen and footmen who had been nearby, the angry husband had, on a piece of anonymous advice, been going to the private chambers to confront his wife and the young lord.

  Beverley, cut off from any other route of egress, and with the sense of entitlement that a lord might be expected to have, had smashed the window and taken the gardens out.

  “And Winslow?” asked Lenox.

  “Found his wife there—she had told him she intended to dine out—and they had a furious row, apparently. She said that she was as surprised as he was to find them both there.
She had received an anonymous note asking her to be there—and from what we hear,” Dallington added, “very prettily turned the matter on him.”

  “There would certainly have been a duel between Beverley and Winslow,” said Polly. “There may still be. The involved parties are not of dovelike temperament.”

  Lenox sighed. A duel would mean a quick trip to the fields of Belgium or Germany, where such barbarism remained legal, and likely neither party would have thrown his shot away. Polly was right: the usual sordid mess.

  “Then what is the debate between you two?” Lenox asked.

  “Ah. That. Dallington wants to go back again and catch them.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “I see no profit in it for us.”

  Lenox looked at the young lord. “They’ll scarcely return to the same spot this time, after all that has occurred,” he said.

  Dallington looked as if he had handled this objection thirty or forty times already. “I think they will. People are fools, and Beverley has the room reserved nightly with the porter. I would wager the only thing holding him back is the common knowledge that Polly and I are there. This time I mean to conceal myself.”

  “To what end!” cried Polly. “Even if you catch him, there is nothing to be said to him, nor anything to be done.”

  “He can be shamed.”

  Polly looked at Lenox and threw up her hands. “Dallington is on friendly terms with this Winslow.”

  “No, my father is. But he’s a thundering good chap,” said Dallington angrily.

  Lenox knew Winslow vaguely, an older, very conservative, utterly responsible landholder, certainly selfless in his public service. They had never exchanged more than a civil hello. “What does Mr. Cheesewright say?”

  “He is satisfied with our answer,” said Polly. “And added specifically that we should at all costs avoid embarrassment to the Members. Of both the Commons and the Lords.”

  “Then I must side with Polly,” Lenox said to Dallington. “What business is it of ours?”

  Dallington shook his head. “Something about it is off.”

  “What?”

  Polly, with an exasperated gesture, said, “He’s being a fool.”