The Inheritance

by Charles Finch

  “Let’s both.”

  They walked out toward the luncheon, whose speeches were still audible in a muted drone from two doors away, and Frost said, “We’ve found something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you remember the stationery you spotted in Middleton’s desk—at home, not in his chambers—which had his name and the address 24 Aldershot Place printed upon it?”

  “I do.”

  “This morning we finally sent someone there. It’s a gambling parlor, as it happens. A very high-end one, Milton’s.”

  Lenox saw the link immediately. “He was in debt.”

  Frost nodded, surprised. “We think he might well have been, yes. How did you guess?”

  “If he gambled there frequently enough that Milton’s gave him complimentary cards—to correspond with his fellow players, I’m sure—then he cannot have been ahead over the course of his career. What did he play?”

  “Hazard.”

  Lenox winced. The game involved not even the mathematical skill of the card player—it was one of pure chance, in which the dice were cast again and again, until they came up two or three, “crabs,” or in the new parlance occasionally “craps,” and the player was out. “How bad was the debt?”

  “We do not know, except that they would no longer extend him credit from the start of last summer.”

  “And he stopped playing there?”

  Frost shook his head, “On the contrary, he was away only a few weeks after they closed his house account, according to the steward. He returned with ready money.”

  “Did you ask Beaumont about this?”

  “We still haven’t managed to find him.”

  That was odd—and anything odd attracted Lenox’s eye, at this point. He nodded, thinking. “I wonder if it was a secret from him, too. They were financial partners.”

  “It doesn’t seem like it, if Middleton had the stationery of 24 Aldershot Place, after all,” Frost pointed out.

  “Yes, but no doubt only to communicate with his fellow gamblers, as I said. It’s quite customary. Sometimes these men don’t want each other to know their home addresses.”

  Frost nodded. “Yes.”

  “Classes cross at a place like that. The Duke of Beckham used to play penny faro at a brothel, according to the rumors of the ballroom.”

  “Middleton’s stakes were very much higher.”

  Lenox nodded. Suddenly he had a thought. “I can guess where he got his money.”

  “Where?”

  “Do you remember telling me that Terence Fells’s name was connected to Gerald Leigh’s, in Middleton’s ledger?”

  “Of course.”

  “You assumed, reasonably, that because Fells’s name and the initials TF began to appear at the same time, it was one of Middleton’s usual abbreviations—they’re all over the ledger. But I think they may be unrelated.”

  “Why?”

  “Because TF—it could stand for ‘The Farthings,’ couldn’t it?”

  Frost stopped and turned to Lenox, whistling a low whistle. “You think a man of Middleton’s position would go to the Farthings for money? That would be madness. And well out of his usual sphere.”

  “If he was a bad gambler, he might have exhausted all other avenues of income. Think of Charles Fox—one of the most distinguished orators in the history of Parliament, and a hundred and forty thousand pounds in debt over cards. Or Byron’s daughter, the Countess of Lovelace, who used her mathematical abilities to devise a system for betting horseraces and ended up penniless.”

  They had arrived just outside the doorway to the luncheon room, and a burst of applause broke out. “The Farthings must have decided that he was more use to them alive than dead. Until—the contrary.”

  Lenox nodded slowly. “Yes. I still have my doubts about that.”

  He was about to elaborate when there was a soft cough behind them. A porter whose jacket had the seal of the Royal Society on its breast was standing with a letter on a silver tray. “Mr. Lenox?” he said.

  “That’s me.”

  “A letter, sir.”

  Lenox took the letter, which had his name upon it in a bold hand, frowning. “Who delivered it? Nobody knows I’m here.”

  “I don’t know, sir. My apologies. It was left upon the front desk a few moments ago, just when the porter had stepped away to assist a gentleman with his luggage.”

  Lenox tore open the letter in a ragged strip—and as he did so a small object fell with a ping onto the marble floor.

  A farthing.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Even before the coin had struck the ground, Lenox felt a coldness grip his heart. For a moment he and Frost both stood and stared at the coin where it had landed, and then Frost stooped down and picked it up, rising with a shake of his head. “Too far,” he said immediately.

  Lenox’s thoughts were with Sophia and Lady Jane. “I have to go and tell my wife,” he said. “Don’t leave Leigh for anything. I’ll be back shortly.”

  Frost grabbed his arm. “It would be unwise to go off alone after such a message, Lenox. Wait, would you?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  He made it home, looking over his shoulder the whole way for a trap but finding none, and discovered Lady Jane in her drawing room, writing letters. She looked up at him curiously when he entered. “Home already?”

  “Where is Sophia?” he asked.

  “Upstairs in the nursery. Why?”

  Just at that moment there was a merry cry, with what he could never have mistaken for anything but his daughter’s joy in it. “Thank goodness.”

  “Why, Charles?” said Jane again.

  He told her. She had been thrown out of her daily schedule by some threat to Lenox more than once, but now that they had a child she grew angry at these intrusions of his work into their life. With justification.

  “Will this never end?” she asked, standing up.

  “My idea is that you should go to Toto’s for the night,” he said. “That will be no hardship. Sophia will like to sleep in George’s nursery. And there are already men going directly to the Farthings’ chief to arrest him, including the superintendent, if I have my way—I wrote him, through Frost, and used Edmund’s name.”

  “Charles.”

  “Nothing will come of it all. You have my solemn word.”

  He felt sick, though, as he kissed Sophia’s cheeks ten minutes later. “I shall be over to see you this evening, love,” he said.

  When they were gone, he was alone again. He stood for a moment—away from the windows, he noticed, fearful of bullets—and let his thoughts run.

  Why had they targeted him now? First Middleton had been sent this message of the solitary farthing; then an amateur detective. Was it because Frost was too powerful a figure, embedded within the official body of Scotland Yard, to menace?

  But then—why send such a message at all? Why not strike, if you intended to strike? It was this question that puzzled him most, and had before that day, too.

  Sophia and Jane, at least, would be safe at McConnell’s heavily fortified house on Grosvenor Square, a place that would offer protection both in numbers and in concrete physical ways that not many other private houses could.

  He left by the back gate, coat up around his ears, eyes darting left and right. There was a threat in every face he passed; at the corner he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder, and turned, violently.

  Only Pargiter, the newsman. He looked surprised. “All well, Mr. Lenox?”

  “Oh—fine, yes.”

  “I thought you might want the afternoon papers.”

  “Later, Pargiter, later. Thank you.”

  It was only when he was sunk low within the anonymity of a London taxi a few minutes later that he felt safe again. He directed it back to the Royal Society.

  Frost greeted him in the marble rotunda. “Family safe?” he asked.

  “Safe,” Lenox confirmed.

  “You’ll be happy to know we’ve been bu
sy here. There is a large group going to the Blue Peter. At least twelve men, including, I believe, Superintendent Gilbert.”

  “Good.”

  “Yes, I think so. There are fifteen of these gangs—any one of them that we really turned our attention to could be gone in a week, and they know it. The trouble is another would pop up. But it would be worth it to keep you and Leigh safe. As I said, it’s gone too far. Let them kill each other—but not us.”

  “Thank you, Frost.”

  The inspector nodded seriously. “Don’t mention it. I’ve instructed one of my men to return here as soon as possible with a report on the arrest—they may begin coughing up what they know immediately, the scoundrels.”

  Lenox puffed out his cheeks, very modestly reassured. “Thank you,” he said again. He had fewer friends at the Yard than he once had. His dear friend Jenkins was gone. But here was a new one. “That’s decent of you.”

  “Not at all.”

  To Lenox’s amazement, lunch was still, after this interruption, somehow a going concern, the gentlemen in the room having loosened their ties, poured out brandies for themselves, and lit cigars, and the room whirring with amiable clubroom chatter. (One word rose above the noise again and again, eliciting a laugh almost every time. In the American state of North Carolina forty or fifty years before, Rowan had told them over lunch, some particularly fatuous politician had made a speech, immediately derided as unctuous and full of airy sophistry; it was delivered in the county of those parts called Buncombe, and almost immediately, in that mysterious way of slang, that name had become a byword for just such nonsense—soon making the transition from its proper form to the more generic “bunkum,” or, as the men of the Royal Society had taken to shortening it in their appropriation of the word, to indicate friendly disagreement during a postprandial conversation, “bunk.”

  “I think they’re bunk,” Frost muttered at last, watching them.)

  Leigh was in deep conversation with a slim red-haired young man, very earnest and it would appear very engaging, too.

  “Nothing off?” Lenox asked Frost.

  “Nothing.”

  They were standing on the periphery of the room, watching the luncheon. Lenox hadn’t taken more than a small glass of wine—he wanted a clear head—and Frost’s eyes didn’t leave Leigh. Nor did Cohen’s; he stood close to the room’s other entrance.

  Lenox’s old friend eventually noticed them, however, and beckoned his young red-haired friend to come and meet them. “Lenox, Frost—this is Mr. William Shandy. A man after my own heart: untrained.”

  “How do you do?” said Mr. William Shandy, untrained.

  Lenox and Frost introduced themselves. “An amateur, then?” asked Lenox, civilly, despite the anxiety that still gripped him. “What is your field?”

  “I propagate ferns, sir.”

  Instead of saying “how infinitely dull,” Lenox nodded politely, and inquired about the ferns; yes, they were easy to grow; no, they had few predators in England; yes, there were interesting facts about their inherited traits.

  “This is the glory of England, this kind of thing,” Leigh said, beaming. Lenox hadn’t seen him so happy that day. “You must remember that Darwin studied medicine and divinity, nothing else. He became a natural philosopher simply by attempting natural philosophy over and over! Which is how we shall launch an aeroplane into the heavens, one day, I imagine, no matter how many of us have to fall down first.”

  “You cannot believe that rot,” said Lenox. “Mr. Shandy, do you?”

  Shandy looked both scandalized that Lenox had spoken to Leigh in such a way, and uncomfortable that the discussion had moved on from ferns. “I cannot say, sir. I really cannot say.”

  Leigh was immediately approached by another fellow of the Society, who drew him into a conversation about the microbe (Lenox hoped never to hear the word again) and had soon induced one or two other men to join their colloquy. The word “bunk” came along, and Lenox wondered how much longer he would have to endure the interminable gathering.

  Frost pulled a flask from his breast pocket. “You look as if you could do with a sup, after the last few hours.”

  Lenox took the flask, a much dented and tarnished old pewter object, inscribed with lettering too darkened to read, and said, “If you absolutely insist.”

  The liquid inside was fiery—every time he visited a workingman’s pub, he had to admit his tastes had grown genteel in the years since university—but its results were as gratifying as the finest Jura malt could have provided, filling him with a warm calm.

  He asked what it was, and Frost said, “A London mash.”

  “Not for the faint of heart.”

  “Ha! No.”

  “Your flask has been through the wars.”

  Frost looked down at it in his hand. “Oh, yes, quite literally. It was my grandfather’s. He had it in Crimea—he wore it over his heart, trusting that it might stop a bullet. Instead he got shot in the upper leg, like a common poacher, he always says. He mostly sits with the leg up in Lambeth now, where he has one of those new stores you’ve probably heard of. A nice little business, paid for by his pension.”

  “New stores?”

  “Have you not been? You serve yourself. The shopkeeper does nothing but sit behind the cash register like a grandee.” Frost sighed and capped the flask. “Someday I’ll do it myself. I only hope I don’t have to get shot in the leg for the pleasure. Granddad gave me the flask when I joined the Yard—said perhaps it would catch a bullet for me, even if it hadn’t for him.”

  “Not today, I pray,” said Lenox.

  “No—not today, I quite agree.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  It was fifteen or twenty minutes later when Frost’s man Phelps returned, coming straight to report to them. “Checking in, sir. Nine arrested at the Blue Peter; a squad of four remaining to scrabble out any others lurking in the shadows; statements being taken at the Yard as we speak.”

  “Fast work, Phelps, well done. Did Superintendent Gilbert accompany you?”

  “He did, sir. Came in his coach and four—like a hound from hell he was too, reading them the warrant himself.”

  “Who was the highest up of the gang?”

  “Spencer, sir”—that was the deceptively friendly figure behind the bar at the Blue Peter, with the vulpine face—“and Smith. Assorted other lieutenants. One odd thing, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “All of them swear, separately, that the Farthings would never, ever send a farthing coin in an envelope, for any reason, to anyone. Impossible, they said. Outright impossible.”

  “Not as intimidation?” asked Lenox.

  “No, nor as any kind of oath of revenge or the like.”

  Frost furrowed his brow. “And you believed them?”

  Phelps cocked his head, raising his eyebrows, as if to say it was difficult ever to know what to believe, but then nodded cautiously. “I did, rather, sir. They seemed properly outraged by the very idea.”

  The act had never made any sense. “Which of them seemed outraged?” Lenox asked.

  “All of them, sir, as I said. Starting with Spencer.”

  Lenox glanced at Frost, who had a hand on his cheek, scratching his thick gray beard distractedly. “What do you make of that?”

  “Peculiar.”

  “It might have been the bright idea of someone lower down,” said Lenox. “Anderson and Singh, for instance.”

  Phelps shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir. Spencer said something odd. ‘The first rule is to leave no trace.’ The moment he said it he looked as if he wished he hadn’t—only he was so hotted up at the accusation that it slipped out.”

  “Did you ask them about Wasilewski?” said Frost.

  “Yes, sir. Nobody admitted even to knowing the name.”

  “Mm. To be expected.”

  At long last, the luncheon appeared to be breaking up. Standing at the edge of the room, Lenox, Frost, and Phelps watched as various men took leave o
f Leigh, who was polite with all of them, though slightly distant, too, Lenox observed.

  When Leigh broke away he came over to Lenox. “It has just been observed to me by an informed gentleman that if you were somehow able to conjure your way back to the year 1500, you would be dead within two days.”

  Lenox frowned. “Murdered?”

  “Murdered! Heavens, no. You must take your mind off murder.”

  “Of what, then?”

  “Of disease, at least according to him. Every man and woman who reached their majority in medieval London had already passed through a gauntlet of diseases that it would chill you to your marrow if I named them. When I say that the bubonic plague and typhoid fever are two of the nicer ones it gives the picture, perhaps.”

  Lenox, to whom a protracted battle with typhoid fever seemed only marginally less pleasant than remaining at the Royal Society as these scientists slowly stumbled themselves back out into the world, far too drunk to do much of anything on behalf of British science for the rest of the afternoon, nodded, and said, impatiently, “But really, hadn’t you better be going? It’s already nearly three.”

  “Is it?” Leigh frowned, glancing up at the clock. “Worse luck. I shall have to skip Rowan’s—but I will sit to a cup of tea with him and Baird. It’s only civil, after all they’ve done for me.”

  As Leigh waded again into the room to find these two, Lenox wondered if he ought to leave, and go report to Jane that the full force of the Yard had landed on the Farthings. The trouble was his uncertainty about who was behind the farthing after all. Should he send them into the country, Sophia and Jane?

  He was about to tell Cohen and Frost that he had to go, when suddenly something struck him, however. It came of glancing at Cohen, who was standing with Leigh’s small brown leather weekending bag. The sight of it took Lenox back to where this had all begun, at the Collingwood Hotel.

  Strange to see that name in Middleton’s appointment ledger, now that he thought of it. Most of the hotels there were large, but the Collingwood was small, only twenty rooms.

  Why did it bother him all at once, that reappearance?

  Lenox looked around the room, eyes narrowed, thinking. He tried to recall what else had stood out for him from Middleton’s journal. The initials, certainly: AR, PQ. He tried out the names of everyone he could recall from the case, trying to squeeze them into those initials, but without success.