Recently, Kirk, Lenox and Lady Jane’s butler of long standing, a vast and venerable person of about sixty, had come into his fortune. It had passed into his hands by way of a maternal aunt. This respectable woman, living deep in Buckinghamshire, had succumbed peacefully one November night to the dream that awaits us all (as the lawyer who sent the news had rather impressively put it) and left her nephew nine hundred pounds, a sterling silver tea set, a traveling carriage, and a pair of good six-year-old horses.
Kirk had given his notice not long after receiving the news. Lenox and Lady Jane, though they congratulated him profusely, must have been visibly bereft, for Kirk had hastened to add that it was a conditional departure. He intended to stay as long as it took to find and train a suitable replacement.
That had been before the turn of the year, and when Lenox arrived home to Hampden Lane on this February afternoon, he found Kidgerby, Kirk’s much-harassed novitiate, continually in the wrong on matters large and small, holding the inkstand from the front hall table in one hand. Kirk loomed sternly over him.
“What has he done now?” said Lenox, hanging up his dark claret surtout.
Kirk took his gloves and hat. “Nothing serious, sir,” he said, though in a tone (intended for Kidgerby) that declared the words themselves laughable—the situation being, rather, serious in the extreme.
“No, please, I’d like to know. These small things can have great import.”
Kirk shot poor Kidgerby a significant look. The lad was about twenty-five and built like a beanpole. He had served competently and honestly as a footman in the house for several years, but his sudden elevation had overcome him, and these days he apologized as soon as he entered any room, and grew flushed with sadly little provocation.
Yet once you were a butler to a good family, your fortune was made. It meant higher wages, a different position in the delicate milieu downstairs, and even the possibility of more, for capable butlers were in hot demand. Lenox couldn’t count the number of people who had tried to poach Kirk—quite openly, no less; it was considered fair game.
“He’s left the inkstand dry, sir,” said Kirk. “There is a waste.”
Lenox frowned. “Well, Kidgerby, I hope this will be an important lesson. I don’t know, Kirk. I suppose we mustn’t be too hard on him. I’ve wasted gallons of ink in my time.”
“Certainly, sir,” said Kirk stiffly.
He looked as if he wished to contradict Lenox, and indeed Lenox wouldn’t have put it past him—his inheritance had gone to his head. The same thing had happened to his friend Gubby, whose younger cousin had died unexpectedly, making him the Earl of Wickham; much above himself for several months before he settled down.
Lenox offered Kidgerby a smile. “We won’t put you on the street over one inkstand,” he said.
Kidgerby had been getting redder and redder since Lenox entered, as if he was bursting to speak but didn’t dare. At last he couldn’t help himself.
“Congratulations on the success of your case, sir!” he cried.
“Kidgerby!” said Kirk, aghast.
“It’s quite all right. Thank you very much, Mr. Kidgerby. It’s kind of you to mention. Kirk, is Lady Jane in?”
“She is not, sir.”
“How long until supper?”
“A little more than an hour, sir.”
“Very good. Did Graham call round, by the way?”
“No, sir.”
Lenox was disappointed; he had been trying to see his old friend for some time, but without success. “No matter. I shall be in my study if anyone needs me.”
“Very good, sir.”
With a nod, Lenox left Kidgerby to his exacting pupilage, walking about twenty paces up the dark red-carpeted front hallway. He paused at his door when a shout and footsteps sounded from upstairs, but they were followed by a laugh, and he felt a quick joy spring up in his heart. Only the noises of home. He went inside the library and shut the door softly behind him.
This sanctuary of his took the shape of a rectangular room, with bookshelves running all along its two long walls. At the far end was a fireplace with armchairs and a liquor stand in front of it, while here, closer to the door, sat Lenox’s desk, near a row of tall, elegant windows overlooking Hampden Lane.
He went and stoked the fire (it wasn’t a large enough hearth to have a back log), then went to his desk and fetched a thin stack of papers.
He leafed through them, before, his curiosity piqued, going to sit in one of the armchairs so that he could attend them more deeply.
A glass of brandy, a splash of soda, and Lenox was situated. The fire, laid with warm coals earlier to keep the room at a non-arctic temperature in his absence, had stirred nicely into life, snapping a little here and there as peels of the kindling caught and curled. He contemplated it for a moment, sipped his drink, then turned his attention to the file again. It contained what little he knew about the Wallace murder.
It was the kind of crime that ought to have been easy to solve. More difficult were those that took place on the streets at night, in confused gin-motivated arguments that left someone dead mostly by violent accident rather than design.
By contrast, Wallace—Harold Catesby Wallace, as his full name went—had been killed in his own bed, inside a seemingly secure house, on a pleasant street down which a sober and respectable constable passed every thirty minutes each night, whistling a tune and swinging his lantern.
Mayfair was shaken.
Every account described Wallace, the victim, as a short, stout, irascible person. He was sixty-five at his death. He came from a prominent Warwickshire family and possessed independent means. His two younger brothers were both still in the army, the family profession, both distinguished gentlemen; but Wallace had been born with poor vision and had as a consequence been ineligible to serve.
He had never worked nor married. For society, he had chosen mostly to keep to fellow lovers of whisky, which was his great passion. He belonged to two private clubs dedicated to the appreciation of the potable, and once a year traveled from London to the peat bogs of Islay, where he had shares in a distillery and enjoyed, by all accounts, the prestige that the investment bestowed upon him.
Among the unlikeliest of men, in other words, thought Lenox as he flipped through his notes by the fire, to meet a violent death.
Yet he had. One evening a month before, Wallace had entertained two fellow whisky aficionados in his study between eight and eleven o’clock. Both were family men of good reputation, and both had been home within half an hour of leaving Wallace’s house according to their servants.
After they had departed, Wallace had asked his butler, one George Colmes, for a candle, and taken himself upstairs to bed. It was the last time he was seen alive.
Colmes had noticed at around nine o’clock the subsequent morning that the master was lying in unusually late. He had gone to the door and inquired from outside if Wallace required anything. A maid, Harriet Warner, tidying a guest room nearby, had witnessed this.
There was no response. Colmes had then noticed that the door was ajar, he said. This was unusual; Wallace, who feared burglars, generally locked it from within when he went to bed. The butler had pushed the door open slightly, and, according to everyone in the household, not just Miss Harriet Warner, immediately let out a blood-curdlingly loud cry.
In fairness, the sight that had greeted him was a grim one: his master, stone dead, eyes wide but lifeless, bloody bedsheets clutched with iron force in his hands.
Scotland Yard had acted swiftly. They interviewed the staff, turned the house inside out looking for the knife which the medical examiner had concluded must be the weapon—going so far as to dismantle and inspect the lavatory pipes—and put together a picture of Wallace’s movements in days preceding his demise.
This was the publicly available information, at least—which was all that the file Lenox perused, glass of brandy in hand, held, for he had been shut out from the case from the start. His recent investigation had still been near its outset when Wallace died, and though he had inquired, Scotland Yard by then had been entirely closed to him.
Whether or not he could have helped, what was certain was that the Yard’s great effort had produced no commensurate result. Immediate suspicion for the crime had fallen upon the staff, who numbered six, but as it happened all except Colmes had been permitted to attend a servants’ ball in Twickenham on the evening of the murder, and all had stayed until the last omnibus home, at five o’clock, well after the hour of the murder.
This left the butler himself. He became the obvious target of the Yard’s interest. Finally, in the absence of all other plausible explanations, detectives had arrested him on the strength of two facts. The first was that, besides Wallace, he was the only person with a key to the bedroom. (He had given it up without protest from his breast pocket to the first constable who arrived on the scene.) The second was that there had been a shirt in his closet with a dark, much-scrubbed stain upon one arm, which certainly looked like blood.
Yet there were doubts. From the start Colmes had denied his involvement in the crime with passionate vehemence, and while that was not surprising, circumstances were inclined to support this denial; he had been in Wallace’s service for more than twenty years and was well paid. Beyond that, he was himself a whisky drinker, and by most accounts on this score something like an actual friend of his employer.
Of course, friendship could not exclude the possibility of murder. But the butler’s behavior on the morning of the death had been unexceptional, and he was known within the household as someone who fretted over disruption, a very regular sort, put out by a late milk delivery—temperamentally unsuited to concealment.
And, Lenox reflected, each of the two points against Colmes was fatally flawed. For a start, why keep the bloody shirt? He would have had the whole night to get rid of it. And then, why would the butler have used the key to murder Wallace and then left the door open, knowing this would lead directly back to him?
He wondered whether these questions—which seemed so self-evident to him—could really be lost on the (remaining) detectives at Scotland Yard. He supposed it was possible. Of course, the issue remained of who had actually done the crime, but in the absence of an answer to this, the butler remained the Yard’s sole suspect. His trial was set for late March.
It did—bother Killian—affect Lenox after all, he found. Both the injustice of it, should this Colmes be innocent, as he suspected, and the faint uneasiness of knowing that such a murder had occurred a thousand yards from his front door and might go unsolved.
He was just on the verge of pouring himself another drink when he heard the front doorbell ring. There were muffled voices in the hallway and heavy footsteps, followed by a knock at the door.
It couldn’t be Lady Jane, obviously, since she would have come straight in. Lenox rose from his seat just as Kirk appeared in the doorway, a figure trailing behind him. Kidgerby?
No. “His Excellency, Mr. Benjamin Disraeli,” announced the butler.