A difficult week ensued for Charles Lenox—sleepless, agitated, full of regrets. Again and again he thought of ways in which he ought to have ensured that Eli Gilman’s killer could have lived to meet justice. A constable at the White Horse. Someone on the roof to prevent such an easy escape. It gave him no pleasure that justice had likely been done; he wanted the full facts.
Still, they were now all but sure that they had a name for the gray-haired accomplice: one Bert Smith, it would appear. The Yard had interviewed each of the so-called Patriots Abroad independently, and while they maintained a united front, to a man hotly denying any knowledge of the circumstances of Eli Gilman’s death, Stevenage suspected that the gray-haired man was the one person among their number they hadn’t been able to locate: Robert Smith, who went by Bert.
They searched his rooms near the White Horse and found them abandoned, with only a few unilluminating odds and ends left. He had no close family or friends.
As for the murderer himself, that was easier.
Winfield Bell, slayer of eminent American, plummets to death!
Full report inside; 16 individual illustrations of fatal chase
Inspectors Dunn and Hemstock lauded
That was merely one headline that made the papers about the man named Winfield Bell.
He had been an American, Bell, raised in Charleston before moving north at the age of fifteen to New York. There he had become involved with a gang of criminals operating from what had once been called Stuyvesant Meadows, now Tompkins Square. They knew this because Scotland Yard kept a file of all foreigners suspected of having fled America to avoid hanging; Bell disappeared shortly after the 1852 death of a shopkeeper, a murder for which he was the prime suspect.
“A shame that nobody checked for his name in the rolls of the gangs here,” Mayne said as they were reviewing the case together, the small team investigating the Murder at Paddington.
It was a dry, clear, cold day five days after Bell’s now infamous fall.
“It would take hundreds of hours,” said Stevenage. “Besides which, any of them with half a brain change their name when they come here.”
“Bell must have had a quarter of a brain, then,” said Mayne.
“Less than that after the fall,” Hemstock said.
“Hemstock, please,” said Mayne.
“What! You try and stop seeing it.”
Mayne shook his head but apparently forgave the insubordination on the grounds of Hemstock’s clear distress at the recollection. “Anyhow. The case may be resolved, but I would like to know more about Bell’s motivation. We cannot have every American politician who comes here murdered.”
“For their part, the Patriots are scared witless,” Stevenage said. “They’ve stayed silent, but they know they’re being closely watched. I don’t think they’ll move a finger without asking our permission.”
“Haase’s family will be paid a pension out of the railway fund,” said the man off to the side. Lenox glanced at him. He always looked familiar, somehow. From the theater some time perhaps. “It was voted yesterday.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Sir Richard. “His daughters were distrait. Poor girls, quite as they should be. And what about Hollis?”
“He departs in a few weeks,” Lenox said. “I shall see him before then, I hope.”
“He’s recovered?”
“Mostly,” Lenox replied.
“Good. Then see him out of the country as fast as possible, please.” Mayne closed the file he had. “The sooner this is behind us, the better. Find the gray-haired fellow one way or another. Smith. I don’t care how you do it. Dunn, you’re in charge of that. We need to give the Americans a satisfactory ending to this nasty business.”
“Very good, sir. Though as far as I can see it’s all a matter of them killing each other.”
“Be that as it may. Go on, then, thank you. Lenox, stay back, would you.”
Lenox nodded good-bye to the other men as they left. Mayne didn’t look up; he was writing something. Nor did he speak when they were gone.
Lenox waited, until at last Mayne handed him the paper upon which he had been writing and returned his pen to its stand.
1: G. L. Pritts
2: Y. Goodin
3: J. Colbert
—>
4. S. Brush
5. J. Barker
6. C. Noel
7. J. Dunn
8: B. T. Jones
9: Q. Jones
10: R. H. L. Creeley
“What is this?” said Lenox.
“A list of my best inspectors.” Mayne pointed at the sheet and then looked Lenox straight in the eye. “The arrow is where you would be.”
Lenox studied it. “Dunn is your seventh-best man?”
“That’s your first question? Yes, he is. And what’s more he would be higher up than Noel if he weren’t so hard-headed. He’s logical, at least.”
“I’m flattered,” said Lenox.
“Are you? My hope was that you would be insulted. Shouldn’t you like to be first?”
“I suppose so.”
“You might, if you come and work here.” A lengthy look passed between them. There was no need at all for Lenox to explain to Sir Richard Mayne why he could not. But Mayne was apparently counting on Lenox being monomaniacal enough to overcome his bone-deep class aversion to working for hire. “Consider it.”
“I will. Thank you, Sir Richard.”
“Fair warning: You will otherwise soon find me less amenable. Not out of spite. Your involvement has worked well twice. Three times if you count the Dorset business—though that was his own. Still, one time it will go wrong, and thirty people will arrive at my office to ask why the dilettante brother of an MP was allowed to interfere in Yard business.”
Lenox nodded. “I understand.”
Mayne stood up, ready to turn his attention to other matters, but took the time to add, “Dunn isn’t wrong about you, you know. He’s wrong in how he says it. But he’s not wrong.” Then he looked up. “What’s more, if you come, I can give you a budget to study crime. You needn’t take cases you don’t wish to. Merely consult. Build up that archive you’re always discussing. But with two or three intelligent clerks under you, good grammar school lads.”
Lenox walked home, cold and full of complex feelings. He felt an overwhelming resistance to the idea of working for Scotland Yard, among the Dunns and Hemstocks of the world—but those last words of Mayne’s, the promise of building something real and lasting, tempted him more than he wished to admit. What an edifice he could construct with more help and more time!
More immediate than any of this, however, was a determination to find the second man—not that he be found but that Lenox himself do it. (There was vanity for you.) The papers could detail Winfield Bell’s history with ostensible solemnity—their prurience showing right through the light topcoat of sobriety—and elegize Eleazer Gilman as a peaceful representative of an allied nation. They could decide that the matter was resolved.
But for Lenox it was not.
He returned home to find a friend and neighbor at his chessboard. Not Deere, though. It was Lady Jane.
She looked pale, out of countenance. “Hello, Charles,” she said, rising. “I hope I am not intruding?”
“Never in life.”
She sat down again with her quiet, graceful smile. Mrs. Huggins had given her tea. She poured him a cup, and he took a grateful sip, his ears and nose still cold.
“I came over because I have some business with you,” she said once he had sat down.
“Do you? Not chess, I hope. Deere—Grey, rather—beats me often enough to suffice for both halves of the marriage, I should have thought.”
“No, I loathe chess. Life is too short to play chess. Who told me that?”
“I cannot say.”
“Duch, perhaps. Anyhow, listen. Now that you have pushed this fellow off the chimney tops—”
“Jane!”
“I’m sorry—now that he has fallen”—and here she winked—“I wonder if you might really settle down to the business of Catherine Ashbrook.”
“I didn’t push anyone off a building.”
“I shall be sure to tell her that.”
“You’re going to drive me around the bend. Anyhow why does it matter now?”
“Because she is not short on suitors,” Lady Jane said. She seemed serious. “I do not impose her upon you, Charles—if you do not find her congenial. But if you do, I beg you would let me take the reins of your social calendar, just for these first weeks of November, before everyone goes off on their holidays.”
He hesitated. He remembered with vividness that moment standing in front of his window late at night, the loneliness of it; the hunched man passing solitary down the snowy street.
“Very well,” he said.
She was well bred enough not to dwell on her victory. “Good. And now I must ask for your help.”
“Anything, of course.”
“It’s about James.”
“Oh?”
“They are going to ask him to leave. A wife in his regiment told me.” Lenox’s heart fell. Deere hadn’t told her himself, then. “My question is how can I convince him to stay.”
“To stay?”
She nodded. She looked like misery incarnate—at least, to Lenox’s closely watchful eye. “I will tell you something that I cannot tell even my other friends.”
“What?”
“When he is gone—well, you cannot imagine feeling as alone as that. It is the very worst thing. He can’t leave. He can’t. And he won’t ask me to come to India. I’ll ask, and he’ll say no, and I’ll have to listen.”
It had been many years since he had seen tears in her eyes for herself, perhaps even since some adolescent game in the gardens that had gone against her, so self-possessed was she in general—yet there they were, plump and unfallen in the corners of her eyes.
He set down his cup of tea. “I’m so sorry, Jane. I can try to speak to him.”
“Could you?”
“And if it doesn’t work, we may hope that it is only for a short time.”
She wiped her eyes. “Yes. All right. But would you try? I’m sure he’ll stay if he sees how very much it means to me. I’m sure he will.”