Having had a happy luncheon with Jane, Lenox returned to Hampden Lane. He was hanging up his hat when Mrs. Huggins appeared.
“Did you give Cobb something to eat?” he asked her.
She looked horribly unhappy. “I tried, sir.”
“But didn’t succeed?”
“He said he didn’t want to impose on me and that he would get his own lunch—and he went and returned with three apples,” she said.
“Then everything ended well. How is he coming along on the bread, though?”
“Sir,” she said, and gave him a look of such betrayal that he felt guilty.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Huggins. Why don’t you bring in something light for the two of us now?”
He had eaten a hearty bowl of broccoli and potato soup served with crusty bread and plenty of butter at the coffee shop with Lady Jane—an ideal meal in this weather. But he would eat again to make the housekeeper happy.
In the brightly lit dining room, covered in stacks of paper and loose objects that the staff had been instructed not to touch, Lenox and Cobb traded reports of their progress. Cobb was still making his inventory of the contents of the trunk.
“I am all curiosity for Mr. Graham to return,” said the American.
“As am I,” said Lenox, “but I don’t know that we should look for him until much later today. He’s methodical.”
In the event, Graham proved Lenox’s prediction wrong. He was back not twenty minutes later, cheeks red, the cold rushing in the front door and down the hall behind him—most welcome in this case.
“Graham!” said Lenox.
The valet made straight for the dining room, unpinning his cloak and removing his hat on the way, sensing, no doubt, that the two investigators were eager for his report.
“How do you do, sir?”
“Very well—and you?”
“It was a satisfactory morning,” said Graham, taking a seat.
Lenox felt a surge of excitement. “Why? What did she say?”
Graham took a twice-folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket. “I wrote down everything I could after I left,” he said. “But two facts I found particularly salient.”
“Go on.”
“The first is that Winfield Bell suddenly came into a great deal of money in September.” Graham glanced between his listeners and was apparently content with their reaction, because he went on. “Mrs. Peck—though she goes by the sobriquet Lady Elaine, her name is Anne Peck—was sharing a room with Bell at the time.”
“How did they fall in together?” asked Lenox.
“They met three years ago, just after Bell moved here, at the White Horse. As she recalls there was an immediate affinity between them.”
“Sorry to interrupt. Please go on.”
“Mrs. Peck complained that she had often been responsible for Bell financially. He was fond of drinking and gambling, and she was secretive about what work he did, if any. In September, however, he returned home with a pair of gold earrings for her. She was wearing them this morning.”
“Did he offer an explanation?” asked Cobb.
“No. She assumed that he had been on a successful run at cards. But his behavior continued to change. For instance, he bought a new suit of clothes, and when she became sick in late September he paid for a doctor to visit.”
“Sweet of him. Did she have any idea where the money came from?”
Graham shook his head. “None. In fact, she is convinced of Bell’s innocence.”
“Innocence!”
“Yes, partly because of the second piece of information she offered that piqued my curiosity. It would seem that, whatever his other faults, he had no special obsession with matters of racial origin.”
“How do you mean?” asked Cobb.
“According to Mrs. Peck, Bell’s best friend from the merchant navy was an African, who stayed with Bell every time his ship stopped in London. The two of them would go on long sprees, she said—a week or more.”
Interesting. Lenox recalled that Bell had been in the American navy. This was one of the most common careers he met in his investigations, and it had struck him as deepening some prejudices irreversibly (against women, for instance) while loosening others (most obviously against other nationalities, since there was such a motley of people aboard a ship).
“But he was a member of the Patriots Abroad,” said Cobb.
Graham nodded. “I asked about that. She said that he couldn’t give a—well, she said it colorfully, but making the point that he had no interest in slavery, for or against. He was apolitical. I pressed her on that question. She insisted that he had only begun to frequent the White Horse because when he moved here, after his discharge from the American navy, he had a friend who was there every night. He was a game but passive member of the group, as I understand it.”
“I should have spoken to her long ago,” said Lenox. “Superb work, Graham. Thank you.”
Cobb nodded soberly. “It is. But tell us—what did you make of her honesty? Her story seems so clearly to Bell’s benefit.”
“On the contrary, it seems to me to guarantee that he was guilty of murder,” said Lenox. “That is how he came into his temporary fortune.”
“Yes. Yet it also makes it sound exceedingly unlikely that he would have murdered Gilman purely for reasons of racial pride or prejudice.”
“I do not think Mrs. Peck would be capable of constructing the character she has given Bell from nothing,” Graham said. “She is a lax talker—a drinker, incautious. My belief is that she was telling the truth.”
“Does she mourn Bell?”
Graham shrugged. “After her fashion, sir. I would hazard that she is accustomed to sudden loss—death included. She has a new male friend already.”
“From the White Horse.”
“No. He’s a police officer, she told me. With some pride.”
Lenox was curious. “Did she say whom?”
“No, she refused.”
At that moment Mrs. Huggins entered the room, trailed by a kitchen maid named Mercy. Between them they carried a banquet’s worth of food and drink, as if by sheer volume they could overcome Mr. Cobb’s taste—tea, buttered toast, a plate of soft cheeses, caraway biscuits, chocolate biscuits, and much more. Off to the side were a glass of milk, several brown rolls, and an apple.
Mrs. Huggins placed all of this on the table, with a face that seemed to say that she did so absolutely without judgment or intolerance. If a person wanted to eat a hundred apples it was all one and the same to her.
“Can I pour anyone tea?” she asked.
“I might as well give it a whirl, thank you so much, Mrs. Huggins,” said Cobb, smiling, and Lenox liked him all the more in that moment, for putting her at her ease.
In the end all three of them took tea, and some of the color came back into Graham’s cheeks.
Cobb was asking him further details about Lady Elaine, taking notes. Lenox, half listening, pulled Who’s Who over. He read his brother’s familiar entry—he himself had none—then looked up the name Ashbrook (no luck there), before turning to the page Cobb had flagged.
Witt, Forsythe, financier; b. Newcastle, 9 April 1808; educated as bookkeeper and cashier, Travers and Co., 1818–1824; traveled in 1825 to Mandeville, Jamaica, as bookkeeper to Elfrid Robinson; remained in employ there 1825–1828, surviving two epidemics of cholera, removing in 1828 to St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica; there founded Witt and Co. Shipping; m. 1830 Miss Alana Robinson, daughter of his former employer (d. 1851, in childbirth); who bore him seven children, five living; returned to England 1848, having survived further cholera outbreaks and a smallpox epidemic; m. Mrs. Chelsea Adkins, relict of Rev. Theophilus Adkins; returned in 1854 as MP for Rivington-upon-Tyne.
Mandeville, Jamaica. Tuning Cobb and Graham out entirely now, he read the entry again carefully, starting from the beginning. As he did, a strange idea stirred somewhere in his mind.