The next several days were busy. Lenox spent them closely tracking the developments in the investigation of Middleton’s murder, consulting frequently with Inspector Frost. The death had been an attractive one for the newsmen: a safe and respectable street, a safe and respectable victim, and the tantalizing possibility of an upper-class killer. As a result many of the locals in and around Maltravers Street were eager to be interviewed by the police. Their exhaustive canvass produced no tangible leads, however.
Lenox had been in touch with Leigh by wire; he was again safely ensconced at the University of Paris, he said. Lenox tried to insinuate to him the lurking danger of his situation, without mentioning the Farthings outright. But Leigh either ignored or missed his hints.
In the meanwhile Pointilleux, their young French associate, had been picking up a far older inquiry: the MB.
He spent the better part of two days away from the offices in Chancery Lane. He returned on Wednesday evening, his enthusiasm undimmed by the frigid winds—he was only twenty after all—and eager to impart his findings.
Lenox was in his office, studying a maddeningly incomplete list of Middleton’s and Beaumont’s clients. (“Why Beaumont’s?” Frost had asked. “It wouldn’t be the first time a man was mistaken for someone else and killed,” Lenox replied.) When Pointilleux came in, he pushed the list aside.
“The prodigal investigator! Welcome back. Have you struck gold?”
Pointilleux frowned. “I have struck snow. There is snow every place of this metropolis.”
“On the case, I mean.”
The lad patted a folio under his arm. “I think only silver. I can exclude one among the candidate.”
“Which one?”
“Mr. Leigh’s uncle, the Earl of Ashe.”
“On what basis?”
“If this gentleman would to have twenty-five thousand pounds sterling, many, many parties would be interest,” said Pointilleux, in his customarily roundabout English. “Not least Her Majesty Government—merchants up and down Jermyn Street and within the county of Cornwall—”
“Duchy. It’s a duchy, not a county.”
“What is the differentiation?”
Lenox started to speak and then stopped, checked by his own ignorance. “I say, I’m not sure I actually know.”
“Well, people all over this duchy will wish to speak to Lord Ashe—should he have twenty-five thousand pound within his possession.”
“Is that the sum of your evidence?”
“No. There is his will, as well. I have it here. It is of public record. The house and lands entail to his son. Any remaining monies are belonging to his sons equally. They should be able to have a frugal meal of chickens and potato, I suppose, ha, ha.”
“Very amusing,” said Lenox.
“In total it is probably no more than a few hundred pounds to each of them. How they will keep the house I cannot say.”
Lenox felt a sorry sinking emotion—not for Ashe’s sons, but because this meant that Townsend, the object of loathing for Leigh’s entire youth, the man who had killed Leigh’s father with his recklessness, was also in all likelihood his benefactor. And not once, now, but twice.
And at the same time, this news introduced the faintest glimmer of doubt in Lenox’s mind. Could his friend Gerald Leigh have killed Middleton, somehow, if his fury toward Townsend was sufficient? Certainly not, he thought—and yet, were it any other case, it was an idea that Lenox granted to himself that he would be forced to entertain. Covington’s was not far from Maltravers Street. There had been a window of an hour or so in which Beaumont had been absent from the offices that day, and also before Lenox, McConnell, and Polly had finally run Leigh to ground.
“And what of Townsend?”
“That is a harder fish to fry,” said Pointilleux. As was his custom when he deployed any English idiom, he hesitated proudly, with a very serious, distracted air to conceal it, before carrying on. “I think though—I think it is him.”
It seemed the reason the young Frenchman had been absent from Chancery Lane was that he had traveled to Truro, the chief seat of Cornwall, a good four-hour train journey outside of London. For his troubles he had been firmly rejected in his attempts to see Townsend’s will.
He had learned something of Townsend’s circumstances, however. Since Leigh’s boyhood, it appeared, the man had grown only wealthier. Before his death he had controlled several disparate businesses with, altogether, a few hundred employees.
What was more, he had fallen out with his only son, who lived in London, mixing in fast society. The general opinion was that Townsend hadn’t left his money to the young man, particularly because upon his death, according to locals more confiding than the courthouse officials, there had been several unusual legacies, including a thousand pounds to a disreputable old gambling friend, a few hundred to a local schoolteacher who had been cruelly jilted, and the very great sum of ten thousand to a former valet.
“No rumor of twenty-five thousand pounds to a scientist, I suppose.”
Pointilleux shook his head. “I’m afraid not. But he was not local.”
“Is there anything to tie Townsend directly to Middleton?”
“In the year before he has died Mr. Townsend has made several trips to London, of obscure purposes,” Pointilleux said, squaring off the papers he was reading where they lay on the desk.
“Whom did they hear from about their inheritances—the old gambling friend, the local schoolteacher, the former valet?”
“A local solicitor,” conceded Pointilleux. “But the affairs of Mr. Townsend were complex of the extreme. There are several attorneys involve alone in the disbursal of his firm, for instance, and I am suspecting his estate is much the same. This solicitor will answer only for a few legacies that he received the assignation to make.”
“Assignment,” Lenox said automatically.
“Yes, if you prefer, assignment.”
They talked a bit more. Pointilleux had further lines of investigation to pursue. But Lenox felt sure already that he had the truth in his hands. Beaumont had confirmed that Middleton had become busy with a large estate about two months before, which coincided precisely with the time Townsend had died, and what was more, Beaumont recalled Middleton saying it was a tricky one. It was some severe wasting disease that had taken Townsend, apparently. He would have seen his death coming in time to make a will.
And suddenly a stray thought came to him: The letter left for Leigh with the legacy had said that it wished its author could have had a greater opportunity to know him. That implied some previous relationship, if only a slight one.
Lenox stood up from his desk. He had been feeling thwarted by the case, which presented so many features that it ought to have been easy to solve—except that the strands kept separating, each mystery refusing to tie into the others.
But now he was heartened. “Congratulations, Pointilleux. You have given us our first real suspect.”
“Have I? Who?”
“Townsend’s son.”
“Why him?”
“If Leigh forfeited his claim to that money, it would by law descend to Townsend’s closest living relative. His son. What have you discovered about him?”
Pointilleux consulted his notes. The fellow’s name was Andrew Townsend. He lived in Soho, along a rather racy strip of territory around Lexington Street. That reference to fast company had been vague for a reason, however: Pointilleux knew no more than that several people in Truro had shaken their heads darkly when referring to the young man, and made oblique references to the racetrack and to women of loose morals.
“Do you have an address?” Lenox asked.
“I can locate it,” said Pointilleux.
“Good. We’ll go and see him in the morning, after I speak to Inspector Frost.”
They discussed Townsend further as Lenox gathered his hat and his gloves, preparing to go home. He would have stayed longer on another day—but tonight was the night that Jane and Sophia were finally returning home, and he wanted to meet them at Charing Cross.