Chapter 15

 

In Which John Pickett Consults a Lawyer…and Gets a Surprise

 

Chancery Lane, as its name implied, had been the legal center of London since the Middle Ages, home to venerated bastions of English law ranging from the Six Clerks’ Office at 113 to the rarified environs of Lincoln’s Inn, which occupied much of the western side of the street. Several solicitors’ offices were also located here, along with a few commercial enterprises catering to those in the legal profession. Most prominent among these latter was one which had occupied the site of number 93 since 1689. This was the establishment of tailors Ede & Ravenscroft, makers of the judicial robes and white wigs that characterized British court proceedings as well as the scarlet, ermine-trimmed ceremonial robes of peers.

Pickett, slowing as he passed in order to survey the sampling of judicial accoutrements displayed in the storefront windows, had a sudden vision of himself clad in the robe and coronet of a marquess, and hurried past, shuddering.

As he approached his destination, however, it became clear that something was amiss at number 91. The pavement outside the building seemed to sparkle in the light, and the reason for this curious phenomenon soon became apparent. The front window had been shattered so thoroughly that not a single glass pane remained intact. The frame was smashed as well, creating a hole large enough that an adult could crawl through with relative ease. The door stood wide open, but this, Pickett recognized as he drew abreast of the establishment, was due to the young man—a clerk, if his sober clothing and harried expression were anything to judge by—sweeping the broken glass from inside with the aid of a broom. Looking beyond him into the shadowy interior, Pickett could see that every drawer and cabinet door was open wide, and the floor was littered with papers.

The Bow Street Runner who still lurked just beneath Pickett’s consciousness instantly asserted himself. “What happened here?” he asked sharply.

Pausing in his task, the young man leaned on his broom. “Someone broke into the office during the night.” He gestured toward the broken glass. “Came in through the window, as you can see.”

“Was anything taken?”

“Let him in, Hawkins,” a second man called from deeper within the office.

The clerk stepped aside and waved Pickett inside with a flourish, and the second man, clearly the superior of the two in both years and position, picked his way through the debris to greet him with hand outstretched.

“Good of you to come so promptly,” he said, pumping Pickett’s hand firmly.

“Oh?” asked Pickett, taken aback by the realization that he was expected.

“My clerk, Mr. Hawkins, came in at seven o’clock this morning to light the fires, and this”—his hand swept in a wide arc—“is what he found.”

“You saw no one?” Pickett addressed himself to the clerk, who had abandoned his broom and didn’t even pretend not to eavesdrop on his employer’s conversation.

Hawkins shook his head. “No one at all.”

Pickett turned back to the senior of the two. “Was anything taken?”

“It’s hard to say. The petty cash is undisturbed, so the fellow obviously wasn’t after money, but as for just what he was after—well, look at the mess he left behind.” He sighed and shook his head. “It’ll take days, perhaps weeks, to put everything back in order.”

Pickett stooped, picked up a paper at random, and glanced at it. …granted to the party of the first part…to be paid quarterly by the party of the second part… He looked back up at the two men as recognition dawned. “It’s a contract.”

“One of many: contracts, deeds, wills—” The elder man shrugged. “The same sort of thing you would find in any solicitor’s office.”

“So this is a solicitor’s office,” Pickett said, glad to have one puzzle solved.

“Why, yes.” The elder man, presumably the solicitor himself, frowned. “Why, yes, of course it is. Were you not informed?”

“I had only the street name and number,” Pickett said with perfect truth, neatly sidestepping the question.

“Well, then,” said the solicitor, clearly flustered, “let me rectify the omission at once. “Henry Watson, solicitor, your very obedient servant.” Mr. Watson offered his hand, remembered the had already shaken hands, and contented himself with a nod.

“John Pickett.” He returned the other man’s nod. “I believe you had some dealings with my father—also named John Pickett, but usually called Jack.”

“Ah, yes. I had the pleasure of assisting Mr.—let us say, Mr. John Pickett the Elder—only a few days ago. What a small world it is, to be sure!”

Pickett was still puzzling over this non sequitur when the clerk interrupted.

“They’re here, Mr. Watson, sir!”

Messrs. Pickett and Watson turned as one, and saw a slender youth clad in the blue coat and red waistcoat of the Bow Street Foot Patrol enter the office, followed by a taller man in street clothes, an incredibly handsome man with windswept blond hair and blue eyes which were at that moment wide with amazement.

“Good God!” Pickett exclaimed. “Harry?”

“Why, it’s Mr. Pickett!” cried the youth, flushing with pleasure. “Fancy our meeting you here!”

“Yates, isn’t it?” asked Pickett smiling down at Harry Carson’s young partner. “An unexpected pleasure.”

Mr. Watson glanced in confusion from Pickett to the newcomers, and back again. “Good heavens! Are you not, then, the Bow Street Runner I sent for?”

“He is most certainly not!” put in Harry Carson, with feeling. “I am! That is, we are!” His gesture belatedly took in the youth beside him.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Watson,” Pickett said hastily, seeing the solicitor’s brow lowering in growing indignation. “It was not my intention to deceive. In fact, I was with Bow Street for several years, until quite recently, so I suppose I—but that’s neither here nor there. It’s just that my father—died—a few days ago, and—”

“Oh, Mr. Pickett!” exclaimed Yates in ready sympathy. “I’m so sorry!”

Pickett acknowledged this expression of condolence with a little smile and a quick nod, but continued to placate the solicitor. “—And among the things found on his body when he died was a scrap of paper with your direction written on it. I’m trying to—to put his affairs in order, and thought perhaps you might have some idea of what he’d intended to call on you for.”

“Oh, very well,” Mr. Watson said, obviously torn. “I’ll let Mr. Hawkins talk to these fellows—it was he, after all, who discovered the damage—and I’ll tell you what I can about your father’s situation. In fact, he consulted with me only a few days ago. If you’ll just step into my office—you’ll see that it has not escaped the destruction…”

Still decrying the condition of his place of business, he gestured for Pickett to precede him through a door at the back of the room. If it were possible, the havoc wreaked upon this inner office was even worse than the damage to the outer room. Here, too, the floor was littered with papers, but the drawers of the broad mahogany desk, instead of merely hanging open, had been pulled out and dumped onto the floor, and one of the doors of the tall cabinet against the far wall had been completely ripped from its hinges. Even the painting hanging on the wall behind the desk—a portrait depicting a man, most likely the ancestor of the office’s current occupant, wearing a solicitor’s black gown and holding a rolled-up paper tied with a black ribbon—hung at a drunken angle, suggesting a search for a safe or some other compartment hidden behind it. Pickett was struck by the thought that this was no wanton act of destruction for its own sake, but a frantic search for some specific object, even to the point of sounding the desk drawers for a false bottom.

He made this observation aloud to the solicitor, adding, “I suppose it’s too soon to tell if there anything is missing.”

“Lord, yes!” said Mr. Watson, heaving a sigh. He picked his way through the litter to seat himself behind his desk, then motioned Pickett toward the room’s only other chair. “All these documents will have to be sorted and filed, but even after everything has been put back in order, it may be months, even years, before I realize that something that should be here is gone.”

“Are any of these documents”—he made a gesture that encompassed all the papers littering the floor—“valuable enough for someone to steal?”

Mr. Watson leaned over to pick up a collection of papers still stacked more or less neatly, and flipped idly through the pages. “Yes and no,” he said. “The paper itself is of no particular value, although I won’t deny that the vellum required for legal documents is quite costly. But many—I would not scruple to say most—legal documents represent considerable wealth, or its loss, for someone: a will, for instance, showing that a large fortune is not to be left as one or more of the potential legatees had hoped; the deed to a valuable tract of land, perhaps acquired through dubious means; a contract that requires one to pay a sum of money one can ill afford—need I go on, Mr. Pickett?”

“I see your point,” Pickett said. “But you say my father came to see you only a few days ago. Can you tell me why?”

“Normally, of course, I would not discuss one of my clients or his affairs with a third party, but if he has died, as you say…”

His voice trailed off uncertainly, and Pickett nodded. “Stabbed in a back alley in Limehouse.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Mr. Watson, pausing in the act of gathering up still more of the papers at his feet. “Is it possible that he knew—that he had cause to believe—”

“That he knew what?”

The words came out more sharply than Pickett had intended, but if the solicitor noticed, he took no offense.

“Forgive me. I only wondered if your father had any reason to suspect that his life was in danger.”

“Not that I know of.” But even as he refuted this suggestion, Pickett’s ears pricked up at the possibility. Nothing in his father’s manner had suggested that he harbored any fears for his life, but then, he was beginning to question how much he knew, how much he had ever known, about the man who had sired him. “What makes you say so?”

Mr. Watson leaned forward, propping his elbows on his desk and steepling his fingers beneath his chin. “Because,” the solicitor said, “he came to see me about his will.”