‘The Rag?’ Grand repeated. It still didn’t sound right.
‘Army and Navy Club to you and me, Matthew. I’ve never been across its portals. I nearly did, when I was with the Telegraph, but the members don’t cotton to the Press much. That’s why I think your other card would look better tonight.’
The cab lurched to a halt at the corner of the Mall and St James’s Square. The place was buzzing, people everywhere, laughing and joking away the warm, glowing night. The lights burned late at the Horse Guards and, far away through the trees, Buckingham Palace had never looked so radiant. All London knew the Queen was not there. The widow was skulking at Windsor, the gossip ran, her heart forever broken over her beloved Albert. At the palace, it must have been the Prince of Wales holding a soirée.
Grand was impressed with the opulence of the Rag, its brass gleaming in the firelight, its windows with a promise of good food, good wine and good company. The flunkey on the door tipped his hat to them, although he was a little surprised that they were not in evening dress. Gentlemen in infantry scarlet and cavalry blue sauntered in the foyer, interspersed with white cravats and black tails and the obligatory full sets of the Navy.
The visitors’ dress might not have been right but the card did the trick. ‘Captain Grand,’ the man on the desk beamed. ‘Third Cavalry of the Potomac. Welcome, sir. It’s not often we have an officer from the colonies. Er … former colonies. May I enquire who you wish to see?’
‘We have an appointment,’ Grand said, ‘with Lord Arthur Clinton.’
The man’s face darkened. ‘Ah, could you bear with me for a moment, sir?’ and he slipped into an anteroom.
‘This could go one of two ways,’ Batchelor murmured out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Since His Lordship called yesterday, I did some digging. Not only is he not an MP any more, he’s not in the Navy, either. Resigned in April, apparently. Oh – and the bad news? He’s seriously in hock. He was declared bankrupt two years ago.’
‘Well,’ Grand said, retaining the smile for the benefit of passing members, ‘you have been a busy little enquiry agent, haven’t you? And when were you planning to fill me in on these little details?’
‘About now,’ Batchelor winked at him. ‘Look, Matthew, I know we don’t have time for this, what with the Dickens case. And I don’t know that there’s much we can do. But at least I’ve got across this threshold – one of my little ambitions: humour me.’
‘Gentlemen,’ the desk man was back, looking grim. ‘Could you follow me, please?’
They did, into the bowels of the building, through twisting passageways without number, until they came to a dark door. The flunkey knocked.
‘Enter,’ they all heard and the flunkey opened it.
A large man sat behind a leather-topped desk. He wore naval mess dress and had a large glass of rum on the table beside him. ‘Thank you, Thompson,’ he said, and the flunkey left.
‘I’d get up, gentlemen,’ the naval gent said, ‘but I’m afraid my gout has the better of me tonight. That’s why,’ he waggled the glass at them, ‘I’m dining down here, alone.’
‘We have an appointment,’ Batchelor said. ‘With Lord Arthur Clinton.’
‘One he won’t be keeping, I fear.’
Grand and Batchelor looked at each other.
‘Brace yourselves, gentlemen,’ the man said. ‘Lord Arthur is dead.’
They looked at each other again.
‘Suicide?’ Batchelor asked.
‘Scarlet fever,’ the man said. ‘Oh, forgive me. This has all come as something of a shock. I am Anthony Rivers, Commodore. I served with Arthur when he was a midshipman in the Crimea. Dear boy, dear boy. You are …?’
‘Grand and Batchelor,’ Grand said. ‘Enquiry agents.’
‘Really?’ Rivers raised an eyebrow.
‘Lord Arthur consulted us,’ Batchelor said, ‘on a matter of some delicacy. Yesterday.’
‘Yes, well, there it is,’ Rivers sighed. ‘That’s the very devil about scarlet fever, isn’t it? Right as rain one day, in God’s jollyboat the next. Tell me, this “matter of some delicacy” – may I enquire as to its nature?’
‘No, sir,’ Grand said. ‘I am afraid you may not. It is, as we have all agreed, a matter of some delicacy and you are not, I believe, a blood relative of the deceased.’
‘Oh, no, dear me, no.’ Rivers sipped at his grog. ‘Merely a ship that passed him in the night.’
They made their excuses and left and it was not until they were in a cab again, jingling back to the Strand, that Batchelor said, ‘I didn’t know that about scarlet fever, Matthew, that it kills so quickly.’
‘It doesn’t,’ Grand said. ‘Leastways, not in the States. Maybe you’ve got a different brand over here.’
The offices of Chapman and Hall were still in sombre mood that Friday morning when Frederic Chapman arrived. The black bow still graced the front door. Miss Emmeline Jones was at her desk, ledger open in front of her, checking the stamp petty cash against letters sent. Sometimes, she could curse – in only the most ladylike way, of course – Anthony Trollope and all his works up in a heap; and that didn’t even include his dratted son, the young idiot, who drove her beloved Frederic to such apoplexy. This morning, she cast all Trollopes from her thoughts and smiled up at Chapman as he entered in a waft of Thames miasma, a sight to chill the blood of the strongest man.
Frederic Chapman was in no mood for niceties. He swept through the outer office and disappeared into his own inner sanctum; he needed to have a serious think. Edwin Drood was preying on his mind. It was sad, of course, very sad, that Dickens had dropped off his very lucrative twig at all, but to do it at a pivotal point of one of the few books he had ever written that could be said to be brimful of suspense – that was just downright perverse. He was already muttering to himself as he divested himself of his coat and pushed back his shirtsleeves, ready to make what notes he could, to try and bring this wretched business to a conclusion. As far as he could see, it had to be Uncle Jasper – but surely a writer of Dickens’s calibre couldn’t be that obvious. He shrugged to himself; all things being equal, Dickens had never been what you could call subtle.
‘Hello.’ The voice, issuing as it did from the depths of the armchair pulled up to the empty grate made him yelp with surprise.
‘Verdon! How did you get in here?’ Chapman was holding his chest and leaning heavily on the corner of his desk. ‘You could have killed me, man.’
‘It isn’t hard to get in here, Frederic,’ Verdon said. ‘All you need to do is to get in before Em … I’m sorry, Miss Jones, gets here and you can walk into any of the offices you like. She is like Cerberus’s dog, but even she has to sleep.’
Chapman grunted and sat behind his desk. ‘I was always of the opinion that Miss Jones spent all her life sitting at that desk,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it has ever occurred to me that she left her post.’ He bestowed a wintry smile on the editor, despite the stickiness of the season, to show that he was joking. ‘Please, don’t do it again. And … excuse me a moment.’ He reached over and took a brass speaking tube from its hook on the wall, removed the stopper and blew down it sharply. Both men heard Miss Jones’s shriek of surprise through the door. After a moment, her voice came, uncannily, both from the outer office and through the tube, in spectral echo.
‘Yes, Mr Frederic, sir?’
‘Miss Jones. Do these offices lock?’
‘Beg pardon, sir. I don’t quite …’
‘Hell’s teeth, woman. I couldn’t be much clearer. These offices. Are there keys?’
‘There are keys to the street door, sir.’
‘But nowhere else.’
‘I believe in your uncle’s day, sir. But not any longer.’ There was a pause. She did so like to be helpful. ‘There are keyholes.’
‘God give me strength. They are not much help without keys, woman. Kindly engage a locksmith. I want all of these rooms lockable by nightfall. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. Now don’t sit there counting your stamp collection or whatever it is you’re doing. Get that locksmith here. At once.’ He slammed the speaking tube back in its holder; Miss Jones – who was still cradling her end at her ear, hoping for more words from the golden lips of her beloved – was half deafened. She rang her bell for the office boy and sent him in search of a locksmith. Some things, she thought, as she tried to recall how far she had got in her stamp counting, really were beneath her dignity. Cradling her ear with one hand, she began again from one.
In his office, Chapman was giving Verdon short shrift. ‘I am happy to know, Gabriel, that I shall not be finding you in here uninvited again. We may have known each other for years, but there are standards! However, since you are here, may I ask why?’
‘I was just …’ Verdon was suddenly tongue-tied. ‘With the sad demise …’
‘Yes, yes, yes. I suppose you’re here like all the rest. You have written a novel, blah, blah, blah. In deference to the great man, Drood should remain unfinished, blah. To fill the pages, you have a tale that will wring withers, freeze blood and make a maiden blush; pick any two per episode. Am I right?’
‘Not quite,’ Verdon began.
‘Near enough, though, I’ll warrant,’ Chapman snapped. ‘Now, get back to wherever you editors gather and do … whatever it is you do. I have work to do. And, Gabriel?’
‘Yes, Frederic.’ Verdon was keeping his temper with difficulty.
‘If I ever, ever find you in here again, you are to consider yourself disengaged from the employ of Chapman and Hall, longest-serving editor though you may well be. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Verdon drooped, as only a misunderstood editor can. ‘I do understand, sir.’
‘Good. Now, get out. I have some work to do, even if you haven’t.’
‘’Ere, it’s that copper again,’ Mrs Rackstraw announced.
Chief Inspector Williamson barely waited until she had gone. ‘Hasn’t got any better, has she?’ he sighed.
‘We do have offices, Chief Inspector,’ Batchelor reminded him, ‘if Mrs Rackstraw upsets you so. Just a few doors down.’
‘You have an office,’ Williamson corrected him. ‘No, I wouldn’t miss the cheerful bonhomie of this place for all the world. And, in any case, the last time I looked, your office was full. Someone was in there trying to swing a cat.’
Batchelor decided to ignore him. Grand, his nose, uncharacteristically, in a book, remarked without looking up. ‘Don’t tell me James has been upsetting the medical fraternity again.’
‘Oh, I expect he has,’ Williamson said, sitting down unbidden. ‘But that’s not why I’m here.’
Batchelor put away his pen and leaned back. Dolly Williamson was the doyen of the Yard detectives these days, now that Whicher and Tanner had gone – one to a nervous breakdown, the other to pour pints in Hampshire. The man’s suit marked his calling, the glittering, deep-set eyes even more so. Yes, Mrs Rackstraw had got it right – he could only be a copper.
‘So,’ Batchelor smiled. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’
‘Arthur Clinton,’ Williamson said.
‘Who?’ Grand and the truth could merely be on nodding terms at times.
Williamson laughed. ‘That’s what I love about you boys. You enquiry agents are all the same. You’d like your clients to believe you’re officers of the law, but that’s the last thing you are, isn’t it?’
‘We prefer “agents of justice”, Chief Inspector,’ Batchelor said. ‘We happen to believe that justice is more important than the law.’
‘Hm.’ Williamson nodded, clasping his hands across his ample waistcoat, for all June still burned. Almost unheard-of temperatures were no bar to keeping up appearances, to his mind. ‘But the problem with that little analogy is that justice is blind. I’m not. Arthur Clinton came here to see you two – or perhaps just one of you – on Tuesday last.’
‘You were having him followed,’ Grand said.
‘Too right I was having him followed. The man’s a nob, in every sense of the word. He’s due in court soon. I don’t want him following his confrères and doing a runner to the continent. He’s got dubious contacts everywhere – Rome, Paris. So, what did he want?’
Grand put down his book. ‘You do know the man’s dead, Chief Inspector?’ he asked.
‘Of course I do,’ Williamson said. ‘Keeping up to snuff is what they pay me for. And that makes my enquiries – and yours – all the more interesting, doesn’t it? My case is ongoing. There are others due to face the high court. It doesn’t end with Clinton.’
‘I’m afraid, yet again,’ Batchelor was patience itself, ‘that we cannot divulge—’
‘Of course you can!’ Williamson bellowed, sitting up and pounding the arms of his chair. ‘Your client’s dead. All bets are off. I can close you blokes down.’
‘No, you can’t,’ Batchelor told him. ‘We’ve broken no law. We’re just doing our job.’
‘Yes. And I’m doing mine. You’re obstructing the police in …’
‘All right,’ Grand interrupted in a gentle, reasonable tone. ‘We’ll tell you what you want to know if you answer our questions first.’
Williamson blinked. ‘What questions?’ he asked.
‘What was the cause of Clinton’s death?’ Grand asked him.
‘Scarlet fever,’ Williamson said.
‘How long had your boys in blue been following him?’
‘Three weeks solid, but on and off since the magistrates’ hearing. You do know he’s a Maryanne, don’t you?’
‘Had they noticed anything odd about him, your boys in blue?’ Grand asked, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
Williamson roared with laughter. ‘Don’t get me started,’ he said.
‘No, I mean over the last three or four days,’ Grand explained. ‘Did he look unwell?’
‘I don’t know if scarlet fever shows, does it?’ Williamson frowned.
‘Well, yes and no,’ Grand said. He picked up his book again. ‘Wintle’s Pharmacopeia is a damn good read, believe it or not. James, you interviewed Arthur Clinton. Did he complain of a headache?’
‘No.’
‘Sore throat?’
‘No.’
‘Did his neck appear swollen? Did he have difficulty speaking?’
‘No, I …’
‘And what about the rash? It must have been obvious.’
‘Matthew …’
‘My colleague was sitting as close to the man as I am to you, Chief Inspector, and he saw none of the symptoms described by the admirable Wintle in his Pharmacopeia.’ He tapped the volume again.
‘So, the doctor got it wrong,’ Williamson shrugged.
‘What, Chief Inspector?’ Batchelor roared with laughter. ‘You’re doubting the word of a member of the medical profession? Dr Beard would be horrified.’
‘That’s different,’ Williamson said.
‘One last question.’ Grand leaned back in his chair. ‘Have you seen the body?’
‘No,’ Williamson frowned. ‘I have no reason to … Why? What are you thinking?’
‘He’s thinking,’ Batchelor said, ‘as I am, that a soon-to-be-peer of the realm, accused of sodomy, might consider taking his own life while the balance of his mind is disturbed.’
‘That’s possible,’ Williamson conceded. ‘Now it’s my turn. And I repeat – what was Clinton’s business with you?’
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Grand said. ‘He wanted to know what could be done in the event of his being harassed by police brutality.’
‘Brutality,’ Batchelor added, ‘that may well have led to suicide.’
‘Back home,’ Grand said, ‘that’d be reckless endangerment. You’d get five years hard.’
Williamson was on his feet. ‘Yes, well, consider that, Mr Grand.’
‘What?’ Grand asked him.
‘Going home.’
‘You young hooligan. Gedoutofit!’ They heard the shriek, then a clash of pans and even a squawk as a cat somehow got in on the action.
‘Is there a problem, Mrs Rackstraw?’ Matthew Grand popped his head out of the upstairs window. It was high noon and the little yard at the back was stinging hot in the heat, the cobbles themselves wobbling and the tarmacadam melting on the road.
‘This whippersnapper says ’e knows yer. I told ’im not to be so bloody cheeky. My gen’lemen don’t have truck with the likes of ’im.’
‘No, no!’ Grand shouted. ‘It’s all right, Mrs Rackstraw. Truck is the order of the day.’ He bolted for the stairs. He didn’t like the murderous look in the woman’s eye and he’d seen what a carpet looked like after she’d used her beater on it. The coiled cane work was in her deadly grip as he ran.
‘Isaac?’ Grand frowned as he reached the yard. The boy was cowering in a corner, doubled up with his hands over his face. ‘Isaac, is that you?’
It was. Isaac Armitage had collected together his savings from Mr Dickens’s wages and had ridden the pony to the station. For all he was houseboy to the most famous writer in the country, he had only been to London once before in his life and he hadn’t liked it. Mr Dickens had always called it ‘town’ as if there was only one. To Isaac Armitage, town was Rochester and he felt at home there. The last time he had been in the metropolis, he had been with Mr D, who had taken him to the zoological gardens. This time he had been on his own and crossing Waterloo Bridge he had realized how huge and terrifying the place was.
Nobody – until this mad old besom with the carpet beater – had spoken to him; and him the houseboy of the most famous writer in the country. He had looked at Mr D’s books on London in his great study at Gads Hill and had memorized the way to the Strand. The houses, the hotels, the shops, soared above him and a pigeon paid him a compliment, right on his head. He was still trying to remove that when he collided with a crowd on the pavement. A cab horse was down, wilting in the heat, whinnying pitifully in its traces and lolling its tongue. Isaac had never heard language like it – from the cabman, from the onlookers, from the harassed peeler who was trying to move them all on.
He’d got Mr Grand’s card tight in his sweaty fist and he’d got the office right, but it was all locked and barred, so he’d flipped the card over and gone to the address on the back. He hadn’t realized that Messrs Grand and Batchelor, enquiry agents, shared their lodgings with the inmates of a lunatic asylum.
‘Don’t you give ’im no ’ouse-room, Mr Grand,’ Mrs Rackstraw warned. ‘We don’t have no riff-raff ’ere in Alsatia.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Rackstraw,’ Grand smiled rigidly, telling himself firmly that the woman really would have to go. ‘Isaac, are you thirsty?’
‘Parched, guv’nor,’ the boy said.
‘Come with me.’
It was cool in the parlour of the Coal Hole, and the smells of the barrels and the river almost cancelled each other out. Isaac sat with a pewter tankard in front of him, proud that Mr Grand should think him worthy of a pint. Thomas Barnardo, had he been watching, needn’t have worried: Isaac’s pint had more water in it than the Thames. Which is why Grand was drinking brandy.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘tell me again, from the beginning, why you’ve come so far,’ he jerked his head towards Alsatia and the wide world beyond, ‘and risked so much, to come see me.’
‘Well,’ Isaac looked at the pint, as though the froth would focus his mind, ‘like I said, the place was done over.’
‘Gads Hill Place?’
‘Not the house; just the chalet.’
‘When was this?’
‘Two days ago. Well, nights.’
‘Wednesday.’
‘That’s right. I got up as usual. Half past six.’
‘And?’
‘I checked the stables, sponged Dinky’s nostrils, gave him his feed.’
Grand supposed that Dinky was the pony and so said nothing.
‘I was just on my way to the house to get Georgy’s … Miss Hogarth’s orders for the day and I seen it.’
‘What?’
‘The chalet door was open.’
‘Forced?’
‘Yeah. There was glass all over the step and the carpet.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I went in.’
‘And?’ This was like pulling teeth.
‘The whole room was turned over – cushions ripped, books upended. Mr D’s desks pulled open.’
‘Anything taken?’
‘I don’t know,’ Isaac shrugged. ‘You’d have to ask Miss Hogarth.’
‘What happened next?’
‘I went to the house. Cook was in the kitchen and I told her.’
‘What did she do?’
‘Went up to Miss Hogarth and told her.’
‘What did she do?’
‘Come down, told me to stand up straight and close me mouth, like she always does, then went with me to the chalet.’
‘Did she send for the police?’
‘No, Mr Grand, that was what was so peculiar and why I come here. I offered to saddle Dinky and ride to Rochester but she said no. She said there’d been enough trouble in the Dickens household and she didn’t want no more. I helped her put the place straight. Then Mr Brunt come and mended the glass and the lock.’
‘You say the glass was smashed?’
‘Yes sir. Like crystal, it was.’
‘And the chalet turned over?’
‘That’s right.’
‘That would have made a fair amount of noise, Isaac,’ Grand said. ‘Where do you sleep?’
‘At the back, sir, over by the stables.’
‘Not in the house itself?’
‘Only in the winter, sir, when it’s brass monkeys.’
Grand had no idea what time of year that was, so he let it go. ‘And it goes without saying, I suppose, that you heard nothing.’
‘Not a thing, sir,’ Isaac said. ‘There was a smell, though.’
‘A smell? What, like burning? A pipe, something like that.’ It seemed unlikely that a burglar would stop to smoke, but stranger things had happened.
‘No, sir, nothing like that. In the chalet, when I first went in, I smelled it. Mr Brunt, he smelled it too. Attar of roses, he said. And he should know.’
‘Attar of roses, James.’ Grand poured them both a brandy. ‘Mean anything to you?’
‘Not a lot.’ Batchelor raised his glass in a silent toast. ‘Perhaps burglars down in Kent are a rather strange lot these days. Or am I letting the Clinton case get to me? Tell me, why did Isaac come to you?’
Grand shrugged.
Batchelor mulled it over. Grand wasn’t most people’s idea of a father figure. But in the various interviews they had both had down at Gads Hill Place, there had been no talk of a Mr Armitage. Perhaps Isaac was an orphan of the storm looking for someone to rely on; now that Dickens was dead, he was an orphan, pure and simple. It was amazing, taken by and large, that he wasn’t known throughout the household as David Copperfield or Oliver Twist, Richard Carstone or Philip Pirrip. Isaac Armitage was perhaps a name Dickens was saving for later. ‘Maybe he feels something’s not right,’ he said. ‘If you were housekeeper to the most famous writer in the country and said writer’s place is burglarized, wouldn’t you be round hotfoot to the nearest law? More, wouldn’t you insist Scotland Yard was called in?’
Batchelor nodded. ‘Our friend Miss Hogarth is playing her cards too close to her chest, Matthew,’ he said. ‘Time you did something about that.’
‘I can’t keep going back to Gads Hill Place,’ Grand complained. ‘She wasn’t exactly welcoming at first last time. I think the next time she will turn the dogs on me.’
‘I didn’t notice any dogs,’ Batchelor said.
‘Figure of speech. There’s something fishy going on down there, though, and we need to find out what it is. But by a more roundabout route. That’s what we need.’
‘Sala?’
‘Perhaps not the most brilliant idea you have had, James,’ Grand observed. ‘Since Sala is paying us to investigate, asking him questions as to what might be going on may prove to be counterproductive. He might ask for his money back; and I don’t know about you, but the cigar and brandy lifestyle is one I could easily come to like.’
‘I didn’t mean interrogate the man,’ Batchelor said, miffed. ‘I mean, get some more names from him. We’ve tried Ouvry and Dolby and I can’t say they were very useful. We’ve still got Forster to go, but he’s not proving to be an easy man to catch.’
‘Might Chapman and Hall be a way in there? I know he doesn’t work for them per se, but they might know where he is at any given time. He can’t just have had Dickens as a client, surely?’ Grand wasn’t really sure what an agent actually did. He had seen them at work at his father’s business, but it always seemed to involve a piece of paper, a hurried walk and a hunted expression; what came of such behaviour, he could never ascertain.
‘I should think that he did,’ Batchelor said. ‘Why would he need another? Dickens far outsold any other ten writers put together; I should think that ten per cent of that would be very nice indeed.’
‘Hmm. True. Perhaps Sala could tell us a few others to approach. I’ve always had a bit of a hankering to meet Ouida, if I’m honest.’ Grand was ever a man with a surprise up his sleeve.
‘Shall we ask him for a longer list, then? We don’t have to tell him we’re down a blind alley. We can just say we leave …’
‘No stone unturned. James, I think you might be able to pull that one off.’ Grand sipped his brandy and flipped the lid of the humidor. ‘Off you trot then. Look. I can’t go; I’m just lighting a cigar.’