A Stranger in Mayfair (7 page)

“Would you mind if we spoke to a few people in the house?” asked Lenox. “I have a spare evening.”

“I really think—the Yard has been excellent. Mr. Fowler was here just this morning.”

Then why did you ever come to me?
Lenox thought. All he said was, “He’s excellent, yes, but perhaps another set of eyes could see something new.”

“Two more sets,” said Dallington and grinned.

Ludo grimaced but relented. “Of course,” he said. “With whom would you like to speak first?”

“Have you been through his room at all?”

“Oh, no. The maid stripped off the sheets but left everything else as it is. For his mother, you see. We thought she might want to look over his things before they’re packed up.”

“When does she arrive?”

“Today. She’s traveling by post.”

“What’s the delay? It’s been four days.”

“I don’t know,” said Ludo. “Perhaps she had to find someone to look after her public house.”

Lenox shrugged. “At any rate, it might be valuable to speak to her. But that’s for tomorrow. Shall we have a look at the room? We need to know more about Frederick Clarke.”

“By all means,” said Ludo.

From the rather glum front parlor where they had been sitting, Ludo took them into the entry hall. There he led them through an unobtrusive door, painted the same color as the walls, and downstairs to the servants’ quarters. The largest room downstairs, the kitchen, was bright and busy with cleaning up after supper. Down a slim hallway to the right was a row of doors.

“Which one was it again?” said Ludo to a pretty young girl. “Frederick’s room?”

“It’s the last on the right, sir.”

The chamber when they reached it proved exceedingly modest, with only a bed and a small side table in it. There was one closet, too. On the side table were a stack of books and a candle that had burned down to a snub.

“Bring a lamp!” called Ludo down the hallway, and a moment later the same girl scurried down with it.

“Are you Jenny Rogers?” asked Dallington.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“How the devil did you know that?” asked Ludo.

“She doesn’t look like Betsy Mints, aged forty, cook, to me,” said Dallington.

“You’ve been looking into my household?”

“Yes.”

“Quite routine,” said Lenox.

“Still, I say, it’s a bit awkward,” said Ludo.

“We’ll need to speak to you soon, Miss Rogers.”

“You’re not a suspect,” added Dallington, still smiling. Lenox sighed. His apprentice couldn’t resist a pretty woman.

Chapter Nine

After Jenny Rogers had blushed, offered a confused curtsy, and retreated down the hallway, Lenox and Dallington turned into the room to begin a proper examination. Ludo stayed in the hall, trying to peer over their shoulders and shifting nervously from foot to foot.

“He was reading rather heavy stuff,” said Dallington, crouching down to look at the names on the spines of the books upon the side table.

“What?” said Lenox.

“There’s something called
The Philosophy of Right
by a chap named Hegel, a pamphlet on universal suffrage, and a little quarto of George Crabbe’s. He must have been the best-educated footman in London.”

“Those are all from my library,” said Ludo. “We encourage the staff to pluck what they will from it, but I’m afraid most of them read books from Mudie’s—adventure stories and romances. Three-volume novels. You know the sort of trash.”

“I rather like the triple-deckers myself,” said Dallington. “They make the time go.”

“To each his own,” answered Ludo frostily. His vices were not intellectual ones, at any rate.

“What sort of education did he have?” asked Lenox curiously. He stood up from his examination under the bed. “It must have been rather atypical. One of my friend Thomas McConnell’s footmen is quite illiterate.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know. As I told you before, I didn’t pay the lad much attention.”

“I don’t blame you if he was always on about Hegel,” murmured Dallington, then laughed at his own joke.

There was really very little to see in the room. Lenox examined the entire bed and its frame for anything hidden—a note, a diary—but found nothing. The side table was similarly unrevealing. A small shelf in the corner had an assortment of meaningless trifles: a jar of ink, a picture postcard of Stratford with nothing on its reverse, a ball of black India rubber. The only thing that intrigued Lenox was a scrap of paper that read,
When’s your birthday? C. said you would turn 20 soon. Did you have the day off last year?

“Does this note mean anything to you?” asked Lenox.

“I was curious about it myself,” said Ludo. “I asked Collingwood, and he said Elizabeth sent it, through him—we let the staff have their birthdays off, but she realized she didn’t know Clarke’s. She knew all the others.”

“Wouldn’t Collingwood have found that out? I imagine days off are within his purview.”

Ludo shrugged. “You know how solicitous my wife can be. She felt badly to think that we hadn’t given him his birthday off.”

“I see.”

The closet was the last place in the room that hadn’t been searched; in fact both Dallington and Lenox had run their eyes over everything else, shaken out the books, felt for lumps in the pillows. Lenox opened the closet, vaguely hoping to see something revelatory—something covered in blood, say—but he was disappointed. There were two tidy suits of livery, both black, such as a footman might wear, and four shirts.

“We provide them, of course,” said Ludo.

There was also a very fine gray suit, his one personal suit, that looked expensively tailored. On a shelf behind these was a stack of shirts. Lenox shook out and refolded each, then did the same with two pairs of trousers, checking the pockets, three pairs of socks, and a nightshirt.

“Defeated,” said Dallington.

“Probably,” replied Lenox.

He knelt down and looked at the shiny black shoes on the floor of the closet. He groped inside the left and found nothing, and then he groped inside the right and found—something.

He pulled it out and saw that he was holding a gentleman’s signet ring, made of heavy greenish-yellow gold. On its oval face was an intricately worked griffin with a small ruby as its eye.

“Good Lord,” said Dallington. “It looks like an heirloom.”

“I should think so. It’s shined smooth from use on the outside.”

“What is it?” asked Ludo, still in the hallway.

“You can come in,” said Lenox.

“I’d rather not.”

The detective flipped the ring. On the reverse of the griffin were two initials:
LS.
“I think perhaps you’d better,” he called out to Ludo.

“What is it?”

Lenox went to the hallway, holding the ring up between his thumb and middle finger. “Does it look familiar?”

For a long time Ludo peered at the ring uncomprehendingly. “What is it?”

“I believe it’s your ring. Unless there’s another
LS
in the house.”

Realization dawned on Ludo’s face. “The thieving bastard! That’s an old Starling family ring. I had it engraved when I was at university.”

“You didn’t give it to him?”

“Give it to him! Never in a century of Sundays!”

“Then I’m afraid he may have stolen it. I’m surprised, however. Would his duties as a footman have taken him near a jewelry case?”

“Anything’s possible.”

Lenox frowned. “Perhaps somebody else took it and put it here.”

“It even could have happened after Clarke’s death,” said Dallington.

“Yes.” Lenox examined the ring, holding it an inch from his eye. “Ah—or perhaps not,” he said.

“Why not?” asked Ludo, still in the hall.

“There’s another engraving, on the bottom inside of the ring, opposite your
LS. FC.
”

“Frederick Clarke,” said Dallington.

Lenox nodded.

“The ruddy nerve,” said Ludo.

“Did you wear it often?”

“That? No. That doesn’t mean I intended it as a present for a footman.”

Lenox peered around the room, the ring now in his clenched fist. He gave the bed a tentative prod and thought over what he had seen. From the kitchen a sound of heavy washing filled the room’s new silence.

“It’s strange,” he said. “A strange room.”

“Why?” asked Dallington. “Strikes me as in the normal run of things for a footman.”

“Does it really? It’s extremely spartan, for one thing. I doubt the other servants’ rooms are as unadorned as this one. Could he possibly have been here four years and left so little a mark?”

“Perhaps he moved between rooms?”

“I doubt it. Ludo?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I think he’s one of those people who lives a life of the mind. Did he often take books of this sort from your library?”

“Yes, quite regularly according to Collingwood.”

“Yet contrast that with this ring.” Lenox held it up again. “Why take such a personal bauble for himself? From everything this room has to show, he cared nothing at all for physical comfort or ornament, but this is what he chose to steal?”

“Worth a damn lot of money,” said Ludo.

Lenox shook his head. “No. It’s not about the money. He engraved his initials on it. That shows he valued it.”

Dallington said, “Of course.”

“Something odd was happening in this young man’s life. Intelligence combined with menial labor…I wonder, is it possible he had found his way into crime?”

“Of course he had,” said Ludo. “My ring.”

“Not that, no. Think: a well-tailored suit, a signet ring…it looks to me as if he might have been playing the young aristocrat. Some scam or other, couldn’t it be?”

“Perhaps that’s why he reads,” added Dallington excitedly. “To impress people—to seem like a varsity man!”

“I say, could I have that ring back?” said Ludo.

“Of course, here it is.”

After handing Starling the ring, Lenox stood in the doorway of the room for a long time, thinking. Nobody spoke. The rhythmic sound of washing—what must have been the sound of Frederick Clarke’s life—wore on like the blank, unvarying noise of an ocean.

“Something deep is happening here,” said Lenox. “Deeper than I realized at first.”

Chapter Ten

An interview with Jenny Rogers left Dallington perhaps half in love—she was extremely soft-spoken, with an endearing way of furrowing her forehead to show how intently she was listening—but yielded little helpful information. What was most interesting to Lenox was that she seemed genuinely sad to have lost her friend. It made Frederick Clarke more real, made his death seem graver, when she talked with a smile on her face about him.

She had been working at the Starlinghouse for a year. “I’ll never forget,” she said, “at the end of my first week he took a piece of the cake they was having upstairs—Mr. Starling’s cake,” she added, remembering he was there, “and put a candle in it for me. ‘Happy first week,’ he said.”

As far as she could recall, she had never seen him wear a gray suit or a gold ring, or indeed anything other than his footman’s livery. He always had his nose in a book.

She had oberved occasionally in the past that he had scrapes on his hands.

“Occasionally,” murmured Lenox after she had been dismissed down the opposite hallway (the staff were segregated in their sleeping quarters, men down one hall and women down another). “If it was an ongoing condition it means there’s no significance in their directly preceding his death.”

“They still might be related.”

“Perhaps.”

Betsy Mints was even less helpful than Jenny Rogers. A small, thick woman, she had a deeply stupid face that was red from the constant heat of cooking over fire. In conversation, however, she was witty enough, in a voluble northern way. Her experiences with Frederick Clarke were extremely limited. She thought he was quite handsome, very efficient, and rather rum—quiet, inward, that is to say—but that was the extent of her analysis of his character.

Lenox had higher hopes for Jack Collingwood, the young butler. For one thing he directly supervised Clarke. Lenox and Dallington sat at a table with him while Ludo hovered anxiously behind.

“I apologize for the lateness of our meeting,” said Lenox.

“Not at all, sir.”

“It’s nearly ten o’clock. You must be off soon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“From what I understand, Frederick Clarke was a good footman?”

“Entirely blameless in the conduct of his professional duties, sir.”

“Did you like him?”

“Like him, sir?”

“Were you friends?”

“No, sir.”

“What was your impression of his character?”

“Mr. Clarke was quiet and studious. He preferred to be in his room, reading, if he had spare time. He spoke to me once or twice about going back to school. I dissuaded him from it, of course. He was excellent in his work and could have risen to be a butler in due time.” This said as if there could be no higher conceivable ambition.

“Who do you think killed him?”

“I have no idea whatsoever, sir. A vagrant, I might venture.”

“But to what end? Did he carry money?”

“No, sir. He and I both have our wages deposited in Mr. Starling’s bank, and I never saw Mr. Clarke spend his on anything. As for household money, that is my province exclusively.”

“What was his day off?”

“Thursday, sir.”

“That’s all?”

“The family eats a cold collation after church services, following which the servants have Sunday afternoon to themselves.”

“Did he leave the house or stay in?”

“Left, sir, invariably. That’s quite usual, however.”

“Did you ever see him wear a gray suit?”

“No, sir.”

“Or wearing a gold ring?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you ever celebrate his birthday?”

“No, sir.”

“And you saw cuts or scabs on his hands?”

“Yes, sir. I reprimanded him once—his only reprimand—for having unsuitable hands. Of course under his white gloves it didn’t matter, but then it’s the principle of the thing, I believe.”

“Did you ask him where he got them?”

“No, sir.”