An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) (13 page)

At the end of this passageway they came to a door marked
HEAD WAITER
. Dallington knocked at the door, and it was drawn open at once, revealing a jowly man, nearly as large as the tiny room he inhabited, with white hair and thick glasses. He sat at a desk covered with papers.

“This is Minting,” said Dallington. “Minting, Charles Lenox.”

“M’lud,” said Minting, just rising an inch or two from his seat and then, this tremendous exertion concluded, emitting one or two very heavy breaths as he sat again.

“You are the head waiter here?” asked Lenox.

“I doubt Minting has lifted a tray in fifteen years,” said Dallington. “He keeps the club bets.”

Hence the paperwork on the desk. “With all due respect, how would Mr. Minting, in this office, know better than the porter who had entered and exited the club?”

“He knows,” said Dallington simply. “Minting, we want to learn whether Archibald Godwin was here in the past day or two.”

“Arrived at 12:40 this postmeridian, departed 1:50, on his own, placed no bets.” The velocity with which Minting delivered these facts seemed like a rebuke to Lenox for his doubts. “Sat alone for lunch. Spoke with several young men in the card room but played no hands.”

“When was the last time he was here prior to this afternoon?” asked Lenox.

Without hesitation Minting answered. “November 1873.”

“Minting’s got an excellent memory, you see,” said Dallington to Lenox. “Everyone in the club rats to him, too, it’s a disgrace.”

“False, m’lud,” said Minting complacently.

“Did Godwin stay here?” asked Lenox.

“No, sir. In ’73 it was the Graves Hotel in Pall Mall, not half a mile away. Quieter, he said. He’s a country gentleman. The lads can get a bit noisy in the lower rooms here. Carries into the quarters.”

“Did he drink?” asked Dallington.

“Half-bott of the Ducru-Beaucaillou with lunch. Deplorable vintage, if I’m being honest.”

“Did he tell anyone of his plans, of what brought him to London?” asked Lenox.

“Business, he said.”

“Did you see him?” asked Dallington.

“No, m’lud.”

The two men standing exchanged looks, to confirm that neither had another question. “Thank you, Minting,” said Dallington and passed a coin to the man.

It disappeared into one of the folds of his voluminous waistcoat. “Sir,” he said and then, as they were closing the door, added, “Congratulations on the Dwellings Act, Mr. Lenox.”

Dallington smiled as they walked down the corridor again. “He’s a genius, Minting. Laziest chap you ever saw, though. Otherwise he might have been a very great man—perhaps in your line of work. Perhaps in business, for I know him to have a remarkable knack for figures. As it is I think he’s grown richer than half the club’s members over the years. He made a packet when Siderolite won the Goodwood, though he gave some of it back on Doncaster last year.”

“Strange fellow.”

The consultation over, and therefore his duty discharged, Dallington had gone from looking poorly to looking positively deathlike. “Would you mind if we sat down for a moment in the back bar? It will be quieter there.”

“You poor soul. Come, let’s skip the bar. If you can make it into the carriage we’ll take you home.”

“That might be for the best.”

As they drove, Dallington slumped into the corner of the carriage, eyes closed and breathing reedy. He could barely make it up the stairs at Half Moon Street; Lenox hadn’t entirely realized the effort it had required for him simply to leave the house this evening. When he did reach his rooms he collapsed, gratefully, onto the divan in his sitting room. Lenox would have stayed to look after him, but Mrs. Lucas was already attending to it. A smell of sulfur lingered in the air.

“I’ll be around in the morning,” said Lenox. “We’ll hope for some response from Godwin’s people in Hampshire before then.”

Dallington lifted a hand in response, and as Mrs. Lucas hustled a bowl of soft broth up the stairs, the older man took his leave.

At home Lenox said hello to Lady Jane—it had been a long day since he had seen her that morning, and he spent ten minutes acquainting her with its events, and another ten hearing of her own activities—and then scribbled a note to Jenkins, telling him what they had found at White’s.

Now, both rather exhausted, Lenox and Lady Jane ate supper together, a comfortingly warm soup, to begin, and then a roasted pheasant with peas and potatoes. The best part of the meal, though neither was a nightly drinker, was the bottle of red wine they shared, quieting their brains, making the candlelight look soft and sleepy, dividing the buzz of the day from the peace of home. Slowly their voices relaxed, and their thoughts seemed to linger in the air. The conversation had nothing sharp in it. When the plates were cleared away they went to the sitting room, each with a small cup of coffee, and sat and read for a little while, hands occasionally touching—a reassurance. After a drowsy half hour upon the sofa they retired, both ready for sleep.

When Lenox woke in the morning there was a telegram for him, handed in at Raburn Lodge, Hampshire. Both Jenkins and Dallington were copied. It read:

Dear Sirs STOP I hope you have somehow mistaken your man and that my brother is alive, but fear that the worst is indeed true STOP Despite my distress I know that Archie would wish you to be in full possession of the facts of his trip to London STOP As such I will be in London by our 3:18 train and staying at the Graves Hotel STOP You may call upon me there at your convenience STOP Henrietta Godwin

Lenox took down his copy of Bradshaw’s and looked up the timetables. The 3:18 would put Henrietta Godwin in central London at half past four, and from the station she might take another twenty minutes to arrive at her hotel. To permit her some time to settle he decided that he would call in on her at a little bit past five o’clock in the afternoon, teatime, and wired to both Jenkins and Dallington that such was his plan. This wasn’t quite his case; then again, he was involved and felt a measure of responsibility, and unless he was positively making a nuisance of himself he was determined to stay on and see it through to the end. He wanted a word with that light-haired man from Gilbert’s. Pride, he supposed. By that sin fell the angels.

Graham was up, too, and having taken breakfast in his own rooms now called upon Lenox. Seeing his secretary sent a shadow of unease across the Member’s thoughts. He ignored it. There would be time to speak with him later, and the day was busy. “You are meeting with Lord Heath at nine o’clock,” Graham said, “and with Phillip Marsden at ten, both to discuss the naval treaty.”

“Could you push them?” asked Lenox.

“Marsden perhaps,” said Graham, frowning. He looked tired, and Lenox realized that when he slackened the pace of his work Graham was the one who took up the extra line. “Lord Heath is insistent that he must see you.”

“There was a murder in Knightsbridge last night.”

“So Kirk told me, sir,” said Graham, smiling faintly. “I recall a time when such affairs were your chief interest.”

A very distant time, his tone seemed to imply. “Dallington needs my help.”

“Very well, sir, I will change Mr. Marsden’s place upon the schedule. Lord Heath you will see at nine?”

“Yes, fine,” said Lenox. “But in exchange I need a favor—I need you or Frabbs to find me a moment in the schedule at Buckingham Palace, to visit with a woman named Grace Ammons. She is one of the Queen’s social secretaries. She is in Mrs. Engel’s office.”

Graham raised his eyebrows slightly but merely nodded.

Throughout Lenox’s meeting with Lord Heath, which lasted three-quarters of an hour, his mind dwelled not, sadly, on the proliferating French navy, nor on the quantities of armaments that Heath was positive Parliament must vote to order, but upon Miss Grace Ammons and the corpse of Archibald Godwin. Halfway through the meeting Frabbs entered the room.

“What is it, boy?” Heath asked with tremendous vexation, a huge lump of a man.

“Pardoning myself, sirs, Mr. Graham wished you to know, Mr. Lenox, that you will be welcome upon your errand any time after ten o’clock.”

“Yes, all right, thank you,” said Lenox, trying to match the peer’s tetchiness, though in fact he could have stood Frabbs a pint of ale, he was so pleased that they would finally find Grace Ammons that day. The rest of the meeting seemed a long blur of impossibly slow exchanges. When Heath was at last satisfied, Lenox shot from the room and went directly to Half Moon Street.

His haste was not misplaced; when he arrived, Dallington was up and pacing his rooms. He looked ill, even febrile perhaps, but his jaw was set with determination.

“Do we have an appointment?”

“I’m not sure they’ll want you to introduce the plague to Buckingham Palace,” said Lenox.

Dallington managed a smile. “I’m fit enough. Mrs. Lucas had me swallow some beef broth this morning.”

It was the kind of moment when Jane would have said she wished that Dallington had married by now, and had someone to care for him. Of course, Jane was very close with Dallington’s mother, whose own interests also lay in that direction. Personally Lenox felt grateful that Mrs. Lucas was present. That was enough. “If you’re sure you can do it, let’s be on our way,” he said.

They drove toward the palace by way of the Mall, green on either side of them, until they came to the roundabout that lay before the eastern front of the building. The carriage turned and they could see Nash’s grand facade, brick and painted stone, with the sovereign’s guards standing motionless at short intervals in the white gravel. Off to one side was a very small door that had a bit of bustle about it. Lenox took it for the visitors’ entrance.

He and Dallington applied here for entrance to the palace and were told they must go around the corner. This they did, and after a very cross-grained porter looked up their names in several different ledgers, he locked the door of his post and beckoned them inward. The fate of any visitors who might arrive in his absence was apparently of negligible interest to him.

“They could sell one of these paintings and hire another chap,” muttered Dallington, gesturing at the brightly adorned walls.

Indeed, the entire building, even in these back channels, bore a kind of heroic concupiscence, like a child adding twenty spoonfuls of sugar to his tea. They were walking on a red and gold carpet of intricate design, and it was so thick that one’s footsteps wobbled into it. (Lenox thought of Sophia, who would have enjoyed it for crawling.) A less charitable Englishman might have believed that he discerned a certain German richness of taste—or absence of taste, supplemented with richness—but it was doubtful that the Queen had ever thought of these halls, much less designed them herself. As they walked, Dallington steadied himself upon a succession of priceless French side tables.

“Here you are, sirs,” said their guide, rapping snappishly against a heavy door. “Mrs. Engel.”

The door opened immediately, a sinewy woman with thick glasses and white hair standing behind it. “Yes?” she said.

“My name is Charles Lenox. My colleague and I made an appointment to call upon Miss Grace Ammons.”

“I am Grete Engel,” she said. “Come in.”

The room the Queen’s social secretary had for her use was tiny, but there was a small Rubens upon one wall, a Winterhalter portrait of Prince Albert upon another, and best yet a lovely view of the palace’s large interior courtyard, crisscrossed with a complex geometry of paths. On a cloak stand in the corner was a smart jacket, which Lenox guessed that Mrs. Engel might wear over her rather plain smock when she went to see the Queen.

The largest object in the room was the secretary’s desk, an oak and mahogany object the size of a small seafaring vessel. There were dozens of tiny cubbyholes in it, each brimming with paper. Only a madman or a genius could find organization in such profusion. Then again, Mrs. Engel took credit, one heard from those in the Queen’s circle, for being a genius. Victoria’s own version of Mr. Minting, as it were—likely with a slighter attentiveness toward horseracing results, however.

The actual surface of the desk was clear, except for an inkstand and a single sheet of paper. Lenox sneaked a look: It was a menu. Mrs. Engel, standing by her chair, must have seen his eyes, because, with a faint smile, she said, “Pigeons in jelly, hare soup, galantines de veau, and saddle of mutton. And plum tart, Her Majesty must have plum tart.”

“Do you plan the food at the palace, too?” he asked. “Surely your responsibilities are heavy enough.”

“I check the menus against the guest list.” Her English was excellent, albeit with a slight German crispness around the vowels. “The Prime Minister cannot abide onions in any hot dish.”

That was actually a useful bit of information to Lenox, and he filed it away in his mind to tell Jane later. “This is Lord John—”

“I know both of your names, Mr. Lenox,” she said. “Why do you hope to see Miss Ammons?”

Lenox’s face became serious, and his voice confidential. “You may once have heard my name connected with criminal investigations,” he said, “though perhaps not. Lord John is still involved in the field. Together we have reason to believe that Miss Ammons may be in danger.”

Mrs. Engel looked at them both with an appraising eye. Then she nodded. “Give my regards to your mother,” she said to Dallington. “Miss Ammons is waiting in the East Gallery now. The door into it is at the end of the hallway. There are guards at all the other doors. I tell you this simply as a matter of course, not because I expect you to leave the room.”

They thanked her, and she set one foot into the hallway to watch them go down the corridor. At the end of the hallway Lenox tried the door; it was open, and together they stepped into one of the most beautiful rooms, he thought, that man had ever produced.

It was a long, thin gallery, with a curved glass ceiling. Because the Queen and her guests processed down it before official state banquets, it was empty in the middle other than a rich, slender carpet, but along the walls were long couches, upholstered in white with a very thin gold stripe. Then there was the art: High on the vaulted walls were massive paintings by Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Lawrence, and Constable. In the center of the gallery were two doorways, and all along it were ranged a series of marble fireplaces, carved with cherubim.