An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) (2 page)

He thought of all this because of the note Frabbs had passed him: It had come from his former protégé in detection, Lord John Dallington, asking for help on a case. Having read it ten minutes before, Lenox itched with irritation at his position already, eager to be gone from the Commons.

It was true that he had promised Disraeli, and several other men, that he would be an assiduous participant in these debates. Still, he had already exchanged words with Twinkleton once, and for an hour or two’s absence anyway he would hardly be missed. Particularly if the vote was to be delayed beyond that evening.

Ah! There was Frabbs’s head, popping around the doorjamb—and yes, there was the thumb in the air. With a murmured good-bye to the men on his bench, and a promise that he would return just after the break, Lenox stood and made for the exit, happier than he had been since he left the house that morning. A strange circumstance, Dallington’s note had promised. Lenox smiled. Who knew what might await him out there in the great fervid rousing muddle of London?

A stroll up and across Green Park took Lenox to Half Moon Street, where Dallington lived. The address was a fashionable one, popular especially among the young and idle rich, lying as it did close by both their clubs and Hyde Park, where they might ride their horses in the morning. Dallington lived toward the Curzon Street end, almost precisely halfway between Parliament and Lenox’s own house in Hampden Lane, which was situated in the leafy, more sedate precincts of Grosvenor Square.

John Dallington, the youngest son of a very kindly duke and duchess, must have been twenty-seven or -eight by now—but he was fixed in many London minds as a disreputable cad of twenty, who had been sent down from Cambridge in sordid circumstances, then spent the subsequent years making the acquaintance of every gin hall and debauched aristocrat in Mayfair.

This image might have been just once, but by now it was unfair. Lenox knew as much firsthand. Several years before, Dallington had, to the older man’s very great astonishment, expressed an interest in detective work, and though the lad was still prone, in times of boredom, to relapse, visiting with friends from that less seemly era of his life, by and large he had settled into adulthood. His apprenticeship to Lenox had been profitable to both men. Indeed, through his own intelligence and industry he had now succeeded Lenox as the premier private detective in the city—or at the very least trailing just behind one or two other men who followed the same calling.

Dallington inhabited a chalk-colored building of four floors, taking the large second story for himself. At the front door now was the neighborhood’s postman, in his familiar uniform, the scarlet tunic and high black hat. Dallington’s landlady—a redoubtable and highly proper personage in her twenty-fifth month of mourning for her husband, only a little black crepe around her shoulders—answered the door and took the post, then saw Lenox farther down the steps.

“Mr. Lenox?” she said, as the postman touched his hat and retreated.

“How do you do, Mrs. Lucas?” Lenox asked, climbing the steps.

“Are you here to see Lord John, sir?”

“If I might.”

“Perhaps you can convince him to take his toast and water.”

“Has he been ill?” Toast and water was the food considered most suitable for convalescents, at least for those who belonged to the generation of Lenox, of Mrs. Lucas, of Twinkleton—boiling water poured over burnt toast, and mashed into something like gruel. Personally Lenox had never found it palatable.

This made sense of the note, at any rate, which had contained a postscript apologizing that the young lord couldn’t come to him.

“You shall see for yourself,” she said, turning and leading him into the dim hallway.

“Not contagious, is he?”

“Only his mood, sir.”

“I see.”

She lifted a candle from the table in the front hall and led him up the stairs. A boy was sweeping them but made way.

“Mr. Lenox, here to see you,” called the landlady when they reached Dallington’s door, tapping it chidingly with her nails.

“Push him in!” called out the young lord. “Unless he doesn’t like to get consumption.”

“Ignore him,” she whispered. “Good evening, Mr. Lenox.”

“Good evening, Mrs. Lucas.”

By contrast to the shadowy stairwell, Dallington’s rooms were a riot of light, candles and lamps everywhere. Such was his preference. Because of that the air was always tolerably warm there, especially now, in the spring. The sitting room one entered from the hall was pleasant and comfortable, with dog-eared books in piles upon the mantel and one of the sofas, watercolors of Scotland upon the wall, and a cottage piano in the corner.

“How do you do, Dallington?” asked Lenox, smiling.

The young man lay upon a divan, surrounded by discarded newspapers and letters stuffed back into their envelopes. He wore—the privilege of the ill—comfortable clothes, a soft jacket of blue merino and gray woolen trousers, with scarlet slippers on his feet. “Oh, not very badly.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Now—”

“Though if I die I would like you to have my collection of neckties.”

“They’re too colorful for me. It might be that an especially garish meat-pie seller would agree to take possession of the quieter ones.”

Dallington laughed. “In truth it’s only a head cold, but I must keep Lucas on her toes, or she’s liable to come it pretty high. Toast and water, indeed.”

His appearance made a lie of this deprecation, however. Despite his years of drink he was usually healthy-looking, face unlined, hair sleek and black. At the moment, by contrast, his skin was pallid, his eyes red, his person disheveled, and on top of that he had a nearly continuous cough, though he managed mostly to stifle it in a handkerchief. It seemed no wonder that he didn’t feel equal to venturing out upon a case.

“I can’t stay long,” Lenox said.

“Of course, and thank you for coming—I thought perhaps you might not be able to get away from the Commons at all. It’s only that I’m due out to meet a client at eight in the morning, and finally decided two hours ago that I don’t think I can go.”

“You couldn’t reschedule?”

“That’s the damnable bit, I—” Here Dallington broke into a fit of coughing, before finally going on in a hoarse voice. “I have no way of reaching the person who sent the note. An enigmatic missive, too. You can pick it out from the birdcage, if you like, the red envelope.”

This brass birdcage, absent of avian life, was where Dallington kept his professional correspondence. It hung near the window. Lenox went to it and found the letter Dallington meant, tucked between two bars. It was undated.

Mr. Dallington,

The police cannot possibly help me; perhaps you might. If you are amenable to meeting, I will be at Gilbert’s Restaurant in Charing Cross Station from eight o’clock Wednesday morning, for a space of thirty-five minutes. If you cannot contrive to meet me then I will write to you again soon, God willing. You will know me because I am dining alone, and by my light-colored hair and the striped black umbrella I always carry.

Please please come.

“Well, what do you make of that?” Dallington asked. “It is unsigned, of course, which tells us that he desires anonymity.”

“Yes.”

“Moreover, he cannot know me very well, to address me as Mr. Dallington. I don’t stand upon much titled formality but I generally receive it anyhow.”

“What else?”

Dallington shrugged. “I cannot see much farther into it.”

“There are one or two telling details,” said Lenox. “Here, for instance, where he says he’ll wait for thirty-five minutes.”

“Why is that odd?”

“Such a specific length of time? Given that he proposes meeting at a train station, it suggests, to me, that he will catch a train shortly after 8:35. Do you have a Bradshaw?”

“On the shelf there,” said Dallington.

Lenox pulled the railway guide down and browsed through it, frowning, until he found the listings for Charing Cross. “There is an 8:38 for Canterbury. The following train doesn’t leave until 8:49. I think we may presume that your correspondent is traveling to Kent.”

“Bravo,” said Dallington. “Is there anything else?”

“Yes,” said Lenox. He paused, trying to define his reaction in his own mind before he told it to Dallington; for the letter had unsettled him.

“Well?”

“It is something in the tone. I don’t know that I can identify it precisely.” He gestured toward the page. “Its despairing scorn for the police, for instance. His carefully generic description of himself.”

“He is being cautious, you mean?”

Lenox shook his head. “More than that. This phrase, ‘God willing,’ and then this rather desperate final line. All of it together makes me believe that the man who wrote this letter is living in a state of mortal fear.”

Just before ten that evening Lenox’s carriage pulled to a slow stop in front of his house in Hampden Lane.

“A great many lights on downstairs for the hour,” he murmured to Graham, who was sitting beside him. “Yet Jane must be done with supper by now.”

Graham, who was reading the minutes of an electoral meeting in Durham, didn’t look up. “Mm.”

Lenox glanced over at him. “Do you never tire of politics?”

Now Graham did pull his eyes away from the paper, lifting his gaze toward his employer. He smiled. “I find that I do not, sir.”

“I sometimes think you’re better suited to all of this than I am.”

“As for the lights, I would hazard that Lady Jane is waiting for you to arrive home. Not Sophia, hopefully. Well past her bedtime.”

Lenox clicked his tongue in disapproval at the idea, though in truth he would have been selfishly pleased to find the child awake. Sophia was his daughter, now nearly two years of age, a plump, pink creature. All of the mundane achievements of her time of life—stumbling around in a mildly convincing impression of upright mobility, speaking fragmentary sentences—were an unceasing enchantment to her parents, and even to hear her name in passing, as he just had, still made Lenox happy. After a lifetime of polite boredom when confronted with children, he had finally found one whose companionship seemed a delight.

Lenox stepped onto the pavement from the carriage, Graham behind him, and started up the steps toward the house. It was a wide one for a London street; before they had married, Lady Jane and Lenox had been next-door neighbors, and by knocking down a few walls strategically they had merged their houses. It had only taken two or three hundred arguments (between two generally mild people) before it was finished to their satisfaction. It was done at last, at any rate, and thank the Lord for it.

With a nod good night, Graham opened Lady Jane’s old door, on his way to his rooms there, while Lenox took the front door to the left, the one that had been his own for so many years.

As he came in, the house’s butler, Kirk, greeted him and took his coat. “Good evening, sir. Have you eaten?”

“Hours ago. Why the hullabaloo?”

“Lady Victoria McConnell is visiting, sir.”

Ah, that explained it. Toto often visited at unusual hours. She was Jane’s cousin and also closest friend, a vibrant, sometimes flighty woman, good-humored, even in her thirtieth year now exceedingly youthful. She was married to an older man, a friend of Charles’s, Thomas McConnell; he was a doctor, though he didn’t practice any longer, such work being conceived as below the dignity of Toto’s great, very great, family.

“Are they in the drawing room?”

“Yes, sir.”

This was down the front hall and toward the left, and it was here that Lenox turned his footsteps, walking briskly past the flickering lamps in their recessed sconces along the wall. It was good to be out of the Commons. The debate was still going, and he had spoken several times more after returning from his visit to Dallington, but it had become apparent quickly that there would be no immediate vote—many men had much to say upon the merits and imperfections of the bill—and that the truly consequential speeches, from the frontbenchers, would be delayed until the next evening.

He came in and found Lady Jane and Toto side by side on the rose-colored sofa, speaking in low voices.

“Charles, there you are,” said Jane, rising to give him a swift kiss on the cheek.

“Hello, my dear. Toto, I fear you look distressed.”

She ran a hand through her blond hair. “Oh, not especially.”

He went to the sideboard to pour a glass of Scotch. “Did you have money on Scheherazade in the fourth at Epsom? Dallington lost his shirt.”

It was then, to his surprise, that Toto burst into tears, burying her face in Jane’s quickly encircling arms.

In a woman of slightly lower birth it would have been a distasteful spectacle. Rules soften toward the top, however. It was not the first time Toto had cried in Hampden Lane, usually because of a mislaid necklace or a serial novel without a happy ending, and it wouldn’t be the last.

“Don’t be beastly, Charles,” said Jane. “Toto, you and I shall go to my dressing room—come along.”

Toto, wiping her eyes, said, “Oh, who gives a fig whether Charles sees me cry. I cried in front of Princess Victoria when I was a child after my aunt pinched my neck—to keep me quiet—and had a square of chocolate as a prize, so who knows what good may come of crying in front of people, I say. Charles, come and set yourself upon that couch, if you like. You can hear it all, the whole truth about your horrid friend.”

As he sat Toto gave a fresh sob, and Lenox, having believed it to be another trifle, saw that Toto, whom he loved, was truly upset. Alarmed, he asked, “What has happened?”

There was a long pause. At last, softly, Lady Jane said, “She is worried about Thomas.”

Immediately Lenox’s thoughts flew to drink, and he felt a lurch of worry. There had been a time when McConnell was lost to that vice, in the earlier years of his married life with Toto, when she had been perhaps too callow to support him, he perhaps too weak to handle the disappointment of abandoning his vocation, finding himself lost in so many empty hours.