An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) (26 page)

When they reached the top of the stairs—even in this hurry Lenox noticed how different it looked here than in the official rooms, more subdued, if no less richly outfitted—the Queen was standing there.

“He missed,” she said and then added, “So did all of you, apparently.”

Lenox felt sick with failure. “Where is he, ma’am?”

“My guards fell upon him. He will be bruised in the morning, I expect.”

This was Victoria’s famous calm, then. “You are sure you’re not injured, Your Majesty?”

She gave them a small smile—but Lenox saw in her eyes fear, shock, something she was attempting to master, the old lessons of a youth dedicated to the exigencies of self-restraint. “I was at my desk. He entered the room and told me to raise my arms. I threw a crystal glass at him and yelled for my maid, and he fired his pistol wildly, the stupid fool. Shackleton, tell them to find Hannah and send her up to me. I will be in the Pink Study.”

“Ma’am.”

If only Albert were still alive, Lenox thought. Or if only the Queen’s children didn’t all live in Germany, sent out upon the transnational chores of royalty.

There was a hoarse shout two rooms away. Shackleton pulled a guard aside and told him to find Hannah. Then he gestured for the three men to follow him.

The assassin was being held in a small closet covered, rather absurdly in the circumstances, with murals of laughing angels, playing in a woodland. Fragonard, Lenox would have guessed. Another treasure—though too saccharine for his tastes.

It was dark in the room, and the three guards turned with angry faces, until they saw that it was their superior officer.

“Is he secured?” said Shackleton.

“A sight beyond his liking,” said one of the men, with grim satisfaction.

“Who is it?” said Dallington. “Ivory?”

“No,” said Lenox and lit a lamp so that they all might see more clearly. “Gentlemen, unless I am much mistaken, this fellow is Mr. Archibald Godwin.”

The list of men who had tried to kill Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India, was long, varied, and ignoble. The assassination attempts that had made the news occurred in 1840, 1849, 1850, and 1872—and most notably in 1842. During that year, when she was only twenty-three years old, a man shot at her carriage; the next day, the Queen insisted on riding the same route, in hopes that he would attempt it again. He did. He was a fellow named John Francis, and had been immediately arrested and charged with treason. In the end he had escaped the gallows and been transported to the colonies for life.

Later in the same year, 1842, a different madman had tried to kill Victoria, but his pistol was improperly loaded. He had received eighteen months in jail.

It took Lenox’s breath away to think of that leniency, after what he had seen this evening.

On his person Godwin had a pistol, a sixpence, a key, and a shred of paper that said, in a firm, slanting hand,
We forgive; we cannot forget.
It was unsigned. He wore a beautifully tailored suit. Lenox would have bet sixpence that it came from Ede and Ravenscroft. It bore no resemblance to the tattered, odorous garment Godwin had left behind in the Graves Hotel—and that was where Lenox’s train of thought had started.

He began his explanation instead with the nose.

“Do you remember seeing the body at the Graves?” Lenox asked Dallington. “Its features?”

Dallington nodded seriously. “Of course.”

They were sitting in a jail cell at the Tower of London. In the normal course of events Jenkins would have taken Godwin to Scotland Yard, but the Tower, a castle dating from the twelfth century, was where the Queen’s own prisoners went, a living relic of the Middle Ages. It was where the two little princes had died, where Henry the Sixth was murdered, where Anne Boleyn was imprisoned and executed. The whole history of England’s monarchy could have been told by these yellowing walls, moated around with an empty gravel expanse, guarded by silent, dark-faced men. It was a solemn feeling that Lenox had as he looked across the table at Godwin.

With Lenox were Jenkins and Shackleton; standing by the door was one of the Queen’s guards. Godwin was, as had been reported, a short, fat person, with a face of dreamy innocence and a fringe of brown hair. The only evidence of his evening’s activity was a rapidly swelling cut near his left eye and a matching one upon his upper lip.

His nose was fat.

“I had a letter from my friend Peter Hughes this morning,” said Lenox, “in which he described Mr. Godwin. One of the details he provided was that Godwin had a bulbous nose. Yet the corpse at the Grave Hotel had a
thin
nose—I remember that specifically, and remarked upon it at the time, when we were looking at the body.”

Dallington and Jenkins looked at the prisoner. “Mr. Godwin, who was it?” asked Jenkins.

The prisoner gave no indication that he heard the question, but Lenox thought he knew. “That suit of clothes you left behind in the wardrobe of your room at the Graves—I don’t think it belonged to a farmer, as we originally speculated. I think it belonged to a homeless man. A vagrant. You found one who looked adequately similar to you, in shape and size, and somehow enticed him up to your room at the hotel. Was it with the offer of a new suit? A new suit and a hot meal?”

“A homeless man?” asked Shackleton curiously.

Lenox told them about the note in the crime column, during the last week, about the vagrant missing from the area near Gloucester Road—near the Graves.

“I don’t know how they were sure he was missing,” said Dallington. “Mightn’t he have found another bench?”

“Yes, I wondered the same thing.”

Jenkins shook his head. “These bobbies know their streets amazingly well—every brick, every face, every shop window. If an itinerant always slept upon a certain grate, or begged at a certain corner, his absence would be noticeable. Perhaps even alarming. Some of them are figures of quite popular local character.”

Godwin still hadn’t spoken, but a certain hardness in his eyes, or perhaps around his mouth, told Lenox that this conjecture was correct. “We wondered why the body at the Graves—your body, we thought—had been so thoroughly stripped. Hat, watch, everything in the pockets. It could not have been for the purpose of forestalling identification, since of course the body was lying across the threshold of your room, and looked like you. Those things were gone for a very simple reason, I suppose: because you needed them.”

Godwin said nothing. Jenkins added, “The overnight bag the bellboy carried upstairs for you upon your arrival was gone, too, as I recall.”

Lenox smiled faintly. “The suit the dead man wore—was it one of the suits that Wintering bought at Ede and Ravenscroft? We should have checked the sizes in which he ordered them. We would have found, I expect, that the tall fellow I met in Gilbert’s was ordering clothes of a very different measurement than their customer Mr. Godwin usually did.”

Dallington, frowning, said, “And Wintering? Where does Wintering enter into the picture? He was there that morning.”

Shackleton banged the table with his palm. “Never mind this nonsense! Why were you trying to kill the Queen, you bastard?”

Godwin’s interrogators let a moment pass, in case their subject chose to answer this angry query. When he didn’t, Lenox said, “I’m guessing the two men with whom Whitstable saw you out upon Gloucester Road were Wintering and the homeless man.”

“Whitstable,” muttered Godwin.

It was the first word he had spoken. “You used him to place Wintering at the scene of your ‘murder,’ correct? Wintering thought he was still your accomplice at that stage. I don’t know when he realized he was only your pawn.”

Recognition dawned in Dallington’s eyes. “Ah. I see it now. Somehow you convinced Wintering to impersonate you—then, when you died, the suspicion would fall upon him.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Jenkins, “is why he needed an accomplice at all.”

Lenox shrugged. “He needed someone to lay the groundwork—to meet with Grace Ammons, to buy suits and guns and hats, to go to Buckingham Palace. He couldn’t do all that from Hampshire, and anyhow I’m sure he preferred to lurk in the background. It was intelligent. We spent days chasing a tall, fair-haired man around London, never suspecting that the real threat came from a different source entirely.”

“But why kill anybody?” asked Shackleton. “Simply to frame Wintering?”

“Yes,” said Lenox. “Why did you need so badly to be found dead, Godwin?”

The murderer—the would-be assassin—looked at them strangely and then said, with sudden decision, “What time is it?”

Lenox looked at his watch. “It’s nearly midnight.”

Godwin again stared at them and then, somehow, seemed to soften, relent. “Yes, I framed Wintering, the poor fool. He was always a piggy little fellow. His mother starved herself, gathered rope at that shambles of a curacy, so that he could play the tassel cap at Wadham. Back then I found him rather amusing. It was funny to order an expensive drink on his round and watch him pretend not to sweat out the arrival of the bill.

“Nobody wanted anything to do with either of us. I have my own ways, and Wintering … he was raised a gentleman, but he tried too hard to please other people. He was never comfortable in his own skin. One could always play upon his greed. I told him I had hatched a plan to rob Buckingham. He didn’t believe me at first, because I’ve always had a great deal of money, but I persuaded him it was gone. And then of course my people have a grudge against the Queen.”

Something blazed for an instant in Godwin’s eyes. “What for?” asked Lenox.

Godwin was silent for a long time, perhaps a minute, staring into the damp upper corner of the stone room. Then he said, lightly, “Oh, no reason.”

“Why did he use your name?” asked Jenkins.

“I told him to order himself suits, clothes, anything he liked—to use my name. I wanted him to for my own purposes, as you have guessed.”

“It was an error to give it to me at Gilbert’s,” said Lenox.

Godwin shrugged. “I suppose he had become habituated to the alias, and no doubt he believed you to be a simple lovestruck fellow. Not a private detective. It was an error, to be sure—I wonder whether I would be here if he had told you that his name was Jones or Robinson. And yet here I am.”

There was something sanguine, something troublingly calm, in Godwin’s face as he delivered this statement, and suddenly Lenox wondered. Why was he being so forthright, so helpful? Why did he seem unperturbed by his predicament?

Then the answer came to him: It wasn’t over. He felt a lurch of panic. “Shackleton, where is the Queen?” he asked.

“In her bedchamber, I hope, safe.”

“Who is with her?”

“Her guards.”

“You must go back—you must take her from the palace. There’s going to be another attempt.”

Shackleton frowned, half-standing. “By whom?”

“Hetty Godwin. Jenkins, someone must go and arrest her.”

Suddenly there was a crack like the report of the pistol. It was Godwin’s hand, slamming down on the table. “No!” he said. His face was transformed, hideous with fury.

“Jenkins, Shackleton, go—as quickly as you can, for the love of God, go.”

The two men flew from the room, as behind them Lenox, Dallington, and Shackleton’s subordinate restrained Godwin—a small and fat man, but strengthened all out of proportion to his physique by emotion—from pursuing them. When at last Godwin was exhausted by his struggles they shoved him unceremoniously back into his chair. Lenox stood back, breathing heavily, as Dallington, still recovering, slumped into one of the other chairs. The palace guard kept his head better. He knocked at the door, and the keeper of the cells, a fellow named Matthew Almond, came to see him.

“Shackles,” was all the palace guard said. He, too, was rather panting.

Almond nodded and left. Godwin was giving his captors a look of sheer malevolent hatred. “She’ll get there in time,” he said at last.

“What does that mean?” asked Lenox.

Then, as if remembering himself, Godwin modulated his voice and said, “She’ll get there, back to Hampshire, in time that you’ll miss her. They’ll miss her. Then you’ll look pretty foolish.”

In his face Lenox saw that this was an effort not of weeks or months that Godwin had made, but of years, perhaps decades.

My people have a grudge against the Queen …

“What time was your sister supposed to follow in your footsteps?” Lenox asked. “Did Wintering take a third wax impression, at a different window?”

“We cannot leave the keys in the windows for garden parties any longer,” muttered the palace guard, who seemed to take it all as a personal affront. “They’ll have to roast or freeze by their own lights, the buggers.”

“What made you suspect Hetty Godwin?” asked Dallington.

“Godwin’s behavior in this past hour has been too strange for my liking—silence, followed by volubility. Then when he asked me the time … I didn’t think anything of it at first, but it was followed by his change in attitude. It made me wonder if perhaps he was stalling.”

“The only reason to stall would be to let someone else get on with the job,” said Dallington.

Lenox nodded. “As soon as that occurred to me, I started thinking about the people involved. Then I remembered the body.”

“What, Wintering’s?”

“No. At the Graves Hotel.”

“The homeless man.”

Lenox shrugged. “That’s only a theory, for Mr. Godwin here to affirm or reject—but that body, yes. You’ll recall that the corpse had a single small bullet hole at the temple. It was not enough to interfere with the person’s facial features.”

Dallington snapped his fingers. “You clever fellow, Lenox. She identified the body.”

The older man smiled, feeling a little surge of pride. It was quickly poisoned by the memory of the Queen telling them they had failed—and now the possibility that they had failed her again. “Yes, she went with Jenkins and positively said it was her brother on the slab. It strains credulity to think she could make an honest mistake in identifying her nearest relation, the person with whom she spent every day of her life at Raburn Lodge.”