An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) (27 page)

Dallington turned to Godwin. “What was the plan? If the news hadn’t emerged by midnight that the Queen was dead, she was to follow you into the palace?”

Godwin didn’t speak. “It was cunning,” Lenox said. “At every step it was cunning.”

Dallington was leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, studying the floor. At last he said, “She seemed cool, during that first meeting. Perhaps too cool.”

“She knew her brother wasn’t dead.” There was a moment of silence, and then Lenox thought of something else. “Do you recall the one moment when she seemed surprised? When we said that Godwin had been seen in a group, out upon Gloucester Road. By Whitstable. She asked who the third man was. She seemed nonplussed, actually nonplussed. We weren’t supposed to hear about anything other than Godwin and Wintering asking Whitstable for that penknife.”

They asked Godwin a few more questions, receiving only blank stares. Almond came in and shackled the prisoner, using long medieval-style chains that extended from his ankles to a steel ring bolted into the wall. When the small drama of their binding was concluded, the whole room fell into a morose, tense silence. Three of the men were saying quiet prayers for the Queen; one, for his sister.

A few minutes later Dallington added another piece to the puzzle. “It’s been troubling me that they didn’t remember the name Godwin at Cyril’s, too,” he said abruptly.

“The restaurant?”

“Yes. If Wintering ate there every night, someone would have had some recollection of him. Now I remember that it was Hetty Godwin who gave us that information.”

“But why?” said Lenox.

They both glanced at Godwin. Dallington shrugged. “She needed a compelling reason that Godwin would have come to London. He was corresponding with his tailors and his hatmakers and his gunmakers from Hampshire. Why would he have come to London?”

“True,” said Lenox. “It also planted the idea in our heads that he was going to confront the tall, fair-haired gentleman, the impostor. We didn’t look far when his body turned up.”

“It’s true. And then our whole sense of Godwin was confirmed by her, established in part by her—retiring, nervous, shy. She played that up, I suppose. For herself, too.”

“Yes. She said she wished to retire at six, or whatever absurdly early time it was.”

Lenox thought of Henrietta Godwin’s determined, gaunt face. It was possible, he supposed, that it had been she who pulled the trigger at Wintering’s apartment. They ought to have kept better track of her while she was in London.

But a woman! He ought to have known by now that women were capable of murder. Just think of Ludo Starling’s wife. Still, somehow there was always a lag in his mind, a hesitation at the idea. It was a flaw of his detective’s brain.

The next hour passed with excruciating slowness. Every so often one of the two men—and after a while the third, too—would throw out some question at the prisoner, perhaps taunting, perhaps conciliatory. There was never a response. Both sides had played out their strategy. All that remained to be seen was who would win—and when Lenox, intermittently, remembered the stakes, the life of the Queen, he would almost gasp, and then say a silent prayer.

“You will hang for this, you know,” Lenox quietly told Godwin at one point.

“I hope not.”

At length Almond the cell keeper came in with a pot of tea for them and water and a crust of bread for Godwin, who ignored the provisions. Almond took a message from Lenox for Lady Jane. The palace guard perked up considerably under the influence of the hot tea, and Dallington and Lenox, who had declined, changed their mind. Dallington looked as if he would rather have a glass of whisky, so etched was his face was with anxiety.

Just after a quarter past one, Almond came in. “DCI Jenkins has returned, gentlemen,” he said.

Lenox turned automatically toward Godwin, who greeted this news with a look of wild hope. “What’s happened?” asked the prisoner.

Almond smiled faintly. “The Queen sends her regards.”

A powerful emotion—more than relief, closer to love—flooded through Lenox, corporeal. Thank God. He turned and saw that Dallington was experiencing the same thing.

Godwin looked stricken.

Jenkins and Shackleton were out in the small office Almond kept. A boy of fourteen or fifteen was there, too. “My son,” said Almond.

“What happened?” asked Dallington.

“We took her as she was leaving her hotel. She had a bag with a pistol, a key, a rope … everything she needed. She kicked up every kind of wrath when we arrested her, and went for the pistol.”

“And the Queen?”

“She has started early for Balmoral,” said Shackleton. “We deemed it safer, until we can be sure nobody else will crawl out of the woodwork. The castle there is extremely isolated. Easier to defend.”

Lenox shook his head. “Hetty was the last gambit, I think. Where is she, Jenkins?”

Almond answered. “In her own cell in a different part of the Tower.”

“We will keep them separated,” said Jenkins.

“Of course,” murmured Dallington.

There was a pause. On the desk was a plate of biscuits, and Shackleton and Almond’s son reached for the last chocolate one at the same time. Almond’s son won the race—offered it to Shackleton—was politely rejected. There was a funny feeling in the little office: The Queen had been saved, just like the song said, and the capital was ignorant of her salvation. The brother and sister were secured. It felt a strange night in London.

Almond was a large, bright-eyed fellow, with a bushy black and gray mustache. He reached into his pocket. “I don’t generally drink on the job, gentlemen, but in this flask there is a quantity of whisky, which I propose we take turns in. To the Queen,” he said and took a sip.

“To the Queen,” said Shackleton, who was next in the half-circle and took a solemn sip, too.

Dallington, his face shadowed in the shifting dim lamplight, took it next. “To the Queen.”

Then Jenkins, then Almond’s son. Then finally Lenox. “To the Queen.”

Neither of the Godwins would talk. Each of the detectives—Dallington, Lenox, Jenkins—shuttled back and forth between Henrietta and Archibald Godwin, trying to cajole them first into confession, then into conversation, and finally into any speech at all. Both were as silent and watchful as animals.

Henrietta seemed to Lenox the more likely to break down, because it was plain that she became upset when he mentioned the possibility that Archie might end at the gallows. Even after they learned this, making her offers and promises to the contrary, however, she remained stubbornly quiet. The two had made a plan, evidently, in the event that both were caught.

At last Jenkins had to let them see their solicitor. He could prevent them seeing each other—though there was no way of preventing them from communicating through this third party. He was an acute white-haired man with owl-like eyes, taciturn, no friendliness in his manner at all; immediately he called in a barrister from the Inner Temple to consult upon the case. Soon thereafter Jenkins told Lenox and Dallington, with regret, that they would no longer have access to the prisoners.

“If it’s a consolation, they aren’t talking anyway,” said Jenkins.

Dallington shook his head. “We know the facts. I’d like to know the story.”

“The story’s in Hampshire, if we want badly enough to find it,” said Lenox. “For my part I cannot go. There is too much to occupy me in Parliament, a fearful amount.”

Dallington nodded. “I’ll go, then.”

Lenox had hoped Dallington would say that. “Good. You must consult with my friend Peter Hughes there before you begin your investigation. He lives not ten miles off of Raburn Lodge, and he knows that county as well as anyone.”

“Excellent.”

They were standing in Scotland Yard, a Friday morning; Jenkins was on his way now to see the Godwins again. It would be some time until the trial. The crown’s best hope of a conviction in the murder of Wintering was a confession, obviously—there were numerous witnesses to his attempted assault upon the Queen—and though the hopes of one seemed faint, Jenkins was going to keep trying. The papers were obsessed with the affluent, wellborn pair; the reports they received (some, perhaps, from Jenkins himself) were muddled and contradictory, but that made no alteration in the ardor of their interest.

After they said good-bye to Jenkins, Lenox and Dallington walked back toward Hampden Lane, discussing it all.

“By God, she was cool, wasn’t she?” said Dallington. “I mean Victoria. Standing at the top of the stairs, making little jokes.”

“Her reproof has stayed with me.”

The young lord waved a hand. “There is almost always an element of luck in these things, or mischance. The only reason I have any success is that it’s so damned difficult to commit a crime without leaving evidence of yourself, or without something going wrong. I could almost sympathize with Godwin. It must be maddening.”

Lenox smiled. “Something maddened him long before this.”

“Yes, true.” They walked a few paces. It was a warm day, and London looked leafy, prosperous, peaceable. “Do you know what’s been on my mind?”

“What?”

“Why was Wintering in Gilbert’s that day at all? It couldn’t have been a coincidence.”

“I’ve been thinking about it, too,” said Lenox. “I rather think it was more to do with Grace Ammons than Archibald Godwin.”

“How do you mean?”

Lenox shrugged. “She is a beautiful woman. I wonder if he fell under her spell.”

“And began to follow her?”

Lenox shook his head. “No. I would hazard that he had an enormous amount of information about Grace Ammons, her habits, her residence, her circle of acquaintance. He would have known about her monthly visit to Ivory’s mother.”

“What makes you say so?”

“I am more convinced with every moment that passes that this attempt at assassination was years in the planning. The care that went into every step of it was remarkable.”

“Or perhaps he simply followed her.”

Lenox laughed. “Yes, I suppose so.”

They arrived at Lenox’s house. Waiting on the steps there was a guest: Alfred Anixter, Miss Strickland’s operative.

“Mr. Lenox, Lord John,” he said, standing up and taking off his cap.

“What are you doing here?” asked Lenox.

“I wanted a word. Miss Strickland is still acting on behalf of Grace Ammons, and will be until the case is resolved to her satisfaction.”

“If she’s still charging Miss Ammons a pound a day and expenses, she ought to be taken to court,” said Dallington.

Anixter shook his head. “No. When the Godwins were arrested we stopped charging Miss Ammons, but Miss Strickland likes to do a thorough job.”

“What does she wish to ask us?”

Anixter had a whole host of questions about the night that Archibald Godwin had attempted to kill the Queen, about Leonard Wintering, about the homeless man who had died in Godwin’s stead at the Graves Hotel. (A constable from the homeless man’s street had gone to the morgue to confirm that it was he, Joseph Thayer, a vagrant, at one period a blacksmith until an accident crippled his right hand, at which time he turned to drink, gradually losing his purchase in civilized society. The constable had described him as a gentle soul, well enough liked on the Gloucester Road. His had been a life like any other’s, of course, his flesh as alive as the Duke of Omnium’s—it was a sentimental view, but one the papers had adopted, and with which Lenox, though a relativist, tended to agree.) Anixter read these questions from a neatly written list he pulled out of his pocket.

When he had concluded, Lenox said, “I would be delighted to answer these questions for Miss Strickland in person.”

Anixter shook his head. “I’m the point of contact on the Ammons case.”

“Where are her offices? In High Holborn, I believe? I would be happy to call on her there.”

“She doesn’t work out of the office,” said Anixter quickly. “We meet new clients there, and if their cases are of sufficient interest they meet Miss Strickland elsewhere.”

Lenox smiled wryly. “Is that right?” he asked. “Well, if she would like to speak to us in person, please get in touch. Until then.”

Anixter watched both men touch their hats and then, his face darkening, turned on his heel. “I would like to help Miss Ammons,” said Dallington as Anixter stalked away.

“So would I. Quick, let’s follow him.”

“Who, Anixter?”

“Yes. Or Miss Strickland, as he chooses to be called.”

“Lenox, you reprobate. I’ve never been fonder of you.” Dallington pointed up the street. “He’s getting into a hansom.”

“Then we’ll hail one, too.”

They followed Anixter’s cab through Mayfair, down Brook Street, then turning into Davies Street and passing Berkeley Square, before finally arriving, twelve minutes later by Lenox’s watch, at a small, ugly brick house in Hay’s Mews. It was a fashionable address.

Anixter left the cab—Lenox had directed the driver to keep going when the cab they were following stopped, so they passed him—and went into the house. At the end of the street Dallington and Lenox got out.

“What’s our plan?” asked Dallington. He looked uncommonly happy to be engaged in this kind of subterfuge, the sprightly white carnation in his buttonhole matching his mood. “Do we climb in through a window? Jimmy open the cellar and sneak upstairs?”

“I think we should knock on the front door.”

“Cunning.”

The house was only two stories high, small though well maintained. Was it Anixter’s own house? Lenox knocked on the door.

A housekeeper appeared. “May I help you, gentlemen?” she asked.

“We are here to see your mistress,” said Dallington, in a voice he occasionally summoned—a domineering voice, to the manner born. He held out a card for her to take. “Please tell her Lord John Dallington and Mr. Charles Lenox have arrived. We will wait in her sitting room.”

The housekeeper, face doubtful until she heard the word “Lord,” said, “She’s just here—she’ll want to see you straightaway, I know, m’lud.”

The house was bright and cheerful, with small French paintings lining the front hall. They came into a sun-filled sitting room. Anixter was upon a sofa there, speaking to Miss Strickland. She turned a sly, pale, beautiful face up to them in surprise—the face of the woman who was still being called Thomas McConnell’s mistress all over London: Polly Buchanan.