An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) (7 page)

Dallington frowned. “She might have done.”

“She seemed desperate for help, certainly. Though perhaps our meeting gave her enough of a fright to silence her.”

“There are more than a few private investigators, though.”

Lenox nodded. “Well, there are scores of cheap and dubious ones. There are only a very few with any reputation among the upper classes, however. Think of her writing paper, the hand in which she wrote, her diction. Clearly she is a woman of some position. That she approached you is perhaps proof enough of that.”

Dallington laughed weakly. “I cannot say that a woman spending time in my company has always vouchsafed her good breeding.”

“But really,” Lenox said, “to whom might she have gone, if she could not go to the police? You, Audley, LeMaire. That is the list, is it not?”

“Even Audley has a very middle-class clientele,” said Dallington. “They go to LeMaire if they want the old Vidocq touch. He’s not especially skillful, but for some the accent makes them feel they’re getting a bargain.”

“I’ll go around to both tomorrow,” said Lenox.

“Why should they tell you anything?”

“I’ve no wish to poach a client, only to get one back—and the information about Godwin, the man calling himself Godwin, could be of use to them.”

The engineers’ and conductors’ tearoom at Charing Cross lay toward the back of the station, far from the crowds of travelers queuing near the platforms. Its door was made of frosted glass and had the word
PRIVATE
stenciled in large black letters upon it. The roving ticket salesman who had pointed it out to Lenox hadn’t wanted to at first, until a coin persuaded him; evidently these engineers and conductors valued their solitude. Well, too bad.

Lenox knocked. The door opened a few inches, and a fat round face, with a magnificent dark toothbrush mustache appended to its upper lip, appeared. “’Lo?”

“How do you do? My name is Charles Lenox, and I—”

“Ticket office to the left,” said the face, and then the door slammed.

Lenox knocked it again. The door opened. “I am in some difficulty, and—”

“You can’t imagine how little I care, sir.”

“I wish you would address a perfectly civil inquiry with a greater respect.”

“If wishes was horses then beggars would ride,” said the man immediately.

“I’m looking for the conductor of the 8:38 to Canterbury, Padden.”

“Who, what, Padden? Should have said so straightaway, daft of you not to. Can’t think why you weren’t clear from the start. George Padden!”

“Not in!” called a voice.

“You’ve a visitor!”

The door then closed in Lenox’s face again, but he heard footsteps, and soon enough it reopened, and a thinner, paler face appeared. Its bearer was extremely tall. His face was impassive. “Yes?”

“Let me begin—”

“Sir, we have ten minutes now and again for a cup of tea. Otherwise it’s tramping up and down a train all day, soot in your clothes, and a vagrant sleeping off the back porch as thanks. Say your piece quick, please.”

“I’m worried about the safety of one of your regular passengers, a young woman who takes the 8:38 to Canterbury once each month. She might well have taken it several days ago on a Wednesday.”

The conductor frowned and then, after a beat, sighed. “You’d better come in,” he said.

The room was cozy, with a great silver-plated urn at one end, crowded around at its base with chipped blue and white cups and saucers. There was a bowl of sugar off to the side, and a whole jar full of spoons. Every surface in the room, tables and chairs and sofas, was covered in periodicals and newspapers. A few conductors and engineers lounged peaceably, drinking their tea—or, in the instance of the man who had first greeted Lenox, something that looked like a glass of beer—and reading, one of them drowsing underneath a crumpled paper. There was a bright fire in the grate, making the whole room sleepy and warm. An enormous clock stood at the center of each wall, no doubt to keep them to schedule.

More civilly now, Padden offered Lenox a cup of tea, which he took—it was rather a cold morning. He spooned a quick shower of sugar into it and stirred. “Lemon, milk?” Padden offered.

“Go on, then, if you have milk,” said Lenox.

Padden pulled a pot of milk from its spot on the only windowsill in the room, where it must have kept reasonably cold. Lenox took a sip of the tea. It was excellent, very strong. Padden, glancing at his pocket watch, invited Lenox to sit down in the corner of the room. “Tell me more, then,” he said.

As minimally as he could, Lenox explained who he was, that he had acted on Dallington’s behalf in meeting this young woman, and how she had been scared away. He also described her appearance, at least as accurately as he could recall it.

When he had finished speaking, he looked at Padden expectantly. “Well?”

The conductor leaned back in the chair, his long legs crossed. “I know the young woman you’ve described.”

“Was she on the train recently?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know her name?”

With a skeptical rise of his eyebrows, Padden said, “If I did know it, I’m not sure I’d give it straight to you. As it happens I don’t know her surname. I heard her Christian name once.”

Lenox’s heart fell. “Can you tell me anything about her? Any detail at all? What station she leaves the train at, with whom she might travel, any distinguishing marks of apparel?”

“You said you were a Member of Parliament. Do you have a card?”

“Of course.” Lenox took one from the thin silver case Jane had given him three Christmases before. “At your service.”

Padden took the card and inspected it, then looked up. “If you don’t mind, I’ll look into your story for myself and call upon you in the next day or two, should I find that all’s in order, like.”

Lenox nodded at once. “I understand, though I would appreciate your haste. The matter may be pressing.”

“Yes,” said Padden. “She was more agitated than I’d seen her before.”

At the other end of the room Lenox’s first friend here—the man with the pink face and the toothbrush mustache—folded his paper. “Right, chaps,” he said. “The 8:29 to Clapham Junction waits for no man, unless I should stumble and fall into the tracks and have my head stoved in by a train. Which it’s very possible, clumsy as I am, and if it happens be generous when they pass the hat for the widow Parker. None of your ha’pennies, I want to hear a rattle of crowns, or I’ll haunt you proper.”

He tipped his cap, and there was a chorus of good-byes, Padden lifting a hand. “I’d better go myself, then,” he said to Lenox, glancing up at the clock. “I don’t like to leave it quite so late.”

Lenox stood. “Thank you,” he said. “Please call upon me as soon as you can. I shall be in Parliament after two, perhaps even earlier. I owe you a cup of tea. Or I’m happy to return here, if you send word round.”

“I fancy seeing the inside of Parliament,” said Padden, smiling slightly. He put his conductor’s hat on. “This afternoon.”

“I’ll have one of the runners give you a tour after we speak. Only be quick about it, please.”

As Lenox left Charing Cross he checked his own watch, before realizing that of course he knew what time it was—just far enough shy of 8:38, anyhow. He had, as ever, a great deal to do in Parliament, but he decided that he could put it off for another few hours. With any luck Audley and LeMaire would both be at work already; unlike Dallington (who had given him their addresses), they had proper offices, not far from each other in the West End.

As he walked out of Charing Cross Lenox pondered what the conductor had said about the young woman—that she was more agitated, on the train trip the previous week, than he had seen her before. For the dozenth time he pondered as well the motivations of the man calling himself Archie Godwin, and what he might have to do with her.

It was useless to speculate. Better to keep his mind clear of possibilities, and hope that he received more information soon.

As he walked toward the mall he saw flutters of spring everywhere. Flower sellers on the pavement, sweet little blossoms dotting some of the trees outside of Charing Cross, rather wind-shaken but sturdy enough to have survived to their bloom. Patrols of red squirrels were outside and vigilant again, after their sleepy winters.

He associated all of these things in his mind with the London season, which was to begin very soon now—always the Monday after Easter, just a week or so away. In every part of the country, young girls, accustomed to the drear of fox hunts and country balls, would be packing excitedly for the grander stages of the capital, trading letters with each other about how it would be, preparing to stay in town for the first time, and soon they would be crowding into the ballrooms of London to look for husbands, as gallant young fools nearby worked up the nerve to ask for dances and stodgy whiskered men looked on at them fondly from the dim corners, murmuring to each other over the punch in their cups. The London girls would feign boredom and superiority. In the first week there would be twenty engagements, a fifth of which would be tactfully canceled in the second, and in the third still more, the very plain girls and the very beautiful ones, settling and picking respectively. Though the season lasted until August, this first burst of activity was the brightest.

Lenox didn’t know what would be on his own docket, aside from their supper for Disraeli, but it would be crowded, with several parties starting at each hour of the evening, mothers imploring Jane, a great arbiter in these matters, for her presence. They had gone to just as many last year as ever, despite Sophia. It was tiring to contemplate. Still, he enjoyed a glass of punch, and it was pleasant to be one of the older men in the corner. There was not all that much joy in aging—his back creaked quite often now—but he felt glad that at any rate he was beyond the age of wife picking. He thought of Jane as he walked and smiled to himself.

He went to LeMaire’s first. Halfway down Brook Street was a gray house, much like all of its neighbors save for a discreetly gleaming brass placard near the bell, which read
J-C.LM
, letters that stood for Jean-Claude LeMaire’s name.

Lenox rang the bell. A handsome lad, very tall and with jet black hair, answered the door. “Have you an appointment?” he asked in a strong French accent.

Lenox sent in his card, perching himself patiently upon a small chair in the front hall to wait after the assistant disappeared. There were cards in the silver card stand of very grand personages, or at least one was intended to surmise as much—the names themselves were blacked out, in a flawed bid for confidentiality, leaving only the titles,
Monsieur Le Duc de
___
,
Lord
___
of
___
, The Honourable
___
, Member for
___
. Lenox wondered with some dismay if his own card would be superadded to this heap of distinction. Without even examining the stand’s contents closely he had already spotted the card of that fool Lord Sharpley, whose crest was unconcealed. No doubt Sharpley had hired LeMaire to investigate the disappearance of his two prized hunting dogs, though everyone this side of Northumberland knew his own ne’er-do-well brother had stolen them from him and sold them to a Scottish baronet.

The fellow who had greeted Lenox at the door reappeared and with a bow requested that Lenox follow him. LeMaire’s office was at the end of a small, dark corridor. The detective himself met Lenox at the door.

“Mr. Lenox! A remarkable pleasure, this!”

The old Vidocq touch, Dallington had called it, and he was precisely correct. LeMaire was a distinguished-looking fifty-year-old man, dark hair shagged down below his collar, a gallant small pointed beard descending from his chin, a twinkle in his eye. He was the Englishman’s idea of a canny Frenchman—and no doubt he was very intelligent; one could gather as much from his face. Of course, one could be intelligent in different directions. No doubt there would be a small surcharge at the foot of each bill for that twinkle.

It would be gratefully paid, for it was Vidocq who still held the most powerful hold on the British imagination of any police officer, at least this side of Sir Robert Peel. Vidocq had been first head of the French Sûreté, work he had described at length in his bestselling memoirs. Lenox was skeptical of the humility of anyone who felt the need to discourse about himself for fully four volumes, but they were rattling reads, enlivened considerably by the fact that before joining with the forces of justice, Vidocq had been one of the leading forgers and jailbreakers in France.

After he had reformed, he had also been the country’s first private detective—indeed, might have been the first in the world. His innovations had been legion: indelible ink, plaster molds for footprints, an index of the unalterable physical traits of known criminals, all the equipage that Lenox and Dallington and their kind now regularly employed. Lenox had narrowly missed meeting him many years before, when Vidocq was in his eighties and near death. It would have given him pleasure to look the shrewd old chap in the eye. Even after his celebrated reform Vidocq had not given up the old ways entirely, and in his seventies had briefly returned to prison, on a charge of fraud; when he died, not long after, eleven women came forward claiming to be the sole heir of his estate.

“How do you do, Monsieur LeMaire?” asked Lenox.

“I flourish badly, sir.”

“In that case you do not flourish at all, I fear!”

LeMaire smiled. “My English is not up in snuff, I am sure. To use your parlance.”

“It seems very fine to me.”

“How may I help you?”

“You may have heard that I was once a detective—like yourself,” Lenox added, thinking with an unbecoming note of pride that it was the other way around.

“Yes, of course. We are grateful you have cleared the field, though I read with very great ardor the account of the murders upon the
Lucy.
”

At the last moment he transmogrified the last word into
Lucys,
willfully it seemed to Lenox. He suspected the Frenchman of shamming his awkward English, and had since the words “up in snuff” passed his lips. It was no doubt beneficial to be underestimated, and of course nobody disdained a funny accent like the British. “That was a hairy business,” was all Lenox said.