An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) (8 page)

“I thought you did capitally well.”

Lenox inclined his head to acknowledge the compliment, then went on. “Once in a rare while, I do take on a case. I have one at the moment.”

“I am impatient that I might help you,” said LeMaire. “What is the case?”

Lenox had told the story of his encounter in Gilbert’s not forty minutes before to Padden, and now he had the points of the matter set in his mind and told LeMaire with decisive efficiency about the entire sequence of events. The French detective listened with great interest, all the way forward over his forearms on his desk, at the very edge of his seat, occasionally looking down at his hands and twisting his little beard with two fingers when Lenox came to a puzzling detail.

He waited until Lenox had finished and then said that alas, no, no such woman had come to him, that his only cases at the present moment concerned a vanished husband and a stolen ruby necklace, that while he kept his “ear in the ground” and tended to hear from his spies of much of the private detective work in London, he had not heard of this woman, he was so sorry, he was a thousand apologies. He begged of Lenox his card and promised to call upon him the moment he learned anything relevant, anything at all.

Lenox thanked him warmly and accepted the offer of a cup of coffee before he left. It was a loss of fifteen minutes in his crowded day but gave him a further chance to study the Frenchman. They discussed old crimes, on both sides of the Channel. He was a sagacious fellow, this LeMaire. By the time Lenox departed he was still not entirely sure whether that sagacity was complemented by honesty.

If LeMaire’s office had been very fine, ormolu and sterling, Robert Audley’s was all oak and brass. It stood not far away on Mount Street, near the fine old pile called the Prince of Saxe-Coburg Hotel—named for the Queen’s prematurely dead love, Prince Albert, for whom she still, by all accounts, mourned deeply. Indeed, Audley was the house detective at several of the grand hotels in London, including besides this one the Langham and Claridge’s, responsible for any minor matters that their august guests brought to management. He had been on the police force until about six or seven years before; Lenox had known him then, a sturdy young man, impatient of nonsense.

He was also, according to Dallington, a committed alcoholic.

Audley greeted Lenox at the door himself, gruffly acknowledged the card he received, and said that he did remember their previous encounters, though from his tone you wouldn’t have guessed the memories were altogether fond. In the plain, banker’s-style office there was no whiff of spirits. Certainly he had no assistant.

There was another telltale sign, however, one that Lenox had observed in about a third of the alcoholics he knew. Audley kept a great deal of food on hand, none of which, Lenox would have guessed, he touched, beyond a biscuit every day or so. It was, as so often in these cases, too much food, betraying in its very ubiquity the illusion the drinker aimed to preserve.

Or perhaps not—Lenox reminded himself that Dallington had been wrong before. He tried to stem his judgment of the man.

“What brings you here?” Audley asked. “I don’t have time to talk shop.”

“No, certainly not,” said Lenox.

“Well?”

Audley’s bluntness, perhaps like LeMaire’s bumbling Frenchness, was likely a reassurance to the customers who sought him out—though in this case it was an unaffected trait, accidentally useful to him in his profession. “I am worried about the safety of a young woman who came to me for help.”

“In your capacity as a Member of Parliament?”

“No. Her information was out of date, apparently, because she believed me still to be a detective. It happens half a dozen times a year.” This was true in general, if not in this particular case; Lenox simply didn’t want to bring Dallington into the matter. “In the end she convinced me, against my better judgment, to help her.”

“Why couldn’t His Drunken Lordship do it?” asked Audley. “You usually pass your work on to him, from all I hear.”

Lenox looked at Audley sharply. “I suggest you watch your words. In particular when you’re with his friends, of whom I consider myself one. John Dallington is a very fine detective.”

Audley hesitated for a moment, a bit of fight in his eyes, but then held up his hands in apology. “Withdrawn. It’s a vice I can’t abide, drinking, and my temper sometimes overruns my mouth.”

“I can assure you that he has no problem with drink now, if ever he did.”

“I hope that’s the truth. They’re clever at hiding it.”

Lenox was half-inclined to leave—but this was his best chance, short of Padden offering some revelatory information, of finding the young woman he had seen at Gilbert’s. So he stayed and told his story. In the end he was glad he did.

“Light-haired, you say?” Audley asked.

“Yes. With a black-and-white striped umbrella, at least when I saw her.”

“Her name is Laurel Wheeler.”

“Laurel Wheeler,” Lenox repeated, his attention complete, his pulse quickening—but his voice cautious. “You seem very sure of that name.”

He looked more closely at Audley. The man’s face was difficult to read; behind him was a high bank of windows, showing the gray day along this quiet slice of Mount Street, and this faded light cast Audley in shadow.

He nodded. “Yes, I’m quite sure.”

“Could you elaborate?”

Audley shrugged. “I’ve given you the name of the young woman in question. She left no address, so I cannot offer you that. And since she may yet need the services of our profession—”

“Your profession,” said Lenox.

“Our profession. Since she may still need one of us, I don’t see the advantage to me in telling you more.”

“Yet the advantage to Miss Wheeler may be very great indeed.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Audley. There was a slight throb or shiver in his right hand, which he did his utmost to master. “For the moment that will have to be enough, Mr. Lenox.”

“Tell me, at least, how you are so sure of her name.”

“She left a card behind her.”

“I don’t quite understand you, Mr. Audley. She has come to see you, left her card behind, and yet you still wonder whether she might be your client? Surely it is beyond dispute now?”

“Evidently you were her first pick.”

It was a fair point. “Then why give me her name?”

“The case she offered me was limited in scope. There may be other avenues you wish to explore, and if she is truly in danger I wish you luck with them. For my part I mean to consult her later this afternoon.”

“Listen here, what if I tell you that I will take her case on myself, but you can keep her fee? In fact, I’m happy to match her fee—I can hire you.”

This had been a misstep, Lenox saw immediately. Audley’s face darkened with professional disdain. “I have my own agency, Mr. Lenox. In Whitehall word may no longer reach you about your profession—your former profession, let me grant your point—but my agency is rather a successful one. Successful enough that I have no need to subordinate myself to an out-of-practice society gentleman who once dabbled in the art to which I have dedicated my life.”

A silence hung in the air for a moment. Then Lenox said, “As you please. Thank you for the name, at any rate, and if it can be of any benefit to Miss Wheeler, she may reach me at the address upon this card.”

Audley took the card that Lenox proffered and studied it for a moment. Perhaps he felt he had been harsh, because he added, in an explanatory tone, “On top of it all, a new client is always a boon to me. She will have friends, she might recommend me. It is how I earn my bread.”

It was a just point, as far as it went. “Quite so. Good day, Mr. Audley.”

“Mr. Lenox.”

As Lenox closed the door behind him and ventured into the street, he could almost sense a bottle opening in the room he had just vacated. A strange man, Audley. Hopefully he had steered Lenox closer to the truth.

It was drizzling outside now, the street dark except for the jolly sparkle of light in the Queen’s Arms public house on the corner. Lenox turned up his collar and ducked his head, looking up and down to see if he might hail a hansom cab—but without success. He had to get down to Parliament. It was just far enough from Mount Street to make the prospect of walking it in the rain an unpleasant one. He sighed and soldiered on.

Soon the rain intensified, however, and when he came to another pub, this one called the Bear and Pony, he couldn’t resist it. He pushed open the door and went inside.

It was warm and dry. Crowded, too—evidently others had the same idea of escaping the rain. Still, there were a few empty seats at the bar, and he went and took one, asking for a hot whisky and water, just a small one. The brisk young ginger-haired man in his apron nodded and went off to prepare the drink.

“That you, Lenox?” asked a voice nearby.

Lenox turned to look, and when he saw the face to which the voice belonged he smiled. It was a man named Joseph Baltimore. “Hullo, Baltimore. Stand you a drink?”

“Brotherly of you, but I have a fresh one.” The older man held up his tankard. “Is this your regular drinking house?”

“No, I just came in to get out of the rain. You?”

“I live two doors down. Liza sends me here when I’m underfoot. Today she’s seeing about the season. Boring as all hell.”

“Are you very busy?”

“Only averagely, three dozen parties a night. I wish it were already over.”

“Give it a skip.”

“No, I shouldn’t hear the end of it.”

Baltimore was an American, raised in the northeastern part of that country, of an old family; his first ancestor in the country had been the bell ringer of Boston when there were fewer than eight hundred people there. Shipping had brought the family a fortune, and on his tour of Europe Baltimore, then less gray, his face less lined, had met Elizabeth Winston. He was handsome and rich, she plain and poor, though very wellborn, and yet it was said in the West End that there was not a couple more in love with each other. They had nine children. Four were in America, where their father had insisted they study. The remaining five were girls—and for all he cared they might study in Transylvania, he had once told Lenox.

Baltimore didn’t work, precisely, and yet he was useful to many men, and it would have been surprising if he hadn’t earned a great deal of money, through the years, by his intelligence. He was London’s expert on America. He helped politicians, businessmen, and also parents, who felt both the risk and the allure of the American fortunes that courted their sons and daughters. (“There’s a lot of
money
over there, you know,” people had taken to saying in the past year or two at parties, with shrewd, naive eyes, as if they were discussing dragons’ teeth; great rumblings of rail and oil fortunes had begun to reach the island.) Baltimore’s discretion was supreme, nearly unexampled in the hurly-burly of London society, yet paradoxically he was known for putting in a soft word at the right moment, in time to avert mischance.

And in fact that was what he did now, for Lenox. “I’m happy to have run into you,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Indeed, I thought of calling on you when I was in Parliament yesterday, seeing Amos Cross, but our meeting ran long.”

Lenox’s interest was piqued. “I hope nothing is the matter.”

“It’s about your secretary. Graham.” He pronounced the name without acknowledging the
h
in the middle, “gram.” Baltimore stuck stubbornly to his flat accent—closer than the English accent, he was fond of reminding people, to the tone in which Shakespeare himself would have spoken, because no German family had come marauding for America’s crown, slowly modulating the fashionable accent all out of recognition from its previous sound, as the Teutonic tones of the royal family had in the last hundred years. “You may want to keep your eye on him.”

“I would trust him with my life,” said Lenox immediately.

“I don’t doubt that. Your career might be another matter, however.”

Baltimore was not a troublemaker. Lenox would have walked away from most men who said anything against Graham in his hearing, but now he stayed. “What have you heard?”

“Nothing substantial, only mutterings. Not about you, though—always about Mr. Graham.”

“He drives a hard deal with the other side, to be sure.”

“Not that,” said Baltimore in a low voice. He took a sip of his porter. “The other thing. Money.”

“Graham?” asked Lenox skeptically.

“Yes, him. That he can be bought. But I’m sure you know your man.”

“What exactly have you heard?” asked Lenox.

“I won’t name the person I had it from, for he himself had it secondhand. But he said that it was well-known among the other political secretaries with masters in the Commons that Graham had arranged some kind of fund to pay himself through, something cozy.”

“There are no more specifics than that? Pah. It’s a slur upon his class, nothing more.”

“Perhaps,” said Baltimore, taking a pensive sip from his pint pot.

Most political secretaries in Parliament were young men with political ambitions of their own, often from the great public schools and universities, cultivating the connections that would one day attain for them their own seat, even eventually their own ministry. Lenox had scoured their number for a suitable secretary when he was elected, but none of the candidates had seemed quite compatible; instead (to general derision) he had selected his butler for the post. He considered it the best decision he had made as a politician.

“Nonetheless I am grateful to you,” said Lenox. “It’s better to know of these things. I’ll have a word with Graham this afternoon.”

The next morning it was Saturday, and Lenox lingered in his bedroom until nearly ten, reading the weekend papers and sipping at a sweet cup of tea. Jane was away from the house early, out with Toto at a meeting for the Humane Society. (This was Toto’s influence. Jane liked dogs and cats, but she had grown up among the rougher folkways of the country, and therefore perhaps didn’t have her friend’s total and consuming sympathy toward their plight. She also couldn’t especially spare the hours it required once a month to pin her focus to them, when there was so much else to do, and she was reluctant to wear the gruesome large yellow ribbon that indicated her membership in the women’s circle of the society. Still, friendship.) Finally he dressed and went downstairs to eat a small breakfast, a hot egg upon a piece of brown toast.