The Vanishing Man Page 15

  Lenox wanted to return to the clue, momentarily. First, he said, “Your great-grandfather’s papers of research—have they been preserved?”

  The duke nodded. “Yes. My father spent much time organizing and examining them. I have done the same when I had respite from my public duties.”

  “And what do they reveal?”

  “There is no clue either to the origin of the portrait or the specific play that was found. He was too canny to commit either to print, I suppose. As to the play, there are rumors, of course.”

  Lenox knew these from the reading Duncan Jones had given him. The legends of lost Shakespeare plays were ten-a-penny—to begin with, those that had very definitely been performed by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, but of which no text existed. (For instance, Love’s Labors Won—a sequel to Love’s Labors Lost.) Others were only rumors. The tradition had it that there was a play about Queen Elizabeth herself, as well as a variety of plays with tantalizing names: Cardenio, Double Falsehood, Fair Em, Lancelot, Lord Cromwell. Men spent their lives in dusty bookshops and forgotten libraries hoping to unearth one of them. Thus far none had succeeded.

  Lenox nodded. “And so now we come to the poem.”

  The duke smiled. “Yes, the poem. A trifle that I have spent many years of my life contemplating. A rhyme scheme of AABB, one of the simplest possible. Iambic tetrameter. Seven syllables, eight, seven, eight.”

  “Forty miles from Charing Cross,” Lenox said.

  “Forty miles from Charing Cross,” the duke said, and nodded.

  “I take it that you or your forebears have followed the instructions.”

  The Duke nodded again. “Yes. With a very considerable margin of error built in.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In 1822, my father used a compass to draw a forty-mile radius around Charing Cross. Then he spent a month traveling the terrain by horse himself, allowing two miles on either side—anything thirty-eight to forty-two miles from Charing Cross.”

  “He did not forget the apple’s toss, then,” said Lenox.

  The duke shook his head. “Believe me, we have not.”

  “And what did he find?”

  “There were around fifty fields that matched the description in the poem. He took his steward, Crawford, under his advisement, for he was a methodical man, and together they made a search, though my father never told him for what.”

  “What did they do?”

  “First, they looked for markers. Wherever there was anything resembling a marker, they dug—my father spending very freely on local laborers and on the men to whom the land belonged, explaining that he was chasing an old Dorset cross, not especially valuable in itself but of great worth to our family.”

  “I wonder that they believed that.”

  “Perhaps they did not,” said the duke.

  There was a knock on the door, and then it opened, which, since the duke had not answered, was rather surprising—until Lenox remembered they were in a prison.

  It was a middle-aged maid in a coarse dress, bearing a tea tray. Behind her was the bailiff, holding the keys. “Mr. Ward sent tea through, from the Port of Whitby downstairs.”

  “Ah, good of him, thank you,” said the duke. The maid came in and set the tea tray with its small sandwiches and scones down on a table. “That reminds me that I have not asked you to sit, Mr. Lenox. Will you join me? It is not quite White’s.”

  The young detective smiled. “It is more interesting.”

  By the time they were alone again, the door shut behind them, each had a cup of tea. The wind whistled through the stone turrets.

  “To return to my story: They found nothing, my father and his steward. Nothing at all. My father once told me that he had not once ever felt even close.”

  “Was he bitter about it?”

  “Oh, no. But he was certainly determined that I should continue to look.”

  Lenox nodded. “And the painting itself? Have you had it inspected?”

  Dorset nodded. “Numerous times. Inside, outside, backside, frontside, framed, out of frame, the frame itself.”

  “And?”

  “No clue about the play has come from it. It is obviously of the right age—various experts have attested to that. They have also noted that its sitter—”

  “Is Catholic,” said Lenox.

  Dorset smiled faintly. “Well done. Yes. That is why the picture was hidden in John Shakespeare’s house.”

  In his Latin dictionary, Lenox had looked up the phrase Nomen Mariae, BV. “In the name of Mary, Blessed Virgin,” he said.

  “Yes. The lily in the painting is her emblem. They are Catholic references that anyone of Shakespeare’s own time would have known instantly.”

  Lenox nodded. He put down his teacup. “Very good, Your Grace.”

  The duke looked alarmed. “Are you leaving?”

  “I have a solid idea of what we’re working from now,” said Lenox. “But I still must find that picture.”

  “Why? You know about the play.”

  Lenox was tempted to elaborate—but nothing good could come of talking before he fully knew what he was saying. “Your Grace,” he said, “I wonder still whether your initial call upon my services began with an error.”

  “How is that?”

  “Does it not strike you as implausible,” said Lenox, “that someone would know of the existence of this portrait and then steal the wrong picture?”

  Dorset frowned. “I assumed they sent a thief, who bungled the job.”

  Lenox tilted his head. “It is possible. Anyhow, I am very eager to learn more about your valet, and I am stubbornly still hopeful that finding the portrait will help us. If you excuse me, I promise to send you word of my progress this evening.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  At home Lenox found waiting for him Graham, neat as a pin as usual in his laurel-gray suit, sandy hair combed right.

  “Hello,” said the detective. “Have a look at this.”

  He handed over the copy of the poem he had jotted down, and Graham took it and read it carefully. “New clues,” he said, looking up.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Lenox.

  They took two chairs in the front hall—this was too urgent a conference for them to make it any farther into the house—and Lenox enumerated all his discoveries of the past twenty-four hours, including the second clue he believed he had found in the letter, the one that led him to the notion of why the missing portrait had been stolen instead of Shakespeare’s.

  Graham listened carefully, occasionally intervening with a question. At the end of the explanation, Lenox felt obscurely relieved. It was always better to have Graham in possession of the facts of a case—always.

  Meanwhile, the quiet, competent valet had himself been busy. “I have amassed the information you asked me to about Craig.”

  “Thank you. Anything interesting?”

  “I hope so. I stopped into the Junior Ganymede, sir.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I did, sir.”

  The Junior Ganymede Club was a gentlemen’s club located just off of Berkeley Square, exclusively for the valets and butlers of the aristocracy. (This sort of specificity in a city with hundreds of gentlemen’s clubs was not unusual—next door to White’s was a very comfortable club for trout anglers, the Salmo.) Graham had joined the year before.

  “I thought the first rule at the Junior Ganymede was the privacy of their masters?”

  “In general it is, yes, sir. But I thought this likely would not touch on the Duke of Dorset’s secrets. And more significantly, in this case there may be the chance that one of the membership has been murdered.”

  “Craig was a member!”

  Graham nodded. “I approached a steward that I trust, sir. An Oxfordshire boy.” Graham’s rare smile appeared. He was himself an Oxfordshire boy. “He works the last shift. Hence my late return last night. I wanted to wait until most members had departed.”

  “That was cleve
r. But I say, a servant in a servants’ club. No putting anything by his masters.”

  “He is a stalwart fellow.”

  “What did you learn?”

  Graham pulled a piece of club stationery from his pocket. “Alexander Arnold Craig, sir,” he began. “Born in Dumferline on the fifth of November, 1810, making him forty-two at the time of his death yesterday morning.”

  “Too young.”

  “Craig joined the Scots Guards at sixteen as a private, sir, and mustered out with distinction at twenty-three. He went straight into service in the duke’s household; he noted, in the Members’ Book, that he had a very strong recommendation from his commanding officer, Lieutenant Pinney-May, who is a cousin of the duke’s.”

  “Do you know why he left the military?”

  “He preferred a domestic situation, sir.” Graham looked down at his notes. “He went into the duke’s service as a footman, but soon thereafter became a valet, upon the retirement of his predecessor to the Sussex Downs.”

  “They spent nineteen years together,” Lenox said.

  “Yes, sir. Virtually Craig’s entire adult life, and much of His Grace’s. Before and after he ascended to the title. No criminal record in London—the Junior Ganymede does not permit it.”

  “For, say, stealing,” said Lenox.

  “Sir?”

  “If that is why he was shot, I mean.”

  “Yes, that sounds out of character, sir.”

  “Does it?”

  “Craig was by universal consent a model servant, sir, at least according to the Junior Ganymede’s membership. Those who had worked in the Dorset household said he was precise and rigorous in his habits.”

  “The military.”

  “Exactly, sir.”

  “Debts? Family?”

  “He paid his bill as soon as he received it each month, sir—”

  “Well done, Graham.”

  “Thank you, sir. That includes this month, on the first. No family listed except a cousin, Walter Craig, who is a corresponding member of the club based in Essex, with the family of Mr. Peregrine Tarrant, a landowner of means there.”

  Lenox crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair, studying the matter from all sides, hand across the lower half of his face. He looked up. “Did you ever see him there?”

  “No, sir. But I understand that he was a regular card player on Tuesday evenings—his afternoon off—and frequently lunched in the dining room, sometimes up to four or five times a week.”

  “I see.”

  “He was not a drinker, sir.”

  “Never?”

  “Not according to my acquaintance, sir.”

  Alexander Craig. Nineteen years in service to one gentleman, then shot by him in the early hours of the morning. It was both a damnable and bizarre situation, no matter what he’d been trying to steal. And he sounded a conscientious servant, if anything perhaps even too austere in his habits, which matched Lenox’s few personal impressions of him. The farthest thing from a thief imaginable.

  “I wonder if I could ask you a favor, Graham. Could you try to get in amongst the servants at Dorset’s house and ask about someone named Maggie McNeal?”

  “Not Craig, sir?”

  “If they have any information about Craig I would be curious to hear it. But Maggie McNeal is a person I am also curious about. She departed without notice from the duke’s household two days ago.”

  Graham raised his eyebrows. “I see. Yes, sir. Of course.”

  Lenox glanced up at the carriage clock on the table near the door. “If you have time after you’ve done that, I would be grateful if you could run a General Arthur Pendleton to ground. It shouldn’t be hard. He is staying in London at the moment, I would imagine at the Army and Navy. If not there, one of the usual places.”

  Graham—the quickest of studies—knew the world of London clubs as accurately as any man in the West End. “Very good, sir. Before you leave, you have a note from Thaddeus Bonden, sir.”

  “Do I? Let me see it, please.”

  Graham passed him a rough piece of paper folded in half.

  Will be there at 3:37. No need to come east. Bonden.

  It was just around noon. “Where is Lancelot?” he asked.

  “Out with the curate, Mr. Templeton, sir, upon an educational trip to the museum of zoology.”

  “Ah, he’ll hate that,” Lenox said with satisfaction. “And meanwhile I can sit in my study, thinking, without a single person bothering me until—well, three thirty-seven. I wonder how he decided upon that hour?”

  Graham took the note and read it. “I cannot say, sir.”

  “One of the things Willoughby Clark told me about Bonden is that he can multiply any two numbers in his head, just like that, faster than you could do it by hand. Large numbers.”

  “Interesting, sir.”

  “Clark called him a misfit, I think. An oddball? But I wonder if it has something to do with his gift. After all, there are all sorts of mad geniuses in painting, and that kind of thing.”

  “Indisputably, sir.”

  “Yes, laugh at me, but it’s true. Perhaps Bonden is only … different. I don’t know what I mean, I’m tired. Anyway, Lord, how I hope he has found that stupid painting. We are one piece away from knowing everything now. I’m positive.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  At 3:38 P.M., Lenox and Bonden had been sitting in Lenox’s library for one minute. Bonden had declined the offer of coffee or tea.

  “You look different,” Lenox said. “What have you been doing?”

  Bonden was in a suit, a proper suit. “I broke into the duke’s private study.”

  “You what!”

  “It was necessary.”

  “The last man who did that was shot.”

  “On the other hand I was not.”

  Lenox frowned. “If he finds out, he’ll rain every police officer in London down on you. And half the Coldstream Guards.”

  “I have no plans to tell him,” said Bonden.

  He was smoking. Lenox was torn between admiration and annoyance at his phlegmatic manner.

  “Why did you do that?”

  Bonden drew on his pipe and exhaled a thin river of smoke. “I wanted to see if it was possible to get in through the window.”

  “Was it?” asked Lenox.

  Bonden shook his head. “I did it in the end. But no, it is not—practically speaking. I wouldn’t care to come down with a painting, either. Even with a ladder, which nobody would dare use in plain view of the street. It would be difficult to gain entry through the window. The small hedge in front of the building makes for a sharp angle upward.”

  “What did you do after that?”

  “Stood and watched the house for four hours.”

  “Four hours!”

  “I wanted to see it.”

  “I should say you had the chance.” And now Lenox felt his heart quicken, for they were coming to the point. “Do you know where the painting is?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “No.”

  “Then how can you know its location?”

  “Because I know that it’s not anywhere else.”

  Lenox had to stop himself from scoffing. It could be in Indochina, he thought once more. “Then where is it?”

  “In Lord Vere’s bedroom.”

  The young detective was so taken aback that he just stared for a moment. “Lord Vere’s bedroom.”

  “Yes.”

  Lenox took out his billfold. “Here is your payment,” he said.

  Bonden took half of the money Lenox held out. “For my time. See if the painting is there. If it’s not, you owe me nothing more.”

  Lenox took the bills back and said cautiously, “You are that confident?”

  “I am that confident.”

  “But it could be in Yorkshire now, or Florence. It could be ash.”

  “Yet it is not.” Bonden stared at him impassively. “You hired me, Mr. Lenox. Go see
for yourself if you like.”

  Lenox thought of what he knew of Corfe. He had seen him, sickly but dressed, on the morning of the duke’s arrest.

  “How can you be so arrogant!”

  Bonden shook his head. “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘No’?”

  “The person who stole the painting did not climb through the window—and they are not in Yorkshire now, or Florence. Nor do I think even Lord Vere would be stupid enough to start a fire in the dead of summer when he has a fever, so it has not been burned.” Bonden paused and stood up. “Once I knew it was in the house, I paid a servant to give me the full layout of the place. There are new servants there every day, more or less. There were only four places in the house it could have been. She checked three of them for me.”

  It was obvious that Bonden hated speaking this much. “And that’s all I’m to know,” Lenox said.

  “That’s quite enough,” Bonden replied shortly. “You may send the remainder of my payment to the Dovecote. Good afternoon, Mr. Lenox.”

  Lenox watched him walk down the hall and let himself out.

  Magical, they had all said of Bonden. But this was the most obvious trouble with magic. It always turned out to be fake.

  Still, what if it wasn’t?

  At seven o’clock, beneath vast gray rainclouds undercoating a heartache shade of evening, Lenox went to Dorset House. He was hoping that he would arrive in time to catch the family dining, and he did.

  He was led to wait in a massive drawing room—yet another that Lenox had not seen—and nearby was a flawless Holbein (even he could recognize that much), a noblewoman against a background of pure yellow. This one was nearly priceless, he supposed. It convinced him more than ever of the significance he knew he alone suspected the missing portrait from the duke’s study held—otherwise why not grab this Holbein and sell it to some unscrupulous upjumped American?

  Ward entered, greeting him with an admirably friendly hello given how much of his time Lenox had demanded recently.

  “What brings you here?” he asked. “News?”

  “Tell me,” said Lenox in a low voice. “What do you make of Vere?”

  Ward frowned. “That is what you want to know about? Corfe?”