A Stranger in Mayfair Read online

  “Excellently, Mr. Graham, I thank you.”

  After the man had walked on, Lenox said in a low voice, “My God, that was Percy Field.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How on earth do you know him?”

  Percy Field was the Prime Minister’s own assistant, a famously accomplished and imperious lad from Magdalene College, prodigiously intelligent, whom the PM himself had declared more important to Great Britain’s welfare than all but ten or twenty people. Field had little patience for most Members, let alone their secretaries.

  “He snubbed me, until I took the liberty of inviting him to one of your Tuesdays, sir. I spoke to Lady Lenox in advance of the offer, and she readily consented. Mr. Field’s attitude was cold when I first approached him, but he quickly warmed.”

  This was disingenuous; they were Lady Jane’s Tuesdays, as they had been for fifteen years, a gathering of London’s elite—say twenty or so people—in her drawing room. Even for Field an invitation would be a great coup.

  “Well done, Graham. Extremely well done.”

  They went inside, up to the cramped office, and began the day’s work. For the rest of the morning Lenox dutifully attended his meetings and read his blue books. The entire time, though, his mind was on the murder. As such it wasn’t quite a surprise when he heard himself saying to Graham, “Send my regrets to the one o’clock meeting, please. I’m going round to fetch Dallington. I have to go to Frederick Clarke’s funeral.”

  Chapter Twelve

  What was the proper form for a servant’s funeral? In general one attended, but then in general the deceased was old and respectable. What if there was the strong prospect of a title, which only scandal could preclude?

  The moment Lenox laid eyes on Ludo Starling it was clear the man had been mulling over these questions all morning. In the event Ludo and his wife were present, but Tiberius and the Starling boys weren’t. Jack Collingwood, Jenny Rogers, and Betsy Mints sat in the second row. Alone in the first row was a large, thin woman, perhaps fifty years old but still well-looking, horsey and countryish. She wore a straw mourning bonnet, black, with a deep black crepe ribbon, a soft black gown, and a dark veil. When she turned back Lenox saw that she was rather plain-faced, but somehow still attractive.

  “That must be the boy’s mother,” he whispered to Dallington as they took their seats several rows back. “The place of honor.”

  “Don’t you feel a bit dodgy here?” asked the young lord. “We didn’t know him.”

  Lenox nodded gravely. “Even so, we owe him our best, and this is a singular opportunity to see who he knew and what he was like.”

  The funeral took place in a small, appealing Mayfair church, St. George’s, which Lenox knew the Starling family had generously endowed over the years. It was a distinguished building with tall white columns in front, steep stairs to the front door, and a high bell tower overhead, part of the Fifty Churches Act that Parliament had passed in the early eighteenth century at the behest of Queen Anne, to keep up with London’s expansion in population. A pious woman, Anne had wanted to ensure that all of her subjects were close to a church. In the end the project fell well short of its target—a dozen churches or so had gone up—but they had left their mark. The great architect Nicholas Hawksmoor had built many of them, and even the ones he didn’t build (like this) were in his style. They were called Queen Anne’s Churches now—all much of a piece, beautiful, high, very white, and somewhat severe. Given Ludo’s newfound affinity for discretion, it was surprising to find the service held in a firmly aristocratic church.

  The most striking occurrence at the funeral happened just before the service began. With the church already full, six footmen in identical livery marched somberly down the center aisle and took an empty pew. They made for an arresting picture.

  “I’d like to speak to them,” said Dallington.

  “Perhaps they were his real friends. It wouldn’t surprise me. He couldn’t have been proper friends with either of the women in his house or Collingwood, his superior among the staff.”

  “True, and he lived along that row of houses. All the footmen would have been in the alley constantly.”

  “Precisely.”

  The service was a modest one, without music save for Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at the recession. Funerals in London tended to be grandiose (at one last year, Lenox had seen a procession of mutes and jugglers before the coffin), but this was a plain old English service—rather touching in its simplicity.

  One rather strange absence was that of Inspector Grayson Fowler of Scotland Yard. Perhaps the feeling of propriety that had nettled Dallington kept him away, but Lenox doubted it. Fowler was a particular type—old, grizzled, disagreeable to most people, and extremely sharp-witted. He was well past fifty years of age, and in his many years on the force had been one of the few people at the Yard of whom Lenox had entirely approved. In turn he had always liked Lenox, who had talked over cases with him many a time, interpreting clues and prodding theories to find their soft spots. Lenox decided that he would visit Scotland Yard that night, despite the curt note he had received when he tried to contact Fowler before. Perhaps it had been a bad day.

  As they stood on the steps of the church after the funeral, nobody seemed quite sure what to do. A reception would have been appropriate, but Ludo hadn’t mentioned one, and the boy’s mother was from out of town—and an old family servant! It was shabby of Ludo, actually, and thus it made Lenox doubly glad when one of the six footmen did something gallant. He was a red-haired, freckled, very young-looking man.

  To the group he said, “Since we appear to be at loose ends, may my friends and I invite you all to the second floor of the Bricklayers’ Arms? It’s one street down, and Freddie often enjoyed a pint there. Mrs. Clarke, may I take your arm?”

  “Oh—yes,” stammered Ludo. “Here, I insist upon buying a round.” He fumbled through his pockets and came up with a note, which the footman had the good manners to accept.

  “Freddie,” murmured Lenox to Dallington.

  “Maybe I’ll buy a round as well. Come along?”

  “Graham will murder me if I don’t get back. Come see me tonight though, will you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  A ragged procession had already begun down the street, and Dallington ran up to join it. Lenox sidled up to Ludo Starling.

  “Where is the boy’s mother staying?” he asked. “With you, I assume?”

  “No. We offered.”

  “You don’t know where?”

  “A hotel in Hammersmith.”

  “But that’s miles and miles away.”

  Ludo shrugged. “We offered, as I say.”

  “Which hotel?”

  “It’s called the Tilton. That’s all I know. Listen, Charles—I feel uneasy about you looking into this murder. It’s nearly been a week already. Fowler says we can’t expect to discover who did this horrible thing to Frederick, and I don’t want to detain you for the purposes of a—a fruitless search.”

  “Yes,” said Lenox placidly.

  “After all, what’s the point? The House sits again soon, and we both have work to do before then.”

  “True.”

  “Will you drop it?”

  “My priorities are certainly at the House, but if you don’t mind I’ll have Dallington look around a little more.”

  “Oh?” said Ludo. His face was difficult to read. “If he has the time, by all means. I just want to be sure you don’t waste any time that would be otherwise spent productively.”

  “Thank you,” said Lenox.

  As he walked away down Brook Street toward New Bond, Lenox pondered this exchange with Ludo. There was no possibility whatsoever that Grayson Fowler had said the Yard couldn’t expect to solve the case. For one thing it was against policy, and for another Fowler was an irascible, tenacious man, not given to accepting failure gracefully. What could be happening between Ludo’s ears? Why ask Lenox onto the case and then try to kick him off? The
title?

  He was walking in the direction of Grosvenor Square. He was already late to see Graham, but it had occurred to him during the service that he hadn’t seen Thomas and Toto McConnell in nearly a week, and he decided to go visit them.

  It was Toto herself, big as a house, who answered the door. Her funereal butler, Shreve, stood behind her with a dismayed downturn at the corners of his mouth.

  “Oh, Charles, how wonderful! Look at the size of me, will you? I’m not supposed to be on my feet, but I saw it was you through the window.”

  “Shreve could have gotten it.”

  The butler coughed a muted agreement.

  “Oh, bother that, I wanted to stand up anyway. Thomas was reading one of his scientific papers to me, something or other about dolphins, I can’t keep up and it’s dreadfully boring. I do like his voice, though, don’t you? It’s very soothing.”

  McConnell was standing before the sofa, beaming—still tall, still exceedingly handsome with his shaggy hair.

  “How are you?” he said.

  “Excellent, thank you. Any day now?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think it’s a girl.”

  “I do want a girl,” said Toto, heaving herself onto the couch with an unladylike grunt, “but of course a boy would be lovely, too.”

  “Anything happening about the murder?” asked McConnell.

  “Don’t talk about that nonsense,” said Toto crossly, her pretty face flushed. “I want to hear happy chatter, not about murders and blood. Just this once. After the baby comes the five of us can have a symposium on the subject, but right now I want to talk about nice subjects. How is Jane’s garden, Charles?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  That evening Lenox was sitting at his broad mahogany desk, reading a blue book on the subject of England’s commitments to Ireland. It was early September all of the sudden, after the endless warm summer of his honeymoon, and chill on the streets. Lady Jane had been out all evening, and he had stayed home, hoping to speak with her when she returned. He owed her a better apology and in his mind he worked over the words he would say when she came in.

  As it happened the sound of the front door opening brought not her but a breathless Dallington.

  “Lord John Dallington, sir,” said Kirk, coming in after the young man yet again. “The young gentleman didn’t knock, sir,” he added with opprobrium. Between him and Shreve, it was a bad day to be a fastidious butler in London.

  “I was in a rush, wasn’t I? Lenox, it’s about the case.”

  “What?”

  “I spent the last five hours at the Bricklayers’ Arms. I think we have a suspect.”

  Lenox stood up. “Who?”

  “Jack Collingwood.”

  Lenox whistled. Append another unhappy butler’s name to the growing list. During their interview Collingwood had sounded so very neutral about Clarke, appropriately sad but not, seemingly, very affected.

  “What makes you suspect him?”

  “I’ll tell you in a moment. Graham, could you scare up a glass of brandy for me? Oh, but of course you’re not Graham—Kirk, is it? Thank you.” He turned to Lenox. “I sipped one glass of porter all afternoon, trying to keep my head clear, even though I bought five rounds. I have a terrible thirst.”

  “Make it two, Kirk, and I’ll take mine warm.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve found out why he had scabbed knuckles. Freddie Clarke. Everyone calls him Freddie, by the way—his friends.”

  “Why?”

  “It doesn’t help us. He was an amateur boxer, bare knuckles. Apparently they make these footmen of pretty durable material—he fought every other Thursday and trained whenever he could, including early mornings, at a ring in South London.”

  Boxing had grown up over the course of Lenox’s lifetime, replacing fencing and the quarterstaff as the city’s most prevalent combat sport. There were both aristocratic sparring rings and back-of-the-pub arenas devoted to it.

  “Who did he fight? Was it rough or clean?”

  “Clean—a nice place, expensive enough to be a drain on his income. He was great friends with his sparring partners.”

  “It’s too bad. I thought the hands might be a clue.”

  “I did, too.”

  “What about Collingwood?”

  “May I tell it chronologically, while it’s fresh in my mind?”

  “Of course.”

  Kirk arrived with the drinks, and Dallington downed half of his in one gulp. He looked at Lenox. “Oh, don’t put on that irritable face,” he said. “I hardly drink at all anymore.”

  Lenox laughed. “I didn’t know I had any particular look on my face.”

  Dallington still caroused three or four days a month, out with the lively young things of the West End, with loose women and plentiful champagne in the dim dens lying under unmarked doors, the ones that only true revelers could discover. As a result he saw opprobrium in Lenox’s eyes perhaps more often than it was there.

  “Let me think,” said Dallington. “I should begin by saying that the footmen you saw at the funeral were Dallington’s closest friends. They came from various houses along Curzon Street and went to the pub once or twice a week together, in addition to meeting in the alley where he was killed, to smoke and chat.”

  “It makes sense—he didn’t have any close friends in the house.”

  “On the contrary, he absolutely loathed Jack Collingwood, his superior and apparently a very strict taskmaster. They nearly came to blows three weeks ago when Collingwood called Clarke an idiot. Collingwood withdrew the insult when Clarke challenged him to fight. According to Jenny Rogers, by way of Ginger—that’s the red-haired chap who spoke on the church steps—Freddie said he didn’t care a whit about the job and would quit just so that he could fight Collingwood.”

  “That’s why you think Collingwood is a suspect?”

  “Partly. There’s a great deal of anecdotal evidence about how little the two men liked each other. Ginger told me several stories—so did his friends—about that. Once Clarke dropped a silver tray as he was coming down the stairs, and even though it was undamaged Collingwood reported the incident to Ludo Starling. Apparently Collingwood was outraged when Starling refused to reprimand him, much less sack him. Suffice to say there was a good deal of animosity between the two men.”

  “Go on.”

  “What’s far more damning for Collingwood is something that happened about a fortnight ago, four days before Clarke died.”

  “What?”

  “According to Ginger, Freddie found Collingwood pilfering money from Elizabeth Starling’s desk.”

  Lenox turned, his eyes wide with surprise. “Really?”

  “Yes. Apparently Collingwood went pale, and Clarke left immediately. Still, they both knew what he had seen.”

  “Congratulations, John. It may be the answer.”

  “It may be.”

  Inside, however, Lenox felt a twinge of disappointment. He told himself it was stupid, but he had found himself drawn further and further into the case as the days went on, and while he hadn’t realized it until now this return to detection had been deeply satisfying. In turn it made him doubt, for a fleeting second, whether he truly belonged in Parliament. If his old career felt so natural, so true, was it right to turn away from it? Was it vanity that made him want a more respectable, prestigious occupation? Partly, perhaps. He had always loved politics, it was true, and he knew he would make a good Member. Nevertheless he felt troubled in his mind. It would be a grave personal loss to give up detection altogether. A grave loss.

  “Did Ginger or any of Clarke’s other friends go to Inspector Fowler?”

  “No.”

  “Or Ludo Starling?”

  “No. Clarke himself said he wouldn’t be a tale-teller unless Collingwood tried to get him sacked. Which makes it all the sadder, really.”

  “That doesn’t mean Ginger shouldn’t say anything. It’s not telling tales if it’s murder. A few coins is obviousl
y a different matter.”

  “Sorry, I wasn’t clear. That was just an additional piece of information. The reason Ginger and his lads won’t tell is that they’re trying to establish where Collingwood was during the half hour when Freddie might have been killed.”

  “Why? Surely that’s the work of the Yard.”

  “Perhaps, but they feel that the stronger their case is, the more likely they’ll be heard.”

  “It may be so.”

  “At any rate, that’s what I got out of my afternoon at the Bricklayers’ Arms. That and a hundred stories about Freddie Clarke.”

  “Did you talk to the lad’s mother, incidentally?”

  Dallington swirled the last sip of his brandy and then drank it down. “No. She only stayed for one drink, and then one of Freddie’s friends chaperoned her back to her hotel. When he came back to the pub he said she was dead tired and of course pretty beaten up. Ginger is going out to see her tomorrow.”

  “I may as well see her, too.”

  “Oh?”

  “I don’t think it can hurt,” said Lenox, “and it may help us discover something new.”

  “What about Parliament?”

  “I’m in too deep now to give it up. I’ll still ask you to look at things, but I want to be a part of it, too. Besides, Graham has made my life much more efficient. And perhaps it will turn out to be simple, and Collingwood will be the murderer as you say.”

  “It seems pretty damning.”

  “Indeed. Even if he did murder Frederick Clarke, though, I wonder if there was anything more to it than the change he stole from Elizabeth Starling. A job as a butler and a few shillings—are they worth killing for?”

  “Don’t forget his father was the butler, too. It could be a matter of family pride.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lady Jane returned rather late in the evening, not much before midnight. For a moment Lenox wanted to comment on this and ask how it was any different from his own late homecoming the night before. He decided against it when he saw her impassive face, set for an argument. She sat at her mirror and began to let down her hair.