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The footman didn’t do anything so vulgar as react. He simply shut the door, leaving Jem on the doorstep. Jem waited, and waited longer, until he was forced to decide between hammering on the door and giving up and walking away. He had his hand almost to the knocker when the door opened again.
‘MrKite,’ the footman said. ‘MrMorley-Adams will see you now.’
Jem was shown into a drawing room. It was gracious, airy, well-appointed and about twice the size of the room to which his own life had dwindled. Hugo had electric lights instead of gas, he noted, and the chairs looked new.
He was examining the titles on the bookshelves—all classics, he noticed, not a modern novel in sight—when the door opened and Hugo came in. He was beginning a greeting, but it died on his lips as they looked at one another.
Hugo at thirty-one was in the prime of life. He’d grown a moustache, which was something of a shock, but suited him. His hair was a little less thick and his hairline a little further back, and his frame undeniably a little less muscular after a decade of fine living, but he was bright-eyed and straight-backed as ever, and very well dressed indeed in a superbly cut suit. Jem knew that Hugo, observing him, would see a shabby clerk, bowed of shoulder, elbows shiny and cuffs frayed, boots worn despite efforts at polish, and tried not to care.
‘Jem,’ Hugo said at last. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘It has, yes.’
‘How are you? Can I offer you a drink? Tea?’ Hugo was watching him, not suspicious, but careful. Jem would doubtless have been careful too if one of the others had arrived out of the blue.
‘No, thank you. I’d like a little of your time, please.’
‘Of my time,’ Hugo repeated, then smiled. ‘That you may have. Please sit. Are you sure you won’t have tea, coffee? Sherry?’
‘It’s a bit early for me,’ Jem said, with some understatement, and then felt his face heat as he realised what the question meant. ‘And if you’re asking whether I’ve come to you because I’m some drunken breakdown?—’
‘Not at all. To be quite honest, I’m a little off balance. I didn’t expect to see you.’
‘Have you seen any of the others?’
Hugo frowned slightly. ‘No. Should I have?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jem said. ‘One more question: have you received any interesting letters recently? The kind to which the writer doesn’t sign his name?’
‘Ah. May I ask?—’
‘Sent to my place of work,’ Jem said. ‘Accusing me of killing Toby. I lost my position over it.’
‘I’m extremely sorry to hear that. May I help?’
‘Yes. You can answer the question. I want to know if that letter was specific to me, or if anybody else had one. I want to know why, after ten years, someone felt it necessary to write that, to see me dismissed from my post. I want to know who wrote it and why, and why now.’
‘But there are so many letters.’ Hugo’s voice was flat. ‘Is that really your first in ten years?’
‘In the last three, I suppose. There have hardly been any since I moved to London.’
‘You are doubtless harder to find than I am. I suppose I have…oh, no more than one or two a month now, unless I make a notable speech, when they increase again. My secretary opens all my post, so I don’t see them. My fiancée puts a special mark on the envelopes when she writes, so that he knows to pass those to me unopened.’
Jem hadn’t imagined what it might be like, in practical terms, to be in the public eye. It had been bad enough as a private individual. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Yes, well.’ Hugo made a face. ‘It happens in some degree to all prominent men, you understand. I’m informed that if it wasn’t this subject, it would be accusations of adultery with the writer’s wife, or embezzlement, or some such.’
‘But that would be imaginary,’ Jem said.
‘Yes. Yes, that makes it worse. That people sit at home, take pen and paper, find an envelope, find a stamp?—’
‘All to write spite to people they don’t know. And so many of them do it.Why?’
‘You’d have to ask a medical man. I don’t know, Jem. I cannot imagine.’
They sat together in silence for a moment, then Hugo gave his head a slight shake. ‘Anyway, as I say, I don’t read them. My secretary has instructions to keep them all?—’
‘Why?’
