Page 23 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

The accountant inclined his head, accepting the compliment as his due. "Mallow and Company keeps a wharf, lands goods, pays its men, and is in every outward respect a dull little business of the river. Yet its receipts bear little relation to the scale of its trade. Within days of the courier's arrival, unusually regular sums are deposited into Mallow's account at a modest bank in the City." He looked up. "The firm's books describe an ordinary wharf. Its banking describes something else."

“Does it now?” Graves asked, smelling the scent of a trail that could be followed.

Whitfield continued. "Honest trade rises and falls with the seasons, the weather, and the fortunes of commerce. One week a vessel founders, another a strike delays cargo, a third the river freezes. Yet Mallow's receipts scarcely vary at all. Week after week, the same handsome sums appear with almost mathematical regularity." He folded his hands. "That is not how the river pays a man."

I found myself smiling despite the subject. "How then?"

"It is how a man pays himself when he is dressing dirty money as clean and lacks the imagination to make the figures breathe."

"A front," I said.

"Precisely. A laundry disguised as a wharf." He turned the top paper face down, a small tidy gesture. "And from Mallow the money does not rest. Each quarter the surplus is swept up and paid to a firm of solicitors—Pell and Hartwright, of Bedford Row. A sound old house that has done nothing in its hundred years to deserve the company it now keeps."

I regarded him for a moment. "Mr. Whitfield, I begin to wonder how an accountant comes by such remarkably confidential information."

The faintest suggestion of amusement touched his mouth. "I have my ways, Your Grace."

Finch chuckled into his tankard. "Leave the man a few mysteries of his own."

"Can we compel them to tell us who owns the account?" I asked.

Whitfield's answer was immediate. "No. A solicitor's client account is a wall built by Act of Parliament. They hold money for a client. They will not name him, and they cannot be made to."

The lamp hissed. Below us a plate rang upon stone.

"Then we are stopped," I said.

“We are walled, which is not the same thing.” Whitfield permitted himself the ghost of satisfaction. “A wall cannot be built without leaving a little mortar exposed. I have found three such places.”

I leaned in. So, I marked, did Graves.

“The first.” Whitfield raised a finger. “A structure of this kind requires a man to stand at the front—to sign where signing must be done, to be a name upon a lease and a director in a book, so the true owner need never write his own. There is such a man. He guarantees Mallow's account at the bank and signs as though he owned the lot.”

He glanced down at his papers. “His name is Walter Marsh. A respectable nobody who appears nowhere a man truly lives, only where a man must sign. He is a man of straw, hired to lend a name and shield the one behind it. But a man of straw is still a man. He was paid. He can be found, frightened, and made to say who pays him.”

“The second,” I said.

“A club. Marsh was put up two years since at the Argosy, in St. James's, and his subscription is paid—not from his own pocket, which would not stretch to it, but from this same dressed money. Why elevate a nobody and buy him admission to a gentleman's club? Because the man behind him wished to walk in and out of the Argosy under a borrowed name, meet whom he chose, and have no member ever learn that the quiet fellow at the long table and the master of a trade in women and drugs were one and the same.”

His mild gaze met mine. “A club is the one place in London where a gentleman may sit for hours beside another and never once be asked his business.” Whoever he is, he sat in that house, ate its dinners, and was bowed to by its servants.”

“And the third,” he said before I could ask, “is ground. The structure pays a ground-rent, through Pell and Hartwright, on land held to the west of the town, beyond Hammersmith and near the river. A good deal of land. The lease runs through the wall, so I cannot see the purpose of it, only the rent and the size.”

He consulted his papers.

“There are buildings upon it. Warehouses, sheds, and some sort of riverside landing, if the assessments are to be believed. Too much land and too much expense for a common wharf, yet producing no outward trade sufficient to justify either.” He folded his hands. “It is the one holding in the whole affair that is not a paper but a place—somewhere that exists, that has walls and doors and a key in someone's pocket.”

He looked from one to the other of us.

“That is as far as the figures will take me. A wharf that is a laundry. A wall of lawyers. A man of straw with a borrowed name and a gentleman's club. And a riverside estate in the west for which someone pays dearly, though the books cannot tell me why.” He permitted himself the smallest smile. “I have given the ghost a shape. I have not given you his face, because his face is the one thing he has spent this entire enterprise to keep.”

For three weeks I had hunted a man who was little more than a rumor—no name, no face, only the outline he had left in other men's fear. Now there was an architecture to him. He banked. He hid behind a wall of lawyers. He sheltered himself behind a borrowed name. He held land beyond Hammersmith. The ghost had acquired substance. More importantly, it had acquired an address.

“Then we have three roads before us,” Graves said.

“Four,” I said.

“No,” Graves replied. “Four gets men killed.”