Page 39 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

“Political opinions?”

The ghost of a smile touched the steward’s mouth. “He avoids them with admirable consistency.”

I turned from the window. On paper—and Marsh existed chiefly on paper—here was the least remarkable member of the least remarkable club in London. No vices, no debts, no friends, no opinions. In thirty years of government I had learned to distrust every man who presented no surface at all. Honest men are inconvenient. They have tempers, or debts, or views on the Corn Laws. Only a constructed man has none.

“Did he receive visitors?”

“Visitors, Your Grace?”

“Gentlemen calling at the club and asking for him.”

Morris’s weight shifted, no more than an inch, from one foot to the other. In another man it would have meant nothing. In a servant of his discipline it was the equivalent of a shout.

“Not many,” he said.

“But some.”

“Yes.”

“Do you recall who?”

“Most of them I could not put a name to. Gentlemen of business, by their look. They never stayed long.” He stopped there, and the stop had an edge to it. There was more, and he was deciding what to do with it.

I waited. Silence is the cheapest instrument of inquiry and the least often used.

“There was one,” Morris said at last, “whose name I knew.”

“Go on.”

“Sir Basil Crane.”

The name dropped into the quiet room and lay there between us. The old gentleman behind The Times slept on. I kept my face in order, which cost me something, because for five days I had labored to hold two investigations apart—the murder at Kew on one hand, the ghost on the river on the other, two inquiries that must never once be seen to touch. And a club steward had just laid them in each other’s arms.

“Sir Basil,” I said, “was a member here himself, I believe.”

“He was, Your Grace.” Morris’s voice lowered by a degree, the tone reserved in every servants’ hall for the recently and scandalously dead. “You will understand the committee has been most anxious that the club’s name not be drawn into the matter of his death. Most anxious.”

“I understand entirely. Nothing you tell me will travel.” It was a promise I intended to keep in the letter if not the spirit. “You say Sir Basil called upon Mr. Marsh. Were they friends?”

“I could not honestly say they were, Your Grace.”

“What were they, then?”

Morris took his time. “It always seemed to me that Sir Basil sought out Mr. Marsh, and never the reverse. Mr. Marsh would be in the library, or at his coffee, and Sir Basil would come in from the street, ask the hall porter whether Mr. Marsh was in the house, and go straight up to him.”

“And then?”

“They would remove to one of the small rooms and speak privately. A few minutes, sometimes. Half an hour at the outside.”

“Were the conversations heated? Raised voices, quarrels?”

“Never once.”

“Did they appear friendly?”

Another pause, longer than the others. “I have kept club rooms for thirty years, Your Grace. One learns to read a table the way other men read a newspaper.”

“I am relying upon it.”