Page 40 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

“Mr. Marsh was never pleased to see him.”

“Displeased how? Afraid?”

“I could not swear to afraid.”

“Reluctant, then.”

Morris nodded slowly. “That is nearer it. Whenever Sir Basil sat down with him, Mr. Marsh had the look of a man waiting for the interview to be over. And when it was over, Sir Basil left the club directly. He never stayed for a hand of cards afterward, though the tables were his usual habit. He came for Mr. Marsh, and having had him, he went.”

I let the picture assemble itself. Crane, the hanger-on, the man of debts and deep play, presenting himself again and again at another man’s elbow. Marsh, the cipher, enduring it. Two readings offered themselves, and they pointed in opposite directions. Either Crane had held something over Marsh and come to collect—or Marsh was no cipher at all, and Crane had come to render account and receive instruction, and had been despised for coming in daylight. The steward’s evidence fit both. Evidence of that kind is the most dangerous sort; it flatters whichever theory a man brought into the room with him.

“When did Sir Basil last call upon him?”

Morris reckoned. “A week ago, or very near it. The Tuesday, I believe.”

Two days before Crane was found at Kew with another man’s pistol beside him.

“And Mr. Marsh? When was he last in the house?”

“That same afternoon, Your Grace.” The steward’s brow gathered as the arithmetic performed itself behind his eyes, and he did not much care for the sum. “I have not seen him since.”

Nor, I refrained from observing, would anyone see Sir Basil Crane again.

“One thing more, Morris, and I am done. Describe Mr. Marsh to me. I may have passed the man a dozen times without knowing it.”

“Describe him.” Morris repeated the word. Plainly no one had ever asked him for such a thing. “A gentleman of middle years, Your Grace. Middling height. Neither stout nor spare. Brown hair, going gray at the sides. Clean-shaven. He dresses well, but not so well that you would remark it.” He stopped, plainly dissatisfied with his own inventory. “I should know him the moment he came through that door. But I find I could not paint him for a stranger, and I have just proved it.”

“You have described him exactly,” I said. “That is what troubles me.”

A man of middle years and middling height, of no vices and no acquaintance, who belonged to a club in order to be alone in it. A man assembled, feature by feature, to be forgotten.

I thanked Morris, pressed a sovereign into his hand, and asked for his discretion. The coin was not payment for his silence—that would have insulted a man who had served the Argosy faithfully for three decades. It was simply an acknowledgment of his time. His discretion rested where it always had: in thirty years of loyal service and the committee's horror of scandal.

On the steps, the heat of the street rose to meet me. A hansom cab stood waiting. What the visit had bought me could be reckoned to the shilling. What it might cost was harder arithmetic. Half of what London knew about itself traveled below stairs. If the quiet Mr. Marsh had ears at the Argosy, then by nightfall he would know a duke had come asking his name.

Let him know. A ghost who learns he is being hunted makes his first mistake soon after.

“Grosvenor Square,” I told the driver.

Finch had claimed Marsh for his own. He would have to hear, before the day was out, that the two inquiries he was sworn to keep apart had met without permission—in a reading room in St. James’s, over a dead man’s visits and a member the club steward could not describe.

Chapter

Fifteen

An Uninvited Call

By the time my hansom cab turned into Grosvenor Square after my visit to Claire, the afternoon light lay flat and bright across the paving, and the square had settled into its quietest hour. The square possessed that placid afternoon aspect that always suggested respectable people had nothing more pressing before them than the arrangement of the tea things.

I, however, was not among their number.

The ride back from Belgravia had given me a half hour alone with my own thoughts, and my thoughts had spent the whole of it walking in a circle. Benson. Harcourt. Crane. A valet who knew everything, gone into the service of a man about whom nobody knew anything. I had resolved to send a note across the square first thing in the morning. Three lines. Businesslike. The word Benson, the word Harcourt, and an hour at which I might be called upon. Nothing that required an answer beyond a yes.

The cab had scarcely drawn to a halt when a familiar figure descended from a hansom across the square.

Mr. Finch.

He mounted the steps to Steele House, his hat set slightly askew, with an unhurried stride. A hurrying man, he had once informed me, is a man announcing to the street that something has happened. His stroll announced nothing at all, which, in the middle of a Mayfair afternoon with forty windows to witness it, announced a very great deal.