Page 49 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

Steele drew a chair close to his desk for me—not next to the men, beside his own.

A knock, and Milford brought in the accountant. Mr. Whitfield was round and spectacled and mild in manner, his collar a fraction off true, and his ears—there is no other honest word for it—were pink.

"My apologies for the delay," he said, squaring his case to the table's edge. "I was otherwise occupied."

"Course you were," Finch murmured into his ale.

The corner of Steele's mouth twitched, there and gone. He knew something, he was enjoying knowing it, and he had no intention whatever of sharing it.

"Lady Rosalynd, may I introduce Mr. Whitfield." Steele waited until the man had settled before moving on. "Lady Rosalynd and I held a discussion in the library, and an agreement has been reached.”

That was one way of putting it.

“There are no longer two inquiries,” he continued. “The man in the mask and the murder of Sir Basil Crane are one matter, and from this hour we work them as one matter—inside this room. Outside it, nothing has changed. To every eye at the Yard, the two inquiries remain strangers."

"Exactly so, Your Grace," Graves said. "If Dodson finds the seam between them, he will conclude there is a conspiracy of dukes and inspectors got up to pervert his case, and he will take it out on Rosehaven—begging your pardon, my lady—because the earl is the only one of us within his reach."

No one argued.

"Finch. For the lady's benefit."

The enquiry agent turned back through his notebook, though I would have wagered he did not need it, and gave me his three weeks entire. With Vale out of the picture after the Trinity Lane affair, the enterprise had to find a new drug source. They had found one. It was shipped in from somewhere—the Continent, America—and delivered to a frightened clerk called Pyke, who took it in and signed for it. From there it went out two ways: to the sellers working the alleys and courts off Ratcliff Highway, and to the Limehouse dens where the stuff was served on the premises. A collector called Renton gathered the takings from three such dens and sellers and passed them to a man on the river, who was away downstream before anyone could follow. On the Thames affair, a procuress who went by Mother Lync found the girls for the boats, took her orders through a go-between, and had never once laid eyes on the man who paid her.

"Every rung of the ladder knows the one rung above it and the one below it,” Finch finished, “but not a soul on it has seen the top. That is not luck, my lady. That is design."

Three weeks. While I had been dressing for musicales and calling it intelligence work, Finch and his men had been climbing through Limehouse in the dark.

“Let’s have Crane now,” Steele said to Finch.

"A ruin, as we supposed. The Belgravia house, the tailor, the wine merchant, and baccarat played badly. Vowels out all over Town."

“Where did his money come in from?” I asked. “A man cannot live three stories above his income on air.” Surely it could not all have come from Claire.

Finch's pencil stopped. "There, my lady, is my puzzle. Because money did come in. Small sums, even sums, arriving regular as quarter-day, only oftener. No rents behind them. No dividends. No wins at the tables; the man lost." He shut the notebook. "I cannot tell you whose money it was. I can tell you it was steady, it was tidy, and it was invisible—and honest money is none of those three things."

"How far back?"

"Two years at the least."

Two years. Not four months of a widow's terror handed over in a drawing room. Two years of somebody paying Sir Basil Crane a wage.

“Whitfield. Pick up where Finch’s trail grows cold.”

The accountant drew out his papers. The pink-eared latecomer was gone. In his place sat a man wholly at home.

“The man on the river sails down to a wharf concern on the Surrey side trading as Mallow and Company, dull in every outward respect, earning the same handsome sum every week of the year. That is not how the river pays a man. It is how a man pays himself. From Mallow, each quarter, the surplus is swept away to a firm of solicitors in Bedford Row, Pell and Hartwright, and into a client account I cannot reach.”

"So the trail ends at a lawyer's door,” I said.

"The trail is walled, my lady, which is not the same thing as ended." A dry satisfaction came into his voice. "I found three edges.” He raised one soft finger and gave me the first. “An enterprise of that kind wants a name at the front of it, to sign leases and guarantee accounts, so that the true owner need never write his own hand anywhere. Walter Marsh is that man. A respectable nobody who appeared on every document a man must sign and in no place a man truly lives. But a man of straw is still a man, and this one has been paid.”

“And the second?”

“A gentleman’s club. The Argosy to be exact. Marsh was put up two years ago. His subscription paid to this day—not out of his own pocket, but out of the same dressed money. Why dress a nobody and then buy him a club? Because the man behind him wished to walk in and out of that house under a borrowed name. To dine there. To sit at the long table and meet whom he chose. A club being the one place in London where a gentleman may sit for hours beside another gentleman and never once be asked his business.

And that gave me pause.

The room went on without me. Whitfield was raising a third finger—leased ground west of the town, beyond Hammersmith, warehouses and sheds and a landing, too much of all of it for any trade the assessments could show—and Graves was asking after the rent, and their voices had moved a long way off, because my pulse had grown loud in my ears.