Page 50 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

A respectable nobody. A man who appeared on every document a man must sign and in no place a man truly lives. That was one way to build a man nobody looks at.

There was another. A fourth if you will.

One might take an elderly gentleman with a ruined chest and a bad leg, and set him in an armchair by the window at every musicale in London, and let a respectful circle of empty space form itself around him out of nothing but good manners. Nobody counts their words in front of a man they pity. Nobody wonders what he can hear.

I had stood not six feet from that chair last night.

"Mr. Finch." My voice came out level, which was a wonder. The room stopped. "The money coming into Crane's account. Can you do better than two years?"

He turned back a leaf. "Two years and some months, near as the bank will give me. The run begins in the spring of the year before last."

The same season Walter Marsh had been put up at the Argosy.

I had the whole of it then, or enough to be dangerous with. Benson led to the potion, the potion led to Claire, and Claire led to a coroner's question about how a tired heart had come to stop. From there it was three short steps to my brother's fist in a man's face. Motive, laid out neat and unasked for, in front of Graves—a serving inspector of the Metropolitan Police. And that could not happen.

"Inspector Graves. Would you be very good and give us the room. You as well, Mr. Whitfield." I turned to the enquiry agent. "Mr. Finch, I would like you to stay.”

Whitfield blinked over his spectacles. Graves did not blink. He set his glass on the edge of the desk with great care and looked, not at me, but at Steele.

"Do as she asks," Steele said.

He said it without a question in it anywhere.

Whitfield calmly gathered his papers.

Graves came to his feet. "I understand, my lady. A man cannot be asked to give evidence of a conversation he was not present at. I would say only this. When the hour arrives that I can be told, I should like to be told before Inspector Dodson tells me."

"You have my word," Steele said.

The door closed behind the inspector and the accountant.

Steele inclined his head toward me. “Go on.”

"What I am about to tell you, Mr. Finch, does not go into your notebook, and it does not go to the two men who have just left this house."

Finch closed the notebook, set it on his knee, and put his hand flat upon it. "Then it don't exist, my lady."

So I gave it to him. Lord Edmunds, old and vain and married to my dearest friend. The potion fetched from a chemist and prepared each evening by the man who dressed him. The night he took more of it than he ought and his heart stopped in the middle of the doing. The inquest in Hampshire, the verdict of natural causes, the coroner who was never asked the other question. And Sir Basil Crane, four months ago, naming the price of his not asking it.

Finch heard the whole of it without one flicker of emotion in his face. “The valet," he said, when I had finished.

"Benson. He fetched the potion and made it up himself. There was nothing in that household he did not know. After Edmunds died he asked Claire for a reference. She gave him one, because he had been faithful and her husband had been fond of him. He entered service again almost at once. With Sir Reginald Harcourt." I let it sit for a moment. "Crane attached himself to Sir Reginald. It has been remarked upon in a drawing room this week. A hanger-on shopping for some secret worth having. He found it at Harcourt’s house from a servant—Benson.”

"He weren't shopping." Finch said it slowly. "He were collecting his wages and being handed his orders."

"But he was blackmailing Claire. That money came to him."

"Did it, my lady? A man with four months of a lady's money in his pocket don't leave his tailor whistling for it." He shook his head. "The bank shows a wage. Small, even, regular as quarter-day. What he had off Lady Edmunds went up, and he kept whatever they saw fit to let him keep. He weren't in business for himself. He were the face they sent, because a gentleman can call at a lady's house and ask her for money, and the man who found out her secret can't." He was up before he had finished saying it. "Two years and some months. Bought first, pointed after."

"Benson tonight," Steele said. "Not the front door."

"Not the front door," Finch agreed. "There's a public house behind every great man's kitchen, Your Grace, and a valet in it by nine."

He went. His feet were quick on the stairs.

“How long have you had this?" Steele asked.

"Since two o'clock."