Page 53 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

She caught it before it left her face and held it there. Then she stretched up and kissed me, unhurried, with none of the desperation of the library about it, and I let a good deal of the day go while she did.

“You need to go home,” I said when I finally lifted my mouth from hers. "Your brother has been sitting with an unread book for hours, and you’ll need to bathe and change for supper.” I brushed a thumb across her mouth. “Shall I escort you home?”

She laughed. “Oh, that’s all the square would need.” She gazed toward the window where the late afternoon light could be seen. “It’s still light out. I’ll manage on my own.”

I saw her down to the door and stood on the step while she crossed the square. Rosehaven House lit at three windows, and Cosmos waiting in one of them for news she had already decided how much of to give him.

She turned at her own door and lifted a hand. I raised mine in return.

Then I went back up to the study and stood over the maps a while. I went over the argument again, the way a man runs his thumb along a joint to be sure of it.

A man who could scarcely cross a room without a stick did not twist her wrist. A man who could not finish three sentences without stopping for breath did not dance a waltz.

It held.

Chapter

Nineteen

A Reliable Witness

Two days had passed since the council in my study, and the machine we had assembled that night had begun to turn.

Finch came at breakfast, which was his custom now. A place was laid for him before he rang the bell. The coffee was strong, the kidneys, ham and eggs hot, and a second rack of toast stood within reach.

"Benson first," he said, "because Benson is where I've got nothing, and the nothing is worth more than the something."

"Go on."

"I've had two men at Harcourt House, a residence built for twelve, since last we met. Wimpole Street. Respectable, quiet, professional sort of street." He salted his eggs. "There are four servants in it, Your Grace. A cook. One parlormaid. And a man who does butler and footman both, which no house of that standing has done in my lifetime. And Benson, of course.”

"Four."

"Four. And here's the part that's kept me awake. There's no housekeeper."

I set down my cup.

"You take my meaning." Finch was not eating now. "A gentleman with Harcourt’s money keeps eight indoors at the least, and a housekeeper over the women. No housekeeper means every servant in that house answers to the master direct. And there's not one housemaid in the place—not a girl to do the grates, not a girl to carry water. Which means there is nobody in that household whose business it is to go into his rooms."

“There’s more, I gather.”

“Years I've been at this. Every house in London leaks somewhere. A dismissed maid with a grievance, a footman with debts, a cook who hates the butler. There's always a seam." He shook his head slowly. "That house has none. Four people who all eat at the same table and none of whom has ever been anywhere else. There's no hall to gossip in and nobody's left to go bitter. I can't get at Benson because there's nothing to get at him through."

"And Benson himself?"

"Came out twice, both times behind his master, both times to hand him into a hired carriage. Never alone. Never on a half day I can find." He returned to his eggs, without appetite. "I'll have him in the end. But it’ll take a month and a stroke of luck."

I turned it over. A household of four in a house built for twelve, arranged so that no servant had occasion to climb the stairs. Economy, said one reading. An invalid who no longer entertains and has let his establishment go, which is a sad thing and a common one.

I filed it under sad and common.

"And Marsh?"

“Worse than Benson." Finch pushed his plate away, which I had never once seen him do. "Marsh is gone."

"Gone how?"

“He has a furnished house off the green in Camberwell, taken two years since, rent paid quarterly by banker's draft. Wife. Three children—two girls and a boy." He turned back a leaf. "Housekeeper comes by the day. She let herself in on the morning after they found Crane at Kew. The house was empty. No word to her. No notice given. Nobody in that family has been seen since."