Page 55 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

The man we sought did not buy witnesses. He grew them.

"Which leaves us one thread," I said. "Somebody put that newspaper in front of him. A member, a servant, a friend. Loftus will remember the conversation."

“Maybe so, but you'll not get near him. Dodson has him wrapped in wool."

The way he said it told me that wasn’t the only thing he came to report. “Is there more?”

“Unfortunately.” Graves did not sit for this either. "Armed with the lady's name, Dodson spent yesterday on the rest of it. Rosehaven’s carriage in Lady Edmunds's street at hours when a carriage is remembered. The two of them side by side at every ball of the season. An afternoon this spring, before witnesses, walking the gardens at Kew." He drew breath. "Weapon, quarrel, blow, motive, and now the woman who ties them together. The warrant is being drawn, Your Grace. He's dotting every i, because he means it to hold. A day. Two at the most."

"Thank you, Inspector."

Once he had gone, I went to the window to stare across the way. The obvious thing—the human thing—was to cross the square and tell her.

But she could not stop what was coming. Nobody could. The witness was honest, the warrant lawful, the machinery already turning. A warning would purchase her nothing but a sleepless night.

Rosalynd does not sit quietly with dread. She spends it. Given a day's notice she would be at the Yard by morning, laying the pistol's history in front of Dodson to draw the fire onto herself, and ruin herself to no purpose whatever. Or she would tell Cosmos, and Cosmos—who would stand in a cart to the gallows sooner than see Claire touched—would do something protective and fatal that Dodson would read as consciousness of guilt.

The Rosehaven family was supremely gifted at fatal acts of love. I was in no position to sneer. I had spent a month committing one.

But there was something I could do to ease their pain. I called for my carriage and went to Lincoln's Inn Fields, to Gathorne and Pryce, who have kept the Thornburn affairs longer than I have been alive. The Fields lay green and orderly, full of clerks eating late bread and butter under the plane trees, every one of them serving somebody's quarrel.

Old Gathorne received me himself, heard what little I could tell him, and asked none of the questions a lesser man would have needed answered. He had served my father and, more usefully, survived him.

"Within days a client will require this firm's whole attention. A gentleman of consequence. I can give you no name and no further matter. I ask that you hold yourselves ready, and that when the name comes, nothing in this office precedes it."

"Criminal or civil, Your Grace?"

"Criminal."

A silence in which a careful man revised his week. "We shall be ready."

"One thing more. A barrister shall be needed. I should like Sir Hugo Rennell instructed. Today, if it can be done."

Gathorne's pen did not pause. "Then I shall come with you."

We went to the Temple together, which is the only way such a thing can be done, and Rennell’s clerk performed the small theater of consulting a diary that all three of us understood would be rearranged.

Rennell's chambers smelled of old calf and older arguments. He heard Gathorne out with his fingers steepled, which took very little time, there being very little to hear.

"You won't give me the name."

"Not today."

"The charge?"

"When it is laid."

He studied me over the steeple of his fingers, and I let him. A man about to clear his table for a stranger is owed a good look at whoever asks it.

"Then I'll ask the only question I need," he said. "Is he innocent?"

"Entirely."

"You would be astonished, Your Grace, how few men say that word without blinking." He drew the diary toward him and struck two lines through the coming week. "Send to my clerk the hour you know anything at all."

I left retainers with both of them—paper promises for a nameless man against a nameless day—and came out into the late afternoon sun with nothing further to do.

That was the whole of the trouble. There was nothing further to do.