Page 65 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

“Yes.”

“Is it yours to tell?”

“No.”

He looked at me for a long moment, and then he did a thing he has never done in my presence. He laughed, one breath of it, entirely against his will. “God help us. It only wanted that.” And then he grew serious. “You have my word on Claire.”

He’d guessed. Of course he had.

I stood at the window while he walked across the square to his home. Only when he mounted the steps and entered Steele House did I cease my vigil.

It was very nearly tea. I went upstairs to change.

Chapter

Twenty-Four

A Full and Frank Disclosure

Milford had the library ready by half past seven. Lamps lit, the long table cleared, the maps carried down and weighted flat, and a cold supper laid on the sideboard: ham, roast beef, a raised game pie, bread and cheese, pickles, and a pot of mustard.

Whitfield came first and squared his papers to the grain of the table. Finch went to the sideboard the way a man goes to his own front door. Rosalynd arrived at eight exactly, having crossed the square in front of whoever cared to watch her do it. Graves came last.

Once everyone had arrived, Milford brought in the drinks. Ale for Finch and Graves, whiskey for Whitfield and me, and a glass of claret for Rosalynd. He asked none of us what we wanted.

I began by apologizing to Graves for the promise I had not been able to keep three nights ago. Then I gave them, with her permission, Lady Edmunds's business obtained that afternoon. Four months of Crane bleeding her over her husband's death, and Rosehaven learning of it and striking him at the Argosy in a room he believed private. That was the motive Dodson had spent two days assembling out of carriage wheels and ballrooms.

"You saw her?" Rosalynd said.

"She is well, and asks you not to worry. But let us move on. Inspector, let us have Rosehaven first."

Rosalynd's hands went still in her lap.

"He is well. Mr. Gathorne saw him this afternoon. Sir Hugo Rennell went with him, which is not usual at this stage and is worth something. Regarding Loftus, the witness who overheard the club quarrel, he cannot be broken because he is telling the truth. That is Rennell's opinion, by way of a clerk who should not have given it to me. Rennell will not stand in the House of Lords and call an honest gentleman a liar, and he is right not to." Graves turned his glass of whiskey a quarter turn on the blotting paper. “Nothing we learn of Crane will save your brother, Lady Rosalynd. Only one thing gets an earl out of Holloway, and it is a different man with a name and a reason for murder. That is my opinion, not Rennell’s.”

"That is what we are here for," I said. "Finch."

He put down his knife and fork and opened the notebook slowly, which he does when the news is poor. "Marsh kept a furnished villa off Camberwell Green. Wife, two girls, a boy of nine. The day after Crane was found at Kew the housekeeper let herself in and the house was empty, her wages on the kitchen table. A week since has bought me nothing. No trunk out of that street, no passage from any dock in England." He closed the notebook on his thumb. "And nobody wrote to the boy's school. Not a line. They're still wondering about him."

"There is always a trace," Graves said, to the blotting paper. "Unless they were taken, that is. If they were, they will not turn up."

Rosalynd had gone white. She did not look away from him, and she did not speak.

"Keep looking, Finch. Mr. Whitfield. Hammersmith."

He set his spectacles and laid two fingers on his uppermost paper. "Eleven acres of leasehold ground on the Middlesex shore. Warehouses, a counting house, a wall and gate, and a private landing on the tideway. The lease runs through Pell and Hartwright, solicitors. And stops there. But there are other threads to pull.”

"Explain."

He turned the paper face down. "A building may hide behind a solicitor. It cannot hide from the parish that rates it, the fire office that insures it, or the Thames Conservancy, which licenses no landing without a person answerable for it. Three registers, none speaking to the others, all open with a small fee to a patient man." He looked up over the spectacles. "The same name in all three. Not Marsh. Not Mallow. Not Bedford Row."

“Who?”

"Mercer."

The name crossed the table and nothing happened, because there was no reason for anything to happen. It was a name none of us had heard.

“Is there a Christian name attached to Mercer?”