Page 66 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

“None to be had. I went back ten years. Directories, births and deaths, bankruptcies, wills. I can find no man who belongs to the name. Mr. Mercer signs for eleven acres on the river, insures them, stands answerable for a landing stage, and does not otherwise exist.”

“That is Marsh again,” Rosalynd said.

“The opposite of Marsh, my lady. Somebody built Marsh a life so the name would bear looking at. Mercer has no life to look at. No address. No family. No bank account I can trace. Nothing beyond the ground he manages.”

“How many men?”

“Between eleven and fourteen on Mallow and Company’s wages. At a wharf that lands no cargo and pays no dues to the Port of London.”

Finch stopped chewing. “So Mercer’s not his name.”

Whitfield looked at him. “I would be very surprised if it were.”

Finch set down his fork and sat back. “Now that is interesting.”

“What is?” Graves asked.

“Marsh dined at the Argosy a dozen times a year. Same private room, same gentleman every time.” Finch looked at Whitfield. “I checked the visitors’ book. Five entries in two years, all in Marsh’s hand, all for the same guest.”

“Mercer,” Whitfield said.

“Mercer.”

For a moment, no one spoke.

“So the man managing the wharf,” Graves said, “is the same man Marsh was meeting privately at the Argosy.”

“Looks that way,” Finch agreed.

“And Mercer is the man who does the work,” Graves continued, “so the man above him need never leave his chair.”

“But we have yet to know who that is,” Whitfield said.

“I do,” Rosalynd said.

She gave it to them as her grandmother had given it to her, plainly. A knighthood in seventy-one or seventy-two that nobody could recall the occasion of. City money, no land, no wife, no heir. Then the chest three years ago, the physician of thirty years let go, the shooting given up, Torquay for the sea air, and a return worse than he went, the household turned out and replaced.

“My grandmother can seat every family in England three generations deep, and this morning she could not name one living soul who knew Sir Reginald Harcourt before the illness and knows him now.” She let it sit. “Not one. He shed them himself, including his physician. None thought it worth a second thought, because that is what a long illness does to a man.”

Graves leaned forward. “How do we prove the man who came back from Torquay is the man who went there?”

Whitfield took off his spectacles and began to clean them, which he does when he wants to make a point. “Signatures.”

We all looked at him.

“A man ill for three years signs less and less. His secretary signs for him. His solicitor acts on instruction. His bankers accept what they have accepted before. But somewhere there will be documents only Harcourt himself could sign.” He replaced his spectacles. “I want fifteen years of them laid out in order.”

“Can you get them?” Graves asked.

Whitfield’s expression suggested the question had offended him.

“Yes.”

“There is one thing more,” Rosalynd said. “We have been looking at the illness as the means by which Harcourt concealed what he could do. I think we have been looking at only half of it.”

Finch stopped eating.

“My grandmother could find no one who knew him before the illness and knows him now. Not his physician. Not an old servant. Not a friend. Not even a shooting companion. Everyone who might have looked at Sir Reginald Harcourt three years ago and said, That is not the man I knew, was removed from his life.”