Page 68 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

“Nothing anybody could establish. The other man never gave a reason, at the inquest or after. He was already serving a long sentence, and it cost him seven years more.” Graves set the glass down and did not appear to hear the room at all. “I remember thinking he took those seven years very calmly. Like a man who considered them a fair exchange.”

Nobody said the thing.

Rosalynd did not look at me, and I did not look at her, and Whitfield turned his top paper face down.

“Find me that case, Inspector. The date, the agency, and the name of the man serving the long sentence.”

“Monday.”

I gave them their work, because there was nothing else to give them. Whitfield to the signatures. Finch to the proprietor in Wigmore Street, by way of any office in London that was not that one. Graves to a seven-year-old file. Rosalynd to visit her brother the next day.

They went a little before eleven. Finch took the last of the ham with him in a napkin. Whitfield gathered his papers into their case. I offered to see Rosalynd across the square; she declined, and accepted a footman instead.

Graves left as he had come, and gave me a look on his way out.

A man three weeks from the Old Bailey does not die in a quarrel nobody can name. The killer gave no reason because there was none to give, only a price, and it was paid by a man who never came nearer than the outside of the wall.

Cosmos was useful alive only while his conviction looked certain. We were at work making it look otherwise. Every yard we gained would shorten the time he was worth keeping alive.

Rosalynd had not followed it that far. Graves had, and had not said so, and neither had I.

Chapter

Twenty-Five

A Note Without a Name

The following morning it took the better part of an hour to reach Holloway. The Camden Road went from stucco to brick to soot, and then the prison came up out of the ordinary street like a castle out of a picture book—gate tower, battlements, arrow slits that had never seen an arrow, built to look ancient by men who finished it the year my father came of age. Someone had gone to the trouble of making it beautiful. That was the part I could not manage.

At the lodge I gave my name and my brother's and signed a book. A warder went through the basket with his hands—the cold chicken, the plums, the pot of damson jam Mrs. Bateman had pressed on me with an expression that forbade comment. He shook out each garment, read the children's letters, and rifled the seed catalogues. He was not unkind about it. He simply did it, as he did forty times a day, while I stood and let him.

Then a second warder walked me across a yard and up a stair to a door with two men on it. The room beyond was narrow and clean—a table, two chairs, a barred window high in the wall. My brother stood beneath it in his prison clothes with his hands clasped behind his back, as though waiting for a lecture to begin.

"Rosie."

I had promised myself in the corridor that I would be sensible. Keeping the promise by the width of a hair, I crossed the room and took both his hands. In the doorway a warder shifted and then, at a look from the other, subsided.

"You are thinner," I said, because it was true and because it was easier than everything else.

"The food here is a rumor about food." He seated me in one of the chairs and took the other.

"Then you shall be glad to hear I brought some from home. Gathorne has arranged for it to come daily."

His collar was clean, and there was a nick high on the cheek that he had not put there. "You have been shaved."

“By a man serving four years for receiving. He’ll be doing it every three or four days. An earl with a week's beard is an earl who has given up, and Sir Hugo tells me half of this business is what men decide when they look at me." The almost-smile. "So I sit very still and think about ferns."

I did not say any of the four things that came to me.

"Now," he said. "Report. All of them, in order."

I gave him the household, name by name, the way he wanted it. Fox in charge of the greenhouse with a solemnity that would have been comic if it were not so plainly love, feeding the sundews so often they had begun to look prosperous and lazy. Laurel informing Honeycutt that the fall of empires was instructive under present circumstances. Holly and Ivy concluding the armistice of the hair ribbon and opening negotiations over a pair of gloves. Chrissie running the house, while I was otherwise occupied, with an efficiency that had startled the servants and, I admitted, me.

Then I gave him the letters. "And Petunia sent this." I unfolded it on the table between us. "I was made to swear an oath of faithful delivery."

The drawing was executed in her fiercest crayon: a small figure with copper scribbles for hair standing atop a mountainous gray beast, and beneath the beast's feet, unmistakable in a good coat and a flattened hat, a gentleman.

"The elephant is named Justice. She wishes you to know that it is sitting on Inspector Dodson, and will remain sitting on him until you come home."