Page 92 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

Graves put men at the railway stations and the docks. His description went to Liverpool, Southampton, and Dover. Nothing came of it.

I had told Graves on the river that he would not find Mercer. He did not enjoy being reminded of it.

The newspapers enjoyed everything else.

Scotland Yard had spent the previous autumn being told by every newspaper in Britain what it had failed to do in Whitechapel. Now it had a criminal organization spread across London, accounts going back twenty years, warehouses full of evidence and prisoners arriving at Bow Street in batches.

They made the most of it. I did not begrudge them.

On the sixth day, a man employed by Drayton—the real name of the man we’d known as Harcourt—decided that loyalty to a dead employer was less useful than avoiding the gallows. He came forward and identified the man who had killed Sir Basil Crane.

George Pritchard had worked at Mallow and Company when work was required and elsewhere when it was not. According to the man who gave him up, Drayton had paid Pritchard to kill Crane and move the body.

Apparently, Mercer had been asked to arrange it, but he’d refused the job. He had told Drayton that he managed money, men, and transport. If Drayton wanted a gentleman murdered in a garden, he could arrange it himself.

I did not mistake that for virtue. There are men who will help build a gallows and object only when asked to pull the lever.

Pritchard was arrested before dawn the following morning. By noon he had been identified by a second witness. Before the afternoon was out, he had been charged with the murder of Sir Basil Crane.

After that, matters moved very quickly.

Steele had kept Gathorne and Sir Hugo Rennell informed from the moment Mercer’s papers reached Scotland Yard. Gathorne had everything prepared. Sir Hugo had only been waiting for the evidence that would finally destroy the case against Cosmos.

The moment Pritchard was charged, Sir Hugo went to court. Before seven that evening, he arrived at Rosehaven House, where our family was waiting for dinner to be announced.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said.

I was on my feet before Honeycutt had finished closing the drawing room door behind him.

“Tomorrow?”

“Eight o’clock. Holloway will have the order tonight.”

For a moment, nobody said anything.

Then I sat down again because my knees had ceased to be useful.

Grandmother reached for the bell. “Champagne, I think.” She had been dining at Rosehaven the entire week, because she didn’t want to miss a thing.

The following morning, I was at the gate at half past seven, which is the sort of thing one does and then has to sit with for thirty minutes.

At two minutes past eight a wicket in the great gate came open, the way a small door does inside a large one, and my brother walked out of Holloway Prison into Camden Road in the coat he had been arrested in. He stood on the pavement for a moment looking at the traffic like a man checking a sum. And then he saw the Rosehaven carriage and me standing beside it.

He got both his arms around me hard enough to hurt and his face down into my shoulder in the open street. He did not say a thing.

I held him.

That was all.

When he finally let go, he looked at me and cleared his throat. “You look terrible.”

“So do you.”

“Yes.”

I kissed his cheek. “Get in the carriage, Cosmos. Everyone’s waiting at home for you.”

He did not speak on the Camden Road. Not through Bloomsbury. Not through the park. He sat with his hands on his knees and looked out of the window as London went past.