An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) (18 page)

“My dear fellow,” he said, “there are so many places in London, so many thousands, from which it would be easier to steal.”

“Can you point them out to me?” asked Lenox. “There is great risk in entering a private residence, and no guarantee that it will hold much treasure, even at the finest address. The museums and societies keep everything of value under lock and key. By contrast, Dallington, consider the paintings we saw on the wall—or the medieval Bible stand in the East Gallery, with gold and rubies in it, with which we were allowed to remain alone for twenty minutes.”

“With guards on every side of us.”

“At a party of eight hundred, would they be such a problem? Heaven alone knows the value of the jewels in the Queen’s vaults. Think of the boy Jones, gentlemen.”

The example of the boy Jones silenced the other two men. Three decades before, Jones, a lad of not more than fourteen or fifteen, had gained entrance to Buckingham Palace, disguised as a chimney sweep. Guards caught him after only a short while, with an eccentric collection of the Queen’s personal items, garments, letters, and knickknacks, none of it very valuable.

They expelled the boy and warned him not to return. Not much later, he scaled the walls of Buckingham Palace and wandered it for hours, sitting on the throne, lying in Victoria’s bed, and stealing food from the larder. One of the wits of the age had dubbed the child “In I Go Jones.”

At any rate, the palace was not unimpeachably secure.

Jenkins rose from his seat. The light was declining into shadow outside, and he lit a lamp recessed into the wall, making the room brighter. “But then we come to Grace Ammons,” he said. “No intelligent thief would leave behind such a trail. If he merely wished access to the palace as a social matter, this light-haired gentleman could deny Miss Ammons’s story. That would be very much harder if he stole something.”

“Perhaps he counted upon her intimidation.” Lenox saw that it was a fair point, and he fell into silence for a moment, as the other two men contemplated him. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “There are too many questions—why our Mr. Smith gave his name out as Godwin beyond the shops at which he used it, whether and why he killed the real Godwin, what he wanted to do at the palace.”

“The behavior of Miss Ammons,” added Dallington, eyes narrowed in contemplation. “Until we are sure of her story we are sure of nothing at all.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Lenox softly.

It was this problem—Miss Ammons’s character, her honesty—that preoccupied Lenox all through the remainder of the evening. Soon he and Dallington left the Yard, agreeing to reconvene with Jenkins the next afternoon. (Hopefully Skaggs would have finished his canvass by then.) Lenox dined alone at the House that evening, and as he ate his chop and mashed turnips and read about the mining crisis, by the flickering candlelight at Bellamy’s Restaurant, his mind kept circling back to her, to Miss Ammons. Even as he sat upon the benches of the house she entered into his thoughts—true, not when he was trying to catch the eye of the Speaker, or as he spoke, or for any of the insensible moments after he sat down, his heart still thumping even after these many years of speeches. In the slack moments, though—for instance, when someone with whom he agreed was entering upon the sixteenth minute of a speech, every word of which the bored scribes in the journalists’ box could have written themselves—it would be Grace Ammons who returned to Lenox’s mind.

There were several important votes that evening, and he didn’t return to Hampden Lane until well after one o’clock. Even then, however, as his tired head fell to the pillow, its last conscious thought was of Grace Ammons.

In the morning it came to him.

In haste he dressed and ate, then hurried over to Scotland Yard, hoping to catch Jenkins before the inspector left for his visit to the palace. By great good fortune he managed it—the Yard’s brougham was sitting outside its entrance, horses warmed, waiting for Jenkins, when Lenox arrived.

“Mr. Lenox!” said Jenkins, surprised, when he met the older detective in the hallway. “Are we not meant to see each other this afternoon?”

“With your permission I would like another word with Grace Ammons, before you speak to her. I think I know her motives.”

“Do you, though? Perhaps you might explain them to me, if we ride to the palace together?”

It was not difficult to convince Jenkins, who agreed to wait in the carriage for half an hour. Soon Lenox found himself following Mrs. Engel once again down the small hallway toward the East Gallery, and once again Grace Ammons was waiting there. Her mood before had been fearful. Now she seemed puzzled.

“I am to see Inspector Thomas Jenkins of Scotland Yard shortly,” she said, rising as Lenox approached her, “despite my sincere desire not to involve the police in this matter. Is it necessary that you and I should speak again?”

“I’m afraid it is,” he said. “Please, sit. As for the police—once there is a death, their involvement is no longer a matter of personal discretion. I apologize, Miss Ammons.”

They took their seats on one of the couches along the wall. “How may I help you, then, Mr. Lenox?”

“I have decided that I believe your story.”

She looked lovely in the wan morning light, with her chestnut hair falling around her pale throat. “Certainly there is no reason you should not.”

“Believe you, that is, despite the barefaced falsehoods with which your story was filled.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I think that for the most part your story is true—that this light-haired gentleman, this murderer, bullied and threatened you—and I think it has taken courage on your part to tell us of it. The trouble is that if you lie once, your whole story is thrown into doubt. Until we are sure of you, it is difficult to proceed.”

“I really cannot imagine what you mean,” she said.

So Lenox told her what they knew: that George Ivory had nothing to do with the Chepstow and Ely company, that he sincerely and apologetically was forced to doubt her tale of a Yorkshire youth, that, in short, it was impossible to parse what was true and what was false in her story.

She began to offer a faltering rebuttal of all this, but the truth told in her face. She seemed to sense that Lenox could read her, and changed tacks. “Whether or not you think I was lying, it is no matter. I have hired Miss Strickland to assist me in this matter, not Mr. Dallington, nor, certainly, you.”

Lenox sighed. “I had a lengthy conversation with Inspector Jenkins this morning. He plans to place you under arrest.”

“He would not.”

“Your position here is no shield, ma’am. He believes you to be in league with this fair-haired gentleman—the murderer of Archie Godwin.”

She gave out an involuntary and anguished cry. “In league with
him
?” she asked. “Of all people you must be the least likely to believe that. You saw how I reacted to him that morning.”

Part of Lenox’s belief in Miss Ammons’s story, that morning, had been secondhand—he trusted Mrs. Engel’s evident and sincere good opinion of the young woman—and now, looking into her eyes, he felt sure that at heart she was true. Still, he said, “It might have been a show, specially designed for me, or for Dallington.”

“I had no idea whatsoever that you were present,” said the young secretary.

“If you make a clean breast of it, I’m sure I can persuade Jenkins not to arrest you.”

She hesitated—and then said, “No, he will have to do as he sees fit. Time will exculpate me.”

Lenox admired her fortitude, and it was with a reluctant heart that he said, “He may have to arrest Mr. Ivory as well, in that case.”

“George? Why?”

“As another accomplice.”

It was here that her resolve broke. She stared at him for a moment, then said, quietly, “No, that will not do. I will tell you my story—my very shameful story—and then pray that you show me mercy, for I could not stand for any of that shame to cast a shadow over George.”

Often in the course of his career as a detective, Lenox had done things that he would never have dreamed of doing outside the context of his vocation. He had picked locks, climbed fences, lied to witnesses—sacrificed many bone-deep integrities upon the altar of an inexact but higher good. These actions almost never cost him any unease.

This one did. When he heard Grace Ammons’s story, the shame she had claimed for herself passed into his ownership. It had been necessary to extract the truth from her—but this was an ugly thing.

She had begun with a heavy sigh. “I was not born in Yorkshire, you are correct,” she said.

“The western part of Sussex, if I had to hazard a guess.”

She inclined her head, in no mood to offer admiration for his deductions. “Yes, in western Sussex, though I thought I had shed my accent. I never knew my parents. My father was a shopowner there, and my mother a woman of gentle birth, rather come down in the world. Both of them died in a fire when I was not three months old. They had scattered the old ashes from their fireplace on the kitchen countertop to scrub it clean, and there was a live cinder among them, which caught on one of the wooden boards there.”

“Where were you?”

“At my grandmother’s house. She took me when there was too much work in the shop. It was she, too, who took care of me after my parents were gone. She was a wonderful woman, my father’s mother, though I just barely remember her. She died when I was seven, my second-to-last living relation. Would that she had lived longer.

“After her death I passed to my father’s sister, my aunt Lily. She was a quiet woman, kind enough when she had the opportunity, but she lived in horror of her husband, my uncle Robert. He was a pious, sober man, with a prosperous farm, but he was a devil—still I believe him to have been the very devil, Mr. Lenox. I will pass over my time in that house, with your permission. I stayed there only until I was fifteen, and that history is not relevant to my current predicament.”

“You may tell the story however you please,” said Lenox. He was on guard, however; her face was so sympathetic, her story already so sad, that he was alert to the possibility that she was manipulating him. “Go on.”

“Growing up in a house that is cruel, I think children either grow to be, as adults, cruel themselves or unusually kind, even soft, perhaps. At any rate, without too much self-regard I can say that I am of the latter sort—I have always been hopelessly soft toward people. It is not necessarily a virtue, I think. One must learn to fight back, and I never did. At fifteen, a very rich, arrogant gentleman, passing through town, took advantage of me.”

“I am sorry to hear it.”

“You asked me for the truth.” She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, and paused before speaking again. “The usual sequel of such an incident—that the gentleman vanishes, and the girl finds herself with child—did not happen, in this case. In fact, what did happen at the time seemed rather wonderful, to me, childish as I was. He took me out of my aunt and uncle’s house—to Paris. That was the truth I told you, the last time we spoke. I went to Paris.”

“Would I know this person’s name?” asked Lenox.

She shook her head. “I thought him very grand when I was young, but he was not of much account. His father was a very minor squire, the son a spendthrift, shut out of much of the society to which he hoped to win admission. Paris offered him a better chance for that access than London, since the rules are looser there. He was a bad man, though generous to me. He is dead now—died two years ago, in a hunting accident. I read of it in the
Times.
I had not laid eyes on him for many years before that. We did have happy moments together, he and I.”

“Please go on.”

“My benefactor—as he chose to call himself—arranged for me to have a small suite of apartments in the rue de Verneuil, though he himself lived in the Crillon. He visited me every day and gave me a small amount of money and a maid. I was fifteen, fresh from Sussex. You cannot imagine the sophistication I saw around me. Really, of course, my maid was reporting everything to him, and laughing at me behind my back, and the trinkets I bought with my pocket money were hopelessly vulgar.

“My fortune changed—you may decide whether for the good or the bad—when, at a very threadbare sort of
salon
in the
huitième,
I met a woman named Madame de Faurier. She was as glamorous as you can conceive, and very warm to me initially, though ultimately as cold, in her way, as my uncle Robert.”

Lenox felt a kind of sickness—it was so clear what was coming. “I am sorry to make you tell this,” he said.

She ignored this apology. “One day not long after that
salon,
my gentleman did not appear. I assumed he was ill and sent word around to the Crillon. No reply. At last on the fourth day that he was absent I went to look for him, but he was gone. On the fifth day my maid ceased to come—her weekly wages not having been paid. I was frantic with anxiety, as you can imagine. I knew that my apartments were rented by the month, of which the end was coming soon, and I had scarcely enough money to buy bread. Somehow they knew at the corner that I was alone, because the butcher and costermonger immediately demanded ready money, when I had always bought my food on credit. I imagine the maid told them.

“I am more intelligent about the world now than I was then, Mr. Lenox. In retrospect perhaps I ought to have taken myself to the British Embassy. Certainly I might have fallen upon the mercy of the English church on the Auguste Vacquerie. I think of how young I looked, and imagine they would have taken sympathy on me.

“You will have guessed what happened next, perhaps. A visitor came. Madame de Faurier. I don’t know if my gentleman was complicit with her, or if he had to scramble away from the city and she merely took advantage of the situation. I suspect the former. Anyhow, I came under her protection.”

There were tears in the eyes of Grace Ammons now, and Lenox offered her his handkerchief. On some winter night Lady Jane had stitched his initials in the corner of it with green thread, and passing it across the sofa he thought of his wife, her own tender character. He felt a blackguard. “You needn’t go on,” he said. “Or you may pass over any details you wish.”