An Old Betrayal

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He went to LeMaire’s first. Halfway down Brook Street was a gray house, much like all of its neighbors save for a discreetly gleaming brass placard near the bell, which read J-C.LM, letters that stood for Jean-Claude LeMaire’s name.

Lenox rang the bell. A handsome lad, very tall and with jet black hair, answered the door. “Have you an appointment?” he asked in a strong French accent.

Lenox sent in his card, perching himself patiently upon a small chair in the front hall to wait after the assistant disappeared. There were cards in the silver card stand of very grand personages, or at least one was intended to surmise as much — the names themselves were blacked out, in a flawed bid for confidentiality, leaving only the titles, Monsieur Le Duc de___, Lord___of___, The Honourable___, Member for___. Lenox wondered with some dismay if his own card would be superadded to this heap of distinction. Without even examining the stand’s contents closely he had already spotted the card of that fool Lord Sharpley, whose crest was unconcealed. No doubt Sharpley had hired LeMaire to investigate the disappearance of his two prized hunting dogs, though everyone this side of Northumberland knew his own ne’er-do-well brother had stolen them from him and sold them to a Scottish baronet.

The fellow who had greeted Lenox at the door reappeared and with a bow requested that Lenox follow him. LeMaire’s office was at the end of a small, dark corridor. The detective himself met Lenox at the door.

“Mr. Lenox! A remarkable pleasure, this!”

The old Vidocq touch, Dallington had called it, and he was precisely correct. LeMaire was a distinguished-looking fifty-year-old man, dark hair shagged down below his collar, a gallant small pointed beard descending from his chin, a twinkle in his eye. He was the Englishman’s idea of a canny Frenchman — and no doubt he was very intelligent; one could gather as much from his face. Of course, one could be intelligent in different directions. No doubt there would be a small surcharge at the foot of each bill for that twinkle.

It would be gratefully paid, for it was Vidocq who still held the most powerful hold on the British imagination of any police officer, at least this side of Sir Robert Peel. Vidocq had been first head of the French Sûreté, work he had described at length in his bestselling memoirs. Lenox was skeptical of the humility of anyone who felt the need to discourse about himself for fully four volumes, but they were rattling reads, enlivened considerably by the fact that before joining with the forces of justice, Vidocq had been one of the leading forgers and jailbreakers in France.

After he had reformed, he had also been the country’s first private detective — indeed, might have been the first in the world. His innovations had been legion: indelible ink, plaster molds for footprints, an index of the unalterable physical traits of known criminals, all the equipage that Lenox and Dallington and their kind now regularly employed. Lenox had narrowly missed meeting him many years before, when Vidocq was in his eighties and near death. It would have given him pleasure to look the shrewd old chap in the eye. Even after his celebrated reform Vidocq had not given up the old ways entirely, and in his seventies had briefly returned to prison, on a charge of fraud; when he died, not long after, eleven women came forward claiming to be the sole heir of his estate.

“How do you do, Monsieur LeMaire?” asked Lenox.

“I flourish badly, sir.”

“In that case you do not flourish at all, I fear!”

LeMaire smiled. “My English is not up in snuff, I am sure. To use your parlance.”

“It seems very fine to me.”

“How may I help you?”

“You may have heard that I was once a detective — like yourself,” Lenox added, thinking with an unbecoming note of pride that it was the other way around.

“Yes, of course. We are grateful you have cleared the field, though I read with very great ardor the account of the murders upon the Lucy.”

At the last moment he transmogrified the last word into Lucys, willfully it seemed to Lenox. He suspected the Frenchman of shamming his awkward English, and had since the words “up in snuff” passed his lips. It was no doubt beneficial to be underestimated, and of course nobody disdained a funny accent like the British. “That was a hairy business,” was all Lenox said.

“I thought you did capitally well.”

Lenox inclined his head to acknowledge the compliment, then went on. “Once in a rare while, I do take on a case. I have one at the moment.”

“I am impatient that I might help you,” said LeMaire. “What is the case?”

Lenox had told the story of his encounter in Gilbert’s not forty minutes before to Padden, and now he had the points of the matter set in his mind and told LeMaire with decisive efficiency about the entire sequence of events. The French detective listened with great interest, all the way forward over his forearms on his desk, at the very edge of his seat, occasionally looking down at his hands and twisting his little beard with two fingers when Lenox came to a puzzling detail.

He waited until Lenox had finished and then said that alas, no, no such woman had come to him, that his only cases at the present moment concerned a vanished husband and a stolen ruby necklace, that while he kept his “ear in the ground” and tended to hear from his spies of much of the private detective work in London, he had not heard of this woman, he was so sorry, he was a thousand apologies. He begged of Lenox his card and promised to call upon him the moment he learned anything relevant, anything at all.

Lenox thanked him warmly and accepted the offer of a cup of coffee before he left. It was a loss of fifteen minutes in his crowded day but gave him a further chance to study the Frenchman. They discussed old crimes, on both sides of the Channel. He was a sagacious fellow, this LeMaire. By the time Lenox departed he was still not entirely sure whether that sagacity was complemented by honesty.

If LeMaire’s office had been very fine, ormolu and sterling, Robert Audley’s was all oak and brass. It stood not far away on Mount Street, near the fine old pile called the Prince of Saxe-Coburg Hotel — named for the Queen’s prematurely dead love, Prince Albert, for whom she still, by all accounts, mourned deeply. Indeed, Audley was the house detective at several of the grand hotels in London, including besides this one the Langham and Claridge’s, responsible for any minor matters that their august guests brought to management. He had been on the police force until about six or seven years before; Lenox had known him then, a sturdy young man, impatient of nonsense.

He was also, according to Dallington, a committed alcoholic.

Audley greeted Lenox at the door himself, gruffly acknowledged the card he received, and said that he did remember their previous encounters, though from his tone you wouldn’t have guessed the memories were altogether fond. In the plain, banker’s-style office there was no whiff of spirits. Certainly he had no assistant.

There was another telltale sign, however, one that Lenox had observed in about a third of the alcoholics he knew. Audley kept a great deal of food on hand, none of which, Lenox would have guessed, he touched, beyond a biscuit every day or so. It was, as so often in these cases, too much food, betraying in its very ubiquity the illusion the drinker aimed to preserve.

Or perhaps not — Lenox reminded himself that Dallington had been wrong before. He tried to stem his judgment of the man.

“What brings you here?” Audley asked. “I don’t have time to talk shop.”

“No, certainly not,” said Lenox.

“Well?”

Audley’s bluntness, perhaps like LeMaire’s bumbling Frenchness, was likely a reassurance to the customers who sought him out — though in this case it was an unaffected trait, accidentally useful to him in his profession. “I am worried about the safety of a young woman who came to me for help.”

“In your capacity as a Member of Parliament?”

“No. Her information was out of date, apparently, because she believed me still to be a detective. It happens half a dozen times a year.” This was true in general, if not in this particular case; Lenox simply didn’t want to bring Dallington into the matter. “In the end she convinced me, against my better judgment, to help her.”

“Why couldn’t His Drunken Lordship do it?” asked Audley. “You usually pass your work on to him, from all I hear.”

Lenox looked at Audley sharply. “I suggest you watch your words. In particular when you’re with his friends, of whom I consider myself one. John Dallington is a very fine detective.”

Audley hesitated for a moment, a bit of fight in his eyes, but then held up his hands in apology. “Withdrawn. It’s a vice I can’t abide, drinking, and my temper sometimes overruns my mouth.”

“I can assure you that he has no problem with drink now, if ever he did.”

“I hope that’s the truth. They’re clever at hiding it.”

Lenox was half-inclined to leave — but this was his best chance, short of Padden offering some revelatory information, of finding the young woman he had seen at Gilbert’s. So he stayed and told his story. In the end he was glad he did.

“Light-haired, you say?” Audley asked.

“Yes. With a black-and-white striped umbrella, at least when I saw her.”

“Her name is Laurel Wheeler.”