The telegram answered that question.
DALLINGTON MAKING A FEARFUL ROW ABOUT THE WEST END STOP THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW STOP TALK OF THE CLUBS STOP STARTED AT THE BG TWO DAYS AGO STOP SHALL I TELL THE DUKE OR WILL YOU STOP NO WISH TO CAUSE THEM PAIN STOP REGARDS MCCONNELL
Lenox’s step slowed as he read this, and his heart fell. The BG would be the Beargarden Club, a haunt of many young and debauched aristocrats. Not coincidentally it was where Dallington’s letter to Lenox — perhaps his final piece of professional duty on the murder of Arthur Waugh — had been sent in. So.
Lenox went back to Everley with this telegram in hand, much preoccupied, thinking the entire way about what he should do. When he arrived he went straight to see Jane, who was writing at her desk, a curl of hair fallen fetchingly over her absorbed, concentrating face.
“Ah, Charles!” she said, smiling and looking up when she realized he was in the doorway. “How are you?”
“Unfortunately I think I shall have to go up to London,” he said, and handed her the telegram.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the end it took a very short while for detective to find detective: Lenox ran Dallington to ground ninety-odd minutes after the train from Bath arrived in London. Now he was walking down Villiers Street, a slim cobblestoned lane that lay directly in the shadow of Charing Cross station. It was dark and cold out, with a bitter, penetrating rain.
He stopped at a dim, unmemorable little doorway with a sallow lantern flickering above it, the name GORDON’S stenciled in black on its glass. Another hundred steps on he could see the Thames and the lights of Hungerford Bridge, and the intrepid small craft that even at this hour, in this weather, were out on the water, scavenging, ferrying, on whatever mysterious errands their pilots had in mind. Lenox had always felt more comfortable in stately, leafy, daytime London than in its dark and secretive nighttime brother. He had had his adventures in both.
Gordon’s Wine Bar was down a stairwell, and Lenox had to stoop to take the steps one by one. By the bottom his eyes had adjusted to the candlelight. The ceiling was formed by a succession of low, steeply curved vaults, so that some parts of it left five feet above your head and some five inches, rather like a cave or an old Roman bath. Its stone walls and columns were smudged black here and there with smoke. Everywhere — under and around the scratched tables and uneven chairs, beneath the bar, above the bar, hung from the ceiling — there were pallets of red wine in clear bottles marked only with a few swipes of chalk.
The bartender, a saturnine, white-haired man with a large belly, was backed by seven great oak casks, marked amontadillo, madeira, port, and so on. (Why was it all Portugese, the wine? Many years before a canny British trade envoy had agreed that his country would buy solely wine from that country if she bought her cloth solely from England. It was one of the most unbalanced bargains ever struck, and the reason that every stolid insurance man in Lambeth drank something as exotic as Port, or Portuguese, wine.) Occasionally one of the quiet customers would sidle up to the bar with his glass and the bartender would fill it from a cask. At the small tables there were men sitting alone, others playing chess, others reading newspapers, the majority of them with the eyes and the complexions of the committed drinker.
This quiet was broken, however, by occasional shouts and laughs from some deeper recess of the place. Lenox followed the noise to a stooped semicircular door, very heavy, which he opened to reveal a group of ten or eleven men and women in a brilliantly candlelit room.
The scene was one of loud debauchery. There were empty bottles by the dozen, women sitting on men’s laps, cards, dice, and cigars flung across every surface.
“The chap with the wine! Capital fellow!” shouted a carrot-haired young man, who happened to be near the door. Then, drunkenly, he said, “But you’ve forgotten the wine. Foolish thing to do, it was your only job.”
Dallington hadn’t turned, yet, but Lenox could see his profile. He looked far gone. His eyes were barely open, and the two women on his lap — prostitutes, almost certainly — couldn’t coax him to awareness. Occasionally with great effort he would stretch one eye open and murmur something incomprehensible, and take a sip of a greenish liquid in a small, bell-shaped glass that never left his hand. Even at this advanced remove from his senses, a carnation stood fresh in the lad’s buttonhole.
Lenox set back out into the main room after a moment. His stomach flipped when he thought he had seen someone from Parliament, a young secretary, but upon closer examination the resemblance was only vague. He walked straight to the bartender. “How long have they been in there, in the back room?” he asked.
“Who’s asking?”
“Have they paid?”
“Very regular.”
“And the women?”
Here the bartender assumed a look of almost total, blank stupidity. “Don’t know.”
“Lord Dancy and William Lawrance can drink themselves to Gehenna, for all I care,” said Lenox, and registering the bartender’s surprise, added, “Yes, I know them all, the idlers, and half their parents. But I do need one of them out. The dark-haired one, with the carnation in his buttonhole.”
“John Best.”
“Yes, why not.” The bartender stared at him for a long moment, and then Lenox realized that he was waiting for the transactional element of the conversation to begin. “Do you have anyone to roust him out for me?”
“And who are you?”
Lenox took out the brown, calfskin billfold that Lady Jane had given him two birthdays past, and removed a pound note. “Get me two strong men and have a cab waiting at the top of the stairs.”
“They’re good for that in the next two hours,” said the bartender. “Don’t want to disturb their group.”
Lenox doubled the amount now. The sum was what a housemaid might make in a month of work. “Haste, please,” he said. “I’ll wait here.”
The bartender paused and then, imperceptibly, nodded. He swiped the notes into his waist — for a panicked moment Lenox wondered if he was simply going to steal them — and then, by way of consecrating their deal, poured a glass of red wine from a bottle under the counter. “My finest,” he said.
“Thank you.” Lenox took a grateful draught of the wine.
Fifteen minutes later two men appeared, looking grim, and it only took them a moment to drag a dark-haired young man up to the bar.
It was the wrong one. “For the love of heaven,” said Lenox and, leading them and the bartender — and a few mildly interested onlookers — back to the door, said, “That one.”
They pulled Dallington out. He couldn’t stand under his own power. Lenox liked a drink, now and again, but this looked like something different, very like illness. He was glad to have dispatched a message, when he arrived in London, to McConnell, asking him to come to Hampden Lane.
Dallington just opened his eyes enough to register Lenox’s presence. He didn’t seem surprised. He put up a token resistance against the men dragging him upstairs — enough to make them pause, though they could have carried on — and said, with titanic effort, slurring badly, “The one in the red dress, the red dress.”
Lenox nodded. “Wait at the cab for a moment, if you would,” he said to the men.
He went once more to the back room and found the girl with the red dress, gave her a bill folded in half, and left the room. He felt no sense of judgment, only one of fatigue and sorrow.
Lady Jane’s two closest friends on the earth, once she had married her closest, were Toto McConnell and the woman she called Duch, the Duchess of Marchmain, Dallington’s mother. It was a new and rather shiny title, three generations old, and both the Duke and Duchess disliked it — but it made them public figures. Beyond that, they were both so wildly happy, so immensely obliged, at the change in John … it was no surprise to him when Jane had agreed he should come to London and handle the lad himself, rather than telling the boy’s parents.
At Hampden Lane Lenox had time, before the servants had recovered from their surprise at seeing him, to
