A Beautiful Blue Death

“Painting?” Lenox asked, leaning closer.

“Yes.”

“What were you painting?”

“The view from a window in the drawing room. I was concentrating deeply.”

“Did you finish the painting that day?”

“No. I never finished it at all, just added a few hasty strokes the next day to make it look complete. I was tired of it.”

“Did you leave the drawing room?”

“Not for a moment. I was absorbed by my work.”

“Who can vouch for that, among the others in the drawing room?”

“I’ve no idea. I wasn’t consciously trying to generate an alibi. None of us had an idea that a girl was being murdered, or I daresay we should have been more attentive to people’s comings and goings. I myself would have made a point of seeing which other people left the room, if I knew that this sort of insulting suspicion were going to be directed at me.”

“How well do you know the other men who are staying with your uncle?”

“Well enough.”

“Do you have an opinion of them?”

“Soames is a wastrel. Potts is lower class. Duff, on the other hand, is a man with sound ideas about things. A Cambridge man too, you know. Rigorous standards for the poor. No more free rides. Good about India, too. Very sound.”

“Are you close with your uncle?”

“Extremely. More so every day.”

“Is he close with Claude?”

“Not at all. Kind, for the family’s sake, but sees him for what he is.”

“Do you know anything of your uncle’s work at the mint?”

“No.”

“If I may ask a delicate question, what is your financial situation?”

Eustace reddened. “Good lord. I’m fine, thank you.”

“May I ask how?”

“If you must, I receive income from my investments.”

“What investments?”

“Uncle Barnard gave Claude and me each ten thousand pounds upon reaching the majority. I invested mine soundly.”

“And Claude?”

“I’ve no idea what he did with his.”

“Which of your housemates do you think is most likely to be guilty of the crime?”

“If you ask my opinion, it was some urchin from the streets who wanted to steal from the house. Or perhaps this maid was stealing, and someone taught her a lesson.”

“Barring that possibility.”

“Soames. Man’s a wastrel, I spotted it from fifty yards.”

Lenox stood up. “I shan’t take any more of your time.”

“Yes, yes, well, nice to meet you.”

“Please don’t tell anyone we met.”

“And why on earth not?”

“Your silence will benefit the girl who has died. We must try to remember her claims in this situation.”

“I shall tell whomsoever I please. But I shall consider your request.”

“You would do the girl a grave disservice. She has had a hard enough fate.”

Eustace seemed to falter. “Well, perhaps,” he said sullenly.

Lenox left the smoking room without another word. It was the second time of the morning that he had become disheartened at the prospect of the generation to which he was meant to bequeath the earth. Interesting that each of the cousins had called the other a wastrel; neither seemed a particular prize to him, but did that sort of mutual animus have a deeper basis than incompatibility? It might simply have been that they were related to Barnard and were competing for a spot in his last will and testament. An unfortunate thing in a family that. Lenox thought with some sense of comfort that at least his own nephews, Edmund’s sons, wouldn’t care about his money. They were bright young lads, polite and kind besides.

Chapter 17

After an unsatisfying morning, McConnell aside, and an unsatisfying lunch, Lenox made his way not homeward, though in truth he wanted to, but rather to Oxley Crescent, a small neighborhood on the periphery of London. The driver of his carriage, he felt, was beginning to tire of these trips to obscure and occasionally lower- class sections of London and would have preferred to travel solely to Piccadilly Circus and back, but Lenox felt, with some sense of self-righteousness, that the driver’s purposes ranked, at the moment, below his own.

As they drove he read the Daily Telegraph, the Whig paper, and before too long they had arrived at their destination. It was a street of somewhat better repute than that in which he had found Jeremiah Jones, and also of better repute than that to which he had accompanied Claude Barnard that morning, but he could imagine that it might offend his driver’s higher feelings. His driver lived on Hampden Lane.

Lenox, however, thought it a nice quiet street, with small houses spaced close together but not in disrepair, and pleasant little gardens dotted along the sidewalk, and old women sitting on their porches or, in this colder weather, at their front windows.

It was on Oxley Crescent that Skaggs lived, and it was to Skaggs’s abode that Lenox had come, in search of a private investigator. Several cases had passed since he had been here, he thought. He knocked twice on the door of a white house with dark shutters, and after a moment a young girl appeared.

“May I help ye, my lord?” she said.

“I’m Charles Lenox. Are you the lady of the house?”

“No, my lord, I’m the girl.”

“Is Mr. Skaggs at home?”

“Just a moment, my lord.”

The door closed, and a moment later Skaggs himself appeared. He was a man in his late thirties, dressed in a brown suit, with a bald head and a fat face and a long scar across the left side of his neck. He had once been fearsome, and still could be when asked, but in truth he had been tamed by his wife in recent years and had settled down to respectability. He was the private investigator Lenox had been looking for.

“Sorry about the girl, Mr. Lenox.”

“Not at all.”

“We’ve only just hired her.”

“A significant thing to do.”

“The wife was always on about getting someone. We had our third, you see.”

“Congratulations, Mr. Skaggs. A boy or a girl?”

“All girls, Mr. Lenox. A pride and a joy, though.”

“You’re a lucky man.”

“Thank you, sir. Will you come in?”

The two men walked into a small room at the front of the house, with only two chairs and a table in it. This was Skaggs’s place of business. Lenox sat down, and Skaggs asked how he could be of service.

“Do you know of Roderick Potts?” said Lenox.

“Yes, sir. ’E’s often in the papers, sir.”

“That’s the man. I’d like you to follow him, closely enough to hear and see what you can.”