A Stranger in Mayfair - Charles Finch [37]
As they sat to eat, Lenox observed a fresh face among the servants ranged at the side of the room. Clarke had already been replaced, then. Collingwood began spooning soup from a large silver tureen into bowls on the sideboard, which the new footman began to distribute. Very distinctly Lenox heard Alfred’s stomach grumble; they were sitting side by side.
“How do you find Cambridge?” asked the older man.
“S’all right.”
“You’re at Downing, I hear? It’s a lovely college.”
“S’all right.”
“The soup looks nice.”
“Oh, it’s lovely soup here,” said Alfred fervently, at last giving his dinner companion the benefit of his full attention. “They use real cream. At Cambridge the soup is too thin, if you ask me.”
“What do you study?”
“Classics.”
“Oh?”
“Father wanted me to.”
Ludo said grace, and they began to eat. Lenox assayed a few more conversational gambits with Alfred but gave them up when they failed to earn a response. He turned to Ludo, on his left.
“Did you study history, too?”
“Look, Lenox,” said Ludo in a low voice, “I apologize for my speech, before. It’s a difficult time in the house, as you can imagine. Between this lad dying, Paul going up to university for the first time, and the prospect of this title…well, a difficult time, as I say.”
“It’s quite all right.”
“Will you leave the case to Fowler?”
“You truly fear my indiscretion?”
“No! Not that at all, you must believe me. It’s simply that the more people are involved, the more attention the situation will receive. I want the murderer found, but I want it done quietly.”
“Isn’t that why you came to me at first?”
Ludo again looked stirred, as if Lenox were misunderstanding him out of sheer obstinacy. “As I told you, Fowler has proved quite a good sort! Listen, will you leave it off, as a favor to me?”
“Paul!” Elizabeth Starling, breaking off her conversation with Dallington, called down the table to her younger son, concern etched in her face. “Is that a flask of liquor I just saw you sip?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Goodness!”
“Not at all the thing,” said Alfred, his glabrous pink face screwed up in judgment. “You mustn’t get a reputation at Downing, Paul.”
“What do you know, anyway? Douglas-Titmore said you haven’t any friends, and you hadn’t any at Shrewsbury either.”
The detective’s heart went out to Alfred, whose face crumpled up as if he were going to cry. “I don’t think I had a single friend my first term at Oxford,” Lenox said. “That was years ago, but I expect it’s the same way now.”
“It only starts in the second term,” agreed Dallington.
“Is that true?” asked Paul, who apparently looked upon the word of a man who could drink five bottles of champagne in an hour as gospel.
“Oh, very true.”
“Hand over the flask,” said Elizabeth Starling.
Tiberius belched. “Tiberius Jr! Tibby!” he called out in a high-pitched voice.
“Not the cat, Uncle,” said Ludo despairingly.
In the cab back through Mayfair, after supper had reached its merciful conclusion, Lenox and Dallington laughed together over the night’s events.
“That family is a mess,” said the younger man.
“I don’t envy them that great-uncle of Ludo’s, rich as he may be.”
“Amusing old git, if you have the right sense of humor. Anyway, do you plan to heed their request?”
“That I leave the case alone?”
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t. Of course not. In fact I think we should go visit the dead boy’s mother in the morning.”
Chapter Eighteen
Hammersmith was a genteel, factory-scattered borough of London, some five miles west of Mayfair and situated on a turn in the Thames. As Dallington and Lenox rode out early the next morning, they continued their discussion of the evening at the Starlings’.
“Did you have a chance to spy on Collingwood?” asked Lenox.
“Unfortunately I was occupied with Paul, the younger son. He asked me a thousand different questions about pubs at Cambridge. I’d be surprised if his innards survive a month of King Street, with all the drinking he seems to have planned.”
Reminded by the word “drinking” that he had tea, Lenox took out his silver flask (a present from McConnell—its cloth