A Stranger in Mayfair - Charles Finch [67]
At last Collingwood relented. “Yes,” he said and then went on, in a desperate tone, “Oh, please! He’s only a boy! You can’t send him to hang! He’ll be out of the country soon—gone from England forever—he has time to change!”
“You have admirable loyalty,” said Dallington. “‘How well in thee appears the constant service of the antique world,’ and all that. You must love the Starlings.”
“You can have the Starling family, all of them—but I’ve known Paul since he was an infant. He might as well have been my own child, for all the time we spent together.”
“Then did you attack Mr. Starling?” asked Lenox.
“I’ve no reason to lie—I didn’t. I told you before, I was having tea and reading the newspaper when you and Mr. Starling came back into the house.”
In that bare room, one of its walls darkened by damp, Lenox suddenly felt something strange: a new grief for Frederick Clarke, that extended soon into grief for Collingwood and his irreparably compromised life. Wherever he went he would remember these days in jail, and his loss of faith in Paul Starling—accompanied by no matching loss of love.
“How did you find out that Paul was guilty?”
Collingwood sighed. “I didn’t suspect him at the beginning. It was when I came to jail. Mrs. Starling visited me, two days ago. She said Paul had confessed to killing Clarke, and that he was being sent abroad forever.”
“Did she tell you why Paul killed Clarke?”
“No.”
“Yet she persuaded you to confess?”
“She said Grayson Fowler was beginning to put the clues together, and that it was only a matter of time before he discovered the truth.”
“So if you offered the police a false trail—”
“Yes, a confession, which I could then retract—”
“You could save him from the hangman,” finished Lenox.
“It was foolish,” said Dallington.
Agitated, Collingwood said, “Remember, again, I dandled the boy on my knee when he was still spitting up his milk, Mr. Lenox, and I was myself only a tiny boy in first livery. He’s a decade younger than I am and always looked up to me—always asked me to play games, to show him things. Until he went off to school, finally. But I could understand!” he went on hastily. “To be among the sons of nobility, princes from Bavaria, every such thing—I could understand his not having time for me anymore! It didn’t mean I stopped regarding him as my own family.”
There was a dead silence in the room.
Lenox broke it, in the end. “There are mysteries remaining in all this.” He thought of the butcher, of Ludo Starling’s lies. “Still, you have my backing, if that counts for anything during your trial, or before that when the police build their case. I believe you to be innocent. As for Paul—I’m not as convinced as you are that he’s guilty. If he is, however, I cannot promise to protect him.”
Collingwood was past caring. His soliloquy about Paul and his fresh confession, of innocence, had taken the last of his energy. “Can I go now, please?”
“Yes,” said Lenox. “Thank you for speaking with us.”
Outside of the prison Lenox and Dallington were standing on the pavement, waiting for Lenox’s carriage to round the block and pick them up, when they saw Ludo Starling. He was smoking a short, fat cigar, a hand in one pocket, seemingly idle.
“Starling!” called out Lenox. To Dallington he whispered, “Don’t mention anything Collingwood told us.”
Ludo turned to see them, and his face fell. “Oh, hullo,” he said. “I suppose you’ve been to see my butler?”
“Yes, we have.”
“It’s damned…I wish you wouldn’t have done it. Elizabeth and I have both asked you over and over to step out of our family’s business. What will it take, money? Let me pay your standard fee, and we shall be done with each other.”
“Money doesn’t interest me.”
“Fowler has everything in hand. Collingwood has confessed, for the love of Christ.”
“That’s true.”
“Will you stop?”
“There are one or two small things I wish to