A Stranger in Mayfair - Charles Finch [77]
It was a green butcher’s apron.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Lenox wavered. He didn’t want to miss his chance to speak with Schott, but he didn’t want to stand in a tight space with a man who had thirty knives nearby, and knew how to use them.
Impulsively he crossed the street and opened the door.
As soon as the smell hit him he knew it had been a mistake. From twenty feet he could admire a butcher’s shop, its sanitary white, its reddish pink slabs of beef cut so tidily. Close up, though, it nauseated him. If it was browned in a red wine sauce there was nothing he preferred to a steak, but seeing it before it had reached that stage was less pleasant.
The man in the green butcher’s apron had been in the back, but at the sound of the bell attached to the door he popped up to the front. To Lenox’s disappointment, it wasn’t the gentleman from the boxing club.
“Mr. Schott?” he said.
“Yes? What can I get you?” The butcher was a short, tough lump of a man, bald and round-headed, with a belt of fat and arms that looked powerful from the heavy work of lifting and chopping. He looked at Lenox without suspicion. The detective put his age at about forty.
“I was wondering why you’d been closed the past few days.”
“I suppose a man can keep his own hours in his own shop, can’t he?”
“Certainly, yes.”
“Will that be all?”
“In fact I was hoping to speak to your cousin.”
Schott looked aggrieved. “Why on earth would you wish to do that? If it’s a cut of lamb you want, I’ve sold a fair few more than he has—only four or five thousand, I admit, but experience must count for something, mustn’t it?”
Lenox almost laughed. “It’s a fair point. But it wasn’t a question of butchery that I hoped to discuss with him. It’s about Ludo Starling. Or Frederick Clarke, really.”
Even as he said the second name Lenox heard something ominous: a lock turning behind him. He whirled around and saw the man from the boxing club, a cleaver in his hand, a key going into his pocket.
He looked back to Schott, who had his arms crossed and a dead-eyed look on his face.
True, visceral terror gripped at Lenox’s heart. There was no way out if these men wished to harm him. How stupid not to have waited until someone could come with him. Or at least to have told someone where he was going!
“Hello,” he managed to say in what he hoped was a mild voice.
“Well?” said the man from the boxing club. “I’m the cousin. What do you wish to say?”
“May I hear your name, sir? Mine is Charles Lenox; I’m an amateur detective and a Member of Parliament.” There. Let them know that if they killed him they were killing someone of note, someone who would be avenged.
“A Member of Parliament?” said Schott.
“Yes, for Stirrington.”
“Where’s that?”
“Durham.”
“What are you doing in London, then?” asked Schott’s cousin. Lenox noticed that he was young, perhaps only twenty.
“Parliament is here, of course,” said Schott in an exasperated tone.
“Your name?” asked Lenox again.
“Mine? Runcible—William Runcible.”
“May I ask you why you ran out of the Kensington Boxing Club that way?”
Schott spoke up. “He was scared. He did something stupid, and he was scared of being found out. Now he has been, the fool.”
“What did you do?” asked Lenox.
Runcible seemed to grip his cleaver tighter. “I’m not going to jail,” he said.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened? Did you kill Freddie Clarke?”
To Lenox’s surprise, Runcible smiled at the suggestion. “Never. Of course not. Freddie was my mate. Came every Tuesday and Friday for the meat. It was him that told me about the boxing club.”
“You were friends there? I thought he associated with some pretty high gentlemen.”
Runcible frowned. “Well—not friends, leastways not there. He was taking their money, and they wouldn’t have bet him if they knew he was a servant, he always said. He invited me to watch, but we never talked while we was there.”
“How was he taking their money?”
“Betting, I suppose. I never asked.”
“If you didn’t kill him, why