A Stranger in Mayfair - Charles Finch [97]
He had no chance of being the first kind. It wasn’t in his makeup. But he could be the second kind, he hoped.
In the meanwhile it was Graham who filled the first role. As the days passed after the case had concluded and Lenox spent more and more time in his office, he found out that Graham had inexhaustible reserves of energy to devote even to the minutest issues. He was a wonderful taskmaster to Frabbs, both cajoling him into better work and teaching him how the work was to be done.
Lenox ran into Percy Field one morning in the halls of Parliament, and Field stopped him to say thank you again for the invitation to Lady Jane’s Tuesday.
“You’re all over the papers,” he said after they had exchanged “thank you” and “you’re welcome.” “Elizabeth Starling?”
“Poor Ludo—I wonder whether he’ll return to the House, or if he’s finished.”
“He’s back at Starling Hall, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
He was there with Frederick Clarke’s mother. Before he had left he had come to Hampden Lane, some three days after his wife’s arrest, to apologize for the past weeks. As they sat in front of the fireplace, lit because the first frost of the autumn had been in the gardens and parks of the city that morning, Lenox studied the other man. His face was pained and older than before. He had taken the glass of claret Lenox offered but, in a way that was very unlike himself, didn’t touch it.
“Do you ever feel you’ve wasted your life?” he asked, an exceedingly, even inappropriately intimate question, but of course Lenox was prepared to make allowances for him.
“I daresay everyone feels that way once in a while.”
Ludo smiled. “No—I see you don’t know what I mean.”
“Perhaps not.”
“I’m taking Alfred to Starling Hall. Paul is there.”
“How are they?”
“Alfred is bewildered—between you and me, he’s rather a bewildered kind of soul—and Paul is angry. I think it will do them both good to get to Cambridge. They go next week.”
“Have you seen Elizabeth?”
“No,” he said shortly, “but Collingwood was in the house this morning. I poured my heart out to him.” He laughed. “I don’t think he forgave me. I wouldn’t either.”
“I can’t imagine he would, no.”
“There are no criminal charges to be laid against me.” Ludo paused. “Tell me, will you turn Fowler in?”
“He and I have our own agreement.”
“I wonder whether you would forgive me, Lenox.”
“Certainly.”
“Don’t be hasty. She might have killed you, you know, on the street outside of our house. D’you know, I feel now as if it was all a dream—a bizarre dream.”
“She was a strong-willed woman.”
“That’s like saying London is a biggish village,” responded Ludo, with a flash of his old bantering ways.
“Could I ask you a question, Ludo? Was Derbyshire supposed to vouch for you? Is that why you didn’t sign in?”
Ludo sighed. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right. If I had signed in, when I arrived it would have showed I wasn’t at the club during the time Freddie was murdered. I was home, in fact.”
Lenox nodded. “I woke up in the middle of the night and thought of it. After Elizabeth murdered Freddie, you went to the club to create an alibi for yourself. You must have tried to make people think you had already been there for many hours.”
“Yes. I lost money to Derbyshire so he would remember I was there, and said as often as I could that I had been there most of the day. I hoped they all would misremember how long I had been there, and in the end I said to Derbyshire point-blank: ‘Do you know how long I’ve been here? Ten hours. Time slips away, doesn’t it?’ It didn’t do me any good, apparently.”
There