Soon a butler came, a pale man in middle age with a slight limp and dark hair. “Gentlemen?” he said. He had returned alone. “You asked for me?”

“Lord Wakefield is out?” asked Dallington quickly, getting in ahead of Nicholson.

“Yes, sir.”

“Where is he?”

“Perhaps if I had some idea why you sought him out, sir.”

Nicholson glanced at Dallington and then shook his head. “You might as well know—Lord Wakefield’s dead.”

The butler, though trained his whole life to suppress the instinct, couldn’t help but react. His eyes grew wide, and his breath seemed to catch. “Dead, you say? Lord Wakefield? Are you quite sure?”

“Yes. And I know from one of my constables that he’d been gone for a day beforehand.”

The butler hesitated. “I suppose you had better come in,” he said. “Dead, my goodness. I suppose I shall have to look out for a new place. Not that … in the circumstances…”

“How long have you worked for His Lordship?” asked Nicholson.

“A little more than one year, sir.”

“And how many staff does he keep?”

“Five of us full-time, sir.”

“All living in?”

“Yes, sir. A butler, a footman, a cook, and two maids. To be honest there is barely work for each of us to fill our time, sir. Lord Wakefield’s needs are few. He lives—lived—largely in two rooms upstairs. This was his father’s house, and he has left it as he found it when he inherited it.”

“Are all five of you here this morning?” asked Lenox.

“Yes, sir.”

Lenox looked at Dallington and Nicholson. “I think we had better see all of them now.”

The interviews took not more than half an hour. All the servants told the same tale: a master they didn’t know well, though if he ever paid them attention it was because something had angered him, not pleased him. The cook in particular, a pretty, timid young woman from Lancashire, seemed intimidated by the marquess. She was just as ignorant as the rest of them about Wakefield’s movements around London.

“What about visitors?” said Lenox to the butler—his name was Smith—after the interviews were concluded. They were sitting in a room with high vaulting windows and a view of a serene and exquisite back garden, with manicured hedges and thickset rosebushes. “Did Lord Wakefield often entertain?”

“Not often, sir. Private dinners now and again—but even those were rare. He was most often at his clubs.”

“Was there any difference to him in recent weeks?” asked Dallington.

Smith looked up, thinking. He had refreshingly little of the reticence one found in most household retainers; it was clear that he bore Wakefield neither much loyalty nor much malice, and that his professional scruples were sincere but not limitless. “Now that you mention it, sir, Lord Wakefield has entertained more often than was usual with him, this month or so. He had four or five different visitors. Though only a single visitor came more than once.”

“Who was that?”

“We addressed him as Mr. Francis, sir.”

“Addressed him—was that not his name?”

“I don’t know, sir. I phrase it that way only because I recall that Lord Wakefield called him Hartley, when they spoke one to one.”

Nicholson said, “So his name might be Hartley Francis, or Francis Hartley.”

Lenox frowned. “How often did he visit?”

“Three or four times a week in the last month, sir, often for several hours in the evening.”

“Was he someone who might have been in Lord Wakefield’s employ? Or was he a friend—a gentleman?”

“Oh, no, sir, he was a gentleman. He and Lord Wakefield met on quite equal terms. Mr. Francis even chaffed His Lordship, now and then.”

“When was the last time Francis was here?”

“He was here just last night, sir, very late, after midnight. He asked to see Lord Wakefield, but as you know His Lordship had been gone by then for some time. He left a parcel.”

“Mr. Francis did? Or Lord Wakefield?”

“Mr. Francis, sir, last night.”

“Do you have it still?” asked Lenox.

“Yes, sir, in the front hall.”

“Could we please see it?” said Nicholson.

For the first time Smith looked doubtful. “I think I had better return it to Mr. Francis—or perhaps to Lord Wakefield’s heir.”

“Your master was mixed up in some very bad business, Mr. Smith,” said Lenox. “Your interests no longer lie with his. We really must see that parcel, if you don’t mind.”

Smith hesitated, and then acquiesced. “Very well, sir. If you wait a moment I’ll fetch it.”

As they waited, Lenox, Dallington, and Nicholson sipped at cups of tea, which the footman had brought in and the butler had silently poured for them as they asked their questions. They conferred in low tones about their interviews with the other four staff members—nothing particularly pertinent, they concurred, though all five servants had agreed that Wakefield had seemed preoccupied in recent weeks. According to the footman he had thrown a plate of turtle soup across the room and stormed out three nights before. That was the worst tale any of them could tell of him. Perhaps, however, that was because all were relatively new to his employ. Smith had been at Portland Place the longest—only a year.

The butler returned with a parcel bound in brown paper and tied with string. It was covered all over with stamps. “I thought you said he delivered it by hand?” asked Lenox.

“He did, sir,” said Smith. He looked at the package. “Oh, the stamps, sir. No, I cannot explain those.”

“They aren’t canceled,” said Dallington, running his eyes over the parcel as he took it.

“Perhaps he intended to send it by post and changed his mind, sir?”

“Hold it with this, if you don’t mind,” said Lenox to Dallington, drawing out a handkerchief. “McConnell may be able to make something of the fingerprints.”

Dallington passed the parcel over, and Lenox studied it. He could remember the stamps of his childhood so vividly: fourpence for the first fifteen miles a letter was to travel, eightpence the next eighty, seventeen the next even hundred. In those days, of course, the recipient had paid. Poor people had often sent each other empty envelopes, which the addressee rejected, simply as a message to let each other know all was still well. Then Rowland Hill had invented the postage stamp, and it had all changed …

“Shall I open it?” asked Lenox.

“Carry on,” said Nicholson.

Lenox had a small pair of silver-handled scissors in his breast pocket and took them out to cut the sturdy string. He tried, on principle, not to untie knots in his detective work, since they were occasionally as distinctive as fingerprints.

Within the package was another small wrapped parcel, in a box, and a note. Lenox opened the note first and read it aloud.

Travers-George—here it is back for you. Tomorrow just before midnight at York’s. Urgent that we tie up loose ends. Hartley.

“Tomorrow—that means today,” observed Nicholson.

“What’s in the box?” said Dallington.

Lenox was busy opening it—a small box, not quite large enough to hold a quarto. Despite experience inuring him to surprises, he gasped when he saw what it held.

“What is it?” asked Nicholson, leaning over to get a look.

Lenox lifted the object with his handkerchief. “A pistol,” he said.

Nicholson paled. “A .422 Webley. The kind of gun that killed Jenkins,” he said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The three investigators and the butler sat there in silence for a moment, and then Nicholson said, very pointedly, “What else can you tell us about this person—Francis, Hartley, whatever the hell he’s called?”

Unfortunately Smith knew very little. He was more than happy to recapitulate the few small details of dress he recalled—a crimson dinner jacket one evening, for instance, as if he had come from or was going to attend some fashionable event—but he couldn’t offer a great deal else. To Lenox the most interesting thing the butler told them was of the variable nature of Hartley’s visits. He sometimes came for ten minutes, sometimes three hours. It suggested either close friendship—or business.