They all stared at me. ‘You have a lurid imagination,’ Lucian said eventually.
I shrugged. ‘Too many Scandi Noir thrillers. Ignore that.’ I went to perch on the edge of the table and gnawed a chicken leg while I thought. ‘I can’t believe these two deaths aren’t causally connected somehow. It is too much of a coincidence.’ I looked at James. ‘They were currently a couple? Or they had been?’
‘They were and had been involved for over a year,’ he said curtly.
‘If anyone else has any ideas, you can just add them,’ I said, and pinned up another sheet. ‘Actions.’
‘The code in those ledgers,’ Garrick suggested.
‘George’s work,’ I said and added both. ‘We need to establish who were his boss and co-workers. Er, superior and colleagues.’
‘Discover their social circle, both the private and the public,’ said Luc. ‘And we’ll need to attend the inquests, see who is called to give evidence and what they say.’ He grimaced. ‘Although I expect we will be called in any case.’
‘There are the other lodgers,’ James said. ‘We have no idea what they might have seen or heard. And we need to interrogate that ratty little manservant of Philip’s. He’s surprisingly nervous.’
‘I might be nervous if I found his lordship with his head beaten in on his own hearthrug,’ Garrick observed.
Luc snorted. ‘I somehow doubt it. But it is a fair point. The man manages to look as though he’s guilty of something, even if it is only helping himself to the contents of the cellar.’ He shrugged. ‘But if this is the first time he has encountered real violence, that could explain it. Right. James, you tackle the lodgers. Garrick – see what you can do with the timorous Bromley. Cassandra and I will investigate George’s place of work and his contacts there.’
‘How?’ I asked, not unreasonably, given that my understanding of how the departments of state worked in 1807 was vague, to put it very kindly.
Luc went to the bookshelves, took down a very small volume and passed it over. ‘That should have it. The Secretary of State for Home Affairs has just changed with the new administration. It’s Liverpool now.’
‘Earl of?’ I ventured, wrestling with The Court and City Register or Gentleman’s Complete Annual Kalendar for the Year 1807. I had no idea why Kalendar not Calendar. It was packed with such vital information as the name of the Collector of Excise for Barnstaple and Moveable Fairs for 1807 and was completely lacking in a useable index. Or a calendar, come to that.
‘Yes.’
‘I know about him, he was a complete bastard,’ I said, dredging through my memory. ‘Peterloo… No, you don’t want to know about that.’ It was twelve years in the future, the Peterloo Massacre, when mounted militia rode down a crowd of peaceable protesters in Manchester and the government responded with savagely repressive legislation.
‘I will endeavour to forget it,’ Luc said drily. ‘But with the change of Administration on the twenty fifth of March, and the Secretaries of State changing in all departments, there might have been alterations further down the tree.’
‘Here we are.’ Having ploughed through the Houses of Parliament and the Royal Households I finally arrived at Secretary of State’s Office. Whitehall. Home-department. ‘No mention of Lord Liverpool. Under Secretaries, Chief Clerk, Senior Clerks… Clerks. Here he is, George Coates, Esquire. £100.’
‘That’s essentially last year’s information,’ James said. ‘So, there’s the possibility he got a promotion, or more responsibility with the change of Administration, which accounts for the better apartment.’
‘And more pressure to go with it, no doubt.’ Luc said. ‘Who are the Under Secretaries? They are the ones who actually run things.’
>
I squinted at the tiny type, resisting the urge to tap or swipe to make it more legible. ‘Sir Thomas Reece, bt. That’s baronet, right?’ Everyone nodded. ‘And Thomas Salmond, Esquire.’
‘Reece I’ve come across,’ Lucian said. ‘He gets about, seen in all the right places, belongs to several of my clubs. Dreadful wife, as I recall. Daughter of the Earl of Reston and never lets anyone forget it. They’ve a daughter to bring out so they ought to be easy enough find at evening parties.’
‘It’s May – isn’t the Season almost over?’
James made a sort of gesture with one hand. ‘Everyone’s staying in Town because of the political manoeuvrings. There’s an election going on, after all, so the political hostesses are making an effort.’
‘Parties?’ I asked, hopefully.
‘Parties,’ Luc agreed. ‘There’s a reception tomorrow and the hostess is political, which helps. We can all three go to that. I have accepted nothing for today, however. I’ll go down to Brooks’s and see what I can find about Reece and Salmond and any gossip about the Home Office generally.’
‘I’ll go round to George’s lodging house, get Mrs Kentish to give me dinner and talk to the other lodgers,’ James suggested.
‘And I’ll tackle the coded ledgers.’ There wasn’t much else for me to do, not that I knew the first thing about codes, other than that E was the most common letter of the alphabet. But, if this was a list of names, that rule might not apply anyway.
‘Will you be dining in, my lord?’ Garrick asked.
‘No, I have no idea where my search for the two Under Secretaries will take me.’ Luc gave me a look that held enough smoulder to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. ‘But I’ll be back by midnight. You will be all right, Cassie?’