Текст книги "The Laws of Murder"

Автор книги: Charles Finch

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CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Nicholson had had a long day—a very long day, between burying one colleague and placing another under suspicion of theft and murder without the least scrap of evidence—and it redounded to his credit that when he saw Lenox and Dallington at his door, late that evening, he invited them in without demurral.

He lived in a set of rooms off the Strand, a bachelor’s apartments. It was a place with little enough ornamentation, except that along one wall there were a dozen framed watercolors of ducks and geese. Most of them were identifiably set in the ponds and marshes of Hampstead Heath, just to the north of the city.

“My hobby,” said Nicholson shortly, when he observed Lenox looking at them, “watercolor.”

“You painted these?”

“Yes, in the mornings before work. On Saturdays I go and sketch, and on weekdays I work from my sketchings.”

“They’re extremely handsome.”

“Thank you.”

“They’re very like life,” said Dallington. “As if they might fly out of the frame, I swear.”

Nicholson, smiling at this, sat them down and offered them something to drink—they declined—and then asked why they had come. As they explained their theory about the houses Wakefield had owned, he listened carefully. When they were finished, he asked a few questions; then, after a moment’s pause, he retired briefly to his bedroom, where he exchanged the soft gray flannel suit he had been wearing for his stiff navy-colored uniform.

“Let’s go immediately,” he said.

The three men went by Lenox’s carriage to a small police way station near Regent’s Park, where Nicholson enlisted the help of three constables who were just coming on duty. A fourth he sent to Scotland Yard to fetch the police wagon, just in case.

All of this passed so quickly that it was scarcely an hour from the time Dallington suggested going to the time that they stopped at the corner of Portland Place. The broad thoroughfare was shimmering with the kind of lamplight that only the city’s most affluent streets brought forth at night—a lady would have been confident of walking unmolested down the pavement, as she might have at midday, at least for these few hundred feet. The grand pale crenellations of Wakefield’s house rose proudly above the corner. A few lights were on upstairs.

“We ought to give Wakefield’s son some warning,” said Nicholson. “They’re his houses now, after all.”

Lenox and Dallington objected, but Nicholson was firm—which both men understood to be fair, considering that it was he who could lose his job if the new marquess grew indignant and took a complaint to the right people.

In the event, a footman informed them (the butler, Smith, was still upstairs recovering from the wounds of his attack), the new marquess was out.

“Has he kept you on?” asked Nicholson.

“For now, anyway, sir,” said the footman.

“Hard luck if you were to lose your place because your master was murdered.”

“Harder luck still for him that was killed, sir.”

Nicholson smiled. “It’s true enough. Do you know when he’ll be back, Lord Wakefield—the younger one?”

“No, sir. He said he wouldn’t be late.”

“We may stop in again, then.”

“Very good, sir.”

As they went next door, to the anonymous house, Lenox felt a kind of charge, an excitement. They might find anything inside. Nicholson paused, then said, “Shall we knock or walk in?”

“Walk in, I think,” said Dallington.

“I had rather knock,” said Nicholson.

At that moment a carriage stopped in front of the house, and a gentleman stepped down, past sixty, with a fox stole around his neck. He took in their small congregation, and perhaps the uniforms Nicholson and the constables were wearing, and got straight back into the carriage, tapping the door with his cane so that it moved immediately. Lenox noticed that there were black velvet curtains hanging over the doors—this was how men of rank, with a family crest painted upon their carriage, traveled discreetly.

He looked at Nicholson, who was grinning; the hasty departure hadn’t been lost on him. “Straight in, then,” he said, and, walking ahead of them, opened the door.

They came into a small entryway. Rather as at Hepworth’s, ironically, the first impression was of extreme opulence. The walls were hung with an ornately patterned red-and-gold flock, and on a marble-topped table in front of them was a silver salver with several dusty bottles of wine and brandy on it, apparently left there to each person’s discretion. Handled glasses stood next to it. Dallington took one and poured himself a glass of wine.

In a distant room of the house there was music. A viola, Lenox thought.

If the first impression he had was one of wealth, the second was of the room’s strange configuration. It was entirely enclosed, a sealed chamber, offering no way any farther into the building. There was something uncanny about it—something Gothic, as the dim light of the two candles on the marble-topped table flickered.

They stood there for a moment, the six men crowded into this small space, and then Lenox had an idea and stepped toward the wall, saying, quietly, “Feel for a seam.”

He ran his own hand along the wallpaper to the right of the table carefully, until at last he found an unevenness. He prodded on it, then pushed when a door gave way. At the same moment one of the constables found a matching door on the left.

The six men looked at each other. “Which way?” asked Nicholson.

“Left, first, I think,” said Lenox. “Toward St. Anselm’s.”

“Half of us might go right,” said Dallington. “I’ll go, and you two come along.”

“Send someone back here to meet when you find anything,” said Nicholson.

“Just so.”

Lenox, Nicholson, and one of the constables made their way through the door to the left. It led into a narrow hallway, paneled in mahogany, with a few lights in widely spaced sconces along it. The sound of the music grew stronger, and at one moment there was a sharp bark of laughter in a distant part of the house, upstairs perhaps.

They came around the curve of the hall and saw a brighter light, and a door—and sitting by it, next to a small table with a silver bell on it, a woman.

It was Sister Amity.

Lenox fell back behind the other two men, ducking his face into his collar. Apparently it worked, because she addressed Nicholson as she stood up. She was no longer wearing a habit, but a dark gown. No wonder it had taken her so long to come outside to meet Lenox and Dallington—she must have had to change clothes.

“What is the password?” she asked Nicholson.

“Scotland Yard,” said Nicholson, and when she moved in front of the door, a panicked look dawning on her face, he pushed his way roughly past her.

First the constable and then Lenox followed, Sister Amity recognizing him at last and giving him a look of helpless loathing. Nicholson turned back and asked the constable to keep hold of her, lest she run off to warn someone of their presence.

They came into a wide room. The scene that confronted them there was extraordinary.

It would be some time before the Yard would piece together the full architecture of the house. Off to the right, where Dallington and the two constables had gone, there was a single room, a different woman standing outside of it and asking for the password as Sister Amity had. They had pushed past, too (Lenox would learn in just a few moments, when he and Dallington reconvened), and found a strange and magnificent gambling parlor. At its center had been an enormous table with a felt top, where four men and four women had been seated in an ingeniously designed series of private booths, so that each could see the table and its cards, but none of them could see each other. Servants stood attentively nearby, bearing champagne, wine, brandy. There had been hundreds of pounds in play upon each hand, far more than even the most exclusive gambling parlors in London permitted

But that was nothing to what greeted Lenox and Nicholson. It was a long, slender ballroom that had been converted into a kind of Roman bath hall, with separate hot and cold baths, both decorated in marble, with fauns, cupids, spouting dolphins. An overweight man with a black eye mask was swimming lazily in one of them, two women at his side—two undressed women. Up and down the sides of the pools there were private stalls made of oak. Some of them were flung open, their owners unconcerned about observation; others were closed. Near the large fountain at the end of the room was a table laden with caviar, chocolate profiteroles, cold roast fowl, and every kind of hothouse fruit, oranges, quinces, pomegranates.

What struck Lenox, painfully, was how extremely young the women looked—for there were women everywhere, in various states of attire. The servants, too, were women, dressed in diaphanous white robes, and from the discarded robes at the side of the baths Lenox perceived that there was probably no distinction between the servants and the prostitutes.

They stood there for a moment. Nobody observed them; it was a large room, its lighting atmospherically low. Nicholson ran his fingers across the intaglio on a table just to the right of the door: SC. Looking around, Lenox saw that there was a similar seal on the wall, on the doors of the stalls.

“It must be a kind of private club,” he said.

Nicholson nodded, staring. Then he said, “But have they done anything illegal? Are we even sure these are prostitutes?”

As if to answer those questions, behind them Sister Amity had just managed to slip the grasp of the constable and reach for the silver bell that had been sitting near her in the hallway from the front door—and she rang it, sharply.

The whole place broke into chaos. Men fled from the stalls, half-clothed, and ran without a backward glance toward the rear of the building.

A moment too late, Nicholson leaped forward, then turned to Lenox and said, despairingly, “We’ll lose them all through the back door!”

“No, we won’t,” said Lenox.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The headlines in the newspapers the next morning were lurid. The mildest of them blared HEDONISM FOUND IN THE HEART OF MAYFAIR, which Lady Jane, reading it with a forgotten piece of toast in hand, said was like printing an announcement that water had been found in the ocean. The Times called for the immediate resignation of the two Members of Parliament arrested, and the less dignified publications reported, breathlessly, that several aristocratic marriages were in shambles. One especially yellow rag declared BERTIE IN SLAVONIAN CLUB BLOW-UP, but Lenox was happy to inform Jane that the Prince of Wales had in fact been nowhere on the premises. Even the sporting pages had a crack: THE HIGHEST-STAKES GAME IN EUROPE, one said of the gambling parlor, which was otherwise mostly an afterthought. There were rumors that the king of a large northern European country had been present during the raid.

It wasn’t Nicholson’s fault that these details had spilled out. The arrests in Regent’s Park had been too noticeable, and the press had arrived almost immediately, following them to the gates of the Yard, ready to offer any guard or officer high fees for information about the bold-faced names who were in trouble. There would be weeks of newspapers sold by this.

“The Slavonian Club,” said Lady Jane, shaking her head contemptuously. “Give people enough money and they’ll make the doomsday sound decorous.”

Lenox smiled and took a sip of tea. “If you pay as much as these fellows must have, a certain air of respectability is part of the service, I suppose. And they could delude themselves into thinking they were part of something mysterious, rather than merely sordid.”

Lenox had been up late into the night, helping Nicholson on the scene. The club had soon been swarming with constables, for the first girl they met had burst into tears and said, in a foreign accent, “Ah, thank God, you have come.”

There had been an ugly welt along her bare shoulder, Lenox noticed.

The two parts of the club were completely segregated, the gambling parlor only a lucrative side business compared to the sprawling brothel that took up most of the two houses.

Otherwise the space of the two houses had been dedicated to the use of the men who were members of this Slavonian Club, as a few would admit it was called—though there was no paper trail on the site; none of them had a card of membership, or even a bill.

In the basement at 75 Portland Place was a taproom, with newspapers, couches, and fireplaces, nothing very scandalous. Upstairs, however, there had been a series of bedrooms, each decorated in a different way, one with an Egyptian theme, another like a Turkish harem, another with the ambience of a Paris dance hall. These were apparently for the gentlemen who desired either more privacy or space than the fountain-side stalls provided.

Then there were two bedrooms on the highest level of the house—and these, though they were empty when Nicholson led them in, were the ones that darkened Lenox’s memory of the night. They looked like dungeons, and hung on the walls were instruments designed to inflict pain.

Next door at what London had thought was St. Anselm’s, meanwhile, was a much less sumptuously decorated space; in it were two long, dormitory-style rooms, lined with hard, low cots. It was very cold. Downstairs was a dining hall, though as it emerged the women who slept in the cots were rarely permitted to eat more than a bowlful of thin soup a day except when they were next door, “at the Club,” their hunger an incentive for them to win the favor of the men who could invite them to eat from the buffet, so that there was fierce competition among them to please the club’s members. Some of the more timid-looking girls Lenox had seen had thin, haunted faces.

Not one of them, it turned out, had been there voluntarily. Not one of them spoke more than a few words of English, either. All of them were very beautiful.

The only other space they had found within what Lenox thought of, still, as St. Anselm’s, was a narrow corridor leading between the two houses, similar to the one that led inward from the street. This one let out into the back alley.

It was here, at the last moment, that Lenox had reminded that fourth constable to bring the police wagon, rather than to the front of the building—and here that the fellow had managed to block off the exit just in time for Nicholson and Lenox and then all the others to catch up and begin making arrests.

Nicholson was still at the Yard, Lenox expected. He and Dallington had left only after three o’clock the morning before. The structure of the place had become clear enough after exhaustive interviews: There were five women of middle age in charge of the prostitutes, including Sister Amity, whom they all seemed to fear terribly. There was also a staff of four people. (This excluded the staff at the gambling parlor, whom Nicholson permitted to leave, along with their patrons, their crimes being, or at least seeming, in the moment, rather more venial.) There were seventeen of the younger women, too—the enslaved girls, as the papers called them—who were now being sheltered in a house owned by the city of London.

To Lenox’s frustration, two people hadn’t been in the house at all. He was simply curious about the first, Sister Grethe.

The second was Andrew Hartley Francis.

The four young men on staff had all been able to prove immediately and beyond a shadow of a doubt that they weren’t called Hartley, or Francis. They were all quite plainly of the wrong class, too, mostly East Enders who had been drawn by an advertisement each had answered, promising high wages in exchange for absolute discretion.

(“We didn’t think anything about it was illegal,” said one of them indignantly at some point after midnight.

“Then what on earth did you think you were doing?”

“It was for the toffs, wasn’t it?” he had answered bitterly. “They have all sorts of clubs.”)

In the end twenty-five people had been arrested, among them several with very illustrious names indeed. Most of these men remained silent, confident in their solicitors; it was the Earl of Kenwood who gave them the most information, desperate to be released before anyone learned that he had been arrested. (A hope in which he was to be disappointed.) Club membership was only available by personal recommendation, he told them; the fees were spectacularly high, something nearly to boast about, Lenox heard in his voice; the girls changed often enough to keep it interesting; of course they were well paid, of course, why else would the fees be so high …

He himself—a thin, pointy-faced man in his sixties who owned most of Hampshire—had been referred for membership by Wakefield.

“Before he died, you know, poor chap.”

“You were friends?”

“Not close—but there are so few fellows in the House of Lords who have any idea of fun, and he used to stand me a drink now and then.”

Lenox understood. Wakefield and Kenwood operated at very different levels of malice, Kenwood a more insipid and less violent person, but nevertheless these sorts of men always did find each other. They had as long ago as Oxford; look at the Bullingdon Club, whose new members destroyed a different restaurant or pub or college common room each year, solely from the pleasure they took in drunken destruction.

Kenwood’s volubility stood in stark contrast to that of the four women who had presided over St. Anselm’s. None of them spoke a word. Nicholson had realized at some point that it would be a difficult case to prosecute, as had his superiors at the Yard. The owner of the two houses, Wakefield, was recently dead, and his son could hardly be held legally accountable for what he was on the brink of inheriting.

The key, Lenox knew, was the tales of the young women. None of them had been able to offer these yet, however, for none of them spoke more than very bad English. It wasn’t even clear what country they came from. A fleet of government translators was coming to the Yard that morning, and they would try to speak to the young women in a variety of languages.

“You’ll be away all day?” Lady Jane asked, over the breakfast table.

“Yes.”

“You must be tired.”

“On the contrary, I have a great deal of energy,” said Lenox, standing. There was a lovely morning light coming through the windows, the room softened by its gentle natural hue. “Though I wonder how it all relates to the deaths of Wakefield and Jenkins.”

Jane looked up at him. “Poor Mrs. Jenkins,” she said. “Do you think it would be inappropriate of me to call on her? We’ve never met.”

“On the contrary, I think it would be very kind.”

“The day after the funeral must be difficult,” said Jane. “At least a funeral is something to … well, not to look forward to, I suppose, but something to plan, something to expect. The days ahead must seem so empty once even that part of it’s over.”

“I expect so.”

She was staring out the window, and when he came around the table to kiss her good-bye, she said, “Do be careful, would you?”

He kissed her, then took a last swallow of tea. “Always, my dear. Do you feel safe here? With Clemons’s precautions in place? You could still take Sophia to the country, you know.”

“We’re safe. But solve the case quickly, Charles. For my own part, I don’t know that I could face the day after your funeral.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

That morning, a team of constables had gone out to every house the Marquess of Wakefield owned in London, checking each of them top to bottom. None of the others proved more than a simple domicile. One did have an unusually high number of cats in residence—twenty-nine—but that was, apparently, legal, and the owner who answered for them, a man named Withers, promised that he kept them all confined to the house and in excellent health.

Still, the Commissioner of the Yard was in an utter state, according to Nicholson. There had been word from very high, indeed from the Palace itself, that the matter was be resolved and quieted as quickly as possible. The presence of the Slavonian Club in the heart of London was an embarrassment not just to its members but to England; already emissaries from the Vatican were on the way according to Hepworth, with whom Lenox had exchanged notes that morning.

As a result the translators were at the sheltering house very promptly. They were a varied group. Some were darker skinned, others more clearly of British descent; some wore the tweeds and spectacles of the academy, others looked slightly less reputable, and one, a fellow named Chipping just down from Caius College, affected an Oriental robe.

Lenox, Nicholson, and one of Nicholson’s superiors were present to watch. One by one, the translators stepped forward and said, in some language, a phrase Nicholson had written: “If you understand the language I am speaking, please come to me, and I will translate your story for these police officers. Regardless of what you tell us, the Metropolitan Police of London guarantee your safety.”

So the young women—clothed now in plain wool dresses, and having eaten a breakfast delivered with vehement generosity by Her Sisters of the Holy Heart that morning—began to divide up and tell their stories. Lenox sat and listened to them, translated from Turkish, French, Arabic, and German, among other languages. Three of the women didn’t respond to any of the languages; they grouped together and spoke among themselves. All of them looked, to his eye, as if they might be from India.

The whole process took many hours, but the tales of life inside the Slavonian Club were depressingly similar: privation, cold all through that winter, enforced prostitution, the alternating viciousness and kindness of the gentlemen who visited the club, each of those beset by its own brand of difficulties. Several of the women were extremely reluctant to speak, as if this might be a trap. That was understandable. There were some weak friendships among them, but women who spoke the same language had always been divided at Portland Place. Punishment had been rife, and all of them recounted the violence of Sister Amity, who beat them with a switch if their paint was careless, if they attempted to speak to each other, if any of the gentlemen were dissatisfied. When these beatings left marks, the women stayed in the dormitories until they were gone. Going more or less hungry, Lenox gathered.

But all of this came out slowly, whereas the most interesting thing of all, to him, came out almost immediately. That was the story of how they had ended up in London.

Aboard a ship.

None of them knew the ship’s name, but Lenox felt, instantly and with tremendous certainty, that it must be the Gunner.

One young Turkish woman, with beautiful delicate cheekbones and troubled dark eyes, told her story, which was similar to the rest of them. Like the other women, she had been a courtesan in her homeland, too, though, also as with them, that had been in very different circumstances—in luxury, as in most of their cases. It wasn’t difficult to imagine, given their beauty.

“A client came in,” said the Turkish woman through one of the translators. “He was very handsome. He had lovely manners. He persuaded me to come and see him the next evening, that he wanted to give me something. He paid my mistress twice what she had asked, and left a card with his name upon it. He made me promise to come. He said he loved me—love at first sight. I was intrigued by him.

“When I arrived at the teahouse where we were to meet, he was absent. I grew uneasy after a few minutes and left, thinking it was better, that I knew nothing of this man or his promises. It was then that they took me—several very rough people, it was instantaneous, there wasn’t time even to cry out. They pushed me into a carriage, and before anybody on the streets could notice, or help, we were gone. I had nothing with me—not my gowns, not my family’s letters, nothing of my old life except the clothes on my back. From there I was taken to a ship. The room aboard was dark, and windowless. There were four other girls in it. It was a small space, we barely fit if all of us stood at the same time. There was a bucket in the corner, but nowhere to empty it. Twice a day they took the bucket, and we were given food. We spent a great deal of time sleeping.”

Lenox asked, through the translator, “And how did you sleep?”

“I do not know the word,” said the young woman, looking directly at him. “In a kind of netting that hanged from the ceiling.”

Lenox nodded and said, “Give her my thanks. Tell her to go on.”

As she went on, though, he was preoccupied by the pile of hammocks they had found next to the trunk that held Wakefield’s body, feeling certain that these were the same hammocks that these women had been transported in Wakefield’s hold. Or at the very least, a similar one.

It was easy to imagine the ruse. The Gunner picked up and dropped off mail from several ports between England and India, and while they were in dock they could have taken the women. Any of the officers might have played the grandee in love with the courtesan, or indeed Wakefield himself could have done it. And a man of Wakefield’s type would have known the most expensive houses of that type in every city, or could have learned their names easily enough.

He thought of what Dyer had told them, with perhaps more honesty than he had intended: All of us are here for the money. Anything that gets in the way of it is a nuisance.

“We were all terribly ill during the voyage,” the woman went on. “When we arrived I knew we were in England, because of the voices. We were pushed into crates. These must have been loaded onto carriages, because I could feel that horses took us across the city. I feared then that we would be killed. But we were only taken to the house, the house where we lived.

“The women rotate very quickly,” she said. “Always new ones. I myself have marked the days in my head—it has been just forty. I think that they cannot risk that we begin to learn English. I am anxious when I contemplate where the other women have gone, the ones who preceded me. I am thankful now that it is over.”

Lenox nodded at her. She was very composed—some of the other girls were in tears—but somehow it made her tale worse.

As the translators continued to gather the women’s stories, Nicholson murmured to Lenox, “I wish they would come back and tell us about the Gunner.”

Lenox looked at his pocket watch. Almost from the first words the young women had spoken, he had advised Nicholson and his superior to send a team of constables down to the docks to arrest Dyer and the men of his ship. “I hope they haven’t resisted arrest. They’re a bloody-minded crew, from the sound of it.”

“Do you think these women can somehow verify that it was the Gunner they were stolen onto? They must have seen a face, scratched their names into the walls—something. I feel sure Dyer is involved with all this.”

“Yes,” said Lenox.

Even so, he and Nicholson both knew they were still missing the whole picture. The difficulty was that Dyer and his men had a cast-iron alibi for the night of Jenkins’s murder: They had been at sea, their ship coming in about an hour after his body was found. A hundred different objective observers had confirmed as much.

And then the next morning, somehow, Wakefield’s body had come to rest in a trunk in the ship’s hold.

“There’s been a question rattling around in my brain for a few days now,” Lenox said to Nicholson. “How did Jenkins come to have Wakefield’s claim ticket for the Gunner?”

“I don’t know, but he must have felt it was important—he left it in his note for you,” said the inspector. “He could have kept it with his notes.”

“Or else he had just gotten it when he was murdered.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wonder if he had just seen Wakefield when he was murdered. I wonder if Wakefield was—though it’s difficult to imagine—helping him.”

“Can you explain?”

“It has seemed singular to me all along that Jenkins and Wakefield were closeted together at Portland Place in the past few weeks. As Wakefield’s butler described it, too, their conversations were at least friendly, if sardonic. All that business about ‘the very profound honor of a visit from Scotland Yard,’ if you recall.”

“Mm.”

“That doesn’t sound like an interrogation, an accusation. Is it possible they were working in alliance? What if he gave him that claim ticket so that Jenkins could stop the Gunner when she came into dock?”

Nicholson was staring intently over his fingertips, thinking. “So then Wakefield was giving up Francis—Hartley—and Dyer, to save his own skin. Yes, it seems possible. All the more so because of the primary thing that he and Jenkins have in common.”

“What’s that?” said Lenox.

“That they were both murdered.”

Just then a constable appeared at the door. He came over to Nicholson. “It’s the Gunner, sir,” he said, out of breath.

“Well? What about her?”

“She’s gone, sir. Shipped out of London early this morning for Calcutta.”