Текст книги "The Laws of Murder"
Автор книги: Charles Finch
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CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
It was back to Portland Place they went, one of the final trips that he would have to make to that accursed street for some time, Lenox hoped as they drove. They knocked on the door of the Wakefield mansion. The butler opened the door and frowned, surprised to see them back so quickly.
“Are you here to see His Lordship again, sirs?” he asked.
Lenox shook his head. “Thank you, no, we are in a hurry. But would you be so kind as to pass a message to him from us?”
“Of course, sir. What is the message?”
“Tell him that we’ve just had a wire—we were away from the Yard—that Armbruster has said he’ll confess to Nicholson. He wants a deal, doesn’t want to go to jail. We’re going back now to hear what he has to say. I know His Lordship was concerned with a quick end to all of this embarrassing business. Please tell him we’ve stopped by just as a courtesy.”
The butler nodded and then carefully repeated the message back to Lenox. “Was that all, sir? Anything else to pass on?”
“No, that will do nicely. Thank you,” said Lenox.
As they walked back to the carriage, Dallington said, “What now?”
“Now we wait at the corner,” said Lenox, “and hopefully not too long a time. There was a clue in Asiatic’s diagram of the Gunner’s holds after all, you know. Give it ten minutes. Less, even.”
“Will you tell us what you’re expecting?” asked Nicholson.
“I’ll tell you that I’d be very curious to meet a man named Jarvis Norman,” said Lenox. “For the rest, wait just a few—no, even less than that! There we are! Follow that cab, driver!”
From the servants’ quarters of the house on Portland Place, the butler and another person had emerged. The butler was wearing a bowler hat and a spring jacket over his regular uniform. Immediately he had flagged a cab and stepped into it with his companion, the cab Lenox now asked the driver to follow.
The person with the butler, Lenox thought, was the young woman who had been so concerned after the attack on him—Miss Randall, the cook.
“We’re following them?” asked Dallington. “What about Calder? The message?”
“The message never got to Calder,” said Lenox. “Nor did it have to. It did its work, as you’ll see.”
The cab they were following turned onto Shaftesbury Avenue and clipped along briskly toward the east, overtaking omnibuses and landaus, under orders, Lenox suspected, to move as quickly as possible. It turned onto Margaret Street. They were headed in the direction of the Seven Dials—one of the less savory parts of the metropolis.
“Please explain, Lenox,” said Nicholson. “At the end of this cab ride are we going to find Francis, finally?”
Lenox, who had been staring intently after the cab in front of them, turned toward his two colleagues. “I doubt it,” he said. “What occurred to me at the Yard was a strange fact—that despite his omnipresence in the case, every single piece of information we have ever received about Andrew Hartley Francis comes from a single source.”
Nicholson objected. “That’s not true. All five of Wakefield’s servants described the same fellow—dapper, young, a gentleman, dark hair, in and out of Portland Place all the time.”
“That’s the source,” said Lenox. “Wakefield’s staff. It should have come to me before now—they must have known about the businesses next door, all of them. Too risky to have it any other way. And at the head of the beast was that man—in the cab in front of us.”
“The butler?” said Nicholson.
“Obadiah Smith,” said Dallington.
Lenox nodded. “It’s him. I think it’s him behind it all. Smith.”
“Why?” asked Dallington.
The cab ahead of them took a right turn, and Lenox’s carriage followed the same turn after a safe delay. Lenox, after peering out of the window to make sure they hadn’t lost their quarry, said, “One of the first things he told us about himself was, not incidentally I think, one of the first things Armbruster mentioned about himself, too.”
Nicholson brightened, his bony face animated. “That they both had fathers who worked at the Yard! Of course!”
“Armbruster still does, apparently. That explains how they might have known each other—how Smith might have brought Armbruster into league with him, if he needed a corruptible police officer. Then there’s Jenkins’s shoe.”
“What about it?”
“It’s been bothering me all along that someone untied his laces. How on earth could they have known he had a letter in his shoe? But consider: What if Jenkins, just before he was shot, had received that claim ticket for the Gunner from Wakefield. They were working together—Wakefield was helping Scotland Yard, as out of character as that might seem. Jenkins must have offered him a choice to go to prison or to betray his circle, and he chose the latter.”
“Honor among thieves.”
“Quite. When the Gunner arrived that night, Jenkins would have been able to meet it at the docks, find the hold that matched the claim ticket—and the girls that must inevitably have been inside the hold. Jenkins was very close to saving those women from their fate. Only he was killed.
“But back to the shoe. What would he have done with the claim ticket as he was leaving Portland Place, that evening he was murdered? He was a cautious man, Jenkins. His notes were locked safely away in his office, but now he had this extremely valuable piece of paper, given to him by his key informant. Perhaps he knew that he was in danger—perhaps Wakefield did, too. He would have written me a hasty note, included the claim ticket, and tied it in his shoe there at Wakefield’s house—in Wakefield’s very sitting room.”
Nicholson finished the thought. “Where one of the servants would have been lurking, watching.”
Lenox nodded. “Exactly. Smith would have told Armbruster, in the bustle of the crime scene, to check the shoe, if he could, get the claim ticket out of it, and the note. Armbruster nearly managed to get it away. If he had, we never would have heard the name of the Gunner, much less searched her holds before she shipped for Calcutta. We would still think Wakefield had murdered Jenkins and fled for the Continent. A tidy crime. Indeed, one of the most brillant I can recall, in its way.”
Dallington frowned. “Yes, but Wakefield had already been missing for more than a day on the night Jenkins was killed,” said Dallington. “Nobody had seen him.”
Lenox laughed bitterly. “According to whom? To Obadiah Smith. It all circles back around to him. Think of it, the brazenness of it! The gun that killed Jenkins—sitting on the table in the front hall. The port that poisoned Wakefield—Smith would have been the fellow who ordered all the wine and spirits for the house, and more significantly the fellow who poured it every night.”
“And the attack on Smith himself?” said Nicholson.
“To divert attention—and to scare me off, with that ‘warning.’ The wounds were ugly but superficial, McConnell told us as much from the start.”
The three men sat in silence for a moment. Dallington looked slightly stunned. “He seemed such an easygoing fellow.”
“He was always very affable with us,” said Lenox. “And extremely eager to help, if you recall—to point us toward Francis.”
Nicholson shook his head. “But why? How? Wakefield and Dyer had their scheme running smoothly, the women at the Slavonian Club smuggled into London aboard the Gunner, St. Anselm’s. How does Smith come into it?”
Lenox shrugged. “I’m not precisely sure. But you recall the names on the schematic of the ship’s hold, John?”
“Some of them, anyhow.”
“There was one we skipped past—between Berry’s Herb and Pharmaceutical and, I don’t know, Jones, or Hughes.”
“Smith,” said Dallington in awe. “He had a hold of his own on the ship.”
“I would bet that the Smith on the schematic is named Obadiah in the Asiatic’s files. Legally, he was bound to use his own name. As was Wakefield. And it must have given Dyer some assurance that their names were there, that he had some proof he hadn’t acted alone, if he were caught.”
The cab ahead of them turned down a dingy side lane. The street was too small to follow down without attracting notice, and Lenox quickly called up to the driver to continue on for another twenty yards, then jumped from the door as it slowed. He ran back just in time to see Smith and the cook—his wife? his lover?—unlocking a red door halfway down the street.
“Let’s arrest him,” said Nicholson.
“He may be armed,” said Lenox. “If I had to guess, he and the cook are going to take what they can put their hands on and flee—the Continent, probably. As long as Wakefield and Jenkins were silent in their graves, Smith was safe, but he’s Armbruster’s big card to play, to keep himself out of jail.”
“Honor among thieves,” murmured Nicholson once more.
They went to the red door. The street was empty, unnaturally quiet for the center of the city. Lenox felt his heart racing. He wasn’t as young as he had once been, and he let Nicholson turn the handle of the door.
The entranceway of the building was covered in dirt and dust, dark as midnight except for a kerosene lamp casting a sallow triangle halfway up the wall. From the second floor came muffled voices.
“Softly on the stairs,” murmured Nicholson.
As they mounted the steps, however, it was clear that Smith wasn’t expecting to be followed, or at any rate didn’t feel obliged to keep his voice down. He was nearly shouting, and a hoarse woman’s voice was responding. Miss Randall, Lenox supposed. Their words were indistinct.
On the landing of the second story Nicholson took out his bludgeon. They stood by the door for a moment and listened.
“I tell you, we have to go this minute!” Smith was saying. His voice was different here, in the eastern rather than western half of London, and Lenox had the flashing thought that in another lifetime he might have been an accomplished actor, so convincing had his act as a pleasant butler been for so long, a figure of minor importance, unworthy of attention. “Armie will have them here within the hour.”
“He won’t peach on us.”
“He will!” Smith’s voice was becoming hysterical. “I heard it from the Yard with my own ears. Good God, are you hoping to be hanged? Every woman in that house will be lining up to point a finger at you.”
There was a pause. “Very well. Let me pack my bag, then.”
“Finally, some sense.”
Nicholson had waited long enough. He nodded at Dallington and Lenox and after a moment of hesitation burst through the door, calling out, “Scotland Yard!”
The two amateur detectives followed closely on his heels. Smith, standing in the middle of the room, was the first figure they saw, his face white with anger and surprise, and behind him Miss Randall.
Between them was a high stack of banknotes, bundled into piles—and next to it a satchel.
And then Lenox almost burst into laughter: because sitting in an armchair next to the fire was a third person, the one Smith had been addressing, and who had been returning his words in perfect English. It was Sister Grethe.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The look of incomprehension that had been habitually fixed on her face was gone. She raised a gun at them.
Lenox disliked guns, though not as much he disliked knives. He had been shot at a dozen times in the course of his career as a private detective, and witnessed several other weapons fired, and in his experience the shooters tended to overestimate their own skillfulness, unless the range was very close. Whereas even the most modestly coordinated simpleton could make a knife hurt, at close enough quarters.
Here, unfortunately, the range was very close.
“Gun!” cried Lenox, and dodged left as sharply as he could.
Dallington, no fool, did the same, and within an instant both of them were muddled into a crowd with Smith and Miss Randall, at whom, they hoped, Sister Grethe wouldn’t be inclined to shoot.
But Nicholson, with real bravery, took the opposite tack, charging her. Just as Lenox heard the bang of the gun go off, Nicholson bowled over both the old woman and the chair she was sitting in.
There was a fraction of a second in which Lenox was sure Nicholson was dead—then, behind him, the bullet ricocheted off the ceiling over his head, chipping clear a large chunk of plaster. He felt his chest constrict and his breath stop, then start again. The plaster fell, and at the same moment the gun dropped to the ground and skittered across the floor.
Smith darted forward, but Dallington, who was just behind him, used the butler’s own momentum against him, shoving him in the direction he was moving so that he stumbled, out of control, past the gun and into the wall.
Just as Miss Randall began to realize that she might try for the gun on the floor, Lenox leaped forward and grabbed it.
For a moment they all stayed exactly as they were—breathing hard, tense, recovering from the rapid sequence of events. Sister Grethe and Nicholson were still in a crumpled mass on the floor, Smith not far from them on his backside. Dallington stood ahead a few feet. Lenox and Wakefield’s cook stared at each other warily—but he had the gun.
Once, in the case of the September Society, one of the shots intended for Lenox had hit him—a superficial wound, but there was a scar as its evidence, and sometimes when they were arguing Dallington would remind Lenox that it had been he who tackled the shooter. There had also been a case in ’64 when Lenox had come within a hair’s breadth of being shot by a gamekeeper on a farm in Nottinghamshire: The squire who owned the hunting preserve had noticed only after several rather dim-witted decades that nearly all of his family’s silver had vanished, and twelve hours after taking up the case Lenox had discovered that it was sitting, a veritable treasure, under the frigid one-room hovel in which the gamekeeper lived. The gamekeeper had been less delighted than his master by that piece of detection and opened fire upon them. Unsuccessfully, thank goodness.
Still, this was been the closest a bullet had come to striking him since those two occasions. That piece of plaster had been very low above him.
“Is everyone unharmed?” he asked.
Nicholson nodded, and Dallington said, “Think so, yes.”
They looked around at the conspirators. “You’re all under arrest,” Nicholson said. He stood and went to the window, lifted it, and blew his police whistle. Then he turned to Sister Grethe. “You especially.”
“Can you be especially under arrest?” asked Dallington.
Grethe spat in his direction, disgustedly. “Lovely,” said Nicholson.
“I’m beginning to suspect she’s not a real nun,” said Dallington to Lenox and Nicholson.
“Possibly not.”
“To begin with, her English is better than she lets on,” said Dallington.
She swore an oath at him, violently—and in English.
That evening, when Lenox arrived home, he passed by the two sentries in front of his house with a nod and turned the new second key in the new second lock, thankful that these precautions were no longer necessary. They had their criminals. He and Nicholson and Dallington had agreed: The exact details of their crimes could wait until the morning. Let them simmer overnight. Armbruster, too; he was back in custody.
Lady Jane greeted him at the door, with a kiss on the cheek. She held a blanket she was sewing for her cousin Addie’s new infant. “I decided just now that I’d like to have a dinner party in two weeks,” she said.
“I was nearly shot today.”
Her face paled. “What?”
“It doesn’t mean we can’t have a party.”
“What happened, Charles?”
“Maybe a smallish party, given the circumstances.”
“No, don’t talk like that, please—what do you mean, nearly shot? Are we in danger? Ought we to leave Hampden Lane?”
“No—no, no, no, I’m sorry, my dear. It all ended well enough.”
She had an arm around him and was looking up at him. Now she leaned her face into his neck. “I don’t like this new job.”
They walked down the hall and went to sit in her drawing room, and carefully he relayed the story of the afternoon to her. He spoke in a tone of voice that downplayed the real sense of danger he had felt—the thudding of his heart, the mixture of euphoria and dismay he’d felt in the hours afterward—while giving her all of the facts.
But she knew him well. “You must be terribly shaken.”
“It’s different than Parliament, certainly.”
She stood up and poured him a brandy then—his second of the day, since Nicholson had sent out for a bottle of it when they returned to the Yard, admitting himself that his hand was still trembling.
“But you were the one who charged her yourself,” Dallington had said. “You saved all three of us.”
“Not at all,” said Nicholson.
“He’s quite right,” Lenox interjected.
Nicholson nodded philosophically. “Well—a toast to all three of us being alive, then.”
“Hear, hear.”
Lenox described this conversation to Lady Jane, too, and she said that she intended to send Nicholson a hamper from Fortnum’s, and asked Lenox whether he would prefer sweets or savories.
“I have no earthly idea.”
“You’ve been with him every day for a week.”
“I know that he likes ducks. Living ones, however.”
“You’re hopeless.”
At last they exhausted the subject of the day’s events, and Lenox said, “Is there anything left for me to eat?”
“Of course. What would you like?”
He looked up and thought for a moment. Suddenly he felt a powerful sense of relief—he was alive, when he might have been dead. No matter the circumstances, that made it a notable day. He was very glad to have Jane, very glad. He squeezed her hand. “I think I would like scrambled eggs, toast, and a cup of very strong and very sweet tea,” he said.
“You’ll have it in eight minutes,” she said, jumping to her feet. “We should have given it to you straightaway.”
Eight minutes later—or perhaps a few more, but he could be charitable—the food and drink were on a tray before him, steaming and filling the room with the rich smell of warm butter and freshly brewed tea leaves.
He tucked in voraciously. “What kind of party did you have in mind?” he asked between bites.
“Only a supper, next weekend. But it’s the last thing we need to think about just at the moment.”
“No, it would be very fine, I think. My brother can come. I’ve seen too little of him recently. Too little of all of you!”
After he had eaten they sat on the sofa for a passage of time. Lenox picked up a newspaper and began to read, which he found restful, and Lady Jane returned to sewing the blanket. She paused midstitch after some time and looked at Lenox curiously. “Who was she, then?” she asked. “Sister Grethe?”
Lenox smiled. “She wouldn’t say at first, but we found out soon enough.”
“How?”
“When we returned to the Yard, I asked several of the older bobbies if they remembered Obadiah Smith, a constable for the Yard. Two did, but no more than the name. But another fellow, Clapham, said Obadiah Smith was the least savory, most crooked officer he’d met in all his days at the Yard. It was then that I realized who Sister Grethe might be, if that man’s son cared enough to stop for her before leaving London.”
“Who?”
“His mother.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
With Smith in custody, people began to talk quickly.
He spoke himself as well. “It was Armbruster who managed it all,” he claimed.
“Armbruster?”
His smooth, ingratiating voice had returned in custody. “The only thing I did in this whole nasty sequence of events was to give His Lordship the port from Mr. Francis. Quite unintentionally.”
“So we are still to believe there was a Mr. Francis.”
Smith looked at them guilelessly. “Of course there was,” he said.
Miss Randall followed the same line. She was the second person they questioned the next morning—with many to come after her. Her presence the afternoon before had reminded Lenox of the other three servants in Wakefield’s employ. They had described Francis identically the week before, his visits, his dress. They had all been working from the same script. Now they were all under arrest.
As for Armbruster, he knew when the game was up.
“They tell us you orchestrated it all,” Nicholson said, as Dallington and Lenox leaned against the wall behind the table where the two colleagues faced each other. It was a rather nicer cell, and there were the remnants of a decent breakfast nearby, an orange peel, a crust of toast, the civilities accorded someone who oughtn’t to have been there. “They say that you brought in the girls with Wakefield, shot Jenkins, poisoned the marquess.”
“Have you gone completely mad?” asked Armbruster.
“No more of that,” warned Nicholson. “You have”—he looked at his own pocket watch, a brass one, well polished and well loved by the looks of it—“twenty minutes to tell us everything you know, or I can’t promise anything short of the rope. You’ve made quite a lot of your friends in this building look foolish. Nobody other than the three of us has any cause to show you leniency.”
For a moment Armbruster’s face went rigid with anger. Then, though, it yielded. He was a weak-willed person, Lenox thought—gluttonous for food, as was obvious from his figure, and apparently gluttonous for money.
That had been the root of it all. He and Smith had known each other since childhood, both the sons of peelers. Eighteen months before, Armbruster said, Smith had taken him into his confidence: They were starting a high-end brothel in the West End and needed some protection from the Yard’s interference. Armbruster had accepted what seemed in the moment like easy money, nothing life-altering, a pound or two a week, and in exchange had kept an eye on the area and smoothed over several minor incidents.
Then, on the day before Jenkins’s death, Smith had wired him with an urgent request to meet.
“What did he ask you?” said Nicholson.
“He said that there was going to be a murder the next day. I told him I couldn’t be involved.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“I did! With Christ as my witness, I did. But he said that it was my own neck on the line—that the person who’d betrayed them had given my name away, too. And he offered me fifty pounds.” Armbruster shook his head mournfully. “That stupid watch. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Lenox felt a flicker of pity for the man at those words.
Then he remembered something. “You took Jenkins’s papers from the Yard before you followed him, though,” he said. “That means you knew who Smith meant to kill.”
“Is that true?” asked Nicholson.
“I—”
“The truth, mind you.”
Armbruster hesitated, then said, “Yes. I knew it was Jenkins. He would have had us all up to the gallows, you know.”
Dallington snorted. “Better to go to the gallows than see a good man murdered.”
“What became of his papers?” asked Lenox.
“I burned them.”
“What did they say?”
“It was a thick file. He knew everything about the Slavonian Club—everything. My name was all over them, Wakefield’s, too. Jenkins had obviously been working on it for months.”
“Was Smith’s name on them? Or Dyer’s?”
Armbruster thought. “I don’t know. I only looked at the papers very quickly. But I don’t think so, no. It was all detail about those houses—the three houses that have been in all the newspapers.”
It seemed clear enough to Lenox. Jenkins had discovered Wakefield’s crimes, and used the threat of prosecution against the marquess to try to chase down all of the criminals involved in the operation. Wakefield had turned on his friends to save his skin. Both of them had died for it.
“And it was you who untied the shoe?” Lenox asked Armbruster. “Before everyone arrived?”
The sergeant hesitated again and then nodded. “Yes. When I arrived to find the body, I knocked on Wakefield’s door on the pretext of searching for witnesses. Smith told me to look in the shoe. He was flustered—had just shot Jenkins and run, not wanting to linger, obviously, in such a public place. I could look in the shoe without drawing notice, because I was leading the investigation, of course.” He shook his head. “But then Nicholson arrived. Another thirty seconds and none of us would be sitting here. I would have had that claim ticket in my own pocket.”
They took fifteen minutes more to sketch in the details of the day Jenkins had died; for his part, Armbruster seemed sincerely not to know anything about Wakefield’s death.
There was a narrow hallway outside of the cell—surprisingly bright, with a clock and a portrait of Sir Robert Peel on the wall—and here Nicholson, Lenox, and Dallington stood, discussing what they had learned.
It all fit together, but there were still questions. Nicholson, shaking his head, said, “If he were planning to betray Smith, why would Wakefield meet with Jenkins right in front of him?”
Lenox shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about that, too. Smith was cleverer than Wakefield. I’ve been following Wakefield’s trail for years—he was violent, heedless, cavalier. Smith is cold-blooded.”
“And?”
“If I had to guess, I would say that he probably took the precaution of seeing Jenkins when Smith was out. What he didn’t consider was that Smith had been responsible for hiring all of the rest of the staff, too—Miss Randall, the three others. They were his. Wakefield wouldn’t have bothered about details like that. He would have assumed that he only had to watch out for Smith, that the others were simply normal servants. In fact all four of them were spying on him.”
“For that matter,” said Dallington, “we have no idea what Wakefield told Smith. Perhaps he told him he was only going to give up Dyer—that they were in on it together, against Dyer and the men of the Gunner. But as Charles says, Smith was cleverer than Wakefield by half.”
“Or us, nearly,” said Nicholson. He hesitated. “I also wonder how Smith and Wakefield connected.”
There was a pause as they considered the question. Then Lenox said, “Armbruster is sitting there. Let’s ask him.”
So they returned to the room and posed the question to the sergeant. A disconcerted look came onto his face—one of concealment, calculation. He knew something. “I’m not sure,” he said.
“No more games, I told you,” said Nicholson.
There was a long pause. “Does the name Charity Boyd mean anything to you?”
Lenox nodded. “The woman Wakefield killed. Yes. Why?”
Armbruster paused again, as if considering his options. “There’s no reason to drag that case up, you know. Wakefield’s dead. He’s the one who killed her.”
“This is your final warning,” said Nicholson. “We—”
Lenox thought he understood. “The officers who helped investigate the murder,” he said. “Was one of them Obadiah Smith’s father?”
Armbruster nodded very slightly. “Yes.”
“And another one of them was your father.”
Now the sergeant looked pained. “Yes. But it was only Smith who helped Wakefield, I’m sure of that—sure of it. My father’s nearly seventy now, anyhow. You’ve no cause at all to bring him into this.”
Lenox turned away in disgust. He remembered the witness who had seen Charity Boyd’s death, only to recant his testimony. How easily a brief encounter of intimidation from someone in a uniform might have changed his mind. And how easy to imagine that once a fruitful relationship had been established between Wakefield and Obadiah Smith Sr., the rest of the family—the constable’s son, his wife—might have found their way into Wakefield’s employ.
Except that Smith had probably become something very like a partner, it seemed to Lenox. Dallington evidently had the same thought. In the hallway, he said, “I suppose Smith made himself indispensable.”
Nicholson nodded. “For all we know, the entire enterprise was Smith’s idea.”
“Yes,” said Lenox. “Wakefield had the houses, Dyer the ship, but they needed Smith to run the operation. I know Wakefield—there’s no way he could have been bothered with all that work. He was essentially an idle man, unless some piece of violence was called for. Smith and his mother—they were the ones in charge of the whole thing, until it came crashing down. They must have been minting money before that. Think of that pile of notes we found Smith ready to pack. Thousands of pounds.”
Nicholson shook his head. “I wonder how Jenkins discovered the truth. It was a damned fine piece of detection, however he did it.”
The other two nodded, and they stood there in silence for a moment, considering their departed friend.
