Текст книги "The Laws of Murder"
Автор книги: Charles Finch
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 18 страниц)
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
As the women’s stories of captivity seeped out into the press, the charitable hearts of the British public were stirred. A collection was taken up through the newspapers, a fund established by which all of them might have their return fares to their homelands provided, along with a six-month stipend to put them on their feet. There was talk, moreover, of a suit against Wakefield’s estate, some reparation. Most of the women left as soon as they could. They gave forwarding addresses, though Lenox doubted that these would stay good for very long. Two or three women elected to stay in London—and one, in fact, a young German lady, would eventually become the well-known mistress of one of the gentlemen who had been arrested on the night of the raid at the Slavonian Club, Clarkson Gray, a bachelor of long standing descended from a line of immensely wealthy manufacturers in West Bromwich.
Several weeks after the fact, Lenox saw Gray at the Travellers Club. Gray gave him a pained look. “Bloody bad show, that was,” he said, without any other greeting. “I’d no idea they weren’t paid. None at all. And with the fees of the place! She’s a damn fine girl, too. I’m trying to make up for it to her, you know. And she knows she can go back any time she likes. I’ve told her so earnestly. She prefers it here.”
That encounter was still in the future as Lenox and his two partners slowly drew the net around Smith in the days after his arrest, carefully interrogating the various people who had been involved. Sister Grethe was, indeed, the grieving widow of Obadiah Smith Sr., or in any event the apartment in which she had shot at them was rented to a woman with the same name as his wife, Gwen Smith. She wouldn’t confirm anything, but several of the captive women had been only too delighted to identify both Smith and his mother in person, telling long, complex tales of their roles in the day-to-day operations of the Slavonian Club. One of the girls had laid eyes on Sister Grethe—a person who in their early encounters had always seemed bovine to Lenox, placid—and fainted dead away with fear.
She was the least of their worries, though. She had fired a gun upon them, and she would end her life in prison. The question was how to be absolutely sure that her son would do the same.
His subordinates in Wakefield’s house turned on him one by one, admitting that they had fabricated Andrew Hartley Francis’s character together, and also that they had been directly in Smith’s employ, their salaries doubled and trebled by him—rather than by Wakefield. (When Lenox remembered how spare the house had been, how little work it must have taken to keep up, he saw the appeal of the job.) Yes, one of the footman told them, he had seen Jenkins put the note in his shoe, and reported it to Smith. He’d had no idea Jenkins was going to be murdered—only Smith had threatened them with their own deaths if they said anything, and promised them grand lumps of money if they could stick it out until the new marquess was installed in the house.
Nicholson, one afternoon, wondered out loud why Smith had stayed around, acting as butler. “I suppose it would have been too suspicious if he disappeared just at the moment Wakefield did.”
Dallington nodded. “What’s been on my mind is why, if the Slavonian Club is only eighteen months old, they’ve had holds on the Gunner for so long.”
Lenox shrugged. “There are plenty of illegal things to do with a hold on a ship, I suppose. They simply grew more ambitious. Perhaps they were always bringing in women, and decided to eliminate the intermediate step—to run the brothels themselves, rather than take all the risk of finding women for the brothels.”
“There’s opium, too,” said Nicholson, “and any other number of drugs. We’ve had a fearful time stopping the trade.”
They were in Nicholson’s office, eating a bite of lunch together. A definite companionship had sprung up between the three men, now that the case was concluded, and they talked easily, enjoying each other’s company.
“Did we ever learn why they named it the Slavonian Club?” asked Dallington.
“It was in the papers, you know,” said Nicholson. “It’s a place on the Continent. ‘Even more hedonistic than its neighbor Bohemia,’ or some rubbish of that nature, was what I read.”
Lenox added grimly—and it was this he would ultimately think of when Clarkson Gray rationalized his behavior at the Travellers’—“And there’s a word buried right in the name, too. Slave. Whether that’s an accident or a cruel joke, who can say.”
They might easily have sent Obadiah Smith to trial with the evidence they had. There were witnesses who could place him at the Slavonian Club, a constant presence, and the other servants were all quick to blame him. Nevertheless, it seemed a little thin. The houses belonged to his employer, Lord Wakefield, and he could plausibly plead that he had no idea of the crimes that had taken place there. He and Miss Randall allotted all the blame to Armbruster—and to the servants beneath Smith, who they claimed were conspiring against him.
There was also no trail of paper tying him to the business other than the hold in the Gunner, and though that was registered to O. Smith, according to the Asiatic there was no address or other identifying tag to confirm that it was the same man; apparently the captain of the Gunner managed the holds. As for all the money they had found in Smith’s possession—that was another piece of highly suspicious circumstantial evidence, but there was nothing illegal about it, on its face.
It was in the state of frustration induced by these tenuous pieces of evidence that Lenox passed the next week, searching for a way to break down Smith’s story once and for all. What they knew about his connection to the club would perhaps be enough to send the man to prison for a few years, but on the more serious charge of the murders of Jenkins and Wakefield, he had covered his tracks too cleverly. As it stood, they would have to hope that Armbruster was a persuasive witness. He was the only person who could definitively declare that Smith was a murderer. The problem was that it wouldn’t be difficult to make a jury doubt the word of a man so plainly corruptible.
One of Smith’s fellow plotters wouldn’t prove quite as elusive as the silver-tongued butler, however. On a morning the next week, as Lenox was puzzling over all of the case’s details in the offices at Chancery Lane, a telegram came from Nicholson. It said:
DYER SHOT STOP GUNNER HELD AT LISBON STOP
“Dallington!” he called out.
The young lord popped his head around the doorframe. With Jenkins’s murder solved, he had resumed his normal schedule of work and was investigating a housebreak at Brixton. “Yes?”
“Look at this.”
Dallington took the paper, read it, and whistled. “Shall we go see Nicholson?”
Nicholson had a limited amount of information, but some, and more came in during the next few days. The Gunner had sailed into the port under camouflage, painted with a new yellow-and-white check above the sea line (which meant that it had been done in the week since she left London) and calling herself the Ariana. The British admiral stationed in Lisbon had received the word from Scotland Yard to look out for the ship, however, and one of his assistants had spotted her right away, despite her attempts at concealment.
The admiral had decided to let her run into port, rather than challenging her out at sea. As she tied on, a lieutenant had called out, “All men of this ship are under arrest, by order of Her Majesty the Queen.”
There had been a stirring on deck then, followed by two noises in quick succession: a gunshot, first, and second, a splash, the sound of a pistol hurled far overboard.
They found Dyer in his cabin. He had been shot in the back. None of the two-hundred-odd men aboard the Gunner would say a word, other than to confirm that the captain had ordered the ship repainted and renamed since they left the Thames.
“Can’t say why,” the ship’s lieutenant, Lawton, had said. “Captain’s orders.”
Indeed, it became clear that the magical use of this phrase, Captain’s orders, was the reason Dyer had been killed by his own men. The British representatives at Lisbon heard it hundreds of times as they investigated the ship. It was a clever maneuver: By maritime law, the illegality of the ship’s new, unregistered name, and the illegality of anything in the holds, were the responsibility of the captain alone.
And indeed, one of the things that the navy found was a group of several women, living in hammocks—in the hold licensed to Lord Wakefield, the hold where Lenox and Dallington had found his body.
This detail puzzled them, until they learned that the women had all lived for several months at St. Anselm’s—at the Slavonian Club. That, evidently, was how Smith, Wakefield, and Dyer had ensured that none of the women mastered English. Every time the Gunner came and went, it exchanged new women for the old.
Where had Dyer been taking the women now, though? They didn’t know themselves, of course. Lisbon wasn’t part of the course the Gunner usually sailed on its route to Calcutta. Why, then, had Dyer risked putting into port there, when the disguise he had arranged for his ship showed that he was already worried about being caught?
The answer must be money, and Lenox surmised, on the day he and Dallington went to see Nicholson, that Dyer must have gone to Lisbon to sell off the women in his holds. From there he could have sailed the Gunner to Calcutta—confident that no ship could outrun her on that route—and then left her with the Asiatic. He and his crew might well have dispersed there, leaving the company to replace them, perhaps eventually returning to London overland.
With all this in mind, Nicholson asked the British navy in Portugal to investigate the city’s brothels, to ascertain whether there was any that might have taken women from the Gunner in the past. (“Though asking the British navy to look at a city’s brothels seems like a redundant request,” Dallington had pointed out.) With the assistance of the Portuguese police, who were eager to aid the country that brought so much foreign trade into their cities, they raided half a dozen houses and questioned the women working there.
Finally, at one of these, belonging to an aristocrat named Luis Almonte de la Rosa, they found success: Several of the women had been at the Slavonian Club, and were paid no more now than they had been there. Emboldened by the assurances of the navy that they could have their freedom, they recounted their own stories of the Gunner, which had brought them first to London and then here.
The emergence of this second criminal consortium, far away in a different country, returned the story to the headlines for several days. After that it gradually faded, in abeyance until the trial of the last living member of the criminal trio who had planned it all began.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The weeks after Smith’s arrest were rainless and bright, the soft, light days of spring hardening toward the heat of summer, women walking with fans in hand, men in suits of lighter cloth. Along Chancery Lane, the dogs belonging to each shop lingered in the shadows of their doorways, their instincts for adventure and alarm dormant while the sun was up.
At the detective agency one story above street level, business had resumed.
“What about you, Dallington?” asked Lenox.
They were sitting at the conference table. “Two new cases over the weekend. One a woman of middle age whose husband has been missing for four years—she wants proof that he’s dead, so that she can remarry. The other is from a fellow who saw our names in the papers. He was defrauded of three hundred pounds by an itinerant salesman. Offers to split whatever we can recover. It will probably lead nowhere, of course, but I thought I might put Pointilleux on the trail, if we don’t need him here.”
Lenox nodded. “And Polly?”
For Polly was still there; she had declined Monomark’s offer. Now, as a fly buzzed against the warm windows, and she sat in the meeting that Lenox had begun by reporting that he had no new cases, she looked as if she might regret it. Briskly she tapped her pen twice against the sheet of paper in front of her, then offered up her usual list of small and middling clients, many of them women—good, steady business.
Eleven percent. Since the day LeMaire had announced he was leaving, the words that had rattled around Lenox’s mind were those two, eleven percent. That was the trivial proportion of the revenue the firm took in for which he was responsible. Could he blame the Frenchman for leaving? Or Polly if she had chosen to go?
The difficulty was that the previous autumn he had viewed this return to detection as a pleasure, a fulfillment of his private wishes—not as a business.
Today that changed.
“Thank you,” he said to Polly when she had finished. Then he paused. “As you both know, my official, paid involvement in the Jenkins murder concluded on Friday. I’ll still be helping Nicholson, but only in an unofficial capacity. That makes this a good moment to address the future of the firm, I think. I told you I had a plan, and I do.”
Both Polly and Dallington looked at him more alertly, eyes enlivened by their curiosity. With each other, in the last week, they had been stiff, polite. Polly had been most animated when she told them about her second meeting with Monomark.
“At first he tried to cajole me into accepting,” she had said. “Then I asked him about the articles in the Telegraph.”
Dallington had raised his eyebrows at that. “What did he say?”
“He turned bright red and asked me if I was certain once and for all that I declined the position. I said I did. He stood up and walked out then—leaving me with the bill for tea, no less.”
They had all seen the result of that meeting the next day, when the Telegraph had blared a headline: LEMAIRE FOUNDS DETECTIVE AGENCY. Monomark’s second choice, evidently, but quicker than Polly to accept the offer. The article below the headline described precisely the kind of agency that Monomark had offered Polly control of. Indeed, the newspaper baron’s fingerprints were all over it. The subheadline read TO BE PREMIER FIRM IN ENGLAND, and a quote from a high official at Scotland Yard, probably one of Monomark’s cronies, said, “Certainly LeMaire’s will be our first and only choice should we ever require outside assistance in a criminal investigation.”
LeMaire’s firm was already up and running, with daily advertisements in half a dozen papers, favorable stories in the press, and even fairly positive word of mouth. Within a month, Lenox had privately reckoned, he might well take half of their business. If he did that they might as well shutter the firm.
Fortunately, he did have a plan. What was more, it was Monomark who had given him the idea for it. At their morning meeting, he asked Dallington and Polly—the words were directed at Polly, really, for he knew Dallington would never leave—to draw up the last drops from their reservoirs of faith in him. He would return that evening with news.
He took his carriage then and went to Parliament, where he spent a long, tiring day—but a triumphant one.
At six o’clock that evening, as the Members began to make their way through the hall outside the Commons into the benches for the evening session, Lenox stood, watching them wander in as he had for so many years, until he felt a tap on his shoulder.
He turned and saw his brother. “Edmund!” he said. He felt himself smiling. Throughout the course of the case they hadn’t seen each other. Edmund was his closest friend, and it was an unusual length of time for the two of them to have gone without each other’s company. This was a happy coincidence.
“Charles, what on earth are you doing here? I could have stood you a late lunch, or an early supper for that matter.”
“I was here on business, alas. Do you have time for a quick glass of wine now?”
Edmund checked the large clock on the wall. “Quickly, yes,” he said. “But what the devil do you mean, business? They had pheasant with chestnut sauce and cranberries this afternoon, too, your favorite thing.”
They went to the Members’ Bar, mostly empty now, and after they ordered their drinks they sat, Lenox asking what the subject of the debate that evening would be. Foreign trade, Edmund answered. That was the dullest of subjects Parliament could take up, in his opinion, though one of the most important.
“Better you than me,” said Lenox.
“Molly says that Jane is having a dinner party this weekend?” said Edmund.
“Yes, can you come?”
“Molly has bought a new dress already, so I imagine we can. She’s down in London so rarely these days that she says she never knows the city fashion until she’s walking out the door, dressed in the last season. But since Teddy is ashore for leave, she can’t tear herself away from home. Speaking of which, you must come down soon.”
Edmund still lived mainly at Lenox House in Sussex, where they had grown up. “We thought of coming in July.”
“That would please me inordinately. For one thing, we’re going to have a dance, for the county people, you know, and it would dispel the rumors that you yourself are part of a criminal gang if you were to attend.”
“Is that what they say?”
“The news gets very garbled on its way south, you know. And I may put it about that we’re disappointed in how it all ended for you, of course.” Edmund smiled, a spark in his eyes. “Anyhow—business? That’s why you’re in the building?”
“Yes. It’s been an interesting day.”
Not long before, Lenox had read an article in Blackwood’s that mentioned that the word “abracadabra” originally meant “I create what I speak” in the Hebrew language, a magician’s word that had migrated into English. This piece of trivia had been running through his mind all day, because so much of what he had done was to create money out of nothing—out of mere speech.
He had taken eighteen short meetings that day, he told Edmund, with eighteen friends and allies from his days in Parliament. (Twenty had been scheduled, but two Members had been detained elsewhere.) What all eighteen had in common was that they were men of business, and to each of them Lenox had proposed the same idea: that their firm pay an annual fee to retain the services of Lenox, Dallington, and Strickland on a permanent basis.
The blunt reaction of the second man he had seen, a steel manufacturer named Jordan Lee who had a great rotund belly and a thick mustache, had been typical. “Why on earth would I need to hire a detective agency?”
Lenox had been prepared for the question. “You’re familiar with the Holderness case?” he asked.
Lee grimaced. “Of course, the poor bastards.”
The year before, a quiet senior manager at Holderness had stayed ten minutes after work one evening, opened the company safe, and walked away with nearly four thousand pounds in European certificates of stock. It emerged that he had also been embezzling from the company for years. The two brothers in command of the firm, Andrew and Joseph Holderness, were living in sharply reduced personal circumstances as they attempted to pay off their debts and set the business back on its feet.
“A stitch in time, you know, Lee,” said Lenox. “We have a dedicated accountant who will do a quarterly examination of your books for fraud, detectives to do thorough investigations into any person you wish to hire—and of course in the case of any actual crime, theft, or violence, we’ll be on the spot immediately.”
Lenox saw Lee thinking. It was a good offer in general, he thought—though the accountant was, as yet, pure fiction—but the word that had most intrigued him was one thrown in with careful carelessness, “violence.” It was what the industrialists like Lee had most to fear.
“How much are you asking for the service?” he asked.
“Six hundred pounds per annum. We’ll keep a record of what we do for you, and charge more or return some of that at the end of the year based on our charges. Our own records are scrupulous, of course. I would be happy to show you a sample.”
For a moment the question hung in the balance—but then, perhaps because of his long acquaintance with Lenox, perhaps because six hundred pounds was a substantial but not a shocking sum, Lee nodded and put his hand out. “I think it’s a clever idea, now you explain it. We’ve been losing a mint simply from scrapped steel that’s gone missing. Your people could start there.”
Not all of Lenox’s meetings were so successful, of course. Eight of the men declined outright, two had, rather vexingly, already hired LeMaire to do the same job, and three others said they would think it over, in a hard genial tone that made it clear they wouldn’t.
In a way it had been a painful day for Lenox, who was so used to his own pride, so long accustomed to the luxury of financial independence, still adherent to old standards of what a gentleman ought to do. He had been inculcated with a disdain for business, for trade. These men, in fact, were those who looked up to him, to his life with his aristocratic wife, and in some of their faces he saw a subtle sense of reversal, perhaps even reprisal. That had been difficult.
And yet in another way it had been thrilling. Business was a kind of game, and for the first time he saw why men like Monomark chose to play it.
Better still, after he had finished his drink with Edmund, he could return to the offices with his news: that he had found five new clients that day, who would pay a total of seven hundred and fifty pounds into their accounts that very week, their first quarterly payments.
“Three thousand pounds for the year, then?” said Dallington uncertainly.
Polly repeated the words, too, but her voice was entirely free of uncertainty. She was beaming, with a look of pure relief and joy on her face, like a gambler who’s put his last shilling on a long shot and seen it run first through the gate. “Three thousand pounds!” she said. “Are you sure? It’s a fortune!”
Lenox smiled. “I’m sure.”
“Not that I doubt your word—only seven hundred and fifty pounds is already twice as much as every farthing we’ve brought in till now put together, Charles! My God, I could kiss you!”
