Текст книги "The Laws of Murder"
Автор книги: Charles Finch
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CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The next month was one of frantic activity at Chancery Lane, all three of them putting in many long, grueling days of labor, so that the first weeks of May passed in a haze of early mornings and late nights. It was Polly who took the situation in hand, hiring, the day after Lenox’s meetings, an accountant, a new clerk, and a new detective named Atkinson. He was a fifty-year-old man who had recently retired from the Yard in search of a better salary, tall and solid with salt-and-pepper hair. He would be the person who went to the firms for a monthly checkup and interacted directly with the managers.
“They’ll prefer that type of fellow,” she said confidently after Atkinson had left his interview. “You and Dallington are too refined—and of course I’m a woman, which would never do.”
Atkinson was an immediate success, as was the new clerk, King. On the other hand, the accountant arrived at the offices in a state of impressive inebriation on his third morning, and they fired him on the spot, replacing him later that afternoon with a meek chap named Tomkins, who turned out to be splendidly intelligent. In his very first week he found a clerical error that saved Jordan Lee, the steel magnate, nearly seventy pounds.
At the same time, for some half-mysterious reason, the business coming in for Lenox, Dallington, and Polly increased. Small cases, mostly, many to do with minor sums of money, though some genuinely enigmatic ones were mixed in as well. Lenox spent three sleepless days helping a butcher in Hampstead recover a kidnapped child, who turned out, in the end, to have been taken by a local woman who imagined that the butcher had scorned her.
Lenox described the influx of cases to Lady Jane one evening, as they sat out upon the small stone terrace that overlooked the back garden at Hampden Lane, the pleasant call of birds in the air, a light breeze making it cooler than it had been for most of the week. Between them was Sophia. She sat on a small wooden horse and rocked back and forth, murmuring some very important words to herself, lost, as so often, in a private and apparently vivid world. It was one of Lenox’s favorite things about his daughter—the intensity and liveliness of her interior life. What on earth was she saying to the horse?
“Why do you think more cases have come in recently?” Lady Jane asked.
“I’m not certain,” he said. “Perhaps the establishment of LeMaire’s firm has raised awareness that such a thing as a detective agency exists—and that means ours, too. A rising tide, and all that. Or I suppose it may be that after the murders, our names appeared in the papers often enough to be noticed.”
“I give Polly the credit, personally.”
“Thank you, my dear. It’s nice always to have one ally.”
Lady Jane laughed. She looked very lovely, a slender champagne flute in her hand, the falling light capturing the soft contours of her face. “No, I give you the credit,” she said. “I only meant that she always seems to know exactly what to do.”
Polly had been at Hampden Lane fairly often in the past few weeks, as had Dallington, a few small quick meetings at first turning into a series of teas and suppers there, until it became a kind of office away from the office. They had sat in Lenox’s study for many hours, and though they had always liked each other, something about this second space, combined perhaps with their revitalized business, had knitted the three of them closer together. Even Dallington and Polly were becoming easier with each other again. Partly that was because of Lady Jane, who always interrupted their meetings to bring them sandwiches, or drinks, or to tell Lenox something—interruptions that made the meetings feel homelike, informal, but also somehow more productive. It all seemed very natural for the first time, this business of running a detective agency.
Lenox reached over and put his hand on Sophia’s head, though she pushed it away irritably and kept rocking. He smiled. “Yes, she’s splendid. To be honest I don’t think we could have done it without her, Dallington and I. We both like the detective work, but she sees the whole picture. Thank goodness for Atkinson, to take just one example.”
Despite all of this, the agency was still battling uphill. Though Lenox had taken several additional meetings after that first marathon of a day, they had only produced one more client, and the massive initial infusion of money they had received would have to be carefully apportioned out over the course of the year, would have to pay for the salaries of the new employees, the trips to visit their clients, the offices. Lenox and Dallington also continued, rather guiltily, to take cases for free when the clients couldn’t afford to pay. Polly—more practical—showed such softness far more rarely.
Then, at the end of May, something disquieting happened: LeMaire poached one of their clients, a mill owner named Templeton, the Member for Stratford. His first quarterly payment to them would be his last. “Better rates with Monomark’s fellow, Lenox,” he said when they saw each other at a party. “He told me all about it at Ascot. Same service. It’s the nature of business, you know. I’m sorry to have to leave you.”
Dallington was furious. Polly was more philosophical; she recommended that they meet with their clients to be sure that they were happy with the agency. Still, it made for a worrying week, and a few late nights looking at the books and making lists of possible new clients, until, almost as if the universe had decided to rebalance their luck, something fortuitous happened.
It was on a June morning (a rainy one, at last) just a week before Obadiah Smith’s trial was to begin. The papers were full of the case again, and the Slavonian Club. The journalists all felt sure that Smith would go to prison for a few years, but that it would be impossible to convict him of the murders of Jenkins and Wakefield, as the crown hoped to do. Lenox had pulled out his notes on the case, studying them a thousandth time, searching for some detail to pin Smith to the crimes. The gun—that would have been their best hope, but it had been wiped clean, and packaged in that parcel from Francis. It was maddening. The butler had been too clever for them.
Pointilleux knocked on the door and came in without waiting for an answer. “You have a visitor.”
“Who is it?”
“Someone named Mr. Graham.”
“Graham! Push him in.”
“I will, I will,” said Pointilleux testily. He had been in a bad mood all morning because of dyspepsia caused by the breakfast his landlady had made him. (“The egg in this country are pepper beyond anything reasonable.”) “He is wet with rain, unfortunately.”
Graham was, indeed, wet with rain, but he smiled and put out a hand as Lenox stood and welcomed him in. “What brings you away from Parliament?” asked Lenox. “Look, you’re soaked. Let me ring for tea.”
The office had another new employee, a maid named Mrs. Barry, and a few moments after Lenox asked for it she came in with a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits. Graham accepted a cup of tea gratefully, sipping carefully as the steam rose from it.
“Busy at the Commons?” asked Lenox, taking a sip of his own tea.
“There’s a vote later today,” said Graham. “The foreign trade bill.”
“I know. I’ve seen some of the speeches in the papers. You’ve taken on a very great role.”
“Yes,” said Graham, nodding grimly, as if it hadn’t been by choice, or altogether to his liking. “The first time I’ve spoken much.”
“I feel very sorry to have missed your maiden speech. If I had known you meant to give it I would have been in the gallery.”
“It was a necessity at the last moment, unfortunately. Qualls fell ill and had to bow out.”
“And then—the responses.”
Graham smiled dryly. “Yes, quite.”
When Graham had been Lenox’s secretary in Parliament, the other party had spread rumors about his conduct—namely, that he was corrupt. These had seemed plausible perhaps more than they otherwise would have because of Graham’s birth, which was low for anyone intimately involved with England’s national politics. In the last weeks those rumors—quelled when he ran for Parliament—had resurfaced, with oblique mentions in speeches from the other benches. They implied that certain foreign powers, particularly Russia, had bought Graham’s influence.
“Is there something I can do?” asked Lenox. “Someone to whom I can speak?”
“Oh, no, thank you,” said Graham. “We can handle them.”
Lenox nodded. Graham, more than anyone else he knew, would be able to manage his position in the brutal joust of Parliament. “But then why have you come? Not that I don’t wish it were a more frequent occurrence.”
“I wonder if you recall that form you filled out when we had lunch several weeks ago?” asked Graham. “The very long one?”
“Yes—the exit interview, as it were. They wanted to know how much port I drink, which I thought intrusive of them. Not that it’s very much.”
“I’m afraid I deceived you,” said Graham. The word “sir” still hovered toward the end of the sentence, without appearing. He reached down into his valise and pulled out a thin sheaf of papers. “It was a questionnaire that the House rules subcommittee wished you to fill out.”
Lenox frowned. “The House rules subcommittee?”
“We would like to offer you a new position that has been created only this week. As yet it doesn’t have a name, but you would be the official house detectives of the Commons and the Lords.”
Lenox’s eyes widened, and for a moment he was struck dumb. “Never, really?”
Graham smiled. “Of course, we have army officers and Metropolitan Police stationed around the building.”
“I remember them.”
“But there are as many small and large crimes in Parliament as in any other concern involving several thousand men, and the Yard is not always as quick as one would like in its response, or indeed its solution of them.” Graham paused and then said delicately, “There would be a retainer of nine hundred pounds a year, and of course any additional expenses would be reimbursed.”
Lenox looked at his old friend, touched. He could tell even glancing at the papers Graham had passed him that this had been his work—his gesture. “I would be honored to accept,” he said. “Thank you. Particularly as it means we might have lunch more often now, too.”
For whatever reason, it was at this moment that Lenox finally believed that the agency was going to succeed. It wasn’t even the money that gave him the feeling. In the next room Polly was meeting with a new client; Dallington was out upon a case, as were Pointilleux and Atkinson; the scratch of different pens rose from the outer office; and in his chest he had a feeling that at last things had clicked into place. It would be easier from here on out. Of course there would be challenges—but not defeats, he felt sure. They would make it.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The morning that Smith’s trial was to begin, Lenox and Dallington had breakfast with Nicholson in a small, noisy restaurant near the courthouse. They hadn’t seen him in some time. He looked tired and flagged down the waiter several times to ask for more coffee.
“We’ve been trying desperately to find further evidence against Smith,” he said. “The case has been given a very high priority at the Yard, as you can imagine—a police inspector and a marquess. No limit to the budget or the manpower at my disposal. But for all that, we haven’t been able to find definite proof. There is Armbruster’s word, but even he didn’t see the murder directly—and of course he’s cooperating with us to avoid punishment himself, which makes him less than an ideal witness. Smith must be a genius, I think, to have come through this foul situation without a mark on him.”
“He’s been both clever and lucky,” said Lenox. “Anyone in the world might have seen the murder on Portland Place.”
“Sister Grethe comes to mind as a possible witness,” said Dallington dryly.
“Too bad her trial begins today, too,” said Nicholson. Gwen Smith was also at the Old Bailey. “I can’t imagine she’ll escape prison, at least. That’s a minor consolation.”
“You have him on the Slavonian, too, though?” asked Lenox.
“Oh, there’s no question at all about that. Dozens of witnesses, each more eager than the last to point a finger at him. The difficulty is that it won’t put him behind bars for more than three or four years. That’s the law. What’s heartbreaking is that it’s probably the precise punishment he would have served if Jenkins and Wakefield had lived. He’s saved himself nothing, and cost them a great deal—Jenkins especially, of course.”
The waiter set down an extra plate of buttered toast at the center of their table, and Dallington took a piece, tearing it into bites moodily. The clink and clatter of silverware and the din of cheerful voices was all around, a London morning, but the three of them sat silent for some time.
At the courthouse there was a push of journalists standing by the doors, shouting questions at the witnesses and solicitors who entered. Fleet Street would use any excuse it could find to bring the Slavonian Club back into its headlines, the story’s lurid mixture of aristocracy, money, and sex selling out editions faster than anything else had in 1876, every tutting curate and bored housemaid desperate to devour each minor new detail that the press could winkle out of the case.
“Mr. Lenox! Will he hang, Mr. Lenox!” cried out one chap, and another at the same moment said, “Nicholson! Inspector Nicholson! Is it true as you were a client as well, and you and Armbruster hushed it all!”
Nicholson flushed and turned. “Don’t answer,” Dallington advised.
At the door there was a small line, and Lenox found himself waiting behind a thin-shouldered man in an expensive cloak. The man turned as Lenox came up behind him. It was Monomark.
“Lord Monomark,” said the detective, smiling faintly. He was surprised. “Are you sitting in the galleries?”
Monomark had brilliant, predatory eyes, in a thin, ascetic face. “Surprised you’re here,” he said, “after all that our Inspector Jenkins said about you in the papers. Wonderful quotes, those, honest and forthright. A testament to the chap. Though they must have stung, I expect. Dear, dear.”
It did sting—and the Telegraph had reprinted the quotes that very morning. Lenox only widened his smile and said, “They ask you to come when you solve the case, you see. I’m not surprised LeMaire has yet to learn that, however.”
Monomark flushed—he was not a man whose jibes were often answered. “We’ll see you out of business within the year. Mark my words.”
“Did you hear that we’d been named official investigators for the Houses of Parliament?” Lenox asked mildly. “Mrs. Buchanan is there even now. More work than we know what to do with. Tell LeMaire we’re happy to hire him back, when he’s out of a job.”
In another lifetime, Lenox probably wouldn’t have made his words so barbed. Business had changed him, however. Monomark, who no doubt thought of him as part of the soft circle of aristocrats to which he had gained only halting and uneasy entry, seemed to reassess him with those eyes. “Parliament,” he said. Lenox could tell he hadn’t heard of their hiring. “A pack of fools. Everything you need to know about the House of Lords you can learn from the fact that three is a quorum.”
“The house in which you sit, if I’m not mistaken, My Lord.”
“I didn’t—”
But what Monomark did or didn’t do would have to wait, because just then, behind them, there was a piercing cry on the steps. “She’s dead!” It was one of the runners, who were able to enter the cells with messages. “Gwen Smith is dead! I saw the note! Story to the highest bidder!”
There was a pause, and then the full pack of journalists sprinted toward the boy. Monomark almost looked as if he wanted to join them, and for an instant Lenox liked the old man, his will still so bent upon success, upon victory. “False, I’m sure,” he said.
Behind Lenox, Nicholson pushed his way through. “Let’s go in,” he said. “Enough of this. Scotland Yard—yes, this is my badge, stare at it if you like, but quickly, quickly.”
It was the truth: Obadiah Smith’s mother was dead. She had poisoned herself. It would be several hours before the coroner confirmed the cause of death, but he didn’t have to bother to convince the detectives—she had left a note.
In it, she confessed to every crime of which her son might have been guilty.
And then I did take the pistol and shoot Inspector Jenkins from short range in the head … packaged the pistol in a parcel under the fraudulent seal of an invented person of my own invention, Andrew Francis … never informed my son that the port had been poisoned … I know he believed the club located at 75 Portland Place to be a wholly legal business … I take my own life out of guilt and ask only that he be fully exonerated and allowed to live his life …
The note ended with an entreaty, incredible on its face, that the new marquess of Wakefield retain Smith as his butler. It’s only fair, Your Lordship, said the note.
Nine days later, Obadiah Smith received a sentence of two months’ imprisonment in Newgate. He also received a hundred pounds from the Telegraph to write a story: INSIDE THE SLAVONIAN CLUB: AN INNOCENT’S TALE. In prison that money, in addition to whatever else he had saved, afforded him a life of luxury, in particular the most sumptuous thing a person in his position could buy—privacy. For a few extra coins, as well, Miss Randall went to visit him each night. Smith was working on a book, from what the guards said. It would expand upon the article, profess his innocence, lament his mother’s misdeeds. And—what guaranteed that it would make him a small fortune—it would name the names of the aristocrats who had frequented the club.
The same coroner who had determined that Gwen Smith poisoned herself informed Nicholson, one morning, that she had been in a very advanced stage of illness, with mere months to live, perhaps even weeks. Lenox was a father, and just as he had felt a fleeting tincture of admiration for Monomark, so he did for Gwen Smith. It must have taken mettle to plan and then carry out her own death, all to shield her son.
Of course, he was also distraught. After the trial, he, Dallington, and Nicholson took their carriage to Jenkins’s house and sat with Madeleine Jenkins for an hour. They apologized for their failure. To Lenox’s surprise she seemed better, however, even, when her children entered the room just before they left, allowing a smile to appear on her face. Perhaps he had underestimated her resilience.
“Did we ever contribute to the fund for the family?” asked Dallington as they left, in a low voice.
“The firm did,” said Lenox.
“It’s not enough.”
“No.”
And it wasn’t. When they returned to the office in Chancery Lane that afternoon, Lenox fetched a small slate blackboard he had in his office. He went and hung it by the door and carefully wrote two names on it:
William Anson
Obadiah Smith
The two men who had eluded him since he returned to detection. The agency would carry on, obviously, and his own work in the next months might lead him anywhere, to any corner of England or the world—and how thrilling that seemed, how distant from the dry closeted workings of Parliament!—but sooner or later he would repay the debt he owed them.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
In June the citizens of London’s leafy western precincts scattered off toward the country, the sea air of Devon, the rolling downs of Yorkshire, where they found slower days, longer evenings, earlier cocktail hours. But Lenox and Lady Jane remained in London for the first weeks of the month, primarily so that he could go to work every morning, and on the month’s first Saturday night they had their friends for supper. Toto was at her father’s house with George; McConnell, though, had remained through the weekend, busy doing rounds at the children’s hospital in Great Ormond Street, and he came early to sit in Lenox’s study and drink a glass of hock.
The windows were open, allowing in a breeze and the noise of voices and footsteps from the street. “Have you seen anything of LeMaire since he started the new firm?” McConnell asked.
“Not a sight. Pointilleux still dines with him every week, and says he’s happy with the bargain he struck. I’m sure it’s remunerative, at least.”
“Are you sure the nephew isn’t spying?”
“Very sure. For one thing he’s the most literal human I ever met. For another we gave him a raise in pay, and a great deal more responsibility than his uncle is willing to give him. He has a whole pile of newspaper cuttings with the articles in which his name appeared after the Portland Place business. Keeps them in his top drawer, thinks none of the clerks know about it.”
“I wish I could have helped more,” said McConnell. “Found the source of the lead in the port, for instance.”
“He covered his tracks well, Smith.”
McConnell hesitated, then said, “Far be it from me to question how to do your work, but I confess I’ve wondered from time to time whether that twenty pounds in Jenkins’s pocket might be the answer.”
Lenox grimaced. “Have you? I’d been hoping everyone had forgotten.”
The doctor looked at him quizzically. “Why?”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with the case, and Jenkins was a good chap.”
“What do you think it was, then? You needn’t tell me if you don’t like, but I’m curious.”
Lenox sighed. The truth was that he thought he had a good idea about that twenty pounds; and he suspected that it had come directly from the purse of Lord Monomark.
Monomark’s reporters famously paid for information, serious sums when it was good information. Lenox’s theory, which he had shared only with Dallington, was that as part of his campaign to discredit their new agency, Monomark had paid Jenkins for his negative words about Lenox.
Several things made him think so: the cash itself, which must have come from somewhere; the unlikeliness that Jenkins, long a friend, would have said something negative about him to a reporter; the gloating look on Monomark’s face on the steps of the Old Bailey, and his inability to resist mentioning what Jenkins had told the paper. There was even the timing: the morning after Jenkins had died, there had been new quotes in the Telegraph, perhaps indicating that he had met with someone from the paper on the day of his death, which would have explained why he’d had the money with him when he died.
Then there was a final detail—the letters on Jenkins’s desk at Scotland Yard from various creditors, demanding payment.
In a way it softened the blow of what Jenkins had said. Family must come first, duty. If the inspector had spoken to the Telegraph to pay his bills, so be it. It had been intelligent of Monomark, even. Lenox’s long and publicly touted alliance with Jenkins had been one of the things that gave the new agency its legitimacy.
Lenox explained all this to McConnell. “That’s terribly unfortunate,” said the doctor.
“I suppose it might still be related to the case. But in my heart I think Monomark is the answer.”
“What a diabolical fellow!”
“Just so.”
Fortunately it was hard to stay very angry on such a mellow pink evening, and as the guests started to arrive, Lenox left his study to greet them, conducting them as they arrived out into the back garden, where Lady Jane and a few of her friends were already sitting. Dallington’s mother and father were there, and Molly Lenox, and Jane’s cousin Emily Gardner, whose fiancé, George, was expected to arrive shortly, and Emily’s dear friend Ellen Daring, who was expecting a child. Lenox took a glass of cold lemonade from a table off to the side and watched his wife from the corner of his eye. The bars were off of their windows now, and the regular patrols outside on Hampden Lane had been reduced to a weekly check from Mr. Clemons himself.
“A good horse eats seventy-two pounds of straw a week, and fifty-six pounds of hay,” Dallington’s mother was saying. “Not to mention two bushels of oats. I think it’s simply disgusting. Mark my words, we’ll have carriages with engines in them soon, and the city will be much cleaner for it.”
“But what will pull them?” asked Emily.
“Nothing at all. They’re inventing them in Germany right now. They pull themselves.”
Emily was too well-bred to convey her extreme skepticism at this idea with anything other than a very faint lift of her eyebrow, but she said, “I cannot imagine London without horses.”
The duchess, who was not a reticent person, said, “It doesn’t matter whether you can imagine it.”
Just then a footman appeared leading Dallington, who, despite the warmth of the evening, looked unflushed, his dark hair in place, his acerbic face brightening genuinely with each person he saw.
“Have I interrupted a very dazzling conversation?” he asked.
“Your mother is attempting to clear the horses out of London,” said Lady Jane.
“Oh, again? I don’t know where they’ll go. Birmingham, I suppose. A whole city of horses. Anyway it’s nonsense, because they’ll never build an engine large enough to pull a carriage.”
“I tell you the Germans are doing it.”
“They’re only Germans, not magicians.”
“You don’t know whether they’re both! I’ve been to Baden twice, and you’ve never been at all.”
“My apologies. I’m sure you spent the whole time touring their engineering colleges, and none of it at the spa.”
Just at that moment two more guests came in at the same time, first Edmund and then Polly, who said she was arriving straight from the office. Unlike Dallington she was flushed, and she accepted a glass of lemonade gratefully. Edmund had just been at Parliament; for his part, he said, having been drawn into the conversation, he did not think the horses of London were in any grave or immediate threat of eviction. If the subject was transportation, he was more curious about how Count Zeppelin’s balloons and airships might change the skyline.
Soon they went into dinner, an intimate group of fourteen. Later Lenox would recall it as one of the nicest parties he could remember them having at this house on Hampden Lane—every person there a particular friend, no grudges between any of them, the courses rolling away under the sound of laughter, the night cooling until they were all comfortable. Dallington was on especially good form. He told a long and excellent story about the valiant but unsuccessful attempts of a friend visiting America to go upstate, thwarted continuously by the city of New York’s system of public conveyance, that culminated in the fellow staring forlornly at the retreating metropolis as he sailed directly and unintentionally south.
When the supper was finished, the men and the women remained together rather than dividing, by common agreement, and they sat up for another hour or so, drinking brandy or iced wine, sitting in small clusters around Lady Jane’s drawing room. At last their energies began to flag. Edmund and Molly went home first, the two brothers making a plan to meet for lunch the next day at the Athenaeum Club, and shortly after them went Emily and George in separate carriages, and after that everyone decided that it was time, alas, for the evening to end.
When the last guests had gone Lenox closed the door behind him. “Are you awake?” he said to Jane, who was standing in the soft light of the front hall
“Just scarcely,” she said. She smiled sweetly and gave him a fond kiss on the cheek. “What a wonderful evening, Charles. Thank you.”
“No, thank you. Look, is this Dallington’s cloak, though? He’s forgotten it, the fool. I’ll run it out to him.”
Lenox opened the door and went onto into the cool evening. He hesitated on his steps, looking up and down across the spaced yellow pools of the gaslight. Then he saw that toward the right of the house two figures were standing very close together, holding hands. One of them laughed, the sound of it ringing in the empty street, and he realized with a shock that it was Dallington and Polly.
After a beat, he smiled, then stepped back into the house with the cloak. It could wait until the next day to find its way again to its owner. He closed the door behind him as quietly as he could—his heart filled with happiness.
