The Last Passenger - A Prequel

by Charles Finch

  As usual, he was in a state that you might certainly call jolly, if you wished to be polite—outright drunk, if you were blunter.

  “Hullo!” he cried. “What’s this? Chess? Sport of kings, chess.”

  That was horse racing. No matter. “How are you, Mr. Hemstock?” Lenox said, putting out his hand. He liked the inspector, taken all in all. “Much occupied this evening?”

  “Yes! Thought you might want to come round with me, learn a trick or two. It’s a murder.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Paddington Station.”

  Some piece of ha’penny violence, Lenox supposed. A burglar, a gang member, a sailor. The motive probably petty vengeance or drunken ire.

  “Unfortunately I don’t think I can. I have a guest, as you see.”

  Hemstock looked surprised. It was the first time Lenox had refused such an offer.

  An affable, short, solid fellow, about forty, with a squashed face and an infectious gaiety, Hemstock was the worst detective Scotland Yard had. Indeed, the job belonged to him only because his late father had been one of the original Peelers, a figure of legend and lore, revered at the Yard. The son did little harm in his sinecure—if not, unfortunately, much good either. Lately, however, he had been allowing Lenox to solve his cases, under the guise of his “helping” the young squire, showing him “a trick or two.” Most men at the Yard despised the idea of Lenox’s amateur involvement in their work, but Hemstock had noticed that he could be useful.

  “It’s a strange one,” the inspector said.

  “Perhaps I could come in the morning and see you about it then,” said Lenox.

  “Of course. Until the morning.”

  “The morning. And I say, I am sorry. Thank you for stopping by.”

  Hemstock had recovered from his surprise. “May be dry by then, eh? Or else we’ll soon be boarding the animals two by two. Any time after ten o’clock.”

  He accepted a drink to see him on his way—a brandy, which vanished quickly—and left.

  Deere, surprised, watched Lenox take his chair again. They were not quite close enough that he could ask why Lenox had declined. (If Jane were here, she would have done so without hesitation.) Instead they played out their muddled, unsatisfying third game.

  The instant it was clear that Deere had won, the detective stood up.

  “I’m sorry, Deere,” he said.

  He called for Graham. “Sir?” said the valet—somewhere between a butler and a valet, really—appearing at the door.

  “I’m sorry, Graham,” said Lenox, who was handing out apologies this evening at such a rate that he would soon run short of them, “but could you get the horses warmed after all? I think I must go to Paddington Station, or I won’t rest.”

  “They are ready in front, sir.”

  Lenox gave a look of surprise, then a rueful smile. “Thank you, Graham,” he said. “I suppose I am predictable after all this time under the same roof.”

  “Not at all, sir.”

  “Just give me my hat and my cane then, if you don’t mind. I bet I can beat him there.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The storm only gathered strength during the short trip to Paddington. Lenox felt keenly for poor William Elliott, the raw-faced young groom, just seventeen, who sat atop the box of the carriage with the reins and whip in hand.

  Inside the carriage it was tolerably dry, though water beaded at the joints of the door. Lenox’s view through the small windows was impenetrably dark. As they drove northwest on Edgware Road, he could just make out the ghostly pale silhouette of Marble Arch at one point. But that was all.

  The benefit of the weather was that they were virtually alone on the road; in only fifteen minutes or so they had made the journey.

  “This will do,” Lenox called out when they were near the front of the station.

  “Shall I wait, sir?”

  “Please—but look, I’ll point out where.”

  Paddington Station was new. It had opened just the year before, the design of a gentleman, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who was reshaping the nation building by building, one of the most celebrated men in Victoria’s realm.

  He had constructed Paddington as a long, slim rectangle—rather like Lenox’s study, come to think of it. You entered on one of the short sides, here on Praed Street, and were immediately a few feet from the station’s two tracks. (Many a tardy traveler had blessed Brunel’s name for this touch.) At the far end, which lay open to the city, the trains departed.

  Then there were the two long sides of the rectangle. On the left was a series of rooms and offices. On the right, partially open to the air, was an ingenious carriage route that allowed taxis and wagons to pull up directly to the trains.

  This lane was where Lenox directed Elliott. It would offer him and the horses at least a bit of warmth and dryness, he hoped.

  Lenox alighted from the carriage and into the shelter of the awning in front of the Great Western Hotel, a new establishment, catering mostly to travelers, with a splendid and blindingly bright façade, as dramatic as a Scottish castle on this stormy night. A bellman glanced at him inquiringly, but Lenox declined his assistance with a wave that he hoped implied his thanks.

  He studied the train station from the short distance across the street. It was desolate, no light stirring behind its doors. Lenox had checked his Bradshaw’s, the book of timetables every Londoner kept a copy of. The last train that evening had been expected at 10:14, and now it was past 11:00, which must mean the last travelers had long departed, most of them drying themselves by cozy fires, coats dripping in front halls humble and grand across the city.

  He pulled out his pocket watch: 11:12, to be exact. He placed the watch—his late father’s, a battered and dented gold object—back in his waistcoat pocket and strode across the street.

  Murder. He might act as if he had grown too grand for Hemstock’s patronage, but he had still only ever been involved with two murders of any note—that is, which had taken longer than ten minutes to solve. Though it was doubtful this would be the third, his pulse nevertheless quickened as he entered the station.

  His eyes took a moment to adapt. He made out the great curved roof that swept overhead, making the hall at once grand and intimate. All around were shuttered stalls, which during the day did a roaring trade in newspapers, tobacco, and various foodstuffs to be eaten on the hoof.

  Soon he grew accustomed to the dark. Receding up the left interior side of the building was a long row of signs projecting out from the wall every ten feet or so.

  Cloakroom

  Gentlemen’s Lavatory

  Telegraph Office

  Parcels

  Dining Room

  Booking

  For discretion’s sake, perhaps—certainly not for convenience’s—the last was WOMEN’S LAVATORY. It was near this distant spot, which Lenox took to be the scene of the crime, that he saw a small group of people, the only ones visible in the station, glowing by the light of at least two lanterns. They stood next to the only train left in the station. Lenox set out to see who they were.

  Despite his footsteps, which he thought would have alerted them, they started when he said, approaching, “Good evening, gentlemen.”

  A craggy old man in a huge sealskin cloak took a step forward. “Who’re you?”

  There were three men. One was a police constable with a cherubic look, but Hemstock wasn’t among them. This was no surprise; the inspector was likely at a bar, taking his leisure. He was on duty until six the next morning and rarely rushed himself.

  Lenox bowed his head slightly. “Charles Lenox, gentlemen. I am an associate of Inspector Hemstock’s.”

  “Hemstock? Is he from the Yard?”

  “He is, sir.”

  Lenox always avoided saying that he himself was from the Yard—when he could. “We sent the constable for him over ninety minutes ago,” the older man said.

  “I have just seen Mr. Hemstock. He will be here shortly. In the meanwhile, may I
ask the pleasure of knowing your name?”

  “I’m Joseph Beauregard Stanley,” the old man in the sealskin coat said. “Late of Her Majesty’s Navy. Presently the stationmaster on duty.”

  “There’s been a death, Mr. Hemstock says? Possibly a murder?”

  One of the other two men snorted. Not the constable. “If it was anything else, I’d like to know what.”

  “A violent death, then.”

  “Violent, yes,” the man replied, as if the word could scarcely describe what he had seen. He wore a black frock coat and no hat. Anticipating Lenox’s next question, he went on, nodding at the train, “I’m the conductor of the 449.”

  “This train.”

  “Yes. From Manchester.”

  “So you found the body?” asked Lenox.

  “I did. By chance, mind you.”

  Lenox was curious about that statement, but said, following the conversation’s momentum, “Perhaps we had better have a look.” When there was a pause, he turned to the constable, a very young man, he saw now, who held the other lantern. “Good evening. Charles Lenox.”

  “Rossum, sir,” said the lad in an accent conspicuously of the East End. Lenox would have laid a shilling coin that the boy had been born within hearing of Bow Bells: the traditional definition of a cockney.

  “You were on your beat?”

  “No, sir. I was round the Nimble Peacock on Chapel Street, sir, just by. Day finished. Enjoying a pint of beer. I only came at the whistle, sir.”

  He looked a bit proud as he said this—not without reason. It had technically been his duty to answer the call of his fellow officer, but few of London’s constables would have taken the trouble on a dark and rainy night. The whistle usually blew to ask for nothing more than assistance with a drunken brawl.

  “Well done, Mr. Rossum,” said Lenox. “I shall inform Sir Richard in the morning of how responsible you were in performance of your duties.”

  Rossum’s eyes widened in his lantern’s light. Sir Richard Mayne was the head of Scotland Yard. “I thank you friendly o’ that, sir.”

  Lenox nodded. Then he said again, trying to sound unrushed, “Shall we go and look at the body?”

  “Hadn’t we better wait for the inspector?” replied the old stationmaster.

  “The sooner the body is gone, the sooner your station is yours again, Mr. Stanley,” Lenox said. “I’m happy to wait if you wish, however.”

  Stanley sighed. “No, I suppose you’d better go aboard.” He didn’t like the idea though. “I’ll let these chaps take you. It’s not a sight I care to see a third time. And someone must be here when the inspector comes. If he ever does.”

  They boarded the train single file, led by the conductor.

  The 449 from Manchester had four passenger cars, it appeared. The conductor, whose name Lenox still hadn’t caught, took them to the first of them, the third-class carriage. This would have been the cheapest seat to reserve, its hard benches usually populated exclusively by men of the working classes. They traveled closest to the clamor and powerful, if not unpleasant, coal smell of the engine room.

  The first-class carriage—quieter, much more expensive, and outfitted to a high standard of comfort—would be at the rear. It was in the first-class carriage that Lenox traveled, generally; Hemstock, by contrast, was a classic man of the second-class carriages, which occupied the middle two cars.

  A funny place sometimes, England.

  Both the conductor and Constable Rossum had lanterns, and it was by their light that Lenox saw the victim.

  He was slumped on the last bench at the rear of the car. He looked young, his light brown hair combed back. His head leaned against the window next to him, as if he were asleep. He had, Lenox thought, a handsome face, clean and strong.

  The other two made way for Lenox to go first. The fire from the lanterns danced in the glass windows. Moving forward he tried not to betray his nervousness—concealing it behind an intent gaze that took in the details of the carriage. But this was pointless. There was nothing to see, all the luggage gone, every seat emptied, the carriage cleaned even of the usual refuse.

  At last he drew close to the body. He saw that the man was young, perhaps the same age as Lenox himself. He was extremely pale in the light of the lanterns.

  Then Lenox looked down and saw why. It was no wonder the stationmaster hadn’t wished to come aboard again. The victim had lost a tremendous amount of blood, and even now remained in a desperate pose, as if trying and failing to hold in his entrails. His stomach had been slashed open.

  A butchery of a murder. There was a sour, metallic smell in the air. Lenox turned back to the conductor and the constable, trying his best to be professional. “I take it nobody saw anything.”

  “Only me,” said the conductor. “I had collected all the tickets from the seats before London, but I was missing my own return bus ticket, to get home. I came through to see if I had dropped it. ’Twas then I found him.”

  “Did you clean the carriage? It appears spotless.”

  “No—that would have been one of the station’s men. Probably tidied up my bus ticket along with everything else. But there is occasionally a drunken man asleep aboard the train. Whoever cleaned the car would have assumed that had happened here. Ignored him.”

  “Despite the blood?”

  The conductor shrugged. “It was dark and it’s the third-class carriage. A quick tidy.”

  “I see.”

  Lenox thought for a moment. There was a great deal to take in, and, beginning with an inspection of the body, he noted it all with a pencil in the small leather-bound notebook he kept in his front pocket, each small detail.

  Still, when he stepped down onto the platform again, some fifteen minutes later, it was not the inhumane manner of the murder that filled him with consternation. It was that for the first time in his young career, he had encountered a case without a single clue.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hemstock arrived about half an hour after Lenox. Only the young amateur detective and the grizzled stationmaster remained on the platform. The conductor had been raring to get home, his lost omnibus ticket nothing to the price of a hansom if he could merely get some sleep, he’d said, and while Rossum, the young constable, had played his role admirably, he had asked after they got off the train if his presence was still necessary. Lenox had let him go.

  Hemstock strolled in without a care in the world. You had to hand him that much: He had insouciance.

  “Lenox!” he cried upon approaching. “Dashed glad to see you joined the hullaballoo after all.”

  Stanley, the stationmaster, took in Hemstock’s approaching figure charily.

  “Is someone coming along to fetch the body?” he asked. “I must write my report. And this train must be cleared and empty by morning. It goes to the south coast at 7:33.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Hemstock. “A medical examiner will arrive before long.”

  “What time is the first train of the morning?” Lenox asked the stationmaster.

  At 5:49, came the answer. Did they have anything further? If not, Stanley said, he would return to his office. They could find him there, the large brick-and-glass stand lofted a few feet above ground level near the front doors of the station.

  When Hemstock and Lenox were alone, Hemstock sighed. He would have preferred to be somewhere else, the noise suggested—perhaps a tavern scene by Frans Hals.

  “Well?” he said. “What do we have?”

  “Perhaps you’d better come and look.”

  “Must I?”

  “I think so.”

  Thus they boarded the third-class carriage again, and Lenox described how he had passed his time here. Hemstock, after staring with a furrowed brow at the dead man for a moment, sat down heavily on the bench opposite and looked up at the young amateur, listening.

  Lenox had begun with the body. The general cause of death was obvious: The victim had been slashed and stabbed repeatedly in the stomach and ribs. Whether it was
loss of blood or a specific wound that had in fact killed him was for the medical examiner to say.

  “But the more interesting bit came next,” said Lenox. “When I looked for identification.”

  “Why? Who is he?”

  “I don’t have the slightest clue.”

  Hemstock looked sincerely surprised. “How’s that?”

  Lenox demonstrated what he meant. He turned out all of the man’s pockets, showing that there was nothing inside them. “I lifted the body up after I found his pockets empty and looked to see if a billfold or valise was underneath him. Nothing.”

  “Hm.” Hemstock looked still more curious. “No identification on the body, then. Stolen?”

  “I don’t think so, because of what I saw next.”

  “What?”

  Carefully, Lenox opened the dead man’s jacket. It was a charcoal-black sack coat, a casual fashion imported in the last few years from Manhattan. Lenox had recently been talked into having one made for himself. “Look.”

  Cut raggedly from the inner pocket of the man’s coat was a rectangle where its tailor’s label would have been sewn. There was blood around the area—mostly dry, but certainly fresh.

  He proceeded to show Hemstock the jacket inside and out—it was a ginger business to remove it—and then the shirt. The victim’s pants, which were of a light gray, unmatched to the jacket, had had their label removed, too, from the inner right leg.

  “What about behind his neck?”

  “Another label torn out.”

  “Very, very strange.”

  Last of all, Lenox observed, the man’s boots were gone entirely. “And even his socks—they are cut at the top.”

  Hemstock was indifferent to his work, not stupid. “Where a monogram might have been. This is odd indeed.” He blinked his eyes a few times quickly. “What do I—what shall I make of it?”

  Lenox shook his head. “That I still do not know, unfortunately.”

  “Hm.”

  Hemstock looked disappointed. It was a more complex case than he had been hoping would fall to him.

  But Lenox felt a kind of pure, racing thrill, somber to be sure but not without a tincture of joy. This was a real and serious crime, with a horrible mixture of violence and methodical cunning to the way the murderer had slashed the man to death and then carefully cut away the labels of his clothes. It had to be solved—he had rarely felt anything so strongly. Either violence or wit could make a criminal dangerous. Lenox had learned this in his painstaking study of the history of crime. But together they could make the same criminal truly diabolical.