The Fleet Street Murders

by Charles Finch

  Dallington whistled softly. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Gracious.”

  “Can you blame Exeter for his certainty?”

  This question snapped Dallington out of his reverie. “By God, I can! Gerald Poole is simply—is simply not a killer. I know it with every fiber of my being!”

  “We shall have to work to prove it, then,” said Lenox, a doubtful grimace on his face. “Consider, though, the clear motive he had and his open admission that he met with Hiram Smalls, and Exeter’s case seems a difficult one to disprove.”

  “Yet equally impossible to prove—because Gerry didn’t kill anyone.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Where are you going next, Lenox?”

  To Jane’s, the detective wished he could say, but he had other appointments to keep. “I expect I shall go see Inspector Jenkins. Then I think I’ll go and see Smalls’s mother. That will require tact.”

  “What can I do?”

  They stood on the corner, and Lenox examined his protégé. “If you want a job—”

  “With all my heart.”

  “Then you might go to Fleet Street and speak to Pierce’s and Carruthers’s friends and colleagues. You might find out whatever you can about Jonathan Poole. You might speak to Pierce’s family and find out about the landlady of Carruthers, the Belgian woman who vanished.”

  “Then I shall,” said Dallington stoutly. “Will you be at home this evening?”

  “God willing,” said Lenox.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  L

  enox was closeted with Inspector Jenkins of Scotland Yard for some twenty minutes and came away from the meeting with a copy of the frankly unrevealing police report. Jenkins was pessimistic about the case. He felt far from sure of Poole’s guilt, as his telegram to Lenox had indicated, but admitted now that no other leads had emerged to contradict Exeter’s theory. He promised to meet Dallington and keep Lenox apprised of any news by telegram, but when the two men parted it was in a melancholy mood.

  It was ten o’clock in the morning by then and had already been a long, long day for Lenox. He left the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police by hansom cab to see Hiram Smalls’s aged mother but had the driver let him out a few doors early so he could stop into a public house. A warm brandy braced him to no end and took some of the cold ache out of his bones, and he walked up Liverpool Street with a renewed sense of purpose.

  “What is she like?” he had asked Jenkins.

  “You understand I haven’t been involved in the case at all—or rather, simply as a spectator with better access than the public.”

  “Still, I know you speak to the constables on their routes, the other officers.”

  Jenkins shook his head. He was an intelligent, sensitive young man, who found fault with Scotland Yard but served it faithfully. “Nobody saw her other than Exeter,” he said. “Who reported back that she was entirely intractable.”

  “What a wasted opportunity.”

  Jenkins, who had heard with horror that Exeter had neglected to ask for Smalls’s personal effects at Newgate, nodded. “Then again, many people in the East End fear the police. With reason, sometimes.”

  “She’s in her right mind, however?”

  “I believe so. Exeter said nothing on that score.”

  Lenox rang at the door, and a small, plump, red-cheeked girl of two or three and twenty answered the door. She had sharp little eyes.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I’m here to see Mrs. Smalls, miss.”

  “Are you, then? Well, I’m sure I don’t know whether she’s receiving visitors.” The girl put her hands on her hips. She had a pronounced cockney accent. “May I ask ’oom I ’ave the pleasure of meetin’?”

  “Charles Lenox, ma’am.”

  “Fair enough, Mr. Lenox, and your business?”

  “I’m investigating Hiram Smalls’s death.”

  Instantly the tone of the conversation shifted from the suspicious to the outright combative. “We don’t want none of your kind here, Mr. Lenox.” His name as if it were a curse word. “Good day.”

  “Are you Mrs. Smalls’s landlady?”

  “Am I her—well, I’m sure it’s no concern of yours, but I am, yes.”

  “I believe Hiram was murdered.”

  She inhaled sharply, and her eyes widened. “No!”

  “I’m not with the Yard, ma’am. I’m a private detective.”

  “Well.”

  “I only want justice.”

  “For Hiram?”

  “If he was wronged.”

  “Of course ’e was wronged! Hiram wouldn’t ’urt a fly!” Her outrage was in its way as persuasive as Dallington’s on behalf of Gerald Poole. “Come into the ’allway, come in. I’ll speak to Mrs. Smalls.”

  After a series of complex negotiations, in which the landlady went back and forth and inquired who Mr. Lenox was, first, and then who Mr. Lenox thought he was, second, and finally whether he was quite sure he didn’t belong to Scotland Yard—only after all of these questions had been posed by the doubting go-between and satisfactorily answered by Lenox did she lead the detective up one flight of stairs to see Mrs. Smalls.

  Now, Mrs. Smalls was, anybody with a rudimentary faculty of perception could see straightaway, a particular type—a faded beauty. She retained all the ornaments and outward accoutrements of beauty, including a beautiful velvet dress, profuse jewelry, and massive, heavily curled hair. There were gaudy cameos of a pretty young girl on half the surfaces in the cramped sitting room, and on the other half sat framed and dusty notices of a variety of plays.

  Although the woman herself was pale, painfully thin, and red eyed, and Lenox speculated to himself that perhaps this tragedy had punctured her vanity for good. She looked as if the cares of the world had all crowded around her at once.

  “How do you do, Mr. Lenox?” she asked in a somber voice and gave her curled forelock a vicious twist and tug as she curtsied.

  “Fairly,” he said. “I’m so sorry about your son, Mrs. Smalls.”

  “You believe my Hiram was murdered?”

  “It may be the case.”

  She sighed heavily. “Mr. Smalls was a fishmonger, Mr. Lenox. I was on the stage, you know, and Lord Barnett once asked at the stage door for me—”

  Here she paused for a moment to give Lenox the opportunity to appreciate her accomplishment, which he did with a lift of his eyebrows.

  “Still, we always figured Hiram would follow his father into fish.”

  There was something ludicrous about this that under other circumstances might have provoked laughter in Lenox. Despite that, there was the weight of grief in the apartment, and he merely nodded.

  “He didn’t, I take it?”

  “Put it this way, Mr. Lenox—he never worked a proper job, but he always had money.”

  “Something illegal, you think?”

  “Ah, but he was so sweet, Mr. Lenox! You ought to have seen him, in his blue suit. He worked hard, whatever he did—and like the fool I am, I was proud of him whatever he did.”

  “It’s a becoming pride in a mother,” said Lenox gently.

  “Well,” she said, with a theatrical but genuine sob—in fact, the theatrical was the genuine in Mrs. Smalls, perhaps. “Oh, but he was sweet! Did you know I owed a man a hundred pounds—think of it!—and was only a few months away from debtors’ prison when Hiram paid it off? Months away!”

  “Where did he find the money?”

  “Oh, he always found the money. You should’ve seen him as a lad, you know! Always wanted a ha’penny for candy, he did. Little nipper.”

  Lenox sighed inwardly and to forestall any further reminiscences said, “May I ask you one or two questions, Mrs. Smalls?”

  Instantly her look sharpened. “Now, where do you come from, Mr. Lenox?”

  “Not Scotland Yard, ma’am. I’m an amateur detective.”

  “How do you come to involve yourself in the case, sir?”


  “A friend of mine knows Gerald Poole and has asked me to intervene on that young man’s behalf.”

  “Who is intervening on Hiram’s behalf?” said Mrs. Smalls angrily.

  “Nobody, as yet. I shall see what I find. As I understand it, the prison remitted your son’s effects to you?”

  “Yes, as why shouldn’t they?”

  “Of course, ma’am, of course. I had hoped to see a letter he was in possession of.”

  “I know the one.”

  “I didn’t quite understand what it was.” Now, here was a fib: He recalled that it was thirty-two words, beginning The Dogcarts Pull Away and ending No green. “Do you have the letter?”

  “You have a trustworthy face,” she said and half-sobbed again.

  “Thank you.”

  “Well—here it is, then.”

  It was on a coarse piece of paper such as might be had for a penny in any shop, unfortunately, and looked new—relatively clean, written recently. It was in an unsophisticated hand; there was a greeting but no farewell, nor was there a date. There were two paragraphs: a short one of thirty words and another that was even shorter, only two.

  Mr. Smalls—

  The dogcarts pull away. I’ll see that Messrs. Jones get all the attention and care they need. For the others, George will rely on you and on your worthy peers.

  No green.

  Now this was, at best, puzzling. It seemed as if Messrs. Jones (but wasn’t that a strange locution, in fact?) were in for something sinister, as were the “others” to whom George and Smalls—if indeed the letter was addressed to him—were to give attention and care. Although clearly the keys to it were the first sentence and the last: The dogcarts pull away and No green. Both of them seemed like utter nonsense to Lenox, anyway. A dogcart was a rough-and-ready farmers’ equipage used on country roads. No green perhaps meant “no money.”

  Lenox read it two or three times, skipping words (“The-pull-I’ll”—“The-away-Messrs.”—no), reading backward, and adding one letter to every word, then to every other word—first t, then r, then s—but no. It had to be written in some prearranged language that the reader would understand without resort to any trick. So faithfully he copied the note down and thanked Mrs. Smalls, promising her he would give it his further consideration.

  The puzzling thing about the note was why Hiram Smalls would have taken the letter to prison. Either he had acted very stupidly, had been been sure of the code’s impenetrability, or else he had wanted to be caught for something—or perhaps it wasn’t his! That was the possibility that shook Lenox slightly. What if after all Hiram Smalls was innocent of any involvement in the murders of Simon Pierce and Winston Carruthers?

  “Mrs. Smalls, do you see any meaning particularly in the oranges that Hiram ordered while he was at Newgate?”

  She shook her head vehemently. “There’s been too much discussed about that, Mr. Lenox. It doesn’t mean a single thing! I don’t remember Hiram enjoying oranges, but he has very refined—erm—parentage, sir, and there’s no reason why he wouldn’t enjoy the finer things in life.”

  “Of course,” said Lenox sympathetically. “What else was there among his possessions that the prison gave you?”

  Her trust in the detective was more or less complete now, and she brought out a bag of things—and slightly sad things they were, a little rough, of coarse fabrics and cheap paper. The serge suit, the copy of Black Bess, the pouch of tobacco. Methodically Lenox searched through these but found nothing.

  “May I ask you one other question?” he said as he returned Hiram’s things to her.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think your son was capable of murder?”

  She shook her head violently. “Never! Never in a million years!”

  Lenox thought again that this was as persuasive as Dallington’s fervent advocacy of Gerald Poole, in its way. Apparently everyone was innocent. With a sigh, Lenox wished Mrs. Smalls good-bye and went back out to the street.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  B

  ack at home there was a telegram from Sandy Smith, Crook’s associate, with a list of commitments that Lenox had to return in time to fulfill the next day. He would have to be on the train by six the next morning, he saw with frustration. Still, it had been a productive half day. He had some grasp of the case, however uncertain.

  As he passed the threshold of his home, he traded the uncertainty of the three murders for the domestic uncertainty that mattered far more to him.

  “Has Lady Jane returned here, Mary?” he asked after he had changed into a new suit.

  “No, sir. Shall I see if she’s in next door?”

  “Yes, please do.”

  She curtsied and left. With dismay he saw the stack of unanswered letters that had built up in his absence, sitting on his desk. He shuffled through them listlessly and waited for Mary to return. She was downstairs now, ringing a bell strung through to the servants’ quarters next door. If they rang back once Jane was in, twice and she was out. Lenox smiled as he thought of this—the ties between them both literal and figurative.

  He hoped so.

  Mary returned. “Lady Grey is in, sir,” she said.

  “Thank you. I’ll go over there, then. I’ll want lunch when I get back.”

  “Sir?”

  “Oh—” Lenox waved his hand. “Graham would know. Something warm. Ask Ellie.”

  This was the house’s cook. “Yes, sir,” said Mary. “I did, sir, and she says she—well she didn’t know.”

  Ellie had a salty vocabulary, and Mary blushed.

  “I suppose we must have some sort of potato lying around, gathering dust? No doubt a single homely carrot might be procured from the fruit and vegetable man? If I dream I can imagine a very small cut of meat with sauce?” He snapped. “Tell Ellie if she values her job she’ll put two or three things on a plate by the time I return. The same goes for you.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Even as the door closed behind her he sighed. It was rare for him to lose his temper, and he always regretted it instantly. Mary would know his threats were hollow, in all probability—Ellie certainly would—but they still might distress her. It was all because of his fear of this tête-à-tête with Jane.

  He strode outside and over there in a burst of determination, however, and once Kirk, Jane’s very fat, very dignified butler had admitted Lenox, he felt silly. It was a house that made him comfortable in all its details, for it reminded him of her, and suddenly things seemed as if they might be all right.

  She came out at the knock of the door and saw him. “Hello, Charles,” she said.

  “Hello, Jane. I’m so pleased to see you, now that I have a moment to breathe.”

  “Will you eat something?”

  “No, thanks. Ellie’s cooking.”

  “Come into the sitting room, then.”

  She wore a plain blue dress with a gray ribbon at her slim waist and a matching one in her hair, which was slightly different now, lying in curls down her neck. Her thin, graceful hands, which had more than once shown surprising strength, were folded over each other, and it was slightly awkward that the two didn’t touch as they went to the sofa and sat down.

  “I’ve missed you very much, Jane,” Lenox burst out. “Your letter made me miserable.”

  “Oh!” she said. Tears came into the corners of her eyes.

  “Did you mean what you wrote?”

  “I don’t know, Charles.”

  There was a moment’s unhappy and uncomfortable quiet, while each of them pondered the letter she had written—which as Lenox had thought at every stray moment since then was so out of character, so flighty in contrast to Lady Jane’s stable, un-dramatic personality.

  He forced himself to speak of something different. “How is Toto?” he asked.

  “Physically, entirely well, but as I wrote you—well, you read what I wrote.”

  Now he took her hand and, looking straight at her, said with conviction, “Can’t yo
u see how different and how well suited to each other our temperaments are? Haven’t all our years of friendship revealed our true compatibility?”

  This eruption led to some silence while Jane cried. Lenox looked at his hand and realized with some detachment that it was shaking.

  “I fear I must tell you a secret now, Charles.”

  His stomach plummeted. “What can you mean?”

  She sighed and looked pale. “You remember my first marriage, I know.”

  Indeed he did. At the age of twenty she had made a spectacular marriage, one entirely apposite considering her beauty and nobility, to Lord James Grey, the Earl of Deere and a captain in the Coldstream Guards. It had been the wedding of the season, breathlessly gossiped about, with an invitation seen by those who were on the borderline of receiving one as more precious than rubies and emeralds.

  Lenox had sat next to his brother and his father in the third row, a flower in his buttonhole, and the queer feeling he had in his stomach as he watched her walk down the aisle, straight backed and lovely, was the first intimation he had that he might feel something more than friendship for her. Her father, the Earl of Houghton, was Lenox’s godfather, and Lenox and Jane had always been playmates—never more.

  Then, not six months later, tragedy—James Grey had died in a skirmish with locals in India, where he was stationed with his regiment.

  “I do, of course,” said Lenox softly. “Was it unhappy?”

  “We hadn’t time to be either happy or unhappy, I think, only joyful, as newlyweds are. Yet I never told you Charles—it’s a difficult thing to talk about—”

  “Yes?”

  “I found I was pregnant just a few weeks after the wedding.”

  “But that makes no sense—”

  He stopped.

  “Yes,” she said. “Just the same as Toto.”

  All he could say, after a minute of silence was, “I’m so very sorry, Jane.”

  “It has made these few weeks difficult for me, you must understand, and I need—I simply need more time, Charles.”