A Beautiful Blue Death clm-1

by Charles Finch

  Lenox could say this of him: He did not stint in his generosity in the field of his chosen passion. Whenever he went to a party, he took the lady of the house a flower of exceeding beauty and rareness, one perfectly chosen to match her temperament and sense of style. There was no lady of his own house. Barnard was a bachelor.

  It was thus said that you could monitor George Barnard’s social schedule by following his blossoms from address to address. Depending on whom you asked, this habit was either charming or cloying. Lenox was neutral on the issue; though if Barnard had not been so proper, so trustworthy, so unblemished, he would have seemed to Lenox to be sinister.

  Chapter 3

  By the time the cab drew to a stop, Lenox’s watch had nearly ticked to seven o’clock. He had stopped at Bond Street to up his friend Thomas McConnell, which had put him a good deal out of his way.

  As he had guessed correctly Barnard’s first decision had been to bring in a high-ranking officer from the Yard. From the other carriage in front of the house, it looked as if it might be Jenkins, a young detective. His presence wouldn’t be a bad thing usually, but Lenox guessed, again correctly, that the owner of the house had told Jenkins to come alone. It was all a struggle between Barnard’s impulse to keep things quiet and his impulse to exercise his authority. If Barnard had his way, there would be no doctor, no routine examination of the premises, only an imperious dictate to resolve matters, and quickly.

  So it had been necessary for Lenox to bring Thomas, who was a doctor.

  The house was a very large yellow one, of the kind that was sometimes called a mansion. It had a garish coat of arms over the door, which made Lenox wince every time he saw it, and each of its dozens of windows showed some light. Barnard always had a surfeit of guests. He also threw parties by the dozen and had a famous annual ball, which wasn’t far off.

  Lenox stepped gingerly from the brougham, avoiding a well of slush by the curb. He had had, just a little while before, the happy anticipation of supper and a night in his library ahead of him, but that loss couldn’t still the tiny hum of excitement in his mind—who knew what was inside this house, where it would lead him, how it would end? He loved his work.

  Barnard was standing on his stoop, engaged in a solemn conversation with the young detective, when he spotted Lenox and Thomas approaching.

  “Charles!” he said.

  “George, how are you?” said Lenox. “I’m sorry about this business.”

  “Terrible matter. Under my own roof. No end of embarrassment, you know.”

  “Did the girl serve upstairs?”

  “Indeed she did! Only for two weeks or so, of course, or I would have been able to spot it before it happened.”

  “Of course,” Lenox said. Barnard was already fibbing. Hadn’t Lady Jane said that it had been three months? “I’m here because Jane asked me to come lend a hand.”

  “Not necessary,” Barnard said. There was a pause. “How is Jane?”

  “Well enough, I think.”

  “Still, not necessary. Not at all. We’ve got Jenkins here. Good man.” He spoke as if Jenkins weren’t present.

  “Have you met Thomas McConnell, George?”

  “I haven’t had the honor. George Barnard,” he said, reaching out his hand.

  “A pleasure,” said Thomas, who had met Barnard dozens of times.

  There was a brief pause; then Lenox spoke again. “Still, George,” he said, “you won’t mind us having a quick look inside? To put Jane’s mind at rest?”

  Barnard was evidently troubled by this request and paused before he answered. He was weighing his desire to please Lady Jane, whose good graces he wanted to be in, against his annoyance with Lenox for coming. At last he said, “For Jane, yes, I suppose. But Jenkins has seen to everything already. Says we need a doctor, but I don’t see why. Clear case of suicide.”

  “Suicide?” said Thomas.

  “Suicide,” Barnard said emphatically. “There’s a note, plain as day. Still, go in if you wish.”

  “Thank you, George.”

  He walked into the house with Thomas and Jenkins at his side, while Barnard walked toward the grand front staircase, seemingly dismissing them from his mind. Lenox had seen this front hallway many times, at the beginnings and ends of parties, but now, for the first time, he concentrated on the small gilt door to the side, which was guaranteed to be of cheap wood on the reverse and stood beneath a vast mirror, one of the dozens of doors concealed all over the house that led downstairs to the servants’ quarters.

  He opened the door, and the smell of the kitchen drifted up. Barnard always served good food; you could say that for him.

  When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Lenox waited for Jenkins to take the lead. But apparently he wanted first to have a word.

  “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Lenox. We’ve never been formally introduced.”

  “It’s an honor for me too,” Lenox said to the inspector.

  Thomas stepped to the left and took a sip from a flask, while Jenkins hurried after him.

  “It’s down here,” he said.

  “I know,” said Thomas. “In houses of this design the servants’ bedrooms are always to the left, and the kitchen is always to the right.”

  Lenox smiled to himself and followed the two men.

  They were walking along a clean well-lit hallway, slightly wider than Lenox had expected, with small drawings of flowers in between each set of doors. Some of the doors had small personal details—an embroidery that said SARAH, a garland pinned against a hinge. The noise from the kitchen receded behind them, but they could still hear the business of the house being conducted.

  At the end of the hall, a door was slightly ajar. Thomas stopped and asked Jenkins if it was the correct room, and Jenkins answered that it was. Both men stepped back for the first time, and allowed Lenox to come forward. He put a leather glove on his right hand and opened the door.

  “Why do you wear a glove?” Jenkins asked.

  McConnell answered for his friend. “There’s a new technology emerging—fingerprinting. Have you heard of it?”

  “No.”

  “A chap named Herschel, magistrate in India, started to put prisoners’ handprints next to their signatures. At first he did it just to scare them into being honest. But then he noticed the individuality of the fingers and decided he would focus on them rather than on the entire hand. Ingenious, really. Still rather hit-and-miss, the whole thing, but Lenox and I agree there’s potential in it.”

  Jenkins looked at the back of his hand. “The prints from your fingers?”

  “Turn your hand over,” McConnell said with a smile.

  “Oh,” Jenkins said. “I think I see what you mean.”

  Lenox had by this time scanned the scene and was ready to take a closer look. In front of the three men was a modest room—altogether unremarkable, if you had seen servants’ quarters before, save the fact that the body of a dead human being lay on the bed.

  But first, thought Lenox, the room. He usually left the body for last, because the clues surrounding it were so much more likely to vanish in a short amount of time.

  The room measured out as a perfect square, no doubt identical in shape and size to most of the other bedrooms on the hall. On the right, fitted snugly against the wall, was a narrow bed. On the left, barely leaving space to walk through the room, were a desk, a bureau, and a small seamstress’s table. High on the left of the back wall there was a window of middling size.

  The room was, if anything, more tidy than the house upstairs, which was strewn with the expensive debris of Barnard’s life. The desk was bare except for four objects, which he would examine in a moment; the bureau was bare, though he would have to look in the drawers; the seamstress’s table had a few bits of thread on it, but even those were tucked together neatly.

  What did the room say about the victim? Either that she was most fastidious or that she had few possessions—more likely the latter. She was not without some person
al sense of taste, however. A picture of Hyde Park was tacked above her bed, which perhaps she had bought on her half day or received from a beau. And Lenox saw, as he opened the drawers of her bureau with his handkerchief, that she maintained her clothes as well as she could. Beyond personal taste, he thought, perhaps she took some pride in herself.

  Thomas and Jenkins were both standing in the doorway, and even when Lenox went to the far left corner of the room, they only peered in slightly more intently.

  “Big enough for a thin man,” said Jenkins, and Lenox nodded without turning.

  He was referring to the medium-sized window that Lenox was inspecting, which looked out at a view of the feet walking by on the street, in an almost direct path to the wheels of his own carriage. It was, as Jenkins said, big enough to admit a man or, just as likely, to let a woman out. It was flung open. And on such a cold day.

  “Probably too trampled outside to show anything. Scuff marks on the windowsill, which we should bear in mind. Don’t know why they’re there. It’s slick and so is the floor under it, but they probably would be anyway, just from the melting snow. Jenkins,” Lenox said, “have any of the servants been in here?”

  “No,” the young inspector said. “Mr. Barnard posted the housekeeper at the door as soon as the body was discovered. And apparently the housekeeper is something of an iron maiden.”

  “Do you know what an iron maiden is, sir?” Thomas asked.

  Jenkins blushed and didn’t answer; he addressed Lenox. “None of the servants, no, sir.”

  “And did Mr. Barnard tell you if he himself touched anything?”

  “He said he hadn’t. Only picked up the note, there, on the desk.”

  “I see,” said Lenox.

  The open window puzzled him, but no doubt it would all come clear. He stepped back into the center of the room and got on his hands and knees. There was nothing on the floors—not even dust, to speak of—under the desk or the bureau, or under the small table, or in plain sight. Except for one thing. In the middle of the room, on the floor just next to the desk, were three or four drops of something. He scratched at one with his fingernail: wax.

  He thought about this for a moment, filed it away, and then thoroughly examined the space under the bed, trailing his fingers along the underside of the mattress and shining a candle against every dark corner.

  So! he thought. We have only the desk and the body. He stood up and walked toward the desk.

  It was a thin piece of deal, without drawers but with sturdy legs. On top of it were an empty glass, with the stain of some drink on its lip; a new candle, which had never been lighted; a small brown unmarked bottle made of glass, with a rubber stopper; and a smooth piece of paper, the suicide note.

  “A suicide, on the face of it,” said Jenkins.

  Lenox thought for a moment. He would mention what he had seen (or rather, seen the absence of) in a few moments. He wanted to be unencumbered by Jenkins’s awe or embarrassment (who could predict which) while he looked at the desk.

  “Indeed,” he muttered. “Indeed.…”

  He leaned over the desk on his fists and read the note.

  It is too much. Sorry, James, I am sorry.

  The note was unsigned.

  “Is James her fiancé?” Lenox said.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s in service here?”

  “Yes.”

  Lenox thought for a moment and nodded. He would take the glass and the bottle home to examine.

  But before anything else, he thought wearily, it was time to disillusion the young detective.

  “Jenkins,” he said, “you think this is a suicide?”

  “It seems clear enough, sir.”

  “I need you to fetch James for us. But don’t bring him into this room. Find a table somewhere.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And Jenkins—had it occurred to you that there should be a pen on this desk? Something that crossed my mind.”

  The inspector frowned. “A pen?” he said.

  “To write the note.”

  “Perhaps it’s in a pocket?”

  “Maids’ uniforms don’t have pockets, a relic of the time when their omission was thought to make stealing more difficult.”

  Jenkins looked at the body. “And nowhere in the room?”

  “No,” said Lenox, trying to make his voice kind.

  “But she could easily have carried the note around with her.”

  “I don’t think so,” Lenox said. “If you look at it, the paper is uncreased and unwrinkled.”

  Jenkins stared at the desk. “Well, perhaps she took the pen and then replaced it,” he said.

  “In the grip of suicide? Unlikely. There’s a chance, but I’d lay odds that we find it’s a murder. Someone wrote this with their own pen and left it here. Notice the small squiggly letters—probably somebody trying to hide their handwriting. Forger’s tremor.”

  Jenkins sighed. “Yes, you’re right, I imagine.” Then he looked up and said, “I’ll find the fiancé.”

  Lenox nodded. Then, thinking, he looked at the desk and the doorway until he was satisfied and turned to the bed.

  “Thomas,” he said. “The body.”

  Chapter 4

  Thomas McConnell had moved to London from Scotland, where he had grown up, shortly after the conclusion of his formal medical education. He was a doctor. He opened a practice on Harley Street within six months of his arrival, advertised as a specialist in surgery, and set about making his name. This he had done quickly and impressively; he was open to new techniques, and his skill with a scalpel was surpassing. By the time he was thirty, he had one of the leading practices in all of London.

  And then, when he was thirty-one, he married. More specifically, he married up—to Lady Victoria Phillips, who was nineteen at the time. McConnell was handsome, had a fair amount of money, and came from a good family. But in each of these respects, the civilized world agreed, he was infinitely inferior to Toto Phillips, who had beauty, fortune, and a name by any standard you cared to choose.

  She married Thomas McConnell in the year she came out, because, her friends knew, he was different from the men of her milieu and generation. Those men had been her friends from birth, and they would always be her friends. But she could never have married any of them. Thomas was manlier, less dandy, less corrupted by money, and he had ideas: about books, about plays, about the cities of the Continent, about beauty, about her beauty, about her. Their wedding was a celebrated one, because while he had married up, he hadn’t married so far up as to disqualify him from benefit. The Prime Minister—Toto’s father’s friend from public school—had come, along with half of Debrett’s.

  For the first three years, Thomas and Toto were happy. It was during this time that Lenox first met McConnell. Lady Jane was, after a fashion, Toto’s mentor—they were first cousins but treated each other as aunt and niece, Toto’s mother having succumbed to a fever when her daughter was only eleven. So Lenox was thrown together with the young couple a good deal. Thomas had reduced his practice, and he and his wife went out most evenings and traveled widely together. He accepted with goodwill her social schedule, and she accepted with equal goodwill their yearly visits to his family in Scotland.

  But the first three years had ended, and the halcyon days of their marriage had ended with them. Thomas had all but abandoned his practice by then, and he began to drink too much. Toto had taken to spending six months of the year at Longwell, her father’s estate in Kent, just outside of London, while her husband remained in the city.

  There had been a further deterioration, to the point, after five years of marriage, that the couple rarely appeared in public and were said not to be on speaking terms. But something had relented—either they had given up or they had resolved to make the best of things—and they were now, aged thirty-six and twenty-four, settling into the long view of life. It could end in two ways, Lenox had always thought: either in cold politeness, or in a new, quieter kind of love. Toto
was so young, and McConnell so idealistic. But perhaps they would learn to compromise. At any rate, they had seemed kinder to each other the last few times he had seen them together. Lady Jane thought so too, and she was reliable about things like that.

  But there had been a casualty of the past six years. Toto was still one of the most important women in London’s highest social circles, but Thomas was no longer as brilliant as he had been, in any sense of the word. He no longer performed surgery, and, perhaps more sadly, he no longer possessed the golden shine of a handsome young man with ideas and ambition. He had been through the worst of the drinking, but he still drank far too much to wield a scalpel. There had been so much money after he married Toto that he no longer needed the practice, so it had eventually been sold for a song to a young Phillips cousin. All that work, building the practice up, his own place—that, too, absorbed by his wife’s family.

  He now studied all sorts of minor subjects in his spare time, from chemicals to psychology. For a while now marine life had been predominant among these interests—McConnell collected samples of rare cold-weather fish and mammals, the prize of his collection being a perfect Eastern Dolphin. Every few years he took trips, sometimes dangerous ones, off the coasts of Greenland and the fjords. Upon returning he would present his findings to the Royal Academy (he was a member) and contribute his lecture to their journal.

  But it wasn’t medical work. The only work he did of that sort was the kind that had brought him face-to-face with the corpse of Prudence Smith. For the pleasure of it, he helped Lenox when he was asked and, though he tried not to betray it, felt an inkling of that old pleasure again, of real work, the excitement of the human mind examining the human body.

  He was of middling height and weight, with curly blond hair, a face that was at the moment unshaven, and which told of his drinking. His eyes were lidded but occasionally sharp. He had been putting a golf ball across the cavernous ballroom in his house to a waiting footman when Lenox arrived to pick him up. Now, when Lenox beckoned him toward Prue Smith’s body, he roused himself out of observation and stepped in the room toward the bed.