“Go on,” said Lenox.
“I suppose, objectively, he was good to us—gave us pocket money, paid for university, let us live as we pleased with him. But I can’t explain his constant references, alone or in company, to our indebtedness. It was horrible.”
“And then he gave you money, didn’t he?”
As if realizing he had let on too much, Claude slowed to a sullen pace. “Yes, he gave us a bit of money.”
“And what did you do with it?”
“You know that already, I suppose.”
“You can explain your feelings, though. All I know are the facts.”
Again drawn out, Claude said, “He gave us ten thousand pounds each. When he did that, Eustace came to me.”
“He went to you?”
“We were united in our dislike of our uncle, but I still didn’t like my cousin. Still, he was irresistible. Said he had found a way for us be rich, both of us, and we both knew he was rather brilliant about things of that sort. I think he managed his own family’s budget from the age of six or seven, saved them from that awful cycle of wealth and poverty I went through. Our uncle only sent remittances erratically, you see.” A shadow of childish anger passed over Claude’s face.
Lenox, again subtly urging the lad on, said, “He painted you a picture, then?”
“He convinced me. He said we would never have to work in our lives! And of course he was right. Even if we had accepted the board’s decision and managed well, we could have survived on what we had, not to mention the stock’s growth. But he had filled my head, you see, with these visions of absolute opulence”—Claude stubbed out his cigarette on the open windowsill and ran his hand through his hair—“until ten thousand pounds didn’t cut it anymore.”
“There were debts, I gather.” Lenox offered Claude another cigarette as he said this.
“Why fight it,” Claude said bitterly. “You know already. I had been drinking too much, you see, and I owed for cards, and had bills outstanding that would have forced me to live very stringently. From the ten thousand I would have had, perhaps three or four thousand left. A large sum of money, to be sure, but by no means enough to live on as I wanted to live. Or no—as I wanted to show Uncle Barnard I could live.” Again that shadow of anger across his face. “Even living very cheaply, I would have run through it in five years.”
This was the moment, Lenox knew. Had to be handled carefully. “And Eustace had a solution.…”
Claude paused but then nodded. “At last he convinced me. He said if we got Soames off the board, we would be rich: all of my worries, my family’s worries, all of Uncle Barnard’s snide comments—gone. One hundred thousand quid apiece at one go.”
“It wasn’t murder at first, was it?”
“No, not at first. To begin with, we merely spread it about that Soames was a drunk and had no money left. We thought perhaps he would be put off the board on the strength of public opinion. I fear we made his life miserable, poor sot.” He looked at Lenox almost defiantly when he said this, but the detective’s face remained impassive. Claude went on in a burst. “It didn’t work—and gradually, you see, Eustace convinced me that our very lives depended on it. As I told you, it was like a dream. I ask you, to murder somebody? I had money enough, all the friends in the world, a rich uncle if an autocratic one—how could I have been brought round? The insanity of it! It only dawned on me after Prue died… and then my life depended on it. I couldn’t go backwards, Eustace kept saying.”
“Go on.”
“No. I’ve said too much. I don’t even know what protection you can give me.” He stood by the window, still smoking.
Lenox murmured, “It must have been difficult, murdering a girl you had known—perhaps even liked.”
“Liked?” said Claude sourly, turning quickly back to Lenox. “I liked her, it’s true.… Do you remember seeing me dine alone, in the upstairs of the Jumpers? I think that moment was when I really saw what had happened. When I woke up. I saw what an insidious, awful person my cousin was—truly was—for the first time. I felt such sorrow, then. It’s no excuse, none; but it’s the truth.”
“What do you mean, you woke up?”
“You see, when I killed Prue, I didn’t really understand it. Eustace gave me some poison or other; he had cadged it from our uncle, plus a bottle of dummy poison that was in the housekeeper’s room.” Lenox nodded to himself. “He’s the one who knows botany—said he used it on plants. I would never have known. I barely scraped a third at Oxford. She had overheard us talking about Soames, I guess. And she trusted me enough, poor Prue, to confront me.” He stubbed out his second cigarette and accepted another from Lenox. “It didn’t seem real, the poison. I didn’t really connect it with Prue’s death, as strange as that sounds. It was just a little bottle that looked like medicine.”
“You had fought, hadn’t you?”
“Fought?”
“And then you had to keep her quiet long enough to poison her after the fight.” Seeing that Claude meant to protest, Lenox said, a little more sharply, “Come now, the struggle where you were burned.”
“You do know it all, I see. We did fight. In whispers, so as not to be overheard—but she was awfully angry. I did get burned. But in the end I convinced her to stay quiet until I could persuade Eustace to give it up. I said it was just talk.”
“So you tricked her?”
There was a long silence; Lenox knew this was the moment when Claude would either try to flee or break down. Slowly, without moving quickly, he pulled a dusty bottle of rye and two glasses from the hideous wardrobe some aunt or other had left to him. Claude wasn’t the first suspect he had brought into the back room. He poured the rye slowly into two glasses and offered the young man one of them. Claude looked at it, paused for a fraction of a second, then took it and had a sip. With a crack in his voice, he went on.
“It tortured me to do it. I drank heavily that morning. But that wasn’t the real reason I went through with it. That only helped. I was jealous, you see. The thing was that I really liked—nearly loved—that maid.” He laughed, with such incredulity on his face that it almost seemed he was speaking of someone else, some other set of events. Lenox thought of Deck and James, their different reactions. It was obvious that Prue had some quality that all three of these men had more than loved—they had been obsessed.
No longer needing Lenox’s frequent prompting, Claude went on. “And Eustace—oh, he was clever—he told me that morning about the man from the tavern sneaking into her room. Deck. I don’t know how he figured it out, but I was filled with anger. It ate me up. I went downstairs… I put the poison in her glass of water… lurked in the hallway. Watched her drink it with something like happiness, you know. Then I replaced the candle, put the note there, and left some other bottle I was to leave. And that was it.”
“And once you had done that, you had to help with Soames.”
Claude looked at Lenox with something almost like surprise, as if he had been talking to himself. “It’s true,” he said. “I didn’t have an alibi for the time when Prue died, so I needed the alibi for the second murder. I was contrite but I didn’t want jail, you know, or the gallows.”
Lenox sat back in the chair. It was snowing hard now. Claude was still at the window, and now, with neither of them speaking, there was a deep silence in the night.
“The gallows… no, I suspect not. It occurred to me for a moment that you might be trying to trick me—that really it was you who led Eustace on. But that’s not right, I see. It was essential that you commit the bloodless murder, the easier one, the one that didn’t seem real. Your cousin must have known you couldn’t push a knife through a man’s ribs and drove you as far as you could go.” He paused. “No, I don’t think the gallows. Twenty or thirty years in prison, most likely.”
As if smacked back into reality, Claude said, “Thirty years?” He looked shocked.
Lenox nodded. “It’s time to wake up truly now, Claude. It wasn’t all a joke.”
After just a second, Claude made his move. Lenox had been half expecting it, but was still caught off guard. Claude pushed him out of the way and bolted toward the door. There was no time to make the call; Lenox only gasped out “Edmund!” as loudly as he could. Then he roused himself from the floor (there was still a hint of ache in his body from the beating he had taken) and ran for the door. On the other side of it, Claude was struggling in Edmund’s arms, which were wrapped firmly around him.
Chapter 46
McConnell had arrived and heard the entire story from Lady Jane. Graham had a note from Exeter saying he was on an excellent trail and had no time to come over. The four friends spoke quietly in the library about Claude, who was now more calmly sitting in the back drawing room, locked in by the door and the windows.
“You had better let him sleep in one of the bedrooms,” said Lady Jane, “and then take him in tomorrow. There’s a blizzard.”
Lenox hesitated at first and asked if he would do the same if Bartholomew Deck had murdered Prue Smith and Jack Soames. But gradually the other three convinced him to do the generous thing. It was the last night Claude would spend comfortably for some years.
So Lenox relented and allowed the young man his hot water bottle and soft bed, locking the guest room door from the outside, and the next morning, though he refused to eat with the lad, had breakfast sent to him upstairs. He could only imagine his guest, sitting in an armchair in the luxurious bedroom, eating the last truly good meal of his early life.
Exeter’s hot trail had gone cold and he finally came over, where he heard the story, promptly said he thought it was something “very much of the sort,” bemoaned the lax morals (perhaps correctly) of the young “aristos, who never had to earn a pound,” and took Claude into custody. Claude had pressed his suit himself and neatly tied his tie. He looked very somber, but also somehow relieved.
The next matter was to find Eustace. He was not at Barnard’s house, where McConnell and Lenox first looked. Nor was he at any of the several clubs he belonged to. They went back to Barnard’s, then, and asked to be let into Eustace’s room. It still seemed occupied, but the possessions in the room had thinned out since Lenox last looked there, and finally the ever-charming Miss Harrison reluctantly told them that Mr. Bramwell had left with a trunk, saying he was on a trip home for a few days to check on his mother.
Lenox and McConnell stood for a moment in the entryway of the house, talking, after hearing this news and walking downstairs. They thanked the housekeeper and stepped outside onto the freshly coated sidewalk.
“I suppose we shall have to follow him up there,” said Lenox.
“Yes,” said McConnell. “He can’t know anybody’s after him.”
Lenox paused at this and then cried out, as fast as he could, “Come with me, come with me—there’s no time to lose!”
Without asking for an explanation, McConnell leaped into his carriage, which had four horses at Toto’s insistence, and beckoned Lenox to follow him.
“Where?” he said, when they were both in.
“The head of the river!” shouted Lenox, “and fast as can be!”
“A ship?” said McConnell, as they rattled quickly along the cobblestones.
“Yes, yes, a ship!” said Lenox. “Oh, how stupid I’ve been! How stupid, all through the case! To underestimate such an intelligent man! Oh, I shall never forgive myself, Thomas!”
“But how do you know that he’s on a ship?”
“A full trunk? To visit the North for a few days? No, no, no. And the trains out of England leave too irregularly and too slowly, but there is a ship every day, and we could scarcely hope to catch a ship as we could a train! Everything indicates it, Thomas. He must have followed Claude to my house and realized the game was up.”
They arrived at the dock very quickly and ran through the small building where people bought tickets, waited, and said their goodbyes. Yes, there was a ship, the man at the ticket counter informed them, bound for Egypt, and then on to Asia, and yes, there were still berths available.
They ran to the dock, and Lenox scanned the deck of the ship while McConnell looked at the passengers still on dry land.
“Nothing,” said the doctor as the crowd thinned out, and Lenox, too, saw nothing.
“Last call!” the captain shouted out, and at the same moment McConnell yelled and pointed. “There he is!”
It was Eustace Bramwell, standing on the foredeck of the ship, unmistakable, dark-haired and wearing a gray suit. He hadn’t even thought to hide in his room until they had gone, so sure had he been that Lenox wouldn’t decipher his plans. There was a yelp behind them, but their eyes remained fixed on Eustace.
Lenox ran over to the captain. “We need to get on,” said Lenox. “There’s a criminal on board!”
“Are you the police?” the captain asked.
“No, but we’re surrogates,” said Lenox.
“Sorry. Ship’s off limits.” He prepared to walk up the gangway himself, but a last passenger streaked toward it, while McConnell reasoned without avail to the captain.
The last passenger anxiously handed his ticket over. He had absolutely no luggage.
“Third class,” the captain said, tore the ticket, and pointed up the gangway. He managed to resist the implorings of Lenox and McConnell, even forcibly repelling them once, and after five minutes of waiting for more passengers, he himself went up to the deck of the ship and cut her loose.
Lenox stood there, then, feeling hopeless, while McConnell walked off to make futile contact with the police, but then he saw something. It was the last passenger, who had rushed onto the ship without luggage. The man’s eyes were firmly focused on Eustace, and he only looked back at Lenox once. When he did, he pointed at Eustace and made an inquisitive face. Lenox nodded; yes, that was the murderer. He knew he was sealing Bramwell’s fate but he nodded anyway.
The man was dressed in a pitch-black suit. After Lenox’s nod, he walked slowly toward Eustace, stopping a few feet away and gazing intensely, hatefully, at him. It was James, the footman, Prue’s fiancé. And Lenox saw with clarity the inevitable course of events. He waved McConnell back to him as the ship slowly began to move and told him not to make any further effort. He pointed out James and Eustace, feet apart, and told the doctor what he knew would happen.
He sent word to Egypt to look for Eustace but expected no results. And six days later, when the ship docked in Cairo, he was no more surprised—when the captain remitted the following message to the English authorities, which was then repeated in the papers—than he was surprised that the sun rose in the morning.
Very little is known of the death of two men who were sailing with the HMS Britannia on a course for the Far East. On the first night of the voyage, they washed overboard very late at night, according to the captain. One was a first-class passenger, the other in third class. Authorities believe the man from first class to be Eustace Bramwell, one of the two murderers in the Jack Soames case, which was so ably cleared up by Inspector Exeter before more life was lost. The incident is believed to be an accident.…
Chapter 47
Afew days later, Lenox turned his thoughts to his Christmas visit with his brother, due to begin soon. He still wanted to take Edmund to task after Newton Duff’s revelatory comments, perhaps that evening over supper and a bottle of their father’s wine. And of course Lady Jane would be there, just a few miles off with her brother, in the house where she had grown up.
For now, though, Lenox was in a place that offered even greater measures of bliss than Lenox House, the home of his childhood. He was in Linehan’s, Bootmakers, Crown Street, in a respectable middle-class neighborhood by Leicester Square. Not the type of place he would have found on his own, he thought. Thank God for Skaggs.
“Yes, three pairs, cork-soled, two black, one brown, all lined with flannel,” he said, repeating his order. He had come in two days earlier, and now his boots were ready.
“Packed up?” asked Mr. Linehan, a
jolly, rotund, white-haired man.
“No, I shall wear the brown pair, please.” “Would you like us to wrap your old boots?” Lenox shuddered. “I hope never to see them again.”
Mr. Linehan laughed. “Well, I guarantee these, Mr. Lenox. You’re at the right place. I admit I don’t think much of the boots you’re wearing.”
“Nor do I, Mr. Linehan. I can’t abide them for another moment.”
Mr. Linehan laughed again, took the offending boots, which Lenox had slipped off, and offered the brown pair, designed specifically for his feet from the measurements that Lenox had found much pleasure in seeing Mr. Linehan take.
Lenox put on a fresh pair of socks, which he had brought especially, and then the boots, and wasn’t disappointed. Instantly warm, but soft—yes, this was all he truly needed. He gave his profuse thanks to the cobbler, received a bag with the other two pairs, blessed Skaggs for his practicality, and walked onto the street, where, despite the new snow, his feet remained warm and dry. It was a heavenly feeling.
He had two more errands before the evening trip to Lenox House. The less pleasant first. He directed his coachman to Bow Street and Scotland Yard. Today was the day of Exeter’s promotion. In combination with the diminishing crime rates in the West End, his bailiwick, there were the Marlborough forgery and the Jack Soames case to his credit.
Though it was cold, Lenox saw that Exeter and William Melville, the head of Scotland Yard, were standing on the sidewalk by the gates before headquarters, addressing a crowd of maybe fifteen journalists and a few citizens. There were a few moments of remarks from each of them, a large grin on Exeter’s face the whole time. Lenox didn’t mind especially, though he felt slightly duped.
After the remarks were over, the journalists milled about, taking pictures of the principals and of Exeter’s young family. Lenox shook Exeter’s hand without receiving much attention. But after the majority of the pictures were taken, Exeter brought a young boy of perhaps eight to see Lenox. They moved off a bit to the side.
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