The Fleet Street Murders clm-3

by Charles Finch

  Soon it was time for the standard procession between the church and the cemetery. On this no expense had been spared. First there were men on foot, an assortment of pallbearers in black, a series of young pages, and three mutes wearing black cloaks and carrying wands. All of these men, from the youngest lad to the oldest mute, were very certainly pickled to the gills on gin — a license of their profession, since they had to stand outside in the cold continually — but they did their duty solemnly.

  Next came the funeral hearse, a grand black and silver object with gold trim everywhere, and following it a line of carriages full of Exeter’s friends and relatives. His widow, a handsome, dark-haired woman, had held up admirably well, and their young son was well dressed and well behaved.

  “I have my carriage if you need a ride to the cemetery,” said Lenox to Jenkins.

  “I must be getting back to town, in fact.”

  “Look — do you think I could see Carruthers’s rooms, either today or tomorrow?”

  Lenox had expected a difficult argument, but he got none. “Yes. Certainly.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Not at all. You’ve the unofficial license of the entire Yard behind you now; in fact, I was instructed to tell you as much. I was only just going to do so.”

  “How can I get in?”

  “There’s a constable there — constables everywhere, since Exeter died and this all became so famous.”

  “You’ll send him word —”

  “Yes, go over any time.”

  “Are you officially at work on this case?” Lenox asked.

  “Now, yes.”

  “Who do you think killed Exeter?”

  “Honestly? I think it was unrelated to all this. A fluke. His job made him enemies all over the East End.”

  Lenox nodded. “Perhaps.”

  “See you soon, Charles.”

  Exeter was interred in a small cemetery not a mile from the church, and the procession made its increasingly ragged way back to Exeter’s house. It was a modest, handsomely kept two-story building, white with a thatched roof and blue shutters.

  Inside it was warm and comfortable, and Lenox had a vision of Exeter after hours, sitting by his hearth with his family around him. By now they had sloughed off the Lord Mayor and the majority of his ilk, and it was Exeter’s cousins, his uncles, his subordinates at the Yard who ate ham and drank ale. Lenox found himself with nobody quite to talk to and soon wandered outside to the side of the house for a smoke.

  It was here that he saw Exeter’s son, John.

  They had met once before. After a case that Lenox had been instrumental in solving, Exeter had taken the credit for himself and received a commendation from Scotland Yard. Lenox, used to it, offered no objection but was surprised when Exeter had invited him to the ceremony. There, by way perhaps of apology or explanation, he had introduced the eight-year-old John Exeter to Lenox with a sort of rough pride. Lenox had understood the inspector better in that moment than ever before.

  The lad was playing near a chicken coop, among the rows of a small, productive-looking garden. He had on a black suit that was dirtied at the knees because he had been kneeling between two tomato vines.

  Suddenly Lenox felt the pain of it all: Exeter had been alive, and now he was dead. The industry and hominess and practicality of the little rows of vegetables seemed somehow to summarize it all, more than the gloomy, garish funeral ever could, and it touched him profoundly.

  “Hello, John,” said Lenox.

  “Hello, Mr. Lenox,” said the boy, his face serious and handsome.

  “You remember me?”

  “Of course. My fa talks about you all the time, sir.”

  Lenox absorbed this uncertainly. “What have you got there?” he said.

  John held out his dirty hand, which clutched a toy train. “It’s the best one I’ve got,” he said.

  “Do you like trains, then?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I do, too.”

  “I want to ride one.”

  “Haven’t you?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “You will, someday soon. When is your birthday?”

  “March eighth, Mr. Lenox.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” said Lenox. “Perhaps someone will send you an even better train set on March eighth. I feel sure of it, in fact, John — just wait. Will you shake hands?”

  The boy stood up and with grave concentration put his small, sweaty brown hand into Lenox’s. “Good-bye, Mr. Lenox.”

  His pipe done, Lenox went inside to say good-bye to the widow. On the way home to Mayfair he looked out through the window of his carriage at the clear, cold day and felt the melancholy that veiled the city to his eyes.

  Dallington was waiting for him in Hampden Lane.

  “How are you?” Lenox asked.

  “Bloody awful.”

  “Gracious, what is it?”

  “He really did it, by God. It was the worst twenty minutes of my life, listening to him. He had a reason, and he — he knew exactly how it had been done.”

  “Forgive me, but — Poole?”

  “Yes, Gerry Poole. He was a different creature today than he had ever been before. He talked about plunging a knife in a man’s back as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”

  It was the most upset Lenox had ever seen the younger man, who was always so quick with a joke and a smile.

  “Did he give you any details?”

  “Not really.”

  “Anything about Martha Claes?”

  “Not a thing.”

  The return of the Belgian maid (who had apparently been moving along the Norfolk coast, unsuccessfully trying to find a way out of the country) had offered very few details about the murder of Winston Carruthers. She was in police custody now, but according to Jenkins she had only said she had acted as Poole’s assistant, helping him gain access to Carruthers and standing by as he murdered him. She had returned seeking immunity to prosecution for providing evidence and refused to speak another word until she got it.

  Dallington stayed for a few minutes longer, then left, still disconsolate. Lenox had felt that sort of anguish before, in his early days as an amateur detective.

  Despite the confession, he had work to do still, he felt. Who had killed Inspector Exeter and Hiram Smalls? Not Gerald Poole, certainly; and if his proxies had done it, why and who were they? Almost at the same hour as Exeter was lying on his deathbed, Poole had been giving his confession. It made no sense.

  So Lenox decided to persevere — and to begin with Winston Carruthers’s rooms, a few streets away.

  It was dark by now and cold outside. He waited for his carriage on the curb, stamping his feet to stay warm. Eventually it came and he stepped in.

  Just as he was going to close the door, a voice called from behind him, “You dropped a penny, sir.”

  It was one of the footmen who had brought the horses around.

  “Cheers,” said Lenox.

  He took the penny in his hand — and as he sat down his mind started racing.

  A penny.

  What had he found under Hiram Smalls’s bed? A farthing, a halfpenny, a penny, threepence, sixpence, and a shilling, he had told the warden of Newgate. All the coins of the realm…

  Smalls had been sending a message, Lenox realized with a thud in his chest, a message pointing to the man who made those coins — at the Mint.

  Then Lenox remembered: He had a story about the Royal Mint, Moon had said of Carruthers. A story about the Mint — had he discovered something about the Mint? Corruption there? Was he trying to blackmail Barnard?

  Just like that, Lenox remembered something funny — Barnard had called Carruthers “Win,” his common nickname, at Lady Nevin’s party but claimed he hadn’t known the man the press called Winston.

  A last thought flitted into his mind about what Jane had said, George Barnard was to have a party, but he’s gone to Geneva instead.

  It appeared that these murders led
back, as half the crimes in London did, to one man: George Barnard. Who now had fled to Geneva.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  It hung together in his head, the whole thing, but only tenuously — a number of disparate facts that couldn’t bear much weight, that only hinted at the truth, but that together seemed definite. For instance, as he worked it through in his mind he remembered that Smalls’s mother had mysteriously been relieved of a hundred-pound debt. Mightn’t Barnard have paid that? If he had, then Smalls would have only felt comfortable leaving a veiled clue (the coins) rather than an outright declaration.

  Then there was Carruthers’s article about the Mint, of which Barnard had been head! He must find that. Could it be the motive — that Carruthers, a corrupt and corruptible soul, was trying to blackmail Barnard because he had discovered the man’s theft from the Mint?

  “Poole is innocent,” muttered Lenox under his breath. Then in a louder voice he said, “Stop the carriage!”

  He ran inside and took from a locked door in his desk the one-page file on Barnard he had compiled from his hundreds of pages of facts collecting and speculation and read it, searching for a clue to Winston Carruthers’s murder — and to Hiram Smalls’s murder.

  The file distilled all of the crimes in which he had discovered Barnard’s involvement — or thought he had — and combined notes on them with a biographical sketch. The most elusive part of his research for the latter concerned Barnard’s recent time at the head of the Royal Mint, which was a well-guarded place both physically and informationally — a yellowing building on Little Tower Hill, near the Tower of London, which stood behind a tall wrought-iron fence, regal and, in a busy street, silent. Inside, delicate machinery converted bars of pure gold and silver into exactly weighted coins.

  Digging further into the past Lenox had found, however, that Barnard’s tracks were everywhere. Lenox kept a file of London’s unsolved crimes, including both ones he had worked on and others, and so far he had attached roughly one in every nineteen to Barnard. It didn’t sound like much until one took in the immense variety and size of that file. There was the Astor Grange fire, not five miles from the city, when thousands of pounds’ worth of rare letters from Isaac Newton to his puritanical father were thought to have burned; Barnard had been staying with the private collector of the letters at the time and was well known to be fascinated by the history of Newton, who had himself once been Master of — yes, the Royal Mint. That was the higher end of things. There were also gin drunks found dead in alleyways, illegal casinos raided and their monies confiscated by people almost certainly impersonating officers of Scotland Yard, a thousand minor crimes and a hundred major ones all leading back to one man.

  Lenox had for years known Barnard differently, as a politician and businessman with an ostentatious but also genuinely beautiful house off of Grosvenor Square, a place large enough to host one of London’s most famous balls. That annual event aside, however, his commonplace birth in Manchester had prevented his access to the highest tiers of society. Instead he lived in an aristocratic demimonde, the wives of his colleagues prejudiced against seeing him socially. His friends had been snobbishly chosen, men with titles and standing but also possessed of some fatal social flaw — no money, no intelligence, no scruples. He would drop their names, moving slightly higher with each new friendship, until he realized they were no good, when he would drop them instead.

  When he had left Parliament for the Royal Mint, however, he had become difficult to ignore and had finally gained access to the best clubs and the best houses. There are many men who sit in Parliament, and some of them make soap; on the other hand the Mint has only one Master, and he is an exalted personage. It was at this time that Barnard had begun to court the unresponsive Lady Jane, whom Lenox had subsequently rescued from the fate of being one of the richest women in the city.

  Even then, though, there had been one peculiarity about Barnard: It was a common parlor game across London to guess from which obscure source his wealth had come. At twenty-six he had been a shipping house’s clerk. He quit that job and four years later bought the shipping house. His activities in the intervening time were utterly mysterious. At the age of thirty-three he had entered Parliament.

  Then, just over a year ago, Lenox had been investigating the murder of a young maid who had been in Barnard’s employ. The man himself had no involvement in the matter (Lenox had since had plenty of opportunities to observe and note how clean Barnard kept his own hands) but almost incidentally the detective had discovered that a sum of nineteen thousand pounds was missing from the Mint’s new batch of currency. Such a small sum, in the context of the vast numbers involved, and yet such a large sum in the context of the world! Exeter and his family might have lived on it their whole lives! It was this nineteen thousand pounds that had changed Lenox’s opinion of Barnard — before, he had seen him as a petty, vain, but tolerable man. Now Lenox recognized him to be perhaps the most powerful and dangerous man in London.

  There was no doubt of it — Barnard was a fiendishly clever sod, and he had played his hand very carefully and very well over the years. Now Winston Carruthers and Simon Pierce were dead because of him, and perhaps Hiram Smalls and Inspector Exeter, too.

  But why? He remembered Dallington’s crucial bit of information — Carruthers was corruptible. Had Barnard for some reason bribed the man and then elected to silence him?

  Lenox scanned the rest of the sheet, his private and carefully compiled dossier. For muscle Barnard used the Hammer Gang, a group of East Londoners each with a green tattoo of a hammer curled around one eyebrow. Though he had a large staff in his home and at the Mint, he didn’t seem to have any particular trusted assistant.

  Then something clicked into place — No green, the end of Hiram Smalls’s letter had said. Could it have been a reference to the tattoo? In effect, “Don’t get your tattoo before you pass this final test and gain entry to the Hammer Gang”? If so, Smalls had evidently failed the last test — and paid a high price for his failure. It seemed like a plausible interpretation of that mysterious phrase No green, in particular because Barnard probably knew by now that his association with the Hammers was no longer secret. He couldn’t have the man who killed Simon Pierce bear a tattoo that would link them.

  Geneva — what could be there? Since retiring from the Mint (doubtless much richer than when he had begun the job, thought Lenox bitterly) he had been consulting with the government on several minor issues but had in general been very quiet.

  It was ominous.

  All of this flurried through Lenox’s mind in a matter of moments as he held the single sheet that defined George Barnard’s misdeeds. Then he thought that the case needed more than he and Dallington could do and called for his carriage.

  It was a long drive to his destination, perhaps thirty minutes. Oxley Crescent was a small neighborhood on the southern edge of London, full of closely spaced but pleasant houses, each with a small porch and garden in front. It was to a white house with dark shutters and a charmingly askew chimney that Lenox came when he needed Skaggs.

  Skaggs’s wife answered the door, an insistent and gregarious creature who first shed a tear over poor Inspector Exeter, then scolded Lenox for coming to take her husband away again, and finally insisted he kiss the baby slung low on her hip, all as a toll before he could get through to the house.

  Rupert Skaggs, a man who had once been the best middleweight boxer for a two-mile radius, was fearsome looking, with a bald head, a fat, intelligent face, and a long scar across the left side of his neck, but in truth his wife and his three children had lent him some docility, and he was quite happy in his little home. His looks still often came in handy, however; he was the best private investigator in England, if you asked Lenox. Once Skaggs had found a job as a waiter in order to gather information for him, and since then Lenox had never doubted him. He was forced to pay for Skaggs out of his own pocket, but then, he always reasoned, what higher purpose than justice was money for? Besi
des, less loftily, Skaggs always saved him so much time and effort — much of the unrewarding work of detection belonged to him, under Lenox’s supervision.

  “Hello, Mr. Lenox,” said Skaggs with a pipe in one hand. He had come onto the porch at his wife’s call.

  “How do you do, Mr. Skaggs?”

  “Passably well. I haven’t seen you for some time.”

  Now, this was true — and true because of Dallington. Lenox shifted slightly. “No, and I’m very sorry to call on you so late in the evening. I hope I haven’t interrupted supper?”

  “No, not quite yet.”

  “That’s all right then.”

  “Will you come in, Mr. Lenox? Business has been going well, but I always enjoyed our work together. Thank you for the silver rattle you sent after Emily was born.”

  They walked inside and sat together in Skaggs’s business room, a small square space at the very front of the house that just barely fit two chairs and a table.

  “You’re quite welcome, I’m sure — and in fact I come on work today, too.”

  “What sort of work?”

  “You’ve heard about Inspector Exeter?”

  “Aye, I have. It’s very sad,” said Skaggs solemnly.

  “It is,” agreed Lenox.

  “Are you trying to find out who killed him?”

  “I think I know, in fact.”

  “Do you!?”

  “Perhaps — yes, I think so.”

  “How may I help, Mr. Lenox?”

  “I need you to go to Geneva, to follow a man.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Lenox sat with Skaggs for some time, giving him all the details about Barnard’s flight across the Channel (because Skaggs had once helped Lenox track Barnard once before, he wasn’t surprised to be spying on such an illustrious man), and then left Oxley Crescent. He was due to see Lady Jane that evening, but his mind was racing. Instead he had his carriage drop him at McConnell’s house, sending it home with a message to Jane that he would be an hour or so later than he had promised.