The Fleet Street Murders clm-3

by Charles Finch

  Poole looked genuinely baffled at this. “I didn’t think twice about it, of course.”

  “Yet it was missing from the table and hasn’t been discovered anywhere among his personal effects.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Did you truly kill Winston Carruthers, Mr. Poole?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  There was such conviction in the lad’s voice that Lenox believed —

  Suddenly a possibility occurred to him.

  “Your father was in Parliament, I believe?” said Lenox. “Before the Crimean War began?”

  “Yes,” said Poole cautiously. “Why?”

  There was a long pause. “Did he ever know — or did you ever know — a man named George Barnard?”

  Poole’s face crumpled, but he managed to choke out the word “Who?”

  “George Barnard?” said Dallington with a disbelieving laugh. “That codger.”

  Lenox continued to stare at the prisoner, however. “Barnard? You knew him?”

  At length Poole nodded very slightly.

  “Then you really did kill Winston Carruthers?”

  “I told you, yes.” Poole began to cry softly.

  “My God,” Lenox whispered.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  George Barnard?” said Dallington again, uncertainly this time. Poole spoke as if he hadn’t heard his friend. “For the last months he has been my only friend in London.”

  “He knew your father?” said Lenox.

  Poole nodded. “Yes. He came to see me the moment I arrived here from the Continent. Soon we were together most afternoons, talking — first of generic subjects but then more specifically of the past. I had never been interested in what my father did or didn’t do. It was too painful, and I tried never to be interested in the world — the world at large, I mean. Friends, a roll of the dice, books, all of those things occupied my time. Mr. Barnard told me every detail of my father’s death, and the sudden exposure to something I had studiously ignored all of my life — it opened a wound. A deep wound. It changed me.”

  “So you killed Carruthers?” asked Dallington doubtfully.

  “I’ve a feeling there were many intermediate steps,” said Lenox, “but tell me — why did you confess, after denying it at first?”

  “The guilt became too much.”

  “How could you have done it?” asked Dallington.

  “I don’t have any idea. It sounds funny, but truly I don’t… I go over it in my mind and can’t quite puzzle together how it happened. It seems like a dream.”

  “Why have you been protecting Barnard?” said Lenox.

  A stubborn look came onto his face. “An informer killed my father. I never want to be a rat.”

  “Is that what Barnard preached to you? The nobility of protecting a scoundrel?”

  “A scoundrel?” said Poole. “He’s been a friend to me.”

  “No,” said Lenox. “He hasn’t. Let’s leave that aside and tell us how you went from a mild friendship with George Barnard to killing a man in cold blood.”

  “In hot blood,” said Poole. “I’ve never been drunker or angrier in my life.”

  “Well? I want to help you with the police and the judge, Poole, but come now, why did you act as you did?”

  “It’s a secret, but George told me — he told me that this man Carruthers framed my father.”

  “What?” said Dallington.

  Poole sat back triumphantly, and a deep sadness, a pity, rose up in Lenox’s breast. How eager we are to rewrite our fathers’ stories, some of us; the delusions of the heart.

  “I think your father was very probably guilty,” said the detective quietly.

  “No,” said Poole, shaking his head confidently.

  “Well, leave that aside, too. How did Barnard persuade you to kill Carruthers?”

  “He didn’t do a single damn thing, Mr. Lenox, except listen to me talk, and tell me how good a man my father was, and concur that he was undeserving of his terrible fate. I tremble to think of him, my poor father, knowing that he was innocent as he walked to the gallows.”

  “Barnard never incited you to violence?”

  “On the contrary, he advised against it.”

  Clever fiend, thought Lenox. “Then how did you find Carruthers? How did you come to kill him?”

  “It was the strangest coincidence. One night I was drunk, and on the street I bumped into a woman — or perhaps she bumped into me.”

  “The latter, I reckon,” said Lenox, who knew what would come next.

  “It was a woman I knew from my years in Belgium, who had run a tavern near our house.”

  “Martha Claes,” said Lenox.

  “Yes,” answered Poole with some surprise. “I never liked her all that well when I was a child, but we fell into talking about old times, and I asked her what she did now, and she said she kept house for six tenants. She described them all to me in detail.”

  “Including Carruthers,” said Dallington. “You were set up, Poole! He was set up, Lenox!”

  Poole’s confidence seemed to falter slightly. “No, it was a coincidence.”

  “Barnard found her somehow and installed her as Carruthers’s landlady — money will do a great deal, and combined with a dangerous mind can do evil more quickly than anything else… So he put her in your path,” said Lenox. “May I hazard a guess? She hated Carruthers. She thought he was the very devil. He beat his mistress and stole from the poor and threatened her children. Is that about the whole of it?”

  “Yes,” said Poole, now less certain, “and that he blackmailed people. She described all of the lives he ruined through the knowledge he acquired as a journalist. You think George — what, paid her to do that?”

  “I’m certain of it, in fact,” said Lenox. “So Martha Claes — what? What happened?”

  “At last I let slip about my father.”

  “She suggested revenge?”

  “Not precisely — or I don’t think so — I can’t remember, Mr. Lenox.”

  “What about Simon Pierce, though? Didn’t that baffle you?” asked Dallington.

  “Not especially,” said Poole. “It was an odd coincidence, of course, but I never heard of the man, and I thought the newspapers had the wrong end of the stick, describing the two as linked. I knew they weren’t, in fact.”

  Lenox laughed bitterly, but all he said was, “What about your meeting with Smalls?”

  “That happened precisely as I described it, queerly enough.”

  “You haven’t put any of this together, Mr. Poole? You’re an innocent indeed.”

  “Listen — I’ll never believe ill of George Barnard.”

  “That’s your business,” said Lenox. “What happened on the day of the murder?”

  “I was at George’s, and somehow I got drunker than I usually did — got quite badly drunk, in fact.”

  “Listen to yourself, you fool!” said Dallington. “I haven’t the slightest notion of how George Barnard is involved in all of this, but Lenox has it right!”

  Poole ignored the outburst. “He gave me a present that day — it was —” Suddenly true doubt dawned on his brow. “It was the knife.”

  “Did you pay Martha? When you went over that night?”

  “I gave her a little something, as a token of old times.”

  “Barnard must have, too,” said Lenox. “He managed it terribly well. You were seen with Smalls, he had someone who matched your appearance buy the knife under your name, and best of all he must have had Martha burn the document Carruthers was writing and anything else she could find. Christ.”

  The doubt in Poole’s eyes had become full and panicked. “What an idiot I’ve been! What a drunken idiot! But then my father — he — he can’t have been innocent, can he?”

  These last words he said more to himself than to either visitor, and without another glance in their direction he went to the door and asked the guard to return him to his cell.

  It was awful. Dallington look
ed shocked to the core of his being, and Lenox felt with something approaching fear the powerful mind that had orchestrated the journalist’s death.

  But why? Why?

  There was one thing that pleased Lenox in a small way; Exeter had been right. Hiram Smalls and Gerald Poole had murdered Simon Pierce and Winston Carruthers. It was a vindication. Was it for this, though, that he had died? Or had he discovered something else?

  He and Dallington had left Newgate Prison and were walking down the street. The younger man, plainly shaken, was silent.

  At length Lenox said, “There are times when this work destroys my affection for humanity. Look at this gang — the father a traitor to England, the son weak willed and impulsive and drunken, Barnard half a devil, even Carruthers a corruptible old toad.”

  Dallington didn’t respond, except to nod in a distracted way.

  “I daresay that’s the peril of choosing a job you think will do good, whether it’s government or the military or the clergy. Neither a baker nor a banker ever sees the same ugliness.”

  “Who is Barnard?” said Dallington. “That is — I know the man, but what have I missed?”

  “What everyone else has missed, too,” said Lenox.

  He explained at length his initial suspicions of Barnard and then his lengthening dossier of evidence against the man, explained the nature of his small crimes and his large ones, and how they intertwined; explained the mystery of Barnard’s great wealth and the money that had gone missing after the murder of his maid. They walked through the bitter cold, impervious in their respective sorrow and anger, until they had reached Lenox’s home again.

  “How about a whisky?” said Lenox. “It’s early, I know, but nonetheless —”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Did you not listen to Poole talking about his drunken fury? No, I scarcely think I need a drink at the moment.” Dallington muttered something about troubles coming home to roost and then said, “Well? How do I help?”

  “Do you wish to?”

  “I take it as a given that I will.”

  “It’s not a pleasant matter.”

  “You explained it to me when I first came to you — that it wasn’t all heroic or happy work.”

  They were in Lenox’s library. “Then find out what Barnard has been doing for the past few weeks, if you wish. I already have a man tracking him down in Geneva.”

  “Geneva?”

  Lenox explained.

  With a determined scowl, Dallington nodded, said good-bye, and went out.

  Lenox stood for a moment and then poured himself that whisky.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  For a long time Lady Jane had known that Lenox felt a personal distaste for her old suitor, George Barnard, but hoping to protect her he had never quite confided in her his suspicions about the man, though she had seemed perhaps to perceive them.

  Similarly, when he visited her that evening she could sense something was wrong. To make matters worse, now that the sheer relief of once again being together was gone, there remained the awkwardness of their London-Stirrington correspondence.

  She was at his house now, where they were eating supper together.

  “Shall you try for a different seat soon, Charles, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s still alluring to me, the idea of Parliament, but there are other men in line to try for open seats, I fear.”

  “Clearly they should make you a lord and have done with it.”

  Lenox laughed. “Clearly.”

  There was a pause, during which each took a sip of wine. He didn’t know what she might be thinking, but in his own brain stirred the uneasy thought that in fact a lord or at least an MP would be more fitting for Jane, who was such a woman of the world, who knew so intimately all the mores of that little cadre in which politics and society mingled and became one.

  Her thoughts were elsewhere, however. She looked at him rather strangely.

  “Have I got sauce on my chin?” asked Lenox with a smile.

  “No, no,” she said, smiling back. “Only, I had an idea.”

  “What?”

  “Our houses — what do you think we should do after we’re married?”

  It pleased him that she spoke of their marriage so practically. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Mine is a bit bigger, but yours is warmer in the winter.”

  “I should hate to give up my morning room, and you your library,” she said.

  “Well — compromise is a necessity, I suppose,” he said, feeling uneasily that she was about to suggest they live separately. It was a very faint agony, love. He thought of that old line: Ever till now/When men were fond, I smil’d, and wonder’d how.

  She put his mind at ease, however, with her proposition. “What I thought was — well, that we might join our two houses together, Charles.”

  “Physically? Knock down the walls?”

  “Yes, exactly — or at least, one wall in each floor. We wouldn’t want to knock down the wall between your library and that coat-room I have, but — for instance — we could make a very large bedroom on the second floor?”

  Lenox smiled. “I think it’s a wonderful idea,” he said. “It will be a union of minds and a union of houses, eh?”

  Jane laughed, and they spent the rest of supper excitedly talking about their new plans.

  It was a respite to see his betrothed, but by the next morning his mind was again fixed on George Barnard. He decided to go see Jenkins at Scotland Yard and have a talk with him about it all.

  Jenkins would be the third person Lenox took into his confidence on the subject of George Barnard, after McConnell and Dallington, when previously only he and Graham had known. Part of him doubted the wisdom of this, but another part of him was glad that he could unburden himself of this obsession that had so weighed on his spirit.

  He sent back word for Jenkins through the long corridors of Scotland Yard, and soon the young inspector came to fetch him.

  “How is the mood here?” asked Lenox. “About Exeter?”

  “Nine parts frantic for every part sad. Everyone down to the lad selling newspapers is half mad trying to figure it out. It’s an intolerable state of affairs — doing more harm than good, I reckon. Speaking of which, did you visit Carruthers’s rooms, as we discussed?”

  “Yes, I did, as a matter of fact. It’s why I came to speak to you.”

  “Oh?”

  Lenox then explained the entire convoluted history of his suspicion of Barnard; he tried to be concise and complete but found himself rambling slightly. He could see the doubt on his interlocutor’s face.

  Jenkins sighed heavily when Lenox had finished. “George Barnard?” he said at length, rather quizzically. “Why are you telling me this theory?”

  “At some moment, now or in the future, I may ask you to arrest him. I hope that you’ll do so without hesitation and let the explanations come after. Our window of opportunity may be small indeed, when we find it.”

  “He’s a public figure, Lenox.”

  “So was Attila the Hun.”

  Jenkins laughed. “You’ve rarely led me astray, of course, but — well, here’s one thing — why Smalls? We’ve got such a plausible link between Smalls and Poole. Doesn’t it seem more likely that it was a straight transaction between them than… well, than what?”

  “After all, don’t you see — it would have been so foolish for Poole to kill both Carruthers and Pierce, two men who were eternally linked by nothing except his father!”

  “That does strike me as your most probable argument,” said Jenkins, “but then why would Smalls willingly kill Simon Pierce?”

  Here was a question that he could answer, thankfully. “The Hammer Gang,” he said. “As I said, they’re linked to Barnard. It was to frame Poole.”

  “Smalls hadn’t a Hammer Gang tattoo, I’m sure of that. The hammer above the eyebrow — ugly thing.”

  “I think Barnard may have recruited som
ebody new to the gang, in an effort to be particularly careful. Smalls didn’t have a tattoo” — here Lenox paused to explain the words No green — “and he was ultimately disposable.”

  “Who do you think killed him?”

  Lenox shrugged. “At any time there are half a dozen of the Hammers floating in and out of Newgate — one of them would have done it, I imagine.”

  “Very tidily, too,” said Jenkins skeptically.

  “I’m sure the idea was Barnard’s. If only we could find his liaison within the gang — for it’s surely impossible that he knows more than one or two of them.”

  “Smalls, then? Just did it for money? Or to be initiated?”

  “Both, to be sure. There was something else as well.”

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Smalls told me that she was only months away from debtors’ prison. A hundred-pound debt, which she could never have paid, and Hiram wiped it clear in one moment. That’s what she said. Barnard must have used Smalls’s mother as leverage over the man.”

  “Yes,” said Jenkins thoughtfully.

  “Hence the cryptic clues — the note, the stack of coins,” said Lenox. “If he came right out and said anything that might save his skin, his mother would go straight to prison. The clues were a kind of insurance.”

  “It hangs together, I suppose,” said Jenkins, “but most importantly, Lenox, I don’t understand what Barnard’s motive for all this mayhem might have been.”

  Lenox had been afraid of having to address this. “I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. In general I believe it’s because Barnard’s whole criminal career was somehow in danger of being exposed. I think Carruthers may have been blackmailing Barnard. He wrote an article about the Mint, which I just read again — it doesn’t contain any revelations, but Carruthers might have found something.”

  Jenkins looked skeptical. “That’s all? What about Exeter? Pierce?”

  “Pierce was cover, I told you, a red herring. Carruthers was the true target.”

  “If only there was any proof beyond your word.”

  Lenox pulled his valise onto his lap. “Here are the newspaper articles Carruthers kept about G. Farmer. Read over them?”