He turned away and looked across the great river. The high dome of St. Paul’s stood there far, far above the low-slung buildings around it. A smokeless day, clouds chased away by the sun, the sky a pretty blue—too pure for this to have happened. A very small flock of white birds rose out of a rooftop.
There was some sense of purpose in his spirit at the moment: this was the moment that he had known would come. It struck him that it was the dome that was false to him here. The woman who had died was real. This woman had lived; she had breathed as they all breathed here upon Bankside now; now she was gone. That must count for something.
He wondered if he was as unflappable as he supposed, because his heart was also beating hard.
The cortege headed slowly toward the police wagon, and Lenox, lagging them a bit, saw something glinting in the sand and stone of the beach. It broke his reverie.
The long board on which the body had lain had left a rectangular imprint upon the sand, flattening it. He knelt down and stared closely at the area. It was empty, except for the object that had caught his eye. He used his handkerchief to lift it carefully from the sand that had threatened to bury it, like a half-buried toy forgotten at the shore by a careless child. It was a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles, the glass in them newly shattered.
CHAPTER NINE
When Lenox crossed his threshold again three hours later, he felt alive to the end of every nerve.
In an hour or two, there’d be the first newspapers of the evening. (Apparently the evening started at progressively earlier hours as the newspaper wars grew in intensity—inevitably one day soon, luncheon would mark the commencement of evening.) But for now, just now, the case was still his.
He was also—he sighed inwardly—officially on the payroll of Scotland Yard now.
Half a pound a week! He would have given ten pounds a week not to have that half a pound. His parents must never discover the fact.
Anyhow, that was all background noise. What really mattered was the sense of urgency he felt on behalf of the dead woman.
This made it slightly dispiriting when he saw the figure of Mrs. Huggins awaiting him in the entrance hall upon his return: an inevitable delay.
She was a superlative housekeeper, Mrs. Huggins. It had bloomed into a bright day, but even under the hardhearted glare of the sunlight, the rooms were dustless, impeccable, the sun exposing nothing except the virtue of the housekeeper’s abilities. The very fireplaces were clean. She was a cynosure.
“Hello, Mrs. Huggins.”
“Good day, Mr. Lenox,” she said.
There had been a certain school-holiday giddiness in the first days he and Graham spent in this flat above St. James’s Square—a maid, a cook, and a bootboy lurking in the back quarters but otherwise very little interference, two fellows in their early twenties, not much furniture, resident in London for the first time.
Then Huggins.
“I’m afraid of her,” Lenox had finally whispered on the fifth day after her arrival.
It had been a stormy November morning. Graham, who had never skulked in his life, hesitated, then replied, “I am, too, sir.”
She was a fine-boned, blue-eyed woman of fifty or thereabouts. Her husband had died twenty years before, leaving her the proceeds of the sale of a small but prosperous coaching inn that he had owned in Kent. She had immediately put this into 4-percent annuities and—Lenox had all this information from his mother—taken herself to London to find employment, vowing to let the money she had inherited grow behind her back, invisible, compounding itself at whatever rate it would.
Being a person of discretion and elegance, from a background of highborn servants, she had found work as the head of a large, aristocratic household, and lived thereafter upon her wages.
Lenox was her retirement. These twenty years on from her husband’s death, she still wore black, but the money she’d inherited had moved more cheerfully on from its previous owner’s passage out of the muck of the living world, and she was now a well-to-do woman. This, too, Lenox knew from his mother. With one eye toward retirement upon the south coast, she had decided to look for lighter work, after nearly a decade of managing the household of a certain Lady Hamilton, who had four children, nine grandchildren, twenty-seven rooms, and the most unrepentantly unfaithful husband in Parliament (not a contest with light competition).
It was clear that Mrs. Huggins didn’t miss what seemed to have been, from her descriptions, like the almost inhuman labor involved in that work—by her account, she had never risen later than five, nor retired earlier than midnight—but that she did miss being a force of power and authority in the very center of London society. Lady Hamilton had breakfasted with cabinet ministers and earls. Lenox breakfasted with Graham.
Her favorite phrase was “In Lady Hamilton’s household,” which she could apply with a poet’s ingenuity to nearly any situation; if they had been in a lifeboat upon the Pacific Ocean, subsisting on fish and rainwater, she would have managed it.
“In Lady Hamilton’s household, they took only the Times and the Mail,” she had said severely on her very first morning there, seeing Lenox and Graham nearly buried in newsprint over breakfast.
“Is that right?” Lenox had replied sunnily. “How dull!”
“Lord Hamilton did not find it so, I believe, sir,” she had said, and brushed away—never with anything less than the utmost grace in her motions—a few of the crumbs that had fallen to the table.
The litany had gone on over the months. In Lady Hamilton’s household, the pots were scoured with lye each Sunday; in Lady Hamilton’s household, the houseplants were trimmed to certain dimensions (Lenox had been only very vaguely aware that there were houseplants in his possession, was still not certain from whence they had come, and could not have come within a foot of telling you their dimensions, responsibility for which he had immediately deposed in Mrs. Huggins); in Lady Hamilton’s household, the charwoman never expected Sunday afternoon to herself; in Lady Hamilton’s household—
Well, there alone, Lenox concluded at last, Eve had never plucked the apple from the tree and doomed mankind to its present state of fallenness.
Mrs. Huggins had at first been appalled by Graham, presumably because of his familiarity with Lenox and their idiosyncratic relationship. But Graham’s discretion, the seriousness with which he took her complaints, and his obvious, unstinting dedication both to the excitements and the drudgeries of his position had won her over.
And in a queer way, she loved Lenox. His mother had been a frequent guest at Lady Hamilton’s—that connection was how Mrs. Huggins had arrived in her present position—and the housekeeper had from the first extended him a long line of mental credit for that fact, and now sometimes even seemed angrily fond of him.
Not this early afternoon, however.
“Mr. Lenox, sir—”
“I am sorry to say that I am exceedingly busy today, Mrs. Huggins,” Lenox said as he strode past her, tossing his light coat casually onto the console table by the door. The spectacles were carefully preserved in the pocket of his jacket, which he kept on.
“Sir—”
“I am also next door to starvation. Could you please bring me a pot of tea and a sandwich with Stilton and cranberry? I saw someone eating a sandwich of that exact description and I crave it.”
She hesitated. “Yes, sir.”
“The tea hotter than the devil and twice as strong, if you please.”
“As you wish, sir,” she said.
He went into his library.
The reprieve would be momentary. He walked to the table by the windows where he took breakfast and for a moment allowed himself to gaze at the London day.
His anger at the men and women passing each other on the streets had dissipated, the men and women hanging from the omnibuses, reclining in the new grass of the park. In its place was a feeling of tenderness. He wished they might remain innocent of such violence as he had seen this morning.
It had wounded him beyond his expectations
to see that woman’s body; for all that he had read about bodies like it, for all that he had been galvanized by the desire to discover the secrets of its demise.
Lenox removed a handkerchief from an inner pocket—one of the blemishless, brilliant-white handkerchiefs that Mrs. Huggins somehow produced, soft as snow.
He unfolded it and laid it upon the bare table, then took the crushed spectacles from his pocket and placed them on the handkerchief.
He sat and examined them for three or four ruminative minutes. Finally he picked up a pen and made a few notes. Their owner was a male; shortsighted; accustomed to working in low light; not rich, but not quite destitute; and it was highly possible he was not originally from London.
These conclusions matched his image of the author of the letter. Was that a coincidence of his mind’s own creation? He must guard against fulfilling his wishes—stick to the object itself.
As he was finishing his transcription of his observations, Mrs. Huggins came into the room with a silver tray.
If Huggins had a redeeming virtue in Lenox’s eyes—he could have lived with handkerchiefs not quite so luxuriously ivoried and softened, though it was true that Elizabeth had commented favorably on one he had lent her—it was trays like this one. Mrs. Huggins was at once a weedy woman and a natural feeder. There was some wellspring of generosity in her that never came through in her words or features, but did appear on the trays.
This one had a pot of tea, cream and sugar, several sandwiches, a plate of biscuits, and some seed-crackers heaped with a chunky orange-colored chutney, somewhere between marmalade and vinegared cabbage, which she made herself and which was of a magical deliciousness. The severest he had ever seen her was when he praised this chutney; a sure sign of her pride in it. She was a very Christian woman.
Before she had set the tray down, and before he could preempt her, she said, “In Lady Hamilton’s household, Mr. Lenox, the month of May invariably meant a thorough cleaning of the rugs.”
“That’s fine, then. Please take a free hand with the rugs.”
“And in Lady Hamilton’s household, May was also the month we washed the windows from outside. It means hiring a gentleman, sir.”
“Consider yourself to have a free hand with regard to the windows, too.”
“Also in Lady Hamilton’s household, sir—”
But here Lenox cut her off. He had already eaten a gingerbread biscuit whole, but now he looked up as sternly as it was possible to look with a youthful face and mouthful of gingerbread biscuit, emboldened, perhaps, by the morning’s events.
“I am not Lady Hamilton, Mrs. Huggins,” he said through the biscuit, in a choked but severe tone.
“Sir, Lady—”
He swallowed painfully quickly, just so that he could interrupt her. “I do not live in Eaton Square.”
“No, sir. But Lady Hamilton, sir—”
“I do not serve on the board of the Ladies’ Floral Society.”
“Sir, Lady Hamilton’s household—”
“The duties of that position would defeat me completely.”
“Sir—”
“I do not have a dressmaker in Paris.”
“If I could, sir—”
“In short, as I am attempting to convey, I am not Lady Hamilton, Mrs. Huggins.”
“Sir, I—”
“If I were Lady Hamilton, the shock to Lord Hamilton would be profound, I imagine.”
“Sir—”
“Life-altering, one might even say.”
“Sir—”
He held up a hand, and for the first time saw Mrs. Huggins take in the pair of crushed spectacles on the table alongside her beautifully overloaded tray.
She stared hard for a moment, then looked at him. The admission of defeat in her face was temporary. “I can return, sir.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Huggins. Thank you.”
And as she retreated, perhaps because his mind had briefly been otherwise occupied, it suddenly came to him what had bothered him about the area under the plank that had borne the anonymous body of the woman, garlanded in flowers, who had presumably floated down the Thames just as the trunk had floated to Walnut Island.
It hadn’t been wet.
And neither had the plank. Each, five feet from the lapping water, dry as a bone. He stared at the spectacles, stunned, for this fact changed so much.
CHAPTER TEN
Graham returned at ten past two that afternoon. He looked exhausted. He didn’t waste time on either an explanation or an apology for his long absence. “There’s been another letter to the Challenger, sir,” he said.
He set a folded piece of paper down in front of Lenox, who had been lingering over the remains of his lunch, thinking. He picked up the letter. “This is a copy?”
“Yes, sir. Transcribed from memory immediately after I left rather than from the letter itself, unfortunately. I had to look over the constable’s shoulder.”
“Why’s that?”
“The editor at the Challenger was reluctant even to let him see it, sir. Much less myself.”
“Well done then.”
“I cannot promise its exactness, sir.”
Lenox was reading. “I’m sure it’s close enough,” he said distractedly.
“We shall have the true wording when the Challenger publishes it, I would imagine, sir.” Graham glanced over at the silent grandfather clock in the corner of the room. “They plan to run it at six this evening.”
Lenox followed his valet’s eyes to the clock, then settled back in his chair to read the letter carefully.
Sirs,
Did Cain wait a month? Patience likely suited Abel better—he had all of eternity before him, after all. Cain must have wished to return to violence as soon as possible. It is addictive, gentlemen—murder, I mean. Murder is addictive. I would be surprised if Cain’s first was his last.
Yet I find no difficulty in imagining a wait of one month more. I have committed a second perfect crime. I observe already a livelier reaction to this one than to the first. I am gratified. The month will give me the pleasure of watching further, unwatched myself, and laying my marvelous plans.
The magical number of every civilization on earth, from the Angles to the Saxons to the Zulus, is three. Why? Impossible to say. Nevertheless, after a third perfect crime, I shall slip beneath London city’s surface again. Rather like a body slipping into the water! In a century perhaps the world will know my name—Cain’s name. Until then, as Abel did, I will wait.
In faith,
Your ponderous correspondent
Lenox read the letter through twice.
Then he leaned back. “Any thoughts?” he said to Graham.
“He seems madder this time.”
“Yes. It was written closer to the commission of the crime. His blood was stirred up.” Lenox tapped the letter against the table. “No less pretentious.”
“Indeed not, sir.”
“A great deal of biblical fervor.”
“Arrogance, too, sir.”
“I wonder why he calls himself ponderous.”
“Perhaps it may be a joke, sir?”
The detective sat back in his chair thinking. “Perhaps. He does not strike me as a joking sort.” Remembering himself, he gestured for Graham to sit. He rang the bell, which produced the housemaid, Clara, whom he asked to bring more tea. “It was awfully clever of you to get this, Graham.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I should double your pay.”
“I agree, sir.”
“Well, I’m not going to, that would be absurd.”
Graham smiled his inscrutable, very occasional smile. This was his favorite part of his job—there was no question about that—and though Lenox’s remarks would have seemed rudely commercial in the circumstances to an outsider, to the two of them it was quite obviously a placeholder as they thought about the letter; a form of mutual reassurance, the banter.
Neither had experienced anything like that day yet. They were gropi
ng their way through it together.
“What’s next, sir?”
“I’m told that in Lady Hamilton’s household, May is the month they clean the rugs.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“I have only secondhand information. It’s hard to be sure whether Mrs. Huggins is acquainted with Lady Hamilton herself. But do not be surprised if you are moving about the rooms and there are rugs missing.”
There was a pause as Graham tilted his head, acknowledging Lenox’s humorous tone. “Just so, sir.”
“Mm. I suppose.”
“May I inquire about your morning, sir? Have the police come to any firm conclusions?”
“Ah. Yes. They did, didn’t they.”
They had. Two men had been placed under arrest that morning as Lenox lurked behind the proper police force assembled at Bankside: one, the clerk from the Customs House, Nathaniel Butler, who had stumbled upon the body; and two, the half-drunk seaman who had been slumbering on the shingle nearby and then been slumbering in the police wagon.
Inspector Exeter, blundering fool that he was, had made both arrests.
Before he entered into a description of his morning, though, Lenox said, “Tell me, Graham, what do you make of these spectacles?”
They were still lying on Mrs. Huggins’s unblemished handkerchief. “They’re broken, sir.”
Lenox laughed. “Remind me to cut your pay in half.”
Graham gestured toward them. “May I?”
“By all means.”
The valet picked them up and studied them in the clear daylight. At length, he murmured, “Shortsighted, male.”
Lenox nodded. “My first two conclusions as well.” The width of the bridge of the nose and the width of the frame were both strongly indicative that the crushed spectacles had been a man’s. “What else?”
“They’ve been repaired, I believe, sir.”
“Twice, you’ll observe.”
Graham frowned; then recognition appeared in his eyes as he saw what Lenox meant. One hasp was of a slightly different color both from the other and from the original silver color of the frame. There was also a small solder at the bridge. “Glasses more worth replacing than repairing if one could afford it, sir.”
The Woman in the Water--A Prequel to the Charles Lenox Series Page 6
