The Woman in the Water--A Prequel to the Charles Lenox Series

by Charles Finch

  Lenox nodded again. It was this that had led him to conclude that the owner was neither affluent nor destitute. “Anything else?”

  Graham and Lenox occasionally played this sort of schoolboy game, and Graham studied the spectacles at length in the silence of the room. (There had been a popular cheap magazine called The Confounder when Lenox was an undergraduate, which offered a new set of deductive games each month. They had competed over that, too.) “Not that I can see, sir.”

  “What do you think of the maker’s mark?”

  “A fairly standard one, sir.”

  “Not stamped with any excise number.”

  All goods made in London shops had to be. Graham looked again. “Ah. Not a Londoner.”

  “Perhaps not originally. And the name of the maker is Lancashire.”

  “From the north perhaps, then, sir.”

  “I wondered. A name can travel.”

  Graham put the spectacles down. “Where are they from, sir?”

  Lenox frowned, before realizing that Graham was asking about where he had found the spectacles, not their origins.

  He described discovering them underneath the plank that had borne the second victim’s body. Then he added how struck he had been that all of it was dry—the board, the glasses, even the sand underneath the board.

  “I looked up the tides.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t think the body could have been brought there by the water. It didn’t rise that high onto the shore. Whereas the trunk at Walnut Island was ‘heavily sodden,’ if you’ll recall. It had been in the water for some time.”

  “Interesting, sir.”

  “Yes, I thought so.”

  “It must have been easier to place the body there, sir, than to leave it to the chance of floating, being scavenged or overturned.”

  Lenox shook his head. “Perhaps. But what keeps returning to me, perhaps only because of that silly headline, is the myth of Ophelia, floating in the water. And then, more importantly, much more importantly, that her clothing was wet. Why would her clothing alone have been wet, Graham?”

  The valet’s eyes widened as he took in the significance of this observation. “Curious, sir.”

  Lenox laid a gentle finger on the edge of the spectacles. He was unbecomingly proud of himself. Nobody else had noticed these details—though perhaps Field had noticed, arrested the fellow, and was sitting down to luncheon.

  Somehow Lenox doubted it.

  To Graham, he said, “Has it occurred to you how exactly these spectacles match the description we came up with from the first letter to the Challenger? The clerk, underpaid, overeducated, resentful?”

  “It did occur to me, sir, yes.”

  “But then how did they come to be under the plank? They have this chain to prevent them from falling. Something, incidentally, that made me wonder if their owner worked in low light, always bent over his work. A common accessory in that profession.”

  Graham nodded. “Yes.”

  “You can tell from the glass that they were broken only in the last day or two. Dirty, but not grimy. The edges of the glass still gleaming. Of course, it could be pure chance.”

  “But if not, how does it add up, sir—dry board, wet clothes, broken spectacles?”

  Lenox paused, sighed, and then said, truthfully, “I don’t know.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  After Graham had left Bankside that morning to go to the offices of the Challenger, and Lenox had been invited by Sir Richard Mayne to join the small band of professionals examining the body, several things happened in quick succession.

  The first was the arrests. After the body had been placed in the wagon and Lenox had found the spectacles, Exeter had marched over with a man at his side. The fellow looked about forty-five or fifty to Lenox, bleary eyed, with a thick navy-issued peacoat and a white beard of four days’ growth.

  “I think this is our man, sir,” Exeter had said, hauling him forward by the arm.

  “How’s that?” Mayne had asked sharply.

  Exeter, young, beefy, and earnest, yanked the man’s hand out of his pockets. “Near the scene of the crime—a first indication—and,” he went on triumphantly, “blood fresh-caked underneath his fingernails, sir.”

  There was a silence, and then Field had said, “Take him to the station, then.”

  Mayne had nodded grudgingly. “Good work, Exeter.”

  The younger fellow practically clicked his heels—might have, were they standing on any surface other than sand. “Thank you, sir.”

  Lenox was twenty-three (and had been that age for only thirty-six hours or so), and his inclination was to be quiet; then again, his other inclination was to be brilliant.

  “What is the man’s name?” he asked, just as Exeter was turning away.

  Field gave Lenox a sidelong glance, and Exeter turned back, said angrily, “That’s none of your bother.”

  Mayne interjected. “Lenox has some standing here, Exeter. Lenox, this is Mr. Johanssen, an able seaman of the Matilda. No very coherent account of his last twenty-four hours, and he was found slumbering in a stupor nearby. According to a constable whose beat is the docks, he has been arrested in the past.”

  “He has blood on his hands,” Exeter added angrily.

  Johanssen. Many of these chaps hanging around the London dockyards were of Swedish origin—because it was a seafaring nation, Lenox supposed. As mildly as he could, he said, “There is no blood visible on the body, so I do not see the relevance of that particular fact. May I see your hands, Johanssen?”

  The white-blond sailor, whose face stood somewhere between drunk, bewildered, and belligerent, held out his hands slowly. There were abrasions on the knuckles. His thin nose had an ugly scrape on it, and his cheeks were smudged with dirt.

  Field and Mayne, meanwhile, had looked back to the body upon hearing Lenox’s words, as if to verify to their own satisfaction that he was right, that there was no blood on the body.

  As quickly as he could, Lenox got out his notepad. He wrote four words on a sheet and tore it away.

  “Could you read that?” he asked the sailor.

  Johanssen looked at him suspiciously, then at the paper. “Something about blood,” he muttered. He had a slight Nordic accent. Then he burst out. “I’ve already told them I can’t remember a bloody thing. I left from the Jolly Boatman here and fell asleep. Not against any law I know about.”

  Lenox turned the page to Mayne and Field. It said Johanssen’s shipmates bugger him. Not a pleasant phrase, but the one that Lenox had calculated would be quickest to send the average sailor into a rage.

  “Not our letter writer, anyway,” he said quietly to the two superior officers. “And the hands look to me to be from a fight, which I do not think this woman has been in. Drunkenness and fighting—fairly typical of a seaman on shore leave.” He paused, then pulled out his final card. “We might also find out where the Matilda was a month ago. Likely not London.”

  This final point was the conclusive one. They all realized it at once.

  A moment of deadlock passed. Field stared at Lenox. It was hard to assess his look, especially without staring him directly in the eye.

  Mayne was far easier to read. “Exeter, you fool,” he said. “Take the man’s statement again, tell him to leave an address where he can be found, if it’s not the ship, and turn him loose.”

  At that moment, Lenox caught Exeter’s malevolent gaze.

  He knew then, immediately, that he would not easily be forgiven. So be it.

  The look of relief on Johanssen’s face was perceptible—all he wanted was somewhere to crawl away and sleep for twelve more hours, possibly after a pork chop and a pint of ale—and Exeter, muttering something, turned away with the sailor’s arm still in his grip, handling him roughly.

  The crowds behind them had continued to grow. There was the shout of an oyster seller, a chaunter singing the ballad of the Melbury Murders, a man waving broadsheets for purchase.

  M
ayne and Lenox happened to be just off to the side, while Field was walking to the police wagon. “Listen, Lenox,” Mayne had said quietly, “you happened to be right in that instance, but if you have any other observations, save them for me, would you? Hang back. There’s a lad.”

  “Of course, sir,” said Lenox just as quietly. “Thank you.”

  He therefore watched in silence as Field and Mayne analyzed the body at the open-doored rear of the wagon, naming the flowers (at least one of them incorrectly) and speculating about the cause of death.

  There were ligature marks around the neck. Another clear case of strangulation, they agreed.

  Lenox stood as close as he dared, listening intently and looking at the body himself.

  Something about the ugly, rather mannish (or at least practical) brown shoes upon the corpse’s feet bothered him. What was it? Graham would know what seemed off, if it didn’t come to him—whatever the strange thing was.

  “Teeth in good condition,” Field said in a low voice at one point. “Another highborn lady.”

  That puzzled Lenox particularly. Two highborn women, though by that phrase Field meant only “respectable,” of course, of such a class that each woman would have owned more than a single dress, never sold her body, perhaps even had had a maid. Not highborn by the standards of Lenox’s sphere, that was—he clarified this in his mind for its usefulness as a fact, not out of snobbishness—but certainly by the standards of the newspapers and the Yard.

  The crucial question was this: Wouldn’t such women have been missed by their families and neighbors? Their absence remarked upon?

  The second arrest, Field himself had made along with Exeter. It was of the clerk who had discovered the body.

  His name was Nathaniel Butler, and he was terribly distraught, poor fellow. He kept protesting that he would lose his position, and that he would never, in a thousand years, murder a woman—he had merely had the misfortune to work a few hundred yards away, and live in a place that made the walk along the river the fastest way to his office.

  This seemed plausible to Lenox. Field was no fool, however; in a case of high profile, such as this one, it was better not to take the one-in-a-hundred chance of letting a murderer go. Butler would have three hot meals served to him at Newgate each day, and if he was innocent, he would be free again before long.

  The journalists had descended by this time. Dozens and dozens of them arrived at Bankside, shouting questions, plumbing the crowd for quotations, above all desperate for a look at the body.

  Mayne wanted a word with Lenox. “What are your thoughts?” Sir Richard had asked in a low voice. “The same murderer, no doubt?”

  This was before Graham’s delivery of the letter, but Lenox had nodded. “The coincidence would seem to be too great for it to be otherwise.”

  “Yes, I agree. As does Field. He will take the case.” Mayne turned a troubled look into the middle distance. “He will not take kindly to your presence beyond this morning, however. Thank you for your help.”

  Mayne extended his hand, and Lenox shook it. “I understand,” he said. “But before you go—she was not strangled to death.”

  Mayne turned back. “Not strangled? Nothing could have been plainer. Indeed it was the only clear thing about the body that I saw. Floated down the Thames as brazenly as you like.”

  Lenox shook his head. “No.”

  His certainty was not a matter of overconfidence. He had had only two cases these seven months of his residency in London, each of which had taken approximately eight hours of labor, it was true. But the remaining five thousand hours—though a third of them had been spent in sleep, granted—more, on nights after he had been to his club—had not been passed idly, and his morning clippings with Graham were only one minor element of his approach to his new job.

  Mostly this had been reading. He read ravenously, the sensational and stupid, the dry and didactic, consuming Scottish police statistics with the same enthusiasm as penny bloods about the Stirlingshire Decapitator.

  He had taken more practical measures, too. “I have made a study of morbid anatomy recently,” Lenox said, as shortly as he could, since Mayne’s eyes had turned toward the departing row of police carriages. “She was not strangled.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  Lenox had a friend of a friend at St. Bart’s, studying to be a physician there. They’d had drinks, and in exchange for a succession of subsequent rounds at his club, the fellow, Courtenay, had given Lenox a few relevant medical textbooks, with the important pages flagged, and good-humoredly answered all of Lenox’s numerous questions about the variously murdered, hanged, beaten, and anonymous bodies that a medical student encountered in his studies.

  “There is no bruising around the neck,” Lenox said. “There are only abrasions to the skin.”

  “So?”

  “It means her blood was no longer circulating when they were made. She was dead. Nor were there petechiae, for that matter.”

  Sir Richard looked halfway between angry and curious to hear a word he didn’t know. “What?”

  “Pinprick-sized dots of red on the skin and in the eyes. They are present as an absolute rule of strangulation.”

  “What killed her, then?”

  “That I don’t know. Poison perhaps.” Mayne had looked at him indecisively for a moment. Lenox, sensing an opportunity, said, “The first murder will solve as easily as the second. Give me Walnut Island.”

  Mayne had paused, then nodded. “This case gives me an ill feeling. I’ll put you on as a consultant at half a pound a week. I’ll send Wilkinson around with a temporary badge. You report exclusively to me. Avoid Exeter. Avoid Sinex. Avoid Field in particular.”

  “Half a pound a week?”

  “Yes.”

  Lenox’s entire self revolted at this idea: being paid to do police work. He would often wonder, in subsequent years, what career he might have taken had he answered with the first words that came to his lips.

  But this was also proof of Sir Richard’s faith, and proof, in its way, that Lenox had belonged at the scene of the crime that morning, as surely as Sir Richard or Inspector Field.

  So he had gulped and nodded. “Thank you.”

  Walnut Island was his.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Now, just past three on the afternoon of that busy day, he and Graham sat at the table with the broken spectacles, discussing their potential courses of action.

  “Do you think we really have a month, then, sir?” Graham asked Lenox ruminatively.

  “I rather do. He has been fairly loyal to his word thus far.” Lenox tilted his head, thinking. “He seems to be of a precise set of mind, in the way that madmen occasionally are.”

  “Fanatical.”

  “Yes.”

  Lenox stood up from the breakfast table and stretched, a little tired, then wandered toward the other end of the room, where the fireplace, bookshelves either side of it, was burning low. He poked at it; the great pastime of anyone who has ever wished to be lost in thought.

  He was often alone in this room. The liquor stand was nearby. Loose correspondence, too little organized, but which he had ordered the servants not to touch, sat upon a coffee table. Above the mantel there was a cup he had won many distant years before in school—third place in his form’s boxing contest—along with a rough-woven bag of shag tobacco, a book turned facedown, and a small oil of Lenox House. It was by a Frenchman. Two figures walked along the far end of the old home’s pond, Lenox’s grandfather and his grandfather’s brother, inseparable young companions sixty years before when it was painted. Both very old men now.

  There were a pair of very comfortable red armchairs in front of the fireplace; he sank down into one of them.

  A month was a dangerous amount of time.

  “I say,” Lenox observed suddenly, “the rug is gone. The rug in front of the hearth.”

  Graham, who every fifteen days or so let slip a small joke at his employer’s expense, said, “I ho
pe you are not overtaxing your powers of detection at just the moment you may need them most, sir.”

  “Mrs. Huggins,” Lenox muttered bitterly. He liked the rug. When you pushed your feet through it, the bristles stayed up stiff and lighter colored, until you smoothed them back down into their natural state of dark blue. It helped a chap cogitate. “The perfect crime, though, Graham. Think on that one.”

  “Sir?”

  “The crime—as an end in itself. With no motive but itself. With no reason for existing but itself, the pleasure of its own symmetry and design. There’s an evil thing. Murder for money or love or power is also evil, of course, but murder for itself belongs to some different class of person. I don’t like it.”

  Graham, who had risen and was leaning, though somehow his leaning conveyed respectfulness, perhaps in the way his hands were clasped behind his back, or in the attentive tilt of his head, against the wall, absorbed this reflection. “No, sir.”

  The idea of the perfect crime was familiar to anyone who, like Lenox, was a student of sensational fiction. It had been especially popular in the rags this last decade, Lenox had noted; he wondered whether their murderer was a reader of the penny bloods, which gave you eight pages a week for a penny, an ongoing story contained in their sheets. (The more modern term, slowly coming into use, was “penny dreadful,” but to Lenox, who had started reading them at the age of twelve, they would always be the bloods.) Even sober, middle-class novels had begun to engage with the idea of murder. Dickens himself was at work on a mystery, people murmured.

  Lenox’s brother had said something about this very subject a few weeks before. “They don’t hang in public anymore.”

  “So?”

  Edmund had shrugged. They’d been in the dining room at Parliament, where his brother was a backbencher, and content to remain such all his life, looking in on the occasional vote when he was really needed. (He had already avowed to anyone who listened that he would never hold office in the cabinet. On the other hand, he knew a great deal about the husbandry of pigs. He took his role as heir seriously—or perhaps it came to him naturally, the way the city felt more and more as though it was coming to Charles naturally.)