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

by Charles Finch

  “Oh, Charles,” she said, leaning forward. “I’m glad they did. What’s wrong?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  That evening, Lenox dined at the Oxford and Cambridge Club. He had invited his friend Courtenay, the one who had provided him with medical expertise on criminal matters and pointed out the textbooks that would offer more.

  “I’m pleased we’re going to dine together,” said Lenox right at the outset, “but I must offer warning that I had a mercenary reason to ask you.”

  “Did you? How mercenary?”

  Lenox laughed. He liked the young, forthright, hardworking physician. His father was a clergyman in the Cotswolds. He was disappointed that his eldest son hadn’t followed him into the profession, but Courtenay was a scientist to his marrow, a positivist, a scion of the Enlightenment. The second half of the century would bring miracles, he’d told Lenox once, and he hoped to be in the first row for them.

  “Not very. It’s about surgeons. I would like to know who the best are—the very best, regardless of whether they’re here or in … in Burma.”

  “They’re not in Burma.” They were in the wide, red-carpeted entry hall of the private club, and started the climb up the steps to the dining room. Courtenay had been at Magdalene College, Cambridge, before moving to St. Bart’s. “But it depends what you mean by a surgeon.”

  “Does it?”

  As they sat down, Courtenay began to explain. “There are a great number of white-haired consulting surgeons whose opinion I would value very highly.”

  “Such as?”

  Courtenay named half a dozen. “I see. And what is the other kind of surgeon?”

  Just then a waiter came with a mirror-topped trolley of decanters, offering drinks. Courtenay asked for a brandy and soda, and Lenox, though he had felt strongly that very morning that the best course would probably be to join one of those Christian societies you saw in Hyde Park crusading against the evils of alcohol, found it didn’t sound all that bad now that ten hours had passed, and asked for the same.

  He also took a water with lemon, however. His friend Almondsley-West swore by the true cross that this was a panacea.

  Courtenay took a draft of his drink once it had been poured, then put it down, pulling his cheeks back in a satisfied grimace, and said, “The other side of the coin is the actual surgery. For cutting—for sheer cutting—there are many excellent men, but only two at the very pinnacle.”

  “Sheer cutting,” Lenox repeated.

  “Yes, it’s different. You need someone about twenty-nine or thirty-three, in that range, to begin with. Not past forty-five or so certainly.”

  “Why?”

  Courtenay thought. “Hm. Well, at that age a chap has plenty of experience. But he’s still young enough to have his hands. Surgeons are like sportsmen, you see. They’re as good in their ways as the cricketers. When you watch them, their hands are half a step ahead of anyone else’s. It saves lives. I’ve seen it myself, or I would think it nonsense. And even beyond that, there are always a few whose hands are—it’s otherworldly, in a way—their hands are so good you can’t quite believe it.”

  “Interesting. And do you have it?”

  Courtenay shook his head ruefully. “About average, I’m afraid. Useful enough for ninety-eight of a hundred procedures, but—well, take one of these two fellows I mentioned, Anthony Callahan. Interesting tale, Callahan’s. He never even intended to be a physician. He was going to be a veterinarian.”

  “A vet!”

  “Yes. Comes from somewhere in the North. Great ruddy large fellow, solid working class. Had prepared himself quite happily to spend his life as a vet, administering to cows and horses.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ah, so. Vets are usually apprenticed. But Callahan, being fairly bright, came down to a two-year school in London for specialization. Sort of place that produces vets for Goodwood, you know—the best. If the Queen’s dog is ill, that kind of thing.”

  “All right.”

  “Well, on the first day of class, everyone received a frog to dissect. The professor was a medical surgeon. He stood there at the head of the gallery for the fifty minutes, instructing these thirty young men how to cut the frog.

  “He taught the class quite normally. The instant the class was over, however, he pulled Callahan into a cab without saying anything, drove across the town, and walked them both into the office of the Dean of the Royal College of Surgeons. As Callahan tells the story, he thought he was in trouble. But it was quite the opposite. ‘The best two hands I’ve ever seen,’ the professor said. That was all. ‘The best two hands I’ve seen in my entire life.’”

  Lenox whistled low. “My.”

  “The rest is history. Now Callahan’s charging thirty pounds for an afternoon’s work. Still a lovely fellow, mind you. No airs to him.”

  “You said there were two. Who’s the other?”

  “A Scot named Thomas McConnell. Equally gifted, I think.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yes, people scrum to watch them.”

  The menu lay forgotten in Lenox’s hands. “What do you mean?”

  “There are seats in the theater. Generally not hard to come by. But for Callahan and McConnell, students line up an hour or two beforehand. I’ve done it myself. Even then it can be hit-or-miss. I saw Callahan do the prettiest excision of a diseased liver about a month ago, though, you wouldn’t have believed it.”

  “I wouldn’t have had any idea what I was looking at.”

  Courtenay grinned. “No, true.”

  They ordered, and the conversation moved on to other matters. Courtenay was very good company, the second brandy and soda far silkier than the first. After they ate dessert, Lenox asked about petechiae and poisoning, the ghost of a self-doubt in his mind, but his friend confirmed his suspicions entirely, and then they spent a great deal of time talking in confidence about the case.

  “Get me the coroner’s report on the first body if you like,” Courtenay said.

  “I doubt it will even be ready. The backlog is disgraceful—eight weeks more often than not. But could there be anything to learn?”

  “Oh, certainly, always.”

  “I will try, then,” said Lenox. “I say, thank you.”

  “Not at all.”

  They lingered with cigars after supper, drinking port in the billiards room and watching as two older men cleansed the table of its red and white balls over and over, their expertise unerring. At last Courtenay and Lenox took a free table and tried their own impression of the feat; unconvincing. Not bad fun, though.

  The next morning, very early, Lenox went to Harley Street, the slender thoroughfare where every doctor in England of consequence had an office, armed with a list of addresses. Like a broom salesman, he went door to door making his inquiries; by nine o’clock, he had booked two people to travel to Lenox House that week to see his father, on successive days.

  One was named Sir Riley Callum; he had white hair, and fell into Courtenay’s category of consultants. The other was Thomas McConnell. (Callahan, fine anatomizer of frogs, was vacationing in Somerset for two weeks.) The idea was that if Callum advised cutting, McConnell would be there the next day to do it. Lenox saw neither of them—they each had secretaries. He met their outrageous prices for traveling so far and losing a day’s work without demur or negotiation.

  He felt better when that had been done.

  He thought back to seeing his brother the afternoon before. Their mother had already boarded the train home. They were in Edmund’s front room, which was strewn with souvenirs of the country—a horsehair chair, portraits of dogs they had known, walking sticks suitable for a heath but not a cobblestone street—all across it.

  They knew the same information now, though they had received it in a sequence to which only Charles and his mother were privy.

  Edmund had poured his brother a glass of ginger ale (at this point, a few hours before his dinner with Courtenay, Charles was still at the tail e
nd of his previous night’s regrets) and come over to sit down, his face full of sadness and strength.

  “What a dreadful hand to have been dealt,” he said. “For father, I mean.”

  “Mother, too.” Lenox looked at his elder brother. “And you, you shall have to be the baronet.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.” Now it was Edmund’s turn to pause. “I wonder how he’ll take it.”

  “Very calmly,” said Lenox without any doubt.

  Edmund nodded. “Yes, he will, won’t he.”

  Their father was a trim, crisp sort of person, with a clipped gray mustache and short hair, his wife balancing his occasional tautness with her sense of humor and creativity; they were a match.

  The quality Lenox thought of as belonging to him more than any other was that he was true blue, down to his fibers. He was only ever himself. He would sooner have put his head beneath a guillotine than told a lie, or cheated a man. He was known across Sussex for his generosity—just as an example, he leased his lands for five lifetimes, generally, rather than three, and his tenants thus had a sense of continuity like few anywhere else—but it was also known that he would come down very, very hard on anyone who stepped out of line. He would evict a man in a day if the fellow didn’t live up to his standards—a thief, for instance, or anyone violent.

  He had declined to come to London to get a second opinion on his condition, according to their mother. Charles had decided (and told his brother, over the ginger ale) that London would have to visit the country. He himself planned to go down to Lenox House that week, as soon as he had seen to one or two things about the case.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The case: a month was a dangerous amount of time, as he tried to remind himself every hour. Just long enough to let it slip through one’s fingers.

  After he had visited the offices of Sir Riley Callum and Thomas McConnell, he returned home. The papers, which he had taken with him and read along the way back, were full of nothing but the Thames Ophelia, as she was now universally known. His own name did not come up again, blessedly. He had taken scissors in the small leather valise he carried, and even as the carriage rattled, he carefully sliced the stories he wanted to preserve for his archive. It reassured him not to miss a day of the practice.

  When he returned home, he found that Graham’s own newspapers had been dissected and sorted, too.

  “How do you do, sir,” Graham said, greeting him near the breakfast table, where he had been.

  “The rug is back.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Graham.

  It did look cleaner. “Mrs. Huggins!” shouted Lenox.

  The housekeeper appeared after a moment. “Sir?”

  Lenox glanced at the clock. It was only ten, but he was starving. “Could you please ask them to make me a sandwich with cold chicken and some of that chutney you made, if we still have any. And a pot of tea. And see if we have any shortbread biscuits, those square ones, and if we don’t, please fire the cook. Then go get some yourself, because I want those, too.”

  “I’ll—I’ll bring the food, sir,” said the housekeeper, who perhaps hadn’t foreseen her employer’s having accomplished enough business of an unpleasant nature in the morning that he would be in quite such a cavalierly commanding frame of mind. “Just a few moments, if you please.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Huggins. The rug looks marvelous, incidentally.”

  “Oh, I’m pleased you think so, sir!” she said, and looked positively happy for the first time in a long while.

  Lenox felt guilty. “Well, not at all, not at all. And don’t really fire the cook.”

  “We have shortbread, sir.”

  This was the first thing that might have passed as a joke in the long tripartite acquaintance of Lenox, Graham, and Mrs. Huggins, and as she withdrew, the detective and the valet exchanged a look of raised eyebrows.

  “Well,” said Lenox, sighing. “Walnut Island.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going to the dockyards after I eat. You read the papers this morning, from the look of it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “They’ve not gotten far.”

  “That was my conclusion, too, sir.”

  Lenox threw himself down into a chair. “It may in fact be possible that we are the ones who can do it, you know,” he said.

  “I hope we may help, sir.”

  Reading between the lines—for of course outwardly, the press’s opinion being of paramount importance, everything was presented in terms of the rapidest progress, Field was “intensely focused on a handful of suspects,” Mayne was “confident an arrest would be made within the week”—the police themselves had made no advancement whatsoever.

  That was to say, there was no name to attach to either woman; nobody had come forward to claim the body, or had recognized the sketch of her face distributed by police; the papers reported no new witnesses.

  Fleet Street would soon grow restless. Innumerable articles, all with nothing to say.

  Except that of the Challenger, of course. It published the two letters the murderer had written under a banner headline so large and provocative that Lenox had spotted it thirty times that morning already.

  “You looked into Nathaniel Butler?” Lenox asked, shuffling through the clippings he had pulled out of his carrying case. He pointed to Graham’s usual chair. “Please, sit.”

  “I did, sir,” said Graham.

  “And?”

  “I believe he is innocent, sir.” He pushed across a piece of paper. “To begin with, he was away from London for three days on either side of the first murder.”

  “That would be a perfect crime,” Lenox pointed out.

  “Very true, sir, and yet it would be hard to imagine a less perfect crime than the second. He reported it to the police himself. That seems very stupid.”

  “Or the act of an obsessive.”

  “Perhaps. But a third obsession, sir, in addition to the letter writing and the—” Graham’s imperturbable face looked briefly perplexed, and then he alit on the word. “The symbolism, sir? Furthermore, I met Mr. Butler in prison.”

  “How did he strike you?”

  “He is utterly bewildered and afraid, sir. I wouldn’t credit him with the intelligence to plan a luncheon.”

  “Hm.”

  “He was wearing glasses with a chain on them, I feel bound to report as well.”

  Lenox considered this, tapping the table with a finger. Then he picked up the dossier Graham had prepared and began to read it.

  All the relevant details of Butler’s life (date of birth, current address, employer, salary) were here. He was married and had two children. He was relatively prosperous by a clerk’s standards—his wife had brought two adjacent townhouses into the marriage—which was another strike against Lenox’s portrait of the killer. Though it was important, he thought, not to let that become binding in his thoughts.

  “It would be just like Field to arrest this poor clerk and prove right,” he said. “Where was Butler during the week he was away from London?”

  “Visiting his mother in Birmingham, sir. She is ailing, and he was owed vacation. His family was with him.”

  “You have confirmed this?”

  Graham nodded, and Lenox trusted the nod implicitly. “Still, he might have returned in the night to do it. Not all that far, Birmingham.”

  “Anything is possible, sir.”

  “Alas.”

  Lenox’s early lunch arrived, and he fell upon it like a horde of Visigoths sacking a city. It was gone before long. He swirled the last of his tea, drank it off, and then, picking up his newspapers so that he might finish clipping them along the way, left to go to the dockyards.

  He arrived at the navy’s own shipping yard half an hour later. This was an enormous and busy building just along the river, with a heavy smell of fish and old seagoing equipment.

  He knew that a friend of a friend, or really a friend-of-several-friends, a fellow he’d met once or twic
e, was in charge here, Captain William Ampleforth. He sent his card upstairs and was beckoned up not much later. He was here to cross his t’s and dot his i’s, as his most odious schoolmaster had exhorted them every day to do with completely unthinking repetitiveness. (“Boys, you’ll conquer the world if you’ll only…,” and so forth. Thus far none of them had conquered the world that Lenox could see, his old schoolmates. For the most part, they seemed to be drinking in various London clubs and bars.)

  Ampleforth was a genial and generous soul, red cheeked, that particular kind of round-faced naval homebody who feels best at home in an officers’ mess. He immediately offered Lenox a tot of rum, and they drank together. Then they discussed the murders, which were all anyone was talking about along the river, according to the captain.

  Lenox explained that he was looking into them.

  “Bloody mess,” Ampleforth said. “This clerk they’ve arrested is the man, I suppose?”

  “He may be.”

  “There’s plenty of violence for an Englishman to do at sea,” Ampleforth said, shaking his head. “This chap needs Bedlam.”

  “He’ll get it,” Lenox replied.

  “Anyhow, what was it you wanted from me?”

  “Ah yes. It’s about a seaman’s trunk. Have you ever seen one that belonged to the Gallant?”

  “I imagine so. Why?”

  Lenox explained about Walnut Island. It was news to Ampleforth—evidently, to his credit, not a regular reader of the Challenger. (The other papers would get the murderer’s letters into the evening editions.) “It had ‘HMS Gallant’ stenciled on its lid,” Lenox said, “and on the bottom was printed ‘G957,’ which I assume is because it was issued by the ship. No other markings.”

  Ampleforth frowned. “G957?” he said.

  “Yes. Why, does that seem unusual?”

  “Not unusual so much as not usual, if you see what I mean. We’re not too precious about our lockers in the navy, so long as they match the dimensions. Most sailors are on a dozen different ships before they’re nineteen.”

  Lenox was puzzled. “Hm. I see. So that marking—”