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

by Charles Finch

  Graham nodded. “I feel similarly, sir.”

  They got into a hansom. Lenox spent the drive brooding, trying, trying, trying to put the pieces together, to figure out whom Jonathan Pond had killed, and why.

  How could two women simply disappear?

  Lenox wasn’t convinced that his wires across Britain had been useless. Mightn’t the bodies have come to London by train? His thoughts returned to that little cameo in the lockbox. And the name: Susan.

  There was still an enormous crush of people outside Corcoran and Sons, just barely held at bay by a hastily strung rope and a row of constables. It was like a carnival. Lenox showed his identification and pushed through.

  There were two clerks remaining in the large office with fifteen desks in it. Both looked up when Lenox and Graham came in.

  “Still here?” Lenox said.

  “The business doesn’t stop for much,” one of them said ruefully—Jones, Lenox remembered his name would be. “Large shipment tomorrow.”

  “Will it be a distraction if we look through Mr. Pond’s desk?”

  “Not at all, sir,” said Jones. “Let us know if we can help.”

  “Thank you,” said Lenox quietly. He felt sorry for them. They had known Pond. He stood there for a moment, hands in trousers, and at last said, “Tell me, can you believe it of him? Of Pond? That he was a murderer?”

  The two clerks glanced at each other. But after a beat both nodded, reluctantly. “He wasn’t a bad chap,” said Jones. “Or never seemed a bad chap. But he had very grand ideas of himself. He was very down on most of us—cutting, you know. And then, I suppose the rest of us have … He never had a girl that he spoke of, or any interest but his literary goings-on.”

  “He kept to himself,” added Carrington.

  Lenox nodded. “Thank you.”

  For the first time, he began to believe that they had really caught a murderer. But he hadn’t expected it to be like this! The terrible inconclusiveness of it—Pond’s death—Cairn’s pale face, and his thudding fall—the whole vivid, awful afternoon …

  He went to Pond’s desk and sat down heavily in the chair. “You take the left set of drawers, I’ll take the right?” he said to Graham.

  There was nothing much here, paper, an old inkwell, Corcoran and Sons stationery, an old newspaper (not the Challenger but the Times), another of Pond’s pay stubs. But there was one thing that Lenox found that struck him—a short list of goods, seemingly all different varieties of fur from Canada, bound in on a steamer named Fortitude.

  “Look at that, Graham,” he said.

  Graham studied it for a moment. “I cannot see anything remarkable, sir,” he said.

  “It’s the handwriting.”

  Recognition dawned in the valet’s eyes. “Of course,” he said. “Identical, sir.”

  Lenox wasn’t sure why it made his heart so heavy: yet here it was, a fact, that the handwriting on this list was identical to the handwriting of the first letter to the Challenger. Pond was their man.

  Perhaps he would feel better when he could say who the victims were; perhaps in time he would care that they might have saved a life, one that Pond had planned to take sixteen days hence.

  Was it cowardice or determination that made a man shoot himself rather than facing the consequences of his acts?

  At last they bade goodbye to Jones and Carrington, still working by their low green-shaded lamps, and went home.

  “I think that was the longest day of my life,” Lenox said as he turned the key in the door.

  Inside, it got slightly longer.

  Mrs. Huggins, looking infinitely harassed, was trying with a desperate air to coax a great fleet of kittens, nine or ten of them, fifteen possibly, a hundred for all Lenox knew, back into a wicker basket.

  She stood up, bright red, the first time she had been discomposed in their entire acquaintance. “They won’t be any trouble, sir,” she said.

  Lenox burst into a laugh, and felt a huge release within. Life would go on; sooner or later. “It’s quite all right, Mrs. Huggins—it’s quite all right—here, I can catch the gray one. Graham, that orange one is just at your ankles, grab him up.…”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  For the next three days, Lenox barely stirred out of his flat. He read the papers as soon as they arrived, and he and Graham caught up on several missed days of clipping; otherwise, the young detective spent most of his time sitting on the floor of his study, cross-legged, burning matches and dropping them into a glass.

  He knew he ought to shake off this malaise, but found he couldn’t.

  More than once he thanked goodness for the two kittens they had kept out of the enormous litter Mrs. Huggins had rescued from whatever obscure alley in the East End. He didn’t know where the rest were—he had drawn the line at two—though he had granted the housekeeper permission to keep them in the house until she had found them homes.

  Lady Hamilton was taking one; it would be a kitchen cat, Mrs. Huggins reported with gravity and pride. Her harrowing fierceness had returned, and her attention to detail had been redoubled, as if to compensate for the humiliation of being caught using Lenox’s flat as an ad hoc cat sanctuary, but fortunately her demands that he attend to detail had subsided, somewhat, in her distraction over the animals.

  The cats they had kept were lovely little creatures, one black and white, the other an even sea-sky gray. The former was called Scout, the latter James.

  Lenox had taken no part in the naming. “Cats didn’t even have names where I grew up,” he told Mrs. Huggins.

  “They’re more intelligent than dogs, sir.”

  “That is patently false.”

  She glanced at Graham, who wisely kept his silence. “The late Mr. Huggins said that the average cat was twice as smart as the average dog.” She paused, then added, by way of concession, “But the smartest dogs are very smart, I will grant you.”

  “Mr. Huggins was fond of cats?” Lenox asked.

  She almost smiled. “Passionately fond, sir. He grew up with them.”

  Lenox softened. “Well, name them whatever you like—only I shan’t abide by the names, that’s all. They’ll be ‘cat’ to me, that’s it.”

  “Just as you please, sir.”

  He immediately showed himself a liar—and in his three days sitting on his study floor spent most of his time calling out their names, enticing them with bits of string, watching them turn their stumbles into lithe rolls. They had alert little eyes, exploring paws. Their minds were so transparent at moments; such a secret at others. It was a pleasure to watch. A welcome distraction, too. They ate splendidly—Mrs. Huggins planned out their diets as carefully as if they were dignitaries visiting from an adversarial country.

  In these three days, the evidence against Pond accumulated. It was Exeter who discovered in a second survey of the young clerk’s flat a key that eventually proved to fit the trunk marked HMS GALLANT, G957.

  After that, Lenox removed himself from the investigation of Pond. Instead, he sat in his study, striking matches, trying to piece together on his own the elements of a case that still felt unresolved to him, trying to join them together. But perhaps all cases felt this way, and he was only inexperienced. He could have used a mentor to tell him. That was the disadvantage of a profession one invented as one went along.

  On the third day, he had a visitor. It was Edmund. There had been others (Hugh had been by twice, Lucia once; Elizabeth was in Paris, where her husband was on leave) but none so welcome.

  He watched Lenox wave out a match, then said, “You’re going to burn the whole building down.”

  “Ha, that’s where you’re wrong. They’re those safety matches.”

  “Are they! Let me have a go.”

  For their entire lives, every soul in England had used lucifer matches, which struck with any friction—a great virtue and a great vice, since they could be carried loose and struck against a boot, a wall, anything really, in cold or in wet. That was convenient; until o
ne caught fire in your jacket pocket, when it became very extremely inconvenient.

  But now some ingenious person had invented the safety match, which came in a small box made of card and needed to be struck specifically against that box to be lit. The innovation had swept certain parts of society—the navy, which considered fire even more diabolical than France, outlawed lucifer matches immediately—and there was already a noticeable decline in the number of London house fires. And singed hair, more trivially, but not unpleasantly for people who had hair.

  Soon Edmund (a devotee of the lucifer match, as befit his country preferences) was on the floor next to Lenox, legs stretched out in front of him and crossed, lighting matches himself.

  “We’ll have to send someone out for more,” said Charles.

  “I am willing to incur that risk,” Edmund said, striking two at once and gazing at them with childlike joy.

  “How were Mother and Father?”

  Ed looked up. “Eh? Oh, fine. Actually, I stopped by to warn you. Father is coming to London this evening.”

  Lenox looked up from the match. “Is he? Why? Parliament?”

  “No, he doesn’t give a fig about Parliament. He’s coming to see you.”

  “Why?”

  Edmund shrugged. “That’s all he told me.”

  Lenox pondered this in silence for some time. “What did you do, the two of you?”

  “We rode every inch of the property together. I must say, it’s very large.”

  “You were always clever.”

  Edmund grinned. “Shut up. Anyhow, I learned a great deal. I was taking notes the entire time—not that he told me to, but I couldn’t keep up otherwise, and wouldn’t you know it, at just the right moment, he happened to have a notebook and a piece of charcoal in his bag. A plum coincidence.”

  Lenox smiled. That was their father all over. “So what did you learn?”

  “The name of every tree, every rock. He told me the stories of each tenant, going back to his boyhood. He took me right up to the line where Robinson’s property begins and showed me the stone wall there—and told me about our great-great-great-grandfather building it himself, with the help of hired laborers. 1688, he said, and showed me a little scratching by some fellow called Jacob, who just decided to leave his name and the year there. That was a queer feeling, I can tell you. You could imagine his hand doing it. Probably nobody has spoken his name in a hundred and fifty years.”

  Lenox realized in that moment that his older brother was very young. He had never really thought of him like that before; or had, but not really, not truly. “You’ll do a very, very good job, Ed,” he said.

  “I’ll try anyhow.”

  “You will.”

  In a low voice, Edmund said, “He didn’t mention—well, it, you know. Not at all. Except once. He said that we had to take care of Mother. And I said of course we would. And he said, no, I didn’t understand—we had to take care of her. I didn’t quite understand.”

  Charles hesitated, and then nodded. “There’s time.”

  Edmund nodded, too. “Yes. Molly and I talked about it.” He sighed. “Anyway, tell me about this case, would you? Even out in the country, there’s nothing else anyone will talk of. And they all know you’re involved, somehow.”

  They sat for a while. Edmund moved on from playing with the matches to playing with the kittens (a fair little encapsulation in twenty minutes of Lenox’s previous three days) and they talked about the strange case. Charles described watching Pond die, and found that relating the story took away a little bit of its power over his imagination; he had been gazing into those eyes more often than he liked.

  “My goodness,” said Edmund.

  “Worse things happen at sea.”

  “Not all that much worse,” said Edmund.

  “Yes, you have a point. I always wondered what they meant by that.”

  “People getting flogged and drowning and eaten by sharks, probably.”

  “That does sound worse,” Lenox said. “Being eaten by a shark sounds just about as unlucky a go as you can have.”

  “I should add the shark people to my prayers at night.”

  “Who’ll they replace?”

  Edmund frowned. Both brothers had a strict one-in-one-out policy on their evening prayers, dating to the age of nine and six, when they had wanted to get through them as quickly as possible—it wasn’t very Christian, their mother said, but Edmund and Charles had maintained over the years that it kept each conscious of the people for whom he was grateful or of whom he was particularly solicitous.

  “Terrance acted as if I were an intruder all weekend. I think he really thought I might steal the silver. Two months’ probation from my prayers wouldn’t hurt him.”

  After Edmund had gone, Charles spent the rest of the afternoon dreading his father’s arrival. He was sure it would be—what, some kind of plea? To find a more serious career. To keep his name out of the papers.

  He thought with a kind of sickness in his stomach about their cousin Lord Billingsley’s words at Lady Hamilton’s ball.

  To distract himself, he spent his time organizing his notes from the Pond case, including the clippings he had made from it. The petechiae still bothered him; the shoes; he wanted to know more, more. Something was still bothering him.

  At six o’clock the bell rang. Graham answered, and ushered his father in. Lenox had dressed himself—his father, as always in London, was the last word in correct attire. He had often said to his sons that while in London, he was also every single person in Markethouse, the ones he represented in Parliament; that was his duty. He dressed quite to his era, the perfectly tied cravat, the silk hat, the cane.

  “Hullo, Father,” said Lenox.

  “There you are, Charles. Listen, are you free?”

  “Free? For the evening?”

  “For five days.”

  “For five days.”

  Edward Lenox took a folded sheet of paper from his inner breast pocket. “I’ll tell you a secret. In my heart of hearts, I’ve always wanted to see Russia.”

  He smiled, and Charles felt about nine again, the immense, oceanic contentment one found in one’s father’s smile, one’s father’s love.

  “Russia!” said Charles, his voice high pitched even to his own ears. “You mean, to travel there?”

  “Only if you can spare the time.”

  “Spare the—I can of course spare the time, of course, Father.”

  “Good. I’ve booked us to leave by the ten o’clock train from Waterloo this evening. You’ll be back by Saturday next, as if you’d never been gone.” He looked down at his feet. “No doubt someone will be able to watch these cats.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The express train to England’s northeastern coast took four hours. Lenox’s father had booked them sleepers across a slender red-carpeted aisle from each other, and he cheerfully and immediately turned in with an old copy of Gibbon, whose work he reread more or less continually. The fourth of his set’s nine volumes, for their particular trip.

  Charles, in his own small chamber, sat up at the little chair and table, legs and arms crossed. He watched the landscape pass. He was conscious of wanting to remember this very clearly. Villages whose names he would never know or speak, and a broad black sky, sparkling with stars.

  At the start of the voyage, the steward gave him a very good supper—a cutlet of steak, mashed potatoes, crushed peas, a half bottle of hock, and then coffee, followed by a pipe. He read about Russia as he ate. (Graham had somehow packed all his books about the country, all his maps, into the neat little suitcase he had made up for Lenox a few hours before. The trip he had been planning was to have lasted roughly fifteen months. But five days would do.)

  The hours passed. Finally, in the very last moments of the train journey, he took out a pen. He had been contemplating the letter the whole way, but nevertheless as he began to compose it, his heart raced, his hand trembled.

  Dear Elizabeth,

&nbs
p; I love you. I know that nothing can come of this fact—of course. I would do anything before suggesting you leave England. I understand my position. But I don’t want to die without telling you, and they say any of us can die at any moment, though it scarcely seems possible, does it.

  I won’t mention it again. You have my word upon that. I had to do so once, however. Anyhow, please believe my sincerity when I say that you receive this letter with the very dear and constant love of,

  Charles Lenox

  Before he could second-guess himself, he jammed it into an envelope; handed it to the steward with a penny and a sixpence tip, asking him to post it as soon as he could; and before he knew what had happened, they were off the train, in a carriage, and on a boat.

  And so Elizabeth would know.

  The boat took them to Stockholm first. As dawn broke, Charles and his father shared a strong flask of tea—Lenox House tea, of course, packed specially for them by Crump—and watched penguins frolic among the rocks. Or were they great auks? After a flying stop at Stockholm to drop off cargo, not more than an hour, the ship proceeded on to Tallinn.

  It was lovely to feel the air on deck, even as it grew more chill with each nautical mile they traveled. They were wayfaring in great comfort (a Member of Parliament and his son, after all), and Sir Edward spent much of the late morning in a small swinging chair that had been arranged near the bow of the boat for him, sometimes reading, more often watching the water furl behind the boat, large birds darting down to fetch a meal out of its wake, in such deep thought—or perhaps in such pure absence of his thought—that Charles was content merely to observe him from his own chair, a little ways off.

  They had two Finnish porters who brought them a lunch of soft-boiled eggs, black bread with salted butter, tiny buttered potatoes, and salted fish. Lenox’s father had brought a bottle of champagne, which they divided. During their luncheon, eaten upon an overturned crate, the father peppered his son with questions about Russia. Charles was hesitant at first, but eventually, after some coaxing, he began to describe in exuberant detail their destination, its immensely different culture, its people, the landmarks of St. Petersburg.