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

by Charles Finch

  Lenox’s mind was rushing. “You’re entirely certain of this. That the Matilda arrived in London last night.”

  The boy looked at him as if he were mad. “Yes,” he said.

  Lenox was already racing back to his scull. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  The boy, standing on the pebbly shore, shouted after him. “Why?”

  “It doesn’t matter!”

  The boy watched as Lenox pushed off. “Well, so long, then,” he called. “Thanks for the shilling.”

  “I owe you another!” Lenox shouted back.

  The boy answered, but Lenox had already pulled hard into the river, and he couldn’t hear the reply—would never see the boy again, in this life or the next, but he thanked the Lord he had called out to him.

  He rowed as hard as he could across the river, and then, having handed off the scull, sprinted home, arriving breathless.

  “Mr. Lenox,” Mrs. Huggins said sternly, “in Lady Hamilton’s—”

  Was this how little time the blasted cats had purchased them? “Not … not right now,” he panted. “Food and tea. To take with me. Five minutes. Graham too. Get Graham.”

  “I’ve never—”

  He didn’t wait to see what Mrs. Huggins had never, but darted back to his room. There was a standing bowl of water, and he splashed himself as clean as he reasonably could in fifteen seconds, soaped his arms and his face, rinsed himself, and shoved himself not very carefully into a suit.

  He ran back out into the front hall. Mrs. Huggins—whatever her faults, she was a marvel of a housekeeper—was waiting with a little metal holdall. “Soft-boiled eggs, toast, beans, coffee, sir,” she said.

  “Thank you. Graham?”

  “Out, sir. I can—”

  “He’ll find me at the Yard or they’ll tell him where I am. For God’s sake, though, urge him to hurry.”

  Finally her employer’s seriousness seemed to have penetrated Mrs. Huggins’s disapprobation, and she looked concerned. “Are you quite all right, sir?”

  “Yes—only a damned fool, a blind fool. You’ll tell him?”

  “I shall, of course, sir.”

  Lenox hailed a taxi and ordered it to Scotland Yard. It took an infuriatingly long time to get there; his mind was too busy to formulate ideas; the omnibus ahead of them wouldn’t move; his heart raced.

  When he had become a detective, he had often imagined moments like this, the great resolution, the clues at last slotting together.

  But then why did he feel ill?

  Why did he wish he were anywhere else?

  He arrived at the Yard and sprinted past the porter, Sherman, who called an indignant word after him. He ran up to Mayne’s office, and here, too, ignored the protocol of the building and flung the door open without asking.

  Mayne was sitting there with Exeter. He looked at his visitor—who was no doubt slightly mad looking—and said curiously, “Lenox?”

  “I believe I know who the victims are.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” Exeter said.

  Lenox looked at him angrily. “Perhaps it’s because I’m a detective.”

  “Who are they, then?” Mayne asked him.

  “Will you come to Corcoran and Sons with me?” he asked.

  Mayne looked dismayed. Lenox saw the calculation in his mind: the case was closed, nobody had come forward to protest the anonymity of the women, and he, the commissioner, was too important to spend his mornings running down false trails.

  On the other hand, Lenox was his responsibility.

  “Exeter can go with you,” he said.

  Lenox looked at the large inspector warily. Suddenly there was the sound of the door behind them. It was Field, the Yard’s most famous inspector; evidently he had come on another matter, but he looked at them curiously.

  “What’s this quorum for, then, gents?” he said. “We’re only missing Sinex, it would appear.”

  That word—“gents”—was very pointedly a derogation of Mayne and Lenox. Lenox ignored it. “I know who the women in the water were,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “I’m going to Corcoran and Sons to find out.”

  “I’ll come,” Field said mildly.

  Lenox looked at Mayne. “Do you remember the arrest the Yard made on the morning of the Ophelia murder?”

  “Nathaniel Butler? We let him go, the poor sod. I hope he’s gotten his job back.”

  “Not Butler.”

  Exeter looked at Lenox curiously. “Johanssen? The Swede?”

  Lenox nodded. “Of the Matilda.” Internally he cursed himself for his lazy little act of showmanship in getting them to release the sailor. “Scruffy beard. Tall. A bit worse for his night out?”

  “What on earth does this have to do with the victims?” asked Mayne.

  “The Matilda arrived in London last night,” Lenox said. “She had been abroad for eighteen months before that.”

  There was a silence in the room.

  “Pond had a conspirator,” said Field.

  Mayne stood up. There was no question of his staying behind now. His face was black with anger. “Wilkinson,” he shouted to the outer office, “order my carriage ready!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Blackstone, the foreman of the warehouse at Corcoran and Sons, was busy supervising the transfer of a set of enormous teak boxes from Ceylon into crates to be shipped around England.

  They hailed him, and he came over, touching his hat. “Did these arrive on the Matilda?” Lenox asked.

  “They did, as a matter of fact.” Blackstone looked at him curiously. “Black tea. Teak keeps it from moldering. How’d you know?”

  There were dozens of people around, and Lenox scanned their faces. He was looking for the one he had seen twice: the ghost, as he thought of the fellow, whose blurred image he still couldn’t quite distinguish in his mind.

  On the way over, he had described to Mayne, Exeter, and Field the young rope maker’s mate, newly arrived back in London.

  “I got it right, then,” Exeter had said in the carriage.

  “Eh?” Lenox had replied.

  “I had him. I arrested Johanssen.”

  Lenox tried to keep a straight face. But really. Gotten it right! It was true—but for every wrong reason, through blindest luck!

  Yet Exeter had a point, and Lenox was a fair-minded person. “Yes,” he said. “You had your hands on him.”

  In the warehouse now, Lenox had just one question to ask. The others had pressed him to tell them who the victims were, but he would tell them only that he had a suspicion.

  He could feel the ropes tightening, the steps of his logic perfect, as locked into each other as the workings of a clock, if he could just get the correct answer to the question he had.

  “You have worked here quite awhile?” he said to Blackstone.

  “Nineteen years.”

  “Did you ever see Eliza Corcoran?”

  The burly steward looked at him oddly. “Not more than five hundred times.”

  “She was here often enough, then.”

  “Yes. Why? Has Mr. Corcoran drug her home yet?”

  “What does she look like, Miss Corcoran?”

  “Mrs. Leckie now, you mean,” said the burly steward. “She’s a woman like most others, I suppose. Dark hair, curly. A young woman that looks like a young woman.”

  “Was she overweight?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “Answer it, please,” said Mayne.

  “No, not overweight. Slimmer than most girls her age, I would have said.”

  Lenox felt a wash of despair.

  They had gotten everything wrong.

  Lenox glanced at Mayne to see if this had registered with him yet, but he didn’t think it had.

  Suddenly he noticed that Exeter wasn’t among them. Mayne had been just to Lenox’s left, and Field and Exeter behind them. “Where did Exeter go?” Lenox asked Field.

  “To
inquire with Mr. Cairn whether Mr. Johanssen had been seen lurking about the place,” Field said. “The senior manager here, apparently. Thought it would be good to get a head start.”

  Lenox felt the blood drain out of his face. Somewhere in the distant back part of his mind he marveled at that; he hadn’t known it was more than an expression.

  “Oh,” he said. “He didn’t. Tell me he didn’t. The bloody fool.”

  He turned and sprinted toward the back right corner of the warehouse, where the stairwell to the upstairs offices was.

  Behind him, after a moment, he heard Mayne and Field give chase. He looked back and saw Blackstone staring after them—in his mind, Lenox could already hear him telling his mates in the public house, that evening, how inexplicable it had all been.

  Little did he even know.

  “Lenox!” called Mayne. “Stop!”

  “There’s no time,” Lenox called. He was taking the steps two by two.

  “Exeter and Cairn will find Johanssen if he’s here,” Mayne called.

  Lenox stopped for just an instant, looked back with despair, and said, “Cairn is Johanssen, Sir Richard. He killed Eliza Corcoran. He killed Jonathan Pond. And he killed another woman—Exeter may be the reason we never know her name.”

  He turned, ignoring the astonished faces of Field and Mayne, and sprinted up the steps.

  “Cairn?” Mayne called incredulously toward Lenox’s back.

  Cairn.

  In bearing, entirely different from Johanssen, the sailor. But take away the polished hair, the distracting eyeglasses, the fussy manners, the pedantic voice; add in three days of beard, a few bruises and scrapes, a Swedish accent; and what did you have?

  Both were well above average height. Both had white-blond hair, scruffy in one case, slick in the other.

  One of them had been present at the death of their Ophelia, Johanssen.

  One of them had been present at the death of Jonathan Pond, Cairn.

  And the most damning detail of all: he had lied, lied directly, about Eliza Corcoran’s appearance, calling her overweight and fair, when she was shader and dark.

  As he flew into the large clerks’ room of Corcoran and Sons, it was all coming together in Lenox’s mind. Cairn’s performance with Pond had been masterly. He must have shot him and then staggered back toward Mayne and Lenox, the picture of shock and distress, before pretending to faint.

  The gun had been found a foot or two to the right of Pond’s body. Lenox hadn’t noticed that right away, and wondered, now, if Cairn had tossed it down the hallway of the records room after shooting him, or had concealed it upon his person and used the ensuing commotion to place it.

  Either way, Pond—Pond had known. Lenox could see his eyes now, innocent.

  He stopped in the center of the clerks’ room. “Where is Cairn?” he called loudly.

  Fifteen faces looked up at him. Pond replaced already. He heard Mayne and Field enter behind him. “He just stepped out,” one voice piped up. It belonged to a reedy fellow who looked as if he were in his father’s suit. “Not a minute or two ago.”

  “With anyone?”

  “Alone.”

  Lenox whirled around, as if Cairn might attack him.

  What he couldn’t figure out was why, why Cairn had become a murderer. Why he had written the letters. Why he had staged the elaborate scene on Bankside.

  And who, too; who the second woman was, if Eliza Corcoran was the first—which she had to be. The timing, the description, they fit Walnut Island too well.

  He went to Cairn’s office door, which was closed. He took the handle, then dropped it as if it were hot and took a step back.

  He swore an oath under his breath. What if Cairn was still in there, holding his revolver?

  “You’re sure it was Cairn who left?” he hissed at the clerks. “Not a police inspector?”

  They all nodded.

  Lenox threw open the door and stepped back, half expecting the blast of a gun.

  Instead he saw a sight that, in other times, he might have found comic: Exeter was gagged and bound, sitting in a chair, red from all but screaming his head off. Apparently the gag had muffled his hollering, however.

  Lenox, Mayne, and Field came into the office, and they immediately began to undo the complex knots binding their colleague. (Not for nothing had Cairn been in the shipping business for two decades. Though he’d had less than a minute, he’d done an expert job. Was this one called a Turk’s head knot? Lenox tried to recall.)

  The clerks crowded in around them. “Blimey,” one said.

  That about summed up Lenox’s own feelings on the matter. He met Exeter’s eye—and Lenox saw, for a second time, that he had an enemy in the inspector.

  When they had finally worked loose Exeter’s gag—no easy task—Exeter spat and swore, then spat again.

  He was irate. “Why didn’t he shoot me, the coward?”

  “The noise,” Lenox murmured. He turned back to the clerks. “Has Mr. Cairn taken any vacation recently?”

  “His annual trip to the seaside with his cousins,” one volunteered. “He goes every spring.”

  “When was that?” Lenox asked.

  They looked between them. “A few weeks ago, perhaps?”

  Just when Johanssen had appeared. Lenox understood now that Cairn had taken that time to get into character, grow out his beard, get into a pub fight—become a Swedish sailor rather than a proper English clerk. It was another deception, like his imitation trunk from the Gallant, yet another altered appearance.

  Brilliant, in its way. No two figures could be more different than Cairn and Johanssen.

  Mayne shut the door. “Wait there. Don’t move,” he told the clerks. He turned to Exeter. “What in the devil happened?” he asked.

  Exeter looked caught between anger and sullenness. “I came in and told Cairn about Johanssen being the guilty party. He asked who had cottoned on.”

  “What did you tell him?” Lenox asked.

  “I said we all knew it. I suppose I said that you’d been asking Blackstone about Eliza Corcoran’s appearance.” The fool. “Then, quicker than you can say jackrabbit, his gun is on me, I’m in this chair, and he’s gone.”

  “What a foul-up,” Mayne said, brushing his hair back. “Did he say anything else?”

  Exeter shook his head. “No.” Then he took it back. “Wait—yes. He said to tell Lenox something, once I mentioned that you were the one who had figured out about Johanssen, and was speaking to Blackstone.”

  “What?”

  “He said he had been tracking us for his own protection and that he knew about—was it—Elizabeth—I believe? That was the name he said, I think.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Elizabeth.

  It was like this in novels, the desperate chase. Only he hadn’t known that it would feel like the worst thing in the world.

  Elizabeth lived in Mayfair, and Lenox would have given everything he had, down to his last farthing, his last scrap of clothing, his own life, to be able to cinch the whole of London up for just a brief moment and step, take a single step, to wherever she might be.

  There were carriages flying to three addresses at that moment, one (with Exeter, Field, and two constables) to Cairn’s, one (with Mayne) to the Yard to muster up constables to search both for Lenox’s friend and for the murderer, and one (his own) to Elizabeth’s house.

  There was also a whistle relay from one constable to the next, which would indicate—seven longs, two shorts, three longs, one short, in this case—whose beat had trouble afoot. But there would be innumerable houses and people on that beat, and no way faster than Lenox’s carriage of conveying who exactly, which house exactly, was in trouble.

  Lenox had heard his first tales of crime during his schooldays. Back then they were as far from his own experiences as Earth was from Neptune. He came by the stories, which captured him from the start, at the costermonger’s. Every Tuesday, the butcher (who could read, which made him a learned fe
llow by the Markethouse standards of 1837) would sit in front of the costermonger’s huge slatted bins of apples and pears and read aloud from the new penny blood. (Why Tuesday? He couldn’t recall.) The butcher’s fee was a cup of strong tea, which he said helped soothe his reading voice. He would also usually take an apple on his way out, taking triumphant leave of his little crowd of twelve or fourteen, who remained behind discussing whatever they had just heard in a state of chilled credulity.

  A costard was what had once, long before, been the name of an apple, after all—still was in some parts—and so it seemed a fair salary from the costermonger.

  But Lenox had known in his heart, even then, that he was hearing something only tangentially related to real life.

  Whereas now, thirteen years later, nothing could have been so dull, so awful—or so lifelike.

  Lord, he hadn’t known how sheer physical space—the streets outside his carriage, the crossings, the horses, the people—could seem an enemy, the relentless seconds passing by.

  “Can you go any faster?” he shouted up to the cabdriver through the open window. “Knock people out of the way. I don’t care. I’ll double your fare—double it again—if we get there with haste.”

  The cabman grunted. “Right.”

  There was a grievously minute increase in their pace.

  He forced himself to think about Cairn. He pulled out his soft leather notebook. He jotted a few words very nearly at random, trying not to look out the window; it was too close to torture.

  He wrote down the name, Cairn. Then he crossed a letter out.

  Cain.

  What a strange mind he found himself in battle against. Clearly those letters to the Challenger had been a disguise—the “perfect crime” business was perfect to pin to Jonathan Pond, the quirky, quiet, friendless, “literary” clerk, as easy for a detective’s imagination to sketch in as you could please.

  And yet it was funny, Lenox sensed even more strongly Cairn’s own personality in the letter. They would discover his motive for murdering Eliza Corcoran, but this second play on a name (ponderous, Cairn) made Lenox feel sure that in part the letters were true—that he did want to commit the perfect murder.