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

by Charles Finch

  Lenox shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. He helped Corcoran hire the investigator.”

  Graham nodded wonderingly. “Good Lord, the effort and expense.”

  “He was well paid for many decades, and a bachelor. He evidently staked everything on these murders. The question is why,” Lenox said. “That is what I still don’t understand.”

  “What I still don’t understand,” said Graham, “is how someone so methodical could have mentioned the Matilda!”

  “It was his only error. Listen—I’ve no doubt it was a jarring morning for him. He had adopted the character, but it must have been a near miss with Nathaniel Butler, if Cairn was discovered close by enough to be detained. For all we know, he actually intended to push the body on the board into the water and was more or less caught in the act.

  “Anyhow, he would have had the Matilda in the back of his mind, given that she was expected soon with a shipment of their wares. He was caught, and he blurted it out.”

  “Mm.”

  “And I let him right off the hook, didn’t I,” said Lenox bitterly. “What I have learned, above all, is to examine every body carefully when one has the chance. At least I shall take that knowledge forward.”

  In the next hours, they went on discussing the case. Graham speculated that perhaps Cairn had some reason to believe that if Pond and Miss Eliza Corcoran never married, he stood some chance of taking over the business himself.

  Long service, after all.

  But could a man’s character remain hidden for so long? Thirty long years of work—and then the sudden, brutal outburst of violence, as calm as a bank deposit, as carefully plotted as a trip to Asia.

  The next morning, as the search for Cairn continued all over London, Lenox went to see Lady Jane—Elizabeth, as he knew he must call her—at the Savoy.

  She had friends surrounding her. One of them was her husband’s cousin Mrs. Edward Taylor, a young lady of sturdy appearance, whom Lenox had met many times. “Well, here is the hero of the hour,” she said.

  Her tone was not kind. “How do you do, Mrs. Taylor?” said Lenox.

  “Would you care for a cup of tea?” Elizabeth asked him, far more solicitously.

  He rubbed his eyes. “Indeed I would, if you could spare it. I was up very late, and up very early.”

  “The price is your story,” Elizabeth said, rising to fetch a teacup from the sideboard of the hotel room herself. “All the papers will say is that the London police are in hot pursuit of an anonymous senior shipping manager named—what was it, Cousin?”

  “Theobald Cairn,” said Mrs. Edward Taylor without hesitation.

  Lenox raised his eyebrows. “There are details of the story that I’m not entirely sure are quite right to repeat in mixed company.”

  He had been to the Yard that morning: the second victim, the Ophelia, had indeed been male.

  If there was a single sentence designed to elicit Mrs. Edward Taylor’s sympathetic interest, it was this one, however, and soon Lenox was telling them the entire tale, beginning to end.

  “Good heavens, Charles,” Elizabeth said when he had finished. “I must say, I think you’re brilliant.”

  “I’ve always thought so.”

  She smiled. “Stop that.”

  He smiled in return. He was grateful to Cairn in this one respect, perhaps—that the events of yesterday had returned his relationship with his childhood friend to its normal footing. “Only joking, of course.”

  “What a glorious beginning to your career.”

  Lenox shook his head. “I don’t know that I shall continue as a detective, as it happens.”

  “No?” said Mrs. Edward Taylor.

  He thought about Pond’s face, and the brutal infinite twenty minutes when he had thought Elizabeth dead, and the ugly reality of seeing a body, a corpse, and shook his head once more. “No. I think my first case will be my last. There is a good deal of traveling I would like to do. Perhaps when I return I will have some idea of how I might most profitably use my days.”

  “You won’t go immediately?” said Elizabeth.

  “Oh! No. No, not until—not for some while.” She looked at him, understanding as well as he did what he had been going to say, or what he meant, anyway, about his father. “Anyhow, I tell a lie. I have another case, and there is a certain Mr. Rupert Clarkson whom I intend to call upon this morning.”

  “Who is he?” asked Mrs. Edward Taylor, frowning. “Do I know that name?”

  “I doubt your circles overlap, ma’am,” Lenox said, taking a sip of his tea. “An unrelated matter.”

  “You will have to postpone your travels until this Cairn villain is caught,” said Elizabeth’s cousin.

  “The Yard have that well in hand.” Indeed, they had been all through Cairn’s rooms, and were interviewing his sister this morning. All the ports were alerted to his appearance. “My own utility is at its end.”

  “That can never be true of a capable man,” said Mrs. Edward Taylor very finally, with the pomposity of a person for whom cliché is the only real wisdom.

  “No,” said Elizabeth stoutly. “That is true.”

  She was so young—nineteen!—and yet Lenox, several years her elder, and until the fall before having, out of habit, thought of her as of very nearly belonging to a different generation, looked at the wisdom and the intelligence in her face, and renewed his word to himself. He could not marry her;

  well, he would not marry;

  and he would not be a detective;

  the price was too high, this feeling too sickened for all its exhilaration;

  and he would go to Lenox House and spend as much time with his father as he could;

  and he would write down every minute detail he could remember about their trip to Russia;

  and then he would travel;

  except that now, before all that began, before he could begin not marrying and not detecting and writing down and traveling the far reaches of the earth and being a person, a real live adult, he would go and see about Rupert Clarkson.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  A letter arrived at the Challenger that afternoon and was published that evening. The hue and cry went up all across London, and Lenox first learned about it as he passed a newsstand, going home from seeing Clarkson.

  The letter was different in tone from the previous two, though it bore a similarity to them, too.

  31 May, 1850

  Sirs,

  Few people know the world’s shipping passages more intimately than I do, despite never having ventured outside of England myself. Now, it would appear, is the moment to take advantage of that knowledge; by the time this letter reaches you, I shall already be far from these shores.

  Nevertheless, I wish to convey three small truths.

  1) Since the game is up, I may as well tell you that my aim—and nobody could have come closer!—was to take possession of the firm of Corcoran and Sons. I wrote George Corcoran’s will myself, knowing his hand as well as my own; I was to be vested as 51 percent owner in the event that his daughter was deceased at the time of his own death, with various family members receiving the remainder. (To aspiring criminals reading this: Be just avaricious enough, and no more.) It was the least reward I had earned through twenty-eight years of scrupulous service. Scrupulous acting, I may add. Pond’s suicide (attributable, as I envisioned it, to the madness of having Eliza reject him in favor of her father, which would have accounted for his anger at both of them) would have been the ideal coup de grâce. Alas—the world loses a work of art, in losing my crime.

  2) In that light, it is some comfort that the crimes remain, if I say so myself, perfect. My previous crimes, which you will never discover, were perfect, too—but they were less challenging, since they did not involve my own acquaintances.

  3) Any attempt to trace my whereabouts will result in a direct attack on my pursuers and their families. This I take as my personal insurance policy against the absurd society which would put a mind as brilliant
as mine to such inadequate use.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Theobald Cairn

  Graham, who had come along to see Clarkson, also had a paper. He and Lenox finished reading at the same time. “That is our man,” Lenox said. “What do you make of it?”

  “I think he is a very brilliant and a very mad person, sir.”

  “As do I.” Lenox stood, ruminating, on the corner. It was early evening, the trade in the street quiet and amiable. “That phrase—‘my previous crimes’—gives me a chill. I wonder which bodies are buried where.”

  Graham nodded, unsettled as Lenox rarely saw him. “Yes, sir.”

  “If this is our introduction to the profession, I suppose we had better see the ugly parts of it right at the outset.”

  “I suppose so, sir.”

  Their walk home took them across the river. Around the curve was Bankside; to the west, a ways, Walnut Island.

  How sordid it all seemed.

  There had been bridges across the Thames for two thousand years or so. The first one had been built by the Romans, who had asked themselves what they should call it, and replied, very sensibly if perhaps not with the keenest sense of creativity, London Bridge.

  It had been rebuilt and half-rebuilt fifty times since then. Its towering two-tiered presence was visible off to their right. Beneath them were various small craft, traveling the river; a fishing boat with its nets out, a junk collector, a shallow little flat-bottomed skiff upon which two boys were entertaining themselves. The water was dark, both always still and always moving.

  Lenox struggled to step back from the case, to assess his role in it. Was this it? Was Cairn to go unpunished? He felt disgusted with himself. The torment of it was that Exeter was quite right—if not for Lenox’s arrogant little on-the-spot scraps of detection, they might have hauled Johanssen in.

  As if reading his mind, Graham said, about three-quarters of the way across the bridge, “It occurs to me, sir, that the police would have been unlikely anyhow to hold Johanssen—Cairn—at Newgate for very long.”

  “How’s that?”

  “In the first place, I suspect he might have told them that he saw Nathaniel Butler, the clerk who discovered the body, committing the murder, sir.”

  “But the Matilda.”

  “Yes. I was getting to that, sir. He was playing the inebriate, at the time, and at that very moment a ship called the Mariah was docked nearby. She was due to depart that day on a one-month voyage.”

  “The Mariah.”

  “I looked through the old naval gazettes this morning. There are two able seamen upon her lists named Johanssen. Brothers, no doubt.”

  Lenox stopped. “My goodness.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He meant the Mariah. He only misspoke.”

  “Precisely, sir. No doubt the Matilda had been on his mind.”

  “If he had merely said the Mariah, we might never have caught him at all.”

  “Indeed, sir. Or if you had not gone for that row, or if you had not spotted the juggling boy.”

  They walked on in silence for some time, and then, after they had taken the four steps off the old wooden bridge and into the streets of North London again, Lenox said, “He really was so close to getting away with it, wasn’t he.”

  The thought made him feel ill. “No, sir,” said Graham, shaking his head and frowning. “We would have found him.”

  “Perhaps. You are better at this than I am, you know. You would have found him, I reckon.”

  Lenox felt a strange absolution in this moment, for whatever reason. It made little sense. Though perhaps it had to do with how far off Field’s investigation had been, not to mention Exeter’s and Sinex’s. (He had suspected Sinex himself, in fact, briefly.) They had at least cleared Jonathan Pond’s name.

  What a few weeks it had been! Two cases; two resolutions; neither party satisfied.

  For Clarkson, whom they had just visited, had cut up pretty rough.

  Lenox and Graham had gotten to his rooms in the Strand at around half noon, just as Clarkson was beginning his lunch. He invited them to sit, though not to join him in the meal.

  It was a densely packed old place, not musty but accumulative, with old books in Moroccan leather piled high in the shelves (Quarterly Review of Midlands Engineers was a typical title), big, dark, heavy furniture, rock samples under glass, compasses, astrolabes.

  “How do you find yourself, Mr. Clarkson?” Lenox asked as they sat.

  He scowled. “Very unhappy, sir,” he said. His facial expression, his close-shaved white hair, and his spectacles gave him the look of a banker in that moment, an Ebenezer Scrooge. “I have not been to Dulwich these three weeks. I find myself quite paralyzed. And by something so trivial!”

  “Yes, as five pounds,” said Lenox.

  “As five pounds!” Clarkson banged a fist upon the table.

  Lenox glanced at Graham. “I wonder if you might tell me how you came to live in London,” Lenox said. “Did your family set you up in business as an engineer?”

  “My family! Ha. No, it was not my family.”

  “How then did you begin?” Lenox asked again lightly. “It must have been a challenge—and you have ascended very high.”

  He gestured around him, and Clarkson actually followed his gesture, looking at the spacious room, the expensive paintings on the walls, the footman waiting faithfully nearby to clear his filet of salmon.

  “It was a challenge, to be sure,” he said. A subtle change came over his face—nostalgia, pride, though both remained contained within his usual curtness. “It was many years ago now.”

  “Fifty?”

  “More. It is funny that you should mention the sum of five pounds, in fact,” he said. He chuckled. “That is precisely the sum with which I came to London initially, believe it or not.

  “From a very early age, I had a mechanical aptitude, you see. I could have been a farmer, like my father. But even at six, at seven, I could fix the equipment on the farm better than he or any of his hands could. For some time, I went to school in the mornings and worked in the afternoons. But I stopped at twelve. That was when he allowed me to hire myself out to other farms to mend their equipment.”

  “What was your wage?”

  Clarkson laughed, delighted at the question. “Pennies an hour,” he said. “It seemed fair enough at the time. We were deep in the country, of course.

  “I was always a frugal lad. I had nine elder brothers and sisters—one among them still alive, and she has visited me in Dulwich—and I certainly learned to look after myself. At fifteen, I had saved five pounds. I was determined that I should come to the city. How I even had heard of the city, I am not quite sure—but I was determined.”

  “Five pounds, was it indeed,” Lenox said in a mild voice.

  But Clarkson was already in the midst of his reminiscences—and, ignoring this gently pointed interjection, went on with his story, which in the fluency of its telling seemed like one he had told many, many times before.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  “I lost a pound almost instantly,” Clarkson said. He motioned for his plate to be taken away. “One of the usual deceptions they play—a flashy smart-mouth fellow renting a room that isn’t his to rent, disappeared when you return with your things. I may tell you that I wept bitterly over that pound. I had never regretted the loss of a sum of money so much, nor have I since.

  “Finally I found a room in a respectable coaching inn. It was ten shillings for six months. A single room. It included breakfast and tea. The landlady, Mrs. Cooley, was one of the dearest people ever to draw breath. The old Chequers, it’s gone now, but then everyone in London knew it, had an arcade, and my room let out straight onto a balcony. There were many days when breakfast and tea were all I had to eat, for I was very stringent with myself, but Mrs. Cooley seemed to have a sixth sense when too much time had passed, and would slip me the remains of an eel pie, or a rind of cheese.”

  “A generous person.�
�

  Clarkson nodded. “Surpassingly. At any rate. That was one and a half pounds gone. I hired a suit for five shillings, and some shirts and trousers for another two. Those were mine for a year, with a one-shilling deposit. Then there was the basic expense of keeping alive. No matter how prudent I attempted to be, the pennies would make their way out of my purse. They kept only two hundred forty to the pound in those days, then as now.

  “I wore out my shoes at the engineering firms in town—thruppence, that was, having them resoled, in case you thought I was using a figure of speech—but nobody wanted to hire me. There was one place above all that I longed to work, under a Mr. Carroll Cary. His reputation was the highest, both for the quality of his work and the fairness of his terms to his apprentices.

  “Needless to say, he was also the most difficult to gain an apprenticeship under. I aimed my sights much lower—cheap engineering firms. I would have worked anywhere. I had several very close calls, moments when I was nearly hired. I regretted their loss almost as much as I regretted that pound.”

  Clarkson settled back into his chair as a beefsteak with potatoes came before him. He had a glass of wine, and he swirled it, thinking. Lenox could have stopped him here, but he was curious about the story that had started Clarkson’s troubles—his benign troubles—and whether he had found employment under Mr. Carroll Cary.

  “Finally I had only eighteen shillings left. I was a month away from the end of my rent, and whatever Mrs. Cooley’s generosity, it would not have extended to free board. Understandably! We all have to make our way in this world, gentlemen.

  “It was almost the New Year,” he went on, “and I don’t mind saying that it was hard, very hard, to see the families together, smell the gooses roasting … and then, suddenly, I had an idea. I trembled at the very thought of it. I knew I couldn’t do it. And at the same moment, I knew I must.

  “Old Cary had a granddaughter of whom he was very fond. It was well known—even I, who had no job and had been in London for only five months, knew it. She would play under his desk at work, he took her to the theater—doted upon her.

  “I took fourteen of my eighteen shillings to a shop and bought the best materials I could. Solid, gleaming brass. Coils, springs, screws. Then I spent the next nine days in my room, barely leaving. It was freezing—I had no money for coal or firewood—and I worked in my gloves.