“At the end, what I had made fit in the palm of my hand.
“It was a small brass frog. When you turned its lever, it jumped over its own head. It had—oh, I would say seventy pieces or so. When I finished it, I knew I had constructed a masterpiece.
“I left it at Cary’s office with a note: ‘A gift for your granddaughter on the occasion of Christmas, as well as a sample of my work. If I am not hired soon, I shall return to my father’s farm—but I will not regret having made this frog for her. Many happy returns of the season.’ And with it, my name and address.”
“You got the job,” Lenox said.
Clarkson sat back, gazing happily into the past, ignoring his food. “I got the job. Mind you, it wasn’t easy—not at all. The wages were fair, but not high, and the hours were endless, nineteen hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. Usually seven days a week, I daresay. Then again, we knew what hard work was, back then.”
“And all from only five pounds,” Lenox said.
There was a just perceptible roll to Graham’s eye, and Lenox had to stifle a smile. “Well, yes,” said Clarkson. “Why?”
“Have you told your friends this remarkable story of your origins before?” asked Lenox.
“One or two of them, perhaps,” Clarkson said.
One or two of them a day for the past ten years, perhaps. That was the truth.
What Lenox had discovered in Dulwich was that Clarkson’s two sets of friends—on the one hand the fishermen of Dulwich, on the other the diners and oenophiles of London—had begun to worry about the old widower since his retirement.
He was old, rich, alone, and in each of these traits had begun to show some genuine eccentricity. Several had asked him independently to serve upon some charitable board or other and been met with a surprisingly violent rebuke that such things were all swindles. He was growing stingier and stingier, too, disputing small bills with friends who had considerably less money than he did.
On the other hand, he had the habit, especially in his cups, of retelling again and again the story of his first tenuous months in London.
“We thought perhaps we would give him a gentle push,” one of the gentlemen upon the banks at Dulwich had told Lenox—Joshua King. “A chance to look into his own conscience. We thought it might alarm him just a bit. But then perhaps he needed to be alarmed! None of us need a farthing from him. At our age, though, one of the joys of life is passing down what one has earned. Clarkson has been cutting himself off more and more. Why, he fell out with us here over a lost lure just last week—demanded his penny from me. I didn’t have it on me. He left in a fury.”
“Evidently he didn’t understand the message,” Lenox said.
King, the former military man, had looked at him smoothly. “I suppose that you find it in your hands to deliver, in that case.”
The conspiracy extended to four or five friends (there was some overlap in the groups) and one insider—though here Lenox refused to press. He was no informer.
At the conclusion of Clarkson’s tale, Lenox had sat for a moment, and then said, “I think that perhaps the story of your five pounds has made as strong an impression upon your friends as it has upon me, Mr. Clarkson.”
Instantly the engineer looked suspicious. “How’s that, then?”
“What I have gathered in my researches is that these—acts of mischief, you might deem them, belong to one of your friends. He wonders if you are perhaps becoming too stingy, too close, in your retirement, and hopes that you will remember how much five pounds once did for you, and what it could do for others.”
Clarkson had risen out of his chair before this statement was done. He was crimson with fury. “Who!” he cried. “Was it Dinkins, that interfering fool?”
“I do not know that name.”
“Then who!”
Lenox shook his head very slightly. “That is not my place to say.”
“Not your place to say! You took my money!”
Lenox took the two ten-pound notes from the inner pocket of his jacket. He held them up. “I am handing one of these to Mr. Graham, who did most of the work on the case, and whom I would not deprive on account of my own scruples. The other I shall leave here. Please take it in the spirit as your friend’s own emoluments. A man of your means and lack of encumbrances could do an immense amount of good with it.”
Clarkson was furious—still standing, one hand balled. “You’re in league with them,” he said.
“I am not.”
“Is it King? Lewis? Wassner?”
“Good day, Mr. Clarkson,” Lenox said quietly. “There won’t be any further envelopes. You may return to Dulwich at your leisure.”
As they departed, Clarkson continued to call names after them—insults, too, and Lenox suspected that his client (his final client, perhaps!) would remember him as a bounder.
It couldn’t be helped.
Was this what a long, unmarried life meant? He wondered; but the feeling had returned to him throughout the day, recurring again and again more strongly: Elizabeth would only ever be his friend; from this day forward, he would think of her only in those terms; and he would not marry.
It was very easy to make vows at twenty-three, he knew. Still, he intended to keep this one.
As they returned home from Clarkson’s, each with the Challenger underarm, Lenox and Graham discussed their busy day. Lenox was due to have supper out. They passed an old man wearing a Waterloo medal, the first battle for which all participants received a medal of commemoration. His was no doubt still earning him glasses of ale—perhaps too many of them, judging by the broken veins spreading out from his nose onto his cheeks—and it was impossible not to notice that he lifted one leg as if it were heavier than the other, and to wonder about the noble acts of that ancient day; or if a donkey had run over it two weeks before; and to feel guilty for wondering.
He returned home to find Hugh waiting for him, drinking black tea and reading a newspaper, tie elegantly loosened. “Hullo, old fellow,” he said. “Heavens, you’ve been busy.”
“Why are you looking at me as if I had leprosy?” Lenox asked suspiciously.
Hugh grimaced. “It’s the newspaper.” He tossed a copy of the Daily Star onto the coffee table.
Lenox took in the headline as a whole before its words individuated themselves: SON OF SIR EDWARD LENOX LET OPHELIA MURDERER SLIP AWAY, then the subhead, INSPECTOR EXETER HAD COLLARED SUSPICIOUS SWEDE BEFORE INTERFERENCE.
“Interesting,” murmured Lenox.
“They’re fools. Still I thought I would bring it by—best to hear it from a friend.”
Lenox stared at it for a moment and then laughed. “Well! Do you fancy a drink before we go to Lady Wilkes’s? I’m going to have a Scotch.”
Hugh looked as if there might be a catch coming, but then, hands in pockets, simply shrugged. “Go on, then, whisky and soda as usual.” He sighed. “This and the princess returning to Paris in a fortnight—barely aware I’m alive. What a world, Charles. Lacrimae rerum, and all that. Not so much soda—yes—top it up with brandy—I suppose we’re young yet, we may as well play out the string.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Lenox’s father had an eccentricity, which was that he truly loved to paint fences.
There was a common English belief that every landowner had one such eccentricity. Lenox’s friend Bartley was the son of an earl in Nottinghamshire who shaved his lawns—their many, many acres—with a pair of scissors. Just across the county here was a baronet named Bessenger who pleased himself by holding formal wedding ceremonies for his canaries. That was perhaps taking it too far, of course, though in every other respect he was a normal fellow; served in Parliament.
When Lenox arrived home two mornings later, his father was near the gatehouse of Lenox House, no doubt making old Carter, with his stone flask of tea and his morning newspaper, extremely uneasy. Sir Edward had on a smock and was painting the pure black of the wrought iron with delicate precision. Charles saw him first, and n
oticed the smile of inner happiness on his father’s face.
Nearby was a ladder. “Do you need a ladder-holder?” he called out to his father. He had walked from the station. “I offer myself for the post.”
“Charles! Yes, by all means. Do you want a paintbrush?”
“Oh, no, I’ll leave that to you.”
“Yes,” said Sir Edward with satisfaction, “I flatter myself I’ve got it down near a science.”
They stayed out until around lunchtime. They reminisced a great deal about their trip to St. Petersburg, which was fresh in both their minds. Lenox’s mother, sensing by some maternal magic that he was home—for he had only said he would get a train sometime that day—traipsed down the long avenue after a short while, bringing with her a footman who had three folding canvas chairs and a pitcher of iced lemon. It was a warm day.
“There you are, Charles!” she said. “How is London?”
“Still standing, I believe.”
The past few evenings hadn’t been entirely pleasant. Lenox could tell from the social gatherings he had attended that the shine was gone off him; he was only a detective, and a failed one at that.
“Elizabeth is at Houghton House, you know,” Sir Edward said.
“She mentioned that her father wanted her home until all of this had blown over.”
“Yes, I hear he was very firm.” The Earl of Houghton was their close neighbor, Elizabeth’s—Jane’s—father, and one of Sir Edward’s close confidants, though their politics were virtually diametric in every respect. “We ought to invite her to dine.”
“Naturally,” said Lenox.
“Yes, naturally.”
His father reached to apply his paintbrush to a high corner—it was a very slender paintbrush, and the black paint superbly glossy; he was particular about his tools—and winced, holding his chest. After only an instant he regained his composure.
That was one of two or three moments of weakness he saw in his father that week. For the most part, Sir Edward was in very good spirits. His mother was, too. It was a truly lovely summer, and people dropped in to play lawn tennis and have tea every afternoon. There were three or four times, when he wasn’t expecting it, that his mother embraced him and didn’t let go for forty or fifty seconds, laying her head against his shoulder. He felt very wise and old in those moments. Or perhaps it was that he felt very young and very afraid? The difference was so narrow.
When he had been in his old childhood room for five nights, his father told him, at breakfast one morning, that he had received a long letter from Sir Richard Mayne.
“Have you?” said Lenox. “Make him take you to court before you pay anything.”
Sir Edward laughed. They were both eating heaping bowls of oatmeal with healthy piles of brown sugar and cinnamon atop their undulating peaks. “He says you are gifted.”
“Does he?”
Lenox had been thinking a very great deal about his career all week. “Yes. He laid out the whole sequence of events in the clearest terms.” There was a pause. “He mentioned that you have taken a salary, too.”
“That is false,” Lenox said stoutly. The morning after Cairn’s final letter to the Challenger, he had gone into the Yard and retired.
“Is it?”
“I was forced to take half a pound a week from them. But I made it clear that I was not willing to continue the practice—and should remain a strict amateur.” He shrugged. “Anyhow, I doubt I shall continue in the profession.”
“Do you?” asked Sir Edward. “Oh, I don’t know. You sound from the letter to have a genius for it. I myself have never had a mind inclined to see hidden patterns. Nor has Edmund, I think.”
“Mother has.”
“Yes, she is good at puzzles. So is my father, your grandfather,” Sir Edward said, smiling. “He was a fearsome chess player.”
“I never knew that.”
“I don’t believe I ever beat him. In fact, I’m sure that I did not, though I have been playing these many years.” He smiled at the memory. “Anyhow, Mayne says that there have been developments in the—case, you call it, I believe? He asks me to invite you to call upon him should you wish.”
“Perhaps I’ll go up for the night, then.”
His father frowned. “You still have time for a ride, though? I had thought I might take you to Willingham Wood. I don’t think you and I have ridden there together. The view of the country is very beautiful, very beautiful.”
Charles’s heart leapt with a child’s happiness. “Oh no—as to that, I have all the time in the world,” he replied casually. “I could even leave it until tomorrow.”
Lenox and Graham did take the evening train back to London, however. The next morning, they presented themselves at Mayne’s office. A reading of the papers on the way—there were fewer in the country, which had been surprisingly pleasant—showed that Theobald Cairn, the perfects, Walnut Island, the Ophelia, Corcoran, all of it remained very much in the news. NOT RECOMMENDED FOR FEMALE READERS, blared one headline, Lenox presumed because of the discovery that the second woman in the water had been—a man.
Sir Richard greeted them with solemnity. “How do you do, Charles?” he said.
“I hope you don’t think I’m reluctant to show my face,” Lenox said. It had been preying on his mind. “I take full responsibility for letting Johanssen go.”
“I do not blame you. You were the youngest man there by some years and the least experienced by even more.” Sir Richard glanced at the door. “Inspector Exeter’s limitations are known to me.”
Lenox didn’t quite know how to reply to that—if he had started, he could have elaborated upon those limitations for a while. Instead, he said, “What new information do you have?”
“Ah! Yes. Well, three pieces, really. First: there was never a Peter Leckie. He was an invention of Cairn’s, it would appear, as we suspected. Cairn must have taken the night train to and from Scotland several times to keep the ruse going.
“Second, Corcoran’s will, found in his desk, did indeed name Cairn as his heir. Rather a bright stroke, in fact—let me see—yes, here is the line, ‘It is not out of any particular affection that I bear for Mr. Cairn, loyal that he has been, but because the business has been a second child to me, and Mr. Cairn alone knows the strength of will it takes to run.’ Rather plausible, in its way.”
Lenox nodded gravely. “Just so.”
Mayne sighed and looked down at his paper. “We have been looking into his history, his rooms. It all seems rather mild on the surface. But I’m not sure it was. He came to London from his hometown under some cloud—apparently a neighbor’s livestock was mutilated, someone Cairn was known to bear a grudge against. Not just killed, mind you, but butchered. Threats written in blood.”
“Good gracious.” Lenox paused. “Has there been any sighting of him?”
Mayne shook his head. “Here is the circular that is going to every British port.”
Lenox looked at the paper, which bore a very good likeness of Cairn, and a description of his disguise as Johanssen. The eyes that looked at him were lifeless—not because they were printed in black and white, but because they were so accurate—and in that moment, he vowed to himself that whether or not he remained a detective, he would find Theobald Cairn. He didn’t care if it took twenty years. His first case couldn’t end in this irresolution—nor his last. Either way, he was honor-bound. And even as Mayne went on, in his mind, Lenox began to formulate his plan.…
“Then there is the third matter. It is a job offer,” he heard Sir Richard say.
Lenox stiffened. “I had hoped that I made my feelings clear on—”
“Oh! No, no. I’m sorry. Mr. Graham, the offer is to you. I would like you to come aboard as an inspector as soon as possible. My vision of the department demands men of just your energy and skill.”
Graham looked surprised. For some time, he did not speak. “I am deeply conscious of the honor your offer does me,” he said.
“I have never bee
n happier to make such a one.”
“I must decline, however.”
Mayne laughed. The step from service to the position of inspector at Scotland Yard was so profound that he assumed Graham was joking. Then his laughter subsided and he looked uneasy. “Excuse me?”
Lenox looked at Graham, alarmed. “Well, Graham—don’t—take time to think about it.”
“Yes, you may take your time,” said Sir Richard in a slow voice.
Graham shook his head firmly. “I can tell you again that I have rarely been more honored in my life—but my answer is definite. I must decline.”
Now Mayne looked baffled. “I see.”
“Thank you, sir.”
After they had departed, they walked back to Lenox’s rooms. Most of the walk consisted of Lenox’s reproaches to Graham.
At last they arrived at the door. Mrs. Huggins greeted them. “Mr. Lenox! How pleased I am to see you. There is a list of trifling matters, not more than twenty-three on my list, referring in most cases to the practices of Lady Hamilton’s house. I know for a fact that you are not scheduled to do anything this morning.”
Lenox looked around wildly for an excuse, until he saw that he had been caught, at long last. He could not decline Mrs. Huggins’s demand again.
He followed her toward the admittedly welcome scent of tea and toast. “Now I see it,” he muttered to Graham, “how could you have given up all this grandeur?”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
London forgets a great many murders, but it did not forget the murder of the Corcorans and Jonathan Pond. This was due in part to the press, and in greater part to Tussauds.
This minor museum had begun several decades before as a waxworks, featuring a modest sampling of historical, literary, and political figures. Only when it opened its Chamber of Horrors had it become the most popular attraction in London. (The madame herself had died earlier in the year, having lived long enough to grow very rich.) Now it contained waxworks of “Cairn,” upright clerk, and of “Johanssen,” wild-eyed, bearded madman, with blood dripping from his hands and feathers strung—inaccurately—around his neck.
The Woman in the Water--A Prequel to the Charles Lenox Series Page 25
