Home by Nightfall

by Charles Finch

  The small company, impatience mounting, retreated to a nearby chophouse, before finally returning to the baths at half past eleven.

  “I wonder where LeMaire is now,” said Dallington as they went in. “Probably China.”

  “Hopefully far from here, if we’re correct,” said Polly. “I want the glory for ourselves.”

  It had started to drizzle, and Dallington said maliciously, “I hope he’s stuck out in the rain somewhere.”

  The baths were spectacular, Lenox had to admit as they walked through. They were set up in a series of connected rooms, each tiled in a different brilliant pattern, all with divans and sofas and chairs at their edges, turbaned servants standing close by at every turn. Their little crew made for an odd intrusion upon the leisure of the prosperous gentlemen who were using the baths, but they only received glances of curiosity, no challenge to their progress.

  Following the manager, Smythson, they passed through the hot room, then the “very hot” room, which wasn’t pleasant, then the sluice room, where they didn’t pause at the waterfalls of cool water, though Thurley, in his three-piece wool suit, red as a beet, looked as if he wouldn’t have minded.

  After that it was the massage room, the cool room, the plunge pool—room after room after room, the steps in a sequence that aspired toward what must have been a nirvana-like relaxation.

  “You haven’t seen him, Mr. Thurley?” Nicholson whispered after each room.

  “No,” said Thurley. “And it is exceedingly unpleasant to examine these fellows so closely when they’re—when they’re disrobed. I don’t like it a bit, and I don’t blame them for disliking it either, I can tell you.”

  “Stick it out a bit longer,” said Dallington encouragingly. “If we find him, I’ll treat you to a bath myself.”

  Thurley, who liked a lord, colored and said, oh, it was an honor to help, no remuneration necessary, though of course anyone might find it refreshing to enjoy a bath, after suchlike exertions.

  And then, in the middle of this speech, the theater’s manager spotted him: the man that all of London had been looking for.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  He was even smaller than Lenox remembered.

  They found him in the sitting room just beyond the last of the baths, a large chamber that had been decorated marvelously, such that it could easily have been the inner sanctum of a Turkish palace, he thought. All of the men in it, as they entered, were dressed “à la Turque,” having been wrapped in robes and turbans by attendants against the cool air, then seated on comfortable sofas to be served flavored tobacco, sweet coffee, and honeyed pastries.

  “There he is,” Thurley said.

  Even as he said it, the little man, sitting in an armchair and reading a book, saw them.

  He stood up right away, with an uncertain expression on his face. He looked absurd in his turban, his sparse graying chest hair emerging from his robe.

  “Hello, gentlemen,” he said, when they approached him.

  “Take word back to Polly to get going,” Lenox murmured to Pointilleux.

  “Mr. Muller?” said Nicholson.

  The little German nodded. He was standing up very straight. “Yes, it is I. I let her die. There is no point to deny it.”

  He spoke in a squeaky German accent, which took some of the gravity away from this admission. Everyone in the room was staring at them, and Nicholson asked Smythson if they could speak somewhere more private. The manager led them to a little side room nearby, which was overly bright. Muller was extremely docile; he sat with them readily, asking only if he might have a glass of brandy. Smythson dispatched someone to bring it.

  “I am Inspector Nicholson, Mr. Muller,” said the man from the Yard.

  Muller sitting, nodded. “Very well.”

  “You say you killed this woman? Tell us, please, who was she?” asked Nicholson.

  Muller smiled. “Who was she! It is a strange thing to love a madwoman, gentlemen. Love her I did, however. She—she was Katharina Schiller, the beautiful Katharina Schiller, famous throughout Berlin society, the companion of my heart. Nobody has ever understood me as she did. Nobody ever will again, either, alas.”

  “Why did you kill her?” asked Nicholson.

  Muller hesitated. Lenox thought he knew why.

  Poisoning—it had been on his mind all day, ever since his return to London.

  It bothered him. Men who killed their lovers almost always did it out of passion, and by passionate means, a gun, a blow.

  They were supposed to believe that Muller, on the other hand, had murdered this woman by the most premeditated of methods, and at the theater no less, the place and time when having to dispose of a body would be least convenient to him.

  He stepped forward. “Mr. Muller didn’t say that he killed Miss Schiller. He said that he let her die.”

  Nicholson looked at the pianist quizzically. “Mr. Muller? You’ve given us all a great deal of trouble—I do think you might favor us with an explanation of what you did and where you’ve been.”

  At that moment the glass of brandy arrived, and Muller drank most of it in a single draft. Then he studied the glass for a moment, before taking a deep breath and responding.

  “I could never have broken it off with her in Berlin,” he said. “Her father … her personality … well, I could never have broken it off with her in Berlin, gentlemen. Yet if I was to survive another day with my sanity intact, I had to leave her.

  “And here, with the success that has met me in London, far from home, I felt—finally, I could tell her that it was finished, our affair. The day she died, I informed her that I would be traveling on to Paris alone, to meet my real sister, which meant that it would not be convenient to me to have her travel with me any longer. I was very tender, you know! I told her that we would always be friends.

  “She left my dressing room without a word. Just before I was to go on that night, however, I found her there again. She had her own key to the theater and to the room. She had insisted on that when we arrived. In my dressing room she had poured two glasses of wine from a bottle she had brought with her.

  “Little did she know how transparent her offer of a final glass of wine in friendship was! She had told me many times that she would rather kill me than lose me. When her back was turned for an instant at a knock at the door, I switched our glasses. Yes, it was thus that I killed her. I expected her to take a sip and taste the bitterness, and see that I had found her out. Instead, when I took a sip, she laughed like the madwoman she was and drank the entire glass before I could stop her.

  “I cannot describe anything more horrible than seeing her face as she realized what had happened. She died very quickly. I cannot describe…” A funny distance came over the German’s undistinguished little face. “And yet, gentlemen, I do not know that I have ever played better. I felt I was playing for her.”

  The story they eventually teased out of Muller was much longer than this, and went back to the history of his initial meeting with Katharina Schiller in Berlin. There were a hundred details that Nicholson pursued, while Muller was in a cooperative mood: how Greville had helped, how the pianist had hidden Miss Schiller’s body.

  The essentials of the tale never deviated from the original version, first to last, and finally, Nicholson, sighing, said, “Regardless of intent, I must inform you that you are under arrest.”

  Muller stood up immediately and drank the rest of the brandy. “Of course. Let us go now. The hour is late.”

  They left. In order to depart from the baths, they passed back through the rooms of the bathhouse in reverse order.

  Muller joined uncomplainingly in this unusual procession. Only when they were in the antechamber to the baths did he pause. “Mr. Muller?” said Lenox.

  They all followed his gaze, which was trained on a pianoforte in the corner, with a broken wooden back. “Gentlemen,” he said, “might I have a moment to play? It may be some time before I am seated at my instrument again.”

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nbsp; They looked at each other uncertainly. He was a diminished figure, and had come along so quietly.

  Still, it seemed wrong. But Muller took advantage of their silence to go sit at the piano, and nobody stopped him. Testingly, he played a note. It sounded very uncertain—an instrument meant for drinking songs, jangly, probably warped by the steam in the baths, certainly not what he was used to. Muller ran his fingertips along the keys noiselessly, feeling them. It was only now that Lenox noticed the single remarkable thing about the fellow: his hands, which were extraordinarily delicate, long, slender, and muscular.

  Muller began to play. He started with a few notes that sounded unrelated, but which resolved into a tentative chord. Another followed it, three simple notes. Then the initial chord again, held, sustained.

  He played a short run from the first chord back to the second, then paused, then played a few more stray notes, seemingly unrelated.

  And then suddenly they were in the midst of it.

  Lenox had only an intermittent relationship with music, but he was enthralled. As Muller played, the room, the world, were transformed. The unassuming little German seemed to melt into the piano, his body wholly connected to it. The music was fluid, major, then minor, irreducibly magical.

  “Bach,” murmured Dallington, who knew more about the subject than Lenox did. “For organ, usually. A variation.”

  Muller played on and on, and even Cartwright, who had taken the heat of the baths worse than the rest of them, couldn’t pull his eyes away. Thurley’s mouth hung open. As for Lenox—well, as the music went on he felt as if he were in a room with everyone he had ever loved, his brother, his parents, Lady Jane, Sophia. It was the strangest thing. When Muller began to play more softly, in a minor key, it was almost intolerably moving. When he moved back into the major key, all of them felt the strength and suppleness of the emotion behind it, neither triumphant nor defeated. Loss—the loss of Katharina Schiller—was present in all of the notes, but so was life, the force of life.

  At last he began to soften his playing back toward those first chords, the notes quieter and quieter, fewer and fewer.

  When he had finished there were tears in Dallington’s eyes. “My goodness,” he said.

  Muller let his hands rest silently on the piano for a moment, and then he stood up. Lenox would never forget the look on his face. He looked renewed, not exhausted. He bowed. “Thank you,” he said, and then, after only a few seconds, he was again the absurd little German man he had been before he played.

  Genius! Who could explain it?

  In the front room they met Polly and Pointilleux, who had been listening to the piano music, too. They watched Nicholson and Cartwright put Muller into a police dray, promising they would call in the morning to inquire after his status.

  “He did it, then?” said Polly.

  “Yes, he admitted it straightaway,” said Dallington.

  She shook her head. “How beautiful that music was, though.”

  “Was it Pascal who said that all of man’s miseries come from not being able to sit alone quietly in a room?” said Lenox.

  “Very odd. Still, the good news is that we shall be famous throughout Britain tomorrow, fellows. We found him.”

  “And thoroughly routed LeMaire,” said Dallington.

  Yet none of them could feel quite as enthusiastic as they ought to, watching the dray—and after they parted, agreeing to meet early the next morning, Lenox, for his part, carried that melancholy all the way home, hoping that Lady Jane, who could always cheer him up again, would still be awake.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Two weeks later it was truly winter at last, and Lenox, more fool he, was sitting outside on a public bench near Wallace Street very early in the morning, as slow, heavy snowflakes drifted down in the windless air, whitening the awnings, dotting the streets. He was warmly bundled, though, and the company was fair: Graham sat next to him, just as deeply buried in warm cloaks and wrappers and gloves, only their eyes and mouths exposed to the cold. Between them on the bench was a large stone bottle of hot tea that Lenox had brought, from which they frequently replenished their small tin cups.

  “There he goes, meeting that gentleman in the carriage,” said Graham.

  “Damn him,” said Lenox.

  “The third time.”

  They watched as Obadiah Smith stood at the door of the carriage for a few moments, then, after receiving a piece of paper, ducked back into the begrimed public house that served as his headquarters—the sort of backstreet establishment, not uncongenial, that would put your cut of beef on the gridiron if you bought a drink, and bring it to you with mustard and walnut ketchup.

  “What is he doing, I wonder?” Lenox asked for the tenth time.

  “All three carriages have been well appointed.”

  “I noticed.”

  Smith was a long-term quarry of Lenox’s, a score he intended to settle on his own time, and this sort of casual ongoing observation of him wasn’t unpleasant, a piece of the puzzle, not a moment of urgent action. The afternoon before, Graham had asked him to breakfast, and Lenox had invited him instead on this escapade—a dirty trick, to be sure, except that Graham had always enjoyed this extracurricular aspect of his work, when he’d been Lenox’s butler, and they’d had the better part of an hour to talk.

  “Back to the subject we were discussing—spring, you are fairly sure?” asked Lenox.

  “I think so,” said Graham.

  “In that case we will have the supper outdoors.”

  “Supper?” Graham said, raising his eyebrows.

  “Myself, Jane, you, Miss Winston of course, McConnell, Dallington, Lord Cabot—” Cabot was an old political ally of Lenox’s, in failing health but still stubbornly sociable, who had become extremely intimate with Graham in the past year—“and anyone else you care to invite.”

  “Neither Miss Winston nor I wants any bother. I say that quite sincerely.”

  “I’ll see you to hell myself before I let you get married without a supper, Graham.”

  Graham shook his head. “My calendar is full this spring.”

  “Every night!”

  “Every night.”

  Lenox laughed, and was about to reply when Smith came out again. The detective scowled and leaned forward slightly, peering through the narrow slit between his scarf and his hat. “What could he be doing?”

  Graham studied Smith, who was a hardened criminal, a diabolical and clever person. “I wonder if he’s working in his old line again.”

  “Prostitution?”

  Graham nodded. “He’s only receiving papers. Addresses, perhaps?”

  Lenox narrowed his eyes. “Perhaps. But why would the carriages come to him? And why would they leave behind a trail of paper? I wonder if it’s something more complex. Stockjobbing, for instance.”

  “You could find out by following him at night. If it’s prostitution, that’s when he’ll be busiest. If it’s stockjobbing, he’ll be off the clock then.”

  Graham had always been an invaluable second set of eyes. “You’re right. If only it were warmer out.”

  “Mr. Pointilleux is enthusiastic, is he not?”

  “I wouldn’t want to put him in the way of danger. It’s my case.”

  “Then you and I might do it one night this week.”

  “I can’t risk the neck of a Member of Parliament, Graham. Not to mention what Miss Winston would think of it.”

  “I think my neck will be all right,” said Graham drily.

  Lenox continued to peer at the public house, wishing Smith, who’d disappeared inside once more, would come out again. They had a cab waiting and intended to follow the next carriage that came for him. “Well,” he said, still staring, “if you’re busy all spring it will be a luncheon. And if you’re not careful, I’m going to ask Jane to speak to Miss Winston directly.”

  “Heaven help us,” Graham said.

  Lenox laughed.

  Several hours later, still pink-cheeked but drie
d and warmed, and having dropped Graham near Parliament, Lenox was sitting with Polly and Dallington at the weekly meeting of the agency’s three partners.

  “Our finances are not spectacular,” Polly was saying, tapping the end of her pencil against the balance sheet she was studying. “Not disastrous, but not spectacular.”

  “Not disastrous has always been my ambition in life,” said Dallington, and smiled at the look of exasperated affection that Polly shot him. “Anyhow, why be so gloomy? We’ve wiped LeMaire’s eye, we’re the heroes of Fleet Street, and we have half a dozen meetings with new clients today alone.”

  “All six of them put together won’t add up to what we lost by Chadwick. I’m not joking. If it weren’t for the reserve fund, we would be in debt right now. I still think we might be wise to let one of the new detectives go. Mayhew probably.”

  Lenox grimaced. It was true—Chadwick had cost them a few of their steadiest clients. “This is why it’s quite right that Polly is in charge,” he pointed out to Dallington. “Best to have a pessimist making the decisions.”

  “I’m not a pessimist!” cried Polly. “A realist, perhaps.”

  “Are you not pleased that the Daily Mirror called you ‘fetching,’ then?” asked Dallington.

  “I’ll quit if you mention that again.”

  Muller was in dock; the newspapers agreed that he wasn’t likely to serve a long sentence, since murder would be near impossible to prove, and a half-emptied sachet of arsenic had been found among Miss Schiller’s effects at the Hotel York. More than that, the palace had a strong interest in a pleasant relationship with Germany, as several of the John Bull–ish rags took pleasure in pointing out.

  Lenox and Dallington had been to speak to him twice more, and also been to the Yard to receive Broadbridge’s brusque praise. (Most of that credit they pushed toward Nicholson, who looked likely, all fingers crossed, to be promoted on the strength of running Muller to ground. It would be valuable to have a chief inspector among the agency’s friends.) It was true that the three detectives had become briefly famous recently—to such an extent that even the Monomark papers had given them a few terse mentions, because it would have looked odd had they not.