The Laws of Murder: A Charles Lenox Mystery

by Charles Finch

  It was this fact that had driven Lenox after Anson, after Wilchere, after Hughes. Though he wouldn’t have admitted it, he felt a sense of competition with his friend.

  They were sitting now, each with a cup of tea in hand, by the window above Chancery Lane. On the sill were two inches of accumulated snow. In the street below, the busy day was running its loud, unthinking course, the noise of horses, hawkers, and hacksaws replacing the silence of the middle night. Lenox would be glad when the press had come and left, and he could rest.

  Dallington, as ever, was dressed impeccably, a carnation in his buttonhole, his dark hair swept back, his face—which was unlined and very handsome still, his intermittent bouts of dissolution never telling upon it—wry, controlled, and with a hint of a smile. “Pretty casual of LeMaire and Polly, leaving it so late, I would have said.”

  These were their partners. Lenox glanced at his pocket watch. “They have twenty minutes.”

  “LeMaire has a case. He may be out upon business.”

  “And Polly is a woman.”

  “Well identified.”

  Lenox smiled. “I only meant that she may not be as—as punctual, perhaps, as a man.”

  “I call that rot. Very probably she was here earlier and grew tired of waiting for us. At any rate, what would Lady Jane say, hearing that slur? She is more punctual even than you are.”

  “You have my word that she is not,” said Lenox seriously. “If I told you the amount of time she once took last spring to put a ribbon in her hair you wouldn’t credit it, I promise you.”

  “Yes, and you’re often early.”

  “I blame it on the school bells. I still have nightmares about being late for class and having a cane across my knuckles. Edmund does, too.” This was Charles’s older brother and in all the world his closest and most inseparable friend, Sir Edmund Lenox. He was also a powerful political figure—though perhaps the gentlest soul who could claim such a designation. “Still, at least it means that you and I are here to meet the journalists.”

  They wouldn’t be alone, however—the door opened and Polly Buchanan came in. She was trailed by the massive seaman who served as her bodyguard and assistant, Alfred Anixter. Lenox and Dallington both stood, smiling.

  These smiles vanished when they saw the concern upon her face. “Is everything all right?” asked Dallington, taking an involuntary step toward her and then checking himself. They were no more than professional colleagues still, after these many months when it had seemed as if they might become more.

  Polly Buchanan was a widow of high birth, herself with a rather rakish reputation, though nowhere near as dark as Dallington’s had once been; she said what she liked, one of the qualities guaranteed in London society to make a woman the target of malicious natter. She had founded a detective agency the year before, not under her own name but under the pseudonym of Miss Strickland, a ruse designed to keep her clear of the stain of trade. The agency had advertised in the papers and attracted a great deal of halfpenny clients, but Polly was better at her craft than those cases hinted she might be. More than even Dallington or Lenox she had a belief in science: on her freelance staff (now their freelance staff) were a sketch artist, a forensic specialist, a botanist, any number of experts whose knowledge might be drawn upon in a moment of need. As she was fond of saying, 1900 was on its way.

  She shook her head. “Have you seen the Telegraph this morning?”

  “What does it say?” asked Lenox.

  She gestured toward Anixter, who was holding the newspaper. “The front page.”

  Anixter read it out loud in his London accent. “Scotland Yard Urges Newly Founded Detective Agency to Cease Operation of Business.”

  “Good Lord!” said Lenox.

  “Let me see that.” Dallington took the paper and read the subheadline out loud. “Agency places public safety at risk, says Inspector Jenkins. Oh dear, Thomas Jenkins. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is it when … when a chap you like says stuff to the Telegraph. As the Bible tells us.”

  Lenox shook his head. “I had a note from him yesterday, asking if he might see me. I’m sure he wished to explain.”

  Jenkins was a long-term ally of theirs. “I suppose his superiors might have forced him into it. His ambition is becoming inconvenient,” said Dallington.

  “Look at the eighth paragraph,” said Polly. “You’ll find the phrase ‘dangers of amateurism’ in there. Nicholson comments, too, albeit in less harsh terms.”

  “Nicholson! I was with him not half an hour ago. I almost believe he can’t have known about this,” said Lenox. “He was so very friendly.”

  Polly shook her head again. “Charles, you’ll want to look at the second-to-last paragraph.”

  Lenox took the paper and scanned down it. This was bad, no doubt of that—much of their hopes for a successful beginning were pinned to positive publicity. He read, and soon found the line to which Polly had been referring. He read it out loud. “One suspect falsely accused by Mr. Lenox, William Anson, has already been released with the apologies of Scotland Yard. Mr. Anson, a master carpenter—if he’s a master carpenter I’m the Archbishop of Canterbury—has not ruled out a suit for unlawful imprisonment, and has informed friends that Mr. Lenox has long borne an irrational vendetta against him.”

  “Overplaying his hand there,” murmured Dallington.

  “Inspector Jenkins warned that Mr. Lenox might find the transition from Parliament to the world of crime difficult, in particular. ‘If he offers them no more than his name, Mr. Lenox will likely be more of a burden than an aid to his new colleagues.’ As he may have been to his old ones, a parliamentary reporter for the Telegraph, James Wilde, confirms: ‘He was scored off by Disraeli, and had to leave with his tail between his legs.’”

  The Telegraph was a conservative paper, and its owner, Lord Monomark, a fierce partisan and a great enemy of Charles’s allies in Parliament, so that was scarcely surprising. The comment from Jenkins was more surprising—indeed, carried a sharp personal sting.

  Dallington shook his head. “He’ll regret saying that, if I know Thomas Jenkins. He’ll come round and apologize, and we’ll have a cup of tea.”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” said Lenox.

  Polly seemed upset—not hurt, but angry. “Why would the Yard be so dead set against us? Hasn’t Lenox above all proven that he can help them, in the last months? Haven’t all three of us—all four of us—helped them in the past?”

  Just then the fourth in their quartet came in the door, beaming, apparently unaware that anything was amiss. This was LeMaire, a Frenchman with an open, warm face, rather betrayed by the impatient intelligence of his eyes. He held his gloves in one hand and slapped them against his palm happily. “My friends!” he said. “Are we ready to open our doors?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next month was harder than any of them had expected. On the day of their grand debut none of the newspaper writers had been very interested in their brass nameplate, in the vivacious young Miss Strickland, or even in Lenox’s quietly hoarded triumphs—the release of Anson told against those. The burst of positive publicity with which they had hoped to inaugurate the firm never materialized. Though for a while their names popped up in the newspapers, the slant was nearly always negative. Then they stopped receiving mention altogether; except, unfortunately, in the penny press, which adopted a gleeful gloating tone, celebrating the release of Anson in particular, one of their own, an East Ender.

  Business, perhaps as a result, arrived much more slowly than they had hoped it would. Indeed, it arrived much more slowly than they could have imagined it might, even in their most pessimistic prognostications.

  Despite this difficulty, for seven weeks the new office operated in a state of determined good cheer and hard work.

  Then, finally, the stress told.

  It was a sullen late-February morning, the sky a black-gray, as if night had never quite been persuaded to depart for day, a lingering suitor glowering aft
er its lost prize; a freezing rain told a dull pattering tale upon the windows and the roofs, long minute after long minute, long hour after long hour. The four principals were at their customary Monday meeting, held each week to discuss new business. The head clerk, a bright young soul called Mr. Fletcher, took minutes.

  “Any new business?” asked Dallington. He was tapping his small cigar against the table restlessly. In truth he wasn’t suited to the administrative elements of the operation and spent less time in Chancery Lane than any of the others, impatient when he had to pass more than an hour or two in the office.

  “Two new cases,” said Polly, and described them. One was blackmail, one embezzlement.

  Dallington also had a new case; LeMaire, two. The Frenchman was the leading detective within the expatriate community, among the diplomats and the foreign traders, French and German and Scandinavian. He spoke several languages, which helped. He was also popular among the fools of the English gentry, who believed only a Frenchman could make a detective, the Vidocq touch.

  “And Mr. Lenox?” said Fletcher the clerk, in his springy Dorset accent.

  “Nothing new,” said Lenox, as evenly as he could.

  “What a surprise,” LeMaire murmured.

  All five of them looked up, and Dallington started out of his chair, white-faced with anger. “What did you say?”

  LeMaire looked as surprised as any of them, immediately abashed by this hint of dissatisfaction, and after a beat he stood and with great formality said, “You have my sincerest apologies for my unthinking utterance, sir,” he said, “and I will be happy to place them in writing. I spoke without thinking.”

  “It’s quite all right,” said Lenox.

  Dallington was nearly shaking. Polly, with a heavy sigh, interjected before he could speak. “Don’t be foolish, please, fellows. I know that none of us would willingly insult another. It’s an early morning. Sit down and we’ll talk about billings.”

  The meeting resumed.

  Lenox could scarcely pay attention, however, he felt so bitterly, miserably unhappy. For all four of them knew the truth: He had not brought a single case into the firm since its inception. The other three had seen their business decline, but not disappear; Polly had a reputation among the middle class and respectable lower middle class as an affordable, intelligent counsel, and still drew clients from her advertisements as Miss Strickland, which the firm had left in the papers as they had always appeared, altering only the address. Dallington had the faith of the members of his class—as Lenox once had. LeMaire’s base of clients had eroded the least.

  As for Lenox: nothing. All of the referrals he and Dallington had expected to receive from the Yard had evaporated, vanished. Even Nicholson would do no more than smile his friendly smile, and tell them that the Yard was ahead of its business at the moment, in need of no help at all. This when it was known that the coroner had a stack of corpses higher than he could ever hope to handle, each of them an unsolved death, the metropolis spared from their smell only by the glacial temperature of the season.

  Meanwhile Lenox’s parliamentary contacts had proved equally useless, even if they were friendlier, and whatever reputation he’d once had in London was gone, or had been distilled into Dallington’s.

  How hard they had been, these seven weeks that led up to LeMaire’s comment! In a way it was a relief to have the grievance in the open. Every morning Lenox had come into the office at eight, and every evening departed at six. How the hours passed between he was hard-pressed to recall, except that there was a mechanical smile upon his face the whole time, and in his words a constant false tone of optimism. He had spent some of this period organizing his old case files and amassing new profiles of the criminals of London. He had also updated his archive of sensational literature, clipping notes on crime from newspapers that came to him from all across the world. Once or twice he had been able to add a valuable perspective on a colleague’s case, but Polly was independent, LeMaire jealous of his own work, and Dallington (who was most solicitous of his help) so rarely in the office.

  All of this would have been tolerable to him were they not splitting their meager profits, and their increasing expenses, four ways.

  The next Monday LeMaire was scrupulously polite when Lenox reported that he had no new cases, and the same the Monday following. But as March passed, the attitude within the office in Chancery Lane grew discernably less friendly. Soon LeMaire was stiffly polite, no more. Polly, though she was by nature a generous, warm-spirited person, and never changed in this respect to Lenox, did begin to seem downtrodden, as if she doubted that their new venture, which had begun so promisingly, had been wise. She had some small portion left over from her marriage, but she was very definitely in the business, as Lenox could not claim to be, for money, and by that measure the choice had been a bad one.

  As for Dallington—it was not conceivable that Lenox could have had a stauncher ally than Dallington. At every meeting the young lord came in and swore to the heavens that Lenox had solved his cases for him, guaranteed the payment from their clients through his brilliance, single-handedly saved him from the embarrassment of an unsolved matter.

  These were lies, and each week Lenox expected his friend’s eyes to fall slightly, his support to falter in its vehemence, if not in its content. It never happened. An outsider would have sworn from Dallington’s testimony in the meetings that only Lenox’s grim determination and hard work kept the firm together.

  The subject rarely arose between them. “Shall I put more money into the books myself?” Lenox asked in a moment of weakness one evening.

  “Absolutely not,” said Dallington shortly. “These others don’t see how rich you’re going to make us all.”

  Lenox had been so affected by this blind stubborn friendship that he had turned away, unable to respond.

  Finally, after ten weeks, Lenox told Lady Jane about his troubles. Afterward he wished he had done it sooner.

  It was over breakfast. Lenox’s wife was the daughter of an earl and the sister of another, and therefore somewhat higher born than her husband, though they had been raised in and out of each other’s houses, ancient friends. For many years they had lived side by side in London, each the other’s closest confidant; then finally, with what seemed to them both in retrospect unforgivable slowness, they had realized how much they were in love. She was a pretty but plain woman, her dark hair in loose curls, more simply attired than the brocaded and upholstered women of her social sphere tended to be—a blue dress, a gray ribbon at the waist, that was her preference. Motherhood had rather softened her acute, forgiving eyes. Certainly it had added lines near their edges, lines Lenox loved for the thousand smiles they recalled to him: a life together, their love deepening as the unmarked days drew forward into each other.

  Generally as they ate breakfast Lenox and Lady Jane read the newspapers, exchanging stories from them now and then when something struck one of them. That morning, as he stared at a plate of cooling eggs and kippers, Lenox couldn’t bring himself to read. Right away she noticed.

  “Are you all right, Charles?”

  He looked up at her from his hands and smiled. “It’s harder than I expected, the new firm.”

  She frowned. “How do you mean?”

  “I haven’t helped, you know. I’m the worst of the four of us.”

  She sat forward on her chair, engaged immediately, concerned. “At your work? That’s impossible.”

  “Nobody has come in to hire me.” It was hard for him even to say these words, or to look at his wife as he did. The truth was that he had never failed at anything in this way. “LeMaire is unhappy about it.”

  She crossed the table and came to his side, her hands taking up his own, her face consumed by sympathy. “I have wondered why you seemed unhappy. I had worried—worried that you missed Parliament.”

  “No, no,” said Lenox. “Not that.”

  “You must give it time, Charles.”

  He shook his head. “I don�
��t know.”

  Yet he felt better for telling her. He had long since forfeited that adolescent urge to seem perfect to other people, to show no outward flaw in himself—but it was hard to admit that he had tried his best at something and been unsuccessful, even to Jane, perhaps especially to Jane. Her own life was effortless, or so it seemed: She was one of the leading arbiters of London society, the writer of a small, mildly successful book for children that had been much treasured and feted by her friends, a mother of impeccable judgment. In the last months this perfection had worn on him, but when he saw her face now, he knew he had been wrong to keep his unhappiness to himself.

  Or so he thought. That afternoon a client came in for Lenox, a young servant with a sister he wished traced into the colonies; and not much later another, the president of a society for the preservation of cats who was persuaded that her offices were being surveilled. Lenox thought of declining both cases, but he didn’t have the heart to inform Jane that he had seen through her act of charity. Besides, each problem was real enough, by whatever obscure back channels she had located it, and by whatever means she had persuaded these clients to come to Lenox—and in truth, though it was likely his own money they brought him, the firm could use it. Neither matter took more than a day, and each brought in a few guineas. He thought the pity that they represented might kill him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  One evening at the beginning of that April, Lenox and his friend Thomas McConnell, a physician at the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, sat in Lenox’s study in Hampden Lane. They usually passed one or two evenings a week in each other’s company, either at their houses or in one of the clubs on Pall Mall, drinking, smoking, and talking. McConnell was a tall, rangy Scotsman, rather weather-beaten but still handsome.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” said Lenox at a lull in the conversation, “what do you think of a teaspoon of brandy for a child as its milk teeth are coming in, to help it sleep?”