The Laws of Murder: A Charles Lenox Mystery

by Charles Finch

  “It’s not far, just thirty or forty yards,” said Nicholson. “You can see the scene if you look.”

  Lenox and McConnell strained to look through the window. Ahead there was a press of people, and above them, lofted onto handy poles that the Yard had recently introduced for nighttime investigation, bright lamps to illuminate the area. Several large constables kept people back from the pavement, crowding them into the street, which made it difficult for the cabs and omnibuses along Portland Place to pass. The shouting of their drivers added to the hellish din and confusion. Lenox realized with a dreadful pang that the smallish body of his friend was at the center of all this; and dead.

  As they stepped out of the carriage, Nicholson first, Lenox looked up. The houses looked familiar to him, for some reason, not just because they belonged to the rest of the very fine structures along Portland Place, but these two or three houses specifically.

  Had he been to a supper here recently, a ball?

  Then he realized why he recognized the houses, and stopped, chilled—for unless he was much mistaken, the body of Thomas Jenkins was lying in front of the house of the Marquess of Wakefield. The seventh name on Lenox’s list.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The person in charge of the crime scene in Nicholson’s absence was a florid, overweight, and overwhelmed young sergeant named Armbruster. He met them on the pavement, a thick sheaf of papers clamped tightly under his arm. “The newspapers have arrived,” he reported to Nicholson, “and I have sent out for hot soup.”

  “This is Sergeant Armbruster,” said Nicholson, introducing Lenox. “He was in charge of the scene when I arrived, first man on the spot, which means he’s been here for hours—stout fellow, Armbruster, well done. Hot soup, though?”

  “All the men are cold and—and hungry, very hungry indeed.” From its rather desperate tone, this latter assessment seemed as if it might apply more to Armbruster than any of his constables. “To lift the spirits, Inspector. We have been working past the clock for some time now. I myself am accustomed to having my supper very prompt.”

  “Yes, well, fine. Is the wagon ready to go?”

  Armbruster looked unsettled—the wagon had absolutely nothing to do with soup—and took a moment to register the question before saying, “Yes, sir.”

  Nicholson turned to Lenox. “The scene is yours. Take the time you properly need, but work quickly, if you could. I would like to cause as little commotion here as possible, particularly with the journalists arriving, and the wagon is ready to take Jenkins’s body to the morgue.”

  As Nicholson said this, Lenox and McConnell were gazing upon a roped-off section of the pavement, where a white sheet covered a low-lying lump. It was two or three feet from the house—not Wakefield’s house, in fact, but the one directly next to it.

  Lenox was still scarcely master of his emotions. “To whom does this house belong?” he asked.

  Nicholson drew his own notebook out and flipped its pages. “John Clitheroe,” he said. “Forty-two. A merchant from Northumberland. Unmarried.”

  “The house is dark and the lower windows barred, I observe.”

  “He is away for six months upon business, sir,” said Armbruster. “In the Caribbean.”

  Nicholson looked at the sergeant. “The canvass has returned, then? Lenox, as you can imagine we sent out several constables to ask about the house.”

  “Yes, sir. No witnesses, sir, no, though we knocked on every door we could. Unfortunately we’re so close to the park that there’s not as much foot traffic here.”

  That might have been true on a normal evening, but now there were getting on for fifty people, perhaps even more, crowding in on them. “Disperse this crowd, Armbruster.”

  “But the soup will be arriving any moment, sir,” said Armbruster.

  “I don’t give a damn about the soup.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “Neither should you.”

  “No, sir, certainly not, sir,” said Armbruster, though there was a hint of rebellion in his face. He did give a damn about the soup. Lenox wondered if Armbruster had known Jenkins, or if the inspector was only a name to him. The Yard was a large place, when one began to count all the constables and sergeants. There was no reason this fellow should know the kind of man—for Lenox still believed in Jenkins—that had been lost.

  “Thomas, would you rather look at the body here or in the morgue?” asked Lenox.

  “I might give it a cursory look here, and a more extensive one there,” said McConnell. His hands were in his pockets. He shook his head. “I find it hard to believe Jenkins is under that sheet.”

  “Then let us inspect his body together first, after which I can look around the area for myself,” said Lenox. “Nicholson, have you removed the effects from his person, his pockets?”

  “Yes. They’re in a box in my carriage. You’re free to examine them at your leisure. For my own part I could not see very much in them—the normal things a man would carry.”

  “A notebook?”

  “No, none.”

  Lenox and McConnell ducked under the rope—Nicholson having nodded them past the large constable manning it—and approached the body. Off to their left Armbruster was actually doing a fairly effective job of dispersing the crowd, though Lenox knew that at least a dozen of them would remain until every scrap of evidence had been carried off and the last black cloak of the Yard was gone.

  “Do you know whose house this is?” Lenox murmured to McConnell as they came to stand near the body.

  “John Clitheroe, forty-two, Northumberland merchant, unmarried. Or has that sergeant got it wrong?”

  “No, the next one.” Lenox jerked his chin. “There.”

  “Whose?”

  “William Travers-George.”

  “Oh. Oh!” McConnell looked at Lenox in surprise. “Wakef—”

  “Yes, but keep your voice down, please. We can discuss it later.”

  Wakefield.

  Lenox considered the name even as he moved about the scene. The blackmailer Hughes was of relatively gentle birth, while Parson Williams the impostor had been an orphan; both were of equally negligible origin, however, beside William Travers-George, the 15th Marquess of Wakefield. The title was among the highest in the land, outside of the royal family. Among nonroyals, only a duke was permitted to enter a room before him. On top of that the Wakefield marquessate was one of the oldest in England, bestowed first to a particularly loyal treasurer of Elizabeth the First in the 1580s, a lineage that meant that of the thirty-five marquesses in Great Britain (there were hundreds of earls, by contrast) Travers-George outranked all but two.

  The family had extensive lands in Yorkshire, and of course Hatting Hall was theirs, which some people considered the most beautiful of all Hawksmoor’s country houses. As if these credentials weren’t enough to guarantee his respectability, William Travers-George’s father had been a kindly, beloved old soul, rarely away from Hatting, and William Travers-George’s son and heir, who per tradition borrowed the honorary title of the Earl of Calder, was a mild-mannered student at Cambridge. On either side of him, in other words, were decent men. There was no indication of madness or malice anywhere in the family line. Travers-George was biographically unimpeachable.

  Yet Lenox doubted strongly that there was a man capable of greater evil currently alive in England.

  McConnell bent down over the body, whispering to Lenox, “Should Nicholson arrest him?”

  “No,” murmured Lenox, bending down as well. “Not yet anyhow, certainly not.”

  They positioned their bodies so that they were as much between Jenkins’s body and the crowd as they might be, and then McConnell pulled back the sheet.

  Both men were silent at what they saw, for it was he; it was Inspector Thomas Jenkins. There was a small round hole at his temple, but otherwise his face looked composed, almost Roman. He had been a handsome man.

  “It is the pity of the world his life should have ended this way,” said McConnell
.

  “I hope he didn’t feel any pain.”

  McConnell shook his head. “He wouldn’t have, no. It would have been instantaneous.”

  They had examined enough corpses in tandem that they were able to work in silence. McConnell studied first the head and then the neck of the body, loosening the tie Jenkins had been wearing and giving particular attention to the eyes, shining a light in them. “No response, the pupils constricted. It has been longer than ninety minutes. I suppose we knew that. Rigor mortis is setting in quickly.”

  “Is there ever a response after death?”

  “For ninety minutes or so there is a reflex in the cornea.”

  Soon McConnell had moved on to the hands and forearms of the body, which again he studied with great care. Lenox meanwhile was checking to his own satisfaction Jenkins’s suit pockets. They were empty, as he would have expected, even the small ticket-pocket in his waistcoat. Jenkins had carried his identification as a police inspector as a matter of course, but Lenox imagined that it must be in the box in Nicholson’s carriage, together with the rest of the property that had been on Jenkins’s person.

  They spent ten minutes with the body. Finding little enough, at last they permitted Nicholson’s constables to conduct it to the police wagon, where it would sit until the police were certain they were finished with the scene and it could be transported to the morgue.

  “Did you find anything?” asked Nicholson.

  McConnell answered. “Only a rather shallow cut on the left hand. It is about three days old.”

  “He didn’t mention any kind of incident to me,” said Nicholson, “and I saw him every day this week. Several times each day, in fact.”

  The doctor shrugged. “It could easily have happened with a letter opener, or a kitchen knife.”

  “Will you go to the morgue?” asked Nicholson.

  “To see the bullet. Otherwise there isn’t much point. I’ll glance over the body again.”

  “Lenox? Did you find anything?”

  “Did you or one of your men unlace one of his shoes?”

  “No. I don’t think so, anyhow.”

  Lenox frowned. “Peculiar.”

  “What?”

  “One was laced, one nearly unlaced, that’s all. It’s probably not meaningful.”

  “It must simply have come undone,” said McConnell.

  “I don’t think so. The right shoe was triple-knotted.”

  McConnell looked surprised. “That is odd.”

  “I thought so.”

  “What would you like to do now?” asked Nicholson.

  “I want to see what Jenkins had on his person, then go look at these notes he wished me to see,” said Lenox. “But tell me, first, has anyone asked at this house about the incident?”

  “Yes,” said Nicholson, flipping open his pad. “It belongs to someone called William Travers-George, a marquess, the lucky blighter. Only staff is present at the moment. They didn’t see anything.”

  “Where is the owner?”

  “They don’t know. He left in haste two days ago, an unplanned trip, taking no servants, and hasn’t returned. They couldn’t tell us his whereabouts.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  There was a great deal that Lenox hoped to accomplish that night, but he forced himself, now, to take a deep breath and survey the scene. Wakefield had vanished two days before, and now Jenkins was dead twenty feet from his house. It was a situation that required very great care.

  “You’ve canvassed every house in the area?” he asked Nicholson.

  “Yes, and spoken to the few remaining vendors in the park, too. The written report will be ready in the morning—you shall have it when I do—but the constables didn’t learn anything of note, alas.”

  Lenox looked at the vast facade of Wakefield’s house (the marquess’s intimates called him by his surname, Travers-George; his acquaintances and his family called him Wakefield; all others, My Lord or Your Lordship or Lord Wakefield) and saw that on one of the alabaster columns in front of it was stenciled, in elegant black lettering, 73. Portland Place’s addresses ended at 80, if he recalled correctly—there the park began, Regent’s Park. Wakefield’s was a particularly large house, but all of its neighbors were just as distinguished in their construction and maintenance.

  Stylistically they were all the same except for 77, two doors down from where Jenkins’s body had fallen; this was a low-slung brick edifice, rather of the last century. What caught Lenox’s eye was that it looked almost dementedly protected, guarded. There was a wrought-iron fence that reached higher than the house’s roof, its gaps far too small for even a child to squeeze between, and on its small gate were two heavy locks. All of the windows were barred. From the steps a figure, an older woman, was gazing at them. She would have had a good view of the crime, if she had been out there then.

  “Who lives in 77?” asked Lenox.

  Nicholson waved over Armbruster, whose task of managing the crowd had eased with the disappearance of Jenkins’s body into the wagon. On the otherwise unbroken expanse of his white shirt there was a wet brown stain. Soup, Lenox would have wagered. “Armbruster, who was in 77?”

  “It was a convent, sir,” said the sergeant. “Or rather, it is a convent.”

  “Who answered the door?”

  “A lady porter, sir. She said the sisters and the young novices and them were at prayers, sir, at the time Inspector Jenkins was killed. Nor did she see anything or hear anything, except when the commotion out here started. She said she wasn’t a papist, for her part, she was quick to mention that. Only the porter of the place.”

  That explained the reinforcements on the house. Lenox wondered if they knew anything of Wakefield’s history there. If they did the abbess might have contemplated moving away from the street.

  “Did you look carefully around the body, to see if anything was thrown from it?” asked Lenox.

  Nicholson smiled wearily. “We are not rank amateurs, you know. We looked at the entirety of the scene, in expanding concentric circles. Jenkins’s own method.”

  In fact this was Lenox’s method, though he said nothing. “And found?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary. There was the usual London mix. Discarded food and trash, cigar ends, bits of string.”

  “Nothing with writing on it?”

  “No.”

  Lenox believed Nicholson but did his own methodical review. After ten minutes he, too, had found nothing.

  He looked across to McConnell, who was standing by the van, speaking to its driver. This fellow was pressing a hand to his stomach and saying something with great animation, and the doctor felt the spot, palpated it for a moment, and then, speaking sternly, began to take out his prescription pad. At any rate some good might come of this night, Lenox thought. The living always do go on.

  He went to Nicholson, who was consulting with his constables; two of them would remain near this spot overnight, observing. Lenox asked if he might see Jenkins’s possessions now.

  “Yes, come to my carriage. I ought to have shown you on the way.” Nicholson’s face was grim, gaunt. “But listen, Lenox, I’m afraid I can’t stay with you all night. I’ve brought you in, as Jenkins wished, but I have superiors to whom I must answer, an investigation to begin building on my own. It’s nothing personal.”

  “I understand. Perhaps you could leave Armbruster.”

  “Where do you want him to take you?”

  “To the Yard—to Jenkins’s office.”

  “I’ll take you there. After that we can go off our separate ways.”

  “Understood.”

  “It’s nothing personal at all,” said Nicholson again. His face, always angular, looked very wan now, too, in the sallow light of the streetlamps. “For my part I would like to work together.”

  “We might meet tomorrow and compare notes.”

  “Yes, let’s do just that,” said Nicholson.

  They went then to the inspector’s carriage, its bored horse flicking its
tail every so often, and Nicholson found the small black leather box into which he had put all of Jenkins’s possessions. He opened the box. “Not much,” said Lenox.

  “Here’s the list I asked Sergeant O’Brian to make.”

  Lenox took the list.

  Taken from the person of Inspector Thomas Jenkins

  4 April 1876

  Scotland Yard Box 4224AJ

  Keys on a ring, seven, none marked, none unusual

  Billfold, twenty pounds in notes, three in coin

  Pocket watch and chain, silver, embossed TJ

  Pouch shag tobacco

  Meerschaum pipe

  Underground ticket, unpunched

  “Nothing relevant to his work, then,” said Lenox, sifting through the box to check its contents against the list. They matched.

  “No, unfortunately. Perhaps the keys.”

  “And yet I wonder.”

  “Eh?”

  “The ticket is unpunched. I imagine it was for his nightly trip home. Did he take a cab here, then? Was he meeting someone at seven? We can ask his sergeant at the Yard—Bryson, I believe was his name.”

  “Yes, Bryson.”

  “We can also ask his wife if she expected him later than usual. Then there’s the money.”

  “What about it?” asked Nicholson.

  “It seems like a great deal to me. I’m carrying four pounds at the moment and would have imagined that I was above the average even on Portland Place.”

  “True. I’m only carrying shrapnel.” Nicholson drew a few coins out of his pocket, more of them copper than silver. “Enough to get home or have a meal in a pinch.”

  “I wonder if the three pounds was Jenkins’s pocket money, and the twenty for some other purpose.” Out of delicacy Lenox did not say it, but he couldn’t imagine that the inspector earned more than two hundred fifty pounds a year. That meant he had been found with nearly a tenth of his annual wages upon his person—odder and odder. “Again we might ask Madeleine Jenkins, or Bryson.”

  Nicholson looked up at Lenox warily. “Perhaps you and I had better stick together after all.”