“I don’t know if he’s here at the Yard. Let me ask.”
“Tell them to look in the canteen, I suppose.”
Nicholson smiled, then stepped out to send one of his constables off to search for the sergeant. While they waited they discussed the Gunner and the Asiatic Limited Corporation.
At length Armbruster appeared. “Sirs,” he said. Then he gave a not particularly favorable look to the Frenchman. Too zealous the night before, perhaps. “Mr. Pointilleux.”
All three men had remained seated when Armbruster came in, and Nicholson’s office, smaller than Jenkins’s though with the same lovely view of the Thames, barely had room to hold a fourth chair. Instead Lenox moved to a nearby filing cabinet, leaning against it and offering the sergeant his chair.
“You had a question about the canvass?” asked Armbruster, sitting back and looking up at Lenox expectantly.
“A few questions,” said Lenox. “Though my more pressing concern is what you’ve done with the papers Inspector Jenkins left behind.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Papers?” said Armbruster. “What papers?”
Nicholson looked at Lenox with consternation. “You cannot think that Sergeant Armbruster killed Inspector Jenkins?”
“I doubt he did that—or at least, I do not know. He may have. What I do know is that I would like to see Jenkins’s papers.”
“Papers!” said Armbruster again. “I don’t know who you think you’re speaking to, but I’ve been at the Yard for thirteen years. My father and two of my brothers have worked here alongside me.”
There was a crimson flush in Armbruster’s ears, however, a note of hysteria in his voice—this fellow was involved. Lenox pointed at his stomach. “I would bet five quid that you bought your pocket watch this week,” he said. “Am I correct?”
“That just goes to show,” said Armbruster, appealing to Nicholson. “I’ve had this for ages.”
“You really must explain your suspicions,” said Nicholson to Lenox.
“About the watch? Or about Mr. Armbruster? The matter of the watch is simple enough. He wasn’t wearing it Thursday evening, when Jenkins died. I remember specifically seeing a brown stain on his shirt at the time—soup, I think—and there was no watch chain across it.”
“That scarcely seems indicative of any great crime,” said Nicholson.
“I have also noticed across the years—anyone who wears a pocket watch will—that there is substantially more wear at the clasp than anywhere else on the watch. All of those openings and closings, thumb and fingernail rubbing down the metal. Mr. Armbruster’s has no such blemish.”
“That’s easy,” said Armbruster, looking more confident now. “On both counts. I don’t wear it often. Had it for ages.”
“Now you’ve worn it the last two days. And it looks, to my eye, to be made of solid gold.”
“A gold wash,” said Armbruster quickly.
It was here that he betrayed himself.
Nicholson asked, mildly, if he might see the watch. This evidently seemed reasonable enough to Armbruster, but as soon as Nicholson handled the object, it was apparent to the other three men that he did so with a vastly more intimate knowledge than they could have. He had the watch open and its workings under the squinch of his eye in an instant, and after he had turned the watch over and tapped it with his knuckle, then checked the maker’s mark, he passed it back to Armbruster.
“You see?” said the sergeant hopefully.
Nicholson shook his head. “My own father worked in a jewelry shop. I grew up behind the counter with him. Your watch is gold. And new, as Mr. Lenox said; it was made in the year 1876, according to its maker’s mark. What’s more, I doubt there’s a sergeant on the force who has a more expensive watch.”
Armbruster shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “I had a bargain, I suppose. And by ages I meant … months.”
“Do you remember where you bought it?”
“Not the exact name of the shop. I hope it wasn’t stolen.”
Nicholson looked up at Lenox. “Still, I cannot accuse a man on the basis of a new watch. Armbruster—sit down.” This latter injunction was given sharply, because the sergeant had started to rise from his seat. “Why do you suspect him?”
Lenox, hands in the pockets of his jacket, leaned back against the filing cabinet. “As you know, it is difficult to gain access to the inner corridors of this building,” he said. “When we couldn’t find Jenkins’s papers, I wondered whether perhaps he had taken them home or had them upon his person when he was murdered. But Madeleine Jenkins confirmed that he never brought work papers home with him, and the note to me suggested, I believe, that he wasn’t carrying them about London with him. They were in his office, then, locked securely away.”
“Except that they weren’t,” said Nicholson.
“Precisely. And there was that space upon his desk—the empty space you and I both saw, where they might have been. Since I saw that, I have believed there must have been someone working within the Yard who took them. Someone with access to the office and a key to its door.”
“It wasn’t me,” said Armbruster indignantly.
“At first I thought it was most likely one of Jenkins’s close associates—perhaps Hastings, perhaps Bryson—but I no longer think so. May I ask where you live, Sergeant Armbruster?” said Lenox.
“In Hammersmith. Why on earth do you want to know that?”
“You told us yesterday, didn’t you, that you aren’t accustomed to working in the field? That you are generally employed in the back offices?” Armbruster was silent at this. Lenox went on, “Take those facts together, then: You live nowhere near the part of London where Jenkins was killed, you generally work in this building, which is not a hundred steps from the Tube station where you would find your train home, and yet you were first upon the scene of the crime, as Inspector Nicholson here told us when we arrived. That was why you had charge of it, was it not?”
“It was,” said Nicholson. “He sent the fellow who found the body to fetch a constable and watched over it himself.”
Lenox nodded. “It must have been then that you looked through Jenkins’s pockets. You were very thorough—you even untied one of his shoes. But I suppose you were interrupted before you could get it off.”
Nicholson’s gaze had hardened now. “What were you doing near Regent’s Park that evening?” he asked.
“And what were you doing when I arrived,” said Lenox, “with a thick sheaf of papers, clamped tightly under your arm?”
“I didn’t have any papers,” said Armbruster. There was menace in his heavy face now.
“In fact you did,” said Lenox. “And if I had to guess why, I’d say it’s because you watched Jenkins’s office closely, saw when he left, slipped in, took the papers, and then followed him to North London to be first on the scene when he was murdered. You had to hold the papers—there was nowhere you could safely leave them. The only questions that remain are where the papers are now, and whether or not it was you who killed him.”
There was a tense silence in the room. “This is all mad speculation,” said Armbruster at last. “You have no proof that I’ve done anything.”
Pointilleux, who had been sitting quietly, widened his eyes slightly and then said, “I see now! This is why you have done such a bad job with the canvass, last evening!”
“I didn’t do any such thing,” said Armbruster.
“You did!”
“You had better give it up, Armbruster,” said Lenox. “If you were merely working for someone, you can avoid being hanged, anyway.”
For a fleeting moment the threat seemed to work. The sergeant’s face wavered. But he held firm. “This is all nonsense,” he said. “Inspector Nicholson, if you require nothing else?”
“I require a great deal else,” said Nicholson. “Sit there. Your desk and your home are going to be searched thoroughly before you leave this office.”
“As you please,” said Armbruster, and h
e sat back, unperturbed.
Lenox’s heart fell. They could search both his desk and his home all they liked, but they wouldn’t find anything—the fleeting reaction in the sergeant’s face told as much. “Was it Wakefield who was paying you?” he asked.
“Nobody was paying me.”
“Or Hartley? Francis?”
“You’re talking rot,” said Armbruster. “I was in the neighborhood on a social call, and I happened to see a fellow in distress. I ought to be getting a ribbon from you lot, not an earful about how I killed him. It’s a disgrace.”
“Yes, it’s a disgrace,” said Lenox.
Nicholson had gone to fetch two constables from the pool. When he returned, he said, “They’re going over his desk.”
“They won’t find anything,” said Lenox.
Nicholson shook his head. “No, I don’t think so either. And yet this chap lied to us now several times—about the watch, about the papers, for now that I put my mind to it I remember as well that you were carrying some kind of papers, Armbruster, and why on earth would that have been? You’d no need to take work home.”
“They were probably personal papers,” the sergeant said. “I can’t even remember them myself.”
It was maddening: to have someone who knew the truth about two murders sitting here before them, and to be unable to make him give it up.
CHAPTER THIRTY
That afternoon was Jenkins’s funeral. Lenox and Dallington rode together to it, and Lenox used the time to tell his protégé about the interview they had conducted with Armbruster.
“Where is he now?” asked Dallington.
“Still in Nicholson’s office, waiting for them to search his desk and his house. He’s not happy about having to sit there for hours, but they can’t arrest him. For all I know he’s marched out of the office already. He seemed more confident as time went on, I’m sorry to say. There was a moment when I thought he might break down, but if he doesn’t we’re flummoxed.”
Dallington turned his head, his face philosophical. “Still, it was well done to spot him, the scoundrel.”
Lenox hesitated, then said, “No, it was badly done. I realize that now. I would have been much better off observing him, building a case against him.” He shook his head. “I was too excited to have put it together, after Pointilleux described how incompetent the canvass was.”
He half-expected Dallington to object to this self-criticism, but the younger lad said, “Perhaps, I suppose.”
In all the months of the agency’s existence it was the closest he had come to offering any criticism of Lenox. He felt it keenly. “Armbruster will betray himself in the end, I hope. Something in his office or in his house that he didn’t count on us finding.”
“I hope so too,” said Dallington.
The funeral was at a church called St. Mary’s. They arrived a bit early and found Nicholson standing on the church’s steps, changed from his daily clothes into a subdued gray flannel suit, with a black bowler hat on his head. He greeted them.
“Any news?” asked Lenox.
“None. He won’t talk, and there’s nothing unusual in his desk. I’ve left instructions he’s not to move. But as you said, I doubt we’ll find much. All society’s going to hell anyway,” said Nicholson moodily. “Marquesses murdering and getting murdered. Police sergeants stealing papers.”
Dallington smiled gently. “And they say the Queen and Princess Beatrice have been seen smoking cigarettes at Balmoral.”
Nicholson shook his head. “It’s extremely distressing to think of it coming from inside the Yard.” He looked at Lenox. “Do you think Armbruster killed Jenkins himself?”
Lenox shook his head. “I think he did a job for money. The new watch tells us that. He took the papers and he made sure—or tried to make sure—that there was nothing incriminating on Jenkins’s person. At the scene and since, he’s dragged his feet and tried to slow down the investigation.”
Nicholson nodded. “The soup, the slow and incomplete canvasses.”
“But I would hazard that was his full role. I could be wrong, of course.”
“Who paid him, then?”
Lenox shrugged. “Andrew H. Francis, I suppose.”
“Yes. Him.” Yesterday and that morning the Yard’s clerical staff had done extensive research in the directories of London and still hadn’t found Andrew Francis—or at any rate not one who corresponded to the description they had of him, young, aristocratic, wealthy, well dressed. Lenox had begun to wonder whether it was a pseudonym. “The fellow shot an inspector of the Yard, poisoned a nobleman and arranged for him to be shipped to Calcutta like a slab of mutton, and we can’t find hide nor hair of him. Either he’s a genius, or we’re a pack of fools.”
“We’ll find him,” said Lenox. He wished he were as confident as he sounded.
“How?” asked Nicholson.
“By carrying on. After the funeral I mean to start with what Pointilleux found—that list of houses that Wakefield owned. If Jenkins thought it was significant, I’m certain it was.”
They spoke for another few minutes, and then the bells of the church chimed, and all of the people engaged in similar conversations on the steps turned toward the enormous oak doors of the church and began to walk inside.
The service was long. There were several hymns, followed by a warm eulogy from the Lord Mayor of London, a redoubtable figure in black velvet breeches with a silver-headed cane. The turnout was excellent in this respect—there were three Members of Parliament present, the entire upper echelon of the Yard’s administrative staff, and more off-duty bobbies and inspectors and sergeants than could be counted. Behind the final pews of the church were a few loose lines of standing men, and their stolidly endured discomfort over the eighty minutes was its own kind of testimonial to Jenkins, the church too full because he was so mourned.
Of course, though, it was difficult to take much pleasure in the attendance when set off forward and to the left, in the specially wide pews where the local lord must have taken his place on Sundays, was Jenkins’s family: Madeleine; two small boys; a baby girl in a white lace dress and matching bonnet, blessedly unaware, for now, of what she had lost.
After the service was over, the people in the church made their way outside and stood on the steps again. The traditional funeral procession began. First a long series of empty carriages passed down the avenue outside, each, including Lenox’s own, sent by its owner as a mark of respect; after the carriages a line of five deaf-mutes dressed in black and red carried long wands, men who hired themselves out for funerals such as this one every day of the week; then the casket itself came, borne by a dozen pallbearers. Lenox looked among their faces and saw several men who worked at Scotland Yard.
Last was another carriage. Accompanied by a few ancient relatives, Madeleine Jenkins and her children stepped into it. They would follow the convoy to a cemetery nearby for the interment.
As she went, the bells of the church began to ring, thirty-nine times in this case, one for each year of Jenkins’s life, and then nine solemn strikes of the largest one, the tenor, to send the departed man on his way to his God.
The crowd on the steps watched silently until the final carriage was out of sight, and then breathed a collective exhalation, which could hardly be helped from bearing a slight air of relief. That was over, at any rate. By ones and twos most of the men and women began to get into a line of waiting cabs. There would be ham and bread and ale at Jenkins’s house now—a few hours to celebrate the man, with quiet stories and jokes, after these somber hours of grief at his death.
Lenox and Dallington decided it would be quicker to walk. The house—Treeshadow, Lenox recalled—wasn’t far, and it was a lovely spring day. They’d lost Nicholson, who was of course among dozens of his own daily colleagues on an occasion such as this one.
Dallington lit a cigarette. “You won’t find a more Christian fellow than me, but I can’t stand a funeral.”
“Really? I find it comfort
ing.”
“I don’t mind the hymns. I just don’t think anyone should be allowed to talk. It always seems like so much hocus-pocus.”
“Hax pax max deus adimax,” said Lenox, and smiled.
“What on earth are you trying to say?”
“That’s where the word ‘hocus-pocus’ comes from. It’s a nonsense phrase that traveling magicians used to say to impress people as they did their tricks. Sounded enough like Latin, I suppose. I know it because my brother used to say it to me when I was four or five and we were arguing. It always scared the devil out of me. As he knew.”
“Edmund did that? I can’t imagine it.”
“Small boys are dirty fighters. Tell me, though, how are Polly’s cases coming along? You were able to help her?”
“There’s still a great deal more to do this evening,” said Dallington, though he didn’t look as if the prospect of the late night’s work gave him as much displeasure as it might have in other circumstances. “But I tell you, she’s a marvel. LeMaire’s a fool to leave. If Polly has anything to do with it we’ll be minting money by New Year’s. Every one of these cases came to her by a reference from a previous customer, and I think every one of the people she’s helping now will refer her to a dozen more.”
“What are the cases, specifically?” asked Lenox.
As they strolled on in the soft sunlight they discussed these—many of them small domestic matters, worth a pound or two to the firm, but in aggregate, they agreed, creating something more valuable: a reputation. There was the woman in Kensington whose post kept disappearing after it was delivered, the lost dog in Holborn, the Oxford Street tearoom whose owners suspected their cashier was stealing from them—but dearly hoped she wasn’t, because she was their beloved daughter. Small or large, Polly handled all of these matters with intense dedication, Dallington said.
They neared Treeshadow after a little while, identifiable from a distance by the great bustle outside of it. When they arrived at the house Dallington discarded his cigarette.
Lenox stopped him with a hand. “John, before we go in—I only mean to stay for twenty minutes, and then I should be off. You must stay longer for both of us, if you don’t mind, and then you ought to return to Chancery Lane to help Polly.”
The Laws of Murder: A Charles Lenox Mystery Page 16
