The Laws of Murder: A Charles Lenox Mystery

by Charles Finch

  “I think I’ve discovered something,” said Lenox. The other two exchanged glances, and only then did he realize that there was an air of tension in the room. “What?” he asked. “What is it?”

  Dallington’s voice was bitter when he spoke. “The firm is just you and me now, it would appear. Polly is leaving us, too.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Lenox looked at Polly with a kind of despair. He realized he was crestfallen at this news, far more so than he had been at LeMaire’s abdication. Even in just the few months they had been working together, he had come to trust her implicitly. He couldn’t imagine what Dallington must be feeling. “Is that correct?”

  She shook her head once and turned away, and Lenox could see that despite her aloof expression there was some high emotion stirring in her breast. She looked back at him, skin pale but cheeks red with feeling. “I’ve had a proposal,” she said.

  “Of marriage?” asked Lenox, confused.

  “No, no,” she said. “A business proposal.”

  “From whom?”

  “I would prefer not to say.”

  Dallington laughed severely and stood up from the desk he’d been leaning on. “Yes, why tell us? We’re the competition now, after all.”

  “Please don’t be unfair, John,” said Polly. “You must see that we’re struggling.”

  “Businesses always struggle at the beginning. That doesn’t mean you walk out on your friends.”

  “I wouldn’t, in the normal course of things,” said Polly. Her voice was tightly controlled, as if she were trying not to cry. “I should hope you would know that.”

  Lenox held up a hand. “Can somebody tell me what’s happened?”

  Polly explained. That afternoon, a gentleman’s assistant had left his card for her there at the office, inviting her to come take tea with him at the Langham. (“Where else, of course,” Dallington interjected. “Vulgarity upon vulgarity.” The Langham was a new and enormous hotel, which had cost some three hundred thousand pounds to build—an astonishing sum.) She had gone, thinking it might be a case, and, given the name upon the card, which was known to all of them, almost certainly a remunerative one.

  When she had arrived, however, the gentleman in question had presented her with a different idea altogether: that they go into business together. It was simple, he said. He believed in her talent, in her innovations, in the specialists she had hired, and above all in the idea of a detective agency. There was money to be made.

  But the agency she had founded with Lenox, Dallington, and LeMaire had gone about the business all wrong. Bad press. Too little backing. Four overseers rather than one. He knew business, he said, and a firm like theirs needed a single guiding hand—a single guiding vision.

  To his surprise, Lenox realized that he was inclined to agree at least with this latter point. Too much of their time had been spent coming to agreement upon small matters. Four voices upon each subject was too many.

  Polly went on. This businessman, Lord—and here she nearly said his name, but stopped herself—he had a plan. He already had an office selected, and showed her several designs. It would be called Miss Strickland’s, as her own business once had been.

  Above all, it would be substantial. Ten detectives working under her—all trained precisely to her specifications. Specialists of every variety. Security. Clerks. He could guarantee an enormous splash, and an immediate and significant client: himself. His multitude of businesses saw dozens of incidents, large and small, that were beyond the purview or the interest of Scotland Yard but interrupted his efficiency.

  That was the beauty of his idea, he explained: It was a wonderful idea for a business in its own right, but even if it operated at a slight loss, for some time, it would make him money. An in-house detective agency.

  And Polly, in addition to a handsome salary, would own half of the business.

  It took her five minutes to describe all of this, a little longer than it might have otherwise because Dallington, uncharacteristically, interrupted her continually with a succession of small, wounded sarcasms.

  When she had finished, Lenox was silent for a moment. Then he said, “If I were your brother, I would tell you to do it.”

  He looked at Polly and saw that all the anxiety and tension in her face washed away at his words, replaced by relief. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s it exactly. I would be a fool not to consider it. It has nothing to do with my … with my faith in either of you, or in our agency.”

  “Ten detectives,” muttered Dallington. “What a load of nonsense.”

  “Can you not tell us the identity of this benefactor of yours?” asked Lenox.

  She shook her head. “I cannot. It was a condition of the offer he made me.”

  “And it was you he wanted, not either of us,” said Lenox.

  Even as he asked the question he wished he hadn’t, because the answer was very obvious—and what’s more, probably astute. Polly was sharp, young, and she had run a business of this sort before. With very great grace, she said, “He wants just one person—and had heard my name through a friend, I think. I believe it might just as easily have been either of you he approached, but a friend told him my name, and then he had his assistant research my history, and—”

  “I understand, of course,” said Lenox.

  “Then you’re farther along than I am,” said Dallington. “I could never turn my back on either of you.”

  Lenox looked around the office, with its tidy rows of books upon the shelves, its hopeful lamps at each clerk’s desk, its well-ordered air of prosperity. Not six months before, he had been in Parliament! Strange to think of that, anyhow.

  He found that he didn’t want to look at Dallington. His friend was nearly vibrating with disappointment, and Lenox understood, without quite articulating it to himself, that it wasn’t simple professional disappointment.

  “How long do you have to decide?” he asked.

  “I said that I needed two nights of sleep,” said Polly.

  “Then you should have them,” said Lenox. “Why don’t we conduct our business as we usually might tomorrow, and meet the morning afterward? That will give all of us time to think.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. Time to think.”

  “And time to steal our list of possible clients, too,” said Dallington.

  Polly’s face, which had been apologetic since Lenox arrived, flashed with anger for the first time. “You’re a scoundrel to say that to me,” she said.

  Without looking at either of them again, she walked toward her office and went inside, closing the door behind her. Dallington, who had gone pale, stared at the door for a moment.

  There was a long silence.

  “It will be all right,” Lenox said. “Whatever happens.”

  Dallington didn’t look at him but went on gazing at Polly’s door. Finally he said distractedly, “Yes, yes. Of course.” But he looked older than he ever had before, his youthful face suddenly hollow and worn, the carnation always at his breast a mockery of the naked emotion in his eyes. A lock of his black hair had fallen onto his forehead.

  Lenox realized that it was Jane, not he, who would be the best companion for Dallington at the moment. “Will you come have supper in Hampden Lane?” he asked. “We can let Polly’s temper settle. Whatever comes of this professionally, we are all too close now for our friendships to end. She’ll see that in the morning, as will you.”

  “D’you think so?” asked Dallington, still not looking away from the door.

  “Get your things. We can find a cab outside, and I’ll tell you about Jenkins.”

  Some spell broke at that name, and after a beat Dallington shook his head and turned to Lenox, forcing a smile. “Yes. Let’s have supper.”

  In the cab on the ride toward Hampden Lane (despite all of the distractions of the evening, Lenox found himself studying the horse that pulled it, after Hepworth’s aside about the taxi horses of London) Dallington recovered some of his righ
teous indignation, though it was redirected now. He spent most of the way inveighing against the anonymous lord who had approached Polly.

  “Sheer theft,” he said. “It’s our idea, a detective agency.”

  Lenox shrugged. “That’s the marketplace, I’m sorry to say.”

  “I wish I knew who he was, the upjumped bastard,” said Dallington.

  The conversation continued in that vein for some time. Only when they were in front of Lenox’s house—where two men in dark cloaks stood at attention, Clemons’s men—did Dallington say, “What was it that you discovered, after all? I’m sorry I didn’t ask before.”

  “St. Anselm’s isn’t a convent,” said Lenox.

  Dallington frowned at him, puzzled, and for the first time fully engaged by Lenox’s news. “Then what is it?” he asked.

  “I think—I may be wrong—that it’s a brothel.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Lady Jane was in the back sitting room alone when Lenox and Dallington entered, writing letters. She was very busy just at the moment, Lenox knew; she was planning a garden party the next weekend for a cousin of hers, a willowy young woman named Emily Gardner.

  But no woman in London had finer manners.

  “Hello, you two,” she said, rising and smiling. “John, I’m so happy that Charles has brought you home with him. You must stay to eat, of course.”

  “We’re both hungry,” said Lenox quickly.

  Dallington returned Jane’s smile. “If it’s easier we can send out for a chop.”

  “Nonsense. What would your mother say to that, knowing I had you under my roof? I’m going to speak to Kirk and make sure he has the wine open.”

  Sophia was already asleep. It was Mrs. Adamson’s evening out. Lenox realized with a pang how little he had seen of his daughter in the past few days, and wondered whether he had time in the morning to accompany her on her walk through the park. It looked to him like it might rain, though. In any case he would visit the nursery.

  While Jane was arranging supper, Lenox and Dallington went to Lenox’s study at the front of the house. He poured them both drinks. Dallington drank off half of his whisky and water in one gulp.

  Polly was still on his mind, Lenox guessed, but all Dallington said when he had swallowed was, “A brothel?”

  Deliberately, Lenox laid out the facts. At 77 Portland Place there was a house masquerading as a Catholic convent, for unknown reasons; its privacy and security were both fiercely protected—just think of that high fence—and the young women in it only emerged, from all Lenox had seen, under strict supervision.

  “Rather like the novitiates at a convent, handily,” said Dallington, who looked skeptical.

  Lenox bore onward without acknowledging this: At the house next door, 75 Portland Place, a steady procession of gentlemen arrived each evening, mixed in with a few women. All of them opened the door without knocking, and none of them ever appeared to leave.

  “You never saw anyone exit that house?”

  “No. And I was there above an hour.”

  The two houses were connected—and connected as well to the house of the man who owned them, who had lived at 73 Portland Place, a person both of them knew was capable of any violence or iniquity.

  Then Lenox described what he had seen as he lurked at the mouth of the alleyway behind Portland Place: two men, in quick succession, leaving from a small unmarked door at the rear of 77 Portland Place. Both were men he had seen enter the house next door.

  Dallington raised his eyebrows. “Interesting. So you think that the clients arrive at 75 Portland Place, walk through an interior passageway to the convent, and find there … what, some Parisian red house?”

  “Yes,” said Lenox. “And Jenkins, the poor soul—”

  “Somehow found out.”

  Dallington’s face was grave now. Lenox nodded. “Yes, and paid for his life with it.”

  Dallington took another sip of his drink and strolled away from Lenox, toward the windows overlooking Hampden Lane. It was a clear night outside, the breeze light and constant. A landau rolled by, clicking across the stones of the street. “There’s something I don’t understand,” said Dallington.

  “What?”

  “Why all the secrecy? Any officer at Scotland Yard could name half a dozen addresses near Regent’s Park where men go for that sort of thing. Or think of Helmer’s place down by the docks, which as we saw was pretty brazen about its business. Why the whole business of inventing St. Anselm’s? Why not just locate the whole enterprise at 75 Portland Place?”

  Lenox nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that a great deal, and I have a dark thought.”

  “What?”

  “I wonder whether the young women are there by choice.”

  Dallington stopped and looked back at him. “You think they’re kept there against their will?”

  “It would be just like Wakefield, I think. He loved money and had no great regard for women.”

  As he said this, Lenox realized that the phrase “by choice” implied that some of the prostitutes of London—some of those women of the East End streets, or the more superficially genteel West End parlors—did the work as he did his, out of a sense of vocation. There were one or two, perhaps, but it was absurd to imagine that anything but a lack of choice had driven most of them into their work. He thought of Gladstone, who even as Prime Minister had visited with prostitutes, hoping to draw them into new lives—or Dickens, who had built a refuge for “fallen women” in Shepherd’s Bush. Both men had been mocked for what seemed, to some, like an unnatural interest in these young ladies. Lenox wondered. Gladstone, at least, he felt sure was acting out of principle. Very likely Dickens, too. According to the Times there were eighty thousand women in London alone practicing the trade.

  Still, there was a difference between a woman who could buy her dinner at the end of the day and a slave.

  “And this Francis fellow—Hartley, blast him—you think he was Wakefield’s partner.”

  “Yes,” said Lenox. “I don’t know whether he killed Jenkins on his own, or if he and Wakefield planned it together, but all the while Francis was plotting to murder Wakefield, too, and conceal his tracks.”

  “Mm.”

  “What I do know is that I suspect we’ll find him, at last.”

  “Where?” asked Dallington.

  “At 75 Portland Place.”

  Just then Jane called them from the hallway. They ate supper at one end of the large table in the dining room, by low light, and as they talked, some of the unease in Dallington’s face started to disappear. They would have to end things with Polly on a happy note, if indeed things were going to end—it was important. As he had this thought, Lenox realized as well that he considered Dallington more or less a member of his own family, a brother, a nephew, a cousin, a son, some mixture of all those things. As it would have with a member of his family, it made him nervous that his young friend cared so much. It was funny how change came in life—usually not in great calamitous bursts but in the gentle onward motion of the years, half-visible, mostly unconsidered from day to day. Marriage, children: They were like a series of ships out upon the sea as you stood upon the dock, moving so slowly toward you that they never seemed as if they would arrive. Except that then they were there all at once, huge and close, pausing for a moment and then sailing on toward the next person.

  For dessert there was a sponge cake in cream sauce, and after that tea for all three of them. Then Jane returned to her letters, and Dallington and Lenox went again to Lenox’s study, where they sat by the fire with glasses of brandy. They brooded over the case together, discussing St. Anselm’s.

  “It will be an enormous scandal if I’m right,” said Lenox. “A nobleman, a convent that isn’t a convent, that particular part of London. Not to discuss all of the men who will be there during a raid—should there be a raid.”

  Dallington nodded, then, after a moment of thought, said, “You mentioned that it was mostly men who entered
the house—but a few women, too.”

  “Yes, the rate was about seven or eight to one, I’d say. It’s been puzzling me, too.”

  “Surely they couldn’t make use of any such—any such house?”

  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, as they stared into the fire, and then Lenox said, “There must be some explanation for it. They were dressed just as well as the men.”

  Suddenly Dallington’s face grew angry. “Do you know what,” he said, “if it’s true, we ought to go over there tonight and stop the whole damned thing. One more minute of it is too much.”

  “Yes. Except we need Nicholson—we need the Yard.”

  “Let’s go fetch him, then. Let’s go fetch them.”

  Lenox was silent for a moment, and then looked at his watch and nodded. “Yes,” he said. It was nearly ten o’clock. He realized that his sense of deliberation this time had been misplaced. “You’re quite right. You’re absolutely right.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Nicholson had had a long day—a very long day, between burying one colleague and placing another under suspicion of theft and murder without the least scrap of evidence—and it redounded to his credit that when he saw Lenox and Dallington at his door, late that evening, he invited them in without demurral.

  He lived in a set of rooms off the Strand, a bachelor’s apartments. It was a place with little enough ornamentation, except that along one wall there were a dozen framed watercolors of ducks and geese. Most of them were identifiably set in the ponds and marshes of Hampstead Heath, just to the north of the city.

  “My hobby,” said Nicholson shortly, when he observed Lenox looking at them, “watercolor.”

  “You painted these?”

  “Yes, in the mornings before work. On Saturdays I go and sketch, and on weekdays I work from my sketchings.”

  “They’re extremely handsome.”

  “Thank you.”

  “They’re very like life,” said Dallington. “As if they might fly out of the frame, I swear.”