Nicholson, smiling at this, sat them down and offered them something to drink—they declined—and then asked why they had come. As they explained their theory about the houses Wakefield had owned, he listened carefully. When they were finished, he asked a few questions; then, after a moment’s pause, he retired briefly to his bedroom, where he exchanged the soft gray flannel suit he had been wearing for his stiff navy-colored uniform.
“Let’s go immediately,” he said.
The three men went by Lenox’s carriage to a small police way station near Regent’s Park, where Nicholson enlisted the help of three constables who were just coming on duty. A fourth he sent to Scotland Yard to fetch the police wagon, just in case.
All of this passed so quickly that it was scarcely an hour from the time Dallington suggested going to the time that they stopped at the corner of Portland Place. The broad thoroughfare was shimmering with the kind of lamplight that only the city’s most affluent streets brought forth at night—a lady would have been confident of walking unmolested down the pavement, as she might have at midday, at least for these few hundred feet. The grand pale crenellations of Wakefield’s house rose proudly above the corner. A few lights were on upstairs.
“We ought to give Wakefield’s son some warning,” said Nicholson. “They’re his houses now, after all.”
Lenox and Dallington objected, but Nicholson was firm—which both men understood to be fair, considering that it was he who could lose his job if the new marquess grew indignant and took a complaint to the right people.
In the event, a footman informed them (the butler, Smith, was still upstairs recovering from the wounds of his attack), the new marquess was out.
“Has he kept you on?” asked Nicholson.
“For now, anyway, sir,” said the footman.
“Hard luck if you were to lose your place because your master was murdered.”
“Harder luck still for him that was killed, sir.”
Nicholson smiled. “It’s true enough. Do you know when he’ll be back, Lord Wakefield—the younger one?”
“No, sir. He said he wouldn’t be late.”
“We may stop in again, then.”
“Very good, sir.”
As they went next door, to the anonymous house, Lenox felt a kind of charge, an excitement. They might find anything inside. Nicholson paused, then said, “Shall we knock or walk in?”
“Walk in, I think,” said Dallington.
“I had rather knock,” said Nicholson.
At that moment a carriage stopped in front of the house, and a gentleman stepped down, past sixty, with a fox stole around his neck. He took in their small congregation, and perhaps the uniforms Nicholson and the constables were wearing, and got straight back into the carriage, tapping the door with his cane so that it moved immediately. Lenox noticed that there were black velvet curtains hanging over the doors—this was how men of rank, with a family crest painted upon their carriage, traveled discreetly.
He looked at Nicholson, who was grinning; the hasty departure hadn’t been lost on him. “Straight in, then,” he said, and, walking ahead of them, opened the door.
They came into a small entryway. Rather as at Hepworth’s, ironically, the first impression was of extreme opulence. The walls were hung with an ornately patterned red-and-gold flock, and on a marble-topped table in front of them was a silver salver with several dusty bottles of wine and brandy on it, apparently left there to each person’s discretion. Handled glasses stood next to it. Dallington took one and poured himself a glass of wine.
In a distant room of the house there was music. A viola, Lenox thought.
If the first impression he had was one of wealth, the second was of the room’s strange configuration. It was entirely enclosed, a sealed chamber, offering no way any farther into the building. There was something uncanny about it—something Gothic, as the dim light of the two candles on the marble-topped table flickered.
They stood there for a moment, the six men crowded into this small space, and then Lenox had an idea and stepped toward the wall, saying, quietly, “Feel for a seam.”
He ran his own hand along the wallpaper to the right of the table carefully, until at last he found an unevenness. He prodded on it, then pushed when a door gave way. At the same moment one of the constables found a matching door on the left.
The six men looked at each other. “Which way?” asked Nicholson.
“Left, first, I think,” said Lenox. “Toward St. Anselm’s.”
“Half of us might go right,” said Dallington. “I’ll go, and you two come along.”
“Send someone back here to meet when you find anything,” said Nicholson.
“Just so.”
Lenox, Nicholson, and one of the constables made their way through the door to the left. It led into a narrow hallway, paneled in mahogany, with a few lights in widely spaced sconces along it. The sound of the music grew stronger, and at one moment there was a sharp bark of laughter in a distant part of the house, upstairs perhaps.
They came around the curve of the hall and saw a brighter light, and a door—and sitting by it, next to a small table with a silver bell on it, a woman.
It was Sister Amity.
Lenox fell back behind the other two men, ducking his face into his collar. Apparently it worked, because she addressed Nicholson as she stood up. She was no longer wearing a habit, but a dark gown. No wonder it had taken her so long to come outside to meet Lenox and Dallington—she must have had to change clothes.
“What is the password?” she asked Nicholson.
“Scotland Yard,” said Nicholson, and when she moved in front of the door, a panicked look dawning on her face, he pushed his way roughly past her.
First the constable and then Lenox followed, Sister Amity recognizing him at last and giving him a look of helpless loathing. Nicholson turned back and asked the constable to keep hold of her, lest she run off to warn someone of their presence.
They came into a wide room. The scene that confronted them there was extraordinary.
It would be some time before the Yard would piece together the full architecture of the house. Off to the right, where Dallington and the two constables had gone, there was a single room, a different woman standing outside of it and asking for the password as Sister Amity had. They had pushed past, too (Lenox would learn in just a few moments, when he and Dallington reconvened), and found a strange and magnificent gambling parlor. At its center had been an enormous table with a felt top, where four men and four women had been seated in an ingeniously designed series of private booths, so that each could see the table and its cards, but none of them could see each other. Servants stood attentively nearby, bearing champagne, wine, brandy. There had been hundreds of pounds in play upon each hand, far more than even the most exclusive gambling parlors in London permitted
But that was nothing to what greeted Lenox and Nicholson. It was a long, slender ballroom that had been converted into a kind of Roman bath hall, with separate hot and cold baths, both decorated in marble, with fauns, cupids, spouting dolphins. An overweight man with a black eye mask was swimming lazily in one of them, two women at his side—two undressed women. Up and down the sides of the pools there were private stalls made of oak. Some of them were flung open, their owners unconcerned about observation; others were closed. Near the large fountain at the end of the room was a table laden with caviar, chocolate profiteroles, cold roast fowl, and every kind of hothouse fruit, oranges, quinces, pomegranates.
What struck Lenox, painfully, was how extremely young the women looked—for there were women everywhere, in various states of attire. The servants, too, were women, dressed in diaphanous white robes, and from the discarded robes at the side of the baths Lenox perceived that there was probably no distinction between the servants and the prostitutes.
They stood there for a moment. Nobody observed them; it was a large room, its lighting atmospherically low. Nicholson ran his fingers across the intaglio on a ta
ble just to the right of the door: SC. Looking around, Lenox saw that there was a similar seal on the wall, on the doors of the stalls.
“It must be a kind of private club,” he said.
Nicholson nodded, staring. Then he said, “But have they done anything illegal? Are we even sure these are prostitutes?”
As if to answer those questions, behind them Sister Amity had just managed to slip the grasp of the constable and reach for the silver bell that had been sitting near her in the hallway from the front door—and she rang it, sharply.
The whole place broke into chaos. Men fled from the stalls, half-clothed, and ran without a backward glance toward the rear of the building.
A moment too late, Nicholson leaped forward, then turned to Lenox and said, despairingly, “We’ll lose them all through the back door!”
“No, we won’t,” said Lenox.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The headlines in the newspapers the next morning were lurid. The mildest of them blared HEDONISM FOUND IN THE HEART OF MAYFAIR, which Lady Jane, reading it with a forgotten piece of toast in hand, said was like printing an announcement that water had been found in the ocean. The Times called for the immediate resignation of the two Members of Parliament arrested, and the less dignified publications reported, breathlessly, that several aristocratic marriages were in shambles. One especially yellow rag declared BERTIE IN SLAVONIAN CLUB BLOW-UP, but Lenox was happy to inform Jane that the Prince of Wales had in fact been nowhere on the premises. Even the sporting pages had a crack: THE HIGHEST-STAKES GAME IN EUROPE, one said of the gambling parlor, which was otherwise mostly an afterthought. There were rumors that the king of a large northern European country had been present during the raid.
It wasn’t Nicholson’s fault that these details had spilled out. The arrests in Regent’s Park had been too noticeable, and the press had arrived almost immediately, following them to the gates of the Yard, ready to offer any guard or officer high fees for information about the bold-faced names who were in trouble. There would be weeks of newspapers sold by this.
“The Slavonian Club,” said Lady Jane, shaking her head contemptuously. “Give people enough money and they’ll make the doomsday sound decorous.”
Lenox smiled and took a sip of tea. “If you pay as much as these fellows must have, a certain air of respectability is part of the service, I suppose. And they could delude themselves into thinking they were part of something mysterious, rather than merely sordid.”
Lenox had been up late into the night, helping Nicholson on the scene. The club had soon been swarming with constables, for the first girl they met had burst into tears and said, in a foreign accent, “Ah, thank God, you have come.”
There had been an ugly welt along her bare shoulder, Lenox noticed.
The two parts of the club were completely segregated, the gambling parlor only a lucrative side business compared to the sprawling brothel that took up most of the two houses.
Otherwise the space of the two houses had been dedicated to the use of the men who were members of this Slavonian Club, as a few would admit it was called—though there was no paper trail on the site; none of them had a card of membership, or even a bill.
In the basement at 75 Portland Place was a taproom, with newspapers, couches, and fireplaces, nothing very scandalous. Upstairs, however, there had been a series of bedrooms, each decorated in a different way, one with an Egyptian theme, another like a Turkish harem, another with the ambience of a Paris dance hall. These were apparently for the gentlemen who desired either more privacy or space than the fountain-side stalls provided.
Then there were two bedrooms on the highest level of the house—and these, though they were empty when Nicholson led them in, were the ones that darkened Lenox’s memory of the night. They looked like dungeons, and hung on the walls were instruments designed to inflict pain.
Next door at what London had thought was St. Anselm’s, meanwhile, was a much less sumptuously decorated space; in it were two long, dormitory-style rooms, lined with hard, low cots. It was very cold. Downstairs was a dining hall, though as it emerged the women who slept in the cots were rarely permitted to eat more than a bowlful of thin soup a day except when they were next door, “at the Club,” their hunger an incentive for them to win the favor of the men who could invite them to eat from the buffet, so that there was fierce competition among them to please the club’s members. Some of the more timid-looking girls Lenox had seen had thin, haunted faces.
Not one of them, it turned out, had been there voluntarily. Not one of them spoke more than a few words of English, either. All of them were very beautiful.
The only other space they had found within what Lenox thought of, still, as St. Anselm’s, was a narrow corridor leading between the two houses, similar to the one that led inward from the street. This one let out into the back alley.
It was here, at the last moment, that Lenox had reminded that fourth constable to bring the police wagon, rather than to the front of the building—and here that the fellow had managed to block off the exit just in time for Nicholson and Lenox and then all the others to catch up and begin making arrests.
Nicholson was still at the Yard, Lenox expected. He and Dallington had left only after three o’clock the morning before. The structure of the place had become clear enough after exhaustive interviews: There were five women of middle age in charge of the prostitutes, including Sister Amity, whom they all seemed to fear terribly. There was also a staff of four people. (This excluded the staff at the gambling parlor, whom Nicholson permitted to leave, along with their patrons, their crimes being, or at least seeming, in the moment, rather more venial.) There were seventeen of the younger women, too—the enslaved girls, as the papers called them—who were now being sheltered in a house owned by the city of London.
To Lenox’s frustration, two people hadn’t been in the house at all. He was simply curious about the first, Sister Grethe.
The second was Andrew Hartley Francis.
The four young men on staff had all been able to prove immediately and beyond a shadow of a doubt that they weren’t called Hartley, or Francis. They were all quite plainly of the wrong class, too, mostly East Enders who had been drawn by an advertisement each had answered, promising high wages in exchange for absolute discretion.
(“We didn’t think anything about it was illegal,” said one of them indignantly at some point after midnight.
“Then what on earth did you think you were doing?”
“It was for the toffs, wasn’t it?” he had answered bitterly. “They have all sorts of clubs.”)
In the end twenty-five people had been arrested, among them several with very illustrious names indeed. Most of these men remained silent, confident in their solicitors; it was the Earl of Kenwood who gave them the most information, desperate to be released before anyone learned that he had been arrested. (A hope in which he was to be disappointed.) Club membership was only available by personal recommendation, he told them; the fees were spectacularly high, something nearly to boast about, Lenox heard in his voice; the girls changed often enough to keep it interesting; of course they were well paid, of course, why else would the fees be so high …
He himself—a thin, pointy-faced man in his sixties who owned most of Hampshire—had been referred for membership by Wakefield.
“Before he died, you know, poor chap.”
“You were friends?”
“Not close—but there are so few fellows in the House of Lords who have any idea of fun, and he used to stand me a drink now and then.”
Lenox understood. Wakefield and Kenwood operated at very different levels of malice, Kenwood a more insipid and less violent person, but nevertheless these sorts of men always did find each other. They had as long ago as Oxford; look at the Bullingdon Club, whose new members destroyed a different restaurant or pub or college common room each year, solely from the pleasure they took in drunken destruction.
Kenwood’s volubility stood in s
tark contrast to that of the four women who had presided over St. Anselm’s. None of them spoke a word. Nicholson had realized at some point that it would be a difficult case to prosecute, as had his superiors at the Yard. The owner of the two houses, Wakefield, was recently dead, and his son could hardly be held legally accountable for what he was on the brink of inheriting.
The key, Lenox knew, was the tales of the young women. None of them had been able to offer these yet, however, for none of them spoke more than very bad English. It wasn’t even clear what country they came from. A fleet of government translators was coming to the Yard that morning, and they would try to speak to the young women in a variety of languages.
“You’ll be away all day?” Lady Jane asked, over the breakfast table.
“Yes.”
“You must be tired.”
“On the contrary, I have a great deal of energy,” said Lenox, standing. There was a lovely morning light coming through the windows, the room softened by its gentle natural hue. “Though I wonder how it all relates to the deaths of Wakefield and Jenkins.”
Jane looked up at him. “Poor Mrs. Jenkins,” she said. “Do you think it would be inappropriate of me to call on her? We’ve never met.”
“On the contrary, I think it would be very kind.”
“The day after the funeral must be difficult,” said Jane. “At least a funeral is something to … well, not to look forward to, I suppose, but something to plan, something to expect. The days ahead must seem so empty once even that part of it’s over.”
“I expect so.”
She was staring out the window, and when he came around the table to kiss her good-bye, she said, “Do be careful, would you?”
He kissed her, then took a last swallow of tea. “Always, my dear. Do you feel safe here? With Clemons’s precautions in place? You could still take Sophia to the country, you know.”
“We’re safe. But solve the case quickly, Charles. For my own part, I don’t know that I could face the day after your funeral.”
The Laws of Murder: A Charles Lenox Mystery Page 19
