CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
That morning, a team of constables had gone out to every house the Marquess of Wakefield owned in London, checking each of them top to bottom. None of the others proved more than a simple domicile. One did have an unusually high number of cats in residence—twenty-nine—but that was, apparently, legal, and the owner who answered for them, a man named Withers, promised that he kept them all confined to the house and in excellent health.
Still, the Commissioner of the Yard was in an utter state, according to Nicholson. There had been word from very high, indeed from the Palace itself, that the matter was be resolved and quieted as quickly as possible. The presence of the Slavonian Club in the heart of London was an embarrassment not just to its members but to England; already emissaries from the Vatican were on the way according to Hepworth, with whom Lenox had exchanged notes that morning.
As a result the translators were at the sheltering house very promptly. They were a varied group. Some were darker skinned, others more clearly of British descent; some wore the tweeds and spectacles of the academy, others looked slightly less reputable, and one, a fellow named Chipping just down from Caius College, affected an Oriental robe.
Lenox, Nicholson, and one of Nicholson’s superiors were present to watch. One by one, the translators stepped forward and said, in some language, a phrase Nicholson had written: “If you understand the language I am speaking, please come to me, and I will translate your story for these police officers. Regardless of what you tell us, the Metropolitan Police of London guarantee your safety.”
So the young women—clothed now in plain wool dresses, and having eaten a breakfast delivered with vehement generosity by Her Sisters of the Holy Heart that morning—began to divide up and tell their stories. Lenox sat and listened to them, translated from Turkish, French, Arabic, and German, among other languages. Three of the women didn’t respond to any of the languages; they grouped together and spoke among themselves. All of them looked, to his eye, as if they might be from India.
The whole process took many hours, but the tales of life inside the Slavonian Club were depressingly similar: privation, cold all through that winter, enforced prostitution, the alternating viciousness and kindness of the gentlemen who visited the club, each of those beset by its own brand of difficulties. Several of the women were extremely reluctant to speak, as if this might be a trap. That was understandable. There were some weak friendships among them, but women who spoke the same language had always been divided at Portland Place. Punishment had been rife, and all of them recounted the violence of Sister Amity, who beat them with a switch if their paint was careless, if they attempted to speak to each other, if any of the gentlemen were dissatisfied. When these beatings left marks, the women stayed in the dormitories until they were gone. Going more or less hungry, Lenox gathered.
But all of this came out slowly, whereas the most interesting thing of all, to him, came out almost immediately. That was the story of how they had ended up in London.
Aboard a ship.
None of them knew the ship’s name, but Lenox felt, instantly and with tremendous certainty, that it must be the Gunner.
One young Turkish woman, with beautiful delicate cheekbones and troubled dark eyes, told her story, which was similar to the rest of them. Like the other women, she had been a courtesan in her homeland, too, though, also as with them, that had been in very different circumstances—in luxury, as in most of their cases. It wasn’t difficult to imagine, given their beauty.
“A client came in,” said the Turkish woman through one of the translators. “He was very handsome. He had lovely manners. He persuaded me to come and see him the next evening, that he wanted to give me something. He paid my mistress twice what she had asked, and left a card with his name upon it. He made me promise to come. He said he loved me—love at first sight. I was intrigued by him.
“When I arrived at the teahouse where we were to meet, he was absent. I grew uneasy after a few minutes and left, thinking it was better, that I knew nothing of this man or his promises. It was then that they took me—several very rough people, it was instantaneous, there wasn’t time even to cry out. They pushed me into a carriage, and before anybody on the streets could notice, or help, we were gone. I had nothing with me—not my gowns, not my family’s letters, nothing of my old life except the clothes on my back. From there I was taken to a ship. The room aboard was dark, and windowless. There were four other girls in it. It was a small space, we barely fit if all of us stood at the same time. There was a bucket in the corner, but nowhere to empty it. Twice a day they took the bucket, and we were given food. We spent a great deal of time sleeping.”
Lenox asked, through the translator, “And how did you sleep?”
“I do not know the word,” said the young woman, looking directly at him. “In a kind of netting that hanged from the ceiling.”
Lenox nodded and said, “Give her my thanks. Tell her to go on.”
As she went on, though, he was preoccupied by the pile of hammocks they had found next to the trunk that held Wakefield’s body, feeling certain that these were the same hammocks that these women had been transported in Wakefield’s hold. Or at the very least, a similar one.
It was easy to imagine the ruse. The Gunner picked up and dropped off mail from several ports between England and India, and while they were in dock they could have taken the women. Any of the officers might have played the grandee in love with the courtesan, or indeed Wakefield himself could have done it. And a man of Wakefield’s type would have known the most expensive houses of that type in every city, or could have learned their names easily enough.
He thought of what Dyer had told them, with perhaps more honesty than he had intended: All of us are here for the money. Anything that gets in the way of it is a nuisance.
“We were all terribly ill during the voyage,” the woman went on. “When we arrived I knew we were in England, because of the voices. We were pushed into crates. These must have been loaded onto carriages, because I could feel that horses took us across the city. I feared then that we would be killed. But we were only taken to the house, the house where we lived.
“The women rotate very quickly,” she said. “Always new ones. I myself have marked the days in my head—it has been just forty. I think that they cannot risk that we begin to learn English. I am anxious when I contemplate where the other women have gone, the ones who preceded me. I am thankful now that it is over.”
Lenox nodded at her. She was very composed—some of the other girls were in tears—but somehow it made her tale worse.
As the translators continued to gather the women’s stories, Nicholson murmured to Lenox, “I wish they would come back and tell us about the Gunner.”
Lenox looked at his pocket watch. Almost from the first words the young women had spoken, he had advised Nicholson and his superior to send a team of constables down to the docks to arrest Dyer and the men of his ship. “I hope they haven’t resisted arrest. They’re a bloody-minded crew, from the sound of it.”
“Do you think these women can somehow verify that it was the Gunner they were stolen onto? They must have seen a face, scratched their names into the walls—something. I feel sure Dyer is involved with all this.”
“Yes,” said Lenox.
Even so, he and Nicholson both knew they were still missing the whole picture. The difficulty was that Dyer and his men had a cast-iron alibi for the night of Jenkins’s murder: They had been at sea, their ship coming in about an hour after his body was found. A hundred different objective observers had confirmed as much.
And then the next morning, somehow, Wakefield’s body had come to rest in a trunk in the ship’s hold.
“There’s been a question rattling around in my brain for a few days now,” Lenox said to Nicholson. “How did Jenkins come to have Wakefield’s claim ticket for the Gunner?”
“I don’t know, but he must have felt it was important—he left it in his note for you,”
said the inspector. “He could have kept it with his notes.”
“Or else he had just gotten it when he was murdered.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wonder if he had just seen Wakefield when he was murdered. I wonder if Wakefield was—though it’s difficult to imagine—helping him.”
“Can you explain?”
“It has seemed singular to me all along that Jenkins and Wakefield were closeted together at Portland Place in the past few weeks. As Wakefield’s butler described it, too, their conversations were at least friendly, if sardonic. All that business about ‘the very profound honor of a visit from Scotland Yard,’ if you recall.”
“Mm.”
“That doesn’t sound like an interrogation, an accusation. Is it possible they were working in alliance? What if he gave him that claim ticket so that Jenkins could stop the Gunner when she came into dock?”
Nicholson was staring intently over his fingertips, thinking. “So then Wakefield was giving up Francis—Hartley—and Dyer, to save his own skin. Yes, it seems possible. All the more so because of the primary thing that he and Jenkins have in common.”
“What’s that?” said Lenox.
“That they were both murdered.”
Just then a constable appeared at the door. He came over to Nicholson. “It’s the Gunner, sir,” he said, out of breath.
“Well? What about her?”
“She’s gone, sir. Shipped out of London early this morning for Calcutta.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
It was one of the most maddening cases Lenox had ever negotiated. On the one hand, he had uncovered so much of the truth, he felt—Armbruster’s involvement, the dark reality of St. Anselm’s, the role of the Gunner. On the other hand, they had nothing. Armbruster was comfortably entrenched behind his denials. They had scoured London—even now two of Nicholson’s constables were still searching—and found nobody called Andrew Hartley Francis.
And now the Gunner was gone.
They were at the very beginning again, without anything more than a few educated guesses about who might have killed either Inspector Jenkins or the 15th Marquess of Wakefield.
Dallington had spent the morning at Scotland Yard; he and Lenox reconvened at the offices at Chancery Lane just after noon. It felt empty without Polly or her silently hulking assistant, Anixter, nearby, though Pointilleux was full of effusive greetings for them, and thousands of questions, which they did their best to answer. In fact, Polly was still in some evidence—on Lenox’s desk was an envelope with his name on it in her handwriting. Inside was a note that said:
Whether or not we are partners tomorrow, we are still partners today, so I will give you a piece of advice. Every paper in the country ought to know that you and John were with Inspector Nicholson last night. PB.
She was—as usual—quite right. As quickly as they could, hoping to slip into the evening papers, Lenox and Dallington drew up a list of fairly reliable journalists and charged Pointilleux with circulating among their offices at Fleet Street to spread the word.
“Make sure you tell them that the Yard is paying us for our consultation on the case,” Dallington said, “and that we’re available for interviews about our heroic actions—off the record.”
“Are we?” asked Lenox, uncertain.
Dallington nodded grimly. “Yes. I’ll be damned if LeMaire gets to win, after all of this. No offense, Marseille.”
“Only this false name is offense of me.”
Both Lenox and Dallington were tired, but they sat in the conference room drinking tea together all afternoon, piecing together every last detail they knew about the case. At some stage Pointilleux returned. He was cross. Among other things, it was an overcast day, and evidently it had drizzled on him as he attempted to get the omnibus back to the office. “I am soak,” he reported angrily. “The sky of this country is too wet.”
On top of that, he said, the journalists had dismissed his accounts without listening as closely as he would have liked. Lenox wasn’t disheartened by that—he could have told the young man that London journalists had little use for politeness—and in fact he was positively encouraged to hear that three of the nine men had said they intended to stop by the offices that afternoon or that evening to hear more, though it meant staying late.
At four o’clock Nicholson arrived. He looked absolutely dead on his feet, but he had brought them a report from the Asiatic Limited Corporation. Apparently one of the members of the company’s board had pressured the Yard into releasing the Gunner the day before, complaining of the delay and the loss of profits as the ship bobbed idly on the Thames.
“Nobody bothered to inform me the blasted ship was going, though,” said Nicholson resentfully. “Anyway, I’ve brought you their full company files on the Gunner, at least. I have a copy for myself, too. I mean to look over it later. I need to go back to the Yard just now and see what’s come of all these interviews.”
“And at some point you need to sleep.”
“In 1877, fingers crossed,” said Nicholson, and a shadow of a smile appeared on his face. “It’s been made clear to me that my advancement depends upon the resolution of all this. People are angry, you know. Very angry.”
“They ought to be pleased that we found the club.”
“Well, they’re not.”
When Nicholson had gone, taking with thanks a few biscuits from the plate they pushed on him, Lenox took up the file he had left from Asiatic Limited. Dallington came and looked over his shoulder. There were many long pages in tight handwriting detailing the ship’s voyages, accounts, diagrams and drawings of her, lists of past mates.
Lenox sighed. “Shall we divide it up and go through it?”
“I bet we find Francis’s name.”
“And another false address for him, no doubt.”
For half an hour they sat in silence, reading; then, with a cry of delight, Dallington said he’d found something.
It was an overhead illustration of the ship’s hold, dated 1874, on a large piece of paper, the size of a decent map, folded over twice to fit into the file. As Lenox came around the table to look, Dallington planted his finger next to a name. It was the space on the plan for aft hold 119, with Lord Wakefield written in tidy cursive letters.
“Look,” said Dallington, “he had hold 118, too. Did we look in that one?”
“I think we did,” said Lenox.
Together they went around the holds in a circle, reading them aloud together, most of the names unfamiliar, Donoghue Spirits, Jones, India Hemp Corporation, King, Davies, Taylor, Berry’s Herb and Pharmaceutical, Smith, Warrington, Fielding, Brown, but then a few familiar, Dyer, Wakefield, one marked First Lt. and even one that said Helmer. The chap from the docks. That gave Lenox pause. It might be worth speaking to him again.
And then, when they had nearly circled back around to Wakefield’s holds again, they came across a name that stopped them both. And not Francis’s.
Earl Calder.
They looked at each other. “Just one hold,” said Lenox.
“Very close to Wakefield’s.”
“Yet for all the world he acted as if he couldn’t distance himself from his father quickly enough. It was as if the name were poison to him. It can’t be a coincidence.”
“No,” said Lenox quietly, thinking.
“Shall we go see him?”
Suddenly it struck Lenox anew how strange it was that Calder had stayed in Portland Place for the past few evenings. He said as much to Dallington and then added, “After all, his father was murdered, an inspector of the Yard killed on the pavement out front, the butler attacked upstairs. The place is bedlam.”
Dallington had stood up and was pacing the room, thinking. “Yes. Either he’s a fool, a very cool fellow—or he knows he’s not in danger. Let’s go to Portland Place, I say.”
“What should we ask him when we get there?”
“What in the devil he’s doing leasing a hold on a ship that brought capt
ive women into his country’s capital, while he was supposed to be sitting tripos at Cambridge and worrying about whether the Field of the Cloth of Gold was in 1200 or 1300.”
“It was in 1520.”
“Nobody likes a swot, Lenox.”
Lenox smiled. They were both standing now, energized by the possibility that they’d come upon something new. Then something occurred to him to dampen his enthusiasm. “I suppose we owe it to Nicholson to wait,” he said. “It sounds as if he’s already on thin ice.”
“They can’t hold him responsible for us.”
“They can, unfortunately. As you pointed out, he’s paying us.”
Dallington frowned. “True.”
Lenox looked down at the files on the table. “Perhaps we should get through as much of this material as we can, and go see Calder—or Lord Wakefield, I suppose he is now—tomorrow. With Nicholson. At least we can look for Calder’s name again.”
They sent Nicholson a note at the Yard telling him what they had found, and mentioned that they were going to investigate the Asiatic’s files very carefully, if it would spare him doing the same. They dedicated the next hours, then, to doing just that, Pointilleux joining them after he had finished a bit of filing on Polly’s behalf.
At half past six they sent out for a pot of oysters and three pints of ale, and when the barmaid came to fetch back the tankards and the pot, Dallington ordered three more from her. They didn’t find Calder’s name again, though Wakefield’s did appear several times. Just before eight o’clock one of the newspapermen came around, a fox-faced reporter for the Evening Sentinel, and listened to their story. Between that interruption and the density of the documents Nicholson had dropped off, it was ten o’clock in the evening before the three men finally left—dispirited, but promising each other that they would see about Calder the next day.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Seven years before, in 1869, the august medical school in Edinburgh had admitted women for the first time. There had been anonymous threats of violence against these women, and no lesser figures than the Queen and William Gladstone had plotted together to see if they could keep the Queen’s own sex from joining the medical profession, but the next fall these prospective students came to the college nevertheless to enroll. A gathering of hundreds of people met them at the gates, heckling and booing, waving signs in protest. This crowd threw rubbish at the women, old eggs, rotten fruit. At moments it had seemed likely to cross the line that divided a protest from a riot.
The Laws of Murder: A Charles Lenox Mystery Page 20
