The Laws of Murder: A Charles Lenox Mystery

by Charles Finch

  Afterward there were fines handed down by the courts. A pound each, a heavy penalty, for disturbing the peace—from the women, not from the protesters.

  Since Sophia had been born, Lenox sometimes thought of those women, of the injustice of that fine. He harbored little doubt that women were weaker than men, being more prone to the vicissitudes of emotion—though sometimes, watching Lady Jane out of the corner of his eye, even this assumption seemed slightly doubtful—but despite this conviction, having a daughter had made him reconsider the idea of them working. There were women’s colleges at the universities now, after all. Why shouldn’t she attend one of those? He knew for a fact that his daughter was more intelligent than a boy nearby on Hampden Lane of the same age, Alfred O’Connell, who seemed to pass most of his time sucking on his fist. Sometimes Lenox even wondered: Should he be able to vote in an election, for instance, and his own daughter not?

  It was because of Sophia, he thought, or obliquely perhaps even because of those young women in Edinburgh, that he had a sneaking sense of sympathy for Polly’s probable departure from their firm. From the first time they met he had admired her intelligence and her ambition. It was hardly surprising someone else should have noticed those qualities. Still, it was very surprising, outlandish even, to consider a woman being offered the control of such a large enterprise, and at such a young age. Polly was twenty-six now—the age Sophia would be in a quarter century, that far-fetched-sounding year, 1900. He wondered what the world would look like to her then. Perhaps her physician would be a woman.

  It was in this philosophical mood that Lenox waited for Polly and Dallington to arrive at the office in Chancery Lane the next morning. It was an ugly day outside, the sky gray-black in color, with wind and rain whipping between the narrowly spaced buildings, umbrellas turning inside out, the men and women without them retreating further and further into their cloaks as they walked. Apart from a few flickering candles outside of each shop or restaurant, it was hard to see much even from just a single story above the street.

  LeMaire had taken with him his loyal Irishwoman, Mrs. O’Neill, and with her had gone the morning pot of coffee (and her anxieties about Dallington’s bachelor diet). So Lenox made coffee himself, and tea as well. As he was pouring himself a cup of the latter, Polly arrived alone, and they had a friendly if slightly stilted moment of conversation about the weather, full of goodwill toward each other, each apologetic for separate reasons. If she were going, best that she went on good terms.

  Besides, he thought there might just be one more arrow in his quiver.

  Only a bit later Dallington came in. His greeting was stiffer. “Mrs. Buchanan,” he said.

  She colored and then said, with exaggerated deference in her voice, “Lord John.”

  Lenox smiled faintly. “Come along, let’s sit and have a conversation,” he said. “Polly, thank you for your note. A reporter came by in the evening.”

  “Oh? For whom?”

  “The Evening Sentinel.”

  This wasn’t a very august newspaper, but Polly said, stoutly, “Excellent.”

  They sat down together then at the polished conference table, and Polly once again expressed her regret that she had to make the choice to leave. She believed in their joint venture. It was only that the opportunity before her was too significant to throw away. And with LeMaire gone—well, it was true that things would be more difficult, there was no other way of looking at it.

  Lenox nodded at this, Dallington glowered. As if in response to his mood, the steady rain outside began to grow wilder, lashing at the windows, soaking the buildings into darker colors.

  Thoughtfully, Lenox rotated his cup of tea in its saucer for a moment. Then he looked up and spoke. “We hold you in the greatest possible esteem, you know, Polly. I don’t think either of us doubts that if you leave, you’ll be successful. There’s even a chance that you’ll push us out of business. At any rate we won’t continue in these offices. We don’t need so much space, and always worked from our homes before.”

  With an anguished look, Polly said, “I never intended—”

  “No, of course not, and what’s more, for you this is a business, whereas, to speak candidly on a subject I don’t think any of us would like to linger upon, John and I can afford to act as amateurs. For that reason I won’t beg you to stay. But I do have one request.”

  “What’s that?” asked Dallington suddenly.

  “I would like to know the identity of your new partner.”

  Polly shook her head. “His privacy was an absolute condition of his offer.”

  “You have my word as a gentleman that I will keep the information in the very strictest of confidence. Nobody who isn’t present in this room now will ever hear the name you tell us from my lips.” And suddenly the room, awash in natural light, took on a solemn air. “Dallington? Would you commit to the same?”

  “I would never tell,” he said.

  Polly looked at them each in turn, and then exhaled. “Very well,” she said. “It’s Lord Monomark.”

  Lenox leaned back. There was the beginning of a smile on his face, though his brow was furrowed, as if he were taking in the news. In truth it was precisely as he had thought. “Monomark,” he said. “I wondered if that might be the name you’d say.”

  Polly looked at him, confused. “You did?”

  It had come to him last night at home, as he glanced over the newspapers. Polly had described the man who offered her control of this agency as one whose name they would all know, and someone with enough interests that an in-house detection agency would make financial sense. Then there was something suggestive about the meeting-ground of the Langham—a grand hotel, moneyed, the kind of place one might expect a newly arrived fellow like Monomark to take a prospective associate.

  “And finally, of course,” said Lenox, “the articles.”

  “The articles?” said Polly.

  “How much do you know about Monomark?” he asked.

  “A fair amount,” she said. “He was born the son of a grocer, apprenticed as a printer, bought several paper mills before he was twenty, made them very profitable, and now owns a dozen newspapers too. The Queen made him a lord last year.”

  Lenox stood up and went to the window, looking out. He saw how it had all played out now—indeed, should have seen it from the start. The two most damaging articles about the new firm had both appeared in the Telegraph, one of Monomark’s papers, and there had been half a dozen other negative ones in his smaller papers.

  Lenox had attributed the negativity to a political grudge, but now he thought it was probably more complicated. Monomark was above all a man of business, and he would never have made Polly the offer he did—dozens of detectives and staff, expensive offices—for reasons of personal satisfaction, without believing it to be a profitable idea.

  Perhaps even very profitable. As he stared outside at the rain, Lenox began to wonder whether Monomark had heard of their new firm, envied the idea, and then set out systematically to destroy it, so that he might replace it.

  “Two articles,” said Lenox. “One just after the opening of the firm, the other just after Jenkins’s death. For that matter, there may have been others. I don’t read the Telegraph every day, at least not closely. And in both of them the inspector with whose successes I am most closely linked in the public mind was chosen to discredit me—Jenkins, with quotes on the record.”

  Polly realized what he was implying, and indignation began to dawn on her face. “You think that such a conspiracy against you is more likely than Monomark having a genuine interest in my abilities?” she asked.

  Dallington put in his oar. “Of course it’s jolly well more likely!” he said. “Monomark and Lenox were at each other in Parliament constantly.”

  Lenox shook his head. “Monomark has no love for me, but no, I think in addition to any idea of retribution toward me he must have seen your abilities from the start. Perhaps he resented that I would profit off of them, rather tha
n himself. He’s a difficult man, but far from a stupid one. I think he has been determined since January to scuttle our firm and start his own, and I think he’s very nearly succeeded.”

  Polly looked uncertain. “That’s business, I suppose.”

  “But could you trust someone capable of that?” asked Dallington.

  “We don’t even know that it’s true,” said Polly.

  “You don’t find it odd that he was so insistent upon his privacy?” asked Dallington. “He must have known that Lenox would figure out his motivations, once he knew who had made you the offer!”

  “But—”

  “And once the business was started—a favorable article in the Telegraph, I would guess, and a standing half-page advertisement on the third page of the paper. Have I got that right?”

  Polly colored, and was about to reply when Lenox held up a hand to silence them. “I have a plan,” he said.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Word had gone out to the naval bases at every dock between London and Calcutta, by the new overland telegraph that had been built from England to India a few years before, that the Gunner was to be stopped and thoroughly searched if she put into port; Wakefield was dead; the Slavonian Club was closed, and though the staff in charge of it were still silent in their cells, as the days passed the crown’s prosecutors grew more confident that the stories of the young women who had been kept there against their will would tell decisively against their captors.

  That left just the murders. Just. It would have been lovely to pin them to Captain Dyer, whose very ship had concealed one of the corpses, but he couldn’t have killed Jenkins—the Gunner had still been a night’s travel outside of London.

  Could it have been Calder?

  Again and again, since the night before, Lenox had tried to piece together a scenario in his mind by which the young marquess might have become involved in the scheme of transportation and imprisonment that Wakefield and Dyer had apparently been operating for years now.

  Nicholson, Dallington, and Lenox went to Portland Place at midday to interview the young gentleman. Obadiah Smith, Wakefield’s butler, was again at his post when they arrived, answering the door for them, pale after his attack but moving well. He brought them into the living room and asked if they wanted anything to drink or eat.

  “A glass of brandy wouldn’t go amiss,” said Nicholson.

  “Right away, sir. I’ll inform His Lordship that you’re waiting for him.”

  It took Calder several minutes to come, much longer than the brandy. When he entered the room it was with Mr. Theodore Murray, the family cousin who had been handling their business earlier that week when Lenox visited.

  “How do you do?” said the young marquess. He looked rumpled, harassed. “Can I help you with anything? I assure you I’ve told the investigators from the Yard absolutely every detail I know about this … this scandalous club, the one that was operating just next door. I was as shocked as anyone, you can imagine the horror of it. The shame of being in the papers, my God. They searched up and down this very house looking for a passageway leading next door and didn’t find one, though at this stage it’s hard for me to put anything past my father. The family is in an outrage. Thank goodness for Teddy here—preparing a statement to the press on our behalf. Feels it’s important—what was it, Teddy?”

  “We feel it’s important to emphasize the long line of Wakefields who have served the country and the crown,” said Murray.

  “A line that’s bloody well going to start again,” said Calder—or Travers-George, as he must be called now, since he had moved on to more august titles than the honorific belonging to the marquess’s heir.

  As this thought flashed across Lenox’s mind, he realized something. Suddenly there was a sinking feeling in his stomach. “May I ask who your heir is now?” he said.

  “My aunt’s son, Frederick, though he must be thirty years older than I am. Lives in Devon.”

  “And now he’ll be called the Earl of Calder, I suppose?” said Lenox.

  “I doubt he’ll use the name. Though he’s entitled to, until I have a son, at any rate.”

  What Lenox had realized was that Wakefield—the dead marquess—would himself have been called the Earl of Calder until about seven years before, when his own father died. That meant that the hold in the Gunner marked on the schematic with the name Calder could easily have been his, if their illegal plot had been going on long enough. In fact, it would have coincided with the period when Wakefield left England for nearly a year after Charity Boyd’s death—a voyage that for all Lenox knew might have been when the original conspiracy between Wakefield and Dyer was first plotted.

  As that repugnant business had expanded, the marquess could have added more holds in the ship. For legal reasons those would have been the ones marked under his new name: Wakefield. Lenox would check with the Asiatic to see how long the particular storage hold under Calder’s name had been held. Longer than seven years, he would guess. Which meant that their discovery was probably useless.

  In the moment of silence that followed, Nicholson was about to begin asking the new Lord Wakefield about the Gunner, Lenox could tell, and with a subtle motion he gestured for him to stop and instead himself addressed His Lordship, whose pink, small-minded, essentially mediocre face seemed to him all at once exceedingly unlikely to hide the imagination or devilry of a criminal, a murderer.

  “We primarily wanted to see how you were holding up under the strain of all this,” Lenox said. “Inspector Nicholson pointed out that it must be very difficult.”

  The young man flushed with gratification. “Well, that’s awfully nice of you,” he said. “Yes, it’s been jolly hard. We’re bearing up.”

  “Has anyone unusual come to the house? Perhaps Mr. Francis, the fellow we asked about before?”

  “Only reporters, unfortunately. Our eyes are open. And of course there have been all sorts in and out of the two houses next door. Teddy is already arranging to sell them, thank goodness. I’m going to sell this one, for that matter, if I can. I would far rather shake down around Mayfair. It’s where all of the other fellows from college are getting digs after examinations have finished.”

  As the three detectives started back toward Scotland Yard together a quarter of an hour later, Lenox explained in the carriage why he suddenly suspected Calder’s innocence.

  “I didn’t want you to ask any probing questions and have him put in a complaint about you,” he said to Nicholson.

  “Quite right, thank you.” Despite the thanks, Nicholson looked glum, and a moment later he added, “Though it does seem hard luck when we thought we were onto something.”

  They reached the Yard and went to Nicholson’s office for a little while then, where they sat mulling over the details of the case together—all of them in that mood of frustration. Jenkins must have uncovered Dyer and Wakefield’s scheme, they assumed. Did that mean Wakefield had murdered him? Or had Jenkins and Wakefield been working together, and both been killed for it by the same person?

  At about two o’clock, two of Nicholson’s constables came in, Leonard and Walker. They had been doggedly pursuing Andrew Hartley Francis this week even after Nicholson’s attentions had moved elsewhere, asking anyone they could find of Wakefield’s acquaintance if they knew the man. Up until yesterday, none of them had even recognized the name, however, much less the person himself—not Wakefield’s acquaintances in business, not his cousins in the nobility, not the members of his clubs.

  With any luck they were arriving with better news now. Nicholson greeted them. “Any sign of him?”

  Leonard, who was the tallest constable on the force, as thin as a blade of grass, shook his head morosely. “None at all, sir.”

  “Nobody even familiar with the name?” Nicholson said to Leonard.

  “Afraid not, sir. I’m not sure who else we can ask, though I suppose we’ll carry on trying.”

  Walker said, “We might send word to the police in a few of the large
r cities, sir. Manchester, Birmingham. Asking if they know the name. For my part I don’t think he’s in London.”

  “He may be on the Gunner, for all we know,” said Dallington broodingly. “Sitting in the crow’s nest with a flask of whisky, laughing at us.”

  “I’ll wire to Manchester and Birmingham,” said Nicholson.

  After a few more words of conversation, Walker and Leonard left.

  What they had said lingered in Lenox’s mind, however. Just as he and Dallington were about to leave half an hour later—Nicholson was headed toward the interview rooms, to see again if he could get a word out of Sister Amity or any of her cohort—he said, “What’s become of Armbruster?”

  “He’s back on the job today,” said Nicholson. “He’s one of the reasons I’m in everyone’s bad graces now. He wasn’t lying—his father was at the Yard, and both of his brothers. I’ve yet to pass him in the hallways, the scoundrel. I’m sure he was involved.”

  “Of course. All three of us saw his reaction when we confronted him. Dead giveaway,” said Dallington.

  And then all of a sudden Lenox was excited, exhilarated. It was a feeling he knew well: that he was close. The pieces were sifting together in his mind, clicking into place. He was close.

  It was that phrase, his father was at the Yard, and both of his brothers.

  “You have a strange look on your face,” said Dallington.

  “Do I? I’m thinking.”

  “I hope you’re thinking about a slice of steak pie, because I’m famished. If only the canteen here weren’t so monstrous.”