The Laws of Murder: A Charles Lenox Mystery

by Charles Finch

  “Not at all,” said Nicholson.

  “He’s quite right,” Lenox interjected.

  Nicholson nodded philosophically. “Well—a toast to all three of us being alive, then.”

  “Hear, hear.”

  Lenox described this conversation to Lady Jane, too, and she said that she intended to send Nicholson a hamper from Fortnum’s, and asked Lenox whether he would prefer sweets or savories.

  “I have no earthly idea.”

  “You’ve been with him every day for a week.”

  “I know that he likes ducks. Living ones, however.”

  “You’re hopeless.”

  At last they exhausted the subject of the day’s events, and Lenox said, “Is there anything left for me to eat?”

  “Of course. What would you like?”

  He looked up and thought for a moment. Suddenly he felt a powerful sense of relief—he was alive, when he might have been dead. No matter the circumstances, that made it a notable day. He was very glad to have Jane, very glad. He squeezed her hand. “I think I would like scrambled eggs, toast, and a cup of very strong and very sweet tea,” he said.

  “You’ll have it in eight minutes,” she said, jumping to her feet. “We should have given it to you straightaway.”

  Eight minutes later—or perhaps a few more, but he could be charitable—the food and drink were on a tray before him, steaming and filling the room with the rich smell of warm butter and freshly brewed tea leaves.

  He tucked in voraciously. “What kind of party did you have in mind?” he asked between bites.

  “Only a supper, next weekend. But it’s the last thing we need to think about just at the moment.”

  “No, it would be very fine, I think. My brother can come. I’ve seen too little of him recently. Too little of all of you!”

  After he had eaten they sat on the sofa for a passage of time. Lenox picked up a newspaper and began to read, which he found restful, and Lady Jane returned to sewing the blanket. She paused midstitch after some time and looked at Lenox curiously. “Who was she, then?” she asked. “Sister Grethe?”

  Lenox smiled. “She wouldn’t say at first, but we found out soon enough.”

  “How?”

  “When we returned to the Yard, I asked several of the older bobbies if they remembered Obadiah Smith, a constable for the Yard. Two did, but no more than the name. But another fellow, Clapham, said Obadiah Smith was the least savory, most crooked officer he’d met in all his days at the Yard. It was then that I realized who Sister Grethe might be, if that man’s son cared enough to stop for her before leaving London.”

  “Who?”

  “His mother.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  With Smith in custody, people began to talk quickly.

  He spoke himself as well. “It was Armbruster who managed it all,” he claimed.

  “Armbruster?”

  His smooth, ingratiating voice had returned in custody. “The only thing I did in this whole nasty sequence of events was to give His Lordship the port from Mr. Francis. Quite unintentionally.”

  “So we are still to believe there was a Mr. Francis.”

  Smith looked at them guilelessly. “Of course there was,” he said.

  Miss Randall followed the same line. She was the second person they questioned the next morning—with many to come after her. Her presence the afternoon before had reminded Lenox of the other three servants in Wakefield’s employ. They had described Francis identically the week before, his visits, his dress. They had all been working from the same script. Now they were all under arrest.

  As for Armbruster, he knew when the game was up.

  “They tell us you orchestrated it all,” Nicholson said, as Dallington and Lenox leaned against the wall behind the table where the two colleagues faced each other. It was a rather nicer cell, and there were the remnants of a decent breakfast nearby, an orange peel, a crust of toast, the civilities accorded someone who oughtn’t to have been there. “They say that you brought in the girls with Wakefield, shot Jenkins, poisoned the marquess.”

  “Have you gone completely mad?” asked Armbruster.

  “No more of that,” warned Nicholson. “You have”—he looked at his own pocket watch, a brass one, well polished and well loved by the looks of it—“twenty minutes to tell us everything you know, or I can’t promise anything short of the rope. You’ve made quite a lot of your friends in this building look foolish. Nobody other than the three of us has any cause to show you leniency.”

  For a moment Armbruster’s face went rigid with anger. Then, though, it yielded. He was a weak-willed person, Lenox thought—gluttonous for food, as was obvious from his figure, and apparently gluttonous for money.

  That had been the root of it all. He and Smith had known each other since childhood, both the sons of peelers. Eighteen months before, Armbruster said, Smith had taken him into his confidence: They were starting a high-end brothel in the West End and needed some protection from the Yard’s interference. Armbruster had accepted what seemed in the moment like easy money, nothing life-altering, a pound or two a week, and in exchange had kept an eye on the area and smoothed over several minor incidents.

  Then, on the day before Jenkins’s death, Smith had wired him with an urgent request to meet.

  “What did he ask you?” said Nicholson.

  “He said that there was going to be a murder the next day. I told him I couldn’t be involved.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “I did! With Christ as my witness, I did. But he said that it was my own neck on the line—that the person who’d betrayed them had given my name away, too. And he offered me fifty pounds.” Armbruster shook his head mournfully. “That stupid watch. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  Lenox felt a flicker of pity for the man at those words.

  Then he remembered something. “You took Jenkins’s papers from the Yard before you followed him, though,” he said. “That means you knew who Smith meant to kill.”

  “Is that true?” asked Nicholson.

  “I—”

  “The truth, mind you.”

  Armbruster hesitated, then said, “Yes. I knew it was Jenkins. He would have had us all up to the gallows, you know.”

  Dallington snorted. “Better to go to the gallows than see a good man murdered.”

  “What became of his papers?” asked Lenox.

  “I burned them.”

  “What did they say?”

  “It was a thick file. He knew everything about the Slavonian Club—everything. My name was all over them, Wakefield’s, too. Jenkins had obviously been working on it for months.”

  “Was Smith’s name on them? Or Dyer’s?”

  Armbruster thought. “I don’t know. I only looked at the papers very quickly. But I don’t think so, no. It was all detail about those houses—the three houses that have been in all the newspapers.”

  It seemed clear enough to Lenox. Jenkins had discovered Wakefield’s crimes, and used the threat of prosecution against the marquess to try to chase down all of the criminals involved in the operation. Wakefield had turned on his friends to save his skin. Both of them had died for it.

  “And it was you who untied the shoe?” Lenox asked Armbruster. “Before everyone arrived?”

  The sergeant hesitated again and then nodded. “Yes. When I arrived to find the body, I knocked on Wakefield’s door on the pretext of searching for witnesses. Smith told me to look in the shoe. He was flustered—had just shot Jenkins and run, not wanting to linger, obviously, in such a public place. I could look in the shoe without drawing notice, because I was leading the investigation, of course.” He shook his head. “But then Nicholson arrived. Another thirty seconds and none of us would be sitting here. I would have had that claim ticket in my own pocket.”

  They took fifteen minutes more to sketch in the details of the day Jenkins had died; for his part, Armbruster seemed sincerely not to know anything about Wakefield’s death.<
br />
  There was a narrow hallway outside of the cell—surprisingly bright, with a clock and a portrait of Sir Robert Peel on the wall—and here Nicholson, Lenox, and Dallington stood, discussing what they had learned.

  It all fit together, but there were still questions. Nicholson, shaking his head, said, “If he were planning to betray Smith, why would Wakefield meet with Jenkins right in front of him?”

  Lenox shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about that, too. Smith was cleverer than Wakefield. I’ve been following Wakefield’s trail for years—he was violent, heedless, cavalier. Smith is cold-blooded.”

  “And?”

  “If I had to guess, I would say that he probably took the precaution of seeing Jenkins when Smith was out. What he didn’t consider was that Smith had been responsible for hiring all of the rest of the staff, too—Miss Randall, the three others. They were his. Wakefield wouldn’t have bothered about details like that. He would have assumed that he only had to watch out for Smith, that the others were simply normal servants. In fact all four of them were spying on him.”

  “For that matter,” said Dallington, “we have no idea what Wakefield told Smith. Perhaps he told him he was only going to give up Dyer—that they were in on it together, against Dyer and the men of the Gunner. But as Charles says, Smith was cleverer than Wakefield by half.”

  “Or us, nearly,” said Nicholson. He hesitated. “I also wonder how Smith and Wakefield connected.”

  There was a pause as they considered the question. Then Lenox said, “Armbruster is sitting there. Let’s ask him.”

  So they returned to the room and posed the question to the sergeant. A disconcerted look came onto his face—one of concealment, calculation. He knew something. “I’m not sure,” he said.

  “No more games, I told you,” said Nicholson.

  There was a long pause. “Does the name Charity Boyd mean anything to you?”

  Lenox nodded. “The woman Wakefield killed. Yes. Why?”

  Armbruster paused again, as if considering his options. “There’s no reason to drag that case up, you know. Wakefield’s dead. He’s the one who killed her.”

  “This is your final warning,” said Nicholson. “We—”

  Lenox thought he understood. “The officers who helped investigate the murder,” he said. “Was one of them Obadiah Smith’s father?”

  Armbruster nodded very slightly. “Yes.”

  “And another one of them was your father.”

  Now the sergeant looked pained. “Yes. But it was only Smith who helped Wakefield, I’m sure of that—sure of it. My father’s nearly seventy now, anyhow. You’ve no cause at all to bring him into this.”

  Lenox turned away in disgust. He remembered the witness who had seen Charity Boyd’s death, only to recant his testimony. How easily a brief encounter of intimidation from someone in a uniform might have changed his mind. And how easy to imagine that once a fruitful relationship had been established between Wakefield and Obadiah Smith Sr., the rest of the family—the constable’s son, his wife—might have found their way into Wakefield’s employ.

  Except that Smith had probably become something very like a partner, it seemed to Lenox. Dallington evidently had the same thought. In the hallway, he said, “I suppose Smith made himself indispensable.”

  Nicholson nodded. “For all we know, the entire enterprise was Smith’s idea.”

  “Yes,” said Lenox. “Wakefield had the houses, Dyer the ship, but they needed Smith to run the operation. I know Wakefield—there’s no way he could have been bothered with all that work. He was essentially an idle man, unless some piece of violence was called for. Smith and his mother—they were the ones in charge of the whole thing, until it came crashing down. They must have been minting money before that. Think of that pile of notes we found Smith ready to pack. Thousands of pounds.”

  Nicholson shook his head. “I wonder how Jenkins discovered the truth. It was a damned fine piece of detection, however he did it.”

  The other two nodded, and they stood there in silence for a moment, considering their departed friend.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  As the women’s stories of captivity seeped out into the press, the charitable hearts of the British public were stirred. A collection was taken up through the newspapers, a fund established by which all of them might have their return fares to their homelands provided, along with a six-month stipend to put them on their feet. There was talk, moreover, of a suit against Wakefield’s estate, some reparation. Most of the women left as soon as they could. They gave forwarding addresses, though Lenox doubted that these would stay good for very long. Two or three women elected to stay in London—and one, in fact, a young German lady, would eventually become the well-known mistress of one of the gentlemen who had been arrested on the night of the raid at the Slavonian Club, Clarkson Gray, a bachelor of long standing descended from a line of immensely wealthy manufacturers in West Bromwich.

  Several weeks after the fact, Lenox saw Gray at the Travellers Club. Gray gave him a pained look. “Bloody bad show, that was,” he said, without any other greeting. “I’d no idea they weren’t paid. None at all. And with the fees of the place! She’s a damn fine girl, too. I’m trying to make up for it to her, you know. And she knows she can go back any time she likes. I’ve told her so earnestly. She prefers it here.”

  That encounter was still in the future as Lenox and his two partners slowly drew the net around Smith in the days after his arrest, carefully interrogating the various people who had been involved. Sister Grethe was, indeed, the grieving widow of Obadiah Smith Sr., or in any event the apartment in which she had shot at them was rented to a woman with the same name as his wife, Gwen Smith. She wouldn’t confirm anything, but several of the captive women had been only too delighted to identify both Smith and his mother in person, telling long, complex tales of their roles in the day-to-day operations of the Slavonian Club. One of the girls had laid eyes on Sister Grethe—a person who in their early encounters had always seemed bovine to Lenox, placid—and fainted dead away with fear.

  She was the least of their worries, though. She had fired a gun upon them, and she would end her life in prison. The question was how to be absolutely sure that her son would do the same.

  His subordinates in Wakefield’s house turned on him one by one, admitting that they had fabricated Andrew Hartley Francis’s character together, and also that they had been directly in Smith’s employ, their salaries doubled and trebled by him—rather than by Wakefield. (When Lenox remembered how spare the house had been, how little work it must have taken to keep up, he saw the appeal of the job.) Yes, one of the footman told them, he had seen Jenkins put the note in his shoe, and reported it to Smith. He’d had no idea Jenkins was going to be murdered—only Smith had threatened them with their own deaths if they said anything, and promised them grand lumps of money if they could stick it out until the new marquess was installed in the house.

  Nicholson, one afternoon, wondered out loud why Smith had stayed around, acting as butler. “I suppose it would have been too suspicious if he disappeared just at the moment Wakefield did.”

  Dallington nodded. “What’s been on my mind is why, if the Slavonian Club is only eighteen months old, they’ve had holds on the Gunner for so long.”

  Lenox shrugged. “There are plenty of illegal things to do with a hold on a ship, I suppose. They simply grew more ambitious. Perhaps they were always bringing in women, and decided to eliminate the intermediate step—to run the brothels themselves, rather than take all the risk of finding women for the brothels.”

  “There’s opium, too,” said Nicholson, “and any other number of drugs. We’ve had a fearful time stopping the trade.”

  They were in Nicholson’s office, eating a bite of lunch together. A definite companionship had sprung up between the three men, now that the case was concluded, and they talked easily, enjoying each other’s company.

  “Did we ever learn why they named it the S
lavonian Club?” asked Dallington.

  “It was in the papers, you know,” said Nicholson. “It’s a place on the Continent. ‘Even more hedonistic than its neighbor Bohemia,’ or some rubbish of that nature, was what I read.”

  Lenox added grimly—and it was this he would ultimately think of when Clarkson Gray rationalized his behavior at the Travellers’—“And there’s a word buried right in the name, too. Slave. Whether that’s an accident or a cruel joke, who can say.”

  They might easily have sent Obadiah Smith to trial with the evidence they had. There were witnesses who could place him at the Slavonian Club, a constant presence, and the other servants were all quick to blame him. Nevertheless, it seemed a little thin. The houses belonged to his employer, Lord Wakefield, and he could plausibly plead that he had no idea of the crimes that had taken place there. He and Miss Randall allotted all the blame to Armbruster—and to the servants beneath Smith, who they claimed were conspiring against him.

  There was also no trail of paper tying him to the business other than the hold in the Gunner, and though that was registered to O. Smith, according to the Asiatic there was no address or other identifying tag to confirm that it was the same man; apparently the captain of the Gunner managed the holds. As for all the money they had found in Smith’s possession—that was another piece of highly suspicious circumstantial evidence, but there was nothing illegal about it, on its face.

  It was in the state of frustration induced by these tenuous pieces of evidence that Lenox passed the next week, searching for a way to break down Smith’s story once and for all. What they knew about his connection to the club would perhaps be enough to send the man to prison for a few years, but on the more serious charge of the murders of Jenkins and Wakefield, he had covered his tracks too cleverly. As it stood, they would have to hope that Armbruster was a persuasive witness. He was the only person who could definitively declare that Smith was a murderer. The problem was that it wouldn’t be difficult to make a jury doubt the word of a man so plainly corruptible.