One of Smith’s fellow plotters wouldn’t prove quite as elusive as the silver-tongued butler, however. On a morning the next week, as Lenox was puzzling over all of the case’s details in the offices at Chancery Lane, a telegram came from Nicholson. It said:
DYER SHOT STOP GUNNER HELD AT LISBON STOP
“Dallington!” he called out.
The young lord popped his head around the doorframe. With Jenkins’s murder solved, he had resumed his normal schedule of work and was investigating a housebreak at Brixton. “Yes?”
“Look at this.”
Dallington took the paper, read it, and whistled. “Shall we go see Nicholson?”
Nicholson had a limited amount of information, but some, and more came in during the next few days. The Gunner had sailed into the port under camouflage, painted with a new yellow-and-white check above the sea line (which meant that it had been done in the week since she left London) and calling herself the Ariana. The British admiral stationed in Lisbon had received the word from Scotland Yard to look out for the ship, however, and one of his assistants had spotted her right away, despite her attempts at concealment.
The admiral had decided to let her run into port, rather than challenging her out at sea. As she tied on, a lieutenant had called out, “All men of this ship are under arrest, by order of Her Majesty the Queen.”
There had been a stirring on deck then, followed by two noises in quick succession: a gunshot, first, and second, a splash, the sound of a pistol hurled far overboard.
They found Dyer in his cabin. He had been shot in the back. None of the two-hundred-odd men aboard the Gunner would say a word, other than to confirm that the captain had ordered the ship repainted and renamed since they left the Thames.
“Can’t say why,” the ship’s lieutenant, Lawton, had said. “Captain’s orders.”
Indeed, it became clear that the magical use of this phrase, Captain’s orders, was the reason Dyer had been killed by his own men. The British representatives at Lisbon heard it hundreds of times as they investigated the ship. It was a clever maneuver: By maritime law, the illegality of the ship’s new, unregistered name, and the illegality of anything in the holds, were the responsibility of the captain alone.
And indeed, one of the things that the navy found was a group of several women, living in hammocks—in the hold licensed to Lord Wakefield, the hold where Lenox and Dallington had found his body.
This detail puzzled them, until they learned that the women had all lived for several months at St. Anselm’s—at the Slavonian Club. That, evidently, was how Smith, Wakefield, and Dyer had ensured that none of the women mastered English. Every time the Gunner came and went, it exchanged new women for the old.
Where had Dyer been taking the women now, though? They didn’t know themselves, of course. Lisbon wasn’t part of the course the Gunner usually sailed on its route to Calcutta. Why, then, had Dyer risked putting into port there, when the disguise he had arranged for his ship showed that he was already worried about being caught?
The answer must be money, and Lenox surmised, on the day he and Dallington went to see Nicholson, that Dyer must have gone to Lisbon to sell off the women in his holds. From there he could have sailed the Gunner to Calcutta—confident that no ship could outrun her on that route—and then left her with the Asiatic. He and his crew might well have dispersed there, leaving the company to replace them, perhaps eventually returning to London overland.
With all this in mind, Nicholson asked the British navy in Portugal to investigate the city’s brothels, to ascertain whether there was any that might have taken women from the Gunner in the past. (“Though asking the British navy to look at a city’s brothels seems like a redundant request,” Dallington had pointed out.) With the assistance of the Portuguese police, who were eager to aid the country that brought so much foreign trade into their cities, they raided half a dozen houses and questioned the women working there.
Finally, at one of these, belonging to an aristocrat named Luis Almonte de la Rosa, they found success: Several of the women had been at the Slavonian Club, and were paid no more now than they had been there. Emboldened by the assurances of the navy that they could have their freedom, they recounted their own stories of the Gunner, which had brought them first to London and then here.
The emergence of this second criminal consortium, far away in a different country, returned the story to the headlines for several days. After that it gradually faded, in abeyance until the trial of the last living member of the criminal trio who had planned it all began.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The weeks after Smith’s arrest were rainless and bright, the soft, light days of spring hardening toward the heat of summer, women walking with fans in hand, men in suits of lighter cloth. Along Chancery Lane, the dogs belonging to each shop lingered in the shadows of their doorways, their instincts for adventure and alarm dormant while the sun was up.
At the detective agency one story above street level, business had resumed.
“What about you, Dallington?” asked Lenox.
They were sitting at the conference table. “Two new cases over the weekend. One a woman of middle age whose husband has been missing for four years—she wants proof that he’s dead, so that she can remarry. The other is from a fellow who saw our names in the papers. He was defrauded of three hundred pounds by an itinerant salesman. Offers to split whatever we can recover. It will probably lead nowhere, of course, but I thought I might put Pointilleux on the trail, if we don’t need him here.”
Lenox nodded. “And Polly?”
For Polly was still there; she had declined Monomark’s offer. Now, as a fly buzzed against the warm windows, and she sat in the meeting that Lenox had begun by reporting that he had no new cases, she looked as if she might regret it. Briskly she tapped her pen twice against the sheet of paper in front of her, then offered up her usual list of small and middling clients, many of them women—good, steady business.
Eleven percent. Since the day LeMaire had announced he was leaving, the words that had rattled around Lenox’s mind were those two, eleven percent. That was the trivial proportion of the revenue the firm took in for which he was responsible. Could he blame the Frenchman for leaving? Or Polly if she had chosen to go?
The difficulty was that the previous autumn he had viewed this return to detection as a pleasure, a fulfillment of his private wishes—not as a business.
Today that changed.
“Thank you,” he said to Polly when she had finished. Then he paused. “As you both know, my official, paid involvement in the Jenkins murder concluded on Friday. I’ll still be helping Nicholson, but only in an unofficial capacity. That makes this a good moment to address the future of the firm, I think. I told you I had a plan, and I do.”
Both Polly and Dallington looked at him more alertly, eyes enlivened by their curiosity. With each other, in the last week, they had been stiff, polite. Polly had been most animated when she told them about her second meeting with Monomark.
“At first he tried to cajole me into accepting,” she had said. “Then I asked him about the articles in the Telegraph.”
Dallington had raised his eyebrows at that. “What did he say?”
“He turned bright red and asked me if I was certain once and for all that I declined the position. I said I did. He stood up and walked out then—leaving me with the bill for tea, no less.”
They had all seen the result of that meeting the next day, when the Telegraph had blared a headline: LEMAIRE FOUNDS DETECTIVE AGENCY. Monomark’s second choice, evidently, but quicker than Polly to accept the offer. The article below the headline described precisely the kind of agency that Monomark had offered Polly control of. Indeed, the newspaper baron’s fingerprints were all over it. The subheadline read TO BE PREMIER FIRM IN ENGLAND, and a quote from a high official at Scotland Yard, probably one of Monomark’s cronies, said, “Certainly LeMaire’s will be our first and only choice should we ever require outside a
ssistance in a criminal investigation.”
LeMaire’s firm was already up and running, with daily advertisements in half a dozen papers, favorable stories in the press, and even fairly positive word of mouth. Within a month, Lenox had privately reckoned, he might well take half of their business. If he did that they might as well shutter the firm.
Fortunately, he did have a plan. What was more, it was Monomark who had given him the idea for it. At their morning meeting, he asked Dallington and Polly—the words were directed at Polly, really, for he knew Dallington would never leave—to draw up the last drops from their reservoirs of faith in him. He would return that evening with news.
He took his carriage then and went to Parliament, where he spent a long, tiring day—but a triumphant one.
At six o’clock that evening, as the Members began to make their way through the hall outside the Commons into the benches for the evening session, Lenox stood, watching them wander in as he had for so many years, until he felt a tap on his shoulder.
He turned and saw his brother. “Edmund!” he said. He felt himself smiling. Throughout the course of the case they hadn’t seen each other. Edmund was his closest friend, and it was an unusual length of time for the two of them to have gone without each other’s company. This was a happy coincidence.
“Charles, what on earth are you doing here? I could have stood you a late lunch, or an early supper for that matter.”
“I was here on business, alas. Do you have time for a quick glass of wine now?”
Edmund checked the large clock on the wall. “Quickly, yes,” he said. “But what the devil do you mean, business? They had pheasant with chestnut sauce and cranberries this afternoon, too, your favorite thing.”
They went to the Members’ Bar, mostly empty now, and after they ordered their drinks they sat, Lenox asking what the subject of the debate that evening would be. Foreign trade, Edmund answered. That was the dullest of subjects Parliament could take up, in his opinion, though one of the most important.
“Better you than me,” said Lenox.
“Molly says that Jane is having a dinner party this weekend?” said Edmund.
“Yes, can you come?”
“Molly has bought a new dress already, so I imagine we can. She’s down in London so rarely these days that she says she never knows the city fashion until she’s walking out the door, dressed in the last season. But since Teddy is ashore for leave, she can’t tear herself away from home. Speaking of which, you must come down soon.”
Edmund still lived mainly at Lenox House in Sussex, where they had grown up. “We thought of coming in July.”
“That would please me inordinately. For one thing, we’re going to have a dance, for the county people, you know, and it would dispel the rumors that you yourself are part of a criminal gang if you were to attend.”
“Is that what they say?”
“The news gets very garbled on its way south, you know. And I may put it about that we’re disappointed in how it all ended for you, of course.” Edmund smiled, a spark in his eyes. “Anyhow—business? That’s why you’re in the building?”
“Yes. It’s been an interesting day.”
Not long before, Lenox had read an article in Blackwood’s that mentioned that the word “abracadabra” originally meant “I create what I speak” in the Hebrew language, a magician’s word that had migrated into English. This piece of trivia had been running through his mind all day, because so much of what he had done was to create money out of nothing—out of mere speech.
He had taken eighteen short meetings that day, he told Edmund, with eighteen friends and allies from his days in Parliament. (Twenty had been scheduled, but two Members had been detained elsewhere.) What all eighteen had in common was that they were men of business, and to each of them Lenox had proposed the same idea: that their firm pay an annual fee to retain the services of Lenox, Dallington, and Strickland on a permanent basis.
The blunt reaction of the second man he had seen, a steel manufacturer named Jordan Lee who had a great rotund belly and a thick mustache, had been typical. “Why on earth would I need to hire a detective agency?”
Lenox had been prepared for the question. “You’re familiar with the Holderness case?” he asked.
Lee grimaced. “Of course, the poor bastards.”
The year before, a quiet senior manager at Holderness had stayed ten minutes after work one evening, opened the company safe, and walked away with nearly four thousand pounds in European certificates of stock. It emerged that he had also been embezzling from the company for years. The two brothers in command of the firm, Andrew and Joseph Holderness, were living in sharply reduced personal circumstances as they attempted to pay off their debts and set the business back on its feet.
“A stitch in time, you know, Lee,” said Lenox. “We have a dedicated accountant who will do a quarterly examination of your books for fraud, detectives to do thorough investigations into any person you wish to hire—and of course in the case of any actual crime, theft, or violence, we’ll be on the spot immediately.”
Lenox saw Lee thinking. It was a good offer in general, he thought—though the accountant was, as yet, pure fiction—but the word that had most intrigued him was one thrown in with careful carelessness, “violence.” It was what the industrialists like Lee had most to fear.
“How much are you asking for the service?” he asked.
“Six hundred pounds per annum. We’ll keep a record of what we do for you, and charge more or return some of that at the end of the year based on our charges. Our own records are scrupulous, of course. I would be happy to show you a sample.”
For a moment the question hung in the balance—but then, perhaps because of his long acquaintance with Lenox, perhaps because six hundred pounds was a substantial but not a shocking sum, Lee nodded and put his hand out. “I think it’s a clever idea, now you explain it. We’ve been losing a mint simply from scrapped steel that’s gone missing. Your people could start there.”
Not all of Lenox’s meetings were so successful, of course. Eight of the men declined outright, two had, rather vexingly, already hired LeMaire to do the same job, and three others said they would think it over, in a hard genial tone that made it clear they wouldn’t.
In a way it had been a painful day for Lenox, who was so used to his own pride, so long accustomed to the luxury of financial independence, still adherent to old standards of what a gentleman ought to do. He had been inculcated with a disdain for business, for trade. These men, in fact, were those who looked up to him, to his life with his aristocratic wife, and in some of their faces he saw a subtle sense of reversal, perhaps even reprisal. That had been difficult.
And yet in another way it had been thrilling. Business was a kind of game, and for the first time he saw why men like Monomark chose to play it.
Better still, after he had finished his drink with Edmund, he could return to the offices with his news: that he had found five new clients that day, who would pay a total of seven hundred and fifty pounds into their accounts that very week, their first quarterly payments.
“Three thousand pounds for the year, then?” said Dallington uncertainly.
Polly repeated the words, too, but her voice was entirely free of uncertainty. She was beaming, with a look of pure relief and joy on her face, like a gambler who’s put his last shilling on a long shot and seen it run first through the gate. “Three thousand pounds!” she said. “Are you sure? It’s a fortune!”
Lenox smiled. “I’m sure.”
“Not that I doubt your word—only seven hundred and fifty pounds is already twice as much as every farthing we’ve brought in till now put together, Charles! My God, I could kiss you!”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The next month was one of frantic activity at Chancery Lane, all three of them putting in many long, grueling days of labor, so that the first weeks of May passed in a haze of early mornings and late nights. It was Polly who took the situation in hand, h
iring, the day after Lenox’s meetings, an accountant, a new clerk, and a new detective named Atkinson. He was a fifty-year-old man who had recently retired from the Yard in search of a better salary, tall and solid with salt-and-pepper hair. He would be the person who went to the firms for a monthly checkup and interacted directly with the managers.
“They’ll prefer that type of fellow,” she said confidently after Atkinson had left his interview. “You and Dallington are too refined—and of course I’m a woman, which would never do.”
Atkinson was an immediate success, as was the new clerk, King. On the other hand, the accountant arrived at the offices in a state of impressive inebriation on his third morning, and they fired him on the spot, replacing him later that afternoon with a meek chap named Tomkins, who turned out to be splendidly intelligent. In his very first week he found a clerical error that saved Jordan Lee, the steel magnate, nearly seventy pounds.
At the same time, for some half-mysterious reason, the business coming in for Lenox, Dallington, and Polly increased. Small cases, mostly, many to do with minor sums of money, though some genuinely enigmatic ones were mixed in as well. Lenox spent three sleepless days helping a butcher in Hampstead recover a kidnapped child, who turned out, in the end, to have been taken by a local woman who imagined that the butcher had scorned her.
Lenox described the influx of cases to Lady Jane one evening, as they sat out upon the small stone terrace that overlooked the back garden at Hampden Lane, the pleasant call of birds in the air, a light breeze making it cooler than it had been for most of the week. Between them was Sophia. She sat on a small wooden horse and rocked back and forth, murmuring some very important words to herself, lost, as so often, in a private and apparently vivid world. It was one of Lenox’s favorite things about his daughter—the intensity and liveliness of her interior life. What on earth was she saying to the horse?
“Why do you think more cases have come in recently?” Lady Jane asked.
The Laws of Murder: A Charles Lenox Mystery Page 24
