The Fleet Street Murders

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Lenox was closeted with Inspector Jenkins of Scotland Yard for some twenty minutes and came away from the meeting with a copy of the frankly unrevealing police report. Jenkins was pessimistic about the case. He felt far from sure of Poole’s guilt, as his telegram to Lenox had indicated, but admitted now that no other leads had emerged to contradict Exeter’s theory. He promised to meet Dallington and keep Lenox apprised of any news by telegram, but when the two men parted it was in a melancholy mood.

It was ten o’clock in the morning by then and had already been a long, long day for Lenox. He left the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police by hansom cab to see Hiram Smalls’s aged mother but had the driver let him out a few doors early so he could stop into a public house. A warm brandy braced him to no end and took some of the cold ache out of his bones, and he walked up Liverpool Street with a renewed sense of purpose.

“What is she like?” he had asked Jenkins.

“You understand I haven’t been involved in the case at all — or rather, simply as a spectator with better access than the public.”

“Still, I know you speak to the constables on their routes, the other officers.”

Jenkins shook his head. He was an intelligent, sensitive young man, who found fault with Scotland Yard but served it faithfully. “Nobody saw her other than Exeter,” he said. “Who reported back that she was entirely intractable.”

“What a wasted opportunity.”

Jenkins, who had heard with horror that Exeter had neglected to ask for Smalls’s personal effects at Newgate, nodded. “Then again, many people in the East End fear the police. With reason, sometimes.”

“She’s in her right mind, however?”

“I believe so. Exeter said nothing on that score.”

Lenox rang at the door, and a small, plump, red-cheeked girl of two or three and twenty answered the door. She had sharp little eyes.

“Yes?” she said.

“I’m here to see Mrs. Smalls, miss.”

“Are you, then? Well, I’m sure I don’t know whether she’s receiving visitors.” The girl put her hands on her hips. She had a pronounced cockney accent. “May I ask ’oom I ’ave the pleasure of meetin’?”

“Charles Lenox, ma’am.”

“Fair enough, Mr. Lenox, and your business?”

“I’m investigating Hiram Smalls’s death.”

Instantly the tone of the conversation shifted from the suspicious to the outright combative. “We don’t want none of your kind here, Mr. Lenox.” His name as if it were a curse word. “Good day.”

“Are you Mrs. Smalls’s landlady?”

“Am I her — well, I’m sure it’s no concern of yours, but I am, yes.”

“I believe Hiram was murdered.”

She inhaled sharply, and her eyes widened. “No!”

“I’m not with the Yard, ma’am. I’m a private detective.”

“Well.”

“I only want justice.”

“For Hiram?”

“If he was wronged.”

“Of course ’e was wronged! Hiram wouldn’t ’urt a fly!” Her outrage was in its way as persuasive as Dallington’s on behalf of Gerald Poole. “Come into the ’allway, come in. I’ll speak to Mrs. Smalls.”

After a series of complex negotiations, in which the landlady went back and forth and inquired who Mr. Lenox was, first, and then who Mr. Lenox thought he was, second, and finally whether he was quite sure he didn’t belong to Scotland Yard — only after all of these questions had been posed by the doubting go-between and satisfactorily answered by Lenox did she lead the detective up one flight of stairs to see Mrs. Smalls.

Now, Mrs. Smalls was, anybody with a rudimentary faculty of perception could see straightaway, a particular type — a faded beauty. She retained all the ornaments and outward accoutrements of beauty, including a beautiful velvet dress, profuse jewelry, and massive, heavily curled hair. There were gaudy cameos of a pretty young girl on half the surfaces in the cramped sitting room, and on the other half sat framed and dusty notices of a variety of plays.

Although the woman herself was pale, painfully thin, and red eyed, and Lenox speculated to himself that perhaps this tragedy had punctured her vanity for good. She looked as if the cares of the world had all crowded around her at once.

“How do you do, Mr. Lenox?” she asked in a somber voice and gave her curled forelock a vicious twist and tug as she curtsied.

“Fairly,” he said. “I’m so sorry about your son, Mrs. Smalls.”

“You believe my Hiram was murdered?”

“It may be the case.”

She sighed heavily. “Mr. Smalls was a fishmonger, Mr. Lenox. I was on the stage, you know, and Lord Barnett once asked at the stage door for me —”

Here she paused for a moment to give Lenox the opportunity to appreciate her accomplishment, which he did with a lift of his eyebrows.

“Still, we always figured Hiram would follow his father into fish.”

There was something ludicrous about this that under other circumstances might have provoked laughter in Lenox. Despite that, there was the weight of grief in the apartment, and he merely nodded.

“He didn’t, I take it?”

“Put it this way, Mr. Lenox — he never worked a proper job, but he always had money.”

“Something illegal, you think?”

“Ah, but he was so sweet, Mr. Lenox! You ought to have seen him, in his blue suit. He worked hard, whatever he did — and like the fool I am, I was proud of him whatever he did.”

“It’s a becoming pride in a mother,” said Lenox gently.

“Well,” she said, with a theatrical but genuine sob — in fact, the theatrical was the genuine in Mrs. Smalls, perhaps. “Oh, but he was sweet! Did you know I owed a man a hundred pounds — think of it! — and was only a few months away from debtors’ prison when Hiram paid it off? Months away!”

“Where did he find the money?”

“Oh, he always found the money. You should’ve seen him as a lad, you know! Always wanted a ha’penny for candy, he did. Little nipper.”

Lenox sighed inwardly and to forestall any further reminiscences said, “May I ask you one or two questions, Mrs. Smalls?”

Instantly her look sharpened. “Now, where do you come from, Mr. Lenox?”

“Not Scotland Yard, ma’am. I’m an amateur detective.”

“How do you come to involve yourself in the case, sir?”

“A friend of mine knows Gerald Poole and has asked me to intervene on that young man’s behalf.”

“Who is intervening on Hiram’s behalf?” said Mrs. Smalls angrily.

“Nobody, as yet. I shall see what I find. As I understand it, the prison remitted your son’s effects to you?”

“Yes, as why shouldn’t they?”

“Of course, ma’am, of course. I had hoped to see a letter he was in possession of.”

“I know the one.”

“I didn’t quite understand what it was.” Now, here was a fib: He recalled that it was thirty-two words, beginning The Dogcarts Pull Away and ending No green. “Do you have the letter?”

“You have a trustworthy face,” she said and half-sobbed again.

“Thank you.”

“Well — here it is, then.”

It was on a coarse piece of paper such as might be had for a penny in any shop, unfortunately, and looked new — relatively clean, written recently. It was in an unsophisticated hand; there was a greeting but no farewell, nor was there a date. There were two paragraphs: a short one of thirty words and another that was even shorter, only two.

Now this was, at best, puzzling. It seemed as if Messrs. Jones (but wasn’t that a strange locution, in fact?) were in for something sinister, as were the “others” to whom George and Smalls — if indeed the letter was addressed to him — were to give attention and care. Although clearly the keys to it were the first sentence and the last: The dogcarts pull away and No green. Both of them seemed like utter nonsense to Lenox, anyway. A dogcart was a rough-and-ready farmers’ equipage used on country roads. No green perhaps meant “no money.”

Lenox read it two or three times, skipping words (“The-pull-I’ll” — “The-away-Messrs.” — no), reading backward, and adding one letter to every word, then to every other word — first t, then r, then s — but no. It had to be written in some prearranged language that the reader would understand without resort to any trick. So faithfully he copied the note down and thanked Mrs. Smalls, promising her he would give it his further consideration.

The puzzling thing about the note was why Hiram Smalls would have taken the letter to prison. Either he had acted very stupidly, had been been sure of the code’s impenetrability, or else he had wanted to be caught for something — or perhaps it wasn’t his! That was the possibility that shook Lenox slightly. What if after all Hiram Smalls was innocent of any involvement in the murders of Simon Pierce and Winston Carruthers?

“Mrs. Smalls, do you see any meaning particularly in the oranges that Hiram ordered while he was at Newgate?”

She shook her head vehemently. “There’s been too much discussed about that, Mr. Lenox. It doesn’t mean a single thing! I don’t remember Hiram enjoying oranges, but he has very refined — erm — parentage, sir, and there’s no reason why he wouldn’t enjoy the finer things in life.”

“Of course,” said Lenox sympathetically. “What else was there among his possessions that the prison gave you?”

Her trust in the detective was more or less complete now, and she brought out a bag of things — and slightly sad things they were, a little rough, of coarse fabrics and cheap paper. The serge suit, the copy of Black Bess, the pouch of tobacco. Methodically Lenox searched through these but found nothing.

“May I ask you one other question?” he said as he returned Hiram’s things to her.

“Yes?”

“Do you think your son was capable of murder?”

She shook her head violently. “Never! Never in a million years!”

Lenox thought again that this was as persuasive as Dallington’s fervent advocacy of Gerald Poole, in its way. Apparently everyone was innocent. With a sigh, Lenox wished Mrs. Smalls good-bye and went back out to the street.