The Fleet Street Murders

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Half an hour later all three men were at the Guild Hall. Lenox, shaken but determined, was trying his best to concentrate. Crook arrived. All four of them now looked around the hall.

“Adlington,” said Smith, and Crook nodded knowingly.

Adlington was apparently officiating the debate, and Lenox already knew him to be an important personage: the mayor of Stirrington.

Now here was a grand figure. As the crowd filed into the hall he sat at the center of the stage in a dignified manner, with a look that showed his abstraction from the petty cares of the world. Years of diligent work at the dinner table had earned him a shape more akin to a small building than to any of his fellow men. He had a proud paisley waistcoat stretched taut across his girth, and strung along it was a (by necessity) very long gold watch chain.

Crook leaned over to Lenox as they stood on the wings of the stage. “Do you know what the most important part of a public house is, Mr. Lenox?”

“What’s that?”

“The brass. Even more important than the beer, you know. Gives everything that golden gleam, reflects the fire and the faces — makes it out of the normal, if you see my meaning. Not like home.”

Lenox smiled. “How interesting.”

Crook nodded. “Great man taught me that, you know. My Uncle Ned, who had the pub before me. Now, that watch chain on our gracious mayor — it serves a similar purpose. Adds to the dignity of the office, you see, to have ten yards of gold chain stretched across your belly.” Crook laughed loudly, and Lenox joined him. “I haven’t been called slim recently, but I could never hope to pull off that watch chain. It would hang down to my knees.”

Lenox was grateful to Crook for trying to lighten his mood, but butterflies still stirred in his belly and anxiety for Exeter, the fool, in his mind.

Exeter. For years Lenox had alternately aided and squabbled with the man. His bullheadedness had jeopardized more than one case, and his lack of imagination had made Lenox a necessary evil in his life. Half of the time he warned Lenox off, and the other half he came to see him hat in hand, asking for help. It was maddening.

Yet — Lenox couldn’t help but recall meeting Exeter’s small, quiet son, and the look of paternal love in the inspector’s eyes as he gazed at his lad. How painful it was to think of Exeter’s family now. His sins, in the end, had been mostly venial ones; a little too rough with a criminal now and then, obstinate about taking advice. He abused his power, too, but he wasn’t at heart a malicious man.

Furthermore, who on earth would be either stupid or brazen enough to shoot one of the most important figures in Scotland Yard? None of the gangs; they knew how to skirt attention and didn’t bother with the police when they could help it at all. Of course, Exeter had been working on the deaths of the two journalists. Standing beside Crook, watching the auditorium fill, Lenox felt a chill run down his spine. He was grateful to be here in Stirrington.

Lenox couldn’t help but think that a boy like Gerald Poole, full of years’ rage, would be more likely than anybody to lash out without regard for the consequences. Yet Dallington seemed so sure — and Poole so airy. Besides, Poole was behind bars.

A booming voice startled Lenox from his reverie. It was the portly Mayor Adlington. He had stood. “Stirringtonians!” he said and then allowed a moment for the hall to quiet. “Welcome to the parliamentary debate!”

A ragged cheering.

“The participants today are Mr. Robert Roodle and Mr. Charles Lenox. Gentlemen, if you would come to the stage.”

Lenox felt Crook’s hand push him in the back, and he walked onto the stage, meeting Adlington and Roodle in the middle. All three men shook hands, and then Roodle and Lenox went to their podiums, about six feet apart. He heard Lenox supporters calling his name and Roodle supporters calling Roodle’s, and then Adlington held up a hand.

“We meet under sorrowful circumstances, friends. The Honorable Mr. Stoke, who served our corner of England so admirably and for so long in the great halls of Parliament, is dead. Please observe a moment of silence with me.”

Only reluctantly did the Roodleites and Lenoxites stop their bickering. The silence was not very good, as silences go — there were coughs, for one thing, and outside a woman was yelling at either a husband or a horse, which caused a few titters. The mayor dealt with these by staring severely at a spot in the middle of the crowd. For a moment then there was perfect silence, which was broken when a baby toward the back of the hall began to caterwaul. Sandy Smith had been telling the God’s honest truth when he described the strange acoustics of the room; the lone baby sounded like all the demons of hell. Lenox had to stifle a laugh.

The mayor, persevering through the noise, said, “Now let us begin.”

When he described it to Lady Jane and his friends later on, Lenox said the first twenty minutes of the debate had been a blur, and they truly were. He answered as well as he could, but he couldn’t remember from one moment to the next what he had said. All of his focus was on the question at hand. The three men conversed for some time on the question of the British navy and then moved to the more parochial subject of the beer tax. When Lenox called for it to be lowered, his supporters cheered fervently, and among the neutrals there was a murmur of agreement.

The next question was addressed to Lenox. “Mr. Lenox,” said the mayor, “as someone who has lived in Stirrington all his life” — Lenox tried not to groan — “I must say that I agree with Mr. Roodle that it would be difficult for you to comprehend all of the issues that matter to us here. Do you disagree with that?”

“Yes,” said Lenox, “with all proper respect, I do. The issues of Stirrington are the issues of England, Mayor. Not enough money in your pockets. Lads off to fight throughout the empire. The beer tax. Mr. Roodle could live in Stirrington for a hundred lifetimes, and his positions on these issues would still leave his townsmen and women behind. It simply won’t do. Liberals look out for the common man. Conservatives — like brewers — look out for themselves.”

“See how he panders,” said Roodle in response to this. “Look at Mr. Lenox’s tie, gentleman. He thinks that a few quick words and a local tie will convince you of his legitimacy as a candidate for Stirrington’s seat in Parliament. That’s nonsense! He hides behind a knowledge — a knowledge he may or may not have — of England in general. Well, Mr. Fordyce, there in the fifth row, and Mr. Simpson, there in the third — we live in England, to be sure, but we don’t live in the slums of London, or in Buckingham Palace, or in some snobbish house on Grosvenor Square, like Mr. Lenox here. We live in Stirrington. We have Stirrington manners and Stirrington concerns.

“I don’t blame Mr. Lenox. He thinks he can put on a tie and understand us, and it may appear to him that he can. But we — we know that only a true son of Durham, a true son of this wonderful town, can understand its people. And I am that son. I am that son.”

Lenox felt the force of this. He would never acknowledge his inferiority to Roodle in terms of genuine interest for the people of Stirrington, but as rhetoric he knew it was powerful. He drew in a breath, as Mayor Adlington and the entire hall stared at him, awaiting his response.

“I’m reluctant to bring Mr. Roodle’s business into this argument, but I feel I must. I am only now coming to understand Stirrington manners and Stirrington ways, it is true, and it is also true that I feel my qualifications lie in the positions that would benefit all of England.” He saw Sandy Smith wince in the first row. “Stirrington especially,” he added hastily, “but at least I’m trying. My opponent took a lucrative business away from this town he claims to love — and perhaps even does love. So it is surely hypocritical, is it not, to criticize me of putting Stirrington second? If you care so very much for the town, then bring your brewery back here. You either care for yourself and your own prospects or for the town’s and its people’s. We know how you chose the first time around. Why should it be any different this time?”

Surprisingly to Lenox, there was a cheer. He realized some of these men, or at any rate men they knew, must have worked at Roodle’s brewery.

Roodle, red faced, prepared to respond. In the pubs that night they debated what he had actually intended to say; all that came out, however, was the phrase, “Damn and blast your impudence!”

In addition, here all of Sandy Smith’s predictions were borne out. Roodle’s high-pitched words rebounded and buffeted every surface in the hall until they came out as a kind of squeal, a high-pitched and angry yelp.

There was a moment of silence, and then every man and woman in the auditorium, with the exception of a few stern Roodleites, burst into laughter.

After some time the mayor managed to calm the crowd and resume the debate; but for all intents and purposes it was finished already.