The Fleet Street Murders

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

The pub was crowded, cheery, and warm, with red-nosed, white-haired fellows lining the bar, trading bawdy jokes and laughing uproariously, as only men in their cups will. The front room, which contained the taps, was narrow and brightly lit, with a fire reflecting off of the brass above the bar and long time-scarred benches opposite, under a series of paintings of idyllic country scenes. A plaque under the paintings proudly declared that the Great Fire of 1666 had leveled the place. From the back emanated the unmistakable smell of the stables.

The bartender was a keen-eyed, sturdily built chap with sallow cheeks and dark hair.

“Ransom?” asked Lenox when he caught the man’s attention.

“No, I’m Stevens. He’s weekdays.”

“It’s all the same — I came to ask a question.”

“Yes?”

“I understand that Winston Carruthers often worked here?”

“Aye, many a night. Who are you, may I ask?”

“Charles Lenox. I’m helping Scotland Yard. Could you show me where he worked?”

“It was a little room in back. Here, Billy!” He motioned to a lad passing by with a tray of glassware. “Take these gents up to the burgundy room.”

Billy led them up a narrow flight of stairs and down a hallway. The burgundy room was a smallish, windowless place that fit four tables. Three of these were evidently open to patrons, though none of them was taken, but the fourth, in the back left corner of the room, boasted a scratched old brass sign that read RESERVED FOR W. CARRUTHERS.

It was apparent instantly that this corner of an old room at Fleet Street’s traditional public house was in fact the dead man’s office. There was a box full of pencils, India rubbers, and bits and bobs, and on a little ledge next to it there was a stack of clean paper. The table itself was covered in a thousand old wine stains and glass rings and was darkened with years of cigar smoke and splashes of tea.

“What’s this?” said McConnell. He had gone around to the other side of the table before Lenox was finished looking at the room.

“What?”

“I think it matches your idea of the thing.”

The object McConnell was pointing to was a squat wooden box in two tiers, each with a drawer.

“Terrific,” said Lenox. “The yard haven’t been here, clearly.” He pulled open the top drawer and started flipping through the papers it held. “Files on article subjects and public figures.”

“What are you looking for?”

Lenox paused. Of everyone in the world, only Graham knew Lenox’s suspicions. “I know I needn’t ask, but can you keep a secret?”

“I hope I can, yes.”

“The file I want is about George Barnard.”

McConnell laughed incredulously. “Why?”

“I think he may be behind all this.”

“He can’t possibly be. He had nothing to do with that dead girl in his house, did he?”

“No,” said Lenox. “Theft is more in his line, on a grand scale. Murder is a new one, in particular if he had Exeter killed. I fear he may be desperate.”

“Good heavens, why?”

“I don’t know yet.”

McConnell turned and scanned the room, as if to make sure it was still empty. “Well, let’s find it, then. Are the files alphabetical?”

“I don’t know.”

They were. Winston Carruthers’s physical life had been overfull of drink and food, his rooms messy and rich and abundant, but his files were at odds with that image of the man. They bespoke a different and more ascetic intellect. All of the papers were neatly filed and precisely written.

None among them pertained to George Barnard.

“Damn,” said Lenox softly.

“Perhaps he’s in the G section?” said McConnell.

“I doubt it. Let’s check.” A lengthy pause. “No, nothing here. Perhaps Barnard has been here after all.”

McConnell laughed. “That scarcely seems —”

“One does well not to underestimate him, I’ve learned,” said Lenox rather sharply. “Let’s go back to the B’s and make sure.”

McConnell sighed and seemed to look longingly out toward the stairs — and perhaps down to the bar.

“Here’s something odd. A file marked g. farmer.”

“In the B section? A middle name?”

Lenox frowned and opened the file. “No, he hasn’t got a middle name.”

It was a thick file, and he began to leaf through a seemingly endless series of random articles, nearly all of them by Carruthers. One was about a broken church steeple in Cheapside and the plan to replace it. Another concerned a shipping accident, and a third was about crop yields in Northumberland. It was a bizarre miscellany.

“Farmer,” muttered McConnell. “I wonder — Lenox, I wonder whether it’s a pun?”

“What?”

“Barnard — it sounds just a bit like the word ‘barnyard.’ A farmer has a barnyard, after all.”

Lenox laughed. “I think you’ve hit it.”

“That’s why it’s filed under B, too.”

“You’re right.”

Confirmation came a moment later — one of the articles was about Barnard’s tenure at the Royal Mint, a profile.

“I’ll just borrow this, I think,” said Lenox. “Let’s go.”

McConnell asked whether they might have a tot of whisky, and Lenox, won over by the mood of the place, agreed to it. They fell into conversation with the men at the bar and stayed for half an hour, then shared a cab back to Mayfair and their respective homes.

Lenox entered his own exhausted and slightly on edge, the knowledge that Barnard was involved raising the stakes even higher. He thought briefly, as Graham greeted him, of Stirrington and then pushed the memory away, a painful one, something to be forgotten.

“It’s Barnard,” said Lenox wearily.

“Sir?”

“The Fleet Street murders. It’s Barnard.”

Graham, usually so imperturbable, inhaled sharply. “I’m surprised, sir.”

“I’ll need your help.”

“You shall have it, of course.”

“Thanks.”

Lenox spent a happy half hour with Lady Jane then, before returning to his library, where by low light he pored over the file on G. Farmer late into the night. At two he stood up exhausted and decided that he needed to sleep.

It was a disappointing haul. He had looked at every sheet of paper in the file, and only six of them mentioned Barnard by name. There were two articles that caught his eye because they were more recent: one about the history of the building that housed the Mint, which quoted Barnard, and another about a series of thefts from ships near the docks.

Ultimately, however, neither provided him with any insight into the case, and he fell asleep frustrated, puzzled, and certain that the elusive truth was closer than he realized.