The Fleet Street Murders

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

George Barnard?” said Dallington again, uncertainly this time. Poole spoke as if he hadn’t heard his friend. “For the last months he has been my only friend in London.”

“He knew your father?” said Lenox.

Poole nodded. “Yes. He came to see me the moment I arrived here from the Continent. Soon we were together most afternoons, talking — first of generic subjects but then more specifically of the past. I had never been interested in what my father did or didn’t do. It was too painful, and I tried never to be interested in the world — the world at large, I mean. Friends, a roll of the dice, books, all of those things occupied my time. Mr. Barnard told me every detail of my father’s death, and the sudden exposure to something I had studiously ignored all of my life — it opened a wound. A deep wound. It changed me.”

“So you killed Carruthers?” asked Dallington doubtfully.

“I’ve a feeling there were many intermediate steps,” said Lenox, “but tell me — why did you confess, after denying it at first?”

“The guilt became too much.”

“How could you have done it?” asked Dallington.

“I don’t have any idea. It sounds funny, but truly I don’t… I go over it in my mind and can’t quite puzzle together how it happened. It seems like a dream.”

“Why have you been protecting Barnard?” said Lenox.

A stubborn look came onto his face. “An informer killed my father. I never want to be a rat.”

“Is that what Barnard preached to you? The nobility of protecting a scoundrel?”

“A scoundrel?” said Poole. “He’s been a friend to me.”

“No,” said Lenox. “He hasn’t. Let’s leave that aside and tell us how you went from a mild friendship with George Barnard to killing a man in cold blood.”

“In hot blood,” said Poole. “I’ve never been drunker or angrier in my life.”

“Well? I want to help you with the police and the judge, Poole, but come now, why did you act as you did?”

“It’s a secret, but George told me — he told me that this man Carruthers framed my father.”

“What?” said Dallington.

Poole sat back triumphantly, and a deep sadness, a pity, rose up in Lenox’s breast. How eager we are to rewrite our fathers’ stories, some of us; the delusions of the heart.

“I think your father was very probably guilty,” said the detective quietly.

“No,” said Poole, shaking his head confidently.

“Well, leave that aside, too. How did Barnard persuade you to kill Carruthers?”

“He didn’t do a single damn thing, Mr. Lenox, except listen to me talk, and tell me how good a man my father was, and concur that he was undeserving of his terrible fate. I tremble to think of him, my poor father, knowing that he was innocent as he walked to the gallows.”

“Barnard never incited you to violence?”

“On the contrary, he advised against it.”

Clever fiend, thought Lenox. “Then how did you find Carruthers? How did you come to kill him?”

“It was the strangest coincidence. One night I was drunk, and on the street I bumped into a woman — or perhaps she bumped into me.”

“The latter, I reckon,” said Lenox, who knew what would come next.

“It was a woman I knew from my years in Belgium, who had run a tavern near our house.”

“Martha Claes,” said Lenox.

“Yes,” answered Poole with some surprise. “I never liked her all that well when I was a child, but we fell into talking about old times, and I asked her what she did now, and she said she kept house for six tenants. She described them all to me in detail.”

“Including Carruthers,” said Dallington. “You were set up, Poole! He was set up, Lenox!”

Poole’s confidence seemed to falter slightly. “No, it was a coincidence.”

“Barnard found her somehow and installed her as Carruthers’s landlady — money will do a great deal, and combined with a dangerous mind can do evil more quickly than anything else… So he put her in your path,” said Lenox. “May I hazard a guess? She hated Carruthers. She thought he was the very devil. He beat his mistress and stole from the poor and threatened her children. Is that about the whole of it?”

“Yes,” said Poole, now less certain, “and that he blackmailed people. She described all of the lives he ruined through the knowledge he acquired as a journalist. You think George — what, paid her to do that?”

“I’m certain of it, in fact,” said Lenox. “So Martha Claes — what? What happened?”

“At last I let slip about my father.”

“She suggested revenge?”

“Not precisely — or I don’t think so — I can’t remember, Mr. Lenox.”

“What about Simon Pierce, though? Didn’t that baffle you?” asked Dallington.

“Not especially,” said Poole. “It was an odd coincidence, of course, but I never heard of the man, and I thought the newspapers had the wrong end of the stick, describing the two as linked. I knew they weren’t, in fact.”

Lenox laughed bitterly, but all he said was, “What about your meeting with Smalls?”

“That happened precisely as I described it, queerly enough.”

“You haven’t put any of this together, Mr. Poole? You’re an innocent indeed.”

“Listen — I’ll never believe ill of George Barnard.”

“That’s your business,” said Lenox. “What happened on the day of the murder?”

“I was at George’s, and somehow I got drunker than I usually did — got quite badly drunk, in fact.”

“Listen to yourself, you fool!” said Dallington. “I haven’t the slightest notion of how George Barnard is involved in all of this, but Lenox has it right!”

Poole ignored the outburst. “He gave me a present that day — it was —” Suddenly true doubt dawned on his brow. “It was the knife.”

“Did you pay Martha? When you went over that night?”

“I gave her a little something, as a token of old times.”

“Barnard must have, too,” said Lenox. “He managed it terribly well. You were seen with Smalls, he had someone who matched your appearance buy the knife under your name, and best of all he must have had Martha burn the document Carruthers was writing and anything else she could find. Christ.”

The doubt in Poole’s eyes had become full and panicked. “What an idiot I’ve been! What a drunken idiot! But then my father — he — he can’t have been innocent, can he?”

These last words he said more to himself than to either visitor, and without another glance in their direction he went to the door and asked the guard to return him to his cell.

It was awful. Dallington looked shocked to the core of his being, and Lenox felt with something approaching fear the powerful mind that had orchestrated the journalist’s death.

But why? Why?

There was one thing that pleased Lenox in a small way; Exeter had been right. Hiram Smalls and Gerald Poole had murdered Simon Pierce and Winston Carruthers. It was a vindication. Was it for this, though, that he had died? Or had he discovered something else?

He and Dallington had left Newgate Prison and were walking down the street. The younger man, plainly shaken, was silent.

At length Lenox said, “There are times when this work destroys my affection for humanity. Look at this gang — the father a traitor to England, the son weak willed and impulsive and drunken, Barnard half a devil, even Carruthers a corruptible old toad.”

Dallington didn’t respond, except to nod in a distracted way.

“I daresay that’s the peril of choosing a job you think will do good, whether it’s government or the military or the clergy. Neither a baker nor a banker ever sees the same ugliness.”

“Who is Barnard?” said Dallington. “That is — I know the man, but what have I missed?”

“What everyone else has missed, too,” said Lenox.

He explained at length his initial suspicions of Barnard and then his lengthening dossier of evidence against the man, explained the nature of his small crimes and his large ones, and how they intertwined; explained the mystery of Barnard’s great wealth and the money that had gone missing after the murder of his maid. They walked through the bitter cold, impervious in their respective sorrow and anger, until they had reached Lenox’s home again.

“How about a whisky?” said Lenox. “It’s early, I know, but nonetheless —”

“Are you mad?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you not listen to Poole talking about his drunken fury? No, I scarcely think I need a drink at the moment.” Dallington muttered something about troubles coming home to roost and then said, “Well? How do I help?”

“Do you wish to?”

“I take it as a given that I will.”

“It’s not a pleasant matter.”

“You explained it to me when I first came to you — that it wasn’t all heroic or happy work.”

They were in Lenox’s library. “Then find out what Barnard has been doing for the past few weeks, if you wish. I already have a man tracking him down in Geneva.”

“Geneva?”

Lenox explained.

With a determined scowl, Dallington nodded, said good-bye, and went out.

Lenox stood for a moment and then poured himself that whisky.