The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Unsurprisingly, Lenox returned home that evening much later than he had planned, later than supper, past eight o’clock. Despite the hour he heard children’s voices when he opened the door, and smiled. He guessed Toto — McConnell’s wife, and one of Jane’s intimate friends — would be visiting.

His confirmation came almost immediately; as he walked up the long, softly lit central corridor of the house he saw a young person shoot from the drawing room with unladylike verve: little Georgianna McConnell. This was Thomas and Toto’s only daughter, a beautiful child with light brown curls and wide striking dark eyes.

“Hello, George,” he said.

“Hello, Uncle, give me a candy please,” she cried as she hurtled toward his legs.

Lenox braced for the impact, and after it came patted her head as she held him at the knee. “I haven’t got any. Though I do owe you a birthday present. Five years old, was it? I wish I could have been at the party.”

“It was my birthday,” she informed him.

“Yes, I know, I just mentioned it.”

“I’m five.”

“I never, were you?”

They discussed the party for a moment in serious tones. Charles took care not to refer to her unmet wish — to ride above the city of London in a hot air balloon, something that McConnell, a worrier, would no more have permitted than a donkey in the dining room — because he knew it was still a point of sore disappointment to her. “Did you have a cake?” he asked.

“Of course I had a cake,” she said pityingly, as if he were soft-headed even to ask.

He led her by the hand into the drawing room. It was where Lady Jane spent much of her time, a light space with rose-colored sofas and pale blue wallpaper. Jane and Toto, a young woman of high spirits and high humor, were sitting close together. Both looked up and smiled, then said hello. Near them on the floor was Sophia, Lenox’s own daughter. With a feeling of deep love, almost as if he had forgotten, he perceived that she was tired, perhaps fussy, though at the moment she was absorbed in some kind of wooden toy made up of a ball and a dowel.

He picked her up and kissed the top of her head, ignoring her cry of displeasure when he pulled her away from her toy, and then set her down again. “I’ve just been with your husband,” he said to Toto.

“Have you? About poor Mr. Jenkins?”

“Poor Mr. Jenkins and more, unfortunately. But why are these girls up?” he asked. “It’s very late, you know.”

Toto looked at the gold clock on the mantel. “So it is. But I cannot hold with putting a child to bed when there’s still light in the sky. We aren’t Russian peasants. There must be some joy in life, Charles.”

“It’s been dark for two hours.”

“It’s also unattractive to be so literal.” She sighed. “Still, I do need to take George home. Jane, thank you for the glass of sherry, and the biscuits she ate. George, step to, time to go home and go to bed.”

George was standing by Lenox. “Shan’t,” she said.

Around her father — of whom she stood in awe — George was saintly. She was more comfortable around her mother, and correspondingly far more willful, possibly one of the most willful children in London, Lenox sometimes thought. Beside her parents, the rest of her loyalty in life was given over to one of Lenox’s dogs, Bear, whom she worshipped with uncritical adoration. She begged every day to be allowed to visit him. Now she walked over and lay down on top of him. He was a docile dog and didn’t mind, and neither did Lenox or Lady Jane, though these were unorthodox manners in a child. An aristocrat’s child could perhaps make her own rules, to some degree.

Toto frowned at her daughter. “You shall too, or your father will know about it.”

She was holding Bear’s ear with her small fist. “Shan’t and won’t.”

Lady Jane smiled mildly and said, “Charles, tell us about Jenkins while George rests.”

This was a clever stratagem. The child already looked tired, as if Lenox’s arrival had reminded her that it was late, and after only a moment or two of adult conversation she was half-asleep on top of the dog. Lenox lifted her carefully up and carried her out to Toto’s carriage, where Toto waved a silent but cheerful good-bye. Back inside, Sophia’s nurse was taking her up to bed.

“You know how to end a party,” said Jane as they walked back up the steps. “You must have been terribly unpopular as a bachelor.”

Lenox smiled and took her hand as they reentered the house. In the front hall he stopped at the table and looked through the calling cards on the silver rack — left by their visitors for the day, cleared at midnight — and at the stack of post next to it. Nothing very interesting. Jane, next to him, put a hand on his shoulder and kissed his rough cheek.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“Just a bit.”

“I’ll have Kirk fetch something. Will you tell me what’s happened about Jenkins?”

What had happened about Jenkins — it was a story that could fill many inches of column space. “I will. Have the evening newspapers arrived?”

“They’re on your desk.”

“I just want to glance at them. I’ll be along to the dining room shortly.”

“Let’s eat in the drawing room, it’s more comfortable. Will roast pheasant do?”

“Handsomely,” he told her, and then went to look at the papers.

A glance was enough to tell him that they had been fortunate for a second straight day — Wakefield’s body had been discovered just too late, probably by half an hour or so, to make the presses. The morning papers, broadsheets and rags alike, would be full of the matter, of course — the death of one of the highest peers in the land — but the papers of this evening contained only news of Jenkins.

When Dallington and Lenox had uncovered Wakefield’s body aboard the Gunner, the whole apparatus of Scotland Yard had churned once again into motion. First there was the constable who patrolled the dockyards (Helmer made himself scarce, perhaps wishing to avoid the nuisance of any questions about his semilegal brothel), and soon a fleet of his kind followed. After only fifteen or twenty minutes Nicholson had arrived.

“Is it true it’s Lord Wakefield?” he’d said. “That’s what I was told.”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“Heavens. This will mean a great deal of attention.”

“I should imagine,” said Lenox. “We would like to consult upon this murder, too, if you don’t mind.”

“Mind! I’ll pay both of you, but for pity’s sake, help me, help me.”

Nicholson smiled faintly as he said this, looking gray and washed-away, as if he had barely slept, and Lenox was reminded how much he had enjoyed working with the inspector that winter, before the opening of the agency. He was refreshingly without pridefulness, but sharp, too, and competent.

“The three of us together will crack it,” said Lenox. “At any rate let us hope this is the end of the deaths.”

“One a day might be reckoned too many by some, yes,” said Nicholson, shaking his head.

Lenox had sent for McConnell. The Yard’s medical examiner hadn’t been long in arriving, but he was a harassed and overworked fellow, and would admit himself that he didn’t have the training McConnell did. The body showed no obvious signs of violence, which was odd.

“Poisoning, do you think?” asked Lenox as a swarm of constables lifted the trunk up to the topdeck.

“I don’t think it was natural causes,” answered Dallington, staring behind them with his hands in his pockets.

“The salt to preserve his body, I suppose. The voyage to India is long and hot.”

Dallington nodded. “Enough so that I doubt the salt would have done the job.”

Lenox had shrugged. “It would have kept the smell down long enough that the ship was unlikely to turn back to London. Forty miles would have been enough, from what I’m guessing of the economic interests of the ship. Perhaps four.”

“True.”

“And very likely when they discovered the body, in two or three weeks, they would have buried it overboard. Sailors are madly superstitious about a dead body on board. They’re a breed of people that can find an omen in every seahawk, of course. A corpse is almost too ominous to conceive for them.”

“Then the body would have been gone, with a cannonball at its feet, to the bottom of the ocean,” said Dallington, “and no evidence that it was Wakefield at all. We might still have been chasing him, thinking he had absconded in the middle of the night after killing Jenkins.”

“Yes,” said Lenox. “Word to the Continent, police officers everywhere looking for him, hundreds and thousands of hours wasted. Now only one thing remains to be discovered.”

“What’s that?”

“Who paid to ship him to India?”