The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER TWO

“Hughes is taken, then? I won’t miss seeing him swan about at parties, as if butter wouldn’t melt on his toast.”

“In his mouth, you mean.”

“In his mouth, then,” repeated Lord John Dallington irritably. They were in the agency’s office at Chancery Lane. It was a well-lit and well-appointed set of rooms, with a large, bright, central chamber full of clerks, and branching out in four directions from this a quartet of private offices in which each of the four detectives would work independently. “Neither way makes any sense. He took the letters?”

“And the money.”

Now Dallington smiled. “Well done, Charles.”

The house in Chiltern Street in which Hughes had been arrested belonged to Alfred Dwyer, patriarch of a cadet branch of a very grand ducal family. His beautiful eldest daughter, Eleanor, was betrothed to her cousin the Earl of Campdown, who would one day inherit the dukedom — a surpassingly eligible match, from the perspective of the Dwyers, and an acceptable one as far as the present duke was concerned.

It was known in certain circles, however, that as a sixteen-year-old Eleanor Dwyer had been desperately in love with her dancing instructor, a German named Stytze, and that there existed, in some dark corner of the world, letters between them of a compromising nature. These letters were the grail of every blackmailer in London. In fact they did not exist — Alfred Dwyer had bought and destroyed them years before — but Lenox had employed the rumor of their survival, with Dwyer’s permission and the use of his house while the family were away for Christmas, to ensnare Hughes.

As Nicholson had said, Lenox had devoted much of November and December to a list of seven names. Each of them had, at some maddening moment, eluded Lenox’s grasp. There was Anson the burglar, who had almost certainly slit the throat of a baker named Alcott in 1869; Lenox ran him to ground in Bath, where he was in the midst of planning a spectacular assault upon the Earl of Isham’s row house. (Bath was known for having a police force so loose and disorganized, compared to London’s, that many of the age’s most intelligent criminals had now shifted their sights to its prizes.) There was Walton the housebreaker, who stole only rare wine. Chepham, the ugliest character of the lot, a rapist. The half-French Jacques Wilchere, who still played cricket quite admirably for Hambledon and for his home nation. Parson Williams, an impostor, owned a variety of clerical uniforms. Hughes was the only highborn member of this offensive coterie, which explained why Dallington had had the opportunity to grow weary of seeing his face in London society. All six were now in the care of Scotland Yard.

The seventh name — that, Lenox knew, would be more difficult. He couldn’t think about it without brooding; anger; he saw no way to get at the fellow, but no way either that he could permit him to carry on in his designs. Anyhow, anyhow …

Aside from the satisfaction of seeing these men go to prison, Lenox had pursued them as a test to himself. He was out of practice, no doubt of that. There had been a time when he could have identified every significant criminal in London by the back of a neck, the motion of an arm, the cut of a frock coat, but time and inattention had rendered much of his knowledge obsolete, and certainly in that period his skills had dulled, too. The three stray cases he had solved as a Member of the House had demonstrated as much, even if each had ended in success.

In fact, Dallington was now probably the sharper of the two men. Certainly he was the better connected — to Scotland Yard, where he had the trust of several important men, as Lenox once had, and to the criminal underworld, where he had the contacts to, for instance, put into Hughes’s ear the false word of the availability and location of the famous Dwyer letters.

It was a surprising reversal. Dallington was a young person just past thirty and for many years had had, in London, a very terrible reputation indeed — as a reprobate; a cad; a blackguard; a devil. Much of this reputation originated from his time at Cambridge, from which he was expelled, and in the two years following that expulsion in London, when he had seemed to inhabit every wine bar and gambling house in the city simultaneously. His parents, the Duke and Duchess of Marchmain — the latter was a very dear friend of Lenox’s wife, Lady Jane — had nearly despaired of their youngest son, even contemplated cutting him from the family on a formal and permanent basis.

It was at the end of this two-year debauch that Dallington had, to Lenox’s shock, approached him, asking to become his student. A detective. Lenox had taken Dallington on only with reluctance, in truth partly as a favor to Jane. It had been one of the great decisions of his life. It had led to a partnership, to Dallington’s recovery, above all to friendship. Though much of London’s upper class — slow to change its opinion of any man — still judged the young lord by his outdated infamies, he had changed. It was true that he relapsed, from time to time, into his old habits. Withal, it had not prevented him from becoming, in all likelihood, the best private detective in the city.

It was this fact that had driven Lenox after Anson, after Wilchere, after Hughes. Though he wouldn’t have admitted it, he felt a sense of competition with his friend.

They were sitting now, each with a cup of tea in hand, by the window above Chancery Lane. On the sill were two inches of accumulated snow. In the street below, the busy day was running its loud, unthinking course, the noise of horses, hawkers, and hacksaws replacing the silence of the middle night. Lenox would be glad when the press had come and left, and he could rest.

Dallington, as ever, was dressed impeccably, a carnation in his buttonhole, his dark hair swept back, his face — which was unlined and very handsome still, his intermittent bouts of dissolution never telling upon it — wry, controlled, and with a hint of a smile. “Pretty casual of LeMaire and Polly, leaving it so late, I would have said.”

These were their partners. Lenox glanced at his pocket watch. “They have twenty minutes.”

“LeMaire has a case. He may be out upon business.”

“And Polly is a woman.”

“Well identified.”

Lenox smiled. “I only meant that she may not be as — as punctual, perhaps, as a man.”

“I call that rot. Very probably she was here earlier and grew tired of waiting for us. At any rate, what would Lady Jane say, hearing that slur? She is more punctual even than you are.”

“You have my word that she is not,” said Lenox seriously. “If I told you the amount of time she once took last spring to put a ribbon in her hair you wouldn’t credit it, I promise you.”

“Yes, and you’re often early.”

“I blame it on the school bells. I still have nightmares about being late for class and having a cane across my knuckles. Edmund does, too.” This was Charles’s older brother and in all the world his closest and most inseparable friend, Sir Edmund Lenox. He was also a powerful political figure — though perhaps the gentlest soul who could claim such a designation. “Still, at least it means that you and I are here to meet the journalists.”

They wouldn’t be alone, however — the door opened and Polly Buchanan came in. She was trailed by the massive seaman who served as her bodyguard and assistant, Alfred Anixter. Lenox and Dallington both stood, smiling.

These smiles vanished when they saw the concern upon her face. “Is everything all right?” asked Dallington, taking an involuntary step toward her and then checking himself. They were no more than professional colleagues still, after these many months when it had seemed as if they might become more.

Polly Buchanan was a widow of high birth, herself with a rather rakish reputation, though nowhere near as dark as Dallington’s had once been; she said what she liked, one of the qualities guaranteed in London society to make a woman the target of malicious natter. She had founded a detective agency the year before, not under her own name but under the pseudonym of Miss Strickland, a ruse designed to keep her clear of the stain of trade. The agency had advertised in the papers and attracted a great deal of halfpenny clients, but Polly was better at her craft than those cases hinted she might be. More than even Dallington or Lenox she had a belief in science: on her freelance staff (now their freelance staff) were a sketch artist, a forensic specialist, a botanist, any number of experts whose knowledge might be drawn upon in a moment of need. As she was fond of saying, 1900 was on its way.

She shook her head. “Have you seen the Telegraph this morning?”

“What does it say?” asked Lenox.

She gestured toward Anixter, who was holding the newspaper. “The front page.”

Anixter read it out loud in his London accent. “Scotland Yard Urges Newly Founded Detective Agency to Cease Operation of Business.”

“Good Lord!” said Lenox.

“Let me see that.” Dallington took the paper and read the subheadline out loud. “Agency places public safety at risk, says Inspector Jenkins. Oh dear, Thomas Jenkins. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is it when … when a chap you like says stuff to the Telegraph. As the Bible tells us.”

Lenox shook his head. “I had a note from him yesterday, asking if he might see me. I’m sure he wished to explain.”

Jenkins was a long-term ally of theirs. “I suppose his superiors might have forced him into it. His ambition is becoming inconvenient,” said Dallington.

“Look at the eighth paragraph,” said Polly. “You’ll find the phrase ‘dangers of amateurism’ in there. Nicholson comments, too, albeit in less harsh terms.”

“Nicholson! I was with him not half an hour ago. I almost believe he can’t have known about this,” said Lenox. “He was so very friendly.”

Polly shook her head again. “Charles, you’ll want to look at the second-to-last paragraph.”

Lenox took the paper and scanned down it. This was bad, no doubt of that — much of their hopes for a successful beginning were pinned to positive publicity. He read, and soon found the line to which Polly had been referring. He read it out loud. “One suspect falsely accused by Mr. Lenox, William Anson, has already been released with the apologies of Scotland Yard. Mr. Anson, a master carpenter—if he’s a master carpenter I’m the Archbishop of Canterbury—has not ruled out a suit for unlawful imprisonment, and has informed friends that Mr. Lenox has long borne an irrational vendetta against him.”

“Overplaying his hand there,” murmured Dallington.

“Inspector Jenkins warned that Mr. Lenox might find the transition from Parliament to the world of crime difficult, in particular. ‘If he offers them no more than his name, Mr. Lenox will likely be more of a burden than an aid to his new colleagues.’ As he may have been to his old ones, a parliamentary reporter for the Telegraph, James Wilde, confirms: ‘He was scored off by Disraeli, and had to leave with his tail between his legs.’”

The Telegraph was a conservative paper, and its owner, Lord Monomark, a fierce partisan and a great enemy of Charles’s allies in Parliament, so that was scarcely surprising. The comment from Jenkins was more surprising — indeed, carried a sharp personal sting.

Dallington shook his head. “He’ll regret saying that, if I know Thomas Jenkins. He’ll come round and apologize, and we’ll have a cup of tea.”

“I suppose it’s possible,” said Lenox.

Polly seemed upset — not hurt, but angry. “Why would the Yard be so dead set against us? Hasn’t Lenox above all proven that he can help them, in the last months? Haven’t all three of us — all four of us — helped them in the past?”

Just then the fourth in their quartet came in the door, beaming, apparently unaware that anything was amiss. This was LeMaire, a Frenchman with an open, warm face, rather betrayed by the impatient intelligence of his eyes. He held his gloves in one hand and slapped them against his palm happily. “My friends!” he said. “Are we ready to open our doors?”