The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“Papers?” said Armbruster. “What papers?”

Nicholson looked at Lenox with consternation. “You cannot think that Sergeant Armbruster killed Inspector Jenkins?”

“I doubt he did that — or at least, I do not know. He may have. What I do know is that I would like to see Jenkins’s papers.”

“Papers!” said Armbruster again. “I don’t know who you think you’re speaking to, but I’ve been at the Yard for thirteen years. My father and two of my brothers have worked here alongside me.”

There was a crimson flush in Armbruster’s ears, however, a note of hysteria in his voice — this fellow was involved. Lenox pointed at his stomach. “I would bet five quid that you bought your pocket watch this week,” he said. “Am I correct?”

“That just goes to show,” said Armbruster, appealing to Nicholson. “I’ve had this for ages.”

“You really must explain your suspicions,” said Nicholson to Lenox.

“About the watch? Or about Mr. Armbruster? The matter of the watch is simple enough. He wasn’t wearing it Thursday evening, when Jenkins died. I remember specifically seeing a brown stain on his shirt at the time — soup, I think — and there was no watch chain across it.”

“That scarcely seems indicative of any great crime,” said Nicholson.

“I have also noticed across the years — anyone who wears a pocket watch will — that there is substantially more wear at the clasp than anywhere else on the watch. All of those openings and closings, thumb and fingernail rubbing down the metal. Mr. Armbruster’s has no such blemish.”

“That’s easy,” said Armbruster, looking more confident now. “On both counts. I don’t wear it often. Had it for ages.”

“Now you’ve worn it the last two days. And it looks, to my eye, to be made of solid gold.”

“A gold wash,” said Armbruster quickly.

It was here that he betrayed himself.

Nicholson asked, mildly, if he might see the watch. This evidently seemed reasonable enough to Armbruster, but as soon as Nicholson handled the object, it was apparent to the other three men that he did so with a vastly more intimate knowledge than they could have. He had the watch open and its workings under the squinch of his eye in an instant, and after he had turned the watch over and tapped it with his knuckle, then checked the maker’s mark, he passed it back to Armbruster.

“You see?” said the sergeant hopefully.

Nicholson shook his head. “My own father worked in a jewelry shop. I grew up behind the counter with him. Your watch is gold. And new, as Mr. Lenox said; it was made in the year 1876, according to its maker’s mark. What’s more, I doubt there’s a sergeant on the force who has a more expensive watch.”

Armbruster shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “I had a bargain, I suppose. And by ages I meant … months.”

“Do you remember where you bought it?”

“Not the exact name of the shop. I hope it wasn’t stolen.”

Nicholson looked up at Lenox. “Still, I cannot accuse a man on the basis of a new watch. Armbruster — sit down.” This latter injunction was given sharply, because the sergeant had started to rise from his seat. “Why do you suspect him?”

Lenox, hands in the pockets of his jacket, leaned back against the filing cabinet. “As you know, it is difficult to gain access to the inner corridors of this building,” he said. “When we couldn’t find Jenkins’s papers, I wondered whether perhaps he had taken them home or had them upon his person when he was murdered. But Madeleine Jenkins confirmed that he never brought work papers home with him, and the note to me suggested, I believe, that he wasn’t carrying them about London with him. They were in his office, then, locked securely away.”

“Except that they weren’t,” said Nicholson.

“Precisely. And there was that space upon his desk — the empty space you and I both saw, where they might have been. Since I saw that, I have believed there must have been someone working within the Yard who took them. Someone with access to the office and a key to its door.”

“It wasn’t me,” said Armbruster indignantly.

“At first I thought it was most likely one of Jenkins’s close associates — perhaps Hastings, perhaps Bryson — but I no longer think so. May I ask where you live, Sergeant Armbruster?” said Lenox.

“In Hammersmith. Why on earth do you want to know that?”

“You told us yesterday, didn’t you, that you aren’t accustomed to working in the field? That you are generally employed in the back offices?” Armbruster was silent at this. Lenox went on, “Take those facts together, then: You live nowhere near the part of London where Jenkins was killed, you generally work in this building, which is not a hundred steps from the Tube station where you would find your train home, and yet you were first upon the scene of the crime, as Inspector Nicholson here told us when we arrived. That was why you had charge of it, was it not?”

“It was,” said Nicholson. “He sent the fellow who found the body to fetch a constable and watched over it himself.”

Lenox nodded. “It must have been then that you looked through Jenkins’s pockets. You were very thorough — you even untied one of his shoes. But I suppose you were interrupted before you could get it off.”

Nicholson’s gaze had hardened now. “What were you doing near Regent’s Park that evening?” he asked.

“And what were you doing when I arrived,” said Lenox, “with a thick sheaf of papers, clamped tightly under your arm?”

“I didn’t have any papers,” said Armbruster. There was menace in his heavy face now.

“In fact you did,” said Lenox. “And if I had to guess why, I’d say it’s because you watched Jenkins’s office closely, saw when he left, slipped in, took the papers, and then followed him to North London to be first on the scene when he was murdered. You had to hold the papers — there was nowhere you could safely leave them. The only questions that remain are where the papers are now, and whether or not it was you who killed him.”

There was a tense silence in the room. “This is all mad speculation,” said Armbruster at last. “You have no proof that I’ve done anything.”

Pointilleux, who had been sitting quietly, widened his eyes slightly and then said, “I see now! This is why you have done such a bad job with the canvass, last evening!”

“I didn’t do any such thing,” said Armbruster.

“You did!”

“You had better give it up, Armbruster,” said Lenox. “If you were merely working for someone, you can avoid being hanged, anyway.”

For a fleeting moment the threat seemed to work. The sergeant’s face wavered. But he held firm. “This is all nonsense,” he said. “Inspector Nicholson, if you require nothing else?”

“I require a great deal else,” said Nicholson. “Sit there. Your desk and your home are going to be searched thoroughly before you leave this office.”

“As you please,” said Armbruster, and he sat back, unperturbed.

Lenox’s heart fell. They could search both his desk and his home all they liked, but they wouldn’t find anything — the fleeting reaction in the sergeant’s face told as much. “Was it Wakefield who was paying you?” he asked.

“Nobody was paying me.”

“Or Hartley? Francis?”

“You’re talking rot,” said Armbruster. “I was in the neighborhood on a social call, and I happened to see a fellow in distress. I ought to be getting a ribbon from you lot, not an earful about how I killed him. It’s a disgrace.”

“Yes, it’s a disgrace,” said Lenox.

Nicholson had gone to fetch two constables from the pool. When he returned, he said, “They’re going over his desk.”

“They won’t find anything,” said Lenox.

Nicholson shook his head. “No, I don’t think so either. And yet this chap lied to us now several times — about the watch, about the papers, for now that I put my mind to it I remember as well that you were carrying some kind of papers, Armbruster, and why on earth would that have been? You’d no need to take work home.”

“They were probably personal papers,” the sergeant said. “I can’t even remember them myself.”

It was maddening: to have someone who knew the truth about two murders sitting here before them, and to be unable to make him give it up.