The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Lady Jane was in the back sitting room alone when Lenox and Dallington entered, writing letters. She was very busy just at the moment, Lenox knew; she was planning a garden party the next weekend for a cousin of hers, a willowy young woman named Emily Gardner.

But no woman in London had finer manners.

“Hello, you two,” she said, rising and smiling. “John, I’m so happy that Charles has brought you home with him. You must stay to eat, of course.”

“We’re both hungry,” said Lenox quickly.

Dallington returned Jane’s smile. “If it’s easier we can send out for a chop.”

“Nonsense. What would your mother say to that, knowing I had you under my roof? I’m going to speak to Kirk and make sure he has the wine open.”

Sophia was already asleep. It was Mrs. Adamson’s evening out. Lenox realized with a pang how little he had seen of his daughter in the past few days, and wondered whether he had time in the morning to accompany her on her walk through the park. It looked to him like it might rain, though. In any case he would visit the nursery.

While Jane was arranging supper, Lenox and Dallington went to Lenox’s study at the front of the house. He poured them both drinks. Dallington drank off half of his whisky and water in one gulp.

Polly was still on his mind, Lenox guessed, but all Dallington said when he had swallowed was, “A brothel?”

Deliberately, Lenox laid out the facts. At 77 Portland Place there was a house masquerading as a Catholic convent, for unknown reasons; its privacy and security were both fiercely protected — just think of that high fence — and the young women in it only emerged, from all Lenox had seen, under strict supervision.

“Rather like the novitiates at a convent, handily,” said Dallington, who looked skeptical.

Lenox bore onward without acknowledging this: At the house next door, 75 Portland Place, a steady procession of gentlemen arrived each evening, mixed in with a few women. All of them opened the door without knocking, and none of them ever appeared to leave.

“You never saw anyone exit that house?”

“No. And I was there above an hour.”

The two houses were connected — and connected as well to the house of the man who owned them, who had lived at 73 Portland Place, a person both of them knew was capable of any violence or iniquity.

Then Lenox described what he had seen as he lurked at the mouth of the alleyway behind Portland Place: two men, in quick succession, leaving from a small unmarked door at the rear of 77 Portland Place. Both were men he had seen enter the house next door.

Dallington raised his eyebrows. “Interesting. So you think that the clients arrive at 75 Portland Place, walk through an interior passageway to the convent, and find there … what, some Parisian red house?”

“Yes,” said Lenox. “And Jenkins, the poor soul—”

“Somehow found out.”

Dallington’s face was grave now. Lenox nodded. “Yes, and paid for his life with it.”

Dallington took another sip of his drink and strolled away from Lenox, toward the windows overlooking Hampden Lane. It was a clear night outside, the breeze light and constant. A landau rolled by, clicking across the stones of the street. “There’s something I don’t understand,” said Dallington.

“What?”

“Why all the secrecy? Any officer at Scotland Yard could name half a dozen addresses near Regent’s Park where men go for that sort of thing. Or think of Helmer’s place down by the docks, which as we saw was pretty brazen about its business. Why the whole business of inventing St. Anselm’s? Why not just locate the whole enterprise at 75 Portland Place?”

Lenox nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that a great deal, and I have a dark thought.”

“What?”

“I wonder whether the young women are there by choice.”

Dallington stopped and looked back at him. “You think they’re kept there against their will?”

“It would be just like Wakefield, I think. He loved money and had no great regard for women.”

As he said this, Lenox realized that the phrase “by choice” implied that some of the prostitutes of London — some of those women of the East End streets, or the more superficially genteel West End parlors — did the work as he did his, out of a sense of vocation. There were one or two, perhaps, but it was absurd to imagine that anything but a lack of choice had driven most of them into their work. He thought of Gladstone, who even as Prime Minister had visited with prostitutes, hoping to draw them into new lives — or Dickens, who had built a refuge for “fallen women” in Shepherd’s Bush. Both men had been mocked for what seemed, to some, like an unnatural interest in these young ladies. Lenox wondered. Gladstone, at least, he felt sure was acting out of principle. Very likely Dickens, too. According to the Times there were eighty thousand women in London alone practicing the trade.

Still, there was a difference between a woman who could buy her dinner at the end of the day and a slave.

“And this Francis fellow — Hartley, blast him — you think he was Wakefield’s partner.”

“Yes,” said Lenox. “I don’t know whether he killed Jenkins on his own, or if he and Wakefield planned it together, but all the while Francis was plotting to murder Wakefield, too, and conceal his tracks.”

“Mm.”

“What I do know is that I suspect we’ll find him, at last.”

“Where?” asked Dallington.

“At 75 Portland Place.”

Just then Jane called them from the hallway. They ate supper at one end of the large table in the dining room, by low light, and as they talked, some of the unease in Dallington’s face started to disappear. They would have to end things with Polly on a happy note, if indeed things were going to end — it was important. As he had this thought, Lenox realized as well that he considered Dallington more or less a member of his own family, a brother, a nephew, a cousin, a son, some mixture of all those things. As it would have with a member of his family, it made him nervous that his young friend cared so much. It was funny how change came in life — usually not in great calamitous bursts but in the gentle onward motion of the years, half-visible, mostly unconsidered from day to day. Marriage, children: They were like a series of ships out upon the sea as you stood upon the dock, moving so slowly toward you that they never seemed as if they would arrive. Except that then they were there all at once, huge and close, pausing for a moment and then sailing on toward the next person.

For dessert there was a sponge cake in cream sauce, and after that tea for all three of them. Then Jane returned to her letters, and Dallington and Lenox went again to Lenox’s study, where they sat by the fire with glasses of brandy. They brooded over the case together, discussing St. Anselm’s.

“It will be an enormous scandal if I’m right,” said Lenox. “A nobleman, a convent that isn’t a convent, that particular part of London. Not to discuss all of the men who will be there during a raid — should there be a raid.”

Dallington nodded, then, after a moment of thought, said, “You mentioned that it was mostly men who entered the house — but a few women, too.”

“Yes, the rate was about seven or eight to one, I’d say. It’s been puzzling me, too.”

“Surely they couldn’t make use of any such — any such house?”

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, as they stared into the fire, and then Lenox said, “There must be some explanation for it. They were dressed just as well as the men.”

Suddenly Dallington’s face grew angry. “Do you know what,” he said, “if it’s true, we ought to go over there tonight and stop the whole damned thing. One more minute of it is too much.”

“Yes. Except we need Nicholson — we need the Yard.”

“Let’s go fetch him, then. Let’s go fetch them.”

Lenox was silent for a moment, and then looked at his watch and nodded. “Yes,” he said. It was nearly ten o’clock. He realized that his sense of deliberation this time had been misplaced. “You’re quite right. You’re absolutely right.”