The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Nicholson had had a long day — a very long day, between burying one colleague and placing another under suspicion of theft and murder without the least scrap of evidence — and it redounded to his credit that when he saw Lenox and Dallington at his door, late that evening, he invited them in without demurral.

He lived in a set of rooms off the Strand, a bachelor’s apartments. It was a place with little enough ornamentation, except that along one wall there were a dozen framed watercolors of ducks and geese. Most of them were identifiably set in the ponds and marshes of Hampstead Heath, just to the north of the city.

“My hobby,” said Nicholson shortly, when he observed Lenox looking at them, “watercolor.”

“You painted these?”

“Yes, in the mornings before work. On Saturdays I go and sketch, and on weekdays I work from my sketchings.”

“They’re extremely handsome.”

“Thank you.”

“They’re very like life,” said Dallington. “As if they might fly out of the frame, I swear.”

Nicholson, smiling at this, sat them down and offered them something to drink — they declined — and then asked why they had come. As they explained their theory about the houses Wakefield had owned, he listened carefully. When they were finished, he asked a few questions; then, after a moment’s pause, he retired briefly to his bedroom, where he exchanged the soft gray flannel suit he had been wearing for his stiff navy-colored uniform.

“Let’s go immediately,” he said.

The three men went by Lenox’s carriage to a small police way station near Regent’s Park, where Nicholson enlisted the help of three constables who were just coming on duty. A fourth he sent to Scotland Yard to fetch the police wagon, just in case.

All of this passed so quickly that it was scarcely an hour from the time Dallington suggested going to the time that they stopped at the corner of Portland Place. The broad thoroughfare was shimmering with the kind of lamplight that only the city’s most affluent streets brought forth at night — a lady would have been confident of walking unmolested down the pavement, as she might have at midday, at least for these few hundred feet. The grand pale crenellations of Wakefield’s house rose proudly above the corner. A few lights were on upstairs.

“We ought to give Wakefield’s son some warning,” said Nicholson. “They’re his houses now, after all.”

Lenox and Dallington objected, but Nicholson was firm — which both men understood to be fair, considering that it was he who could lose his job if the new marquess grew indignant and took a complaint to the right people.

In the event, a footman informed them (the butler, Smith, was still upstairs recovering from the wounds of his attack), the new marquess was out.

“Has he kept you on?” asked Nicholson.

“For now, anyway, sir,” said the footman.

“Hard luck if you were to lose your place because your master was murdered.”

“Harder luck still for him that was killed, sir.”

Nicholson smiled. “It’s true enough. Do you know when he’ll be back, Lord Wakefield — the younger one?”

“No, sir. He said he wouldn’t be late.”

“We may stop in again, then.”

“Very good, sir.”

As they went next door, to the anonymous house, Lenox felt a kind of charge, an excitement. They might find anything inside. Nicholson paused, then said, “Shall we knock or walk in?”

“Walk in, I think,” said Dallington.

“I had rather knock,” said Nicholson.

At that moment a carriage stopped in front of the house, and a gentleman stepped down, past sixty, with a fox stole around his neck. He took in their small congregation, and perhaps the uniforms Nicholson and the constables were wearing, and got straight back into the carriage, tapping the door with his cane so that it moved immediately. Lenox noticed that there were black velvet curtains hanging over the doors — this was how men of rank, with a family crest painted upon their carriage, traveled discreetly.

He looked at Nicholson, who was grinning; the hasty departure hadn’t been lost on him. “Straight in, then,” he said, and, walking ahead of them, opened the door.

They came into a small entryway. Rather as at Hepworth’s, ironically, the first impression was of extreme opulence. The walls were hung with an ornately patterned red-and-gold flock, and on a marble-topped table in front of them was a silver salver with several dusty bottles of wine and brandy on it, apparently left there to each person’s discretion. Handled glasses stood next to it. Dallington took one and poured himself a glass of wine.

In a distant room of the house there was music. A viola, Lenox thought.

If the first impression he had was one of wealth, the second was of the room’s strange configuration. It was entirely enclosed, a sealed chamber, offering no way any farther into the building. There was something uncanny about it — something Gothic, as the dim light of the two candles on the marble-topped table flickered.

They stood there for a moment, the six men crowded into this small space, and then Lenox had an idea and stepped toward the wall, saying, quietly, “Feel for a seam.”

He ran his own hand along the wallpaper to the right of the table carefully, until at last he found an unevenness. He prodded on it, then pushed when a door gave way. At the same moment one of the constables found a matching door on the left.

The six men looked at each other. “Which way?” asked Nicholson.

“Left, first, I think,” said Lenox. “Toward St. Anselm’s.”

“Half of us might go right,” said Dallington. “I’ll go, and you two come along.”

“Send someone back here to meet when you find anything,” said Nicholson.

“Just so.”

Lenox, Nicholson, and one of the constables made their way through the door to the left. It led into a narrow hallway, paneled in mahogany, with a few lights in widely spaced sconces along it. The sound of the music grew stronger, and at one moment there was a sharp bark of laughter in a distant part of the house, upstairs perhaps.

They came around the curve of the hall and saw a brighter light, and a door — and sitting by it, next to a small table with a silver bell on it, a woman.

It was Sister Amity.

Lenox fell back behind the other two men, ducking his face into his collar. Apparently it worked, because she addressed Nicholson as she stood up. She was no longer wearing a habit, but a dark gown. No wonder it had taken her so long to come outside to meet Lenox and Dallington — she must have had to change clothes.

“What is the password?” she asked Nicholson.

“Scotland Yard,” said Nicholson, and when she moved in front of the door, a panicked look dawning on her face, he pushed his way roughly past her.

First the constable and then Lenox followed, Sister Amity recognizing him at last and giving him a look of helpless loathing. Nicholson turned back and asked the constable to keep hold of her, lest she run off to warn someone of their presence.

They came into a wide room. The scene that confronted them there was extraordinary.

It would be some time before the Yard would piece together the full architecture of the house. Off to the right, where Dallington and the two constables had gone, there was a single room, a different woman standing outside of it and asking for the password as Sister Amity had. They had pushed past, too (Lenox would learn in just a few moments, when he and Dallington reconvened), and found a strange and magnificent gambling parlor. At its center had been an enormous table with a felt top, where four men and four women had been seated in an ingeniously designed series of private booths, so that each could see the table and its cards, but none of them could see each other. Servants stood attentively nearby, bearing champagne, wine, brandy. There had been hundreds of pounds in play upon each hand, far more than even the most exclusive gambling parlors in London permitted

But that was nothing to what greeted Lenox and Nicholson. It was a long, slender ballroom that had been converted into a kind of Roman bath hall, with separate hot and cold baths, both decorated in marble, with fauns, cupids, spouting dolphins. An overweight man with a black eye mask was swimming lazily in one of them, two women at his side — two undressed women. Up and down the sides of the pools there were private stalls made of oak. Some of them were flung open, their owners unconcerned about observation; others were closed. Near the large fountain at the end of the room was a table laden with caviar, chocolate profiteroles, cold roast fowl, and every kind of hothouse fruit, oranges, quinces, pomegranates.

What struck Lenox, painfully, was how extremely young the women looked — for there were women everywhere, in various states of attire. The servants, too, were women, dressed in diaphanous white robes, and from the discarded robes at the side of the baths Lenox perceived that there was probably no distinction between the servants and the prostitutes.

They stood there for a moment. Nobody observed them; it was a large room, its lighting atmospherically low. Nicholson ran his fingers across the intaglio on a table just to the right of the door: SC. Looking around, Lenox saw that there was a similar seal on the wall, on the doors of the stalls.

“It must be a kind of private club,” he said.

Nicholson nodded, staring. Then he said, “But have they done anything illegal? Are we even sure these are prostitutes?”

As if to answer those questions, behind them Sister Amity had just managed to slip the grasp of the constable and reach for the silver bell that had been sitting near her in the hallway from the front door — and she rang it, sharply.

The whole place broke into chaos. Men fled from the stalls, half-clothed, and ran without a backward glance toward the rear of the building.

A moment too late, Nicholson leaped forward, then turned to Lenox and said, despairingly, “We’ll lose them all through the back door!”

“No, we won’t,” said Lenox.