The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The headlines in the newspapers the next morning were lurid. The mildest of them blared HEDONISM FOUND IN THE HEART OF MAYFAIR, which Lady Jane, reading it with a forgotten piece of toast in hand, said was like printing an announcement that water had been found in the ocean. The Times called for the immediate resignation of the two Members of Parliament arrested, and the less dignified publications reported, breathlessly, that several aristocratic marriages were in shambles. One especially yellow rag declared BERTIE IN SLAVONIAN CLUB BLOW-UP, but Lenox was happy to inform Jane that the Prince of Wales had in fact been nowhere on the premises. Even the sporting pages had a crack: THE HIGHEST-STAKES GAME IN EUROPE, one said of the gambling parlor, which was otherwise mostly an afterthought. There were rumors that the king of a large northern European country had been present during the raid.

It wasn’t Nicholson’s fault that these details had spilled out. The arrests in Regent’s Park had been too noticeable, and the press had arrived almost immediately, following them to the gates of the Yard, ready to offer any guard or officer high fees for information about the bold-faced names who were in trouble. There would be weeks of newspapers sold by this.

“The Slavonian Club,” said Lady Jane, shaking her head contemptuously. “Give people enough money and they’ll make the doomsday sound decorous.”

Lenox smiled and took a sip of tea. “If you pay as much as these fellows must have, a certain air of respectability is part of the service, I suppose. And they could delude themselves into thinking they were part of something mysterious, rather than merely sordid.”

Lenox had been up late into the night, helping Nicholson on the scene. The club had soon been swarming with constables, for the first girl they met had burst into tears and said, in a foreign accent, “Ah, thank God, you have come.”

There had been an ugly welt along her bare shoulder, Lenox noticed.

The two parts of the club were completely segregated, the gambling parlor only a lucrative side business compared to the sprawling brothel that took up most of the two houses.

Otherwise the space of the two houses had been dedicated to the use of the men who were members of this Slavonian Club, as a few would admit it was called — though there was no paper trail on the site; none of them had a card of membership, or even a bill.

In the basement at 75 Portland Place was a taproom, with newspapers, couches, and fireplaces, nothing very scandalous. Upstairs, however, there had been a series of bedrooms, each decorated in a different way, one with an Egyptian theme, another like a Turkish harem, another with the ambience of a Paris dance hall. These were apparently for the gentlemen who desired either more privacy or space than the fountain-side stalls provided.

Then there were two bedrooms on the highest level of the house — and these, though they were empty when Nicholson led them in, were the ones that darkened Lenox’s memory of the night. They looked like dungeons, and hung on the walls were instruments designed to inflict pain.

Next door at what London had thought was St. Anselm’s, meanwhile, was a much less sumptuously decorated space; in it were two long, dormitory-style rooms, lined with hard, low cots. It was very cold. Downstairs was a dining hall, though as it emerged the women who slept in the cots were rarely permitted to eat more than a bowlful of thin soup a day except when they were next door, “at the Club,” their hunger an incentive for them to win the favor of the men who could invite them to eat from the buffet, so that there was fierce competition among them to please the club’s members. Some of the more timid-looking girls Lenox had seen had thin, haunted faces.

Not one of them, it turned out, had been there voluntarily. Not one of them spoke more than a few words of English, either. All of them were very beautiful.

The only other space they had found within what Lenox thought of, still, as St. Anselm’s, was a narrow corridor leading between the two houses, similar to the one that led inward from the street. This one let out into the back alley.

It was here, at the last moment, that Lenox had reminded that fourth constable to bring the police wagon, rather than to the front of the building — and here that the fellow had managed to block off the exit just in time for Nicholson and Lenox and then all the others to catch up and begin making arrests.

Nicholson was still at the Yard, Lenox expected. He and Dallington had left only after three o’clock the morning before. The structure of the place had become clear enough after exhaustive interviews: There were five women of middle age in charge of the prostitutes, including Sister Amity, whom they all seemed to fear terribly. There was also a staff of four people. (This excluded the staff at the gambling parlor, whom Nicholson permitted to leave, along with their patrons, their crimes being, or at least seeming, in the moment, rather more venial.) There were seventeen of the younger women, too — the enslaved girls, as the papers called them — who were now being sheltered in a house owned by the city of London.

To Lenox’s frustration, two people hadn’t been in the house at all. He was simply curious about the first, Sister Grethe.

The second was Andrew Hartley Francis.

The four young men on staff had all been able to prove immediately and beyond a shadow of a doubt that they weren’t called Hartley, or Francis. They were all quite plainly of the wrong class, too, mostly East Enders who had been drawn by an advertisement each had answered, promising high wages in exchange for absolute discretion.

(“We didn’t think anything about it was illegal,” said one of them indignantly at some point after midnight.

“Then what on earth did you think you were doing?”

“It was for the toffs, wasn’t it?” he had answered bitterly. “They have all sorts of clubs.”)

In the end twenty-five people had been arrested, among them several with very illustrious names indeed. Most of these men remained silent, confident in their solicitors; it was the Earl of Kenwood who gave them the most information, desperate to be released before anyone learned that he had been arrested. (A hope in which he was to be disappointed.) Club membership was only available by personal recommendation, he told them; the fees were spectacularly high, something nearly to boast about, Lenox heard in his voice; the girls changed often enough to keep it interesting; of course they were well paid, of course, why else would the fees be so high …

He himself — a thin, pointy-faced man in his sixties who owned most of Hampshire — had been referred for membership by Wakefield.

“Before he died, you know, poor chap.”

“You were friends?”

“Not close — but there are so few fellows in the House of Lords who have any idea of fun, and he used to stand me a drink now and then.”

Lenox understood. Wakefield and Kenwood operated at very different levels of malice, Kenwood a more insipid and less violent person, but nevertheless these sorts of men always did find each other. They had as long ago as Oxford; look at the Bullingdon Club, whose new members destroyed a different restaurant or pub or college common room each year, solely from the pleasure they took in drunken destruction.

Kenwood’s volubility stood in stark contrast to that of the four women who had presided over St. Anselm’s. None of them spoke a word. Nicholson had realized at some point that it would be a difficult case to prosecute, as had his superiors at the Yard. The owner of the two houses, Wakefield, was recently dead, and his son could hardly be held legally accountable for what he was on the brink of inheriting.

The key, Lenox knew, was the tales of the young women. None of them had been able to offer these yet, however, for none of them spoke more than very bad English. It wasn’t even clear what country they came from. A fleet of government translators was coming to the Yard that morning, and they would try to speak to the young women in a variety of languages.

“You’ll be away all day?” Lady Jane asked, over the breakfast table.

“Yes.”

“You must be tired.”

“On the contrary, I have a great deal of energy,” said Lenox, standing. There was a lovely morning light coming through the windows, the room softened by its gentle natural hue. “Though I wonder how it all relates to the deaths of Wakefield and Jenkins.”

Jane looked up at him. “Poor Mrs. Jenkins,” she said. “Do you think it would be inappropriate of me to call on her? We’ve never met.”

“On the contrary, I think it would be very kind.”

“The day after the funeral must be difficult,” said Jane. “At least a funeral is something to … well, not to look forward to, I suppose, but something to plan, something to expect. The days ahead must seem so empty once even that part of it’s over.”

“I expect so.”

She was staring out the window, and when he came around the table to kiss her good-bye, she said, “Do be careful, would you?”

He kissed her, then took a last swallow of tea. “Always, my dear. Do you feel safe here? With Clemons’s precautions in place? You could still take Sophia to the country, you know.”

“We’re safe. But solve the case quickly, Charles. For my own part, I don’t know that I could face the day after your funeral.”