The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

That morning, a team of constables had gone out to every house the Marquess of Wakefield owned in London, checking each of them top to bottom. None of the others proved more than a simple domicile. One did have an unusually high number of cats in residence — twenty-nine — but that was, apparently, legal, and the owner who answered for them, a man named Withers, promised that he kept them all confined to the house and in excellent health.

Still, the Commissioner of the Yard was in an utter state, according to Nicholson. There had been word from very high, indeed from the Palace itself, that the matter was be resolved and quieted as quickly as possible. The presence of the Slavonian Club in the heart of London was an embarrassment not just to its members but to England; already emissaries from the Vatican were on the way according to Hepworth, with whom Lenox had exchanged notes that morning.

As a result the translators were at the sheltering house very promptly. They were a varied group. Some were darker skinned, others more clearly of British descent; some wore the tweeds and spectacles of the academy, others looked slightly less reputable, and one, a fellow named Chipping just down from Caius College, affected an Oriental robe.

Lenox, Nicholson, and one of Nicholson’s superiors were present to watch. One by one, the translators stepped forward and said, in some language, a phrase Nicholson had written: “If you understand the language I am speaking, please come to me, and I will translate your story for these police officers. Regardless of what you tell us, the Metropolitan Police of London guarantee your safety.”

So the young women — clothed now in plain wool dresses, and having eaten a breakfast delivered with vehement generosity by Her Sisters of the Holy Heart that morning — began to divide up and tell their stories. Lenox sat and listened to them, translated from Turkish, French, Arabic, and German, among other languages. Three of the women didn’t respond to any of the languages; they grouped together and spoke among themselves. All of them looked, to his eye, as if they might be from India.

The whole process took many hours, but the tales of life inside the Slavonian Club were depressingly similar: privation, cold all through that winter, enforced prostitution, the alternating viciousness and kindness of the gentlemen who visited the club, each of those beset by its own brand of difficulties. Several of the women were extremely reluctant to speak, as if this might be a trap. That was understandable. There were some weak friendships among them, but women who spoke the same language had always been divided at Portland Place. Punishment had been rife, and all of them recounted the violence of Sister Amity, who beat them with a switch if their paint was careless, if they attempted to speak to each other, if any of the gentlemen were dissatisfied. When these beatings left marks, the women stayed in the dormitories until they were gone. Going more or less hungry, Lenox gathered.

But all of this came out slowly, whereas the most interesting thing of all, to him, came out almost immediately. That was the story of how they had ended up in London.

Aboard a ship.

None of them knew the ship’s name, but Lenox felt, instantly and with tremendous certainty, that it must be the Gunner.

One young Turkish woman, with beautiful delicate cheekbones and troubled dark eyes, told her story, which was similar to the rest of them. Like the other women, she had been a courtesan in her homeland, too, though, also as with them, that had been in very different circumstances — in luxury, as in most of their cases. It wasn’t difficult to imagine, given their beauty.

“A client came in,” said the Turkish woman through one of the translators. “He was very handsome. He had lovely manners. He persuaded me to come and see him the next evening, that he wanted to give me something. He paid my mistress twice what she had asked, and left a card with his name upon it. He made me promise to come. He said he loved me — love at first sight. I was intrigued by him.

“When I arrived at the teahouse where we were to meet, he was absent. I grew uneasy after a few minutes and left, thinking it was better, that I knew nothing of this man or his promises. It was then that they took me — several very rough people, it was instantaneous, there wasn’t time even to cry out. They pushed me into a carriage, and before anybody on the streets could notice, or help, we were gone. I had nothing with me — not my gowns, not my family’s letters, nothing of my old life except the clothes on my back. From there I was taken to a ship. The room aboard was dark, and windowless. There were four other girls in it. It was a small space, we barely fit if all of us stood at the same time. There was a bucket in the corner, but nowhere to empty it. Twice a day they took the bucket, and we were given food. We spent a great deal of time sleeping.”

Lenox asked, through the translator, “And how did you sleep?”

“I do not know the word,” said the young woman, looking directly at him. “In a kind of netting that hanged from the ceiling.”

Lenox nodded and said, “Give her my thanks. Tell her to go on.”

As she went on, though, he was preoccupied by the pile of hammocks they had found next to the trunk that held Wakefield’s body, feeling certain that these were the same hammocks that these women had been transported in Wakefield’s hold. Or at the very least, a similar one.

It was easy to imagine the ruse. The Gunner picked up and dropped off mail from several ports between England and India, and while they were in dock they could have taken the women. Any of the officers might have played the grandee in love with the courtesan, or indeed Wakefield himself could have done it. And a man of Wakefield’s type would have known the most expensive houses of that type in every city, or could have learned their names easily enough.

He thought of what Dyer had told them, with perhaps more honesty than he had intended: All of us are here for the money. Anything that gets in the way of it is a nuisance.

“We were all terribly ill during the voyage,” the woman went on. “When we arrived I knew we were in England, because of the voices. We were pushed into crates. These must have been loaded onto carriages, because I could feel that horses took us across the city. I feared then that we would be killed. But we were only taken to the house, the house where we lived.

“The women rotate very quickly,” she said. “Always new ones. I myself have marked the days in my head — it has been just forty. I think that they cannot risk that we begin to learn English. I am anxious when I contemplate where the other women have gone, the ones who preceded me. I am thankful now that it is over.”

Lenox nodded at her. She was very composed — some of the other girls were in tears — but somehow it made her tale worse.

As the translators continued to gather the women’s stories, Nicholson murmured to Lenox, “I wish they would come back and tell us about the Gunner.”

Lenox looked at his pocket watch. Almost from the first words the young women had spoken, he had advised Nicholson and his superior to send a team of constables down to the docks to arrest Dyer and the men of his ship. “I hope they haven’t resisted arrest. They’re a bloody-minded crew, from the sound of it.”

“Do you think these women can somehow verify that it was the Gunner they were stolen onto? They must have seen a face, scratched their names into the walls — something. I feel sure Dyer is involved with all this.”

“Yes,” said Lenox.

Even so, he and Nicholson both knew they were still missing the whole picture. The difficulty was that Dyer and his men had a cast-iron alibi for the night of Jenkins’s murder: They had been at sea, their ship coming in about an hour after his body was found. A hundred different objective observers had confirmed as much.

And then the next morning, somehow, Wakefield’s body had come to rest in a trunk in the ship’s hold.

“There’s been a question rattling around in my brain for a few days now,” Lenox said to Nicholson. “How did Jenkins come to have Wakefield’s claim ticket for the Gunner?”

“I don’t know, but he must have felt it was important — he left it in his note for you,” said the inspector. “He could have kept it with his notes.”

“Or else he had just gotten it when he was murdered.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wonder if he had just seen Wakefield when he was murdered. I wonder if Wakefield was — though it’s difficult to imagine — helping him.”

“Can you explain?”

“It has seemed singular to me all along that Jenkins and Wakefield were closeted together at Portland Place in the past few weeks. As Wakefield’s butler described it, too, their conversations were at least friendly, if sardonic. All that business about ‘the very profound honor of a visit from Scotland Yard,’ if you recall.”

“Mm.”

“That doesn’t sound like an interrogation, an accusation. Is it possible they were working in alliance? What if he gave him that claim ticket so that Jenkins could stop the Gunner when she came into dock?”

Nicholson was staring intently over his fingertips, thinking. “So then Wakefield was giving up Francis — Hartley — and Dyer, to save his own skin. Yes, it seems possible. All the more so because of the primary thing that he and Jenkins have in common.”

“What’s that?” said Lenox.

“That they were both murdered.”

Just then a constable appeared at the door. He came over to Nicholson. “It’s the Gunner, sir,” he said, out of breath.

“Well? What about her?”

“She’s gone, sir. Shipped out of London early this morning for Calcutta.”