The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

It was one of the most maddening cases Lenox had ever negotiated. On the one hand, he had uncovered so much of the truth, he felt — Armbruster’s involvement, the dark reality of St. Anselm’s, the role of the Gunner. On the other hand, they had nothing. Armbruster was comfortably entrenched behind his denials. They had scoured London — even now two of Nicholson’s constables were still searching — and found nobody called Andrew Hartley Francis.

And now the Gunner was gone.

They were at the very beginning again, without anything more than a few educated guesses about who might have killed either Inspector Jenkins or the 15th Marquess of Wakefield.

Dallington had spent the morning at Scotland Yard; he and Lenox reconvened at the offices at Chancery Lane just after noon. It felt empty without Polly or her silently hulking assistant, Anixter, nearby, though Pointilleux was full of effusive greetings for them, and thousands of questions, which they did their best to answer. In fact, Polly was still in some evidence — on Lenox’s desk was an envelope with his name on it in her handwriting. Inside was a note that said:

She was — as usual — quite right. As quickly as they could, hoping to slip into the evening papers, Lenox and Dallington drew up a list of fairly reliable journalists and charged Pointilleux with circulating among their offices at Fleet Street to spread the word.

“Make sure you tell them that the Yard is paying us for our consultation on the case,” Dallington said, “and that we’re available for interviews about our heroic actions — off the record.”

“Are we?” asked Lenox, uncertain.

Dallington nodded grimly. “Yes. I’ll be damned if LeMaire gets to win, after all of this. No offense, Marseille.”

“Only this false name is offense of me.”

Both Lenox and Dallington were tired, but they sat in the conference room drinking tea together all afternoon, piecing together every last detail they knew about the case. At some stage Pointilleux returned. He was cross. Among other things, it was an overcast day, and evidently it had drizzled on him as he attempted to get the omnibus back to the office. “I am soak,” he reported angrily. “The sky of this country is too wet.”

On top of that, he said, the journalists had dismissed his accounts without listening as closely as he would have liked. Lenox wasn’t disheartened by that — he could have told the young man that London journalists had little use for politeness — and in fact he was positively encouraged to hear that three of the nine men had said they intended to stop by the offices that afternoon or that evening to hear more, though it meant staying late.

At four o’clock Nicholson arrived. He looked absolutely dead on his feet, but he had brought them a report from the Asiatic Limited Corporation. Apparently one of the members of the company’s board had pressured the Yard into releasing the Gunner the day before, complaining of the delay and the loss of profits as the ship bobbed idly on the Thames.

“Nobody bothered to inform me the blasted ship was going, though,” said Nicholson resentfully. “Anyway, I’ve brought you their full company files on the Gunner, at least. I have a copy for myself, too. I mean to look over it later. I need to go back to the Yard just now and see what’s come of all these interviews.”

“And at some point you need to sleep.”

“In 1877, fingers crossed,” said Nicholson, and a shadow of a smile appeared on his face. “It’s been made clear to me that my advancement depends upon the resolution of all this. People are angry, you know. Very angry.”

“They ought to be pleased that we found the club.”

“Well, they’re not.”

When Nicholson had gone, taking with thanks a few biscuits from the plate they pushed on him, Lenox took up the file he had left from Asiatic Limited. Dallington came and looked over his shoulder. There were many long pages in tight handwriting detailing the ship’s voyages, accounts, diagrams and drawings of her, lists of past mates.

Lenox sighed. “Shall we divide it up and go through it?”

“I bet we find Francis’s name.”

“And another false address for him, no doubt.”

For half an hour they sat in silence, reading; then, with a cry of delight, Dallington said he’d found something.

It was an overhead illustration of the ship’s hold, dated 1874, on a large piece of paper, the size of a decent map, folded over twice to fit into the file. As Lenox came around the table to look, Dallington planted his finger next to a name. It was the space on the plan for aft hold 119, with Lord Wakefield written in tidy cursive letters.

“Look,” said Dallington, “he had hold 118, too. Did we look in that one?”

“I think we did,” said Lenox.

Together they went around the holds in a circle, reading them aloud together, most of the names unfamiliar, Donoghue Spirits, Jones, India Hemp Corporation, King, Davies, Taylor, Berry’s Herb and Pharmaceutical, Smith, Warrington, Fielding, Brown, but then a few familiar, Dyer, Wakefield, one marked First Lt. and even one that said Helmer. The chap from the docks. That gave Lenox pause. It might be worth speaking to him again.

And then, when they had nearly circled back around to Wakefield’s holds again, they came across a name that stopped them both. And not Francis’s.

Earl Calder.

They looked at each other. “Just one hold,” said Lenox.

“Very close to Wakefield’s.”

“Yet for all the world he acted as if he couldn’t distance himself from his father quickly enough. It was as if the name were poison to him. It can’t be a coincidence.”

“No,” said Lenox quietly, thinking.

“Shall we go see him?”

Suddenly it struck Lenox anew how strange it was that Calder had stayed in Portland Place for the past few evenings. He said as much to Dallington and then added, “After all, his father was murdered, an inspector of the Yard killed on the pavement out front, the butler attacked upstairs. The place is bedlam.”

Dallington had stood up and was pacing the room, thinking. “Yes. Either he’s a fool, a very cool fellow — or he knows he’s not in danger. Let’s go to Portland Place, I say.”

“What should we ask him when we get there?”

“What in the devil he’s doing leasing a hold on a ship that brought captive women into his country’s capital, while he was supposed to be sitting tripos at Cambridge and worrying about whether the Field of the Cloth of Gold was in 1200 or 1300.”

“It was in 1520.”

“Nobody likes a swot, Lenox.”

Lenox smiled. They were both standing now, energized by the possibility that they’d come upon something new. Then something occurred to him to dampen his enthusiasm. “I suppose we owe it to Nicholson to wait,” he said. “It sounds as if he’s already on thin ice.”

“They can’t hold him responsible for us.”

“They can, unfortunately. As you pointed out, he’s paying us.”

Dallington frowned. “True.”

Lenox looked down at the files on the table. “Perhaps we should get through as much of this material as we can, and go see Calder — or Lord Wakefield, I suppose he is now — tomorrow. With Nicholson. At least we can look for Calder’s name again.”

They sent Nicholson a note at the Yard telling him what they had found, and mentioned that they were going to investigate the Asiatic’s files very carefully, if it would spare him doing the same. They dedicated the next hours, then, to doing just that, Pointilleux joining them after he had finished a bit of filing on Polly’s behalf.

At half past six they sent out for a pot of oysters and three pints of ale, and when the barmaid came to fetch back the tankards and the pot, Dallington ordered three more from her. They didn’t find Calder’s name again, though Wakefield’s did appear several times. Just before eight o’clock one of the newspapermen came around, a fox-faced reporter for the Evening Sentinel, and listened to their story. Between that interruption and the density of the documents Nicholson had dropped off, it was ten o’clock in the evening before the three men finally left — dispirited, but promising each other that they would see about Calder the next day.