The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER FORTY

Word had gone out to the naval bases at every dock between London and Calcutta, by the new overland telegraph that had been built from England to India a few years before, that the Gunner was to be stopped and thoroughly searched if she put into port; Wakefield was dead; the Slavonian Club was closed, and though the staff in charge of it were still silent in their cells, as the days passed the crown’s prosecutors grew more confident that the stories of the young women who had been kept there against their will would tell decisively against their captors.

That left just the murders. Just. It would have been lovely to pin them to Captain Dyer, whose very ship had concealed one of the corpses, but he couldn’t have killed Jenkins — the Gunner had still been a night’s travel outside of London.

Could it have been Calder?

Again and again, since the night before, Lenox had tried to piece together a scenario in his mind by which the young marquess might have become involved in the scheme of transportation and imprisonment that Wakefield and Dyer had apparently been operating for years now.

Nicholson, Dallington, and Lenox went to Portland Place at midday to interview the young gentleman. Obadiah Smith, Wakefield’s butler, was again at his post when they arrived, answering the door for them, pale after his attack but moving well. He brought them into the living room and asked if they wanted anything to drink or eat.

“A glass of brandy wouldn’t go amiss,” said Nicholson.

“Right away, sir. I’ll inform His Lordship that you’re waiting for him.”

It took Calder several minutes to come, much longer than the brandy. When he entered the room it was with Mr. Theodore Murray, the family cousin who had been handling their business earlier that week when Lenox visited.

“How do you do?” said the young marquess. He looked rumpled, harassed. “Can I help you with anything? I assure you I’ve told the investigators from the Yard absolutely every detail I know about this … this scandalous club, the one that was operating just next door. I was as shocked as anyone, you can imagine the horror of it. The shame of being in the papers, my God. They searched up and down this very house looking for a passageway leading next door and didn’t find one, though at this stage it’s hard for me to put anything past my father. The family is in an outrage. Thank goodness for Teddy here — preparing a statement to the press on our behalf. Feels it’s important — what was it, Teddy?”

“We feel it’s important to emphasize the long line of Wakefields who have served the country and the crown,” said Murray.

“A line that’s bloody well going to start again,” said Calder — or Travers-George, as he must be called now, since he had moved on to more august titles than the honorific belonging to the marquess’s heir.

As this thought flashed across Lenox’s mind, he realized something. Suddenly there was a sinking feeling in his stomach. “May I ask who your heir is now?” he said.

“My aunt’s son, Frederick, though he must be thirty years older than I am. Lives in Devon.”

“And now he’ll be called the Earl of Calder, I suppose?” said Lenox.

“I doubt he’ll use the name. Though he’s entitled to, until I have a son, at any rate.”

What Lenox had realized was that Wakefield — the dead marquess — would himself have been called the Earl of Calder until about seven years before, when his own father died. That meant that the hold in the Gunner marked on the schematic with the name Calder could easily have been his, if their illegal plot had been going on long enough. In fact, it would have coincided with the period when Wakefield left England for nearly a year after Charity Boyd’s death — a voyage that for all Lenox knew might have been when the original conspiracy between Wakefield and Dyer was first plotted.

As that repugnant business had expanded, the marquess could have added more holds in the ship. For legal reasons those would have been the ones marked under his new name: Wakefield. Lenox would check with the Asiatic to see how long the particular storage hold under Calder’s name had been held. Longer than seven years, he would guess. Which meant that their discovery was probably useless.

In the moment of silence that followed, Nicholson was about to begin asking the new Lord Wakefield about the Gunner, Lenox could tell, and with a subtle motion he gestured for him to stop and instead himself addressed His Lordship, whose pink, small-minded, essentially mediocre face seemed to him all at once exceedingly unlikely to hide the imagination or devilry of a criminal, a murderer.

“We primarily wanted to see how you were holding up under the strain of all this,” Lenox said. “Inspector Nicholson pointed out that it must be very difficult.”

The young man flushed with gratification. “Well, that’s awfully nice of you,” he said. “Yes, it’s been jolly hard. We’re bearing up.”

“Has anyone unusual come to the house? Perhaps Mr. Francis, the fellow we asked about before?”

“Only reporters, unfortunately. Our eyes are open. And of course there have been all sorts in and out of the two houses next door. Teddy is already arranging to sell them, thank goodness. I’m going to sell this one, for that matter, if I can. I would far rather shake down around Mayfair. It’s where all of the other fellows from college are getting digs after examinations have finished.”

As the three detectives started back toward Scotland Yard together a quarter of an hour later, Lenox explained in the carriage why he suddenly suspected Calder’s innocence.

“I didn’t want you to ask any probing questions and have him put in a complaint about you,” he said to Nicholson.

“Quite right, thank you.” Despite the thanks, Nicholson looked glum, and a moment later he added, “Though it does seem hard luck when we thought we were onto something.”

They reached the Yard and went to Nicholson’s office for a little while then, where they sat mulling over the details of the case together — all of them in that mood of frustration. Jenkins must have uncovered Dyer and Wakefield’s scheme, they assumed. Did that mean Wakefield had murdered him? Or had Jenkins and Wakefield been working together, and both been killed for it by the same person?

At about two o’clock, two of Nicholson’s constables came in, Leonard and Walker. They had been doggedly pursuing Andrew Hartley Francis this week even after Nicholson’s attentions had moved elsewhere, asking anyone they could find of Wakefield’s acquaintance if they knew the man. Up until yesterday, none of them had even recognized the name, however, much less the person himself — not Wakefield’s acquaintances in business, not his cousins in the nobility, not the members of his clubs.

With any luck they were arriving with better news now. Nicholson greeted them. “Any sign of him?”

Leonard, who was the tallest constable on the force, as thin as a blade of grass, shook his head morosely. “None at all, sir.”

“Nobody even familiar with the name?” Nicholson said to Leonard.

“Afraid not, sir. I’m not sure who else we can ask, though I suppose we’ll carry on trying.”

Walker said, “We might send word to the police in a few of the larger cities, sir. Manchester, Birmingham. Asking if they know the name. For my part I don’t think he’s in London.”

“He may be on the Gunner, for all we know,” said Dallington broodingly. “Sitting in the crow’s nest with a flask of whisky, laughing at us.”

“I’ll wire to Manchester and Birmingham,” said Nicholson.

After a few more words of conversation, Walker and Leonard left.

What they had said lingered in Lenox’s mind, however. Just as he and Dallington were about to leave half an hour later — Nicholson was headed toward the interview rooms, to see again if he could get a word out of Sister Amity or any of her cohort — he said, “What’s become of Armbruster?”

“He’s back on the job today,” said Nicholson. “He’s one of the reasons I’m in everyone’s bad graces now. He wasn’t lying — his father was at the Yard, and both of his brothers. I’ve yet to pass him in the hallways, the scoundrel. I’m sure he was involved.”

“Of course. All three of us saw his reaction when we confronted him. Dead giveaway,” said Dallington.

And then all of a sudden Lenox was excited, exhilarated. It was a feeling he knew well: that he was close. The pieces were sifting together in his mind, clicking into place. He was close.

It was that phrase, his father was at the Yard, and both of his brothers.

“You have a strange look on your face,” said Dallington.

“Do I? I’m thinking.”

“I hope you’re thinking about a slice of steak pie, because I’m famished. If only the canteen here weren’t so monstrous.”

Nicholson, standing up and putting on his coat, smiled and said, “They don’t do a bad suet pudding, mind you.”

“Quiet, quiet,” said Lenox, not angrily but in a low, urgent voice. “Please give me a moment.”

Nicholson raised his eyebrows and sat down again, hands in the pockets of his coat. “Take as long as you like,” he said.

From the start the most elusive figure in all of this had been Francis — and yet at the same moment he had been everywhere, meeting at all hours with the marquess in the weeks before his death, ordering the port that had slain the nobleman, sending the parcel with the gun that had killed Jenkins.

His address, a dead end, a false lead.

His name, unrecognized by every conceivable member of London society who might have known it.

Even its strange confusion — was it Francis, was it Hartley? — had sent them searching for the same man twice over.

Then Lenox knew. He looked up at Dallington and Nicholson. “I’ve got it,” he said.

“What?” asked Dallington.

“Andrew Hartley Francis doesn’t exist,” Lenox said hurriedly, grabbing his own coat down from its hook and throwing it over his shoulders. “What’s more, I know exactly where we can find him.”