The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

It was back to Portland Place they went, one of the final trips that he would have to make to that accursed street for some time, Lenox hoped as they drove. They knocked on the door of the Wakefield mansion. The butler opened the door and frowned, surprised to see them back so quickly.

“Are you here to see His Lordship again, sirs?” he asked.

Lenox shook his head. “Thank you, no, we are in a hurry. But would you be so kind as to pass a message to him from us?”

“Of course, sir. What is the message?”

“Tell him that we’ve just had a wire — we were away from the Yard — that Armbruster has said he’ll confess to Nicholson. He wants a deal, doesn’t want to go to jail. We’re going back now to hear what he has to say. I know His Lordship was concerned with a quick end to all of this embarrassing business. Please tell him we’ve stopped by just as a courtesy.”

The butler nodded and then carefully repeated the message back to Lenox. “Was that all, sir? Anything else to pass on?”

“No, that will do nicely. Thank you,” said Lenox.

As they walked back to the carriage, Dallington said, “What now?”

“Now we wait at the corner,” said Lenox, “and hopefully not too long a time. There was a clue in Asiatic’s diagram of the Gunner’s holds after all, you know. Give it ten minutes. Less, even.”

“Will you tell us what you’re expecting?” asked Nicholson.

“I’ll tell you that I’d be very curious to meet a man named Jarvis Norman,” said Lenox. “For the rest, wait just a few — no, even less than that! There we are! Follow that cab, driver!”

From the servants’ quarters of the house on Portland Place, the butler and another person had emerged. The butler was wearing a bowler hat and a spring jacket over his regular uniform. Immediately he had flagged a cab and stepped into it with his companion, the cab Lenox now asked the driver to follow.

The person with the butler, Lenox thought, was the young woman who had been so concerned after the attack on him — Miss Randall, the cook.

“We’re following them?” asked Dallington. “What about Calder? The message?”

“The message never got to Calder,” said Lenox. “Nor did it have to. It did its work, as you’ll see.”

The cab they were following turned onto Shaftesbury Avenue and clipped along briskly toward the east, overtaking omnibuses and landaus, under orders, Lenox suspected, to move as quickly as possible. It turned onto Margaret Street. They were headed in the direction of the Seven Dials — one of the less savory parts of the metropolis.

“Please explain, Lenox,” said Nicholson. “At the end of this cab ride are we going to find Francis, finally?”

Lenox, who had been staring intently after the cab in front of them, turned toward his two colleagues. “I doubt it,” he said. “What occurred to me at the Yard was a strange fact — that despite his omnipresence in the case, every single piece of information we have ever received about Andrew Hartley Francis comes from a single source.”

Nicholson objected. “That’s not true. All five of Wakefield’s servants described the same fellow — dapper, young, a gentleman, dark hair, in and out of Portland Place all the time.”

“That’s the source,” said Lenox. “Wakefield’s staff. It should have come to me before now — they must have known about the businesses next door, all of them. Too risky to have it any other way. And at the head of the beast was that man — in the cab in front of us.”

“The butler?” said Nicholson.

“Obadiah Smith,” said Dallington.

Lenox nodded. “It’s him. I think it’s him behind it all. Smith.”

“Why?” asked Dallington.

The cab ahead of them took a right turn, and Lenox’s carriage followed the same turn after a safe delay. Lenox, after peering out of the window to make sure they hadn’t lost their quarry, said, “One of the first things he told us about himself was, not incidentally I think, one of the first things Armbruster mentioned about himself, too.”

Nicholson brightened, his bony face animated. “That they both had fathers who worked at the Yard! Of course!”

“Armbruster still does, apparently. That explains how they might have known each other — how Smith might have brought Armbruster into league with him, if he needed a corruptible police officer. Then there’s Jenkins’s shoe.”

“What about it?”

“It’s been bothering me all along that someone untied his laces. How on earth could they have known he had a letter in his shoe? But consider: What if Jenkins, just before he was shot, had received that claim ticket for the Gunner from Wakefield. They were working together — Wakefield was helping Scotland Yard, as out of character as that might seem. Jenkins must have offered him a choice to go to prison or to betray his circle, and he chose the latter.”

“Honor among thieves.”

“Quite. When the Gunner arrived that night, Jenkins would have been able to meet it at the docks, find the hold that matched the claim ticket — and the girls that must inevitably have been inside the hold. Jenkins was very close to saving those women from their fate. Only he was killed.

“But back to the shoe. What would he have done with the claim ticket as he was leaving Portland Place, that evening he was murdered? He was a cautious man, Jenkins. His notes were locked safely away in his office, but now he had this extremely valuable piece of paper, given to him by his key informant. Perhaps he knew that he was in danger — perhaps Wakefield did, too. He would have written me a hasty note, included the claim ticket, and tied it in his shoe there at Wakefield’s house — in Wakefield’s very sitting room.”

Nicholson finished the thought. “Where one of the servants would have been lurking, watching.”

Lenox nodded. “Exactly. Smith would have told Armbruster, in the bustle of the crime scene, to check the shoe, if he could, get the claim ticket out of it, and the note. Armbruster nearly managed to get it away. If he had, we never would have heard the name of the Gunner, much less searched her holds before she shipped for Calcutta. We would still think Wakefield had murdered Jenkins and fled for the Continent. A tidy crime. Indeed, one of the most brillant I can recall, in its way.”

Dallington frowned. “Yes, but Wakefield had already been missing for more than a day on the night Jenkins was killed,” said Dallington. “Nobody had seen him.”

Lenox laughed bitterly. “According to whom? To Obadiah Smith. It all circles back around to him. Think of it, the brazenness of it! The gun that killed Jenkins — sitting on the table in the front hall. The port that poisoned Wakefield — Smith would have been the fellow who ordered all the wine and spirits for the house, and more significantly the fellow who poured it every night.”

“And the attack on Smith himself?” said Nicholson.

“To divert attention — and to scare me off, with that ‘warning.’ The wounds were ugly but superficial, McConnell told us as much from the start.”

The three men sat in silence for a moment. Dallington looked slightly stunned. “He seemed such an easygoing fellow.”

“He was always very affable with us,” said Lenox. “And extremely eager to help, if you recall — to point us toward Francis.”

Nicholson shook his head. “But why? How? Wakefield and Dyer had their scheme running smoothly, the women at the Slavonian Club smuggled into London aboard the Gunner, St. Anselm’s. How does Smith come into it?”

Lenox shrugged. “I’m not precisely sure. But you recall the names on the schematic of the ship’s hold, John?”

“Some of them, anyhow.”

“There was one we skipped past — between Berry’s Herb and Pharmaceutical and, I don’t know, Jones, or Hughes.”

“Smith,” said Dallington in awe. “He had a hold of his own on the ship.”

“I would bet that the Smith on the schematic is named Obadiah in the Asiatic’s files. Legally, he was bound to use his own name. As was Wakefield. And it must have given Dyer some assurance that their names were there, that he had some proof he hadn’t acted alone, if he were caught.”

The cab ahead of them turned down a dingy side lane. The street was too small to follow down without attracting notice, and Lenox quickly called up to the driver to continue on for another twenty yards, then jumped from the door as it slowed. He ran back just in time to see Smith and the cook — his wife? his lover? — unlocking a red door halfway down the street.

“Let’s arrest him,” said Nicholson.

“He may be armed,” said Lenox. “If I had to guess, he and the cook are going to take what they can put their hands on and flee — the Continent, probably. As long as Wakefield and Jenkins were silent in their graves, Smith was safe, but he’s Armbruster’s big card to play, to keep himself out of jail.”

“Honor among thieves,” murmured Nicholson once more.

They went to the red door. The street was empty, unnaturally quiet for the center of the city. Lenox felt his heart racing. He wasn’t as young as he had once been, and he let Nicholson turn the handle of the door.

The entranceway of the building was covered in dirt and dust, dark as midnight except for a kerosene lamp casting a sallow triangle halfway up the wall. From the second floor came muffled voices.

“Softly on the stairs,” murmured Nicholson.

As they mounted the steps, however, it was clear that Smith wasn’t expecting to be followed, or at any rate didn’t feel obliged to keep his voice down. He was nearly shouting, and a hoarse woman’s voice was responding. Miss Randall, Lenox supposed. Their words were indistinct.

On the landing of the second story Nicholson took out his bludgeon. They stood by the door for a moment and listened.

“I tell you, we have to go this minute!” Smith was saying. His voice was different here, in the eastern rather than western half of London, and Lenox had the flashing thought that in another lifetime he might have been an accomplished actor, so convincing had his act as a pleasant butler been for so long, a figure of minor importance, unworthy of attention. “Armie will have them here within the hour.”

“He won’t peach on us.”

“He will!” Smith’s voice was becoming hysterical. “I heard it from the Yard with my own ears. Good God, are you hoping to be hanged? Every woman in that house will be lining up to point a finger at you.”

There was a pause. “Very well. Let me pack my bag, then.”

“Finally, some sense.”

Nicholson had waited long enough. He nodded at Dallington and Lenox and after a moment of hesitation burst through the door, calling out, “Scotland Yard!”

The two amateur detectives followed closely on his heels. Smith, standing in the middle of the room, was the first figure they saw, his face white with anger and surprise, and behind him Miss Randall.

Between them was a high stack of banknotes, bundled into piles — and next to it a satchel.

And then Lenox almost burst into laughter: because sitting in an armchair next to the fire was a third person, the one Smith had been addressing, and who had been returning his words in perfect English. It was Sister Grethe.