The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

With Smith in custody, people began to talk quickly.

He spoke himself as well. “It was Armbruster who managed it all,” he claimed.

“Armbruster?”

His smooth, ingratiating voice had returned in custody. “The only thing I did in this whole nasty sequence of events was to give His Lordship the port from Mr. Francis. Quite unintentionally.”

“So we are still to believe there was a Mr. Francis.”

Smith looked at them guilelessly. “Of course there was,” he said.

Miss Randall followed the same line. She was the second person they questioned the next morning — with many to come after her. Her presence the afternoon before had reminded Lenox of the other three servants in Wakefield’s employ. They had described Francis identically the week before, his visits, his dress. They had all been working from the same script. Now they were all under arrest.

As for Armbruster, he knew when the game was up.

“They tell us you orchestrated it all,” Nicholson said, as Dallington and Lenox leaned against the wall behind the table where the two colleagues faced each other. It was a rather nicer cell, and there were the remnants of a decent breakfast nearby, an orange peel, a crust of toast, the civilities accorded someone who oughtn’t to have been there. “They say that you brought in the girls with Wakefield, shot Jenkins, poisoned the marquess.”

“Have you gone completely mad?” asked Armbruster.

“No more of that,” warned Nicholson. “You have”—he looked at his own pocket watch, a brass one, well polished and well loved by the looks of it—“twenty minutes to tell us everything you know, or I can’t promise anything short of the rope. You’ve made quite a lot of your friends in this building look foolish. Nobody other than the three of us has any cause to show you leniency.”

For a moment Armbruster’s face went rigid with anger. Then, though, it yielded. He was a weak-willed person, Lenox thought — gluttonous for food, as was obvious from his figure, and apparently gluttonous for money.

That had been the root of it all. He and Smith had known each other since childhood, both the sons of peelers. Eighteen months before, Armbruster said, Smith had taken him into his confidence: They were starting a high-end brothel in the West End and needed some protection from the Yard’s interference. Armbruster had accepted what seemed in the moment like easy money, nothing life-altering, a pound or two a week, and in exchange had kept an eye on the area and smoothed over several minor incidents.

Then, on the day before Jenkins’s death, Smith had wired him with an urgent request to meet.

“What did he ask you?” said Nicholson.

“He said that there was going to be a murder the next day. I told him I couldn’t be involved.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“I did! With Christ as my witness, I did. But he said that it was my own neck on the line — that the person who’d betrayed them had given my name away, too. And he offered me fifty pounds.” Armbruster shook his head mournfully. “That stupid watch. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Lenox felt a flicker of pity for the man at those words.

Then he remembered something. “You took Jenkins’s papers from the Yard before you followed him, though,” he said. “That means you knew who Smith meant to kill.”

“Is that true?” asked Nicholson.

“I—”

“The truth, mind you.”

Armbruster hesitated, then said, “Yes. I knew it was Jenkins. He would have had us all up to the gallows, you know.”

Dallington snorted. “Better to go to the gallows than see a good man murdered.”

“What became of his papers?” asked Lenox.

“I burned them.”

“What did they say?”

“It was a thick file. He knew everything about the Slavonian Club — everything. My name was all over them, Wakefield’s, too. Jenkins had obviously been working on it for months.”

“Was Smith’s name on them? Or Dyer’s?”

Armbruster thought. “I don’t know. I only looked at the papers very quickly. But I don’t think so, no. It was all detail about those houses — the three houses that have been in all the newspapers.”

It seemed clear enough to Lenox. Jenkins had discovered Wakefield’s crimes, and used the threat of prosecution against the marquess to try to chase down all of the criminals involved in the operation. Wakefield had turned on his friends to save his skin. Both of them had died for it.

“And it was you who untied the shoe?” Lenox asked Armbruster. “Before everyone arrived?”

The sergeant hesitated again and then nodded. “Yes. When I arrived to find the body, I knocked on Wakefield’s door on the pretext of searching for witnesses. Smith told me to look in the shoe. He was flustered — had just shot Jenkins and run, not wanting to linger, obviously, in such a public place. I could look in the shoe without drawing notice, because I was leading the investigation, of course.” He shook his head. “But then Nicholson arrived. Another thirty seconds and none of us would be sitting here. I would have had that claim ticket in my own pocket.”

They took fifteen minutes more to sketch in the details of the day Jenkins had died; for his part, Armbruster seemed sincerely not to know anything about Wakefield’s death.

There was a narrow hallway outside of the cell — surprisingly bright, with a clock and a portrait of Sir Robert Peel on the wall — and here Nicholson, Lenox, and Dallington stood, discussing what they had learned.

It all fit together, but there were still questions. Nicholson, shaking his head, said, “If he were planning to betray Smith, why would Wakefield meet with Jenkins right in front of him?”

Lenox shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about that, too. Smith was cleverer than Wakefield. I’ve been following Wakefield’s trail for years — he was violent, heedless, cavalier. Smith is cold-blooded.”

“And?”

“If I had to guess, I would say that he probably took the precaution of seeing Jenkins when Smith was out. What he didn’t consider was that Smith had been responsible for hiring all of the rest of the staff, too — Miss Randall, the three others. They were his. Wakefield wouldn’t have bothered about details like that. He would have assumed that he only had to watch out for Smith, that the others were simply normal servants. In fact all four of them were spying on him.”

“For that matter,” said Dallington, “we have no idea what Wakefield told Smith. Perhaps he told him he was only going to give up Dyer — that they were in on it together, against Dyer and the men of the Gunner. But as Charles says, Smith was cleverer than Wakefield by half.”

“Or us, nearly,” said Nicholson. He hesitated. “I also wonder how Smith and Wakefield connected.”

There was a pause as they considered the question. Then Lenox said, “Armbruster is sitting there. Let’s ask him.”

So they returned to the room and posed the question to the sergeant. A disconcerted look came onto his face — one of concealment, calculation. He knew something. “I’m not sure,” he said.

“No more games, I told you,” said Nicholson.

There was a long pause. “Does the name Charity Boyd mean anything to you?”

Lenox nodded. “The woman Wakefield killed. Yes. Why?”

Armbruster paused again, as if considering his options. “There’s no reason to drag that case up, you know. Wakefield’s dead. He’s the one who killed her.”

“This is your final warning,” said Nicholson. “We—”

Lenox thought he understood. “The officers who helped investigate the murder,” he said. “Was one of them Obadiah Smith’s father?”

Armbruster nodded very slightly. “Yes.”

“And another one of them was your father.”

Now the sergeant looked pained. “Yes. But it was only Smith who helped Wakefield, I’m sure of that — sure of it. My father’s nearly seventy now, anyhow. You’ve no cause at all to bring him into this.”

Lenox turned away in disgust. He remembered the witness who had seen Charity Boyd’s death, only to recant his testimony. How easily a brief encounter of intimidation from someone in a uniform might have changed his mind. And how easy to imagine that once a fruitful relationship had been established between Wakefield and Obadiah Smith Sr., the rest of the family — the constable’s son, his wife — might have found their way into Wakefield’s employ.

Except that Smith had probably become something very like a partner, it seemed to Lenox. Dallington evidently had the same thought. In the hallway, he said, “I suppose Smith made himself indispensable.”

Nicholson nodded. “For all we know, the entire enterprise was Smith’s idea.”

“Yes,” said Lenox. “Wakefield had the houses, Dyer the ship, but they needed Smith to run the operation. I know Wakefield — there’s no way he could have been bothered with all that work. He was essentially an idle man, unless some piece of violence was called for. Smith and his mother — they were the ones in charge of the whole thing, until it came crashing down. They must have been minting money before that. Think of that pile of notes we found Smith ready to pack. Thousands of pounds.”

Nicholson shook his head. “I wonder how Jenkins discovered the truth. It was a damned fine piece of detection, however he did it.”

The other two nodded, and they stood there in silence for a moment, considering their departed friend.