The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

As the women’s stories of captivity seeped out into the press, the charitable hearts of the British public were stirred. A collection was taken up through the newspapers, a fund established by which all of them might have their return fares to their homelands provided, along with a six-month stipend to put them on their feet. There was talk, moreover, of a suit against Wakefield’s estate, some reparation. Most of the women left as soon as they could. They gave forwarding addresses, though Lenox doubted that these would stay good for very long. Two or three women elected to stay in London — and one, in fact, a young German lady, would eventually become the well-known mistress of one of the gentlemen who had been arrested on the night of the raid at the Slavonian Club, Clarkson Gray, a bachelor of long standing descended from a line of immensely wealthy manufacturers in West Bromwich.

Several weeks after the fact, Lenox saw Gray at the Travellers Club. Gray gave him a pained look. “Bloody bad show, that was,” he said, without any other greeting. “I’d no idea they weren’t paid. None at all. And with the fees of the place! She’s a damn fine girl, too. I’m trying to make up for it to her, you know. And she knows she can go back any time she likes. I’ve told her so earnestly. She prefers it here.”

That encounter was still in the future as Lenox and his two partners slowly drew the net around Smith in the days after his arrest, carefully interrogating the various people who had been involved. Sister Grethe was, indeed, the grieving widow of Obadiah Smith Sr., or in any event the apartment in which she had shot at them was rented to a woman with the same name as his wife, Gwen Smith. She wouldn’t confirm anything, but several of the captive women had been only too delighted to identify both Smith and his mother in person, telling long, complex tales of their roles in the day-to-day operations of the Slavonian Club. One of the girls had laid eyes on Sister Grethe — a person who in their early encounters had always seemed bovine to Lenox, placid — and fainted dead away with fear.

She was the least of their worries, though. She had fired a gun upon them, and she would end her life in prison. The question was how to be absolutely sure that her son would do the same.

His subordinates in Wakefield’s house turned on him one by one, admitting that they had fabricated Andrew Hartley Francis’s character together, and also that they had been directly in Smith’s employ, their salaries doubled and trebled by him — rather than by Wakefield. (When Lenox remembered how spare the house had been, how little work it must have taken to keep up, he saw the appeal of the job.) Yes, one of the footman told them, he had seen Jenkins put the note in his shoe, and reported it to Smith. He’d had no idea Jenkins was going to be murdered — only Smith had threatened them with their own deaths if they said anything, and promised them grand lumps of money if they could stick it out until the new marquess was installed in the house.

Nicholson, one afternoon, wondered out loud why Smith had stayed around, acting as butler. “I suppose it would have been too suspicious if he disappeared just at the moment Wakefield did.”

Dallington nodded. “What’s been on my mind is why, if the Slavonian Club is only eighteen months old, they’ve had holds on the Gunner for so long.”

Lenox shrugged. “There are plenty of illegal things to do with a hold on a ship, I suppose. They simply grew more ambitious. Perhaps they were always bringing in women, and decided to eliminate the intermediate step — to run the brothels themselves, rather than take all the risk of finding women for the brothels.”

“There’s opium, too,” said Nicholson, “and any other number of drugs. We’ve had a fearful time stopping the trade.”

They were in Nicholson’s office, eating a bite of lunch together. A definite companionship had sprung up between the three men, now that the case was concluded, and they talked easily, enjoying each other’s company.

“Did we ever learn why they named it the Slavonian Club?” asked Dallington.

“It was in the papers, you know,” said Nicholson. “It’s a place on the Continent. ‘Even more hedonistic than its neighbor Bohemia,’ or some rubbish of that nature, was what I read.”

Lenox added grimly — and it was this he would ultimately think of when Clarkson Gray rationalized his behavior at the Travellers’—“And there’s a word buried right in the name, too. Slave. Whether that’s an accident or a cruel joke, who can say.”

They might easily have sent Obadiah Smith to trial with the evidence they had. There were witnesses who could place him at the Slavonian Club, a constant presence, and the other servants were all quick to blame him. Nevertheless, it seemed a little thin. The houses belonged to his employer, Lord Wakefield, and he could plausibly plead that he had no idea of the crimes that had taken place there. He and Miss Randall allotted all the blame to Armbruster — and to the servants beneath Smith, who they claimed were conspiring against him.

There was also no trail of paper tying him to the business other than the hold in the Gunner, and though that was registered to O. Smith, according to the Asiatic there was no address or other identifying tag to confirm that it was the same man; apparently the captain of the Gunner managed the holds. As for all the money they had found in Smith’s possession — that was another piece of highly suspicious circumstantial evidence, but there was nothing illegal about it, on its face.

It was in the state of frustration induced by these tenuous pieces of evidence that Lenox passed the next week, searching for a way to break down Smith’s story once and for all. What they knew about his connection to the club would perhaps be enough to send the man to prison for a few years, but on the more serious charge of the murders of Jenkins and Wakefield, he had covered his tracks too cleverly. As it stood, they would have to hope that Armbruster was a persuasive witness. He was the only person who could definitively declare that Smith was a murderer. The problem was that it wouldn’t be difficult to make a jury doubt the word of a man so plainly corruptible.

One of Smith’s fellow plotters wouldn’t prove quite as elusive as the silver-tongued butler, however. On a morning the next week, as Lenox was puzzling over all of the case’s details in the offices at Chancery Lane, a telegram came from Nicholson. It said:

“Dallington!” he called out.

The young lord popped his head around the doorframe. With Jenkins’s murder solved, he had resumed his normal schedule of work and was investigating a housebreak at Brixton. “Yes?”

“Look at this.”

Dallington took the paper, read it, and whistled. “Shall we go see Nicholson?”

Nicholson had a limited amount of information, but some, and more came in during the next few days. The Gunner had sailed into the port under camouflage, painted with a new yellow-and-white check above the sea line (which meant that it had been done in the week since she left London) and calling herself the Ariana. The British admiral stationed in Lisbon had received the word from Scotland Yard to look out for the ship, however, and one of his assistants had spotted her right away, despite her attempts at concealment.

The admiral had decided to let her run into port, rather than challenging her out at sea. As she tied on, a lieutenant had called out, “All men of this ship are under arrest, by order of Her Majesty the Queen.”

There had been a stirring on deck then, followed by two noises in quick succession: a gunshot, first, and second, a splash, the sound of a pistol hurled far overboard.

They found Dyer in his cabin. He had been shot in the back. None of the two-hundred-odd men aboard the Gunner would say a word, other than to confirm that the captain had ordered the ship repainted and renamed since they left the Thames.

“Can’t say why,” the ship’s lieutenant, Lawton, had said. “Captain’s orders.”

Indeed, it became clear that the magical use of this phrase, Captain’s orders, was the reason Dyer had been killed by his own men. The British representatives at Lisbon heard it hundreds of times as they investigated the ship. It was a clever maneuver: By maritime law, the illegality of the ship’s new, unregistered name, and the illegality of anything in the holds, were the responsibility of the captain alone.

And indeed, one of the things that the navy found was a group of several women, living in hammocks — in the hold licensed to Lord Wakefield, the hold where Lenox and Dallington had found his body.

This detail puzzled them, until they learned that the women had all lived for several months at St. Anselm’s — at the Slavonian Club. That, evidently, was how Smith, Wakefield, and Dyer had ensured that none of the women mastered English. Every time the Gunner came and went, it exchanged new women for the old.

Where had Dyer been taking the women now, though? They didn’t know themselves, of course. Lisbon wasn’t part of the course the Gunner usually sailed on its route to Calcutta. Why, then, had Dyer risked putting into port there, when the disguise he had arranged for his ship showed that he was already worried about being caught?

The answer must be money, and Lenox surmised, on the day he and Dallington went to see Nicholson, that Dyer must have gone to Lisbon to sell off the women in his holds. From there he could have sailed the Gunner to Calcutta — confident that no ship could outrun her on that route — and then left her with the Asiatic. He and his crew might well have dispersed there, leaving the company to replace them, perhaps eventually returning to London overland.

With all this in mind, Nicholson asked the British navy in Portugal to investigate the city’s brothels, to ascertain whether there was any that might have taken women from the Gunner in the past. (“Though asking the British navy to look at a city’s brothels seems like a redundant request,” Dallington had pointed out.) With the assistance of the Portuguese police, who were eager to aid the country that brought so much foreign trade into their cities, they raided half a dozen houses and questioned the women working there.

Finally, at one of these, belonging to an aristocrat named Luis Almonte de la Rosa, they found success: Several of the women had been at the Slavonian Club, and were paid no more now than they had been there. Emboldened by the assurances of the navy that they could have their freedom, they recounted their own stories of the Gunner, which had brought them first to London and then here.

The emergence of this second criminal consortium, far away in a different country, returned the story to the headlines for several days. After that it gradually faded, in abeyance until the trial of the last living member of the criminal trio who had planned it all began.