The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The weeks after Smith’s arrest were rainless and bright, the soft, light days of spring hardening toward the heat of summer, women walking with fans in hand, men in suits of lighter cloth. Along Chancery Lane, the dogs belonging to each shop lingered in the shadows of their doorways, their instincts for adventure and alarm dormant while the sun was up.

At the detective agency one story above street level, business had resumed.

“What about you, Dallington?” asked Lenox.

They were sitting at the conference table. “Two new cases over the weekend. One a woman of middle age whose husband has been missing for four years — she wants proof that he’s dead, so that she can remarry. The other is from a fellow who saw our names in the papers. He was defrauded of three hundred pounds by an itinerant salesman. Offers to split whatever we can recover. It will probably lead nowhere, of course, but I thought I might put Pointilleux on the trail, if we don’t need him here.”

Lenox nodded. “And Polly?”

For Polly was still there; she had declined Monomark’s offer. Now, as a fly buzzed against the warm windows, and she sat in the meeting that Lenox had begun by reporting that he had no new cases, she looked as if she might regret it. Briskly she tapped her pen twice against the sheet of paper in front of her, then offered up her usual list of small and middling clients, many of them women — good, steady business.

Eleven percent. Since the day LeMaire had announced he was leaving, the words that had rattled around Lenox’s mind were those two, eleven percent. That was the trivial proportion of the revenue the firm took in for which he was responsible. Could he blame the Frenchman for leaving? Or Polly if she had chosen to go?

The difficulty was that the previous autumn he had viewed this return to detection as a pleasure, a fulfillment of his private wishes — not as a business.

Today that changed.

“Thank you,” he said to Polly when she had finished. Then he paused. “As you both know, my official, paid involvement in the Jenkins murder concluded on Friday. I’ll still be helping Nicholson, but only in an unofficial capacity. That makes this a good moment to address the future of the firm, I think. I told you I had a plan, and I do.”

Both Polly and Dallington looked at him more alertly, eyes enlivened by their curiosity. With each other, in the last week, they had been stiff, polite. Polly had been most animated when she told them about her second meeting with Monomark.

“At first he tried to cajole me into accepting,” she had said. “Then I asked him about the articles in the Telegraph.”

Dallington had raised his eyebrows at that. “What did he say?”

“He turned bright red and asked me if I was certain once and for all that I declined the position. I said I did. He stood up and walked out then — leaving me with the bill for tea, no less.”

They had all seen the result of that meeting the next day, when the Telegraph had blared a headline: LEMAIRE FOUNDS DETECTIVE AGENCY. Monomark’s second choice, evidently, but quicker than Polly to accept the offer. The article below the headline described precisely the kind of agency that Monomark had offered Polly control of. Indeed, the newspaper baron’s fingerprints were all over it. The subheadline read TO BE PREMIER FIRM IN ENGLAND, and a quote from a high official at Scotland Yard, probably one of Monomark’s cronies, said, “Certainly LeMaire’s will be our first and only choice should we ever require outside assistance in a criminal investigation.”

LeMaire’s firm was already up and running, with daily advertisements in half a dozen papers, favorable stories in the press, and even fairly positive word of mouth. Within a month, Lenox had privately reckoned, he might well take half of their business. If he did that they might as well shutter the firm.

Fortunately, he did have a plan. What was more, it was Monomark who had given him the idea for it. At their morning meeting, he asked Dallington and Polly — the words were directed at Polly, really, for he knew Dallington would never leave — to draw up the last drops from their reservoirs of faith in him. He would return that evening with news.

He took his carriage then and went to Parliament, where he spent a long, tiring day — but a triumphant one.

At six o’clock that evening, as the Members began to make their way through the hall outside the Commons into the benches for the evening session, Lenox stood, watching them wander in as he had for so many years, until he felt a tap on his shoulder.

He turned and saw his brother. “Edmund!” he said. He felt himself smiling. Throughout the course of the case they hadn’t seen each other. Edmund was his closest friend, and it was an unusual length of time for the two of them to have gone without each other’s company. This was a happy coincidence.

“Charles, what on earth are you doing here? I could have stood you a late lunch, or an early supper for that matter.”

“I was here on business, alas. Do you have time for a quick glass of wine now?”

Edmund checked the large clock on the wall. “Quickly, yes,” he said. “But what the devil do you mean, business? They had pheasant with chestnut sauce and cranberries this afternoon, too, your favorite thing.”

They went to the Members’ Bar, mostly empty now, and after they ordered their drinks they sat, Lenox asking what the subject of the debate that evening would be. Foreign trade, Edmund answered. That was the dullest of subjects Parliament could take up, in his opinion, though one of the most important.

“Better you than me,” said Lenox.

“Molly says that Jane is having a dinner party this weekend?” said Edmund.

“Yes, can you come?”

“Molly has bought a new dress already, so I imagine we can. She’s down in London so rarely these days that she says she never knows the city fashion until she’s walking out the door, dressed in the last season. But since Teddy is ashore for leave, she can’t tear herself away from home. Speaking of which, you must come down soon.”

Edmund still lived mainly at Lenox House in Sussex, where they had grown up. “We thought of coming in July.”

“That would please me inordinately. For one thing, we’re going to have a dance, for the county people, you know, and it would dispel the rumors that you yourself are part of a criminal gang if you were to attend.”

“Is that what they say?”

“The news gets very garbled on its way south, you know. And I may put it about that we’re disappointed in how it all ended for you, of course.” Edmund smiled, a spark in his eyes. “Anyhow — business? That’s why you’re in the building?”

“Yes. It’s been an interesting day.”

Not long before, Lenox had read an article in Blackwood’s that mentioned that the word “abracadabra” originally meant “I create what I speak” in the Hebrew language, a magician’s word that had migrated into English. This piece of trivia had been running through his mind all day, because so much of what he had done was to create money out of nothing — out of mere speech.

He had taken eighteen short meetings that day, he told Edmund, with eighteen friends and allies from his days in Parliament. (Twenty had been scheduled, but two Members had been detained elsewhere.) What all eighteen had in common was that they were men of business, and to each of them Lenox had proposed the same idea: that their firm pay an annual fee to retain the services of Lenox, Dallington, and Strickland on a permanent basis.

The blunt reaction of the second man he had seen, a steel manufacturer named Jordan Lee who had a great rotund belly and a thick mustache, had been typical. “Why on earth would I need to hire a detective agency?”

Lenox had been prepared for the question. “You’re familiar with the Holderness case?” he asked.

Lee grimaced. “Of course, the poor bastards.”

The year before, a quiet senior manager at Holderness had stayed ten minutes after work one evening, opened the company safe, and walked away with nearly four thousand pounds in European certificates of stock. It emerged that he had also been embezzling from the company for years. The two brothers in command of the firm, Andrew and Joseph Holderness, were living in sharply reduced personal circumstances as they attempted to pay off their debts and set the business back on its feet.

“A stitch in time, you know, Lee,” said Lenox. “We have a dedicated accountant who will do a quarterly examination of your books for fraud, detectives to do thorough investigations into any person you wish to hire — and of course in the case of any actual crime, theft, or violence, we’ll be on the spot immediately.”

Lenox saw Lee thinking. It was a good offer in general, he thought — though the accountant was, as yet, pure fiction — but the word that had most intrigued him was one thrown in with careful carelessness, “violence.” It was what the industrialists like Lee had most to fear.

“How much are you asking for the service?” he asked.

“Six hundred pounds per annum. We’ll keep a record of what we do for you, and charge more or return some of that at the end of the year based on our charges. Our own records are scrupulous, of course. I would be happy to show you a sample.”

For a moment the question hung in the balance — but then, perhaps because of his long acquaintance with Lenox, perhaps because six hundred pounds was a substantial but not a shocking sum, Lee nodded and put his hand out. “I think it’s a clever idea, now you explain it. We’ve been losing a mint simply from scrapped steel that’s gone missing. Your people could start there.”

Not all of Lenox’s meetings were so successful, of course. Eight of the men declined outright, two had, rather vexingly, already hired LeMaire to do the same job, and three others said they would think it over, in a hard genial tone that made it clear they wouldn’t.

In a way it had been a painful day for Lenox, who was so used to his own pride, so long accustomed to the luxury of financial independence, still adherent to old standards of what a gentleman ought to do. He had been inculcated with a disdain for business, for trade. These men, in fact, were those who looked up to him, to his life with his aristocratic wife, and in some of their faces he saw a subtle sense of reversal, perhaps even reprisal. That had been difficult.

And yet in another way it had been thrilling. Business was a kind of game, and for the first time he saw why men like Monomark chose to play it.

Better still, after he had finished his drink with Edmund, he could return to the offices with his news: that he had found five new clients that day, who would pay a total of seven hundred and fifty pounds into their accounts that very week, their first quarterly payments.

“Three thousand pounds for the year, then?” said Dallington uncertainly.

Polly repeated the words, too, but her voice was entirely free of uncertainty. She was beaming, with a look of pure relief and joy on her face, like a gambler who’s put his last shilling on a long shot and seen it run first through the gate. “Three thousand pounds!” she said. “Are you sure? It’s a fortune!”

Lenox smiled. “I’m sure.”

“Not that I doubt your word — only seven hundred and fifty pounds is already twice as much as every farthing we’ve brought in till now put together, Charles! My God, I could kiss you!”