The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

The next month was one of frantic activity at Chancery Lane, all three of them putting in many long, grueling days of labor, so that the first weeks of May passed in a haze of early mornings and late nights. It was Polly who took the situation in hand, hiring, the day after Lenox’s meetings, an accountant, a new clerk, and a new detective named Atkinson. He was a fifty-year-old man who had recently retired from the Yard in search of a better salary, tall and solid with salt-and-pepper hair. He would be the person who went to the firms for a monthly checkup and interacted directly with the managers.

“They’ll prefer that type of fellow,” she said confidently after Atkinson had left his interview. “You and Dallington are too refined — and of course I’m a woman, which would never do.”

Atkinson was an immediate success, as was the new clerk, King. On the other hand, the accountant arrived at the offices in a state of impressive inebriation on his third morning, and they fired him on the spot, replacing him later that afternoon with a meek chap named Tomkins, who turned out to be splendidly intelligent. In his very first week he found a clerical error that saved Jordan Lee, the steel magnate, nearly seventy pounds.

At the same time, for some half-mysterious reason, the business coming in for Lenox, Dallington, and Polly increased. Small cases, mostly, many to do with minor sums of money, though some genuinely enigmatic ones were mixed in as well. Lenox spent three sleepless days helping a butcher in Hampstead recover a kidnapped child, who turned out, in the end, to have been taken by a local woman who imagined that the butcher had scorned her.

Lenox described the influx of cases to Lady Jane one evening, as they sat out upon the small stone terrace that overlooked the back garden at Hampden Lane, the pleasant call of birds in the air, a light breeze making it cooler than it had been for most of the week. Between them was Sophia. She sat on a small wooden horse and rocked back and forth, murmuring some very important words to herself, lost, as so often, in a private and apparently vivid world. It was one of Lenox’s favorite things about his daughter — the intensity and liveliness of her interior life. What on earth was she saying to the horse?

“Why do you think more cases have come in recently?” Lady Jane asked.

“I’m not certain,” he said. “Perhaps the establishment of LeMaire’s firm has raised awareness that such a thing as a detective agency exists — and that means ours, too. A rising tide, and all that. Or I suppose it may be that after the murders, our names appeared in the papers often enough to be noticed.”

“I give Polly the credit, personally.”

“Thank you, my dear. It’s nice always to have one ally.”

Lady Jane laughed. She looked very lovely, a slender champagne flute in her hand, the falling light capturing the soft contours of her face. “No, I give you the credit,” she said. “I only meant that she always seems to know exactly what to do.”

Polly had been at Hampden Lane fairly often in the past few weeks, as had Dallington, a few small quick meetings at first turning into a series of teas and suppers there, until it became a kind of office away from the office. They had sat in Lenox’s study for many hours, and though they had always liked each other, something about this second space, combined perhaps with their revitalized business, had knitted the three of them closer together. Even Dallington and Polly were becoming easier with each other again. Partly that was because of Lady Jane, who always interrupted their meetings to bring them sandwiches, or drinks, or to tell Lenox something — interruptions that made the meetings feel homelike, informal, but also somehow more productive. It all seemed very natural for the first time, this business of running a detective agency.

Lenox reached over and put his hand on Sophia’s head, though she pushed it away irritably and kept rocking. He smiled. “Yes, she’s splendid. To be honest I don’t think we could have done it without her, Dallington and I. We both like the detective work, but she sees the whole picture. Thank goodness for Atkinson, to take just one example.”

Despite all of this, the agency was still battling uphill. Though Lenox had taken several additional meetings after that first marathon of a day, they had only produced one more client, and the massive initial infusion of money they had received would have to be carefully apportioned out over the course of the year, would have to pay for the salaries of the new employees, the trips to visit their clients, the offices. Lenox and Dallington also continued, rather guiltily, to take cases for free when the clients couldn’t afford to pay. Polly — more practical — showed such softness far more rarely.

Then, at the end of May, something disquieting happened: LeMaire poached one of their clients, a mill owner named Templeton, the Member for Stratford. His first quarterly payment to them would be his last. “Better rates with Monomark’s fellow, Lenox,” he said when they saw each other at a party. “He told me all about it at Ascot. Same service. It’s the nature of business, you know. I’m sorry to have to leave you.”

Dallington was furious. Polly was more philosophical; she recommended that they meet with their clients to be sure that they were happy with the agency. Still, it made for a worrying week, and a few late nights looking at the books and making lists of possible new clients, until, almost as if the universe had decided to rebalance their luck, something fortuitous happened.

It was on a June morning (a rainy one, at last) just a week before Obadiah Smith’s trial was to begin. The papers were full of the case again, and the Slavonian Club. The journalists all felt sure that Smith would go to prison for a few years, but that it would be impossible to convict him of the murders of Jenkins and Wakefield, as the crown hoped to do. Lenox had pulled out his notes on the case, studying them a thousandth time, searching for some detail to pin Smith to the crimes. The gun — that would have been their best hope, but it had been wiped clean, and packaged in that parcel from Francis. It was maddening. The butler had been too clever for them.

Pointilleux knocked on the door and came in without waiting for an answer. “You have a visitor.”

“Who is it?”

“Someone named Mr. Graham.”

“Graham! Push him in.”

“I will, I will,” said Pointilleux testily. He had been in a bad mood all morning because of dyspepsia caused by the breakfast his landlady had made him. (“The egg in this country are pepper beyond anything reasonable.”) “He is wet with rain, unfortunately.”

Graham was, indeed, wet with rain, but he smiled and put out a hand as Lenox stood and welcomed him in. “What brings you away from Parliament?” asked Lenox. “Look, you’re soaked. Let me ring for tea.”

The office had another new employee, a maid named Mrs. Barry, and a few moments after Lenox asked for it she came in with a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits. Graham accepted a cup of tea gratefully, sipping carefully as the steam rose from it.

“Busy at the Commons?” asked Lenox, taking a sip of his own tea.

“There’s a vote later today,” said Graham. “The foreign trade bill.”

“I know. I’ve seen some of the speeches in the papers. You’ve taken on a very great role.”

“Yes,” said Graham, nodding grimly, as if it hadn’t been by choice, or altogether to his liking. “The first time I’ve spoken much.”

“I feel very sorry to have missed your maiden speech. If I had known you meant to give it I would have been in the gallery.”

“It was a necessity at the last moment, unfortunately. Qualls fell ill and had to bow out.”

“And then — the responses.”

Graham smiled dryly. “Yes, quite.”

When Graham had been Lenox’s secretary in Parliament, the other party had spread rumors about his conduct — namely, that he was corrupt. These had seemed plausible perhaps more than they otherwise would have because of Graham’s birth, which was low for anyone intimately involved with England’s national politics. In the last weeks those rumors — quelled when he ran for Parliament — had resurfaced, with oblique mentions in speeches from the other benches. They implied that certain foreign powers, particularly Russia, had bought Graham’s influence.

“Is there something I can do?” asked Lenox. “Someone to whom I can speak?”

“Oh, no, thank you,” said Graham. “We can handle them.”

Lenox nodded. Graham, more than anyone else he knew, would be able to manage his position in the brutal joust of Parliament. “But then why have you come? Not that I don’t wish it were a more frequent occurrence.”

“I wonder if you recall that form you filled out when we had lunch several weeks ago?” asked Graham. “The very long one?”

“Yes — the exit interview, as it were. They wanted to know how much port I drink, which I thought intrusive of them. Not that it’s very much.”

“I’m afraid I deceived you,” said Graham. The word “sir” still hovered toward the end of the sentence, without appearing. He reached down into his valise and pulled out a thin sheaf of papers. “It was a questionnaire that the House rules subcommittee wished you to fill out.”

Lenox frowned. “The House rules subcommittee?”

“We would like to offer you a new position that has been created only this week. As yet it doesn’t have a name, but you would be the official house detectives of the Commons and the Lords.”

Lenox’s eyes widened, and for a moment he was struck dumb. “Never, really?”

Graham smiled. “Of course, we have army officers and Metropolitan Police stationed around the building.”

“I remember them.”

“But there are as many small and large crimes in Parliament as in any other concern involving several thousand men, and the Yard is not always as quick as one would like in its response, or indeed its solution of them.” Graham paused and then said delicately, “There would be a retainer of nine hundred pounds a year, and of course any additional expenses would be reimbursed.”

Lenox looked at his old friend, touched. He could tell even glancing at the papers Graham had passed him that this had been his work — his gesture. “I would be honored to accept,” he said. “Thank you. Particularly as it means we might have lunch more often now, too.”

For whatever reason, it was at this moment that Lenox finally believed that the agency was going to succeed. It wasn’t even the money that gave him the feeling. In the next room Polly was meeting with a new client; Dallington was out upon a case, as were Pointilleux and Atkinson; the scratch of different pens rose from the outer office; and in his chest he had a feeling that at last things had clicked into place. It would be easier from here on out. Of course there would be challenges — but not defeats, he felt sure. They would make it.