The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER EIGHT

The southward drive from Portland Place to Scotland Yard, which was situated not far from the river, was slow that evening, the streets clotted with theatergoers, with young men in spats and top hats on their way to late suppers, with vendors hawking fried onions and potatoes on one of the mildest nights of the year thus far.

“Would have been faster to take the underground,” Nicholson observed angrily at one point, shooing away a man with a yoke slung around his neck, offering pint pots of ale from a large tray.

Of course they all would have been home faster still had Jenkins not been murdered, and Lenox, for his part, was ready to be patient. He stared out at the gaslight flicker of the city. First Baker Street, then Park Lane, the stylish hotels along it facing Hyde Park. There was too much to consider: on a human level, the death of his friend; on an investigative level, the nearness of it to Wakefield’s house, and Jenkins’s concealed missive to him. It had been unnerving to see his name upon that envelope.

More and more, his thoughts circled back to Wakefield.

The marquess was not one of these subtle madmen, showing a fine face in public and working from the shadows upon his designs. He was simply malevolent, a wicked soul, one of those freak remainders that the mathematics of genealogy produces. Certainly there was nothing else in the Wakefield line, long stewarded by sensibly avaricious aristocrats, to have foreshadowed his existence.

Lenox had first heard of him more than a decade before, when the young heir had been forced to leave Hatting House for the Continent — for Spain, if Lenox recalled correctly — after whipping a stable hand into a coma. He had been angry because one of his hunting dogs, a fool puppy, had eaten cyclamen and died. The stable hand had lived, though he had lost one of his eyes. Nor had this been a first incident. There had been some violence toward a housemaster at Winchester, and later Wakefield’s wife had left him two months into their marriage amid reports of intolerable cruelty, a young woman named Effie Maher, though not before conceiving the child who would become his son and heir. Much of the blame had attached to her, however, as she left; it always did to the woman, until the man was proved beyond doubt to be at fault.

That didn’t take long. At this time Travers-George was still only the heir to the marquessate, and therefore under some control by his family. When his father had died he had come into the full allocation of rights and perquisites belonging to his rank, however, and nobody had been alive any longer to check his behavior. If he had been born Jack Smith in Whitechapel he would have been hanged half a dozen times. He had thrashed a bobby; killed one of his own racehorses with a rifle out upon the turf at Goodwood; harassed a young woman who did not return his affections into retreating to Shropshire, terrified for her safety. Yorkshire was certainly too hot to hold him, and now he lived on the fringes of respectable society in London: His companions were men of the turf, or aristocrats drummed out of the military, or those striving families who lived on the edges of good neighborhoods and to whom the title of marquess inspired such awe that no imaginable behavior short of murder on their doorsteps could have barred him from their dinners and dances. And possibly not even murder on their doorsteps.

All of this would have been enough to draw Lenox’s attention — but what had made him so set upon seeing Wakefield in prison (he would have to be tried in the House of Lords, of course, which was what made his prosecution a trickier matter than that of Hughes, or Anson, or Wilchere, or any of the other six names on his list) was something else altogether.

At around the time that Lenox had first stood for Parliament, a servant in Wakefield’s household had died. Her name was Charity Boyd. By all accounts she had been a quiet, dull girl, with few references and entirely without connections, which explained why she had taken a position in a household that held a poor reputation among those in service.

She had died by falling from the roof of Wakefield’s house. The afternoon upon which this had happened had been a wet, windy one, and the girl’s duties did take her to the roof from time to time, if the fireplace inside was smoking.

But a man who lived across the street had sworn up and down that two people had been upon the roof, not five minutes before Charity Boyd’s body fell to the ground. The second had been a man with close-cropped black hair. This was a description that fitted the butler and the second footman, and for that matter any number of men in London — but also Wakefield himself, the owner of the house.

Jenkins had been on the point of arresting the marquess when suddenly the witness came into Scotland Yard, voluntarily, to retract his story. There was a great weal upon his cheek.

“Has the marquess intimidated you?” asked Jenkins.

Lenox had been sitting there. “No,” said the fellow stoutly. He was a bachelor who owned a string of jewelry shops in London.

“We can protect you.”

A smile ghosted to the surface of the man’s face, then disappeared. “I was mistaken. I think I must have been in shock, hearing this poor girl died. At any rate I know she was alone upon the roof.”

The case had fallen apart after that. There had been no violence on Charity Boyd’s body other than that which had been caused by the fall, but according to the coroner she had been active sexually. Lenox had seen her in the morgue. She had an ugly, angelic face, very pale. The fall had broken her neck.

A few weeks after the inquest upon her death, Wakefield had gone on a tour of the colonies with just two servants, leaving London for six months. While he was away he had made investments that had increased his already substantial fortune; by the time of his return, London had forgotten many of the whispers against him.

Lenox hadn’t.

One of his regrets during the years he had spent in Parliament was how little time he was able to devote to the lingering cases that had once been always half on his mind, a night or two every few months if he were lucky. Of the seven he had selected, Wakefield was the one he most despised. Perhaps it was because he could not forget Charity Boyd’s lifeless face. Perhaps it was because they belonged to the same sphere of social life, he and Wakefield. So much had been given to the marquess; and he had taken more. Jenkins hated him, too, and they long ago had formed an alliance of two to keep their eyes on the aristocrat.

As the carriage drove down Dacre Street, Lenox could picture Wakefield in his mind’s eye, short, immensely strong, with a permanently sunburned face, jet black hair, and blue, sparkling, mad eyes. He must have been the man to murder Thomas Jenkins — must have been, lurking near his home even if his servants hadn’t seen him for a few days. But why? Why now? What had Jenkins known?

They would learn the truth soon enough; Jenkins’s notes would tell it.

Lenox felt the tiny square envelope in his jacket pocket. It had contained two things, when they opened it on Portland Place: a red claim ticket without any identification as to its source, blank other than the usual overelaborate printed sequence of letters and numbers that luggage counters used, in this case SRKCLC#AFT119, and a scrap of paper, which said, See my notes. TJ.

“What do you think it is?” asked Nicholson.

Lenox shrugged. “We’d better look at his notes. Is the carriage ready?”

“I suppose he might have been carrying it for months.”

“No. It’s not worn enough to have lived in a shoe for that long.”

“Then we don’t know anything.”

“We know that somebody tried to look in his shoe, after he was dead,” said Lenox. “Did you know he kept things there?”

“No.”

“Nor did I. And yet you and I knew him pretty well.”

Nicholson took this in, considering it. “True,” he said.

“Were his pockets turned out when you found him?”

“No.” Nicholson opened the door of the carriage, inviting Lenox to step in ahead of him. “In fact, we were surprised to find so much money.”

“Whoever it was went straight for his shoe, then.” Lenox held the square notecard up in the air. “This was what they wanted. But they had to flee before they could find it.”

Now, driving through London, he wondered what they might discover in Jenkins’s notes. An entire case built against Wakefield, tidily written out? A few random thoughts? Another letter?

As they pulled into the horse enclosure of Scotland Yard, Lenox suddenly remembered something that had vanished from his mind completely until now: Two or three weeks before, when he had returned to the office from a midafternoon meeting with his solicitor, one of the clerks had informed him that Inspector Thomas Jenkins had called and left his card. At the time Lenox had assumed it was another gesture of reconciliation.

What if it had concerned the marquess?

Lenox was inclined to dismiss the thought. If it had been anything urgent, Jenkins would have called again, surely.

Or would he have? Perhaps the course of the investigation had become rapid, consuming, or perhaps he had decided that Lenox was best left out of it — the final vestige of friendship on Jenkins’s side discarded at last.

That was an ungenerous thought toward the dead man. And almost certainly wrong. There was the note in his shoe, after all, and Thomas Jenkins had told Nicholson to get Lenox if anything should happen to him.

McConnell went with Jenkins’s body toward the morgue; Nicholson and Lenox climbed the empty stairwells and walked the empty corridors of the building, nodding at the few people who remained there on late duty. Jenkins’s office had been on a corner, with a view of the Thames. A sign of his status.

When they reached it, Nicholson turned on a lamp, which flooded the room with yellow light. The desk was crowded but tidy. An aquatint of the Queen was the only framed picture upon the walls.

Nicholson walked in, and Lenox followed him, determined to discover what was in his notes that had made it worth murdering an inspector of Scotland Yard.