The Fleet Street Murders (20 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I

t hung together in his head, the whole thing, but only tenuously—a number of disparate facts that couldn’t bear much weight, that only hinted at the truth, but that together seemed definite. For instance, as he worked it through in his mind he remembered that Smalls’s mother had mysteriously been relieved of a hundred-pound debt. Mightn’t Barnard have paid that? If he had, then Smalls would have only felt comfortable leaving a veiled clue (the coins) rather than an outright declaration.

Then there was Carruthers’s article about the Mint, of which Barnard had been head! He must find that. Could it be the motive—that Carruthers, a corrupt and corruptible soul, was trying to blackmail Barnard because he had discovered the man’s theft from the Mint?

“Poole is innocent,” muttered Lenox under his breath. Then in a louder voice he said, “Stop the carriage!”

He ran inside and took from a locked door in his desk the one-page file on Barnard he had compiled from his hundreds of pages of facts collecting and speculation and read it, searching for a clue to Winston Carruthers’s murder—and to Hiram Smalls’s murder.

The file distilled all of the crimes in which he had discovered Barnard’s involvement—or thought he had—and combined notes on them with a biographical sketch. The most elusive part of his research for the latter concerned Barnard’s recent time at the head of the Royal Mint, which was a well-guarded place both physically and informationally—a yellowing building on Little Tower Hill, near the Tower of London, which stood behind a tall wrought-iron fence, regal and, in a busy street, silent. Inside, delicate machinery converted bars of pure gold and silver into exactly weighted coins.

Digging further into the past Lenox had found, however, that Barnard’s tracks were everywhere. Lenox kept a file of London’s unsolved crimes, including both ones he had worked on and others, and so far he had attached roughly one in every nineteen to Barnard. It didn’t sound like much until one took in the immense variety and size of that file. There was the Astor Grange fire, not five miles from the city, when thousands of pounds’ worth of rare letters from Isaac Newton to his puritanical father were thought to have burned; Barnard had been staying with the private collector of the letters at the time and was well known to be fascinated by the history of Newton, who had himself once been Master of—yes, the Royal Mint. That was the higher end of things. There were also gin drunks found dead in alleyways, illegal casinos raided and their monies confiscated by people almost certainly impersonating officers of Scotland Yard, a thousand minor crimes and a hundred major ones all leading back to one man.

Lenox had for years known Barnard differently, as a politician and businessman with an ostentatious but also genuinely beautiful house off of Grosvenor Square, a place large enough to host one of London’s most famous balls. That annual event aside, however, his commonplace birth in Manchester had prevented his access to the highest tiers of society. Instead he lived in an aristocratic demimonde, the wives of his colleagues prejudiced against seeing him socially. His friends had been snobbishly chosen, men with titles and standing but also possessed of some fatal social flaw—no money, no intelligence, no scruples. He would drop their names, moving slightly higher with each new friendship, until he realized they were no good, when he would drop them instead.

When he had left Parliament for the Royal Mint, however, he had become difficult to ignore and had finally gained access to the best clubs and the best houses. There are many men who sit in Parliament, and some of them make soap; on the other hand the Mint has only one Master, and he is an exalted personage. It was at this time that Barnard had begun to court the unresponsive Lady Jane, whom Lenox had subsequently rescued from the fate of being one of the richest women in the city.

Even then, though, there had been one peculiarity about Barnard: It was a common parlor game across London to guess from which obscure source his wealth had come. At twenty-six he had been a shipping house’s clerk. He quit that job and four years later bought the shipping house. His activities in the intervening time were utterly mysterious. At the age of thirty-three he had entered Parliament.

Then, just over a year ago, Lenox had been investigating the murder of a young maid who had been in Barnard’s employ. The man himself had no involvement in the matter (Lenox had since had plenty of opportunities to observe and note how clean Barnard kept his own hands) but almost incidentally the detective had discovered that a sum of nineteen thousand pounds was missing from the Mint’s new batch of currency. Such a small sum, in the context of the vast numbers involved, and yet such a large sum in the context of the world! Exeter and his family might have lived on it their whole lives! It was this nineteen thousand pounds that had changed Lenox’s opinion of Barnard—before, he had seen him as a petty, vain, but tolerable man. Now Lenox recognized him to be perhaps the most powerful and dangerous man in London.

There was no doubt of it—Barnard was a fiendishly clever sod, and he had played his hand very carefully and very well over the years. Now Winston Carruthers and Simon Pierce were dead because of him, and perhaps Hiram Smalls and Inspector Exeter, too.

But why? He remembered Dallington’s crucial bit of information—Carruthers was corruptible. Had Barnard for some reason bribed the man and then elected to silence him?

Lenox scanned the rest of the sheet, his private and carefully compiled dossier. For muscle Barnard used the Hammer Gang, a group of East Londoners each with a green tattoo of a hammer curled around one eyebrow. Though he had a large staff in his home and at the Mint, he didn’t seem to have any particular trusted assistant.

Then something clicked into place—
No green,
the end of Hiram Smalls’s letter had said. Could it have been a reference to the tattoo? In effect, “Don’t get your tattoo before you pass this final test and gain entry to the Hammer Gang”? If so, Smalls had evidently failed the last test—and paid a high price for his failure. It seemed like a plausible interpretation of that mysterious phrase
No green,
in particular because Barnard probably knew by now that his association with the Hammers was no longer secret. He couldn’t have the man who killed Simon Pierce bear a tattoo that would link them.

Geneva—what could be there? Since retiring from the Mint (doubtless much richer than when he had begun the job, thought Lenox bitterly) he had been consulting with the government on several minor issues but had in general been very quiet.

It was ominous.

All of this flurried through Lenox’s mind in a matter of moments as he held the single sheet that defined George Barnard’s misdeeds. Then he thought that the case needed more than he and Dallington could do and called for his carriage.

It was a long drive to his destination, perhaps thirty minutes. Oxley Crescent was a small neighborhood on the southern edge of London, full of closely spaced but pleasant houses, each with a small porch and garden in front. It was to a white house with dark shutters and a charmingly askew chimney that Lenox came when he needed Skaggs.

Skaggs’s wife answered the door, an insistent and gregarious creature who first shed a tear over poor Inspector Exeter, then scolded Lenox for coming to take her husband away again, and finally insisted he kiss the baby slung low on her hip, all as a toll before he could get through to the house.

Rupert Skaggs, a man who had once been the best middleweight boxer for a two-mile radius, was fearsome looking, with a bald head, a fat, intelligent face, and a long scar across the left side of his neck, but in truth his wife and his three children had lent him some docility, and he was quite happy in his little home. His looks still often came in handy, however; he was the best private investigator in England, if you asked Lenox. Once Skaggs had found a job as a waiter in order to gather information for him, and since then Lenox had never doubted him. He was forced to pay for Skaggs out of his own pocket, but then, he always reasoned, what higher purpose than justice was money for? Besides, less loftily, Skaggs always saved him so much time and effort—much of the unrewarding work of detection belonged to him, under Lenox’s supervision.

“Hello, Mr. Lenox,” said Skaggs with a pipe in one hand. He had come onto the porch at his wife’s call.

“How do you do, Mr. Skaggs?”

“Passably well. I haven’t seen you for some time.”

Now, this was true—and true because of Dallington. Lenox shifted slightly. “No, and I’m very sorry to call on you so late in the evening. I hope I haven’t interrupted supper?”

“No, not quite yet.”

“That’s all right then.”

“Will you come in, Mr. Lenox? Business has been going well, but I always enjoyed our work together. Thank you for the silver rattle you sent after Emily was born.”

They walked inside and sat together in Skaggs’s business room, a small square space at the very front of the house that just barely fit two chairs and a table.

“You’re quite welcome, I’m sure—and in fact I come on work today, too.”

“What sort of work?”

“You’ve heard about Inspector Exeter?”

“Aye, I have. It’s very sad,” said Skaggs solemnly.

“It is,” agreed Lenox.

“Are you trying to find out who killed him?”

“I think I know, in fact.”

“Do you!?”

“Perhaps—yes, I think so.”

“How may I help, Mr. Lenox?”

“I need you to go to Geneva, to follow a man.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

L

enox sat with Skaggs for some time, giving him all the details about Barnard’s flight across the Channel (because Skaggs had once helped Lenox track Barnard once before, he wasn’t surprised to be spying on such an illustrious man), and then left Oxley Crescent. He was due to see Lady Jane that evening, but his mind was racing. Instead he had his carriage drop him at McConnell’s house, sending it home with a message to Jane that he would be an hour or so later than he had promised.

“Hullo,” said the doctor with plain surprise when Lenox came into the drawing room.

“How are you? How is Toto?”

“She’s sleeping at the moment.”

“I know it’s late, but I wondered whether you might go see Carruthers’s rooms with me now? There should still be a constable on duty, watching them.”

“Gladly,” said McConnell, standing up. “I don’t need my medical kit for any reason?”

“Well—perhaps. Just in case.”

“It’s by the door. Let me fetch it.”

“Shall we walk? I sent my horses home.”

“To be sure.”

A little while later the two men had set out for the dead man’s apartments and were talking seriously about Gerald Poole. Lenox still didn’t want to tell anybody about his suspicions of George Barnard, a well-respected man, though he could scarcely hide his revulsion when the name came up in conversation. Now, however, he focused on Poole’s innocence rather than Barnard’s guilt. He explained to the doctor his theory that Pierce’s murder was a cover-up for Carruthers’s, a red herring.

“It strikes me as crucial that Carruthers’s hands were inky and there was a pen on the table but no paper close at hand.”

“You think the person who stabbed him took the paper?”

“Yes, I do, and it seems beyond chance that Carruthers should have been writing a paper that the murderer wanted just when the man came in.”

“What about Pierce?”

“Nothing missing from his house, which Smalls couldn’t have entered anyway, or he would have been discovered. Pierce had evidently been reading, after a week that was in fact rather less busy than usual at work.”

“I see.”

“Finally—could Smalls have been anything other than hired help? I have a difficult time believing that he would have any cause for revenge against Pierce, a mostly anonymous journalist.”

The house in which Carruthers had kept his rooms was a low-slung place, brown on the front, with three floors and perhaps five tenants, if anybody lived in the basement. The door was open when Lenox tried the handle, and he and McConnell followed a soft noise up two flights of stairs.

The noise turned out to be the sonorous snoring of a sleeping constable, a portly gentleman with a red face who was sitting on a chair in front of a closed door.

“Excuse me?” said Lenox in a soft voice.

The constable fairly jumped out of his seat. After a few furious shakes of his head he seemed to return to the world. “Who are you?” he said.

Lenox stuck out his hand. “My name is Charles Lenox, and this is my colleague Dr. Thomas McConnell.”

“Pleasure,” McConnell murmured.

“Inspector Jenkins sent word, I hope, that I might be coming by?”

The constable rubbed his eyes and blinked very fast, then gave his head a few more furious shakes, as if he were trying to teach it a lesson for falling asleep, and then said, “Oh, quite, quite. The door is open. Shall I come in with you?”

“Only if you like,” said Lenox.

“Perhaps I’ll just sit here and—and watch out for everything?”

“All right.”

The apartment they entered was, Lenox assumed, as Carruthers had left it. There were three connected rooms, all decorated in the same rich, cloying style, with gilt everywhere, clothes lying at random on the floor and the tables, and expensive-looking liqueurs strewn among a vast number of books and newspapers. It looked to Lenox like an indulgent life, one perhaps made possible—or at any rate deepened in its luxury—by its inhabitant’s corruption.

“He died here,” said Lenox, pointing to a large round table near the fireplace.

McConnell, his leather kit in his right hand, looked the area over. “No blood.”

“He would have slumped forward, I suppose, and the blood would have fallen down the back of his shirt but no farther.”

Lenox went over all the rooms vary carefully, pulling out books and riffling through them, using a match to explore under tables and chairs, raking through the coals of the fireplace, and checking behind pictures for any bumps. McConnell meanwhile went through Carruthers’s medicine chest.

“He had a touch of the gout,” said McConnell when they met at the door again. “Nothing much else.”

“I’m not surprised, with all the champagne and rich food here.”

“Did you discover anything?”

“One thing—in the bedroom there’s a square patch of floor where the wood is much darker than everywhere else in the room, as if the sun had never hit it.”

“Oh?”

“He must have moved something recently. I just wonder . . .”

“What?”

“Perhaps he saw his enemy coming and moved his files as insurance. It’s a bit surprising that none of these chests contains a single note about his work, isn’t it? One sheet, yes, but the murderer would have had a difficult time escaping with a chest of files.”

“Of course.”

“Would you mind stopping by his office with me? It’s just in Fleet Street.”

“Not in the slightest.”

They left the apartment and passed the constable, who was again peacefully asleep; in the street they hailed a cab. Rain had started to fall, the dark night illuminated only by smudges of bright yellow light from the blurred streetlamps.

Mr. Moon was working late, putting the paper to bed. He was far from happy to see Lenox but impatiently agreed that the two men could look into Carruthers’s office.

“Where is it?” Lenox asked.

“You’ll have to figure that out for yourself,” said Moon.

As they walked out Lenox and McConnell both started to chuckle, and as they went down the hall they were laughing heartily at Moon’s rudeness.

Eventually they did find Carruthers’s office, which had a pleasant view of Fleet Street. Unfortunately, the room was tidy and utterly bland, without so much as a stray sheet of paper blemishing the three clean desks. All of the drawers were empty, except for pens, ink, pencils, and pieces of string, and the bookshelf had only a dictionary on it.

“It’s a marvel it’s so clean,” said Lenox. “After that apartment.”

“Perhaps he didn’t spend much time here?”

“Or else he liked a Spartan office, whatever his home was like.”

“It’s a shame.”

“Or else . . .” Lenox hailed a passing man. “Excuse me, but did Winston Carruthers have another office?”

“Who are you?”

“Charles Lenox. I’m looking—”

The man grinned. “The detective, yes. I don’t know about another office, unless you mean the empty room that was technically his just there, but he had only one office—the Cheese.”

“The Cheese?” said McConnell.

“Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.”

Lenox laughed. “Thank you.”

He remembered Dallington’s account of the pub, with its famous buck rabbit (toast drowned in beer and cheese) and its talkative tender, Ransom. “One more stop?” he asked.

“To be sure.”