The Fleet Street Murders (24 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

B

arnard shouted, “Run!” and, clutching his stomach, turned and bolted before Lenox could reload.

The two men sprinted away, and Lenox got to his feet, reloaded the tiny gun, and started after them. Jenkins’s loud footsteps were pounding toward the noise, and at the door to Barnard’s office the two men met.

“That way!” said Lenox.

It was to no avail. They searched the building’s every hall, and in two or three minutes police constables were swarming the place. They found nothing, other than a vault left half open.

Lenox and Jenkins went out to the courtyard, where Graham was waiting. A trio of constables rushed to Jenkins and reported that they had found nothing.

“Damn it!” said Jenkins, looking hopelessly in every direction. “They’ve simply vanished! We had men on every block, at every exit! Where on earth did they go?”

“They must still be in the building,” said one of the constables.

Suddenly Lenox saw it. “No,” he said. “The river. They’ve gone by boat.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am. Carruthers’s article about the Mint—all the hidden passageways. It’s like the Tower of London. There must be a tunnel or a gate leading directly onto the water.”

“Christ,” muttered Jenkins. “We must put in for a boat from the Yard.”

“There’s no time for that,” said Lenox. “Will you lend me two men?”

“Of course,” said Jenkins. “What do you mean to do?”

“For a dozen reasons they can only be headed east, out of town, rather than west and back through the heart of London. We’ll follow them.”

“Why are you so sure they’re going east?”

Impatiently Lenox ticked off the reasons. “The Thames is only a few hundred yards wide in London—they’d be far too conspicuous. They’ll want to unload somewhere quiet—again east. Barnard as much as admitted he’s leaving England—the eastern coast.”

As if by confirmation of all this, a constable came sprinting toward Jenkins and breathlessly told him that Barnard and his men had been spotted on a makeshift barge but that it was already out of sight.

“Two men?” said Lenox.

“I’m coming, too,” said Jenkins. “Althorp, you stay here and manage the men. Send a team down east in a carriage to look for the barge and track their progress. I’m coming, Lenox.”

“As am I,” said a voice behind them in the courtyard.

It was Dallington.

“How did you discover us?” asked Lenox.

Dallington laughed. “I have to confess—I followed Jenkins. My man was watching the Yard. I couldn’t stand being outside of things. Where are we going?”

There was no time to be upset with Dallington, and in a way Lenox admired his pluck. Soon they had organized a small party, and, running the short distance to the river, Lenox found the smallest, quickest skiff he could, cut it loose, and left Graham behind with money to pay its owner. He, Jenkins, Dallington, and two constables boarded the skiff and instantly started to push out into the wide, rippling Thames.

For twenty minutes there was nothing. They took turns poling the lively little bark down the river, sticking close to the side and peering keenly forward.

“Damned cheek,” said Dallington indignantly. “To think of him stealing from the Mint!”

“It’s the brazenest sainted thing I ever heared o’,” said one of the constables, his voice almost tinged with admiration.

“He was the only man in the nation who could have pulled it off,” said Jenkins anxiously. “Before this is all over you have to explain it to me, Charles.”

“Yes,” murmured Lenox. He was less full of chat than the others; he had not thirty minutes before shot a man with whom he had shared port, at whose table he had dined, with whom he had played cards. He hoped passionately that they might catch him, but also that Barnard might still be alive when they did.

Dawn began to glimmer and rise. It came first as a lightening above the horizon, and then the dark pulled back to reveal a pink and purple range of clouds. It was bitterly cold on the water.

Then they came around a bend in the river and saw it, as big as life.

It was a small red barge, which sat low in the water; it had pulled to the left side of the river now, where a sandy embankment threatened to ground it. The barge’s virtue was readily apparent—four small but very heavy-looking crates stood at the edge of the deck, next to a ramp that extended from its side.

There were five men on deck. Barnard was sitting against the cabin’s outer door, directing the others with his left hand, clutching his right to his stomach. The other four men were engaged in stopping the boat and readying the crates to be off-loaded.

It was a good location, lying as it did in the fields between two villages, only two miles east of London’s outer limits; for all Lenox knew, Barnard might have bought these fields. There was a dray cart with two horses before it standing on the bank and a single man in black holding their reins.

“The devil,” said Dallington under his breath.

“I’ll call to him,” said Jenkins.

“No,” Lenox quickly interjected. “He hasn’t seen us yet. Stop poling.”

It was true. Their skiff was floating along the opposite side of the river, and the men on the barge were so absorbed in their work that they hadn’t noticed the only other boat in sight.

“Look,” Dallington offered, “the hammer above that chap’s eyebrow.”

“Indeed,” said Jenkins quietly. “George Barnard and the Hammer Gang. It will make for a tidy arrest.”

Lenox nodded but had a grim feeling it might not be so simple. “Pole along this bank, and then we’ll run over there as quickly as we can, try to catch them by surprise.”

Soon they had done it, and the two constables were rowing as hard as they could where it was too deep to pole the skiff along.

“You have a pistol?” Lenox asked Jenkins.

“Yes, I brought—”

Then a cry went up on the barge. They had seen the skiff, and Barnard, his face both livid and shocked, began to shout at them. Twenty yards off, Lenox heard him yell, “Leave the last crate! Get me off of here!”

This close Lenox saw the hammer tattooed above the eyes of the men on the barge, and very fleetingly he thought of Smalls and his unfortunate mother.

A bullet cracked him back to attention; it came from Barnard, from the gun he had trained on Lenox at the Mint, and it splintered off a great chunk of the skiff’s hull.

“Get down!” cried Jenkins.

Lenox reached over and pulled on Dallington’s arm—the young man had been standing agog, staring at the barge—and shouted, “Leave off the rowing! Fire back!”

Another bullet flew by them, this time whistling over their heads. A third took out part of the skiff’s starboard side, crackling and singeing the wood there. All of these came from Barnard. Jenkins fired back, but the bullet skittered harmlessly over the river.

“We’re taking on water,” said one of the constables.

“Hold on,” said Lenox. “We can make it to the bank. Try to pull us under the barge, where they can’t shoot at us.”

“Look!” said Dallington softly.

A fourth bullet hit the boat, only narrowly missing one of the constables, but then Barnard turned to stare at what the men on the skiff were looking at.

The four Hammers were in utter disarray. One of them was fleeing west, back toward London, sprinting as fast as he could. One was trying to lug Barnard off the boat to where the three crates rested (the fourth still stood on the deck of the barge). But it was the other two who were of the most interest. One of them had punched the driver of the dray in the face, and the two men were loading one of the crates onto the cart.

“Stop!” shouted Jenkins.

“Stop!” shouted Barnard almost simultaneously.

These were both excellent pieces of advice, no doubt, but they went unheeded. One of the two men was in the back of the cart, lovingly bracing the crates of white notes against the bumps to come in the road, while the other was furiously whipping the aged, stultified horses, who hadn’t been especially perturbed by the gunshots and were only now drafted into motion by the blows on their flanks.

Soon the fourth Hammer, the one who had been helping Barnard, gave that up as a bad job. The third crate had cracked and split upon hitting the bank, and he ran to it and stuffed great thick chunks of money into his pockets and then ran off westward, too.

“Get them!” said Jenkins to the constables. The skiff was pulling up alongside the barge.

The two constables waded into the shallow water and started to run after the criminals. Barnard, meanwhile, had staggered off the boat and was filling his own pockets with money. He started to run east, but Dallington, spry and youthful, caught him almost instantly, tackling him to the ground, and a moment later Lenox and Jenkins had joined him.

Barnard was bleeding profusely, sweat upon his brow, and the impotent gun was still clutched in his hand.

“You’re under arrest,” said Jenkins.

Suddenly everything seemed very quiet. The dray had turned behind a distant row of barns and gone out of sight. Lenox looked up and around him: the barge floating gently at the bankside; the skiff splintered and slowly sinking; the brilliant gold glimmer of light just coming up over the deep green fields and the gray, glossy water. It was beautiful.

“Lenox, you bastard,” said Barnard and fainted.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

W

hy did he have Smalls killed?” asked Dallington.

He, Jenkins, Graham, and Lenox were sitting in Lenox’s library, gulping cup after cup of hot tea with milk and chewing on sweet rolls. It was much later, just past ten in the morning. For the past several hours the wheels of justice had unhurriedly cranked. The two men who had fled on foot were soon run down by the two constables from the skiff, and George Barnard was receiving medical attention as the entire police force buzzed about his identity and potential crimes. Still missing, on the other hand, were the pair of Hammers who had escaped in the dray cart. They had dropped one box of notes by the side of the road but still bore with them thousands of pounds. All across Britain and the Continent police forces were looking for them.

“Panic and caution,” Lenox answered. “Exeter was releasing all of those cryptic, confident statements to the press, and Barnard must have felt the stakes were too high for much to depend on an untested man with uncertain allegiances, who had probably only killed Simon Pierce to clear his mother’s debt.”

“Perhaps to enter the Hammer Gang as well,” Dallington added.

“Exeter,” murmured Jenkins thoughtfully, his coffee cup paused just before he was going to sip it.

The three men pondered their late colleague together; going through all their minds, no doubt, even Graham’s, was some amalgam of pity, sorrow, and reminiscence. He hadn’t been a perfect man, but he had been at heart a decent one, in over his head.

“Walk us through it all one time,” said Dallington. “Won’t you, Charles?”

So Lenox again told the narrative, beginning with the dead maid in George Barnard’s house, which seemed like decades ago, and then running through Gerald Poole, through Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, through Mr. Moon, through his emergency trip from Stirrington to London, and ending with his confrontation at the Mint, loosening for his friends the delicate threads that tied the whole nasty business together.

“Well,” said Jenkins at length, “it’s all fearfully complicated. We’ll need to speak again, no doubt, but at the moment I must be off.”

“I’m going, too,” said Dallington. “I’m dead tired.”

“Off to sleep?” asked Lenox.

Dallington shifted from one foot to the other. “Newgate, actually.” He picked up his hat. The white carnation, the eternal marker of his compact dapperness, stood in his breast. “Bye, then.”

The two men left, and only Graham and Lenox remained.

“He’s going to see Gerald Poole, poor lad,” said Lenox.

“What will become of him, sir?”

“Of Poole? I don’t know. I hope he doesn’t hang for it, with all my heart.”

“Indeed, sir. If I might ask”—Graham spoke gingerly, his quick intelligence looking for the most delicate words—“what are your plans? At the moment?”

Lenox laughed. It was typical of Graham’s tact to ask an ambiguous question, one that might have been about either whether he wanted another cup of coffee or whether he was pulling up roots to pan for gold in the wilds of California.

“We were going to go to Morocco, weren’t we?”

Indeed, they had intended to, although as it so often did in his life his wild imaginings about the journey he wanted to take had been blocked off by reality.

“Yes, sir, we had discussed it,” said Graham. “Although if—”

“No,” said Lenox firmly. “We must go. Have you bought the tickets? Spring, I think.” Aside from greatly anticipating the fun of the trip, the symbolism of it meant something to Lenox—a final bachelor jaunt, a final trip that the two friends, who had for twenty years seen each other nearly every day, could make together.

“Yes, sir.” Graham smiled. “If you’ll excuse me, I must return to the East End, sir, to see about the skiff.”

“Why don’t you sleep first?”

“With your permission, I would rather go now, sir. I left a note at the pier but fear it may not be sufficient to quiet the owner’s worry.”

“As you please, of course. You have enough to offer him? I jolly well hope there wasn’t anything of his on board,” said Lenox. “Here, take a bit more money.”

So Graham left, and Lenox, though tired, wished as soon as he was alone to see Lady Jane. He straightened his admittedly disarrayed habiliment and walked next door.

Jane was in her drawing room, perched upon her famous rose-colored sofa, having a cup of tea.

“Hello, Charles!” she said, greeting him. “I’m so happy to see you.”

“You, too—happier than you know!”

“Oh? I’ve just woken up from the most wonderful rest, you can’t imagine,” said Lady Jane, yawning in a self-consciously demure fashion, then laughing at herself.

“I’m glad of it. I, on the other hand, was shot at more than once last night.”

“What!”

Lenox hastened to ease her mind, promising her that he had never been in real danger—which was, of course, something of a fib—and then explaining the entire strange circumstance of his encounter with George Barnard.

“Imagine it,” she said wonderingly. The shock was written on her face. “One saw him everywhere. I daresay I’ve known him for a decade!”

“Yes,” said Lenox grimly. “It’s a bad business.”

“Thank goodness I was never close to him. I didn’t accept, of course, but you know he wanted to marry me!”

“I can’t entirely fault him for that, I must say.”

Lady Jane laughed and kissed Lenox on the cheek. “You’re a dear,” she said, though she still looked baffled, even slightly haunted, by the revelation of Barnard’s character. “Although, were you really safe?”

Over the next few days, the history of Inspector Jenkins’s pursuit of George Barnard became public, and Barnard exchanged the name of the man who had murdered Inspector Exeter for the promise that he wouldn’t die for his crimes. The instant and total hatred of the Hammer Gang was his other prize, and rumors of a fabulously large bounty on Barnard’s head grew. He lived in deep solitude in Newgate Prison, allowing his food to come only in the hands of a certain waitress at a fashionable restaurant, refusing all visitors, and by all accounts rejecting any other kind of cooperation with the Yard.

The case became remarkably famous in a very short time; Lenox was just able to manage his absence from the reports, and in not very much time at all, perhaps seventy-two hours, Jenkins had been promoted to chief inspector, at least partly as a memorial to Inspector Exeter.

If there was a fallout in Fleet Street, it was nothing to the swift and ceaseless chatter of the upper classes, who moved between dinner parties in Belgravia and Berkeley Square, propelled out in the terrible cold only by a desire to commiserate with their friends over the late, despised George Barnard—for he could not have been more dead to them if he were dead.

“I never had him in
my
house,” sniffed many great ladies, though it must be owned that the great majority of them had. Meanwhile the men in their clubs chomped fretfully on cigars and said things like, “Damn country is going to hell, been saying it for years. I expect the French to invade by the hour, I tell you,” which was very consoling and pleasant to contemplate.

George Barnard had, in fact, eventually become part of London’s highest society. His ball, an annual event of great significance, had hosted royalty, and his country house in Surrey had given shooting to any number of dukes, who had fairly lined up in past years to slaughter his game. Yet he went entirely unmourned, for he had never precisely been one of them. As Lady Jane put it so succinctly, it was hard to see whether he reflected worse on them or they on themselves. The few people who couldn’t help but own up to acquaintance with Barnard, because in better days they had drunk gallons of his champagne and sworn lifelong friendship with him, insisted strenuously that it had all been financial—that they had simply been friends “in the City”—which was some marginal exoneration.

None of this concerned Lenox very much. He was constantly closeted with Jenkins, and sometimes Dallington and McConnell as well, and soon the assizes met. They convicted George Barnard and Gerald Poole within forty-eight hours of each other. The former would never leave prison; the latter was told he had to go to the colonies for a period of not less than fifteen years. The only people who saw him off at the dock were Dallington and one very old woman, who kept calling him by his father’s name, Jonathan.

Martha Claes disappeared. She had promised to testify against Poole but had fled in the dark of the night, past—well, past a sleeping constable, who was situated outside of Carruthers’s rooms and didn’t hear her drag her family and their things out of the door. There was a watch for her on the train lines and at the ferry ports of the south coast, but eventually everyone concluded that one of the country’s vast cities, Leeds or Liverpool or Birmingham or Bristol, had swallowed her and her family up and wouldn’t regurgitate them any time soon.

Finally, it emerged that the poor, splintered skiff had been the property of a chap named Frank Pottle, who lived on the river, a junk and trash collector who found stuff along the Thames and fixed it to sell. Far from being angry, he was ecstatic that his property had been part of such excitement, and according to Graham, Pottle was the hero of every bankside pub in London; he hadn’t bought himself a drink in several days. He received the money to replace his skiff with good grace (and in frankness it was more than the skiff was worth, which improved his outlook on the matter) but vowed that it would be put toward a different use—he wanted to open a gin bar and mingle the satisfactions of his personal life with those of a public career.

And so, Frank Pottle was happy.