The Last Passenger - A Prequel

by Charles Finch

  “I see.”

  “I’ve never lived anywhere but London, either.”

  “Where would you set up this inn if you had your preference?”

  “Gloucestershire,” Hemstock said immediately. He rattled his flask, which had not refilled itself since he last checked it a few seconds before. “No question.”

  “You are very partial to Gloucestershire?”

  “I couldn’t give a fig for Gloucestershire. It shouldn’t even be spelt that way, in my opinion. Damned nuisance.”

  “Then why pick it?”

  “There’s a coaching inn called the Fox and Grapes there, on the road north from Gloucester itself. I happen to know the fellow who owns it. He’d sell to me, I think. Little house above. Prettiest river you ever saw nearby, too. Full of trout.”

  “You fish?”

  “I don’t mind sleeping with a fishing pole near me from time to time,” Hemstock said, and laughed his coughing laugh at his own wit.

  Graham returned with the coffee and food. Lenox hadn’t known he was hungry, but realized now that in the course of his long day, which had involved dead end after dead end as they tried to identify the members of this gang across the way, he had forgotten to eat. There was a Welsh rarebit, and he fell upon it with pleasure. Even Hemstock consumed a pickled egg.

  The hours passed slowly, until at last they all dispersed and went home, Willikens and Swain (at Lenox’s insistence) to lodgings nearby, each with a private room—a luxury that made them both suspicious, to the degree that in the boy’s case it had taken the active ire of Stevenage’s constable to get him to use it rather than sleeping in the streets.

  A restless day passed, until the next night at eight they reconvened.

  They had known it was inevitable they must attract the notice of the coffeehouse’s owner. Having reconciled themselves to this, they set out to win him over, and succeeded without overmuch difficulty. He was a Mr. Collins, a red-cheeked, constantly moving chap of fifty, with bright white hair, and through constant custom, good tipping, and a titillating hint at their official business, they had made him into a friend and confidant.

  But they hoped to keep their repeated presence there obscure to all but him, and this evening sat at a different table, at a different angle, than the night before.

  It was much colder out. Willikens claimed he was perfectly warm, but Lenox went out at twenty past eight to buy a potato and check for himself.

  It did seem warm enough there—just by the low fire, next to the good smell of soft potatoes and butter. Still, he was concerned enough about the situation that he missed what Willikens was trying to say to him as he handed over his change.

  “What was that?” Lenox asked.

  The boy repeated his words, with a soft, unflappable urgency, which would have done credit to a seasoned police officer. “This. Is. Him.”

  It was all Lenox could do not to let his head fly up. But he managed to thank Willikens with a decent simulation of nonchalance and open his potato in its wax paper to take a bite.

  He was dressed down himself, Lenox. Very slowly, he glanced over and saw a man with surprisingly distinguished gray hair curling out from underneath a top hat, approaching them from the west in a long brown mackintosh. The man stopped and waited on the corner, not ten feet off, while two carriages moved briskly past under the yellow gas lamp and then crossed over to the White Horse.

  They had planned for this. Lenox hurried inside and gave Hemstock and Graham a sign with his right hand.

  Two fingers. The older man. Headed into the tavern.

  Each now had their job to do. Graham went to find the constable on his beat who had promised to assist them if they actually saw anyone. Willikens waited fifteen minutes, hung a Back Shortly sign on his cart, and retreated to his room—whose privacy and warmth he had come to enjoy, Lenox had gleaned this evening, and blast it if he wasn’t going to have to figure out where the boy lived and solve that problem, too, but it wasn’t one for this very moment, he must focus, focus …

  The young detective’s heart was racing. He had been right. Or adjacent to right; they were at the least far closer than they had been before tonight to discovering the identity of Eli Gilman’s killer.

  Then, not five minutes later, after some comings and goings, Swain’s candle came alight.

  That meant both the conductor and the gray-haired man were present. After two days without a sign of either, both had appeared in immediate succession. The Patriots Abroad must have been meeting, Lenox realized. Swain’s candle went out after thirty seconds but following a short interval flared alive again, as if he were playing with a lucifer match.

  This was exactly what they had instructed him to do, so that it would not appear conspicuous when he lit the candle.

  “We must go across,” Lenox said in a low, urgent voice.

  “We should wait for Graham to come back with the constable,” said Hemstock.

  “There isn’t time.”

  “Time? They’ll be in there for hours. Anyhow—no—look, we’re twigged!”

  Lenox flew out of his chair, for just at that moment, two men appeared on the low rooftop of the tavern. It was the sheerest luck that Hemstock had seen it—he might have missed them so easily. Lenox had.

  “Damn it,” said Lenox. “They spotted us.”

  They ran outside. Hemstock took a small pistol from his hip pocket.

  “Stop! The law!” Lenox cried at the two men on the rooftop.

  But there was nothing compelling them to stop, and after the briefest of glances backward, the two men set off along the rooftops.

  Yet that glance! In it, Lenox had seen the face—the face of the murderer. Next to the gray hair and brown coat of his accomplice.

  They ventured out further into the street, Hemstock and Lenox, a mismatched pair. They were helpless to do anything. The men were already two houses down, running, full running, a clearer admission of guilt couldn’t be imagined, they were caught, but they were going to get away, because they were close to a dense cluster of rooftops, each with its own ladder. It would have taken twenty men to cover all the exits.

  It was maddening. So close; so far.

  But then, all of a sudden, in a huge surprising jerk—it must have been the ice, Lenox realized!—the dark-haired man, closer to the edge of the rooftops, lost his footing.

  Lenox didn’t see him fall, but he would never forget the hard, heavy sound of the body landing upon the ground halfway down the street ahead of them.

  The man with the gray hair looked over the edge, then back at them. His expression was feral with panic, fear, and self-preservation. After an instant he was off, picking his way very carefully this time along one rooftop and then disappearing down a stairwell and into the warren of the houses—gone, Lenox already suspected, forever.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  A difficult week ensued for Charles Lenox—sleepless, agitated, full of regrets. Again and again he thought of ways in which he ought to have ensured that Eli Gilman’s killer could have lived to meet justice. A constable at the White Horse. Someone on the roof to prevent such an easy escape. It gave him no pleasure that justice had likely been done; he wanted the full facts.

  Still, they were now all but sure that they had a name for the gray-haired accomplice: one Bert Smith, it would appear. The Yard had interviewed each of the so-called Patriots Abroad independently, and while they maintained a united front, to a man hotly denying any knowledge of the circumstances of Eli Gilman’s death, Stevenage suspected that the gray-haired man was the one person among their number they hadn’t been able to locate: Robert Smith, who went by Bert.

  They searched his rooms near the White Horse and found them abandoned, with only a few unilluminating odds and ends left. He had no close family or friends.

  As for the murderer himself, that was easier.

  Winfield Bell, slayer of eminent American, plummets to death!

  Full report inside; 16 individual illustrations of
fatal chase

  Inspectors Dunn and Hemstock lauded

  That was merely one headline that made the papers about the man named Winfield Bell.

  He had been an American, Bell, raised in Charleston before moving north at the age of fifteen to New York. There he had become involved with a gang of criminals operating from what had once been called Stuyvesant Meadows, now Tompkins Square. They knew this because Scotland Yard kept a file of all foreigners suspected of having fled America to avoid hanging; Bell disappeared shortly after the 1852 death of a shopkeeper, a murder for which he was the prime suspect.

  “A shame that nobody checked for his name in the rolls of the gangs here,” Mayne said as they were reviewing the case together, the small team investigating the Murder at Paddington.

  It was a dry, clear, cold day five days after Bell’s now infamous fall.

  “It would take hundreds of hours,” said Stevenage. “Besides which, any of them with half a brain change their name when they come here.”

  “Bell must have had a quarter of a brain, then,” said Mayne.

  “Less than that after the fall,” Hemstock said.

  “Hemstock, please,” said Mayne.

  “What! You try and stop seeing it.”

  Mayne shook his head but apparently forgave the insubordination on the grounds of Hemstock’s clear distress at the recollection. “Anyhow. The case may be resolved, but I would like to know more about Bell’s motivation. We cannot have every American politician who comes here murdered.”

  “For their part, the Patriots are scared witless,” Stevenage said. “They’ve stayed silent, but they know they’re being closely watched. I don’t think they’ll move a finger without asking our permission.”

  “Haase’s family will be paid a pension out of the railway fund,” said the man off to the side. Lenox glanced at him. He always looked familiar, somehow. From the theater some time perhaps. “It was voted yesterday.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Sir Richard. “His daughters were distrait. Poor girls, quite as they should be. And what about Hollis?”

  “He departs in a few weeks,” Lenox said. “I shall see him before then, I hope.”

  “He’s recovered?”

  “Mostly,” Lenox replied.

  “Good. Then see him out of the country as fast as possible, please.” Mayne closed the file he had. “The sooner this is behind us, the better. Find the gray-haired fellow one way or another. Smith. I don’t care how you do it. Dunn, you’re in charge of that. We need to give the Americans a satisfactory ending to this nasty business.”

  “Very good, sir. Though as far as I can see it’s all a matter of them killing each other.”

  “Be that as it may. Go on, then, thank you. Lenox, stay back, would you.”

  Lenox nodded good-bye to the other men as they left. Mayne didn’t look up; he was writing something. Nor did he speak when they were gone.

  Lenox waited, until at last Mayne handed him the paper upon which he had been writing and returned his pen to its stand.

  1: G. L. Pritts

  2: Y. Goodin

  3: J. Colbert

  —>

  4. S. Brush

  5. J. Barker

  6. C. Noel

  7. J. Dunn

  8: B. T. Jones

  9: Q. Jones

  10: R. H. L. Creeley

  “What is this?” said Lenox.

  “A list of my best inspectors.” Mayne pointed at the sheet and then looked Lenox straight in the eye. “The arrow is where you would be.”

  Lenox studied it. “Dunn is your seventh-best man?”

  “That’s your first question? Yes, he is. And what’s more he would be higher up than Noel if he weren’t so hard-headed. He’s logical, at least.”

  “I’m flattered,” said Lenox.

  “Are you? My hope was that you would be insulted. Shouldn’t you like to be first?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You might, if you come and work here.” A lengthy look passed between them. There was no need at all for Lenox to explain to Sir Richard Mayne why he could not. But Mayne was apparently counting on Lenox being monomaniacal enough to overcome his bone-deep class aversion to working for hire. “Consider it.”

  “I will. Thank you, Sir Richard.”

  “Fair warning: You will otherwise soon find me less amenable. Not out of spite. Your involvement has worked well twice. Three times if you count the Dorset business—though that was his own. Still, one time it will go wrong, and thirty people will arrive at my office to ask why the dilettante brother of an MP was allowed to interfere in Yard business.”

  Lenox nodded. “I understand.”

  Mayne stood up, ready to turn his attention to other matters, but took the time to add, “Dunn isn’t wrong about you, you know. He’s wrong in how he says it. But he’s not wrong.” Then he looked up. “What’s more, if you come, I can give you a budget to study crime. You needn’t take cases you don’t wish to. Merely consult. Build up that archive you’re always discussing. But with two or three intelligent clerks under you, good grammar school lads.”

  Lenox walked home, cold and full of complex feelings. He felt an overwhelming resistance to the idea of working for Scotland Yard, among the Dunns and Hemstocks of the world—but those last words of Mayne’s, the promise of building something real and lasting, tempted him more than he wished to admit. What an edifice he could construct with more help and more time!

  More immediate than any of this, however, was a determination to find the second man—not that he be found but that Lenox himself do it. (There was vanity for you.) The papers could detail Winfield Bell’s history with ostensible solemnity—their prurience showing right through the light topcoat of sobriety—and elegize Eleazer Gilman as a peaceful representative of an allied nation. They could decide that the matter was resolved.

  But for Lenox it was not.

  He returned home to find a friend and neighbor at his chessboard. Not Deere, though. It was Lady Jane.

  She looked pale, out of countenance. “Hello, Charles,” she said, rising. “I hope I am not intruding?”

  “Never in life.”

  She sat down again with her quiet, graceful smile. Mrs. Huggins had given her tea. She poured him a cup, and he took a grateful sip, his ears and nose still cold.

  “I came over because I have some business with you,” she said once he had sat down.

  “Do you? Not chess, I hope. Deere—Grey, rather—beats me often enough to suffice for both halves of the marriage, I should have thought.”

  “No, I loathe chess. Life is too short to play chess. Who told me that?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “Duch, perhaps. Anyhow, listen. Now that you have pushed this fellow off the chimney tops—”

  “Jane!”

  “I’m sorry—now that he has fallen”—and here she winked—“I wonder if you might really settle down to the business of Catherine Ashbrook.”

  “I didn’t push anyone off a building.”

  “I shall be sure to tell her that.”

  “You’re going to drive me around the bend. Anyhow why does it matter now?”

  “Because she is not short on suitors,” Lady Jane said. She seemed serious. “I do not impose her upon you, Charles—if you do not find her congenial. But if you do, I beg you would let me take the reins of your social calendar, just for these first weeks of November, before everyone goes off on their holidays.”

  He hesitated. He remembered with vividness that moment standing in front of his window late at night, the loneliness of it; the hunched man passing solitary down the snowy street.

  “Very well,” he said.

  She was well bred enough not to dwell on her victory. “Good. And now I must ask for your help.”

  “Anything, of course.”

  “It’s about James.”

  “Oh?”

  “They are going to ask him to leave. A wife in his regiment told me.” Lenox’s heart
fell. Deere hadn’t told her himself, then. “My question is how can I convince him to stay.”

  “To stay?”

  She nodded. She looked like misery incarnate—at least, to Lenox’s closely watchful eye. “I will tell you something that I cannot tell even my other friends.”

  “What?”

  “When he is gone—well, you cannot imagine feeling as alone as that. It is the very worst thing. He can’t leave. He can’t. And he won’t ask me to come to India. I’ll ask, and he’ll say no, and I’ll have to listen.”

  It had been many years since he had seen tears in her eyes for herself, perhaps even since some adolescent game in the gardens that had gone against her, so self-possessed was she in general—yet there they were, plump and unfallen in the corners of her eyes.

  He set down his cup of tea. “I’m so sorry, Jane. I can try to speak to him.”

  “Could you?”

  “And if it doesn’t work, we may hope that it is only for a short time.”

  She wiped her eyes. “Yes. All right. But would you try? I’m sure he’ll stay if he sees how very much it means to me. I’m sure he will.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  When Lenox looked back upon that November and December of 1855, it was for the month’s Mondays and Thursdays. It was upon these days each week that Kitty Ashbrook and her mother received callers between ten o’clock and one in the cozy, elegant, light-filled rooms they shared in Eaton Square.

  On the occasion of his first visit, it was Lady Jane who brought him. “I haven’t been invited,” he said when she proposed it.

  “You must join us here in the second half of the century, Charles.”

  “I’m more modern than you. Graham has just acquired a clothes press that runs by steam. Our ironing days are over.”

  “I was unaware that your ironing days had ever begun.”

  He frowned. “Well, not mine, specifically.”

  “Mrs. Huggins!” she called out gently.

  They were in Lenox’s breakfast room. The housekeeper appeared after a moment. “Yes, ma’am?” she said.

  “Are the girls downstairs using a steam press? Or ironing?”