The Last Passenger - A Prequel

by Charles Finch

  Batch laughed. “No, I doubt they would give you a very warm welcome.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “I can spare an hour if you like.”

  “I would be grateful.”

  “Let me fetch my coat.”

  They had spent so long staring at the White Horse, which lay on the busy corner of Whitechapel Street and Back Church Lane, that Lenox felt he knew it by heart: dark green paint, gold lettering, swinging sign painted with the white horse. In summer no doubt a few shrubs outside, but certainly not on this January morning.

  He was counting on it being quiet, and when they entered, they found that it was. An old woman was mopping the floors and wiping the tables; a few patrons, each alone, sat nursing gin.

  The bartender was younger than anyone else there—only seventy-five or so. “Help you,” he said to Batch, politely but firmly.

  “Yes,” said Batch. “We need to see the stairwell leading up to the roof.”

  Lenox expected some resistance, but Batch must have been well known; the man just nodded and led them to the back of the bar, past the dartboard and the tabletop skittles (“devil among the tailors” they called the game in these parts), past a last table with a pair of dice sitting in a diagonal of sunshine, waiting for the evening, and into a private room.

  PATRIOTS ABROAD, a silk banner proudly announced, in the colors and style of the American flag. It was hand sewn.

  “This is their private room?” Lenox asked the bartender.

  The courtesy extended to Batch was not his to call on, apparently—the bartender didn’t reply, and Lenox didn’t ask again.

  The old man did show them to a narrow door, about half the width of a normal door. “There you are,” he said, and turned and left the room without another word.

  “Well?” said Batch.

  “Up we go.”

  It was a bit strange to be in the White Horse for the first time. Lenox had not been part of the initial search for the gray-haired accomplice, his focus in those frenetic first moments resting with the two people he felt were under his protection, Swain and Willikens. Nor had he returned, however—and there he could blame himself for slackness.

  The rooftop of the White Horse was laid with an ancient worn-down brick, smooth enough that you might easily slip even were there no ice there at all. A thrill of horror ran through Lenox.

  Batch must have felt it, too. “Bit unsettling,” he said.

  There was a rail that came up to about Lenox’s chest. Higher than he expected. He leaned on it, looking out at the buildings that stretched for miles toward the West End. It was a clear view—new tenements, old brick façades, white stone balustrades. Each of the buildings housed some story, sad or cruel, upward or downward, a story involving cupidity or generosity, love or meanness. All of them had an element of poverty.

  How long could a society last when so many of its members clung to life in it so tenuously? It had been different when Lenox’s parents were young, he thought—but London had grown so huge and unwieldy and dense in the last fifty years. The world even now was very different than the one into which he had been born.

  Lenox and Batch tracked Bert Smith’s possible routes over the rooftop until Lenox had satisfied himself on that point. There were a dozen points of egress into the busy lanes behind Whitechapel, each the matter of scaling a few windows.

  “It would be easy even in the ice,” said Lenox.

  Batch nodded. “Yes.”

  “Yet I see where we made a mistake,” the young detective murmured, hands in his pockets.

  “Where?”

  “Eh? Oh.” It wasn’t what he had been thinking, actually, but he said, because he liked Batch, and because it had just occurred to him, “Very strange that they would go to such lengths to conceal who Gilman was on the train, yet then Bell would come out on a white horse, as memorable as you like.”

  Batch, with his fleshy, shrewd face, shrugged. “You must bear in mind that you are dealing with extremely stupid people.”

  Lenox emitted an involuntary bark of a laugh. “I’ve no doubt. Still, I would be curious to see these white horses. I never did.”

  “I’ll ask old Rutherford if you like.”

  “The bartender?”

  “The very one.”

  “Good, let’s go inside.”

  Batch didn’t need a second invitation. “Oy,” he said to the man behind the bar when they had reentered it. “Where are the white horses?”

  “What white horses?”

  “From the stables.”

  Rutherford shook his head. “Ain’t none.”

  “How’s that?” said Batch.

  “Quoit died about nineteen month back—Whitey before that. Been looking for a replacement but none’s come up, you know.”

  “You mean they haven’t found one to steal,” said Batch, though in such a genial tone that it could have been mistaken for a joke.

  “Don’t know about all that.”

  A voice piped up from the end of the bar. “They call them girls as is available white ’orses,” it said, and then a drunken cackle came from the gap-toothed, grizzled pile of dark clothing on one of the stools.

  “Shut your trap,” Rutherford ordered.

  “The prostitutes?” Batch said.

  “No longer—not any longer, guv,” said Rutherford. “Saw an end to all that, didn’t he—Bell, I mean.”

  “And Smith,” said Lenox.

  Rutherford merely turned away, toward a small stove that had a copper kettle on it. He poured himself some black, bitter-smelling liquid from it into a tin cup with a big round handle.

  “Rutherford,” said Batch, “what about Smith?”

  “What about him?”

  “Did you know him well?”

  “I only work here. That’s the God’s honest, Constable.”

  “You must have at least seen him, then.”

  Rutherford opened his eyes wide, as if to say you’d be surprised. “You didn’t?” asked Lenox.

  “Not till that day,” said the bartender, and took a draught of the scalding coffee. “Excuse me, please. I’ve food to start preparing.”

  “We’ll excuse you when we’re ready,” said Batch.

  Lenox didn’t want to suborn Batch’s clear authority here—goodness knew how one won it—so he asked a few more questions in aid of making the constable’s point. The answers revealed nothing of use. But he had learned two things already during this short trip, he thought, which had changed his understanding of the case for good.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Mayne had told Cobb that while he would offer whatever information and support he could, he wanted no part of the case to fall back upon the Yard. They had moved on from Eli Gilman and Winfield Bell.

  Thus it was that late that evening, after eleven o’clock, Lenox, Graham, and the American congregated in Lenox’s study—only the three of them. It had been a long day for Cobb, no doubt, but he was sharp-eyed and fresh.

  He told them that his trip to Liverpool had been informative. He spoke to both Lenox and Graham, not just the former; Lenox had told Cobb about how integral Graham’s role in the solution to the case was, and Cobb, with that springy democratic reflex Lenox had noticed in the few Americans he knew, had immediately folded Graham into his confidences.

  “I went to the docks. Nobody there would speak to me. At last, out of frustration, I went to the army garrison. I had a single letter of recommendation to its commander, from my own superior at the militia. I’d been hoping I wouldn’t need to use it.”

  “How do they know each other?”

  Cobb took a sip of water. “Well, it was funny. He took the letter, read it—an old man named Whitworth, scars all over his face and hands—and then burst into laughter.” Cobb smiled. “Apparently Brig—my commander, Brigadier General Adams—and this fellow, Whitworth, met in the War of 1812. In battle.”

  Lenox raised his eyebrows. “Did they!”

  “Whitworth poured me a brandy. Then he recounted
the whole thing in perfect detail—as if it had passed not an hour ago. A warm battle, he said, which is how these old veterans describe it anytime they’ve sustained a great number of casualties.”

  “And then?”

  “He made me promise to pour Adams a brandy. Said he thought they’d fought each other to a handsome standstill—would be happy to shake his hand one day, when they’d both reached the other side of the grave, and relive it shot by shot, maneuver by maneuver. Said he could remember every rock of the field they held. He bet Brig could, too. I said yes, I thought so. After that he dismissed me pretty perfunctorily, but he sent along a man of his, and all at once the doors that had been closed to me were opened.”

  “What luck.”

  Cobb nodded. “Yes, and I heard a good deal about Tiptree. Shall I read you the exact account of the incident?”

  “Please,” said Lenox.

  So Cobb read aloud. “Mr. Abram Tiptree, resident of the District of Columbia, United States, arrived in Liverpool on the clipper ship Clarissa 14 November 1855, traveling from New York. He was in the company of his employer, Mr. Eleazer Gilman (now staying Quilt’s Inn, Upper Frederick Street), and their associate Mr. Josiah Hollis (ibid). The Clarissa arrived at Slip 3, Queen’s Dock, at a little after 6:00 p.m. Some passengers from the ship had already debarked in rowboats, including Messrs. Gilman and Hollis.

  “Mr. Tiptree waited in the company of their trunks for a porter. Sailors on deck were stowing the ship for dry dock. Mr. Tiptree was alone. At approximately 6:15 there was a loud cry then a thump; sailors rushed to discover that Mr. Tiptree had fallen from the gangway into the water. He was retrieved from the water and rushed to Royal Liverpool Hospital. He lingered in a comatose state, having sustained a wound to the left side of his forehead, for several days before dying.

  “No witnesses on the docks or the ship saw anyone unusual. Sailors reported that Mr. Tiptree had been unsteady at sea. The coroner determined the cause of death as misadventure. The case is closed.”

  “A loud cry and a thump,” said Lenox.

  “Yes. It seems obvious to me that he was murdered. Then again, it’s possible it might have been an accident. One can see the viewpoint of the police and the coroner. There was no reason for them to believe that anyone wished Tiptree any harm.”

  Graham had an observation to make. “More than once while in your employment, sir,” he said, “I have been mistaken for you as I stood by your luggage. It may be that the attacker thought Mr. Tiptree was Gilman.”

  Lenox nodded. “Yes, and his trunk said ‘E. Gilman’ on the side. Did you see Tiptree’s trunk?”

  “No,” said Cobb, “it’s been shipped back to his family, unfortunately. Still, I think Mr. Graham’s theory makes sense. It explains the lag between the attack at the dock and the attack on the train—some time would have passed before Bell and Smith realized that in Tiptree they had killed the wrong man.”

  Lenox felt pity for the young secretary—gone so young, and not even the star of his own death. “Shall we take it as a working theory for now?”

  “I think so,” said Cobb. He swung his right arm gently through the air in the mimic of an attack. “The left side of his forehead—that is exactly where a blow would have caught him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Unfortunately, that is the full extent of what I found. The Clarissa has already shipped back out. Still, I was glad to have gone. And I am curious how the two of you fared.”

  “Graham?” said Lenox.

  “I have discovered little today, sir,” he said, “but I am hopeful that my meeting with Winfield Bell’s common-law wife—the woman known Lady Elaine—will offer more.”

  “She’ll talk to you? She wouldn’t give up anything to Dunn.”

  “Yes, sir. I offered her a financial incentive. I understand her position as the procuress of the Patriots Abroad may be in jeopardy without Bell. She jumped at the chance to talk.”

  Lenox frowned. “Be careful, Graham. They’ll cut your throat and leave you there if they know you have money.”

  “I have taken precautions, sir,” said Graham.

  No more needed to be said. “Good, I’m glad.”

  “And you, sir?”

  “I went to the tavern. I discovered two things there.”

  “What?” said Cobb.

  “The first is that the tavern hasn’t owned a white horse in nineteen months. At least if we believe the account of the bartender there, which I was inclined to do. This brought home to me—how do I put it?—how outlandish it is that we are expected to believe Bell took all that time to disguise who Gilman was, then bolted away on a white horse as an homage to his group of friends, or to his racial preferences.”

  “People do foolish things for their politics,” said Cobb.

  Lenox nodded. “Yes, no doubt. But then where did he get the horse? Did he hire it? You would have to look around a bit for a white horse—ask here and there, draw attention to yourself. I tried.”

  “It might have been worth it to him. It was a grandiose plan.”

  “Even if you set aside the horse, there is the second thing I discovered at the tavern. Of that I feel no doubt at all.”

  “And what is it?”

  “Winfield Bell didn’t fall to his death. He was pushed.”

  Cobb’s eyes widened. “Pushed!”

  Lenox nodded firmly. “There’s a stone wall on the roof. It came up to my chest. I’m five foot eleven inches without shoes on. Bell was smaller than that—it would have come up another two or three inches on him, say to his shoulder.”

  “So he would have been unlikely to fall over because he slipped.”

  “It would be impossible,” Lenox replied. “It would have taken me at least ten seconds of serious effort to climb up and hurl myself over. It couldn’t have happened accidentally unless I were—oh, six and a half feet tall, no matter how icy it might have been. He’d have fallen straight back onto the rooftop and picked himself up again.”

  “Bert Smith,” Graham murmured, arriving quickly at the conclusion Lenox had spent much of the day reaching.

  “Yes. Suddenly he seems to be the crucial figure. Nobody can tell us a word about him. He was a relatively recent addition to the Patriots Abroad—the bartender hadn’t seen him before; at least so he said. And he had no great friends among them except Bell. So who is he?”

  “And what were his motivations?” Cobb said.

  “I have no idea. But what I do think—what I feel convinced of—is that Winfield Bell was serving Smith’s goals, not merely his own. I would guess that it was Smith who hired a white horse for Bell to flee on. And I would guess that as soon as Bell was caught, Smith shoved him over the edge of the rooftop and disappeared. Now we merely need to figure out who on earth Bert Smith is, and why he engineered this awful scheme.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Their American visitor turned out to be an idiosyncratic fellow, at least in his unobtrusive way. The next day he came over early (Graham was already out visiting Lady Elaine) and after repeatedly declining breakfast, at last he requested—at Lenox and Mrs. Huggins’s joint insistence—a glass of cold milk and a piece of brown bread; but only the crust.

  “I’ll eat the middle part,” said Lenox to Mrs. Huggins.

  She shot him a fierce look. He suspected her of fearing Americans. “I shall return directly, sir,” she said.

  She did so—with a plate so heaped with brown bread crusts that it would have taken a month to eat them all.

  “Thank you very, very much,” said Cobb.

  “Are you sure it’s enough?” Lenox asked.

  “I think it should be more than sufficient—thank you,” said Cobb earnestly.

  “And there’s plenty more if it’s not,” added Mrs. Huggins.

  Lenox sighed internally at the loss of his little joke. But he liked Cobb, a serious, modest man, but one whose modesty never devolved into meekness. Their conversation was lively with disagreement and disputation.


  And Lenox had realized, with dawning excitement, that Cobb’s own stores of knowledge about crime were as evolved as his, if very different. “This reminds me of a murder in Blackpool in 1845,” Lenox might say, and Cobb would nod, listen, and say that it reminded him of an attempted murder—with several witnesses—in Pittsburgh, not eighteen months before.

  A meeting of minds, in other words. For Lenox, who had encountered so much resistance in his vocation, it was a welcome change.

  As Cobb worked his way through the pile of crusts, Lenox read once more through all his notes about Bert Smith, hoping to find something in his careful observations from his interviews that he had missed before. Cobb, meanwhile, was going over the list of contents of Gilman’s trunk. Two of Hemstock’s men had brought it there this morning, and now it stood in Lenox’s dining room, where they had set up at the long table, which was spread with piles of paper.

  They worked steadily and unstintingly. At around half past ten, Lenox glanced at his watch. “Would you mind if I left you for an hour?” he said. “I want to ask someone a few questions.”

  “Of course.” Cobb looked at the clock over his shoulder. “What time do you expect Mr. Graham to return?”

  “Soon, I hope—though knowing him, it might not be until this evening, or even tomorrow.”

  Cobb held up a sheet of paper. “I have a question about Gilman’s schedule.”

  “Yes?”

  He handed the paper, which was divided into three columns, to Lenox. “Am I right in saying that in the left-hand column are important members of the government, and in the center, people acquainted with Her Majesty, belonging to the court? I deduced as much from the book you lent me, but I may be wrong.”

  Lenox scanned the lists. There were about a dozen names on the left, starting with the Prime Minister’s, and five in the middle. “No, that’s correct. What about these names in the rightmost column, though?”

  “That’s my question.”

  Lenox looked at the names: Wilton Sheridan, MP for Camberwell; Forsythe Witt, MP for Rivington-on-Tyne; Samuel Jonas, MP for Spall.