“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.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
T
he pub wa
s crowded, cheery, and warm, with red-nosed, white-haired fellows lining the bar, trading bawdy jokes and laughing uproariously, as only men in their cups will. The front room, which contained the taps, was narrow and brightly lit, with a fire reflecting off of the brass above the bar and long time-scarred benches opposite, under a series of paintings of idyllic country scenes. A plaque under the paintings proudly declared that the Great Fire of 1666 had leveled the place. From the back emanated the unmistakable smell of the stables.
The bartender was a keen-eyed, sturdily built chap with sallow cheeks and dark hair.
“Ransom?” asked Lenox when he caught the man’s attention.
“No, I’m Stevens. He’s weekdays.”
“It’s all the same—I came to ask a question.”
“Yes?”
“I understand that Winston Carruthers often worked here?”
“Aye, many a night. Who are you, may I ask?”
“Charles Lenox. I’m helping Scotland Yard. Could you show me where he worked?”
“It was a little room in back. Here, Billy!” He motioned to a lad passing by with a tray of glassware. “Take these gents up to the burgundy room.”
Billy led them up a narrow flight of stairs and down a hallway. The burgundy room was a smallish, windowless place that fit four tables. Three of these were evidently open to patrons, though none of them was taken, but the fourth, in the back left corner of the room, boasted a scratched old brass sign that read RESERVED FOR W. CARRUTHERS.
It was apparent instantly that this corner of an old room at Fleet Street’s traditional public house was in fact the dead man’s office. There was a box full of pencils, India rubbers, and bits and bobs, and on a little ledge next to it there was a stack of clean paper. The table itself was covered in a thousand old wine stains and glass rings and was darkened with years of cigar smoke and splashes of tea.
“What’s this?” said McConnell. He had gone around to the other side of the table before Lenox was finished looking at the room.
“What?”
“I think it matches your idea of the thing.”
The object McConnell was pointing to was a squat wooden box in two tiers, each with a drawer.
“Terrific,” said Lenox. “The yard haven’t been here, clearly.” He pulled open the top drawer and started flipping through the papers it held. “Files on article subjects and public figures.”
“What are you looking for?”
Lenox paused. Of everyone in the world, only Graham knew Lenox’s suspicions. “I know I needn’t ask, but can you keep a secret?”
“I hope I can, yes.”
“The file I want is about George Barnard.”
McConnell laughed incredulously. “Why?”
“I think he may be behind all this.”
“He can’t possibly be. He had nothing to do with that dead girl in his house, did he?”
“No,” said Lenox. “Theft is more in his line, on a grand scale. Murder is a new one, in particular if he had Exeter killed. I fear he may be desperate.”
“Good heavens, why?”
“I don’t know yet.”
McConnell turned and scanned the room, as if to make sure it was still empty. “Well, let’s find it, then. Are the files alphabetical?”
“I don’t know.”
They were. Winston Carruthers’s physical life had been overfull of drink and food, his rooms messy and rich and abundant, but his files were at odds with that image of the man. They bespoke a different and more ascetic intellect. All of the papers were neatly filed and precisely written.
None among them pertained to George Barnard.
“Damn,” said Lenox softly.
“Perhaps he’s in the G section?” said McConnell.
“I doubt it. Let’s check.” A lengthy pause. “No, nothing here. Perhaps Barnard has been here after all.”
McConnell laughed. “That scarcely seems—”
“One does well not to underestimate him, I’ve learned,” said Lenox rather sharply. “Let’s go back to the B’s and make sure.”
McConnell sighed and seemed to look longingly out toward the stairs—and perhaps down to the bar.
“Here’s something odd. A file marked g. farmer.”
“In the B section? A middle name?”
Lenox frowned and opened the file. “No, he hasn’t got a middle name.”
It was a thick file, and he began to leaf through a seemingly endless series of random articles, nearly all of them by Carruthers. One was about a broken church steeple in Cheapside and the plan to replace it. Another concerned a shipping accident, and a third was about crop yields in Northumberland. It was a bizarre miscellany.
“Farmer,” muttered McConnell. “I wonder—Lenox, I wonder whether it’s a pun?”
“What?”
“Barnard—it sounds just a bit like the word ‘barnyard.’ A farmer has a barnyard, after all.”
Lenox laughed. “I think you’ve hit it.”
“That’s why it’s filed under B, too.”
“You’re right.”
Confirmation came a moment later—one of the articles was about Barnard’s tenure at the Royal Mint, a profile.
“I’ll just borrow this, I think,” said Lenox. “Let’s go.”
McConnell asked whether they might have a tot of whisky, and Lenox, won over by the mood of the place, agreed to it. They fell into conversation with the men at the bar and stayed for half an hour, then shared a cab back to Mayfair and their respective homes.
Lenox entered his own exhausted and slightly on edge, the knowledge that Barnard was involved raising the stakes even higher. He thought briefly, as Graham greeted him, of Stirrington and then pushed the memory away, a painful one, something to be forgotten.
“It’s Barnard,” said Lenox wearily.
“Sir?”
“The Fleet Street murders. It’s Barnard.”
Graham, usually so imperturbable, inhaled sharply. “I’m surprised, sir.”
“I’ll need your help.”
“You shall have it, of course.”
“Thanks.”
Lenox spent a happy half hour with Lady Jane then, before returning to his library, where by low light he pored over the file on G. Farmer late into the night. At two he stood up exhausted and decided that he needed to sleep.
It was a disappointing haul. He had looked at every sheet of paper in the file, and only six of them mentioned Barnard by name. There were two articles that caught his eye because they were more recent: one about the history of the building that housed the Mint, which quoted Barnard, and another about a series of thefts from ships near the docks.
Ultimately, however, neither provided him with any insight into the case, and he fell asleep frustrated, puzzled, and certain that the elusive truth was closer than he realized.
CHAPTER FORTY
T
he next afternoon he was reading through the file again when there was a knock at the door. It was Dallington. He looked downcast and ill, wearing the same clothes he had been the day before.
“Hullo,” said Lenox.
“Before you ask, yes, I’ve been drinking.”
“Am I so draconian?”
“I can’t get Poole out of my head.”
“I’m sorry, John.”
“What bothers me most is Smalls! If he had killed Carruthers in a fit of passion—well, I don’t know, it would be somehow less appalling. Still appalling, of course, but less . . . less cold-blooded.”
“It’s the worst part of our profession, seeing all of this up close. I liked Poole.” Lenox hesitated. “In addition, I’m not as certain as you are that he did the murder.”
“Oh, he did it.”
“How can you say?”
“He was persuasive.”
“He was also persuasive when he told us that he was innocent.”
“What makes you doubt his word, anyway? He’s nothing to gain from confessing to murder.”
“There’s ano
ther lead.”
“What is it?”
Lenox sighed. “I don’t know if I should say anything until I’m more sure of what I mean. I don’t want to raise your hopes.”
“I see,” said Dallington.
It was an awkward moment. “I have full faith in you, of course,” said Lenox, “but I simply want to be sure.”
“What can I do to help?”
Lenox looked at the clock on the wall. “Shall we go see him together? There are one or two questions I might ask him.”
“If you wish,” answered Dallington, looking miserable at the prospect.
“Or I could go alone,” Lenox said.
“No, I’ll come.”
“Then let’s have a spot of tea while they rub down the horses. Graham, are you out there?” he called into the hall. The valet came in. “Will you bell for the carriage and bring in some tea, please?”
“Sandwiches, too,” said Dallington, in a voice so disconsolate that it was almost humorous to hear him ask for a sandwich with it.
Lenox laughed. “Come, the world will turn again, you know.”
“Wait until you see him,” said Dallington.
It was true. They had their tea and sandwiches and soon enough were on their way again to Newgate Prison. It was a bitterly cold January day, of the kind that seems never quite to warm into afternoon before it falls again into night. A few flurries fell, vanishing as they hit the cobblestones, coating the stone buildings of London in a white stubble.
Poole, when he came into the visitors’ room, was a different man. It was as though he had kept the facade up as long as he could and then collapsed under its weight.
“How do you do?” asked Lenox gently. “Are you comfortable?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Plenty of food? Warm enough?”
“Yes.”
“I thought we might have a word, since your confession took me by such surprise.”
“Every word of it is true,” said Poole sadly.
Yet Lenox had his doubts, even after seeing the lad. “Will you describe it to me?”
“The maid, Martha, helped me slip into the building,” said Poole dully. “Win—that man was sitting at a round table, writing. I stabbed him in the back, like a damned coward. I left as quickly as I came, sobbing the entire way. It was a despicable act, and I deserve to swing for it.”
The Fleet Street Murders Page 20