A Beautiful Blue Death

by Charles Finch

  What had made him think of all this? The candle.…

  At ten minutes before eight, he stepped into his carriage. Graham ran out to catch him and handed him a note that had just arrived. It was from McConnell:

  Only one apothecary in London sells bella indigo. Nos. 4 and 9. Penny Farthing Place. Fellow named Jeremiah Jones.

  Lenox thought this over and put the note in his pocket, then asked the driver to go.

  It was a bright sunny morning, but cold, and the snow still crunched underfoot. He arrived at Barnard’s house a few minutes after the hour and greeted the housekeeper amiably, though he received little reward for it.

  In the hallway was a young man, perhaps recently down from university or still there. He had on glasses and wore his hair slightly longer than most men of his age. But he was dressed well, in a blue morning suit with a carnation in the buttonhole, and clearly felt at home in the house.

  “How do you do?” said the young man.

  “Very well, thank you.”

  “I’m Claude. I’m staying here with my uncle, you know.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Claude. I’m Charles Lenox.”

  They shook hands.

  “It seems impossibly early to me,” said Claude.

  “It’s already past eight,” said Lenox.

  “I like how you say already, as if eight were a particularly late hour.”

  “It’s not early for me, I must say.”

  “It damn well is for me.”

  “You’re younger.”

  “And may it stay forever so. Still, I must see a man about a thing. Good to have met you,” he said, and bounded down the steps to the street.

  “You too,” said Lenox, and followed the impatient housekeeper into the breakfast room, adjacent to the formal dining salon. It was a small octagonal room looking out over the back garden, with a circular table at its center, where George Barnard sat with a nearly empty cup of tea at his elbow, studying a pale blue orchid.

  “Charles, sit down,” he said, without looking up.

  “Thank you,” said Lenox.

  “This is a beautiful flower, don’t you think?”

  “Indeed I do.”

  “I mean to give it to Lord Russell’s wife this evening.”

  “Are you dining with the Prime Minister?”

  “I am,” Barnard said. He looked up and smiled. “But breaking my fast with no less a friend.”

  It was an odd thing to say. Barnard went back to his flower. There was a pot of tea, and Lenox, in the absence of an offer, poured himself a cup.

  The window by which they sat overlooked a small garden, full of banks and rows of flowers less fantastically unusual than Barnard’s orchids but beautiful nevertheless, and Lenox stared into it until his host saw fit to speak. The moment came at last, after eggs and bacon had been served and Lenox had eaten a good deal of them.

  “I’m getting a new man in here,” Barnard said, to open their conversation.

  “Are you?”

  “To replace Jenkins.”

  Lenox’s heart fell. “Why?” he said.

  “Incompetent. Getting a man named Exeter. Jenkins insisted that it was murder. Nonsense, I told him. The girl was probably jilted. Happens all the time.”

  “It was murder, George.”

  Barnard paused and looked him in the face. “I disagree.”

  “Do you feel no responsibility to the girl?”

  “I do. But I think your facts are wrong. You’re only an amateur, Charles.”

  “That’s true,” Lenox said.

  “And Exeter seems to be leaning toward my theory on the matter.”

  “Exeter.” Lenox sighed.

  “I want the plain facts, Charles, and I don’t think you’ve got them. Due respect. Bringing Toto’s failure of a husband in as a witness. No jury would believe a drunk. And Exeter’s a good man. Jane has no need to worry. Tell her it will be solved. Or, better yet, I’ll stop by.”

  “No, I can tell her.”

  “As you please.”

  Lenox stood up. “All the same, George, you won’t mind if I look into a few of my ideas?”

  “Not at all. But in the end, we’ll see what the Yard thinks of it.”

  “Of course.”

  “Have you had enough to eat?”

  Lenox took a last sip of tea. “Delicious, as always,” he said. They drifted out into the main hallway, where he saw a familiar face.

  “Mr. Lenox, sir, how do you do?”

  “Very well, Inspector Exeter”—for it was the sergeant himself—“though this matter weighs on my mind. We must do our best for her.”

  “Aye, well said, Mr. Lenox.”

  Barnard said, “You know this man, then?” Lenox nodded. “Look here,” Barnard went on, addressing Exeter, “you’ll figure this out straightaway, won’t you? I’ve no doubt you’re as incompetent as the rest of them.”

  “No, sir,” Exeter said. He glanced at Lenox with a sort of uneasiness.

  “Sure you are. But on this one you suspend your usual stupidity, all right?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s in good hands, sir. You can trust me.” He smiled weakly.

  Barnard turned his attention to Lenox. “I hope you’re coming to the ball next week?”

  “Of course.” The ball was an annual event at Barnard’s. Of the winter balls it was the best known, and while during the season there would usually be several such affairs on a single night, nobody dared to throw one opposite his.

  “Farewell, then,” said Barnard. He looked intently at the flower even as he said it, and Lenox was left with the inspector from Scotland Yard.

  Exeter was a large man, with black bushy eyebrows, a matching mustache, and thick pink features. He wore a full uniform wherever he went, and his helmet drooped over his eyes. He swung a blackjack around by its leather hoop seemingly without cessation, excluding the times when he put it to other use, most often when he dealt with what he called the lower orders.

  London’s police force was barely thirty-five years old. Sir Robert Peel had organized the first Metropolitan Police Force in 1829, when Lenox was a lad, and as a result the men who joined were called either peelers or, more likely, bobbies. Its powers were new and uncertain, and Exeter represented both the good and the bad in the institution: the better chance of public order, and the risk of the abuse of the power needed to maintain it.

  When he entered the force, Exeter had recently retired from the military and had chosen to become a beat man, walking the streets at night and taking the word beat for each of its several meanings. A quick series of retirements and deaths within the Yard had seen him promoted beyond his ability, and hard work had allowed him to rise even higher. He was now one of the half dozen most prominent detectives on the force, and also among the least naturally talented or intuitive of his rank.

  There was no point, for Lenox, in trying to tell himself that he did not dislike Exeter. The man was a snob toward those beneath him, and a cloying sycophant to those above, unless they happened to come under his power, when he dropped all pretense of respect and became merciless. And yet, thought Lenox, I don’t envy him, having to deal with a man like Barnard. That beastly talking-down to. He thought guiltily that he was glad he could afford—literally—not to put up with a man like Barnard. If only Exeter had been slightly more intelligent.… But then, he thought, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

  The housekeeper brought Lenox his hat and his coat, and as he put them on he said a final word to Exeter.

  “If I may give you one piece of information, Inspector—the girl was murdered.”

  “That sounds like an opinion to me, Mr. Lenox.”

  “It is not, Inspector. Good day.”

  And he walked out through the heavy doors, trying to imagine a way in which he could solve Prue Smith’s murder without access to any of the suspects, for he knew he had probably entered the house in a professional capacity for the last time during this case.

  Chapte
r 9

  London on a winter midday held few pleasures for Lenox. There was smoke in the air, which made his eyes tear, and there were too many people along the sidewalks, fighting for the thin path of cobblestone without snow piled atop it. And yet he felt more determined today than he had yesterday evening. In part because Exeter was involved.

  He had set himself just one task for the day, or at least until Graham told him what he had discovered, and that was to see if he could trace the bella indigo that had killed the young maid. In the meanwhile, he was walking toward the Houses of Parliament, after having run a morning’s worth of overdue errands, to have lunch with his older brother, Edmund.

  His brother held the seat of Markethouse, the town attached to their family’s estate, Lenox House, and while he was not active in the Parliament, exactly, he attended when he could and could be counted to vote along party lines. He was, like Lenox, a liberal, and he approved of the reforms of the last thirty years, but he was also a baronet and held a good deal of land, which made him generally well-liked on both sides of the aisle—or at least accepted as a known quantity.

  His full name was Sir Edmund Chichester Lenox, and he lived with his wife, Emily, a pretty, plump, motherly woman whom everyone called Molly, and his two sons, in the house where he and his brother had both grown up. He had two distinct personalities, Lenox always felt: his more businesslike demeanor, in the city, and his truer self, the man who resided at home and felt most comfortable in old clothes, out for a day of shooting or riding or gardening. He was two years older than Charles and, while they looked alike, Lady Jane always said they were instantly recognizable as themselves. Edmund was the same weight and height, but he looked softer, and his manner, while equally polite, was somewhat more eccentric, a trait no doubt cultivated by the solitude of Lenox House in comparison with London.

  The two brothers were immensely fond of each other. Each envied the other his pursuit—Lenox followed politics passionately and longed, from time to time, to stand for Parliament himself, while Edmund adored the city and often felt, rather romantically, that to crisscross it wildly, searching for clues and people, must be next to bliss. Occasionally he tried to solve the local crimes at Markethouse from his armchair, but the newspaper rarely yielded up anything more spectacular than a stolen policeman’s helmet or a missing sheep: poor fodder, he felt, for a budding detective. As a result, the first thing he always asked his brother was whether he was on a case.

  Lenox walked through St. James’s Park and then went a short distance along the Thames to Westminster.

  He loved going to the Houses of Parliament. He and his brother had gone with their father as children, and he still remembered eating lunch there and watching the debates from the visitors’ galleries. These days, he often visited his brother or one of his several friends there.

  The buildings had burned down in 1834, when he was a boy, and had been rebuilt over the next few years. And then they had added the tall clock, called Big Ben, only five or six years previously—was it 1859? For Lenox’s money, Parliament was one of the two or three most beautiful buildings in London, in that yellowish stone unique to England, with its high towers and intricately carved walls. Its vastness alone was comforting, as if generations could rise and fall but these eight acres, these halls and rooms, would keep England safe. Nobody, on the other hand, would ever care about Big Ben.

  The public, when it visited, entered at Westminster Gate, but Lenox went to a small door on the other side of the building, facing the river, and there, waiting in the hall, was Edmund. This was the members’ entrance—straight ahead, up a staircase, were the chambers of government. To the left and the right were the members’ rooms, which were closed to the public. If you took a right, you went to the dining rooms and smoking rooms of the House of Lords and the Queen Empress; to the left and you were in the branch dedicated to the House of Commons. The two brothers turned left, to Bellamy’s.

  Bellamy’s was a large spacious restaurant looking over the river. Dickens had written about it—the butler Nicholas and the provocative waitress Jane—in Sketches by Boz, and their father had always told them that William Pitt’s dying words were, “Oh, for one of Bellamy’s veal pies!” It had old dark mahogany tables and smelled of cigar smoke and the waiters’ pomade. A lot of grizzled old men sat around talking grumpily, sticking as close to the fires as possible, and a lot of animated younger men took drinks at the bar.

  Lenox and his brother sat at a table next to a window, under a portrait of Fox, and Edmund, staying true to form, immediately said, “Well, dear brother, and what are you working on?”

  Lenox smiled. “Lovely to see you too, as always. Are young Edmund and William well? And Emily?”

  “Don’t be that way, Charles, what have you got? Why, only the other day in the country we had a silver thief.”

  “A silver thief! In mild Markethouse! And was he caught?”

  “Well, it was not so much that there was a silver thief as that there was a matter of misplaced silver.”

  “Who could have misplaced so much silver? Did you think of insurance fraud?”

  “It was a fork, to be precise.”

  Lenox raised his eyebrows. “One fork, you say?”

  “But a serving fork, you know, so it was really quite large. And of good silver. Very well made. And old. An heirloom, really.”

  “How many men were assigned to the case? Did you break up the silver ring?”

  “It had fallen under a chair, you see. But I only read that the next day.”

  “So it was touch and go for a turn of the sun?”

  Edmund smiled. “Have your laugh.”

  Lenox did laugh, and then put his hand on his brother’s arm. “Shall we order?” he said.

  “Yes, yes.”

  They each decided that they would have the same thing, the only thing the chef did decently: roasted mutton with new potatoes and buttered peas under, and a flood of gravy over the entire thing.

  “And a bottle of claret?” said Edmund.

  “Unless you have the business of the people to attend to, this afternoon?”

  “No, we’re in committee.”

  “Then yes.”

  “Now really,” said Edmund, “stop delaying, and tell me what happened with the forgery. The Yard has refused to leak it to the press.”

  “It was Isabel Lewes.”

  Edmund gasped. “It couldn’t have been!”

  “It was indeed.”

  “She was out of London!”

  “No, she wasn’t.”

  “And how are you so sure?”

  “There was a sapphire necklace involved.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, please, go on!”

  “Another time.”

  Edmund groaned.

  “At the moment, I am at work on another matter.”

  “What is that?”

  “You’re certain you want to hear?”

  “Of course, of course!”

  Just then the mutton came, and as they poured the wine and cut the meat, Lenox briefly relayed to his brother the events of the previous night and of that morning. He omitted only the name of the poison, because he didn’t want to risk being overheard.

  Edmund was a little overexcited by the new case and for some reason kept saying that he was “as good as a vault” and would be happy to stay in the city to “ferret out the truth, however dark it might be.”

  “It is a perplexing matter,” Lenox concluded, “because the motive of any murder is most likely to originate from one of the victim’s daily acquaintances, but none of her daily acquaintances would be likely to use such a means of murder.”

  “Mightn’t the murderer have stumbled upon the poison? In Barnard’s house or elsewhere? A servant could easily do that.”

  “I thought of that,” Lenox said. “McConnell sent a note over this morning, saying that only one apothecary in London sells the poison, so I mean to ask there. But I think it
unlikely. It would be so easily traced to whatever house it came from.”

  “But perhaps the murderer thought the fake suicide would never let the police get so far.”

  “Perhaps. At any rate, I shall see the chemist this afternoon, and he can settle it. If so, the case will be solved.”

  “Yes,” said Edmund. But he looked uneasy.

  “Is anything the matter?” Lenox asked.

  “I’m in the midst of what you might call a moral dilemma.”

  Lenox looked at his brother, who was in his tweed jacket and had a spot of gravy on the old Harrow tie they both happened to be wearing that day, and at his furrowed brow, and felt an enormous surge of fondness for him.

  “Tell me what it is, if you like.”

  “The dilemma is whether or not I ought to.”

  Lenox suddenly looked very serious. “It is related to this case?”

  “It is.”

  “Then you must, Edmund.”

  “One man can have several loyalties to consider at once, dear brother.”

  “To whom must we be loyal beyond the dead? Surely none of the family is at all involved.”

  “I am loyal to my family and, as you say, to this young girl—but also to my country.”

  They had finished eating. The waiter cleared the plates away in the long pause that ensued. Both men leaned back and lit cigarettes, and Lenox drank a sip of wine.

  “A matter of state?” he said at last.

  “Yes.”

  “Then it is your choice. But you shall have my discretion as a detective and as a brother, should you choose to tell me.”

  Edmund smiled. “I know that,” he said. He sighed. “I may as well.”

  The two men leaned close to each other, and Edmund said, “Barnard is storing this year’s gold in his house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The coinage.”

  “The mint’s gold? To go into circulation next month?”

  “Yes.”

  Lenox sat back and whistled softly.

  The mint was located in a very secure building in Little Tower Hill, near the Tower of London. It was a yellowing stone building that sat behind a tall iron fence. Its front was pillared and wide, though it was only very rarely that somebody went in or out. In a busy street, it was silent. Whenever Lenox passed it he felt the million jealous eyes that had stared at it in the past. Inside, delicate machinery converted bars of pure gold into exact-weight coins, which were then distributed to the nation.