The Fleet Street Murders clm-3

by Charles Finch

  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

  Why 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.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Now it was a month later.

  Early February, and while the days were short and gray, and while those who tramped through London’s streets longed for home, there was a happy glow to Lenox’s life. His hours were taken up with warm fires, long books, slow suppers, his brother, and Lady Jane. He went out very little, and even when he did never commented to a soul about the downfall of George Barnard, choosing instead to focus on clearing up all of Barnard’s myriad crimes by tracing them diligently through the cunning and subtle ways in which the man had pushed Winston Carruthers’s work. The newspaper report of a fracas in some neighborhood, for instance, might dovetail nicely with a robbery several days later in the same area. It was the kind of deep research Lenox had loved since Oxford.

  This morning, however, he was more pleasantly disposed, sitting in his library with Toto.

  She had insisted on coming to him, although he had had his misgivings. “I need to get out of that poky house,” she said, conveniently forgetting about its ten bedrooms, and so she sat now in his library, bent daintily over a small notebook she had been keeping about Jane and Lenox’s honeymoon, her effervescent laugh ringing more and more often through the room.

  It emerged from their tête-à-tête that Toto was a furious negotiator on Jane’s behalf and loved every moment of research and discussion about the honeymoon. She and Lenox complemented each other well. Every time he started to talk about local cash crops or cave art she would roll her eyes and return as soon as she could to the waterfall they had to visit, the dressmaker who was meant to be so clever.

  “What do you think of Ireland?” Lenox asked.

  Toto made a face. “All those potatoes,” she said. “Ugh.”

  “It’s meant to be beautiful, Toto. All that green! And the beautiful Irish babies!” Lenox halted.

  “It’s all right, Charles,” she said.

  “No — it’s — that was awfully tactless of me.”

  “Charles, it’s all right!” He saw that she was smiling shyly.

  “Toto?”

  “What?” she said innocently. Under his gaze, however, she soon broke down. Quietly she admitted, “We’re having a baby.”

  A great weight lifted from Lenox’s spirit. “I’m so happy,” he said.

  “We’re being awfully silent about it,” she said, but then, breaking into a grin, went on, “I am, too, though! How happy I am!”

  “Is Thomas?”

  “Yes, very, very happy, and the doctors say” — here she ran into the strictures of her age and couldn’t sa
y quite what she wanted — “they say how healthy I am, and indeed I feel it! But Charles, you mustn’t tell anybody. I’ve barely said a word about it, except to Jane and Duch.” Duch was the Duchess of Marchmain, Toto and Jane’s great friend. “Thomas will tell you in due time.”

  Rather sadly, Lenox remembered what her mien had been when she was first with child and bursting with baby names and nursery ideas.

  They sat closeted for another half hour, talking about the honeymoon — Toto liked the idea of Greece — until McConnell came to fetch her, smiling broadly at Lenox, his face less troubled than usual, and walking his wife very carefully out of the house and down to their carriage.

  After they had gone Lenox stood just inside the door, thinking about life, about its passing strangeness. He went back to his library to read a tract about the Catiline conspiracy.

  Not half an hour later there was a knock at the front door, and he laid the pamphlet down.

  Graham appeared. “You have two guests, sir,” he said.

  “Bring them in.”

  A moment later the butler reappeared, with James Hilary and — to Lenox’s astonishment — Edward Crook in tow.

  “Crook!” he exclaimed, rising to his feet. “I’m honored to have you here. Graham, fetch something to eat, would you, and drink? How do you do, Hilary? But Crook! I scarcely expected to see you accept my invitation to London so soon — which is not to say I’m not pleased that you have!”

  “It isn’t a visit of pleasure, in fact, Mr. Lenox,” said Crook. Lenox noticed the small gleam of a smile in the corner of his mouth.

  “How do you mean?” asked Lenox.

  Hilary and Crook glanced at each other, and it was the London man who spoke. “Late yesterday evening Mr. Crook called on me. I must confess I was as astonished as you appear to be to see him, but he told me some interesting information.”

  “I couldn’t let go of that election,” said Crook. “It seemed so unjust, after you and I had both worked so hard.”

  “Mr. Crook went back over the rolls of the vote —”