The Woman in the Water--A Prequel to the Charles Lenox Series

by Charles Finch

  “But lay that against the letter itself. Cheap paper. Cheap ink. Pencil lines erased underneath his lettering. That peculiarly admirable penmanship—I would reckon there was a prize for that at some moment in this fellow’s past, perhaps second prize for penmanship in his free school, a Latin primer the prize, handed to him by someone he disdained—a minor cleric at prize-giving day, you know the kind of thing.”

  Lenox was gaining steam. “Because he has had hatred in his heart for a long time, our murderer. That is who we are looking for: a man of very high intelligence, very low station, and very, very great anger, Graham.” Lenox shook his head, and speaking almost to himself, added, “It is a dangerous, murderously dangerous combination, that.”

  Graham tapped the window. “We’re here, sir.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  From the year 843 (and imagine such a year existing, sounding as modern to the ears of its chronological inhabitants as 1850 did to the chronological inhabitants of this time!) to the year of 1707, Scotland was a kingdom unto itself.

  Its interests were of course entwined with England’s; its fate in war often allied; its sovereignty in regard to its more powerful cousin intermittently stronger and weaker. Nevertheless, for the entirety of that period, it was the Kingdom of Scotland.

  Whenever that kingdom had sent emissaries to London, whether for black-eyed negotiation or for amicable meeting, those Scotsmen had by immemorial custom stayed in a small street just behind Whitehall. Over time it had become known, first casually, then more formally, as Scotland Street; then Great Scotland Street; then, through some final invisible passage of linguistic habit by its neighbors, Scotland Yard.

  A house here, backing onto 4 Whitehall Place, was the home of London’s police.

  It was a large private house, though in truth not larger than many fine townhouses in Mayfair. It looked in no wise like a government building—no imposing stone, nor black wrought iron. It might have been the domicile of a prosperous banker. Candles flickered in its windows.

  It could remain so relatively small because the Metropolitan Police, while a large force taken all in all—many hundreds of constables were scattered around the city—had only a few members who worked from headquarters. The beats of the rest ranged across London’s vastness; when they took prisoners, they usually transported them directly to the jails.

  Therefore Scotland Yard (as it had come to be called as shorthand, for whatever mysterious reason, rather than Whitehall Place) could continue to reside in this small, quiet, official building with the presence of a quiet unofficial one.

  A fat gooseberry-cheeked porter was seated just outside in a small booth as Lenox and Graham’s cab pulled up.

  Lenox sighed. “Sherman.”

  The porter let a laugh out from his gut as Lenox stepped down from the carriage. “Why, it’s our young Lord Inspector!”

  Lenox remained stone-faced. He nodded. “Mr. Sherman.” The mockery of the building’s inspectors—those who deployed the constables, and looked into more serious crimes—had given license for the very lowest fellow to mock him. So be it. He had business today. “Please be good enough to pass my card to Sir Richard.”

  The smile fell from Sherman’s face. “Sir Richard.”

  Lenox was holding the card in an extended hand; Graham, behind him, was paying the taxi. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Lenox declined even to answer this question from a bullying, gloating specimen like Sherman. He merely held the card out. At last Sherman took it, hefted his great bulk up from his stool, and went inside.

  A peculiarity of Lenox’s position was that he could not command even a moment of the time of Inspector Field, for instance, the most famous of the detectives who worked here, but that he could quite easily demand to see Sir Richard Mayne. This was the aristocratic head of Scotland Yard, by full title Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis.

  Mayne had been born in the previous century but was modern, forward-thinking, and bright. Lenox would have liked to pick his brain at length, but had quite intentionally refused to use his name (his father’s name, in truth) to meet with Mayne more than a single initial time.

  This was because of his father’s attitude toward Lenox’s choice; one of the most unpleasant conversations of his life (he still thought of it every day, without fail) had been not long after he went down from Oxford.

  “What do you mean to do?” his father had asked.

  Lenox had explained that there were two things that most truly interested him, crime and travel. His father—not a voluble man—had merely looked at him for several moments. “And you mean to pursue one of these as a career?” he had asked finally.

  “Yes,” Charles had replied.

  His father had been silent for a moment, and then, turning away, had said, in a voice of awful quietness, “How very unexpected.”

  They hadn’t spoken of it again.

  Lenox understood, in a way. His family had since time immemorial served England—either in the army or in Parliament—and it had been the iron lesson of their youth that in some fashion he and Edmund would do the same. Still the words had stung him. He had gone to his mother, who had smoothed Edward Lenox’s censure to her son, partly persuaded him that it was only the reaction of a moment.

  She had also told him to go and see Mayne. His father would never deny the introduction, whatever his disappointment in Charles’s choices, she said. She had proved correct.

  In the meeting that resulted, Mayne had been gracious, respectful, and essentially discouraging, believing, in all likelihood, that Lenox was only a dilettante. Well; it was the sensible reaction, no doubt. There was as yet no proof that he wasn’t. Lenox had left the meeting determined to offer that proof in the fullness of time.

  After a moment, a sharp-dressed young clerk emerged with Sherman, nodded civilly to Lenox, and asked him inside. Sherman followed Lenox and Graham’s entrance with an evil eye.

  Mayne had a spacious office on the highest floor of the building. The clerk, who had introduced himself as Wilkinson, ushered Lenox inside; Graham waited without. No need here for a valet with a hard t to make an impression.

  Mayne, who despite his modern ways wore long dark hair in the fashion of around 1822 and breeches rather than trousers, rose, and with a civility equal to his clerk’s said, “How do you do, Mr. Lenox?”

  “You are very kind to grant me a moment, Sir Richard.”

  Mayne gestured to a chair. “Please, sit.” There was a pair of service pistols in a green velvet-lined case on his desk, decorative, as well as a silver inkstand and a desk calendar. On the wall there was an oil of their young Queen and a portrait of Sir Robert Peel, who had founded the very first police force in the city not twenty-five years earlier. “How may I help you?”

  “In truth, Sir Richard, I think this a matter more suited to one of your inspectors than to yourself—knowing that your time is occupied with matters of serious administration and politics—and yet I feared I might not be able to gain their attention quickly enough for so urgent a matter.”

  Mayne’s face remained impassive, but Lenox felt—rightly or wrongly—that the commissioner knew his inspectors made sport of the young interloper. He reddened. “Please go on,” Mayne said.

  Lenox passed across two clippings. One was the letter from the Challenger, the other the description of the Walnut Island murder taken from the Times. “As a means of educating myself, I am developing an archive of articles from daily papers relating to London crime.” Mayne looked up, his lower lip protruding just fractionally in acknowledgment of this commitment. “I fear these two may be related.”

  Mayne read them slowly and deliberately. At last he held one up. “This is from the Challenger.”

  Lenox was impressed that he recognized the typeset. “Yes, sir, which might justifiably arouse your skepticism. But I took the liberty of visiting their offices. I was able to see the original letter there. It wasn’t written by an editor. It may be a hoax, but in conjunc
tion with the—”

  Mayne shook his head. “No, we have been vexed by the Walnut Island matter. I have, personally.” He touched a bell underneath his desk, and within what seemed a vanishing second, his clerk, Wilkinson, appeared. “Fetch the inspector on duty downstairs,” Mayne said.

  “Directly, sir,” said Wilkinson, and withdrew.

  “Thank you very much for bringing this to my attention,” said Mayne to Lenox.

  “Of course, Sir Richard.” He paused. “I had hopes that I might pursue—having put these pieces together—that I might—”

  “Do you have any additional information?”

  He nearly answered that he did not, but then, decided not to waste his moment. “The letter itself presented some interesting features.”

  “Did it?”

  Lenox explained, laying out his conjecture about the character of the man who had written it.

  Just as he was finishing, the door opened again. Lenox—sitting slightly at an angle to his interlocutor—saw that it was Wilkinson, trailed by a tall, beefy, bristle-mustached young man with a hard brow and distrustful eyes.

  Lenox’s heart sank—it was Exeter.

  He followed the work of the Yard closely, and of all the inspectors there, it was Exeter he held in the lowest regard, or perhaps just above a certain Inspector Columbus, an outright dipsomaniac. The best you could say of Exeter was that he was fairly often sober.

  “Mr. Lenox, if you will be so good as to tell Inspector Exeter what you have told me, I would be exceedingly obliged. He will take you downstairs.” Mayne rose, and shook hands with Lenox. “You have our sincere thanks. Please don’t hesitate to call upon me again should anything similar arise—a very sharp eye, to connect the two.”

  “You noted the date, of course, Sir Richard,” Lenox said, hating the rather high desperation in his own voice. “How close the next crime might be.”

  Mayne nodded. “Yes, I did. Wilkinson, find out where Sinex is working today. Exeter—take Lenox to the tearoom and make good use of his time. Consult with Sinex when he has been tracked down.”

  Lenox recalled that it was Exeter and Sinex who were jointly responsible for Walnut Island. “Very good, sir.”

  Wilkinson left. Mayne, having remained standing, left Lenox no choice but to bow slightly and say goodbye, adding his thanks again.

  When they were outside the office, Graham, seated in a leather chair and reading from a thrice-folded journal that instantaneously disappeared into his inner breast pocket, rose.

  Exeter sighed heavily. “Follow me.”

  They went to the tearoom—as ordered to—and there poured themselves cups of tea out of a great silver urn, each taking a thick white porcelain cup from the stacks of them. When they were seated at a small table, Lenox and Graham told Exeter the tale of their day, while the latter took notes, making a thorough job of it, which meant his very obvious skepticism was evidently not enough to surmount his awe of Sir Richard Mayne.

  The tea was good. Resentment suffused every moment of the audience he was granting them, however.

  “All but one time in a hundred, a letter like this is a hoax,” he said when they were finished, setting down his pen, his tone bored in the extreme. “We get them all the time.”

  Lenox was tempted to say that there probably hadn’t been a hundred letters “like this” in the papers in either of their lifetimes. It had some uncanny ring of truth—the erased pencil lines, the superciliousness.

  Perhaps it was this that convinced Lenox that he was right—the superciliousness. There was a certain kind of criminal whose madness took in part the form of an injured sense of unrecognized brilliance.

  “May we look at the trunk from Walnut Island?” Lenox asked, a throw of the dice.

  “Out of the question.” Exeter closed his notebook with a smack and stood up. “I’ll pass this information on to Inspector Sinex. In the meanwhile, please feel free to finish your tea at your leisure. Have another cup if you like.”

  Exeter left the room. At the very least, Lenox thought, it would be clear to two of the Yard’s two-dozen-odd inspectors that Lenox had the ear of Sir Richard Mayne.

  Graham looked at him expectantly.

  “Right,” said Lenox, swallowing the last of his tea and standing up. “There’s not much we can do, it appears, but we can try.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Graham, standing too.

  Lenox took heart from his steadfastness. “We’ll have to split up.”

  This they did. First they walked down Whitehall, making their plans, and then they went off separately, prepared to attack the case.

  They were both active late into the night, checking in periodically at prearranged times at Hungerford Bridge to exchange information.

  Graham spent his time interviewing—he had a real gift for this type of work, his accent blending into whatever conversation he was having, his face somehow eliciting trust automatically, a marvel in that respect—the pilots of the small craft around this area. Lenox, meanwhile, went to the island itself, where he interviewed the man who had found the trunk.

  There were few useful details here, though, and at their last meeting at Hungerford Bridge, it was difficult not to let his despair show to Graham.

  It was eleven o’clock. Many hours had passed with nothing to show. The city was dark, murky, the streets unsavory. Both were exhausted. They stopped at a window and Lenox—famished—ordered them a pair of roast beef sandwiches and a jug of claret.

  They ate these standing. Lenox felt slightly better when this was done. Graham had spoken to dozens of people, and come up empty. The best he could say was that there was a certain dock—Woodbridge Dock—that extended rather farther into the depths of the river than most, and which was also emptier than most, and which lay within about a mile of Walnut Island. This lay within the rough stretch of the Thames where a trunk might have been dropped to wind up in the rushes of Walnut Island, after drifting eastward for an hour or two.

  “Several people mentioned it independently as the likeliest place where something might be dropped into the river and float for a while, sir, without hitting the shore,” Graham said.

  “Wouldn’t that require quite intimate knowledge of the river, though?” Lenox said. “There must be a thousand docks within London’s own limits.”

  Graham nodded. “It’s a slight chance.”

  Lenox looked thoughtful. “Still, we might go out there. Better a long shot than no shot.”

  “By all means, sir.”

  They took a cab. The dock was lonely, dark, empty, windswept. Lenox saw the point the pilots had been making: Woodbridge put them a good forty yards clear of the others into the river.

  They waited there, shivering and nervous, trading sips from a flask, until five in the morning, when at last Lenox said that they should go home and sleep. Even if the murderer was sincere, they probably had a day more until this dark “anniversary” he planned to celebrate, and should preserve some of their energies to spend it searching for him.

  In the meanwhile, perhaps Exeter and Sinex would have found something, and a death could be avoided.

  This was the fatigued but hopeful state of mind in which they went home and to their beds—one to be dashed shortly after the sun had risen the next day.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Lenox knew something was wrong in the very early light of the new day. He would have known it from the look on Graham’s face as he entered the room, but even in the beat before then he had known it, and it took him a moment to realize why: Graham hadn’t knocked.

  Lenox rose to his elbows. “What is it?”

  “Another murder, sir. Very like the first.”

  Graham was holding out a copy of the Telegraph, and Lenox took it.

  Like most papers, it published a second edition after six o’clock in the morning, which was updated to include any news that had emerged since the first edition at three o’clock. As a policy Lenox subscribed to second editions, though it was usually
the first edition that made its way onto London’s breakfast tables.

  It paid off now: 6:50, and he had most of the story.

  Fifteen frantic minutes later, Graham and Lenox were rumbling through the streets of London toward the river in a cab, Lenox urging the driver on from the vehicle’s interior with angry thumps of the roof. He had promised the sleepy-eyed fellow half a crown if they made it to Bankside in less than twenty minutes.

  He was filled with rage, his own tiredness gone. (He had always been able to survive on very little sleep, Graham the same.)

  “We had a very short window of time, sir,” Graham ventured at one point.

  “Mm,” said Lenox in a noncommittal tone, his eyes remaining on the streets.

  He didn’t trust himself to say more. Instead he simmered in his emotions, angry as only the young can be, who still suspect the world to be partially within their control; as only the purehearted can be, to whom evil is a new surprise each time; angry with himself; angry with the indifferent cloudy morning sky; angry with the indifferent passersby, involved so earnestly in their meaningless daily movements.

  GRUESOME AND SENSATIONAL MURDER ON RIVER THAMES

  That had been the headline Graham showed him. It was from the Telegraph, the only paper that had carried the story in its second edition. It was a serious scoop, upon the strength of which its newsboys would sell throughout the morning, and which might even force other papers to go to a third edition, expense be cursed. Nothing else could conceivably lead the evening papers.

  Nevertheless the headline had managed an error in its scant seven words. On the River Thames—doubtful, Lenox thought, that anyone had been murdered on the River Thames.

  The cab crossed Southwark Bridge.

  “Close,” said Graham two-thirds of the way across it, breaking the silence.

  This bridge was toward the eastern part of London; the affluent West End was where Lenox lived, but they had not yet made it all the way east, toward poverty, the infamous rookeries around Tottenham Court Road where men and women lived as close as moles in a burrow, in conditions scarcely less dominated by dirt, the tenements where cholera had wiped away so many thousands of souls the year before, ’49.