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

by Charles Finch

  “I’m a terrible cook.”

  She smiled. “Come now.”

  As they ate their lunch, which was quite good in the end—salmon with lemon and asparagus, a baked cauliflower with cheese, a silver dish of peas with a lump of butter melting over them—the two of them discussed Lady Hamilton’s, their friends, Hugh’s doomed love, Lucia’s likely one.

  Afterwards, a cup of coffee in her hands, Elizabeth wandered the study. She stopped in front of a map of Russia. “Tell me,” she said, “do you really mean to go?”

  “Indeed I do, my lady.”

  “It snows more or less continuously, no?”

  “Sometimes less, and sometimes discontinuously.” He smiled. “Summer is not an English invention.”

  She traced her finger along a route that Lenox had drawn on the map. It took him by train from St. Petersburg to Moscow, with stops marked by small blue circles along the way. “What are these?”

  “Monasteries. You can walk from one to the next.”

  “You shall become very spiritually enlightened one of these days.”

  Lenox shook his head. “May it arrive soon.”

  For the first time, she looked at him directly in the eye. “I owe you an apology.”

  “Do you? I can’t imagine you do.”

  “I do; and you know why. I was very censorious at the ball—and your behavior was none of my business at all.”

  He stared back at her.

  By the time he had realized that she was not merely his closest friend (her youth had been an obstruction to that realization, a fatal one), she had accepted a proposal. This was the closest either had come to speaking a word about their emotions since then.

  “As my closest friend,” Lenox said, “you are forgiven. In fact, you could move to a Russian monastery, and I would visit you there.”

  She smiled. “The country won’t seem so far then.”

  There was a ring at the door.

  Lenox’s heart leapt. Graham came tearing in, if it was possible one could tear into a room in a manner befitting the gravity of a butler. “The telegram, sir.”

  Lenox opened it.

  It was very long, a list of all sales the company had made in London within the last five years, though because Wilton’s were based in Manchester, it wasn’t so prohibitively long that it was impossible to scan. At the top: they had sold 1,900 trunks to a muslin importer in Lambeth; 1,750 to a dry goods company in Greenwich—the list went on, down to ten trunks entrusted to the Oxford and Cambridge Club.

  For shipping food, Lenox would wager.

  And then he saw it. “Here!” he cried. “Graham, order a cab. We have to go to Bankside. Elizabeth, goodbye—I’m sorry—I shall see you this evening, I hope—at Clarissa’s—but I must go.”

  “Go, go,” she said, “go.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  An hour and a half later, Lenox, Graham, Sir Richard Mayne, and Inspector Exeter were in a hansom on the way from Scotland Yard to Bankside, the former two on a bench facing the latter.

  Exeter looked mad as a whipped horse. He hadn’t wanted to come. Mayne had overruled him, but did seem filled with skepticism now, worn down by his subordinate’s ire. “Well—you had better explain,” he said to Lenox.

  Lenox nodded. “Of course.” He coughed into the crook of his elbow, to give himself time to collect his thoughts. “Very well, first, then:

  “As you know, it has bothered me for some time that the door itself upon which the second victim’s body was laid was dry, dry all over—underneath, on top.”

  “Yes, you’ve mentioned it thirty times or so,” said Exeter.

  “Because I found it curious.”

  “Inspector Field did not.”

  “I will tell you why I think it has been bothering me.

  “The board and the body together were heavy, at least some two hundred pounds. That, combined with the fact that they were dry, leads me to strongly believe that they came, crucially, from very close by, if we believe the murderer to be a single person, as I think we all do.”

  Lenox paused to let this sink in. Mayne merely grunted. “Hm.”

  It wasn’t lost on any of the four of them that Lenox had given an address on Bankside to the driver. They looked at him expectantly, and he went on. “The fact that the body itself was wet was only an attempt at disguise, to make us believe that she had floated down the river, like the trunk that landed at Walnut Island—when the trunk actually had floated downriver. From Bankside, I would bet money.”

  All four men were silent, and in that instant caught someone a stone’s throw down the street (they were on Whitehall) singing the ballad of the “Perfect Crimes,” a two-stanza ditty composed to aid in the sale of a gaudy and mostly fabricated little pamphlet about the murders. Lenox was thoroughly sick of the melody, and Mayne, if his face was any indication—the pamphlet was not generous toward him—felt similarly.

  “And where specifically are we heading now?” he asked Lenox.

  They had begun to pull across the fatal river itself. Lenox, though confident in his logic, felt a bundle of nerves. More than once he had asked himself what someone his age could do—and more than once answered himself, more stoutly than he felt, that if it was within Exeter’s capabilities to solve a crime, it was also within his own. At his very dullest he couldn’t be duller than Exeter.

  Lenox passed the telegram he had received from Wilton’s over to Mayne. “That is a list of everyone in London who has made an order for Wilton’s trunks—that is, the kind in which the first victim’s body was discovered—in the last five years.”

  Mayne frowned, staring down at the long list of names. “And?”

  Lenox handed over a second piece of paper. “This morning I wrote down the addresses of every building near our spot on Bankside. Then I looked up their names.”

  Mayne had caught on before Lenox finished speaking, and was cross-referencing the two lists, pointer finger bouncing back and forth between the two sheets.

  He found it, and looked up at Lenox, suddenly no longer a skeptic. “Corcoran and Sons?” he said pressingly. “What is Corcoran and Sons?”

  Lenox shook his head. “I only know that it’s a business. I’m not yet sure in which line.” He pointed at an enormous warehouse along Bankside, number 38. “There it is, however. I think many of our answers lie inside.”

  The carriage stopped. All of them stared at the huge brick building, whose anonymity seemed suddenly ominous.

  Two constables traveled with Mayne at all times, and everyone inside could feel it when they jumped down from the rails outside. A moment later, the two doors opened.

  The four men inside piled out. Both constables, who flanked them as they walked toward the warehouse, were short, one dark and one fair; they were called Middleton and Becker. Mayne nodded at them, and then said, “Well, Lenox, this is your show.”

  Lenox nodded, more optimistically than he felt. “Follow me.”

  After receiving the wire that early afternoon, Lenox had come to this very spot alone. It hadn’t been easy to loiter; there were dozens of men about, ferrying goods to a pier nearby, counting pallets, that sort of thing.

  But he had found what he wanted.

  The warehouse comprised a large ground-level story with vast windows, where goods were held, and two shorter stories above it, which contained offices. Everything on the building was salt- and weatherworn, battered, rough, as indeed everything along the river was after more than a month’s distance from its last painting or polishing. Salt could eat anything, of course—a brush of it from an incoming shipment, a little time, and its tale was told.

  There were two dinghies upended outside the colossal main doors, and various mysterious seagoing paraphernalia, all of it tattered and smudged.

  There were also seven or eight trunks lying about. They were of just exactly the type in which the Walnut Island body had been discovered.

  Lenox first led them to one of these, which sat about twenty yards
from the warehouse. He upended it. “Oy, what’re thee!” shouted a gruff voice.

  It belonged to a foreman, striding toward them. But Mayne and even Exeter were ignoring him. The constables, Middleton and Becker, convoyed in front of their boss, ready to explain.

  On the underside of the trunk, it said G811.

  Lenox gestured toward the others. “The others are the same,” he said. “An in-house marking. Now follow me, if you will.”

  It was with a brisker step that Mayne obeyed this request. The G811 was monumentally significant, of course: it put a trunk from this warehouse directly on Walnut Island, the site where the first victim had been discovered. The warehouse itself was only a hundred paces from the site where the second had been.

  It was beyond conceivable coincidence.

  Lenox led them around the eastern corner of the building, gaining strength from that thought. There were fewer windows here, and a series of smaller doors, presumably entrances to various separate working sections of the warehouse.

  There were seven of these doors in all (Lenox had counted), and all were stripped and salt-worn, like everything else here.

  All the doors except one.

  It was painted a fresh blue-gray color. It was quite obviously new.

  “Where’s the one it replaced?” Mayne asked.

  “In Ealing, unless I am much mistaken.”

  “In Ealing.”

  “I went and saw the door yesterday, despite Inspector Sinex’s objection. It matches the dimensions of this one to the inch, as well as the color of the others. It was substantially more worn, however. A large hole near the handle—risk of a burglary. In other words, it had reached the time when it needed to be replaced.”

  “So it would have been lying about,” Mayne said.

  Lenox nodded. “Forty yards from the river here.”

  “Then why the flowers? The shilling?”

  Lenox shrugged. “Why the HMS Gallant?” He turned the handle of the new door. “I propose that we attempt to find out.”

  They went inside.

  What greeted them in the warehouse was the sight of hundreds of Wilton’s trunks, scattered about in various places. The business of Corcoran and Sons became clear quickly: they evidently took in goods from the ships on the Thames and transported them overland across the British Isles. There was no single dominant good here; being packed into various trunks, by hefty men, there were piles of muslin and fine lace, cases of liquor—luxury goods, all of them.

  It was plain to see how the Walnut Island trunk could have gone missing without being missed.

  An enormous fellow in shirtsleeves, with long side-whiskers and huge arms, was striding toward them. “Private premises,” he said. “Who are you?”

  Four police badges emerged at once—even Mayne’s, which he couldn’t have frequent occasion to display.

  “We need to see the person in charge of this business,” he said.

  The man frowned. “He’s away, Mr. Corcoran.”

  “Where?”

  “Looking for his daughter.”

  A jolt of electricity went through Lenox’s spine. “His daughter? Where has she gone?”

  “She eloped to Gretna Green, the fool. Turned down ten thousand pounds a year by defying Mr. Corcoran—for love.”

  This last word was spoken in the most derisive tone. “Then who is in charge?” said Exeter impatiently.

  The man frowned. “In charge of what? I’m King Jerry the First as far as this particular floor is concerned.”

  “And upstairs?” said Mayne. “Who is in charge there? We have serious questions to ask.”

  “About the perfect?”

  Mayne looked at him. “How did you know that? What is your name?”

  “I’m Blackstone. As for how—happened on our part of the river. Six of you. Doesn’t take a genius.” His massive shoulders rose and dipped just slightly. Obvious. “You’d better see Mr. Corcoran’s senior manager, I suppose. Nobody down here knows anything. I’d’ve whipped it straight out of them. Two women, like that. An absolute disgrace. You should read the pamphlet they’ve going about that tells what happened.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The senior manager of Corcoran and Sons was a tall man who managed to stoop his way into middle height, slope-shouldered, head sunk down to his chest. He had white-blond hair shaped into two diverging and immovable planes, and a middle manager’s face, with owlish spectacles and a furrow of shortsightedness in his brow.

  Old, battered spectacles, Lenox noticed.

  Blackstone had accompanied them up to this office, which was small but commanded a pretty view of the water. (Mr. Corcoran’s own much larger office was just next door, at the corner of the building.) In the vast room outside the two private offices there sat fourteen clerks working, and Lenox had scanned their faces—all turned to see the visitors—closely, looking for signs of his man.

  No new spectacles there, either; nobody he recognized, or whose face drew his notice.

  “Scotland Yard, Mr. Cairn,” said Blackstone.

  Mr. Cairn, who was sitting, peered at them over his spectacles and sighed. “Scotland Yard?” he said. “Mr. Corcoran is away.”

  Lenox thought it odd that he assumed they wanted to see Corcoran. “Our business is not necessarily with Mr. Corcoran,” he said.

  Cairn looked slightly surprised. “I assumed it was about his daughter.”

  “She eloped, we understand?”

  Cairn hesitated, and then said, “Thank you, Blackstone.” When the foreman was gone, he said, with a pained look on his face, “Yes, Eliza Corcoran has eloped, I’m afraid. The fellow an utter bounder. Not a penny to his name, and full to the brim with lies.”

  “How do you know?” asked Mayne.

  “Mr. Corcoran has had him investigated.”

  “He has been gone a month, Corcoran?”

  “A month? No, two weeks. He decided at last that he had better go himself. Miss Corcoran had left a long, hysterical letter about true love and that sort of rot.” Cairn shook his head. Evidently this was not a workplace filled with very great credulity about the concept of love. “Mr. Corcoran has tracked her to Glasgow. Now it is a matter of hunting them to ground, paying this fellow off, and bringing his daughter home. Mr. Corcoran and I asked Scotland Yard for help some time ago. While I have you, I should like to note that we received none.”

  “What is this man’s name?” asked Mayne.

  “Leckie. Or so he says. I told Mr. Corcoran I would bet anything he’s a Spaniard. Swarthy.”

  “An accent?”

  “No,” admitted Cairn grudgingly.

  “When did she elope?” asked Lenox.

  “About five weeks ago.”

  Lenox and Graham exchanged a look. Mayne, who was no fool, saw it pass between them, and immediately cottoned on.

  Exeter, who was closer to a fool, saw only that they were all looking at one another, and started to look at each of them suspiciously, as if they were keeping a secret from him.

  “What does she look like, Miss Eliza Corcoran?” asked Lenox.

  Cairn frowned. “She’s fair, fair-haired. Rather shorter than most, and largish.” His voice became confidential. “Plump, one would admit if one were pressed. Therefore, in her insecurity, vulnerable to this vile sort of predator. Leckie.”

  Lenox, who had been sure this young woman was the victim of Walnut Island, felt disappointed—the body in the trunk had been slender, with dark ringlets of hair—then chided himself for it. Eliza Corcoran was at least alive, whatever circumstances she had worked herself into.

  “Has she been corresponding with her father since she disappeared?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Cairn shook his head again. “Reckless girl.”

  “Eliza Corcoran? I take it you knew her, then?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve been here for thirty years—a third again as long as she’s been alive.”

  Lenox nodded. “And your trunks are from Wilton’s?” he asked


  Cairn looked at him curiously, thrown by the change of subject. “Our most recent batch. We have been looking for a cheaper supplier, actually, but there are only half a dozen who make that type in England. Why?”

  “What is the marking stamped on each one?”

  “They are marked with a G, for goods, which is the railway’s preference, to distinguish them from personal items, and then with a number from our warehouse, which is ours. That way the trunks with which we ship liquor aren’t later used to ship—well, delicate furs, for example.”

  “It’s a luxury goods company, then,” Mayne said.

  “Yes. Buy overseas, sell to England.” He looked at them all now, suddenly concerned. “What is this about? Our books are clean, you know. We haven’t had a case of theft inside the company in three years, either. We pay too well. One stolen shipment about eighteen months ago, but our insurance covered that.”

  “Who is out sick today?” said Lenox.

  “Out? What, sick?”

  “Yes, that, or has been excused early?”

  Cairn gave him a strange look. “Nobody.”

  “Nobody?”

  “I can assure you we hire no malingerers here, sir. It’s a very, very good job for a clerk. Several have been promoted to the managerial level, here or at other firms.”

  “There were fourteen men in the room we passed through to get to your office. There are fifteen desks.”

  Exeter scoffed. “An extra desk.”

  “It had been in use this morning, or I am much in error,” Lenox said curtly.

  Mayne was staring at him. “How did you count so quickly?”

  Lenox hadn’t counted quickly—he had just known, the way one knew the word “tangerine” at a glance without thinking about the t or the a or the n or the g or any of the rest of it. His mind worked that way. It always had.

  “I thought it might be useful,” he said, however, by way of reply.

  Cairn frowned and stood up. “They should all be present. You are right, Inspector—”

  “Lenox. Mr. Lenox.”

  “You are right, Inspector Lenox, in saying that we have fifteen clerks, and that all of them are present today.”