What had set him off after decades of scrupulous work? He must have been very bright to ascend to his position at Corcoran and Sons; the letters seemed to Lenox to contain some distillation of all that effort, a will to be seen, to be admired. He was a man who felt underappreciated. He had drawn and erased those straight lines himself.
If the first victim was Eliza Corcoran … perhaps the motivation was love? Money? She was her father’s heir, after all.
But then who was this adventurer, Mr. Leckie, then? How did he come into it?
It was all so extremely confusing, and he was trying to be calm, and if she were harmed, if she were harmed …
“Hurry, hurry,” he muttered, looking through the window.
They crossed the bridge. He thought about hopping out here and running. It would have taken him eighteen minutes, probably, perhaps twenty. But he knew that the carriage, glacially slow as it might seem, would take only seven or eight.
He forced himself to look at his notepad.
It was the second body that remained puzzling. He read over his notes twice, three times.
1) Why so many flowers?
2) Why the shilling?
3) The shoes
4) Leckie? Corcoran? Gretna Green?
5) Why the door, rather than another trunk?
6) Cairn/Johanssen at the scene.
He studied this until he thought he would go cross-eyed.
But then, suddenly, in one of those strange moments of London traffic, the way before them cleared, and the horse pulling the cab broke out into a brisk trot, its driver, conscious of his imminent payday, whipping the beast along.
At the end of Elizabeth’s block, Lenox leapt from the carriage. He threw a pound note at the driver—infinities beyond the fare—and took tearing up the street.
He arrived at her door and banged it as hard as he could, terrified of what he would find.
Their young butler, portly and dignified, answered the door. He knew Lenox well, and greeted him without any apparent surprise. “Hello, sir.”
“Is she here? Lady Elizabeth?”
“No, sir. Her Ladyship is out upon a social call, and will be through lunch.”
“Where? Has anyone been here?”
The butler looked puzzled. “Been here, sir?”
Lenox could have wept. “Yes, been here! Been by! Asked where she was!”
“There was a telegram for her, sir. I directed the messenger on to the duchess’s, being as it is so cl—”
But Lenox was already flying down the steps three at a time.
The duchess’s house was two blocks over. He had never run harder. Somewhere in a far, far part of his mind, he knew that his fate hung in the balance during this run. It would last a minute or so; it would be the last minute in which he didn’t know whether Elizabeth, the woman he loved, would be the third woman in the water. If she died: no, it was impossible to think about.
But impossible not to imagine, too, as he ran up the crowded pavement along Bond Street, attracting looks from everyone he passed, skipping nimbly among them.
Whether she died or lived, he would never marry. That he knew. If she died—a lifelong grief, a life only of atonement to her. He didn’t know (he turned the corner to the duchess’s) whether that would mean giving up detection, or dedicating himself to it completely.
And then, as he came within forty paces of the duchess’s wide, amiable town house, two things happened.
The first was that he suddenly knew—his brain working behind his back—who Cairn’s second victim was. His list had told him.
The second was that he knew—knew—that Elizabeth was dead.
He stopped at the door. There was a great welling in his chest, which would be there forever now. He thought of his father—how much his father loved Elizabeth, how disappointed he would be in Charles—and thought of her, herself, her soft brown hair, her slim waist, her long fingers, and felt filled with a despair unlike any he had ever known.
He would murder Cairn.
He took the steps two at a time and banged this door now.
A housekeeper answered. “Yes, sir?” she said.
“Is she—here?” he gasped.
“Her Grace, sir?”
“No, no. Lady Elizabeth.”
And then,
a miracle,
there she was. Herself.
She emerged into the hallway with a look of curiosity in her eyes. “Charles?” she said.
He was still breathing heavily, and could barely get the words out. “Elizabeth. Good Christ.”
She looked alarmed. “Charles, what is it?”
“Go inside, go inside.” He shoved his way in, closing the door behind him. “Go.”
“Charles, what’s happened?” she asked. But he was in such a state—bewildered, relieved—that all he could do was stare at her. He took her hands tightly in his own. “Charles, that hurts.”
“I thought you might be—might be harmed,” he said.
“Harmed?”
And then he laughed, giddily, released from himself. Well; none of it mattered now. She was safe. And inadvertently, before he knew it, he called her the name that she had used throughout their childhood together. “Jane,” he said. “My goodness. You’re safe.”
He expected a rebuke, but he didn’t care. In Lord James Gray’s family, their pride in their royal ancestor was such that the name Elizabeth was sacred, and when they had learned that it was Jane’s middle name, that had been her betrothed’s one request, that she might adopt it.
But instead of reprimanding him, she smiled, faintly worried but with her sense of humor there, present as it almost always was—a part of why he loved her.
“Lady Jane, you mean,” she said, and switched their hands so that hers were holding his. “Not Jane anymore, Charles, but Lady Jane, if you will not call me Lady Elizabeth.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
It was around noon the next day, and Mayne was staring at Lenox as if he had two heads. After a long moment, he said, “Repeat that once more.”
“I—”
“No. Wait. Wilkinson!”
This bark brought forth Sir Richard’s secretary, as dapper as ever in a suit of lawn. “Sir?”
“Where would we have the Ophelia’s body?”
Lenox observed that even Sir Richard, in this moment of extremity, had resorted to using the press’s nickname. “In Heathgate, sir. There is quite a backlog of corpses.”
“Was it not put forward to the front of the queue?” said Sir Richard angrily. “I asked that it be.”
Wilkinson looked pained. “The coroners have quite a latitude, as you know, sir, and there are—”
“Asinine. Completely asinine. Never mind. It will take fifteen seconds to prove or disprove Mr. Lenox’s theory. Tell them in no uncertain terms to pull the body out. We will send someone along very shortly.”
Here he gave Lenox an irritated look. Youth, Lenox knew, was a state of being perpetually embarrassed; he had thought that perhaps he had grown past it, but for the moment he sat as if under his headmaster’s gaze.
Wilkinson nodded crisply and left, and Mayne asked Lenox, again, to repeat his theory.
Inspectors Sinex and Field were currently at the apartments of Eliza Corcoran and of Theobald Cairn, respectively, to see what they could discover. Cairn himself was still on the loose. As for Lady Elizabeth Gray—Lady Jane, as Lenox had briefly received reprieve to call her—she was under heavy guard on a floor of the Savoy Hotel. She was the daughter of an earl, the daughter-in-law of another, and the wife of a future third; there were constables lining the halls. It was only a miracle that the Queen hadn’t dedicated a regiment.
Similar notice—and similar, if lesser, protection—had been extended to the families of all those who had investigated Cairn, since he had proved that he had investigated the vulnerabilities of the men investigating him. Would it be a surprise if he went after Field’s family?
Lenox did wonder if Cairn had a
ctually intended Elizabeth harm, or if he had merely been buying time, sending Lenox, at the least, off on a chase. The telegram to Elizabeth had merely said FRIENDS WILL BE WATCHING YOU, hideously. Sent in at Waterloo, the train station closest to Corcoran and Sons.
Which in no way meant that Cairn had boarded a train. The return address might be merely another sleight of hand, from a murderer who had shown himself adept at them over and over, disciplined, ingenious, and elusive.
The Ophelia’s disguise, if Lenox’s hypothesis proved correct, would be Cairn’s most unusual of all.
“My theory is simple, I suppose,” said Lenox in the level lie of a voice that he had used during his most nerve-racking tutorials at Balliol. “Five or six weeks ago, Cairn learned some piece of information to his disadvantage, involving the firm. Who knows if he had been of a violent temperament before then? It would not surprise me. Nor would it surprise me if the madness was always there, but has only cracked open now.
“His first victim was Eliza Corcoran. That seems very clear to me from his lie in describing her looks and from the timing of her disappearance. I don’t know if there is a fellow called Leckie, or if he was another of Cairn’s inventions. What I do think I know is that she was the woman in the trunk marked G957 that washed up on Walnut Island, and which Cairn designed to look as if it had belonged to the HMS Gallant.
“His second deception was the letter.” Lenox paused and took a deep breath. “And here we come onto the shores of speculation, sir.”
“Yes, I should say we do,” Mayne retorted, not happily.
“Under my theory of the matter, the second woman was, as I have said, Eliza’s father. George Corcoran.”
There was a long silence.
This was the fifteen-second test to which Mayne had referred. “There were perhaps a dozen of us who examined her.”
“And because of the letter, all of us were anticipating a woman—a woman, Sir Richard. The letter was very clear upon that point.”
“She had long dark hair.”
“Did you examine it closely?” Lenox asked. “I acknowledge that I did not.”
“No,” Sir Richard admitted. He looked tired. He had the whole constabulary under his supervision, a dozen other irons in a dozen distant fires.
“Moreover,” Lenox said, “the body was bedecked in flowers—absolutely covered, head to toe.”
“At the time you thought this was a poetic gesture.”
“Yes, indeed. But it served a practical purpose. It covered the corpse’s body entirely—superfluously, layer upon layer of flower. We all remarked upon that.”
Mayne was looking away from Lenox, through the window at Whitehall. “The face did have very heavy white makeup on it, didn’t it,” he murmured at last.
Lenox nodded, encouraged. “An inch thick. The brilliance of it from Cairn’s perspective—well, he is fiendishly brilliant, I think, sir. The second murder was brilliant in three ways. In the first place, the disappearances of a twenty-year-old daughter and a fifty-year-old father would be very different from the investigation of two women of indeterminate age.
“In the second, his use of the river in the first murder meant that he could place the body within a stone’s throw of Corcoran and Sons, and we would assume that it might have come from anywhere along the river at all.”
Mayne nodded. “You were always agitated about the dryness of the body and the bier.”
“And third,” Lenox said, “Cairn, as the firm’s senior manager, controlled the outflow and inflow of all information about the Corcorans. He could have placed them in Scotland for the next six weeks without any trouble, as far as the employees and suppliers and traders were concerned. He had been at the firm for ages. His work was beyond reproach.”
There was a knock at the door. It was Inspector Field, buttoned up to his beard as usual, looking grim. “Come in,” Mayne said.
Field was holding a bundle of papers. “We were deceived. Jonathan Pond did not live with Mrs. Hutchinson.”
“What?”
“We have discovered that it was Cairn himself who rented that room. Every last shred of evidence in it, the whole case against Pond, was planted there by him. Pond’s real rooms are in Vauxhall.”
“The landlady said that he rented the room only a month ago,” Lenox murmured. “And that she barely saw him.”
Field nodded. “We found the address at Cairn’s. Two of my constables immediately went to Vauxhall and discovered a great deal of correspondence with Eliza Corcoran. She and Pond have been secretly engaged for some time. In the second-to-last letter he received, she expressed some fear about her father’s reaction, but her last letter is overjoyed. Her father was delighted and had promised that the whole business would be Pond’s.”
“He was the third victim, then,” Mayne said. “The letters did promise a third murder.”
Lenox nodded shortly. He had not forgotten looking into Pond’s eyes as the young clerk died. “Yes.”
“Field, come in. You may as well hear this theory.”
Field looked as if there were few things on earth he wanted less than to hear a twenty-three-year-old cub’s theory about a murder, the focus of decades of his attention. But he came in and sat down.
To his credit, he believed it much more quickly than Mayne. “Makes sense. You’ll recall that the elder Corcoran was described to us as very slight and thin, under five feet six inches. A wig would do for the hair. We never questioned that it would be a woman.
“Meanwhile, there were enough clues that if we did associate the murder with Corcoran and Sons, we would immediately find Pond. The spectacles. The letters in his desk. The rented room, obviously. Cairn must have been able to mimic his handwriting.”
“All these clerks are fairly able in that respect. Wilkinson does my own hand to a fineness.” Mayne sighed. “But what if we had never found Pond? Eventually the Corcorans would have been missed.”
“Easy,” said Field. “Pond kills himself and leaves a note in his own hand—in his rented room.”
Mayne nodded slowly. “Now the question is how to find the bastard, I suppose.”
Field winced. He was known to be very religious. Mayne put up a hand, apologizing. “Anyhow,” said Field, “Lenox, you must be congratulated.”
Lenox felt himself flush. “Thank you, sir.”
His skepticism had fallen gratifyingly away. “I think it’s the fourth finest piece of detection I’ve seen.”
“What are the first three?” Mayne asked Field.
“Oh, those are mine,” Field said mildly. “But the boy is only twenty. And he started out with the disadvantage of going to Oxford. In time he’ll overcome it. Hang on to him, Sir Richard.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Lenox and Graham were up very late that night. It wasn’t for any particularly exigent reason; they were merely untangling Cairn’s methods and motivations to their satisfaction, going over the same facts again and again.
“Think of his deceptions. Not one of them was bad.”
It was around midnight. Graham—who had spoken these words—had dropped the “sir” from the end of his sentences an hour or two before, and even loosened his tie.
“No.” Lenox ticked them off with his fingers. “The stencil for the Gallant. The letters—giving us the date of the second murder, telling us that it would be a woman, ensuring that we thought his motive merely vainglorious, not practical. The flowers, the shilling, the white makeup, the rented room full of proof against Pond—proof just subtle enough, such as the flowers in the Bible, to make the investigators proud of their discovery.”
“The performance as Johanssen. It was quite brilliant to take a vacation and become another person, briefly.”
“The performance as Cairn!” Lenox remarked. “Never would I have suspected that rough-and-tumble sailor, just out of a drunken brawl, as living within seven post codes of the fussy and well-dressed senior manager at Corcoran and Sons. Merely as an actor he did so well.”
“Oh, heavens,” said Lenox, standing. “I’m so terribly sorry, Mrs. Huggins. No, it’s still warm—no, please, retire for the night. Take the morning off. We’ve only lost track of time. Unforgivable to keep you up so late.”
“Not at all, sir,” she said.
“Are the cats—they’ve had milk, and all that kind of thing?”
She looked at him as if this were a risible question, but said, “Yes, sir, they have been fed.”
“Oh, good. Good.”
“If that will be all, sir?”
“That will be all.”
It was not close to all for Graham and Lenox, however, and not much later it was Lenox who went to the kitchen to boil more water for their tea leaves.
He was in an old school sweater full of holes. A part of him was still vibrating with the joy of Field’s compliment of him in Mayne’s office; another part still, residually, anxious about Elizabeth, though he knew logically that she was safe; and in still another he was thinking only of his father.
“What about the strangulation, sir?” Graham asked when Lenox was back. His formality had returned during Lenox’s brief absence. “Why feign it?”
“To make it seem like a crime of passion? Wouldn’t you think? To match the letter.”
Graham frowned. “Yet in the Walnut Island case, it really was strangulation.”
“A young woman,” Lenox said. He winced. “Perhaps Cairn didn’t fancy the risks of a confrontation with Corcoran, and resorted to poison, but wanted the methods of murder to match.”
“Possibly,” said Graham.
Lenox frowned. “He must have been days in making the plan, though, because he had the clothing of a sailor, and the beard, too. His hair was all fallen about.”
Graham nodded slowly. “If Corcoran really did hire a private investigator—”
“Another skillful deception!” said Lenox. “This whole Leckie business.”
“But what would he have said when the investigator returned?”
The Woman in the Water--A Prequel to the Charles Lenox Series Page 23