The Fleet Street Murders clm-3 Read online

  The Fleet Street Murders

  ( Charles Lenox Mysteries - 3 )

  Charles Finch

  It’s Christmas, 1866, and amateur sleuth Charles Lenox, recently engaged to his best friend, Lady Jane Grey, is happily celebrating the holiday in his Mayfair townhouse. Across London, however, two journalists have just met with violent deaths — one shot, one throttled. Lenox soon involves himself in the strange case, which proves only more complicated as he digs deeper. However, he must leave it behind to go north to Stirrington, where he is fulfilling a lifelong dream: running for a Parliamentary seat. Once there, he gets a further shock when Lady Jane sends him a letter whose contents might threaten their nuptials.

  In London, the police apprehend two unlikely and unrelated murder suspects. From the start, Lenox has his doubts; the crimes, he is sure, are tied, but how? Racing back and forth between London and Stirrington, Lenox must negotiate the complexities of crime and politics, not to mention his imperiled engagement. As the case mounts, Lenox learns that the person behind the murders might be closer to him — and his beloved — than he knows.

  Charles Finch

  The Fleet Street Murders

  To my father

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First thanks must go as always to my agent, Kate Lee, and my editors, Charlie Spicer and Yaniv Soha. All three of them are supportive and discerning, and this would be a lesser book without their aid.

  Supplementing their work were two people I must thank: my mother, who can navigate the trickiest plot points and seems to understand my characters better than I do, and Emily Popp, who time and again tied together loose strings to tighten the structure and prose of this book. I’m so grateful to both of them.

  A few notes: Berry Brothers and Rudd and Ye Old Cheshire Cheese are still in business. I highly recommend visiting both. The description of the London Mint is accurate, but I changed some of its internal architecture to suit the exigencies of the story. And lastly, while Stirrington is a fictional town, it has many real counterparts in Durham, and the events that occur there are, I hope, entirely authentic in their nature.

  PROLOGUE

  It was late in the evening, and a thin winter rain beat down over London’s low buildings and high steeples, collecting in sallow pools beneath the streetlights and insinuating its way inside the clothes of the miserable few whom fate had kept outside. Inside Charles Lenox’s house, however, tucked on a short lane just off of Grosvenor Square, all was warm and merry. It was Christmas and only a few short days from 1867. There had been a long, hearty meal, a delicious pudding, and more than a few glasses of wine, and now just two people, the amateur detective and his older brother, Sir Edmund Lenox, sat up, sipping short glasses of a digestive anise and reminiscing about holidays past, as men of their age, just on either side of forty, often will at Christmas. Animated disagreements and frequent peals of laughter filled the long, narrow dining room, as a fire died behind them. Midnight had long passed, and Edmund’s wife and two sons were asleep upstairs. It was an hour since Lenox had walked his betrothed, Lady Jane Grey, back to her own house next door.

  They looked alike, these two men. Both had brown hair, slightly curly, and handsome, kind faces. Edmund, who preferred rural to city life, possessed a haler and ruddier aspect, while Charles, who spent so much of his life pondering the enigmatic, seemed more thoughtful and more introspective. Since the death of their parents, the two brothers had spent their holidays at Lenox House, their family’s ancestral home in Sussex. This year, though, Edmund, who was the Liberal Member of Parliament for Market house, had been held in London by pressing political matters, and Charles had suggested they might alter their tradition and gather under his roof. He was especially happy that they did so because it was a kind of consecration of his very recent engagement to Jane, one of the oldest friends of both brothers. In all the happy hours since she had assented to his proposal, seeing her smiling face ranged among his family’s at the candlelit supper table was the happiest. As he sat with Edmund now his heart felt full, his life blessed. It was wonderful.

  Not very far away, however, was a different, unhappier scene. Near Savile Row a solitary man was sitting in a small but sumptuous apartment, decorated with gold clocks and hunting prints and bearing all the signs of bachelorhood that long tenancy can bestow on a set of rooms. A pair of mended trousers sat next to a half-full wineglass on the table before Winston Carruthers, writer and London editor of the conservative newspaper the Daily Telegraph. He was a short, fat, red man, wheezy and ill looking. Ignoring his landlady, who came in to rake the coals and shot him a look of hatred as she departed — a look not unusual for her countenance but more intense than usual, perhaps because it was Christmas Day — Carruthers wrote furiously on a large sheet of paper, turning and folding it again and again to fit all he had to say.

  They would be the final words the journalist wrote.

  “… iniquity not seen in this age or several since,” he scrawled and then with a great gesture of finality laid down his pen, blotted the paper, and leaned back in his chair to read it. He held the document very close to his face and several times just pulled it back in time to avoid covering it with his wet cough.

  “Damn draft,” he said, looking about disagreeably. “Martha? Is that you?”

  There was no reply to his question, however, and he went back to reading, occasionally pausing to sip the hot negus that had gone lukewarm as he worked. Nearing the end of the sheet he began a short addendum.

  It was as he wrote this that he heard a footstep behind him, and before he could turn he felt a sharp, rending pierce in the back of his neck. Futilely he clutched his throat. In an instant he had fallen to the floor.

  Behind him a man moved quickly to look through the papers in the apartment, leaving nothing out of its place but nothing unchecked. At last he gently plucked from the still warm hand the broad sheet of paper Carruthers had been writing on.

  In an aristocratic voice, the murderer said, without pity in his voice, “Stupid sot. I hope you burn in hell.”

  He put the paper back and fled to the open window, the one from whence the draft that had irritated Carruthers in the final moments of his life had come. The man unrolled a rope ladder and climbed down quickly. The apartment was only on the second floor.

  After he was gone Martha came in, ignoring the body and the long knife protruding from its back, and went to the window, took the rope ladder back up, and after raking the coals again began the slow process of burning it, as downstairs her children slept.

  At the same time about a mile across London, Simon Pierce was sitting at his desk in an austere-looking home office that seemed deliberately antithetical to the extravagant gold and mahogany of the rooms of Winston Carruthers. There were plain oak walls, ringed with a series of severe family portraits, and a very quiet sort of fire burning in front of two empty armchairs.

  Technically Pierce was married, but he rarely saw his wife above once a fortnight. She was a fat woman of limitless vanity, who rather than minimizing her bulk by dressing plainly seemed more by the day to resemble a very loud floral-patterned sofa. Most of her evenings were spent at her father’s house in Lamborn (which in simple honesty she wished she had never left, to make the obscure middle-aged marriage that was all her family’s long lineage had been able to buy her). Pierce, on the other hand, often slept on the long cot in his office at the Daily News. There, unlike in his own home, he was a man of importance, the international editor and a frequent columnist on the editorial page. The couple had a daughter neither much cared for. At eighteen she had married and fled to India. They received twelve punctual and polite letters a year from her. The most recent had wished them a Ha
ppy Christmas, and given Pierce an unexpected and genuine pang for her. The softness of age, he figured. Simon Pierce was not far from his fifty-fifth birthday.

  In looks he was tall, thin, and gray, with bifocals that forced him at all times to lean slightly forward. These made him particularly unpleasant to talk to at parties, where one felt inspected and analyzed at every conversational turn. The excellent free education at his school in Norfolk had paved his way to Oxford, and from there he went straight to London, full of ambition and a belief in hard work that had quickly been borne out by his career’s trajectory. The Daily News was a liberal, if not radical, paper, in line with the views of its founder — Charles Dickens. Pierce had molded himself to the paper’s beliefs, rather than the other way around. He was a powerful man now.

  Unlike Carruthers, he was not writing on that Christmas evening but reading. The Bible was in his hands. Pierce was, unusually, a Roman Catholic. Even on Christmas he would probably have preferred the office to his home, but he had instead endured a long supper with his wife, who was full of her father’s stories. After she had gone to bed he had come into his study restless. He took no wine and felt clearheaded.

  Just as he turned to the first page of the Book of Matthew, Simon heard a soft knock at the front door of the house. The servants were asleep, and with a weary sigh he rose to his feet and made his way along the corridor between his office and the door. It was a sign of disrespect, he felt, that there was no scurry of foot audible below stairs. It didn’t occur to him to wonder why the visitor had knocked, which was sure to raise the notice only of someone nearby, rather than rung the bell, which would have sounded directly in the servants’ quarters. Simon Pierce rarely felt entirely comfortable anywhere other than the office or church, and it was with anxiety that he approached the front hall.

  He opened the door.

  “Yes?” he said. Before him stood a squat, strong man. “You’ll find no alms here. Seek work.”

  The swish of falling rain muffled their words.

  “Don’t need any,” said a distinctly unaristocratic voice. “Have some.”

  “How may I help you, then?”

  “Mr. Simon Pierce?”

  “Yes,” said Pierce with mounting worry. “Who on earth are you?”

  The man turned and looked up and down the street. One house was lit, its windows glimmering orange, but it was a hundred yards off. He took a gun from his belt and, just as Pierce stumbled backward in panic, rushed forward and shot him in the heart. The rain and a well-placed handkerchief stifled the sound of the bullet to some degree. Still, it was louder than he had expected. The squat man staggered down the steps and turned down an alley while Pierce was still on his knees, struggling vainly against death.

  Half an hour later the murderer was in a different alley, in an altogether more refined part of town. He met a tall, blond, hearty-looking man, with an upper-class accent.

  “It’s done, then?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Here. Your payment. In addition to the debt — that’s gone, as I promised,” he said, “but only as long as you keep quiet. Do you understand?”

  He thrust a purse jangling with coins into the squat man’s hand and turned to leave without a word.

  “And a merry bleedin’ Christmas,” the shooter muttered, counting the money. His hands were still shaking.

  Simon Pierce was the first man he had ever killed.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lenox woke up with a morning head, and as soon as he could bear to open his eyes, he gulped half the cup of coffee that his valet, butler, and trusted friend, Graham, had produced at Lenox’s first stirring.

  “What are Edmund and Molly doing?” he asked Graham.

  “Lady Lenox and her sons have gone to the park, sir. It’s a fine morning.”

  “Depends what you mean by fine,” said Lenox. He looked at his window and winced from the sun. “It seems awfully bright. My brother’s in as much pain as I am, I hope?”

  “I fear so, sir.”

  “Well, there is justice in the world, then,” Lenox reflected.

  “Would you like me to close your curtains, sir?”

  “Thanks, yes. And can you bring me some food, for the love of all that’s good?”

  “It should arrive momentarily, sir. Mary will be bringing it.”

  “Cheers, Graham. Happy Boxing Day.”

  “Thank you, sir. Happy Boxing Day, Mr. Lenox.”

  “The staff got their presents?”

  “Yes, sir. They were most gratified. Ellie in particular expressed her thanks for the set of —”

  “Well, there’s a present for you in the wardrobe if you care to fetch it,” said Lenox.

  “Sir?”

  “I would do it myself, but I doubt I could lift a fork in my present state.”

  Graham went to the wardrobe and found the broad, thin parcel, wrapped in plain brown paper and tied with brown rope.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  “By all means.”

  Graham carefully untied the rope and set about unwrapping the paper.

  “Oh, just tear it,” said Lenox irritably.

  Nevertheless, Graham stubbornly and methodically continued at the same pace. At last he uncovered the present. It was a broad charcoal drawing of Moscow, which he and Lenox had once visited. Both of them looked back on it as the adventure of their lives.

  “I hardly know how to thank you,” said Graham, tilting it toward the light. He was a man with sandy hair and an earnest, honest mien, but now a rare smile dawned on his face.

  “I had it commissioned — from one of those sketches you drew us, you know.”

  “But far surpassing it in size and skill, sir.”

  “Well — size anyway.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Graham.

  “Well, go on, find out about breakfast, won’t you? If I waste away and die you’ll be out of a job,” said Lenox. “The papers, too.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “And Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lenox.”

  Soon breakfast came, and with it a stack of several newspapers. These Lenox ignored until he had eaten a few bites of egg and bacon and finished a second cup of coffee. Feeling more human, he glanced at the Times and then, seeing its subdued but intriguing headline, flipped through the rest of the stack. The more populist papers positively screamed the news. Two of the giants of Fleet Street were dead, their last breaths exhaled within minutes of each other, according to household members and confirmed by doctors. Both the victims of murder.

  Lenox picked up one of the papers at random. It happened to be the cheapest of the weekly Sunday papers, the threepenny News of the Day, a purveyor of shocking crime news and scurrilous society rumor, which had come into existence a few decades before and instantly vaulted to popularity among the London multitudes. Most men of Lenox’s class would have considered it a degradation to even touch the cheap newsprint the News came on, but it was the detective’s bread and butter. He had often found stories in the News of the Day that no other paper printed, about domestic skirmishes in Cheapside, anonymous dark-skinned corpses down among the docks, strange maladies that spread through the slums. The paper had recently played a crucial role in reporting the case of James Barry. A famous surgeon who had performed the first successful cesarean section in all of Africa, he had died — and after his death was discovered to have in fact been, of all things, a woman. Margaret Ann, by birth. It had been for a time the story on every pair of lips in London and was still often spoken of.

  SHOCK CHRISTMAS MURDER OF FLEET STREET DUO, the headline on the front page shouted. Eagerly, Lenox read the article.

  The SHOCK MURDER of two of London journalism’s finest practitioners has shocked London this morning. “Winsome” Winston Carruthers, London editor of the Daily Telegraph, and the catholic Simon Pierce of the Daily News died within minutes of each other on christmas night. An unknown assailant shot Pierce in the heart at P
ierce’s South London home, waking his entire household and throwing his wife into fits of HYSTERIA, at approximately 1:07 A.M. this morning. No witnesses have contacted the Metropolitan Police: COME FORTH IF YOU SAW ANYTHING, readers.

  Not FIVE MINUTES before, according to police reports, scarcely an hour into Boxing Day, Winston Carruthers was STABBED in his Oxford Street apartments. Police found Carruthers STILL WARM after a resident of Oxford Street reported seeing a tall, disguised man climbing down a rope ladder!

  Exclusively, the NOTD has learned that Carruthers’s landlady and housekeeper, a Belgian woman, was on the scene and cooperated with the police officers — ONLY TO VANISH THIS MORNING, leaving her apartments and their contents behind save for several small bags. Her two children left with her. Word has been sent to the ports of England with a description of the housekeeper. She is fat, with a prominent nose and a shriveled left hand. IF YOU SEE HER, readers, contact the police, or the NOTD’S editorial offices.

  According to INSPECTOR EXETER, reliable and much decorated officer of Scotland Yard, the housekeeper (name withheld at our discretion) is NOT a suspect: At the same brief moments of the murder and the murderer’s absconding, she was witnessed by a few dozen people along Oxford Street visiting a local alehouse. HOWEVER, READERS, SHE MAY STILL BE AN ACCOMPLICE TO MURDER! If you see her, contact the police.

  CARRUTHERS, forty-nine, was a native of our fair city, a childless bachelor who leaves behind a sister in Surrey. PIERCE, fifty-four, leaves behind a wife, BESS, and a daughter, ELIZA, who is stationed with her husband in BOMBAY. The NEWS sends its sympathy to all of the bereaved.

  ADDED FOR SECOND PRINTING: INSPECTOR EXETER has already cracked the case, according to a reliable source, and found a definite link between the two men BESIDES their profession. WATCH THIS SPACE for more.