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  “Ain’t a bobby, is you?” he asked.

  “No, I’m not. Can I help you?”

  Mason sneered. “Maybe. Though’ I’d just repeat myself—a chap what don’t know ‘is business don’t come to much good.” As he said it he pulled his hand outward from his pocket, and with a flash of panic Lenox saw the dull black sheen of a pistol in the man’s hand.

  “All right,” Lenox managed to mutter.

  Mason stormed off, and Lenox pushed away the steaming pie, suddenly finding that the cliche was true: He didn’t have an appetite any longer.

  * * *

  That evening Jameson, the bobby who had found Phil Jigg’s body, stopped by Lenox’s house to check on the day’s progress. Lenox told him the little he had learned from the Plug brothers and Reverend Tilton, as well as what had happened with John Mason in the pub.

  “We can always bring him in, sir,” said Jameson. “No point in carrying on if you might get hurt.”

  “What I wonder is whether the man was threatening me to protect himself or to protect somebody else.”

  “Himself, I’d reckon.”

  “But why? Why draw attention to himself? It wasn’t as if he were my primary suspect. Or any kind of suspect, for that matter.”

  “Don’t know that he’d think it through like that, sir.” He pushed his black hair away from his eyes. An awfully young man, Lenox thought wearily. “If you ask me, he’s the chap.”

  “You may be right. But what about proof? Motive? Witnesses?”

  “Nobody will stand witness against Mason.”

  “No?”

  “He’s reckoned quite dangerous, and he’s been known to work for Black Sammy.”

  Even Lenox had heard of Black Sammy, the man who ran prostitution, thief-taking, and gambling along most of Great St. Andrew’s. He was known for his violence. His presence cast a shadow over the case now that he was involved, even at one remove.

  “He might be the man—Black Sammy, I mean,” said Lenox.

  “Might be.”

  “Will you come out with me tomorrow morning?

  “You mean to go back to the Dials then, sir?”

  “I do.”

  “I suppose I could come along. Oh—and by the way, I had a friend at the morgue take a quick glance over Phil Jigg’s body.”

  “Did you?”

  “He confirmed what you said, strangulation, though he found a few bruises on the body as well.”

  “Not all that much help, unfortunately.”

  “No.” Jameson frowned at his notepad. “A couple of other small notes—Jigg had one tattoo, on the back of his neck. An old one, apparently, reading ST. He was a heavy smoker, though that’s not surprising. Oh—and he had lots of small scars up and down his legs.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “I thought so, too.”

  Lenox looked into the fire in his library, his chin resting on his hand. “Well,” he said, “the only thing for it is another look around the Dials. Can’t be helped, I’m afraid.”

  * * *

  The next morning Lenox went back to see the Plug brothers. Jameson stood outside the shop while Lenox went in. He thought he would ask about Mason.

  When he did, though, all of the cheerfulness vanished from the brothers’ faces, their attitude toward Lenox completely altered, and they rushed him back out onto the street without a word. For good measure they locked the door behind him and put up their CLOSED sign, turned out the gas lamps inside the shop, and clattered heavily up the back stairs, which must have led to their residence. All of it happened in only a few seconds; it left Lenox in a daze.

  The entire morning passed like that. They asked on Monmouth Street, in the arena, among the street urchins, and nobody would answer any questions about Mason or Black Sammy. Finally, nearing noon, as they walked dejectedly back to the beginning of Great St. Andrew’s, they heard a whisper from the shadows say, “Come over here!” Following it (guardedly), they found a woman beckoning them down a slip of an alleyway. It was Martha Morris.

  “Why, Mrs. Morris!” said Lenox.

  “Listen ‘ere—I’ll only say this because Phil Jigg was a decent chap. The question is: Why was a man like John Mason, plenty of scratch, staying at St. Martin’s?” Before Jameson or Lenox could answer, she had gone back out into the street and picked up her tongs. Prodding the bobby, Lenox motioned toward the other end of the alley, where they wouldn’t give her away.

  “What was that about?” Jameson asked.

  “An old friend.”

  “What do you think, sir?”

  “She’s right. Back to the church, I say, and see if we can hunt down Reverend Tilton, or at least the man who rents out the beds, and ask for an explanation.”

  As they walked back down toward the church, Lenox had to admit that it was a relief to see Jameson’s cosh and pistol in his belt. He didn’t relish the prospect of another meeting with Mason.

  At the church the page who had helped Lenox before appeared again.

  “Can you take us to see Reverend Tilton, my lad?” said Jameson. “Or the man who runs the refectory?”

  “Aye, sir, they’ll both be back in the low courtyard with the orphans. Morning chores.”

  The courtyard was a small one with a frail tree at its center, obviously dying from lack of sunlight. It was a dark place. A door at the back marked out the orphanage; a door at the front, the long room where Phil Jigg had taken to sleeping. Reverend Tilton was pacing among the orphans, watching as they swept the courtyard, wiped down the walls, copied out sheet music, mended socks and blankets—did all the chores they were evidently asked to. Lenox felt his heart sink again. They were all frightfully thin, the poor lads, and wearing patched-up clothes. And he noticed that they all had unusually shaggy hair, long enough to touch their shoulders.

  “Shall we talk to Reverend Tilton, then, Mr. Lenox?” asked Jameson.

  It was then that it came to Lenox, in a flash of revelation. Could it be that—was it even conceivable? Was the coincidence too great? One way to find out.

  “Reverend Tilton,” he said, walking toward the man, “do you mind if I ask you what your first name is?”

  Tilton turned around. “Ah, Mr. Lenox. How do you do?”

  “Well enough, thanks.”

  “Silas—Silas is my first name. But may I wait until the end of chores to meet with you?”

  “Certainly,” said Lenox. He turned to Jameson and said in a low voice, “Arrest that man if I give you the signal, will you?”

  “What—Tilton?” said Jameson, confusion all over his face.

  “Trust me.”

  Lenox went over to one of the boys sweeping the courtyard. “Hello,” he said.

  “How do you do, sir,” the small boy said.

  “I’m Charles.”

  “My name is George, sir.”

  “Could I ask you a favor? Could I see the back of your neck?”

  George shrugged in a puzzled way, and before he could resist Lenox had swept up his hair and taken a look. Tilton shouted and began to run toward them.

  “Jameson!”

  Jameson subdued Tilton despite the startled looks of everyone else in the courtyard—and with some skepticism in his eyes, too.

  “Well, Mr. Lenox?” he asked. “What’s happened?”

  Lenox looked at Tilton. His thinness no longer looked ascetic or godly, but angry and cruel; his wild white hair suddenly sinister, rather than eccentric. Gently Lenox turned George around so that Jameson could see the back of his neck. And there, tattooed freshly on the skin, were two clear letters—ST.

  * * *

  “The ST for Silas Tilton, of course,” Lenox said, lighting a small cigar at the same table at John o’Groats. Jameson sat across from him. It was about two hours later, and Tilton, refusing to speak, was down at Scotland Yard. They had found a piano string with traces of blood on it in his office, though, after a long search, and the curate (innocent of any knowledge of the deed) had confirmed that his superio
r was out at the time of the murder.

  “I understood that—though little else, I have to confess. How did you know? And why on earth would Tilton have wanted to kill Jigg?”

  “I can only answer your second question with an educated guess, I’m sorry to say. As for your first question—the orphans’ shaggy hair was the slightly out-of-key note in the picture that made plain the other ones. There was Tilton mentioning Norwich, first of all.”

  “Norwich, sir?”

  “I may not have told you—he said something inadvertent about the place, about it being different than London, I think.”

  “I’m still not quite sure why that matters, Mr. Lenox.”

  Lenox took a sip of his ale before he answered. “Jigg was from Norfolk, according to the Plug brothers. Well, Jameson, you walk these streets every day. How often do you find one person here who wasn’t born in one of the Dials, much less two on the same street, both living in the same church, from the same county?”

  “Hardly conclusive, if you’ll excuse me saying so, sir.”

  “Not at all. But it lent credence to the second point that returned to me in the courtyard. You’ll remember me telling you, I hope, that according to the Plugs Jigg entered the orphanage in Norfolk at two, not certain whether his parents were dead or had abandoned him. But Tilton—I’ll leave the ‘Reverend’ out if it’s all the same—said that Jigg had lost his parents in a fire. Clearly Philip Jigg was much closer to his longtime friends the Plug brothers than to a clergyman he had only met a few times, rather by the way. How did Tilton have such specific information?”

  “I see what you’re getting at. Dashed clever, Mr. Lenox.”

  “Luck and intuition more than anything else, I’m afraid. It just flashed upon me in the courtyard that there was too much coincidence in the thing—two people from Norwich, an orphan and an orphan-master, and then that small, nagging detail about the fire—all I know is that it felt like deeper water than it had first seemed. And when the lads’ hair was so out of the ordinary … well, as I say, it triggered that rare certainty you’ll come across someday that there’s ominous work afoot.”

  “I don’t understand the tattoos—why so great a risk for so little reward?”

  “I’m afraid that there I have to fall back on pure speculation. I’d say that it was the most significant way in which Tilton cowed the lads, made them wholly his. Pure folly, you’re right. But then I think part of him was utterly mad.”

  “Motive, then? For Jigg, I mean,” said Jameson, a mouthful of steak and peas slightly muffling his words.

  Lenox thought back to the painful skinniness of the boys in the courtyard and the browbeaten look in their eyes after Tilton had gone off. It pained him. “I suspect,” he said, “that Tilton was running the orphanage for a profit. Not uncommon. Parliament gives money to the church, the church squeezes every last halfpenny out of it by working the boys, feeding them next to nothing, making them earn money—think of that music the one lad was copying out, must have been at sixpence a page, I’d say—and a man like Tilton can suddenly afford a new silk hat or a box at the theater.”

  Jameson looked at Lenox pensively. “I’ll have them send someone around this evening to make a full accounting, sir.”

  “The curate seemed a nice enough chap—hadn’t anything to do with the orphanage, only the refectory, you’ll remember, and I suppose he’ll give them a good meal this evening. A first step, at any rate.”

  The troubled look didn’t leave Jameson’s face. “All the same.”

  “Yes, absolutely, do,” Lenox said.

  “I’m still not sure how that links Tilton and Jigg, though, Mr. Lenox.”

  “Oh—well, I suppose that Jigg threatened to go the police when he first stayed at the refectory and saw the orphans in Tilton’s care.”

  “But why would Jigg notice? Or care?”

  “That’s simple enough. I imagine you’ll find that Jigg grew up in Tilton’s orphanage up in Norfolk.”

  * * *

  As Lenox’s carriage rattled toward the Devonshire Club (he was due for a drink with his friends Lord Cabot and Thomas McConnell), he thought over the case again. Simple enough, in its way, if unexpected. As he had told Jameson, Martha Morris’s question had also helped him in that moment of clarity: Why would John Mason have stayed at St. Martin’s? In all probability, exactly for the purpose of meeting and threatening Lenox or Jameson or whoever had come around to investigate the case. No doubt Tilton had been in business with Black Sammy and asked for a hand in the matter. A sordid business, Lenox thought to himself …

  Through his window he watched the moonlight, dappled over the lampposts and high white houses of Park Lane, sparkling in the spring drizzle that had begun to fall. His happiness wasn’t complete, perhaps. He knew that he had helped in some small way, of course, and for that he was glad. But at the bottom of that gladness was the memory of the young girl begging with her fake wound, the young, fearful boys who didn’t stand all that much better a chance without Tilton than with him—and the awful knowledge that in the end he hadn’t really helped at all, and that perhaps he would never be able to. Still, he had done some small good that day. The orphans would have better lives, perhaps, and Silas Tilton go to the gallows. It was enough.

  Also by Charles Finch

  A Stranger in Mayfair

  The Fleet Street Murders

  The September Society

  A Beautiful Blue Death

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this story are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  AN EAST END MURDER. Copyright (c) 2010 by Charles Finch. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotuarbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4299-0866-5

  Read on for a preview of the next exciting installment of the Charlie Lenox series

  BURIAL AT SEA

  On Sale November 2011 from Minotaur Books

  Chapter One

  He gazed out at the sunfall from an open second-floor window, breathing deeply of the cool salt air, and felt it was the first calm moment he had known in days. Between the outfitting, the packing, the political conversations with his brother, and a succession of formal meals that had served as shipboard introductions to the officers of the Lucy, his week in Plymouth had been a daze of action and information.

  Now, though, Charles Lenox could be still for a moment. As he looked out over the maze of thin streets that crossed the short path to the harbor, and then over the gray, calm water itself—smudged brown with half-a-dozen large ships and any number of small craft—he bent forward slightly over the hip-high window rail, hands in pockets. He was past forty now, forty-two, and his frame, always thin and strong, had started to fill out some at the waist. His trim brown hair, however, was still untouched by gray. On his face was a slight, careworn smile, matched by his tired, happy, and curious hazel eyes. He had been for much of his life a detective, more lately a member of Parliament for the district of Stirrington, and now for the first time, he would be something else: something very like a diplomat.

  Or even a spy.

  It had begun two months before, in early March. Lenox had been at home on Hampden Lane. This was the small street just off Grosvenor Square, lined with pleasant houses and innocuous shops—a bookseller, a tobacconist—where he had lived nearly his whole adult life. For much of that time his best friend had lived next door to him, a widow named Lady Jane Grey whose family was also from Sussex: they had grown up riding together, fidgeting through church together: together. Just three years before, to his own confused and happy surprise, Lenox had realized how very much he loved her. It had taken some time to gather the courage to ask her to marry him. But he had. Now, in the winter of 1873, they were just getting used to the upside-down tumble their lives had taken. Their houses, side by side as they were, had been rebuilt to connect, and now the
y lived within a sprawling mishmash of rooms that somehow represented perfectly their joined-up lives. They were a couple.

  Lenox had been in his study that evening in March, making notes for a speech he hoped to give the following day in the House of Commons about India. There was a gentle snow outside the high windows near his desk, and the gaslights cast a dim and romantic light over the white, freshened streets.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Lenox put down his pen and flexed his sore hand, opening and closing it, as he waited for their butler, Kirk, to show the guest in.

  “Sir Edmund Lenox,” Kirk announced, and to his delight Charles saw his older brother’s cheerful and ruddy face pop around the doorway.

  “Ed!” he said, and stood. They clasped hands. “Come, sit by the fire—you must be nigh on frozen. Well, it’s been two weeks nearly, hasn’t it? You’re in the country too often for my taste, I tell you that frankly.”

  Edmund smiled widely in his customary manner, but up close he looked exhausted. “In fact I wasn’t at the house, so you can’t lay that charge against me,” he said. The house being the one they had grown up in together, Lenox House.

  “No? But you said you were going to see Molly and the—”

  The baronet waved a hand. “Security reasons, they say, but whatever it is we were at Lord Axmouth’s place in Kent, five of us, holed up with the admiralty, the chaps from the army, a rotating cast of ministers…with Gladstone.”

  The prime minister. Charles furrowed his brow. “What can it have been about?”

  In person Edmund Lenox looked very much like his younger brother, but he was perhaps less shrewd in the eyes, more open-faced. He served in Parliament out of a sense, not of ambition, but of duty, inherited from their father, and indeed preferred the country to London. Perhaps as a result he had a countryish air. He seemed heartier than his brother Charles.