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

  “What tricks does he do?” Lenox asked Elizabeth.

  “Tricks!”

  “Yes, tricks.”

  She looked appalled. “I don’t know if you have fully grasped the dignity of this animal.”

  “Haven’t I?”

  She gave him a disappointed shake of her head. “Tricks, indeed.”

  Great ceremony had preceded the hippopotamus, which had traveled up the Nile with an entire herd of cattle to provide it milk, a troop led with pride by Sir Charles Augustus Murray, Her Majesty’s consul to Egypt, who had enjoyed his triumph for less than a fortnight before finding his august reputation permanently sullied by the new nickname “Hippopotamus Murray.” (No matter how admiringly he was addressed in this fashion, it seemed doubtful to Lenox that Murray could feel quite content with it, after such a long and distinguished nonhippopotamus-based career.) Now there were vendors selling little hippopotami figurines outside the zoo. The rulers on the Continent were sick with envy. Children played nothing but hippo in the streets.

  The next step was to find Obaysch a mate, and the energies of many stout Englishmen in Egypt were no doubt being squandered on that project as Charles and Elizabeth ate their soup. (Even now Lenox always thought of his mother’s nursery-era lesson in manners when there was soup at table: “Like ships upon the sea, I push my spoon away from me.”)

  “Anyhow,” Elizabeth went on, “when I’m in the country there will be few enough spectacles. I ought to enjoy those in London while I can.”

  She was moving to her new husband’s estate in the autumn, when his military regiment returned to England, to take up her rightful position as the wife of the heir to an earldom; second or third lady of the county.

  That meant there were good works in her future, visits to the vicarage. Some glamour, too, to be sure—but as their friend Nellie had put it, country glamour. Because of her personal qualities, she deserved, in Lenox’s estimation, both high position and high excitement. She would have only the former in her life beginning that autumn.

  “You’ll return often, I hope, however,” said Lenox lightly, though his heart fluttered. He had never proposed. He felt a familiar dull pain at his lack of courage; he had missed his chance. Sometimes, late in the small hours of the night, he wondered if he had missed his only chance. “Your friends here will miss you.”

  She pushed back against the insinuation of his question slightly—at least in her posture, in her voice, a certain formality entering them, though never anything like unfriendliness. “Oh yes, I imagine, when James finds it necessary.” She leaned forward slightly to address the young gentleman on Lenox’s left; a third. “Hugh, have you seen the hippopotamus?”

  Hugh gave them a scornful look. “Have I seen the hippopotamus. Haven’t I seen the fellow six times?”

  “Six!”

  “I consider him more of a brother than a friend.”

  “Disgraceful,” said Lenox.

  “You’re outnumbered,” said Elizabeth. “This is a table that looks favorably upon Obaysch. Hugh and I won’t hear a word against him.”

  Across from them, deep in conversation with Eleanor Arden, another of their set, was Lenox’s aunt. He appealed to her as a last resort. “Aunt Martha,” he said, and the table fell silent as she looked up. “Tell me that you, at least, haven’t condescended to visit the London Zoo in the past two weeks. The old ways must still mean something.”

  She hesitated—a gray-haired and portly older woman, resplendent in a spangled dress of gold and red—and then said, “I must admit that I paused there yesterday.” Everyone at the table burst into kind laughter. She gave the room a generalized look of indignation. “One likes to keep abreast, you know, even at my age.”

  When the soup had been cleared and there was a lull in the conversation, even the hippopotamus parts of it, Edmund stood up. He lifted his glass.

  “What about a toast?” he said.

  “Yes, yes,” said one or two people, and lifted their glasses too.

  “Charles moved to London in the fall, as you all know,” said Edmund. “So far he has not been imprisoned, lost money in a three-shell game on the Strand, or eloped to the Continent with a dancer.”

  There was more laughter, and Lenox called out, “Give me six weeks.”

  “He has also,” Edmund said with stout, awkwardly footed pride, “begun his very significant work as a detective—very significant work, very.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Hugh.

  “I am proud of him for it, and I think we ought to have a double toast to him for it. Join me, please. Two cheers for Charles.”

  As they cheered, Lenox felt himself blush, a little hollowness of embarrassment in his throat and chest. He would have preferred no reference to his work. But he accepted the toast—said thank you—all here loved him—the moment passed—and soon the conversation again became general.

  It was beneath the station of all those present here to have a profession, unless it be politics, arms, or God. It had been many generations since the families of any of them had done work with their hands, season upon season, year upon year, century upon century.

  A gentleman scientist, fine, or in an eccentric case an explorer, a collector, an equerry, a horse breeder.

  But even the most eccentric of these would never have dreamed of taking work as a detective. England’s caste system was too inflexible to allow for it. It was this fact that had poisoned Lenox’s seven months here. Only unto illness, not death, and mostly for his poor parents; but still, still.

  Making it worse was how desperately little headway he had made. He was laughed off in Scotland Yard (he had tried repeatedly to make allies there) and laughed off in a different kind of way at the parties—where he was still welcome, but more often than before because of his brother, or because of Elizabeth, Eleanor, Hugh, his friends. In the fullness of these seven months, he had had two cases, precisely. And this despite charging no fee! He had solved both: one a pitiably simple matter of a missing fiancé (he had an extant family in Bournemouth, unfortunately for the young woman who had entreated Lenox to find him so that she could marry him), and one an embezzler at a midsized firm in the city.

  Both cases had been referred to him by friends. Neither had led to more work.

  At the end of the breakfast, some two hours later, a great deal of it spent reminiscing over old village cricket matches with his cousin Homer, he found himself momentarily in a quiet corner of the room with Elizabeth, who was donning her overcoat.

  She was due at a luncheon—straight from one meal to another, she said, and sheepishly added that when she was fat, she would have to feign an illness to avoid going out—and Lenox, putting his own cloak on, took the opportunity to ask how she had been, which parties she would be going to—

  But suddenly, realizing that they were by the grace of chance briefly isolated from everyone else, he said, anxiously, “Listen here, do you think I’m a fool? About the detective business. Answer me honestly, Elizabeth—be brutal. Nobody else will. Nobody whose opinion I care for.”

  She gave the question a look of real surprise, and then shook her head, concern in her eyes. “Never, never, never,” she said. She touched his cheek. “I think you are valiant as a lion, Charles. And wondrous affable.”

  Before he had a chance to reply, she had turned away to say her other goodbyes. For his part, he did not move for at least ten, fifteen seconds; he could still feel her hand on his cheek.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lenox walked home. His path took him through Green Park, the quiet warmth of the sunlight falling through its trees. When he arrived, Graham met him at the door—uncanny, how he did that—and opened it, taking Lenox’s gloves, hat, and jacket.

  “A pleasant morning, I trust, sir?” he asked.

  “Very pleasant, thank you,” said Lenox. “Did you pull the newspaper clippings from April, by any chance?”

  “I did, sir. They’re in the sitting room, along with the papers we clipped this morning. I ha
ve cleared away everything else except the Times.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You also have a wire from Lenox House, sir.”

  “A wire?” Lenox frowned. “Let me see it, please. And bring me a cup of black coffee if you would.”

  He needed his mind sharp, and he had consented to a festive glass of hot brandy and spice at the end of breakfast. “Right away, sir,” said Graham.

  Loosening his tie a quarter inch, Lenox went and sat down at the round table by the window. He noticed from this higher vantage that the skies toward the east had darkened a little. It might well rain before long.

  There were two neat stacks of paper at his chair. At the top of one was the telegram from home, with that morning’s clippings beneath it, and at bottom the Times; then, next door, the thick stack of irregularly shaped April clippings pulled from the filing cabinet, dating from the window of time when this perfect criminal claimed to have committed his perfect murder.

  The first thing Lenox did was open the wire. Letters from Sussex took only around thirty-six hours to arrive, so a telegram was relatively rare.

  This one brought welcome news rather than bad, thankfully.

  Bound for London tomorrow STOP Wallace STOP Savoy as quick visit STOP arriving by 2:22 STOP dinner Edmund’s STOP will be by yours before to pick you up if you cannot come to me sooner STOP all love STOP Mother STOP oh and happy birthday my dear dear dear STOP Mother

  This telegram would have been impenetrable to most, but it was clear as a June sky to Lenox. What it indicated was that his mother was coming here to see the family’s solicitor, Wallace; the family’s town house, which they kept open from September to April, wasn’t worth reopening for just a night or two, so she had taken a room at the Savoy; she would like to see Charles straight away, but understood that he might be occupied; the latest she would see him was in the hour before their family dinner at his brother’s house, but perhaps he would come to the Savoy earlier if it was convenient.

  He was pleased at the news. He had plans to visit Lenox House in a few weeks, for the first weekend of summer, but he and his mother were, as both his brother and father had observed, like a pair of old shoes. He composed a quick reply saying that he would meet her at Charing Cross. Then he tore the wire in two and dropped it into the wastepaper basket.

  That done, he turned his attention to the articles he and Graham had clipped from the morning’s papers.

  Nine of their ten selections had overlapped, a high number. Graham had noticed something he hadn’t, however—a small article, four paragraphs, about a sailor who had failed to report for duty in Plymouth, a notable occurrence only because he was a generally very reliable hand, a bo’sun with nine years aboard the Culloway who had never before failed to report.

  Lenox wondered why he had missed it, then realized, looking at Graham’s careful notation, that it was because it had been on a page with a larger story, about a crime in the West End. He twisted his lip in disappointment at himself.

  On the other hand, it meant that he had spotted one article that Graham hadn’t.

  He looked to see which—ah, the dog thefts in Parkham Court. No, Graham wouldn’t have considered that notable (dog theft was very common), but Lenox liked anything strange, anything aslant of common experience. In this case, slight differences: These dogs were all domestic, some of them quite doted upon. That was rather out of the ordinary run of things. The clipping would go in today’s file, and he would remember it as he tried to weave, in his mind, thread by slender thread, a tapestry that contained a full picture of this great city’s crime. Each article they cut out was another thread, its own unique shade. The names of streets as they recurred, which neighborhoods saw which types of crimes, the first and second and third most common ways thieves were caught.

  He wanted to know all of it; he was young and ambitious, and very certainly determined to know all of it.

  Graham returned with a cup of coffee on a silver tray. Lenox thanked him and, taking a sip, leaned back in his chair. The rain had just started, light and steady. He gazed through the window for a moment.

  Then he looked up. “Well, Graham,” he said, “what about this perfect crime? The letter from the Challenger?”

  “I was not able to make a connection based upon the articles from April, sir. Perhaps you will perceive something that I have not, however.” Graham reached down and arranged the array of clippings that was on the table from one month previous, seventeen in all. “The single prominent murder was the Singley one, sir.”

  “That,” Lenox said distractedly.

  The Singley case had been solved immediately; half a dozen witnesses who had seen a baker in Bromley beat his next-door neighbor on the street over a matter of honor. The neighbor had lingered thirty hours on this side of the veil before succumbing (the papers never used any other word) to his injuries.

  Lenox skimmed the remaining clippings. None of them recorded anything close to as memorable as an unsolved murder.

  “Very little in that period, sir, as you can see,” said Graham.

  Lenox leaned back, thinking. “Hm.”

  “Perhaps it really was a perfect murder, sir. Entirely unremarked, thought to be a natural death even.”

  “Interesting.” Lenox sighed. “Or else of course it’s the editor of this reckless newspaper stirring the pot, hoping to give everyone a fright.”

  “A likelier possibility, no doubt, sir.”

  Lenox was unsure. There had been something just authentic about the letter, something sinister. On the other hand, he might have been willing that into existence, since he was desperate for work to do. “Ah well.”

  Then he remembered something, though.

  What was it? He narrowed his eyes, thinking.

  It was the Singley manslaughter that had called it to mind. There had been something else around that time, something—

  He jumped out of his chair, pushing it back. “Graham!”

  “Sir?” said Graham.

  But Lenox, wasting no time on a reply, hurried across the room to the filing cabinet. “The letter was printed today, May second,” he said, riffling through papers quickly. “But that doesn’t mean it was sent yesterday. We have no idea when it was sent. There was no date on it.”

  “Sir?”

  “We may have pulled the articles from the wrong time, since we assumed it was sent yesterday, sheerly because it was printed today. Yes, look.”

  Graham leaned over Lenox’s shoulder. “What is it, sir?”

  Lenox held up a clipping, waving it in his gripped hand. “March the twenty-ninth. Here it is. We both clipped it. Of course, given the circumstances. Walnut Island.”

  Graham’s eyebrows rose. “Walnut Island.”

  Lenox nodded grimly. “If the letter is referring to this, it means we are already three days past the date the letter was sent, perhaps longer.”

  The meaning of this dawned on Graham. “Oh no.”

  “Yes. If any of this is real, a second murder may be committed at any moment. Come, get your jacket, Graham, and I’ll pull all the files on Walnut Island. We must fly.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The offices of the rag known as the Challenger lay toward the cheap end of Fleet Street. Every English newspaper was quartered along this avenue, high and low; this was low. The better class of newspaper inhabited the other end of the Fleet, which was so ancient that it had been a principal route through Roman London.

  Graham and Lenox alighted from a hansom cab at Ludgate Circus at a little after three o’clock. The Challenger was housed in a two-story building that tilted slightly left and no doubt gave a tremendous amount of business to the adjacent Ludgate Arms, a pub with a low, skulking, treacherous look to it. Despite stiff competition, journalism was probably the best-lubricated profession in the city.

  NEW-MADE PIES, the pub advertised in its window.

  “Interesting choice a half block from the home of Sweeney Todd,” Lenox said, pointing toward the words.<
br />
  This character, the villain of a penny dreadful called The String of Pearls, was most vivid in Londoners’ minds at the moment, despite being fictional. More than three-quarters of people in a recent newspaper poll had believed him to be real.

  “Intentional, perhaps,” said Graham quietly in reply.

  “Good point.”

  Lenox knocked at the door, Graham a step behind and a step to the side of him.

  A porter answered. “Yes?”

  Lenox held out a half-shilling. “Here to see the editor.”

  The coin vanished so quickly that it might have been a street trick. The door opened a tick wider. “Up, right, up, left.”

  They followed these directions, and were soon entering a large room filled with a surprisingly healthy glow of sunlight. The Challenger was a paper for the masses, but evidently the pennies of the masses added up; the building wasn’t much to look at, but here inside all the desks were handsome, and the men seated at them wore natty suits as they churned out their copy, shouting to each other across the room, paper littered everywhere.

  “Is the editor here?” Lenox asked of a random fellow with greasy dark hair tucked behind his ears.

  He pointed at a door. “But you won’t sell him anything, guv. He’s bought it all and sold it for twice what he paid already.”

  “Thanks. I’m buying, not selling,” said Lenox.

  “Watch your pockets then.”

  The door of this lone private office was ajar. Outside sat a woman. Lenox smiled at her and handed over his card. It said CHARLES LENOX on one line, then an address on the next. (He hadn’t been able to bring himself to add the words PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR between the two.) It was very plainly an expensive object, the address equally plainly an expensive one, and she sat up straighter.

  “I would very much value three or four minutes of Mr. Kennington’s time,” Lenox said.