The Fleet Street Murders

was like the description you subsequently heard of Smalls?”

“Oh, yes — short and stocky. The very man, I would say.”

“Very well, Mr. Poole. Is there anything you wish to add?”

“I scarcely need to say that I’m innocent, I think.”

“Of course not,” said Dallington indignantly.

“In that case we shall bid you good day.”

Outside of the prison again, Dallington said, “What did you think, then?”

“There’s a chance he’s guilty.”

“There certainly isn’t!”

“A small chance, of course. Still, one must say it, a chance.”

“What on earth would his motive be?”

Lenox stopped. Around the two men London’s business milled. “You can keep a secret?”

“Yes,” said Dallington expectantly.

“Carruthers and Pierce testified against Poole’s father. Whether Gerald knew that or not I couldn’t say.”

Dallington whistled softly. “I didn’t know that.”

“Yes.”

“Gracious.”

“Can you blame Exeter for his certainty?”

This question snapped Dallington out of his reverie. “By God, I can! Gerald Poole is simply — is simply not a killer. I know it with every fiber of my being!”

“We shall have to work to prove it, then,” said Lenox, a doubtful grimace on his face. “Consider, though, the clear motive he had and his open admission that he met with Hiram Smalls, and Exeter’s case seems a difficult one to disprove.”

“Yet equally impossible to prove — because Gerry didn’t kill anyone.”

“I hope so.”

“Where are you going next, Lenox?”

To Jane’s, the detective wished he could say, but he had other appointments to keep. “I expect I shall go see Inspector Jenkins. Then I think I’ll go and see Smalls’s mother. That will require tact.”

“What can I do?”

They stood on the corner, and Lenox examined his protege. “If you want a job —”

“With all my heart.”

“Then you might go to Fleet Street and speak to Pierce’s and Carruthers’s friends and colleagues. You might find out whatever you can about Jonathan Poole. You might speak to Pierce’s family and find out about the landlady of Carruthers, the Belgian woman who vanished.”

“Then I shall,” said Dallington stoutly. “Will you be at home this evening?”

“God willing,” said Lenox.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Lenox was closeted with Inspector Jenkins of Scotland Yard for some twenty minutes and came away from the meeting with a copy of the frankly unrevealing police report. Jenkins was pessimistic about the case. He felt far from sure of Poole’s guilt, as his telegram to Lenox had indicated, but admitted now that no other leads had emerged to contradict Exeter’s theory. He promised to meet Dallington and keep Lenox apprised of any news by telegram, but when the two men parted it was in a melancholy mood.

It was ten o’clock in the morning by then and had already been a long, long day for Lenox. He left the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police by hansom cab to see Hiram Smalls’s aged mother but had the driver let him out a few doors early so he could stop into a public house. A warm brandy braced him to no end and took some of the cold ache out of his bones, and he walked up Liverpool Street with a renewed sense of purpose.

“What is she like?” he had asked Jenkins.

“You understand I haven’t been involved in the case at all — or rather, simply as a spectator with better access than the public.”

“Still, I know you speak to the constables on their routes, the other officers.”

Jenkins shook his head. He was an intelligent, sensitive young man, who found fault with Scotland Yard but served it faithfully. “Nobody saw her other than Exeter,” he said. “Who reported back that she was entirely intractable.”

“What a wasted opportunity.”

Jenkins, who had heard with horror that Exeter had neglected to ask for Smalls’s personal effects at Newgate, nodded. “Then again, many people in the East End fear the police. With reason, sometimes.”

“She’s in her right mind, however?”

“I believe so. Exeter said nothing on that score.”

Lenox rang at the door, and a small, plump, red-cheeked girl of two or three and twenty answered the door. She had sharp little eyes.

“Yes?” she said.

“I’m here to see Mrs. Smalls, miss.”

“Are you, then? Well, I’m sure I don’t know whether she’s receiving visitors.” The girl put her hands on her hips. She had a pronounced cockney accent. “May I ask ’oom I ’ave the pleasure of meetin’?”

“Charles Lenox, ma’am.”

“Fair enough, Mr. Lenox, and your business?”

“I’m investigating Hiram Smalls’s death.”

Instantly the tone of the conversation shifted from the suspicious to the outright combative. “We don’t want none of your kind here, Mr. Lenox.” His name as if it were a curse word. “Good day.”

“Are you Mrs. Smalls’s landlady?”

“Am I her — well, I’m sure it’s no concern of yours, but I am, yes.”

“I believe Hiram was murdered.”

She inhaled sharply, and her eyes widened. “No!”

“I’m not with the Yard, ma’am. I’m a private detective.”

“Well.”

“I only want justice.”

“For Hiram?”

“If he was wronged.”

“Of course ’e was wronged! Hiram wouldn’t ’urt a fly!” Her outrage was in its way as persuasive as Dallington’s on behalf of Gerald Poole. “Come into the ’allway, come in. I’ll speak to Mrs. Smalls.”

After a series of complex negotiations, in which the landlady went back and forth and inquired who Mr. Lenox was, first, and then who Mr. Lenox thought he was, second, and finally whether he was quite sure he didn’t belong to Scotland Yard — only after all of these questions had been posed by the doubting go- between and satisfactorily answered by Lenox did she lead the detective up one flight of stairs to see Mrs. Smalls.

Now, Mrs. Smalls was, anybody with a rudimentary faculty of perception could see straightaway, a particular type — a faded beauty. She retained all the ornaments and outward accoutrements of beauty, including a beautiful velvet dress, profuse jewelry, and massive, heavily curled hair. There were gaudy cameos of a pretty young girl on half the surfaces in the cramped sitting room, and on the other half sat framed and dusty notices of a variety of plays.

Although the woman herself was pale, painfully thin, and red eyed, and Lenox speculated to himself that perhaps this tragedy had punctured her vanity for good. She looked as if the cares of the world had all crowded around her at once.

“How do you do, Mr. Lenox?” she asked in a somber voice and gave her curled forelock a vicious twist and tug