The Fleet Street Murders

eyes.

Dallington was waiting for him in Hampden Lane.

“How are you?” Lenox asked.

“Bloody awful.”

“Gracious, what is it?”

“He really did it, by God. It was the worst twenty minutes of my life, listening to him. He had a reason, and he — he knew exactly how it had been done.”

“Forgive me, but — Poole?”

“Yes, Gerry Poole. He was a different creature today than he had ever been before. He talked about plunging a knife in a man’s back as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”

It was the most upset Lenox had ever seen the younger man, who was always so quick with a joke and a smile.

“Did he give you any details?”

“Not really.”

“Anything about Martha Claes?”

“Not a thing.”

The return of the Belgian maid (who had apparently been moving along the Norfolk coast, unsuccessfully trying to find a way out of the country) had offered very few details about the murder of Winston Carruthers. She was in police custody now, but according to Jenkins she had only said she had acted as Poole’s assistant, helping him gain access to Carruthers and standing by as he murdered him. She had returned seeking immunity to prosecution for providing evidence and refused to speak another word until she got it.

Dallington stayed for a few minutes longer, then left, still disconsolate. Lenox had felt that sort of anguish before, in his early days as an amateur detective.

Despite the confession, he had work to do still, he felt. Who had killed Inspector Exeter and Hiram Smalls? Not Gerald Poole, certainly; and if his proxies had done it, why and who were they? Almost at the same hour as Exeter was lying on his deathbed, Poole had been giving his confession. It made no sense.

So Lenox decided to persevere — and to begin with Winston Carruthers’s rooms, a few streets away.

It was dark by now and cold outside. He waited for his carriage on the curb, stamping his feet to stay warm. Eventually it came and he stepped in.

Just as he was going to close the door, a voice called from behind him, “You dropped a penny, sir.”

It was one of the footmen who had brought the horses around.

“Cheers,” said Lenox.

He took the penny in his hand — and as he sat down his mind started racing.

A penny.

What had he found under Hiram Smalls’s bed? A farthing, a halfpenny, a penny, threepence, sixpence, and a shilling, he had told the warden of Newgate. All the coins of the realm…

Smalls had been sending a message, Lenox realized with a thud in his chest, a message pointing to the man who made those coins — at the Mint.

Then Lenox remembered: He had a story about the Royal Mint, Moon had said of Carruthers. A story about the Mint — had he discovered something about the Mint? Corruption there? Was he trying to blackmail Barnard?

Just like that, Lenox remembered something funny — Barnard had called Carruthers “Win,” his common nickname, at Lady Nevin’s party but claimed he hadn’t known the man the press called Winston.

A last thought flitted into his mind about what Jane had said, George Barnard was to have a party, but he’s gone to Geneva instead.

It appeared that these murders led back, as half the crimes in London did, to one man: George Barnard. Who now had fled to Geneva.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

It hung together in his head, the whole thing, but only tenuously — a number of disparate facts that couldn’t bear much weight, that only hinted at the truth, but that together seemed definite. For instance, as he worked it through in his mind he remembered that Smalls’s mother had mysteriously been relieved of a hundred-pound debt. Mightn’t Barnard have paid that? If he had, then Smalls would have only felt comfortable leaving a veiled clue (the coins) rather than an outright declaration.

Then there was Carruthers’s article about the Mint, of which Barnard had been head! He must find that. Could it be the motive — that Carruthers, a corrupt and corruptible soul, was trying to blackmail Barnard because he had discovered the man’s theft from the Mint?

“Poole is innocent,” muttered Lenox under his breath. Then in a louder voice he said, “Stop the carriage!”

He ran inside and took from a locked door in his desk the one-page file on Barnard he had compiled from his hundreds of pages of facts collecting and speculation and read it, searching for a clue to Winston Carruthers’s murder — and to Hiram Smalls’s murder.

The file distilled all of the crimes in which he had discovered Barnard’s involvement — or thought he had — and combined notes on them with a biographical sketch. The most elusive part of his research for the latter concerned Barnard’s recent time at the head of the Royal Mint, which was a well-guarded place both physically and informationally — a yellowing building on Little Tower Hill, near the Tower of London, which stood behind a tall wrought-iron fence, regal and, in a busy street, silent. Inside, delicate machinery converted bars of pure gold and silver into exactly weighted coins.

Digging further into the past Lenox had found, however, that Barnard’s tracks were everywhere. Lenox kept a file of London’s unsolved crimes, including both ones he had worked on and others, and so far he had attached roughly one in every nineteen to Barnard. It didn’t sound like much until one took in the immense variety and size of that file. There was the Astor Grange fire, not five miles from the city, when thousands of pounds’ worth of rare letters from Isaac Newton to his puritanical father were thought to have burned; Barnard had been staying with the private collector of the letters at the time and was well known to be fascinated by the history of Newton, who had himself once been Master of — yes, the Royal Mint. That was the higher end of things. There were also gin drunks found dead in alleyways, illegal casinos raided and their monies confiscated by people almost certainly impersonating officers of Scotland Yard, a thousand minor crimes and a hundred major ones all leading back to one man.

Lenox had for years known Barnard differently, as a politician and businessman with an ostentatious but also genuinely beautiful house off of Grosvenor Square, a place large enough to host one of London’s most famous balls. That annual event aside, however, his commonplace birth in Manchester had prevented his access to the highest tiers of society. Instead he lived in an aristocratic demimonde, the wives of his colleagues prejudiced against seeing him socially. His friends had been snobbishly chosen, men with titles and standing but also possessed of some fatal social flaw — no money, no intelligence, no scruples. He would drop their names, moving slightly higher with each new friendship, until he realized they were no good, when he would drop them instead.

When he had left Parliament for the Royal Mint, however, he had become difficult to ignore and had finally gained access to the best clubs and the best houses. There are many men who sit in Parliament, and some of them make soap; on the other hand the Mint has only one Master, and he is an exalted personage. It was at this time that Barnard had begun to court the unresponsive Lady Jane, whom Lenox had subsequently rescued from the fate of being one of the richest women in the city.

Even then, though, there had been one peculiarity about Barnard: It was a common parlor game across London to guess from which obscure source his wealth had come. At twenty-six he had been a shipping house’s clerk. He quit that job and four years later bought the shipping house. His activities in the intervening time were utterly mysterious. At the age of thirty-three he had entered Parliament.

Then, just over a year ago, Lenox had been investigating the murder of a young maid who had been in