A Stranger in Mayfair (27 page)

“Who was it?” Lenox asked in a hoarse voice, his head still spinning.

“We couldn’t see—he wore a mask, whoever it was. He ran off as soon as he had fetched you that last smack on the head. The coward. I caught you as you lost consciousness.”

“And Ludo?”

“He tried to catch the attacker, and now he’s off to find a constable.”

“Or pay the person his fee,” said Lenox. He felt a throb in his head. Groaning, he let his body go slack, as it wanted to, on the step. “Just get a cab, will you? I want to lie down.”

“Of course.”

On the short ride home Dallington only spoke once—to ask whether Lenox believed that Ludo knew the attack was coming.

Lenox shook his head. “He didn’t know we were coming to see him.”

“He could have set the person after you nevertheless, and told him to attack you when you were in Ludo’s presence. Another alibi!”

Lenox shrugged. “It could be.”

In fact part of him wondered whether it was William Runcible, still afraid of jail and no longer pacified by Lenox’s promise in the butcher shop. Still, wouldn’t he have used a knife, or a cleaver?

At home there was a flurry of activity when it was discovered that he had been attacked. Kirk sent for the police, Dallington went to fetch McConnell, and two or three maids hovered anxiously around the door, waiting to see if he needed anything. As for Lenox, he lay on the couch with a wet, cold towel over his eyes, the lights all dimmed. He wanted to see Lady Jane.

When she arrived he felt comforted. She spared just a moment to come and put a hand on his forehead, then became a whirlwind of businesslike commands. She ejected the maids (who were having a very exciting day, it must be admitted) from the threshold of the room, and asked one of them to return with a basin of water and a cloth to clean the wound, though Lenox had already assayed the job. Then she called Kirk into the room and berated him for not returning with the police, who were on their way, before instructing him to find a doctor in case McConnell wasn’t in.

He was in, however; he arrived not fifteen minutes later. “What happened?” he asked Lenox.

“Some thuggish chap tried to hit me with a brick.”

McConnell smiled. “He succeeded admirably.”

“Don’t make jokes,” warned Lady Jane, her face tense with anxiety. “Look at his head, will you?”

McConnell spent the next few minutes gently cleaning the jagged wound on Lenox’s forehead (a third cleaning), prodding around its edges, and asking Lenox what hurt and what didn’t. At last he offered a verdict. “It looks painful, but you’ll be all right, I think.”

“You think?” said Lady Jane, alarmed.

“I should be clearer—you
will
be all right. The only thing that worries me is whether you might not have some dizziness and lightheadedness in the next few weeks. If that happens you’ll need bed rest—”

“He’ll have that anyway.”

“You’ll need bed rest,” McConnell said again, “and minimal activity. But you aren’t in any danger of long-term consequences, thank the Lord.”

He then took from his battered leather medical bag a length of cloth and set about making Lenox a very dramatic bandage for his head.

“There,” he said when he was done, “now you look like you were in a war, or at least a duel. Walk down Pall Mall on a busy afternoon and it will get all over town that you did some heroic deed.”

Lenox laughed and thanked McConnell, who left, in a hurry to get back to George. Dallington had stayed in the room, at Lenox’s request, but now he left, too.

“Shall we discuss the—” Lenox had said, turning to the lad.

“No, we shall not,” Lady Jane had answered firmly. “John, come back tomorrow if you like.”

When at last they were alone—Lenox feeling much more human, a cup of tea from one of the (again hovering) maids in hand—the pretense of anger and hardness fell away from Lady Jane.

“Oh, Charles! How many more times will I have to worry this way?” was all she said. She hugged him close to her.

McConnell had joked about the attack reaching other ears, but he wasn’t far wrong. In the past when Lenox had been harmed in the line of duty he had never read of it in the evening papers, but now he was a Member of Parliament. After the police had come and gone, offering very little hope to the victim that they might catch his attacker, the newspapers arrived. It was only a small item on two of the front pages, doubtless placed there close to the hour the papers went to press, but it reminded Lenox that he had responsibilities to people other than himself now—and even beyond Jane.

By suppertime he could stand up and move about, and after eating a light bowl of soup in his dressing gown, he went to bed.

In the morning he had a splitting headache and a thousand questions about the case. But he had slept well, and he felt ready for the fight again.

Graham was the second person he saw, after Jane had brought him his coffee and asked how he felt.

“May I inquire after your health, sir?” asked Graham.

“I’m a bit thumped, of course—but no permanent damage.”

“The police have no idea who might have attacked you?”

“None.”

“But you feel quite well?”

“Oh! Yes, not bad.”

Graham coughed discreetly. “In that case might I ask you to discuss parliamentary matters?”

“Of course.”

Lenox came away from the conversation with a stack of fresh blue books (he hated the sight of the things by now) and spent the morning reading them. McConnell stopped in to change his bandage, and Lady Jane brought a pillow or a sandwich or something else useful every half hour, but otherwise he was alone.

He tried—really tried—not to think about Ludo Starling or Frederick Clarke. There was Dallington who could look into it all now.

Nevertheless, as the hands on the clock seemed to slow to a halt and his eyes grew dry from all that unrewarding prose, the questions he had woken up with returned in greater force.

Why had he been attacked? Was it a message, or a true attempt on his life? Did the attacker know that Dallington had the same information Lenox did?

Most importantly,
had
Ludo been involved?

It was a relief when at noon or so Dallington arrived. He brought with him a few magazines full of crime stories.

“It’s what I always read when I’m sick. Somehow having a fever makes them even more exciting.”

Lenox laughed. “Thank you. But what about the real thing?”

“Starling? I spent the morning on it. Something occurred to me.”

“Oh?”

“The method of attack—it was the same as killed Freddie Clarke.”

Lenox inhaled sharply. Of course it was. How could he have missed it? “Good Lord, you’re right. That must mean it was an attempt—a real attempt—to murder me.”

Dallington nodded gravely. “I think so, yes. Or else Ludo wanted again to transfer the blame away from himself. After all, a similar attack rather conveniently removes suspicion from someone we both saw didn’t do it.”

“And less conveniently away from Collingwood.”

“Precisely. In any event, I checked the alley.”

“Yes?”

“There was a different chunk of brick missing from it.”

“The same weapon.”

“Exactly.”

Lenox was still holding a blue book on corruption in the Indian army; he tossed it aside lightly, brooding on the new information.

Suddenly something occurred to him, and he stood up.

“What is it?” asked Dallington.

“I’ve thought of something. We need to go see Inspector Fowler.”

Chapter Forty-Four

Lenox had a wide enough acquaintance scattered through Scotland Yard that he could still walk through the building unchallenged. Several people eyed his bandage curiously, nodding cautious hellos to him, while others stopped to make some small joke about the Member of Parliament returning to his less reputable (or more reputable?) old haunt. Dallington, however, was stopped at a front desk, so Lenox went to see Fowler alone.

The door to his office was ajar. Lenox braced himself for a stream of vitriol before he knocked, and got about what he expected.

“Mr. Fowler?” he said, knocking the door and pushing it open.

“Mr. Lenox,” said Fowler with dangerous calm.

“I’m afraid it’s about the Starling case. We must speak about it.”

Fowler reddened. “I would ask you kindly not to tell me what I must do, sir!”

“I—”

“Really, this infernal and constant intrusion into official matters of the Yard cannot stand a moment longer! Good Lord, Mr. Lenox, do you have no sense of boundary? Of decorum? Of—”

“Decorum?”

“Yes, decorum!” He stood up behind his desk and began to cross the room with a menacing air. “You would do well to learn it, rather than presuming upon our past contact to make a nuisance of yourself.”

Then, rather quietly, Lenox said something that stopped him in his tracks. “I know you’re being bought off.”

The transformation in Fowler was extraordinary. He tried to bear up under the truth of the accusation for a moment, but it wasn’t possible. As he spoke initially a domineering, imposing man, he now drew inward, seemed to get smaller, looked tired and, most of all, old. Lenox was right. The burst of insight had come, funnily enough, from that unreadable blue book—the one on corruption.

“Of course not,” he muttered.

“The truth is in your face, Mr. Fowler—and I can think of no reason on earth why you would behave toward me as you have, when our relationship has always been cordial.”

“Paid? Don’t talk foolery.”

“Yes—by Ludo Starling, to look the other way.”

“No!”

“About a day after the murder, I would hazard. I’m here in part to speak to someone about it.”

The dam broke. “You can’t do that!” cried Fowler.

“Oh?” said Lenox coldly. “I understand that you were going to let an innocent man go to trial, Jack Collingwood—testify against him—perhaps even send him to hang. That I do understand.”

“No! It’s not true, I swear on Christ’s name. For God’s sake, shut the door, come in, come in.”

Lenox entered the office, reluctant to be alone with Fowler but certain the man had information. “He paid you, then? Ludo Starling?”

“Yes.”

Lenox had resisted heretofore believing that Ludo was the killer. Based both on the man’s mien (his rather hapless, debauched life was nonetheless lived without cruelty to others) and the facts (it was his son, for God’s sake), it had never seemed like the likeliest truth. Now the final barriers to his credulity fell away.
How unknowable man is,
he thought.

“I can’t believe you accepted money from him.”

“You don’t know the circumstances, Lenox.” The inspector sat back in his large oak chair, underneath a certificate praising his work from the Lord Mayor of London, and lit a small cigar. While it was clenched in his teeth he reached into a low drawer of his desk, pulled a bottle of whisky out, and poured two tots of it into a pair of dingy glasses. “Here you are,” he said, his voice weak. “Have a drink with me at least.”

“What circumstances?” asked Lenox.

Fowler smiled a bittersweet smile and took a puff on his cigar. “We’re very different men, you and I,” he said. “It’s all very well for you to take the high ground on a subject like money, knowing full well that in the normal run of life it would never come up between us. But do you know what my father did?”

“What?”

“He was a pure collector.” Lenox grimaced unintentionally, and Fowler laughed. “Not so nice, is it? No, it wasn’t then.”

Lenox knew of pure collectors; they had formed part of his reading on cholera. They were men—very poor men—who scavenged for dog and human waste, which they then sold to farms. It took extremely long workdays in extremely unpleasant places to make a living at it.

“I don’t understand the connection of that to Ludo Starling,” said Lenox.

“No; you wouldn’t. While I was using tea leaves four times to get all the flavor of them, living in a house that smelled of—well, why mince words? It smelled of shit! Yes, you can make all the unpleasant faces you want, but while I was living there you were in your father’s house, looked after by nannies, eating off of silver, learning about what your old ancestors did at, at Agincourt…no, we’re very different, you and I.”

Lenox felt on uncertain ground now. This was a tender spot for him. Money was the great unexamined area of his conscience, in a way. “But you took bribery, Grayson, and you have a job now. You’re not a pure collector. That was your father.”

The look on Fowler’s face was contemptuous. “You know about it, do you? Did you know that I have nine brothers and sisters, and that of us all I’m the only one with a decent job? That I’ve given them nearly every cent I earned to keep them in food and clothes, to try to educate their children, and that four of them have died anyway, of that blasted cholera? You have a brother, I know. Can you imagine burying him, Mr. Lenox?”

“No.”

“I have my house, Mr. Lenox—a modest enough affair, but it took me ten years to buy it. Beyond that, nothing except my next wage packet from the Yard…and last year I found out that I’m getting too old to stay on here.”

“What?”

“There’ll be my pension, but that’s only enough for tea and toast. So yes, I’ve taken a few pounds here and there. Always in cases when I thought I knew better than the law. Can you judge me for it?”

The answer was that he couldn’t. No. It was possible of course that Fowler was spinning a story for him, playing for sympathy, but something final and confessional in the man’s air convinced Lenox it was all true.

“Well, but what about Collingwood?” asked Lenox with a struggle.

“He would have been free next week.”

“Why next week?”

But Fowler was in his own world. He stood up and looked through the window, which was flung with a few raindrops. “Do you know when I joined the Yard?” he said. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“When?”

“1829. I was one of the first peelers. Fifteen years of age, but I looked eighteen. Thirty-eight years ago, it was.”

Lenox nearly gasped. In 1829 Sir Robert Peel—one of the great politicians of the last century, famed for the greatest maiden speech ever given in Parliament—had founded the modern police force. He started with a thousand constables, the peelers. Over time they had taken as a nickname not his last but his first name: They were bobbies. To have been among the first rank was an honor, and Fowler was surely one of the few dozen who remained alive.