And then all at once, just past five o’clock, there was a driving snow across all of London.
Inspector Dunn was predictably displeased. “Don’t see why we had to meet in person,” he said darkly to Hemstock, staring out at the blizzard. “It will take all night to get home.”
He wouldn’t even look at Lenox. The three of them were waiting—with Graham off to one side—in a handsome marble vestibule outside the office of Sir Richard Mayne, on the top floor of Scotland Yard, which commanded wide views of the river and the south bank. There was already a patchy topcoat of snow on the steeples and chimneys. The sky was ghostly.
“Did you find anything in Manchester or Liverpool?” Hemstock asked.
“It was productive,” Dunn said curtly.
Lenox took that to mean that he had not. He could not help but observe—indeed, it gave him a fierce private pleasure to observe—that the breakthroughs in the case had been his so far. The murdered passenger aboard the 449 from Manchester to London would still be anonymous if not for him. Josiah Hollis undiscovered or dead, in all likelihood. Their pursuit at a thwarted end.
He had known more peculiar cases, he reflected, but none quite so unorthodox in structure. Usually in a murder investigation, one began with a victim and traced him or her to a murderer; in this one, they had begun with an anonymous victim, and it had taken all the ingenuity they had to find out the man’s name.
It meant that despite having done so much work, most of the case nevertheless lay before them. That was the murderer’s cleverness, he supposed.
Dunn and Hemstock were bartering barely disguised incivilities, but went quiet at the sound of an approaching footstep on the stair. Sir Richard. The three men stood, and he gave them a nod before leading them into his office.
“Where are we?” he said without preamble, moving around to his side of the desk, pushing papers to this side and that, brow furrowed, looking for something.
Dunn delivered a brief and disappointing narration of his trip to the north. Hemstock followed this with a fairly accurate description of the documents. Lenox nodded along, and when Hemstock was finished made a point of complimenting him for his insights. He might as well try to be sure that someone liked him.
And what did the documents show, Mayne wanted to know.
“His correspondence was wide and impressive,” said Lenox, “as Mr. Hemstock discovered before I began.
“Here, for instance, is a copy I made of a letter from the Prime Minister to him from two months ago: I have received the letters of introduction most kindly supplied by Mr. Ralph W. Emerson, Mr. George Dallas, Mr. Horace Mann, and some half a dozen other august members of your political—you take the point. Nearly all of the letters start that way. Gilman laid his groundwork well. The Prime Minister adds that he shall be happy to see Gilman on such and such a date—yesterday, in fact, it would have been, as it happens—for the space of thirty minutes.”
“High connections.”
“The highest. Here is a list of the people with whom he was to meet. You will no doubt recognize most of the names.”
“So Viscount Palmerston is your primary suspect,” Dunn said.
“No,” Lenox said. “I am merely describing the situation to Sir Richard so that he may judge it for himself.”
“Go on, then, please,” Mayne said.
“There is also a second type of letter.” Lenox handed it over. “Take a look for yourself. Mr. Hemstock will have seen it already.”
gilman you *****r-loving filth stay out of England there’s plenty here won’t take it silent if you march, the white was placed by GOD himself to rule over the rest. signed, a proud AMERICAN of the Patriots Abroad
“Why is ‘American’ capitalized?” asked Dunn.
Mayne shook his head slowly, looking at the letter. “How many of these are there?”
“Three,” Lenox replied. “He would have received all of them before his departure. Here is a more formal one.”
To the attention of the Honorable Mr. Gilman,
We have our disagreements, but as fellow Americans we would hate to see you come to grief in Great Britain. Physical violence is abhorrent to our cause. Reliable intelligence informs us that you may be in danger of harm if you insist upon travel to London. Moreover it is unacceptable and traitorous that a representative of the United States would protest her actions on foreign soil.
Yours most sincerely,
The Knights of America in England
“I am not sure they would hate it as much as they declare,” said Mayne. “The idea of violence against Gilman.”
“I am of two minds,” Lenox said. “I agree with you, but on the other hand I hardly think they would have announced their intentions so blatantly if they really meant him harm. There is even the chance that it might be a well-meaning caution, I suppose.”
“Or they might not have counted on Gilman bringing the letter across the ocean with him.”
This was Dunn. It was a fair point. Lenox nodded. “Yes.”
Mayne rang for his secretary, Wilkinson. “Fetch Stevenage if he’s still about.”
Lenox waited for an explanation of who Stevenage was, but when none came he gamely pulled out the two journals with which Gilman had traveled, blue and black.
He held out the black one. “It was this which gave me the greatest pause, however.”
“His journal?”
Lenox nodded. “His diary consists primarily of scheduling information, but the journal is different. It is full of scribblings. There is a much-blotted draft of a bill formally requesting the United States to free its slaves, and declaring Great Britain’s withdrawal from all financial transactions touched by the … what are his words … barbaric institution.”
“Well, he’s quite correct there,” said Mayne, taking the journal.
“There are also his observations of shipboard life. A few sentimental reflections on a young woman named Margaret Murphy of Lawrence, Massachusetts, into which I hardly think we need to pry. But you will see the pages I have flagged. Look at the last one, to start. Crabbe was Gilman’s correspondent at the American consulate. Son of a hero of their revolution.”
Mayne opened the book, turning it halfway so the three investigators could read with him. The writing was quick, dashed off on one of the last pages—perhaps the very last shipboard morning, or not long before. It was so clearly of the penmanship with which one writes to one’s self that Lenox, seeing it, felt a heartache. How very alive people were before they died!
To consult—Scotland Yard/Crabbe
- Anonymous letter postmarked Essex (police at march?)
- gray-haired man shipboard—Lyman? Liman? Strange behavior
- KAE
- Hollis safety/Patriots Abroad/Carel Seaman
“Do you know what they mean?” Mayne asked, handing the journal back.
“The anonymous letter I take to be the one you have read, which encouraged him to seek out protection at the march. The KAE—that must be the Knights in the second letter.”
“Ah,” Mayne agreed, putting them together. “The Knights of America in England.”
“I have no idea about Lyman, or Liman. But you will remember that the man who bought all the newspapers and tobacco from the young newsboy had gray hair.”
“Yes.”
“I stopped by the consulate on the way here. The name is unfamiliar to them. We will need to seek out the manifest for the ship upon which they sailed, I think. Or else Hollis may be able to give us some information.”
“And Carel Seaman, as he is called?”
Dunn spoke. “I know the man. He was brought up before a judge on a charge of assault last year. He and two friends set about an Indian traveler in Covent Garden. They might easily have killed him, though he survived.”
“What was their motivation?”
“Racial. He did not make way for them on the sidewalk.”
“Anything else? Lenox?”
“Seaman hails from Maryland. That is all I can add to what Mr. Dunn says. But I may have the articles about the attack on file at home.”
In fact, he knew perfectly well he did: Each morning, he and Graham competed over matching sets of newspapers, clipping every article on crime in London that they could find, for an archive they were slowly but certainly building together. Lenox would guess that it was already the most complete of its kind.
He had recommended a similar one to Mayne the year before—but the commissioner had called it a waste of the Yard’s time. That sat sore from the man who had banned snowballs.
He was across from Lenox now, holding his fingers to his mouth, eyes narrowed. “Finally we have proper suspects to investigate,” he said. “Well done, Hemstock. Lenox.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Hemstock.
There was a knock at the door. A huge block of man, with a thick brown mustache and an expression that looked as if its owner would brook very little impertinence before resorting to violence, followed the knock inside without awaiting an invitation.
“You requested my presence, sir,” he said.
“Hello, Stevenage, yes. Who are the Patriots Abroad?”
Stevenage—as this man, dressed in a blue suit, every inch the police officer, was evidently named—seemed to scoff. “Nasty but unimportant. A loose affiliation of alcoholics who get their joy out of threatening people.”
“They come from America?”
“About three-quarters do. The rest are British. They meet down in Canary Wharf. Conspiring, I suppose, though I wouldn’t trust them to plan my niece’s birthday party. They do manage about a dozen prostitutes and a tavern or two.”
“What about the Knights of America in England?”
Stevenage didn’t look surprised at the name. “A slightly more respectable group, but with the same essential purpose. They meet in the Strand and wear tailored jackets. Actually I believe all of them are Americans. Merchant class. Not violent that I know of. Though most of them came to England because of a murky past in America, or so I’ve been told, so anything is possible. The leader hails from New Orleans. Quite happy at the moment with President Pierce, though they take a still harder line than he does.”
Lenox, surprised at the easy expertise this man had, said, “Are you an authority in American matters, Mr. Stevenage?”
“No,” the officer replied, without any indication that he wished to elaborate.
“Stevenage knows every gang in London inside and out,” explained Mayne. “He is our encyclopedia.”
“We keep a proper encyclopedia as well,” Stevenage added. “The cemeteries being full of indispensable men, and all that.”
“Is either group capable of political violence?” Lenox asked.
“What, this Eleazer Gilman I assume? I’d not have thought so. They’re very good with letters—threaten every abolitionist who comes to London, every Negro in particular. Not particularly enthused about the Irish, for that matter. But never actively violent so far. They are chatterers, you see. It’s a hobby with them. An ugly hobby—no more. Five years they’ve been at it and never plucked a hair from an abolitionist’s head that I heard of.”
His tone implied that he would certainly have heard if it had been. “I see.”
As if acceding to the fact that the groups of whom he was speaking weren’t wholly harmless, he added, “I will say that Seamen is a man I hate to have on the loose. Unpredictable.”
“Do you have a list of the places where they meet, these two groups? The membership?” said Lenox.
“I can have someone run it up. It will take fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“I’ll wait,” Lenox said.
Mayne nodded. “Very good, Stevenage,” he said. “Thank you. The three of you had better start with Lyman, or Liman, then, I suppose—and after that, Seaman and his people, too. Dunn, you take them. Lenox, you take the two patriotic groups.”
They all assented.
Mayne sighed. “I always feel snow is a bad sign in these matters. Covers up too much. Everyone ducks inside. Still, push on.”