Lenox knew something was wrong in the very early light of the new day. He would have known it from the look on Graham’s face as he entered the room, but even in the beat before then he had known it, and it took him a moment to realize why: Graham hadn’t knocked.
Lenox rose to his elbows. “What is it?”
“Another murder, sir. Very like the first.”
Graham was holding out a copy of the Telegraph, and Lenox took it.
Like most papers, it published a second edition after six o’clock in the morning, which was updated to include any news that had emerged since the first edition at three o’clock. As a policy Lenox subscribed to second editions, though it was usually the first edition that made its way onto London’s breakfast tables.
It paid off now: 6:50, and he had most of the story.
Fifteen frantic minutes later, Graham and Lenox were rumbling through the streets of London toward the river in a cab, Lenox urging the driver on from the vehicle’s interior with angry thumps of the roof. He had promised the sleepy-eyed fellow half a crown if they made it to Bankside in less than twenty minutes.
He was filled with rage, his own tiredness gone. (He had always been able to survive on very little sleep, Graham the same.)
“We had a very short window of time, sir,” Graham ventured at one point.
“Mm,” said Lenox in a noncommittal tone, his eyes remaining on the streets.
He didn’t trust himself to say more. Instead he simmered in his emotions, angry as only the young can be, who still suspect the world to be partially within their control; as only the purehearted can be, to whom evil is a new surprise each time; angry with himself; angry with the indifferent cloudy morning sky; angry with the indifferent passersby, involved so earnestly in their meaningless daily movements.
GRUESOME AND SENSATIONAL MURDER ON RIVER THAMES
That had been the headline Graham showed him. It was from the Telegraph, the only paper that had carried the story in its second edition. It was a serious scoop, upon the strength of which its newsboys would sell throughout the morning, and which might even force other papers to go to a third edition, expense be cursed. Nothing else could conceivably lead the evening papers.
Nevertheless the headline had managed an error in its scant seven words. On the River Thames—doubtful, Lenox thought, that anyone had been murdered on the River Thames.
The cab crossed Southwark Bridge.
“Close,” said Graham two-thirds of the way across it, breaking the silence.
This bridge was toward the eastern part of London; the affluent West End was where Lenox lived, but they had not yet made it all the way east, toward poverty, the infamous rookeries around Tottenham Court Road where men and women lived as close as moles in a burrow, in conditions scarcely less dominated by dirt, the tenements where cholera had wiped away so many thousands of souls the year before, ’49.
No, solid burgher stock lived in these precincts around Southwark Bridge. St. Paul’s loomed above everything. As they crossed the bridge, Lenox saw the thin townhouse facing the river where Christopher Wren had lived as St. Paul’s was being built, so that he could see it from a distance each morning and evening, step back from it after a day spent amidst the dust and mortar. Not dissimilar to a detective’s work.
As they neared the south bank, Lenox saw the official bustle of a police investigation. There was a swarm of ten or fifteen uniformed men keeping order, and perhaps ten times as many bystanders who had stopped to gawk. They were almost exactly where Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre had been, though that was of course many centuries gone.
“This is one for Tussauds,” said Graham.
Lenox nodded. No question about it. The anonymity of the Walnut Island murder had met its exact opposite; the murderer would have his notoriety. Nothing could be more certain. There were already a few enterprising men among the crowds, one selling oysters, another copies of the Telegraph, no doubt at a markup. Three people were reenacting the infamous murder of Joseph O’Connor (even at a few hundred yards, Lenox could spot the top hat that always marked O’Connor as a rich man in these impromptu productions) for a small but enthusiastic group they had siphoned off—the kind of street theater that was immensely popular in London, a long and lurid performance that would culminate in enormous lengths of red handkerchief streaming from one member’s collar as he convulsed upon the ground, O’Connor dying for the ten thousandth time, victim of a dashing, young, poor couple named the Mannings, who had set him for their mark.
Stand up, bow, circulate the hat for pennies, perform it again.
The Mannings were in Tussauds.
“The letter writer will find the fame he sought, sir,” Graham said, echoing Lenox’s own thought.
Lenox nodded. “As he counted upon.”
The article had been short (little information, and a brief time in which to get it to press—the presses held for it, in all likelihood). Its subheadline had virtually summarized what the Telegraph actually knew, adding a nickname.
Thames Ophelia; strangled own hair; bedecked and set adrift
Then the article, whose tone was just a step down from the Times in ways that were subtle but obvious to the avid consumer of newsprint:
The body of an unknown woman was recovered just off Bankside this morning at a little after five o’clock, in remarkable circumstances. It was discovered by a clerk from the Customs House nearby, on his way to work, who immediately alerted P. C. Wright, Number 144 of K Division.
The unfortunate woman was of dark complexion, with ringlets of dark hair upon her brow. The cause of death appeared to be strangulation of the most brutal variety. Most astonishingly, surrounding and surmounting her body were long and numerous garlands of flowers.
She had been floated down the river on a loose board.
Nothing else is known about the victim’s identity. Members of the Metropolitan Police are present, among them Inspector Field. Sir Richard Mayne is expected to attend the scene himself shortly.
Evening edition for further details.
Next to this was a long history—all filler—about unsolved London murders. Nothing about Walnut Island.
As they drew closer to the site, Lenox could indeed see Inspector Charles Field, the two most respected of the plainclothes detectives of the Metropolitan Police, one of the eight original detectives of 1842. Mayne was already there as well.
Heavens, that made four: Mayne, the commissioner; Field, the preeminent detective, famous across England; and Sinex and Exeter, who had drawn the Walnut Island case.
It was hard for Lenox to imagine where he fit into this battalion of people. But he was doggedly committed that it would be somewhere.
Around Mayne and Field were a variety of police officers, some in blue, others in suit and tie. A number of constables held the crowd at bay, but the crowd saw plenty anyway. Lenox himself could perceive that all attention was centered on a small area of the river’s bank, though he was angled too low to see what was there.
“I’ll attempt to get through to the body,” Lenox said as they came onto Bankside, the hansom attracting a few glances. “You take a scan of the crowd—the civilians, that is. Jot notes on the faces you see, clothes, telling scars, markings, but be quick about it, since there’s so much to do.”
Graham nodded. “Yes, sir.”
It was an article of faith among the few criminal manuals available that murderers enjoyed watching the commotion they had instigated. Lenox wasn’t sure if it was true, but it couldn’t hurt to be safe.
He rapped the cab to stop, and steeled himself: mayhem, death, blood. Yet he knew somewhere deep in his mind, from the same mysterious depth that had noticed Graham’s failure to knock on his door half an hour before, that opportunity lay within the chaos.
He wondered how quickly this would be connected to the previous morning’s letter to the Challenger. The Telegraph hadn’t done it. The Challenger would do it by the time it published its evening edition, of course. Still, for a few hours, at least, he and Graham would be among just a dozen or so men in England who suspected that two murders, a month apart, were connected.
One of those dozen or so being the murderer; and contemplating this person, Lenox felt, surfacing to his skin, a profound unease that had been lingering somewhere hidden within him for the past half hour. It had to do with: Who was this fellow? What kind of murderer was he?
For that matter, what was a murder?
Usually he thought he knew. It was a question that seemed to have a single simple answer. And yet in cases like this, its illimitable secondary ones occupied a great deal of his time and thought.
He had been discussing just this with Elizabeth a few weeks before, over tea in her pretty yellow drawing room—not a subject at all appropriate for either teatime or for discussion with a gentlewoman, or for a pretty yellow drawing room. But they were close enough that they could discuss all subjects with equal freedom.
“Do you know how many murders there were in Britain in 1810?” he had asked her, smiling, after she had mentioned one of his cases.
“You know that I don’t. A thousand? Three thousand?”
“Nine.”
“Nine thousand!”
“No, no. Nine. As in, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.”
Her eyes had widened. “You’re making sport of me.”
“Never in life. Nine convictions of murder by a magistrate, out of ten million Britons.”
But of course, as he explained, that was 1810, just before the slow, significant rise in the idea of a professional police force. Nine hundred was a more likely number for how many actual murders there had been that year than nine.
All it meant was that in many ways theirs was the century in which murder had become a real notion. And the idea of solving a murder, of trailing a killer, was even newer. Ten years old? Twelve? Eight, if you reckoned the city’s own way: Field and his seven comrades in 1842 being the first men specifically tasked with solving the identity of murderers.
Lenox was a student of past crimes in addition to the daily crime of London, and within his knowledge there were very, very few instances like this—the mix of anger, arrogance, and performance. The wantonness of it—the flowers, Thames Ophelia—the two strangulations—the idea of a “perfect crime.” None of this was usual. It felt different, unmotivated by money (as the Mannings had been) or drunkenness or marital dispute. It simply felt different, disquietingly different.
What was a murder? Anyhow they were about to see for themselves.