“What did he ask you?” said Nicholson.

“He said that there was going to be a murder the next day. I told him I couldn’t be involved.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“I did! With Christ as my witness, I did. But he said that it was my own neck on the line—that the person who’d betrayed them had given my name away, too. And he offered me fifty pounds.” Armbruster shook his head mournfully. “That stupid watch. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Lenox felt a flicker of pity for the man at those words.

Then he remembered something. “You took Jenkins’s papers from the Yard before you followed him, though,” he said. “That means you knew who Smith meant to kill.”

“Is that true?” asked Nicholson.

“I—”

“The truth, mind you.”

Armbruster hesitated, then said, “Yes. I knew it was Jenkins. He would have had us all up to the gallows, you know.”

Dallington snorted. “Better to go to the gallows than see a good man murdered.”

“What became of his papers?” asked Lenox.

“I burned them.”

“What did they say?”

“It was a thick file. He knew everything about the Slavonian Club—everything. My name was all over them, Wakefield’s, too. Jenkins had obviously been working on it for months.”

“Was Smith’s name on them? Or Dyer’s?”

Armbruster thought. “I don’t know. I only looked at the papers very quickly. But I don’t think so, no. It was all detail about those houses—the three houses that have been in all the newspapers.”

It seemed clear enough to Lenox. Jenkins had discovered Wakefield’s crimes, and used the threat of prosecution against the marquess to try to chase down all of the criminals involved in the operation. Wakefield had turned on his friends to save his skin. Both of them had died for it.

“And it was you who untied the shoe?” Lenox asked Armbruster. “Before everyone arrived?”

The sergeant hesitated again and then nodded. “Yes. When I arrived to find the body, I knocked on Wakefield’s door on the pretext of searching for witnesses. Smith told me to look in the shoe. He was flustered—had just shot Jenkins and run, not wanting to linger, obviously, in such a public place. I could look in the shoe without drawing notice, because I was leading the investigation, of course.” He shook his head. “But then Nicholson arrived. Another thirty seconds and none of us would be sitting here. I would have had that claim ticket in my own pocket.”

They took fifteen minutes more to sketch in the details of the day Jenkins had died; for his part, Armbruster seemed sincerely not to know anything about Wakefield’s death.

There was a narrow hallway outside of the cell—surprisingly bright, with a clock and a portrait of Sir Robert Peel on the wall—and here Nicholson, Lenox, and Dallington stood, discussing what they had learned.

It all fit together, but there were still questions. Nicholson, shaking his head, said, “If he were planning to betray Smith, why would Wakefield meet with Jenkins right in front of him?”

Lenox shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about that, too. Smith was cleverer than Wakefield. I’ve been following Wakefield’s trail for years—he was violent, heedless, cavalier. Smith is cold-blooded.”

“And?”

“If I had to guess, I would say that he probably took the precaution of seeing Jenkins when Smith was out. What he didn’t consider was that Smith had been responsible for hiring all of the rest of the staff, too—Miss Randall, the three others. They were his. Wakefield wouldn’t have bothered about details like that. He would have assumed that he only had to watch out for Smith, that the others were simply normal servants. In fact all four of them were spying on him.”

“For that matter,” said Dallington, “we have no idea what Wakefield told Smith. Perhaps he told him he was only going to give up Dyer—that they were in on it together, against Dyer and the men of the Gunner. But as Charles says, Smith was cleverer than Wakefield by half.”

“Or us, nearly,” said Nicholson. He hesitated. “I also wonder how Smith and Wakefield connected.”

There was a pause as they considered the question. Then Lenox said, “Armbruster is sitting there. Let’s ask him.”

So they returned to the room and posed the question to the sergeant. A disconcerted look came onto his face—one of concealment, calculation. He knew something. “I’m not sure,” he said.

“No more games, I told you,” said Nicholson.

There was a long pause. “Does the name Charity Boyd mean anything to you?”

Lenox nodded. “The woman Wakefield killed. Yes. Why?”

Armbruster paused again, as if considering his options. “There’s no reason to drag that case up, you know. Wakefield’s dead. He’s the one who killed her.”

“This is your final warning,” said Nicholson. “We—”

Lenox thought he understood. “The officers who helped investigate the murder,” he said. “Was one of them Obadiah Smith’s father?”

Armbruster nodded very slightly. “Yes.”

“And another one of them was your father.”

Now the sergeant looked pained. “Yes. But it was only Smith who helped Wakefield, I’m sure of that—sure of it. My father’s nearly seventy now, anyhow. You’ve no cause at all to bring him into this.”

Lenox turned away in disgust. He remembered the witness who had seen Charity Boyd’s death, only to recant his testimony. How easily a brief encounter of intimidation from someone in a uniform might have changed his mind. And how easy to imagine that once a fruitful relationship had been established between Wakefield and Obadiah Smith Sr., the rest of the family—the constable’s son, his wife—might have found their way into Wakefield’s employ.

Except that Smith had probably become something very like a partner, it seemed to Lenox. Dallington evidently had the same thought. In the hallway, he said, “I suppose Smith made himself indispensable.”

Nicholson nodded. “For all we know, the entire enterprise was Smith’s idea.”

“Yes,” said Lenox. “Wakefield had the houses, Dyer the ship, but they needed Smith to run the operation. I know Wakefield—there’s no way he could have been bothered with all that work. He was essentially an idle man, unless some piece of violence was called for. Smith and his mother—they were the ones in charge of the whole thing, until it came crashing down. They must have been minting money before that. Think of that pile of notes we found Smith ready to pack. Thousands of pounds.”

Nicholson shook his head. “I wonder how Jenkins discovered the truth. It was a damned fine piece of detection, however he did it.”

The other two nodded, and they stood there in silence for a moment, considering their departed friend.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

As the women’s stories of captivity seeped out into the press, the charitable hearts of the British public were stirred. A collection was taken up through the newspapers, a fund established by which all of them might have their return fares to their homelands provided, along with a six-month stipend to put them on their feet. There was talk, moreover, of a suit against Wakefield’s estate, some reparation. Most of the women left as soon as they could. They gave forwarding addresses, though Lenox doubted that these would stay good for very long. Two or three women elected to stay in London—and one, in fact, a young German lady, would eventually become the well-known mistress of one of the gentlemen who had been arrested on the night of the raid at the Slavonian Club, Clarkson Gray, a bachelor of long standing descended from a line of immensely wealthy manufacturers in West Bromwich.

Several weeks after the fact, Lenox saw Gray at the Travellers Club. Gray gave him a pained look. “Bloody bad show, that was,” he said, without any other greeting. “I’d no idea they weren’t paid. None at all. And with the fees of the place! She’s a damn fine girl, too. I’m trying to make up for it to her, you know. And she knows she can go back any time she likes. I’ve told her so earnestly. She prefers it here.”