The Fleet Street Murders Read Online Free

shall.”
    “Good-bye.”
    The inspector left, and Lenox sat in an armchair thinking. What puzzled him was the second murderer—for there must have been one, if the murders were so close together in time. How could Poole’s son, who had been out of the country, know anybody in London well enough to enlist them in such a plot?

CHAPTER THREE

    T
    wo days later a mild late December sun set over Hampden Lane. Lenox sat with Lady Jane Grey on the sofa in her rose-colored sitting room—a chamber famous for the exclusivity of the evening gatherings it hosted and for its inaccessibility to all but Jane’s favorite people—fixing his cuff links. She was telling him about the dinner party they were to attend that night.
    Lady Jane was a lovely woman, with fine skin that in the sunless winter had gone quite pale, though her lips were ruby red. Her eyes were lively and gray, often amused but never cynical, with the generous cast of someone more accustomed to listening than speaking. Her intelligence shone out of them. A dark corona of hair was piled atop her head, precariously designed for the dinner party. Lenox liked it best when it shook down in curls across her shoulders, however. She dressed plainly and well; the widow of James Grey, Lord Deere, she had lived these fifteen years next door to Lenox, his closest friend in the world. Only recently, however, had he found the courage to declare his love—and found to his ongoing elation that she returned it.
    Far more so than Lenox, she was a member of London’s very highest society. In that caste there were two types of ruling women: those who campaigned, gossiped, and mocked, and those who through natural grace and intelligence gradually became arbiters of taste. Lady Jane belonged definitely to the second group. Her closest friends were Toto McConnell and the Duchess of Marchmain, and the three of them formed a triumvirate of power and taste. Their houses often hosted the defining parties of a season or the most select evening salons. Yet it was typical of Lady Jane that she was going to marry a man who would much rather be searching for clues in the alleyway of a slum than having supper in one of the palaces of Grosvenor Square. She never let her place in society determine her actions or thoughts. Perhaps that was the secret of having her place there to begin with.
    This was the woman Lenox was to marry, whose counsel he valued above any other, and who was to his spirit both sun and moon, midnight and noon.
    “Shall we take anything to supper?”
    “Oh—yes—they asked me to bring wine, didn’t they? Bother, I forgot.”
    Lenox perked up. “Let’s go by Berry’s,” he said.
    “Charles, they deliver,” said Lady Jane, an exasperated look on her face. “We’ll send someone around, and they’ll send the wine to Lady Nevin’s.”
    “But I like to go,” was his stubborn reply.
    “Then go, and come pick me up on your way back.”
    Lenox was not, as many of his friends were, much addicted to the charms of wine, but nobody could enter Berry Brothers and Rudd Wine Merchants for more than a few minutes without wanting immediately to lay down a few cases of Médoc or to rush off and lecture the barman at his club about the importance of grape variety.
    The shop, its front painted a dark, rich green, and its vaulted Gothic windows bearing its name in yellow stencil, was dusty, old, and wonderful, located a few paces off of Pall Mall on St. James’s Street. The darkened floorboards creaked over a cellar as valuable as any in private hands; at one end of the room was a scale as tall as a man, and beside it an old table crowded with a dozen quarter-full glasses of red wine, which customers had been tasting. Berry’s had existed since 1698 and looked as if it would go on forever.
    The place was largely deserted. One stooped old man—an oenophile, judging from the excited quiver of his nose over every bottle he smelled—was rooting through a case in the back, but the