The Fleet Street Murders Read Online Free Page B

resources in manpower and time of the Yard.”
    Damn the man’s insolence, thought Lenox. “Indeed,” was all he said.
    “Well, I thought I ought to let you know.”
    “I thank you.”
    “I know you’ve taken an interest . . . an amateur interest in several of our cases and even helped us once or twice, but I wanted to tell you that this one is solved. No need for your heroics, sir!”
    “I’m very happy for you.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Lenox, most gracious. Well—and good day.”
    “Good day, Mr. Exeter.”
    “Enjoy your party.”
    These words he said with as much sarcasm as he could muster, and then he nodded to Lenox and left.
    “It’s for the best anyway,” Lenox muttered to himself as he poured a glass of sherry at his side table. It was time to focus on politics, after all.
    The dinner party that evening was at the house of Lady Emily Nevin, a rather mysterious Hungarian woman (said to be the daughter of some nobleman in her home country) who had married a romantic young baronet just before his death. She had inherited everything but his title, which had gone to an impoverished country cousin who could make no bread by it and still had to till his own earth. Still, people “went to see her,” as the phrase went—because the Prince of Wales, on whom Lady Nevin exerted all of her many charms, did.
    It was Lady Nevin’s great conceit that wherever she went she kept a pet on a leash—a hedgehog. It was called Jezebel and waddled around with a surly look on its face, its well-groomed coat glistening with perfume and pomade. She had found it in the basement of her house; indeed, many people in London kept hedgehogs in their basements—the animals slept a great deal in whatever warm corner they could find and voraciously discovered and ate all of a house’s insects. Few, though, brought them upstairs as Lady Nevin had. She even took the creature to other people’s houses. It was considered either wickedly funny or profoundly tasteless, depending whom you spoke to. Lenox found it primarily silly, although he never entirely discounted the bond between a human and an animal because of a Labrador (Labbie, by name) that he had been given as a child and loved with all his heart.
    Despite the hedgehog, Lenox was having no fun at the party. Held in a broad, overheated room with windows overlooking the Thames, it contained few people he knew and fewer of his friends. Lady Jane, with her inexhaustible acquaintance, moved easily among the small groups, but Lenox stood by the window, glumly eating a sherbet. They made a funny sort of couple on occasions like this.
    Just then Lenox heard a voice behind him, and every nerve in his body went taut.
    “An orchid, for the lady of the house,” it said, in a tone that had once sounded arrogant to his ears but now sounded sinister as well.
    “Why, thank you, Mr. Barnard,” said Lady Nevin graciously. “How kind you are to a poor widow.”
    Lenox half-turned, if only to confirm that it was indeed George Barnard.
    He was a powerful man, aged fifty or so, who had served time in Parliament and just finished a successful stint as Master of Great Britain’s Royal Mint. He had retired into private life with an eye toward the House of Lords; judicious donations to the correct charities (and he was opulently rich, if nothing else) were, society assured him, enough to earn a title to match his wealth. He was a self-made man who had grown up somewhere in the north of England, which London associated, to the region’s detriment, with factories and soot, but he had shaken off that dubious birth to rise to his current heights. He was well liked now and known for the beautiful orchids he grew himself and always brought to parties—or, if there wasn’t one at its peak, a bowl of the oranges and lemons he grew in his green house.
    He was also, Lenox felt with complete certainty, the most dangerous man in London.
    For many years his feelings toward Barnard had been neutral. Lenox had