For the next two days London was layered in a fog so dense that according to the papers no fewer than eight men fell into the river from the West India Docks. All of them had been fished out quickly, fortunately, and none worse off than a glass of rum would cure, but as the papers said—still! A pretty pass things had come to, when men and women couldn’t walk the streets of the capital without the prospect of barging straight into a lamppost.
“They add that no doubt the thieves will be pleased by the fog,” said young Lord John Dallington, his eyes scanning the print.
Dallington was Lenox’s protégé—a young, well-born gentleman with black hair, always impeccably dressed, but with even now a lingering reputation as a bad apple. His friends knew better.
They were seated in the Reform, a gentleman’s club in Pall Mall. Outside it was harsh weather—the windows were like long, figureless paintings of swirling gray—but indoors the fire was warm and the chairs comfortable, the smell of tea and old books wafting through the air.
“Won’t the thieves be just as befogged as we are?” Lenox asked.
“I don’t think that would make up a very interesting article.”
“Thieves housebound. No, it wouldn’t do.”
Dallington laughed. “Said to be engaged in needlepoint by fireplace until weather clears. I would buy the paper to read that, as it happens.”
They were here because Lenox had missed out on a great deal since the Lightfoot case began. Dallington was catching him up.
It was still odd to Lenox to be one of the partners in a detective agency, after so many years on his own—mostly unaided in his work, but mostly unencumbered, too. In the past ten years or so Dallington had become one of his closest friends, however, and the third share of the agency belonged to another, an enterprising, thoughtful, and rather remarkable young woman named Polly Buchanan. She was Dallington’s wife—but that was an outcome that postdated their professional partnership. Several years before, a young widow, she had seen a gap in the market and set out to solve all the minor domestic troubles (thefts, dowry arguments, missing husbands) that detectives like Lenox and the police ignored.
Her success had been immediate, and now she was the guiding force of the agency. Under her employment were some dozen detectives, most of them former associates of Scotland Yard and other metropolitan police departments across England and the isles.
Usually Polly would have been present herself at a meeting such as this one (which would have necessitated a different venue—like all the clubs along this regal row of London buildings, the Reform was the province of a single sex) but she was out upon a case herself that afternoon.
Lenox and Dallington ordered lunch, and their food came right where they sat in the comfortable library—part of the charm of the club, that you could remain in one seat the whole day long if you wished.
Dallington had been making his way in his muddled fashion through the cases Lenox ought to know about, but shoved aside the papers with a relieved sigh when the food appeared. He was a bright and intuitive detective—but Polly would have done an infinitely better job at this sort of debrief, thought Lenox with an inward sigh.
They ate in comfortable silence, which Lenox broke only after some little while.
At the very back of the deep hearth nearby was an enormous, roughly cut piece of oak. “Do you know what that is?”
“Wood,” said Dallington moodily.
“And they say you’ll never make a detective.”
“Who says that?” the young lord asked angrily. Then he saw that Lenox had been joking. “Oh. Anyhow. I should like to see them say it to me.”
It was no use pointing out Dallington’s low spirits, which he was doubtless aware of himself, so Lenox returned to the huge piece of oak in the hearth. In medieval times, he explained, it had always been called the “back log.”
“Which is, incidentally, the very thing that has brought us here—a backlog of cases.”
Dallington was not quite so enchanted as his mentor by the coincidence, and said why did Lenox always have to know where words came from, and added that nobody liked a know-it-all. Then he said he was sorry, he had a bit of a headache, but still it was a bit much. Backlog.
“I spent the morning trying to read Plato,” Dallington added, rubbing his temples. “It nearly did me in.”
“Why on earth did you do that?”
Dallington flushed. “No reason.”
“You’re reading Plato for no reason?”
“I said trying to read, in the first place. And anyhow, I was, yes, you would think I’d said I was trying to solve the problem of perpetual motion the way everyone’s reacted.”
This was a small mystery—Dallington’s reading generally extended not much further than the comics in Punch—but Lenox left it to the side.
“If you’re finished eating, let’s get through the—”
“Please don’t say backlog, Charles. I don’t have the margin.”
“The other cases,” replied Lenox with dignity.
They spent forty minutes on this task, reviewing the performance of their newer employees as well, and finally discussing the wildly disarrayed state of Scotland Yard. They were just entering into the depths of this particular conversation when a fellow called Killian, a dyed-in-the-wool Tory with whom Lenox had once exchanged heated words in the House of Commons, came into the library. He was a balding, heavy-lidded, paunchy, skewering sort of person.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said. “Lenox, I see that you have broken up Scotland Yard! Well done.”
“Thank you, Killian.”
“Any word on Wallace?” he asked.
“No,” said Lenox.
“Dallington? Have you solved it? No—I imagined not—bad lookout. It won’t do, Lenox, a murder on your very own street. Tsk, tsk.”
“Two streets over, actually.”
Killian smirked at them. “Ah, yes. No doubt that makes all the difference. My mistake. Good day, fellows. I’m due to win some money at piquet. I was only coming in to see if there was a pencil here—and look what I have found, the very stub of a pencil. That will do splendidly. Congratulations again, Lenox.”
Killian went on his way. Dallington stared behind him with distaste and, when he was out of earshot, told Lenox to ignore him; nobody had come close to solving the Wallace murder.
“I wish they would,” said Lenox. “I keep opening the newspaper and hoping to discover that someone has confessed.”
“Who, the butler? Not yet. But it will come out in the end. The last thing any of the three of us needs is more work at the moment.” Dallington looked at the papers spread between them. “Particularly you.”
“You’re quite right,” said Lenox. He glanced up at the clock. “Speaking of which, I ought to be going.”
“I suppose I should, too.”
Yet Killian’s comment rankled in Lenox’s bosom. For he did feel, after all, that even with the grueling schedule he had been operating by, he should have done better, done something, to solve the case that was leading every newspaper in the English-speaking world. What was worse, too, he had fibbed: It had happened only one street over from Hampden Lane, in truth; nearer to his own front door than he cared to admit.