A small, neat, prematurely gray gentleman trailed Graham into the study. He wore a practical gabardine suit and had a hat under his arm. He walked with a just perceptible heaviness in his left leg, as if he carried an old and familiar wound in the hip.
“May I present Mr. Winston Cobb, sir,” Graham said.
“Good evening, Mr. Cobb,” said Lenox, and they shook hands. Graham withdrew. “Charles Lenox.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, though sorry to call upon you on a holiday.”
“Not at all. I only hope that I can help you in some way, given how cold your trip here must have been.”
“Starting with a cold passage across the Atlantic!” said Cobb, and smiled gratefully. “Fortunately I have a heavy cloak, which your butler was kind enough to take from me.”
“Goodness, have you sailed here from the States? Please, sit. May I offer you a glass of brandy, or a cup of tea?”
“If it’s not too great an imposition, I would be most grateful for coffee, most grateful. I have the American habit, and my day has been a long one.”
“Of course. The days are often longest when the light is shortest, as my father once remarked.”
Lenox went into the softly lit hall and asked Graham if he might get them some coffee, and perhaps something to eat as well.
“Right away, sir,” said Graham. He disappeared through the small door near the front entrance that led down to the kitchen.
Alone in the hall, Lenox borrowed a moment for himself, trying to assess the situation. Then he shook his head and went back in. He couldn’t parse it.
Cobb had sat down on the blue leather sofa in the center of the room and was setting out two groups of papers on the table. For a dreadful moment Lenox wondered if he was a salesman.
“How can I help you?” he said.
“I am here on behalf of the United States government, Mr. Lenox. My charge is to provide them with an account of the deaths of Mr. Abram Tiptree and Representative Eleazer Gilman.”
“Gilman!”
Though he reacted with surprise, the name had never been far from Lenox’s mind. Indeed, he thought of it daily, contriving to discover some clue that might lead them to Robert “Bert” Smith, the accomplice of the murderer Winfield Bell. But even as Bell’s body had been falling, Lenox had considered the case essentially solved.
“Yes—Mr. Gilman,” Cobb said.
Lenox was conscious that he must be cautious. He had immediately taken to the small American—he had no side, as the saying went, nothing officious or arrogant in his manner—but his aims were still unclear.
“What I can tell you is that I was there on the night the body was discovered, and that the same man pretending to be the conductor of the 449 later fell from the rooftop of the White Horse Tavern.”
Cobb nodded seriously. “I have heard something like that, and am glad to have your confirmation. Well—I have found it best, since I arrived here earlier this week, to declare my bona fides immediately.” He gestured at the papers he had laid out. “If you would care to study them.”
“Of course.”
Lenox took up the larger of the two sets of paper. In a scrolled Gothic script, it said at the top:
Commissioned, hereby, for a term of three (3) months, as a Federal Marshal, United States Army Sergeant (ret.), Winston Cobb who, in the execution of his duties, agrees, First,
Thereafter it enumerated a long list of duties. Lenox read through them carefully. The government had temporarily relieved Cobb of his duties as a member of the Militia of the District of Columbia and provided him with wide latitude and a (quite generous) daily payment of fifteen dollars, plus matching funds for his expenses when in England, out of the United States Treasury, in addition, of course, to travel to and from London.
It was signed by no less a dignitary than President Franklin Pierce. Apparently his philosophical differences with Gilman’s party ended at the water’s edge.
Lenox turned to the second document. This proved to be a scrupulous and thorough set of papers of identification issued by the American consulate in London, which had received by separate ship a detailed physical description of the newly commissioned marshal and a password that he was to give them upon his arrival. Two signatories attested that he was the man the government in Washington had sent.
“This looks like they have made a very serious business out of Mr. Gilman’s death,” Lenox observed.
“Indeed they have, Mr. Lenox,” Cobb replied gravely. “As well as Mr. Tiptree’s.”
“I thought Mr. Pierce was an opponent of all for which Mr. Gilman stood.”
“All—except America, I think,” said Cobb. “He was a United States congressman. We do not take the death of one of those lightly.”
“May I ask without offending you what the Militia of the District of Columbia is?” Lenox asked.
“Of course you may. It was our Thomas Jefferson who created it, Mr. Lenox. He was the first president to live regularly in the District. The American army of his time was small, and he wished to create a standing guard for the city and its politicians—in particular the president—so that they would not be susceptible to surprise attacks by small foreign parties. Or domestic parties, for that matter.”
“I see! And you came to this militia through the army?”
“Yes, I did. President Jefferson recruited the first officers of the militia himself, and they have generally drawn on the recommendations of their friends from the army and navy when they selected new members. There is some prestige in the uniform—I hope.”
“I see,” said Lenox. He looked across the table at Cobb. “But you are not a police detective?”
“No.” Cobb met Lenox’s look, and a deep intelligence flashed somewhere in his eyes, lurking some long distance behind his good manners. “However, it has occasionally fallen to me to investigate crimes. Including murder. It is something of a specialty of mine.”
“How interesting.”
“I should hasten to add that my presence implies no rebuke at all to the work done by Scotland Yard. Or yourself as a private consultant, for that matter, though it was not until I met with Mr. Hemstock and Sir Richard Mayne that I came to appreciate your role in the case fully.”
Lenox nodded. “I should speak with those gentlemen before you and I discuss this matter.”
“Ah!” Cobb reached into his jacket pocket. “I thought you might say that. You may still do so if you wish, obviously, but this might save us each some time.”
Here the American produced a letter from Mayne enjoining Lenox to help. He recognized the handwriting of Mayne’s assistant, but it had a postscript, under seal—Americans are bloody serious about this. Tell him all you can. Mayne.
As Lenox read this, Graham knocked and entered with coffee, sandwiches, and toast. Cobb was very earnestly grateful—in that particular American way, which made such sincerity tolerable.
“Very well, then,” said Lenox, going over to his desk. He took a key out of his pocket and retrieved his papers relating to the Gilman murder. “But it may take an hour or more to tell the whole story.”
In fact it took four. Cobb was a determined and curious questioner, Lenox a willing respondent, and they discovered they had a great deal in common—so much so, as they exchanged stories of investigation from that capital and this one, that by the end of the evening there was a real amity between them.
It was just shy of 1856 when at last Cobb left, having taken down perhaps a dozen pages of notes. Lenox was tired, and a little perplexed, but not unhappy. He told Graham about the long meeting. They were involved enough in their conversation that the clock took them by surprise when it struck midnight. They wished each other many happy returns through yawns, and soon Lenox retreated to bed, for he had a New Year’s breakfast to attend the next morning at Lady Jane’s.
He woke at the first light, however; no problem in rising. But with his awakening he felt a strange unsettled suspicion in his mind.
What had caused it? Something pressing, yet indistinct. He stared through his window at the view of distant trees, swaying against the pale morning sky.
Was it about Bert Smith? No; he thought not. He felt the answer close at hand, and he spent some time chasing it fruitlessly through his thoughts. It was nothing Cobb had said, for Lenox had done most of the talking. Cobb had had very little new information—was still in the stages of gathering it.
He had to fall asleep to find it again. His alarm rang at eight o’clock, jerking him from an unexpected second slumber, and he realized he knew what it was that had been on his mind.
Gilman: That was the problem. They had missed something. He knew it by instinct. None of it added together just so—with that click of perfect transparency one felt in some cases. They had gotten it wrong—not all wrong, no, it had been Winfield Bell whose face he saw in Paddington Station and at the White Horse Tavern.
But they had gotten enough wrong that Lenox knew, prompted to relive the case by Cobb’s visit, that someone, somewhere, had gotten away with murder.