Jonas lived in Elizabeth Street in Belgravia, not far, in fact, from Kitty Ashbrook. The address proved to be that of a handsome, substantial house, which had been divided into apartments for bachelors. Jonas’s was number 2.
No one answered the bell; to Lenox’s surprise, quiet Cobb pulled a shimmy from his pocket and in a jiffy had them inside a resplendent foyer, with a subdued landscape of London on the dark blue wall and a vase of hothouse tulips.
Lenox said to remind him not to fight the Militia of the District of Columbia.
Cobb laughed. “You may treat for a truce in advance, after the hospitality you have shown, Mr. Lenox.”
There were three floors, each with its own proprietor. They reached the second and saw what was evidently Jonas’s door, for there was a 2 painted on it in black.
Lenox stopped several feet short of the door. “It’s open,” he said in a low voice.
Cobb looked, and indeed the door was ajar. “Carefully, then,” he said, and without hesitation stepped in front of Lenox and pushed it open slightly farther.
Lenox, young and eager to prove himself, wished he had done this, but now that it was done he had no choice but to follow his American counterpart. A floorboard creaked as they entered, and they paused. But no replying sound came. If the house held Samuel Jonas, he was either hiding or dead.
His rooms were a mess. Clothes, old plates of food, newspapers crumpled rather than folded, pewter flagons fetched up from the pub and never returned for their deposit—all these lay strewn over the floor and tables and chairs. Lenox reflected that he would have gone to the Carlton Club, too, if he lived here. Yet it was a quite obviously expensive life he led.
There were touches of domesticity. On the wall was a pair of portraits that from their dress Lenox guessed must have been from around the turn of the century. Perhaps Jonas’s grandparents. On either side of the portraits were framed pictures in cross-stitch. One was of Parliament, and the other was of a large white house with high white columns supporting a broad balcony that shaded a large front porch, with Jonas Hall in scroll across the bottom.
“I’ll check the bedroom,” said Cobb softly.
As he did this, Lenox investigated the large living room, checking behind the sofa, in the single closet, and through the swinging door—with his heart in his throat—that led to the servant’s quarters.
These were small, a kitchen and a narrow bedroom. Lenox checked both thoroughly, and both were empty. There was a quartet of oranges, a luxury, out on the counter. He felt them: firm. Jonas had been here recently. But the servant’s room looked unused. That would explain the mess as well.
“Empty,” said Cobb when he came back into the living room.
“So are the kitchen and the servant’s room.” There was an unspoken moment of relief, a slackening of vigilance. “Then what do we make of the door?”
“Nothing good,” said Cobb.
Lenox gestured around the room. “On the other hand, nobody could accuse Mr. Jonas of being overnice in his style of life.”
Cobb shook his head. “No. I can’t believe he represents an entire constituency of people but can barely hold together two rooms.”
“I think his servant has left him.”
“Why?”
“The quarters look unused. All of Jonas’s meals have been brought in.”
“There’s a diary and some papers on the desk in the bedroom,” said Cobb. “I didn’t look, but perhaps we should.”
“I think the open door justifies it.”
The diary was empty of commitments—except, strikingly, for on this day. Sav, 4:00, said the entry, underlined twice for emphasis. “What could that mean?” Cobb asked.
“It’s bound to be the Savoy.”
“What’s that?”
Now that was very hard to explain to someone who didn’t live in England. In essence, long ago a member of the royal family had been given a tiny sliver of London as a duchy, and while it was still subject to the Queen’s laws, it had strange, ancient laws of its own, too. The most famous of these involved debt. No writ of debt applied in the Savoy. That had made it a famous hideout for men who could afford the high prices there but not the tens of thousands of pounds they owed; George Mowbray, a cousin of Lenox’s own, hadn’t left the Savoy in ten years. There were always debt collectors waiting at the edges, even in the dead of night, looking for people who thought they could dart in and out of the Savoy’s protection.
Lenox explained all of that as briefly as he could. “But do you imagine Jonas is in debt?” Cobb asked.
Lenox said that he didn’t think so. “He could be arrested at the Carlton any time. But it may be that his meeting is with someone who is dodging the collectors.”
“True.”
“Debtors’ prison is a fearful place. Have you read the books of Mr. Dickens?”
“I have. He may be the most popular writer in our country, aside from Mr. Cooper,” said Cobb. “And Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, of course.”
“If we ever manage to get rid of them, it’s Dickens who will have done it,” Lenox said.
It was just past one. The two men agreed that they must of course be present in the Savoy at four, though as Lenox said, there were a variety of pubs, lodging houses, and inns there. Their best chance was to be out in the streets a bit beforehand. For that they would need Graham—an extra set of eyes.
They looked through the rest of the flat—quite unabashedly, for there was something in its squalor that seemed to disqualify its inhabitant from privacy—without finding much. The rolltop desk held quite a lot of money, in pounds and dollars; even this was pretty casually kept. There was a half-composed letter to Jonas’s haberdasher, ordering two new top hats “of the kind I bought in July.” In short, everything gave the appearance that Jonas might reappear any minute and resume his normal course of activities. It was this—perhaps the letter—that hastened their search, and finally they left.
“Door open or closed?” asked Lenox.
“Ajar, I suppose,” said Cobb, after thinking. “They trained us to leave everything as we found it in cases like this.”
An unbidden thought flashed across Lenox’s mind: Cobb was not merely a soldier, or a detective. He was a spy. Lenox believed that he was in London as a detective, and he did not doubt that Cobb was playing straight with him. But could he be wrong?
These thoughts didn’t cause him to miss a step in the conversation. “Before you leave, I wish you would give me a list of these injunctions. I am trying to learn the profession, but it is uneven progress.”
“With pleasure,” Cobb said. “I feel no very great confidence at the moment myself, though. Jonas might simply have left the door open and have a meeting with a friend. The connection to Jamaica might be accidental.”
“Perhaps,” said Lenox.
He knew it wasn’t. Something about the double line under the appointment; something about the crimes, and the people; something about Sheridan’s stubborn ignorance; something about Winfield Bell’s sudden fortune: All of it felt linked; all of it must be linked.
They agreed to meet at three o’clock on the steps of the royal chapel in the Savoy, a church built to order by one of the Henrys a few hundred years before, a miniature jewel of stained glass and paneled wood. From there they could explore the nooks and clefts and hiding places of the old district, in search of an answer, at last, to the mystery of who had murdered Eli Gilman and why.