Hemstock arrived about half an hour after Lenox. Only the young amateur detective and the grizzled stationmaster remained on the platform. The conductor had been raring to get home, his lost omnibus ticket nothing to the price of a hansom if he could merely get some sleep, he’d said, and while Rossum, the young constable, had played his role admirably, he had asked after they got off the train if his presence was still necessary. Lenox had let him go.
Hemstock strolled in without a care in the world. You had to hand him that much: He had insouciance.
“Lenox!” he cried upon approaching. “Dashed glad to see you joined the hullaballoo after all.”
Stanley, the stationmaster, took in Hemstock’s approaching figure charily.
“Is someone coming along to fetch the body?” he asked. “I must write my report. And this train must be cleared and empty by morning. It goes to the south coast at 7:33.”
“Oh, yes,” said Hemstock. “A medical examiner will arrive before long.”
“What time is the first train of the morning?” Lenox asked the stationmaster.
At 5:49, came the answer. Did they have anything further? If not, Stanley said, he would return to his office. They could find him there, the large brick-and-glass stand lofted a few feet above ground level near the front doors of the station.
When Hemstock and Lenox were alone, Hemstock sighed. He would have preferred to be somewhere else, the noise suggested—perhaps a tavern scene by Frans Hals.
“Well?” he said. “What do we have?”
“Perhaps you’d better come and look.”
“Must I?”
“I think so.”
Thus they boarded the third-class carriage again, and Lenox described how he had passed his time here. Hemstock, after staring with a furrowed brow at the dead man for a moment, sat down heavily on the bench opposite and looked up at the young amateur, listening.
Lenox had begun with the body. The general cause of death was obvious: The victim had been slashed and stabbed repeatedly in the stomach and ribs. Whether it was loss of blood or a specific wound that had in fact killed him was for the medical examiner to say.
“But the more interesting bit came next,” said Lenox. “When I looked for identification.”
“Why? Who is he?”
“I don’t have the slightest clue.”
Hemstock looked sincerely surprised. “How’s that?”
Lenox demonstrated what he meant. He turned out all of the man’s pockets, showing that there was nothing inside them. “I lifted the body up after I found his pockets empty and looked to see if a billfold or valise was underneath him. Nothing.”
“Hm.” Hemstock looked still more curious. “No identification on the body, then. Stolen?”
“I don’t think so, because of what I saw next.”
“What?”
Carefully, Lenox opened the dead man’s jacket. It was a charcoal-black sack coat, a casual fashion imported in the last few years from Manhattan. Lenox had recently been talked into having one made for himself. “Look.”
Cut raggedly from the inner pocket of the man’s coat was a rectangle where its tailor’s label would have been sewn. There was blood around the area—mostly dry, but certainly fresh.
He proceeded to show Hemstock the jacket inside and out—it was a ginger business to remove it—and then the shirt. The victim’s pants, which were of a light gray, unmatched to the jacket, had had their label removed, too, from the inner right leg.
“What about behind his neck?”
“Another label torn out.”
“Very, very strange.”
Last of all, Lenox observed, the man’s boots were gone entirely. “And even his socks—they are cut at the top.”
Hemstock was indifferent to his work, not stupid. “Where a monogram might have been. This is odd indeed.” He blinked his eyes a few times quickly. “What do I—what shall I make of it?”
Lenox shook his head. “That I still do not know, unfortunately.”
“Hm.”
Hemstock looked disappointed. It was a more complex case than he had been hoping would fall to him.
But Lenox felt a kind of pure, racing thrill, somber to be sure but not without a tincture of joy. This was a real and serious crime, with a horrible mixture of violence and methodical cunning to the way the murderer had slashed the man to death and then carefully cut away the labels of his clothes. It had to be solved—he had rarely felt anything so strongly. Either violence or wit could make a criminal dangerous. Lenox had learned this in his painstaking study of the history of crime. But together they could make the same criminal truly diabolical.
“You no doubt observe what else is missing, too, of course,” said Lenox.
“Eh? Oh?” said Hemstock, as if in fact he did reserve the right to doubt that he had noticed it.
“No hat,” said Lenox.
That was indeed uncommon for any man, of any class. “No hat.”
“To go with no money. No watch. No overcoat. Nor even a handkerchief. I checked all of his pockets twice.”
He had checked the rest of the carriage, too, every inch of it. Empty.
“Those are all items of value,” Hemstock said. “They might have been taken more easily than the boots.”
“All of them?” Lenox asked.
“No,” Hemstock said. “I suppose not.”
It took Lenox an instant to realize what Hemstock was really feeling: fear. This crime lay beyond his regular abilities. He was like a schoolboy sitting to an exam for which he was unprepared.
“It will be all right, you know,” Lenox said. “It is just a case to be solved, not more, not less.”
“Perhaps a bit more,” muttered Hemstock.
“We shall manage it.”
Just then there were voices outside the carriage. Lenox glanced at his watch. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. In another version of this evening, where it had never rained, he was at a ball attaining its last raucous crescendo.
Instead, he and Hemstock descended the train’s stairs. On the platform were two men, one Lenox recognized, one he didn’t.
“Good evening, Inspector,” said the one Lenox did.
“Good evening, Dunn.”
This was Hemstock’s superior, a fellow named Ephraim Dunn, short, handsome, and officious. He had jet-black hair, which he pomaded into a brilliant slickness, so that despite his height you could see the glint of him from a London block away—as the constables would joke. He was clean shaven, the better to show the expression of a man who looked for ill in the world each day and never went to sleep disappointed.
“And Mr. Charles Lenox,” he said. “How exceedingly benevolent of you to come to our assistance!”
“Mr. Dunn,” said Lenox, nodding his head.
“Still, I think you may leave. Winstanley—the body. Hemstock, go and fetch the two men with the stretcher, please. They’re in Praed Street. They’ll have to drive round.”
Hemstock jumped to it, glad to be a soldier rather than a commander. Meanwhile Dunn and Winstanley boarded the train. Winstanley, a thin, wistful person who looked as if he needed a solid meal, was apparently the medical examiner.
Lenox stood on the platform, gazing down at the gravel between the wooden railroad ties.
He had learned to use moments like this to think. Of course, he reasoned, the lack of clues in this case was the clue. It would have taken the murderer precious time to cut the labels from each garment, to remove each boot. To gather the hat, handkerchief, boots, and watch, all the small outward gestures of acquisition that defined a person by a glance.
Then to leave Paddington with all of it, unnoticed … he must have had a large piece of luggage, Lenox thought. If it was well after the station had emptied, perhaps he had been seen.
Winstanley and Dunn descended from the 449 to the platform about ten minutes later, just as Hemstock returned with two burly constables, there to carry the body to Winstanley’s wagon.
Winstanley, peering carefully at the group above his round spectacles, said, “The victim appears to have been stabbed to death.”
“I thought so, too,” Hemstock said.
“It is hard to conceive of anyone disagreeing,” Dunn said shortly. “Was there anything else?”
“No. It is all perfectly straightforward.”
That, in fact, was a statement with which one could conceive some disagreement. But at that moment Lenox realized something.
“I saw no wounds on his hands,” he said. “Only blood.”
Winstanley’s turtlelike scrutiny shifted to him. “Sir?”
“Perhaps he didn’t see the attack coming,” Lenox said. “Perhaps he was asleep. Or perhaps he knew his murderer.”
“It is high time you left speculation to the professionals,” Dunn said. “Good evening, Mr. Lenox. No doubt there is some champagne breakfast or horse racing event at which you are required early tomorrow.”
“None at all,” said Lenox, anger rising in him.
“Nevertheless,” said Dunn, “I’m sure you will welcome your rest. Good evening.”
And so Lenox had no choice but to leave. It was useless to point out that he had helped Scotland Yard; still more useless to point out that he knew already he wouldn’t sleep much that night. He nodded goodbye and made his way back to his carriage, the rain thrumming relentlessly on the station’s glass roof.