The senior manager of Corcoran and Sons was a tall man who managed to stoop his way into middle height, slope-shouldered, head sunk down to his chest. He had white-blond hair shaped into two diverging and immovable planes, and a middle manager’s face, with owlish spectacles and a furrow of shortsightedness in his brow.
Old, battered spectacles, Lenox noticed.
Blackstone had accompanied them up to this office, which was small but commanded a pretty view of the water. (Mr. Corcoran’s own much larger office was just next door, at the corner of the building.) In the vast room outside the two private offices there sat fourteen clerks working, and Lenox had scanned their faces—all turned to see the visitors—closely, looking for signs of his man.
No new spectacles there, either; nobody he recognized, or whose face drew his notice.
“Scotland Yard, Mr. Cairn,” said Blackstone.
Mr. Cairn, who was sitting, peered at them over his spectacles and sighed. “Scotland Yard?” he said. “Mr. Corcoran is away.”
Lenox thought it odd that he assumed they wanted to see Corcoran. “Our business is not necessarily with Mr. Corcoran,” he said.
Cairn looked slightly surprised. “I assumed it was about his daughter.”
“She eloped, we understand?”
Cairn hesitated, and then said, “Thank you, Blackstone.” When the foreman was gone, he said, with a pained look on his face, “Yes, Eliza Corcoran has eloped, I’m afraid. The fellow an utter bounder. Not a penny to his name, and full to the brim with lies.”
“How do you know?” asked Mayne.
“Mr. Corcoran has had him investigated.”
“He has been gone a month, Corcoran?”
“A month? No, two weeks. He decided at last that he had better go himself. Miss Corcoran had left a long, hysterical letter about true love and that sort of rot.” Cairn shook his head. Evidently this was not a workplace filled with very great credulity about the concept of love. “Mr. Corcoran has tracked her to Glasgow. Now it is a matter of hunting them to ground, paying this fellow off, and bringing his daughter home. Mr. Corcoran and I asked Scotland Yard for help some time ago. While I have you, I should like to note that we received none.”
“What is this man’s name?” asked Mayne.
“Leckie. Or so he says. I told Mr. Corcoran I would bet anything he’s a Spaniard. Swarthy.”
“An accent?”
“No,” admitted Cairn grudgingly.
“When did she elope?” asked Lenox.
“About five weeks ago.”
Lenox and Graham exchanged a look. Mayne, who was no fool, saw it pass between them, and immediately cottoned on.
Exeter, who was closer to a fool, saw only that they were all looking at one another, and started to look at each of them suspiciously, as if they were keeping a secret from him.
“What does she look like, Miss Eliza Corcoran?” asked Lenox.
Cairn frowned. “She’s fair, fair-haired. Rather shorter than most, and largish.” His voice became confidential. “Plump, one would admit if one were pressed. Therefore, in her insecurity, vulnerable to this vile sort of predator. Leckie.”
Lenox, who had been sure this young woman was the victim of Walnut Island, felt disappointed—the body in the trunk had been slender, with dark ringlets of hair—then chided himself for it. Eliza Corcoran was at least alive, whatever circumstances she had worked herself into.
“Has she been corresponding with her father since she disappeared?” he asked.
“Yes.” Cairn shook his head again. “Reckless girl.”
“Eliza Corcoran? I take it you knew her, then?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve been here for thirty years—a third again as long as she’s been alive.”
Lenox nodded. “And your trunks are from Wilton’s?” he asked
Cairn looked at him curiously, thrown by the change of subject. “Our most recent batch. We have been looking for a cheaper supplier, actually, but there are only half a dozen who make that type in England. Why?”
“What is the marking stamped on each one?”
“They are marked with a G, for goods, which is the railway’s preference, to distinguish them from personal items, and then with a number from our warehouse, which is ours. That way the trunks with which we ship liquor aren’t later used to ship—well, delicate furs, for example.”
“It’s a luxury goods company, then,” Mayne said.
“Yes. Buy overseas, sell to England.” He looked at them all now, suddenly concerned. “What is this about? Our books are clean, you know. We haven’t had a case of theft inside the company in three years, either. We pay too well. One stolen shipment about eighteen months ago, but our insurance covered that.”
“Who is out sick today?” said Lenox.
“Out? What, sick?”
“Yes, that, or has been excused early?”
Cairn gave him a strange look. “Nobody.”
“Nobody?”
“I can assure you we hire no malingerers here, sir. It’s a very, very good job for a clerk. Several have been promoted to the managerial level, here or at other firms.”
“There were fourteen men in the room we passed through to get to your office. There are fifteen desks.”
Exeter scoffed. “An extra desk.”
“It had been in use this morning, or I am much in error,” Lenox said curtly.
Mayne was staring at him. “How did you count so quickly?”
Lenox hadn’t counted quickly—he had just known, the way one knew the word “tangerine” at a glance without thinking about the t or the a or the n or the g or any of the rest of it. His mind worked that way. It always had.
“I thought it might be useful,” he said, however, by way of reply.
Cairn frowned and stood up. “They should all be present. You are right, Inspector—”
“Lenox. Mr. Lenox.”
“You are right, Inspector Lenox, in saying that we have fifteen clerks, and that all of them are present today.”
Lenox felt his pulse rise. The murderer might be fleeing even now.
Cairn circled them to get to his door, which he opened, going out into the main clerks’ room. He surveyed this with an expert eye. “Hm,” he said to himself.
“Well?” asked Mayne.
The senior manager tapped the nearest clerk on the shoulder. “Where is Pond?” he said.
The fellow, who was young and plump, possessed of a very earnest face, looked up like a rabbit peeking from its hole in the ground at the scent of spring air, and turned his eyes toward the empty desk on the other side of the room. “The loo, sir, perhaps?” he said. “I saw him at his desk earlier.”
Cairn stepped forward, as if to make an announcement. But Lenox grabbed his arm. “Perhaps we could speak in your office,” he said.
The six large men pushed their way (very noticeably, and rather comically) back into the small office. Cairn took his seat, his back to the beautiful view of the river and the city. “What’s this about?” he asked again.
“Can you tell us anything about Pond? What is his first name?”
“Jonathan.”
“Where is he from?”
“Listen, I’ll go find him right now. He’s in the loo, no doubt. Though we expect a great deal of our clerks, that’s one privilege we allow them in the job.” Cairn had sharpened up. “Anyhow,” he said, “I really must insist upon asking what this is about, if not Eliza Corcoran.”
“It’s about the murder that happened on Bankside,” said Mayne.
Cairn looked about to reply, then paused, nonplussed. Evidently his foreman was quicker to the draw than he was. “The murder?”
“Yes.”
“Did Pond see something?”
Lenox looked at his watch. Mayne wasn’t taking charge of the situation quickly enough. “Go find him if you can, Mr. Cairn,” he said. “Becker, Middleton, get downstairs as quickly as possible and cover the exits.”
Mayne looked at him, and then, suddenly realizing what Lenox thought, nodded: Pond might already be on the run.
“Exeter,” he said quickly, “you could do the same. Mr. Graham, if you were so inclined, you might also help them. Mr. Cairn, Lenox, and I will follow you. We must hope that there is a simple explanation for Mr. Pond’s absence from his desk.”
The four men left, Exeter leading them, and the remaining three followed, striding out of the clerks’ office and then three abreast down a wide hallway.
Cairn, more serious now, didn’t speak, but was half a step ahead. This was a prosperous concern, Lenox thought. Brass light fixtures, mahogany paneling, gleaming wood floors.
Cairn went into the bathroom (indoor plumbing, no less) and emerged after a moment. “Empty,” he said, looking a bit more concerned now.
For his part, Lenox was utterly sure something was wrong.
The certainty derived from a single reason, which was the signature appended to the second letter the Challenger had received: In faith, your ponderous correspondent.
The fellow, feeling too clever by half, hadn’t been able to resist inserting his name in the letter twice. Ponderous correspondent.
Cairn, with a more urgent step, said, “He may be in our records room. I feel absolutely sure that Pond is not—cannot be involved, if that is a serious consideration of yours, and if he had seen something, I know that unless he were under some threat, he would have, that he—”
Mayne cut off Cairn’s anxious chatter. “We only wish to speak to him.”
The records room was two long hallways down from the central office, in a dim and musty corner that faced South London, the part of the building without a view of the river.
At that moment, Lenox considered that if Pond wasn’t here, Graham might get hurt. A wave of guilt passed through him. Middleton and Becker had whistles and training, but if Pond were very desperate—and Graham were alone, separated from the constables or Exeter—
But Pond was here, after all, he was here.
They discovered this when Cairn pushed open the door of the records room (the name embossed in gold leaf, money here, money, Lenox’s mind racing to store all that he saw) and stepped inside.
There was a confused instant, Lenox and Mayne following him inside, in which Cairn said, “Mr. Pond, there you are. The police are here and would—”
And then, a gunshot.
Lenox had shot guns his whole life, but he had never heard a sound as earsplittingly loud as this one, a gun fired in an enclosed space.
“Good God,” said Mayne, and Lenox at the same moment said, “Cairn!”
But it wasn’t the senior manager who had been shot. Cairn turned back to them, his face whiter than chalk, said, “But he’s shot himself—he—he—”
And then fainted dead away.