At just before eight the next morning, Frost and Lenox stood in Scotland Yard’s long tearoom, the former moodily stirring a cup of charred-black tea that he had just poured himself from a tall polished urn. Lenox followed his lead—there were stacks of chipped cups and chipped saucers next to it, as well as a colossal tray of biscuits, underneath a sign that said, WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE WOMEN’S RELIEF SOCIETY.
Lenox took a custard cream, silently blessing the Women’s Relief Society. “The hellish thing about it is I was so sure Townsend was our man,” said Frost.
“He’s still in custody?”
“No. We had to let him go. Chisholm was threatening all manner of suits against us. Noisy enough in the end to have Townsend sent home. With a strict warning not to leave London, but—you know.”
Lenox did, and for a moment he wondered whether they had merely been fooled by two accomplished actors the day before. “And Anderson and Singh?”
“Choirboys. The jig is up after Dover. Neither has moved from the Blue Peter. All we’ve done is give them a vacation.”
“And kept them from murdering Leigh, in fairness.” Lenox thought for a moment. “We had better think of who their next team is, the Farthings.”
Frost brightened. “That’s a stroke. You’re quite right. It would probably be the Pole, Wasilewski. An ugly character. English mother.”
“What does he look like? I’ll warn Cohen and Leigh.”
“Very pale, watery pink eyes, rather like a rabbit, fair hair. Dresses inconspicuously.”
“And after him?”
They went through a roster of possibilities, Lenox taking notes. At last, sighing, he said, “And then, Fells.”
Frost sighed, too. “Yes. Fells.”
The inspector had arrived at the house of Terence Fells at six o’clock sharp the night before, while Lenox was at the Royal Society. Fells had been home, according to Frost’s description a tall, curly-haired fellow whom one could spot from a mile as doing what Londoners called “black-coated work,” something in the clerking or bookkeeping or accounting or banking lines, respectable, not manual.
Frost had mentioned Middleton, and Fells had denied any knowledge of the name.
Even from the last week’s papers? Frost had asked.
Fells replied that he didn’t read the papers.
He had never brought Middleton business?
Never.
But Frost had seen something in the young man’s face, and had begun to hammer away at him, asking over and over in every way he could think to ask whether he might have run across Middleton and not remembered it. He offered Fells all the dates from Middleton’s ledger that were marked with his name—though without mentioning this fact—and waited patiently as Fells got his own datebook and answered for his whereabouts on those days.
Then Frost had begun expanding the reach of his questions, asking about Leigh, about Anderson and Singh, about the East London gangs. Here Fells had seemed genuinely perplexed.
“Though it is possible,” said Frost, stirring his tea morosely, “that by this stage he had merely braced himself for all my lines of questioning.”
“Just so,” said Lenox, who could sympathize.
At that moment someone behind them called out Lenox’s name from a distance of fifteen or twenty feet, and both he and Frost turned to look who it was.
“Oh, hell,” Frost muttered.
Lenox turned fully and smiled at the young gentleman who approached them, a chipper fellow named Huntington. “Hello, Huntington,” he said.
Huntington looked delighted. “Lenox, my dear chap, what brings you into these quarters—this prosaic old place!”
“Oh, a case, as usual.”
Huntington shook his head with good-natured consternation. “It really is beastly, isn’t it? And the swill they serve as tea. Hullo, Frost.”
Lenox, in his Harrow days, had been unique among his acquaintances in his obsession with the police and with crime. Now he had been joined by a more generously peopled younger generation of enthusiasts—Dallington was not the only junior aristocrat in England who wished to be a detective, a change that Lenox attributed to the enormous spike in popularity of detective fiction, following Mr. Poe’s innovations. In particular the novels of Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, had made every impressionable young adolescent of the 1860s a connoisseur of the detective novel.
Now they were beginning to pop up around the metropolis. Huntington was one example. The son of an unimpeachably lineaged Hertfordshire nobleman, he had been to Eton and Cambridge and then at the age of twenty had arranged, through high-powered friends, to be placed in a favorable position at the Yard, and more egregiously still on what was called, within these walls, the murder squad, which was generally home only to the most accomplished inspectors.
On the one hand this was an admirable choice—Huntington hadn’t any need to work at all, and had very probably wagered his annual salary from Scotland Yard on a single hand of whist at the Beargarden only the night before. On the other hand he was incompetent, lazy, and grandstanding, and worse yet never let go of the fact of his astonishing choice to become a detective, moving about in perpetual awe at his daring, reminding everyone he met of it, most particularly the new colleagues to whom he condescended so impossibly.
Lenox had hopes that he might grow—he was young—but at the moment this particular young aristocrat was not a credit to his class’s involvement in police work, alas.
“Tell me,” Huntington asked confidentially, “is it about Middleton?”
“Can’t say,” Frost replied quickly. “Forrester’s orders.”
That was their chief. “Ah, too bad. Tell me, Lenox, has Johnny Dallington left Parliament yet? I heard he had pitched up there with your—other partner.”
Lenox felt a flash of irritation at the intonation of those last two words, which Huntington delivered as if Polly was somehow disreputable. “I’m not sure. I’ve been occupied with other matters.”
“Mm, yes, Middleton.” Huntington sighed. “A nuisance, no doubt, in and out of the courts where he worked, all of that. Say, Frost, are you close?”
This was the single worst question you could credibly ask a fellow detective, of course, and Lenox saw, with a mixture of mirth and pity, that Frost was hard-pressed not to give Huntington an earful. “Very close,” Frost said with bitter irony. “A matter of hours. Possibly minutes.”
“That’s excellent!” Huntington was generous, at least—he wanted to like and be liked, he enjoyed good news, he wished nobody failure. “Let me know if I can help. I’m on rather a run of form, I fancy.”
“I’ll be sure to knock on your door.”
“Good, good.” Huntington had poured himself some tea, and sighed again. “Well, no rest for the weary, gentlemen. A milliner in Hampstead has been stabbed. Off I go, if I can choke this down first.”
Frost looked after their departing friend murderously, then turned to Lenox. “Tell me, are we ‘close’?”
Lenox laughed. “Close to getting Leigh out of England. I shall be happier then.”
Frost shook his head. “I would find it funnier if he were assigned to a department that didn’t matter.”
In fact, though, Huntington had given Lenox a thought. “I do wonder about what he said, though—the courts.”
“What do you mean?” Frost asked.
“Twenty-five thousand pounds is an enormous sum of money. Middleton cannot have been responsible alone for its passage from one person to another. What happens to it when he’s gone? Who’s in charge of it? For that matter where is it? Where are the documents pertaining to it, other than in that blasted valise?”
“Hm.”
When Lenox thought of the chancery courts, he pictured an enormous, cathedral-sized archive, with hundreds and hundreds of rows of shelves, each hundreds and hundreds of feet high, all of them stuffed with hundreds and hundreds of spilling files and records, paper, paper, paper, and occasionally some hapless and benighted fellow worriedly wandering the aisles, taking snuff to steady himself in his search.
And yet it couldn’t possibly work so inefficiently as that. “You know what—I’ll have one of our fellows go over to the court and look into it.”
“A sound idea,” said Frost. “I feel stupid not to have thought of it myself. I wonder if I ought to send one of ours, too—to give it an official gloss.”
“Yes, perhaps. They could work in concert. Though I don’t know that the court is obliged to turn anything over.”
“My junior can be persuasive. Nobody likes to be on the wrong side of the Yard.”
They paused, contemplating this, as they watched Huntington, across the room, give some earnest advice to a man of three times his age and thirty times his experience, then depart. “You had better catch him if you have any questions about how to proceed,” Lenox said.
Frost scowled. “I have some ideas.”
“What do you intend to do?”
“For some reason I haven’t been able to track down Beaumont for a day or two,” he said. “I’d like to ask him a few more questions about Middleton’s last days. He might have remembered something else. I suppose I’ll go to his home, since he hasn’t been appearing in his chambers.”
“Mm.”
“Then I’m going to visit the Blue Peter again, if only out of sheer frustration. I want to rattle the cages of Anderson’s and Singh’s superiors. They know something. Would you care to come?”
Lenox shook his head. “I’m going to send someone to the courts—you can push your person along with me if you want—and then I’d like to take a look at that ledger of Middleton’s. I know you looked at it already, but—”
“No, no, two sets of eyes are always better.”
“After that Leigh has his luncheon at the Royal Society. If we can get him through that without being attacked, he may leave these shores safely after all.”