It was fifteen or twenty minutes later when Frost’s man Phelps returned, coming straight to report to them. “Checking in, sir. Nine arrested at the Blue Peter; a squad of four remaining to scrabble out any others lurking in the shadows; statements being taken at the Yard as we speak.”
“Fast work, Phelps, well done. Did Superintendent Gilbert accompany you?”
“He did, sir. Came in his coach and four—like a hound from hell he was too, reading them the warrant himself.”
“Who was the highest up of the gang?”
“Spencer, sir”—that was the deceptively friendly figure behind the bar at the Blue Peter, with the vulpine face—“and Smith. Assorted other lieutenants. One odd thing, though.”
“Oh?”
“All of them swear, separately, that the Farthings would never, ever send a farthing coin in an envelope, for any reason, to anyone. Impossible, they said. Outright impossible.”
“Not as intimidation?” asked Lenox.
“No, nor as any kind of oath of revenge or the like.”
Frost furrowed his brow. “And you believed them?”
Phelps cocked his head, raising his eyebrows, as if to say it was difficult ever to know what to believe, but then nodded cautiously. “I did, rather, sir. They seemed properly outraged by the very idea.”
The act had never made any sense. “Which of them seemed outraged?” Lenox asked.
“All of them, sir, as I said. Starting with Spencer.”
Lenox glanced at Frost, who had a hand on his cheek, scratching his thick gray beard distractedly. “What do you make of that?”
“Peculiar.”
“It might have been the bright idea of someone lower down,” said Lenox. “Anderson and Singh, for instance.”
Phelps shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir. Spencer said something odd. ‘The first rule is to leave no trace.’ The moment he said it he looked as if he wished he hadn’t—only he was so hotted up at the accusation that it slipped out.”
“Did you ask them about Wasilewski?” said Frost.
“Yes, sir. Nobody admitted even to knowing the name.”
“Mm. To be expected.”
At long last, the luncheon appeared to be breaking up. Standing at the edge of the room, Lenox, Frost, and Phelps watched as various men took leave of Leigh, who was polite with all of them, though slightly distant, too, Lenox observed.
When Leigh broke away he came over to Lenox. “It has just been observed to me by an informed gentleman that if you were somehow able to conjure your way back to the year 1500, you would be dead within two days.”
Lenox frowned. “Murdered?”
“Murdered! Heavens, no. You must take your mind off murder.”
“Of what, then?”
“Of disease, at least according to him. Every man and woman who reached their majority in medieval London had already passed through a gauntlet of diseases that it would chill you to your marrow if I named them. When I say that the bubonic plague and typhoid fever are two of the nicer ones it gives the picture, perhaps.”
Lenox, to whom a protracted battle with typhoid fever seemed only marginally less pleasant than remaining at the Royal Society as these scientists slowly stumbled themselves back out into the world, far too drunk to do much of anything on behalf of British science for the rest of the afternoon, nodded, and said, impatiently, “But really, hadn’t you better be going? It’s already nearly three.”
“Is it?” Leigh frowned, glancing up at the clock. “Worse luck. I shall have to skip Rowan’s—but I will sit to a cup of tea with him and Baird. It’s only civil, after all they’ve done for me.”
As Leigh waded again into the room to find these two, Lenox wondered if he ought to leave, and go report to Jane that the full force of the Yard had landed on the Farthings. The trouble was his uncertainty about who was behind the farthing after all. Should he send them into the country, Sophia and Jane?
He was about to tell Cohen and Frost that he had to go, when suddenly something struck him, however. It came of glancing at Cohen, who was standing with Leigh’s small brown leather weekending bag. The sight of it took Lenox back to where this had all begun, at the Collingwood Hotel.
Strange to see that name in Middleton’s appointment ledger, now that he thought of it. Most of the hotels there were large, but the Collingwood was small, only twenty rooms.
Why did it bother him all at once, that reappearance?
Lenox looked around the room, eyes narrowed, thinking. He tried to recall what else had stood out for him from Middleton’s journal. The initials, certainly: AR, PQ. He tried out the names of everyone he could recall from the case, trying to squeeze them into those initials, but without success.
Where was Beaumont?
He felt intensely vexed, closer and closer to some essential truth, still too far to hold it within his grip.
At that moment the same porter who had brought him the envelope with the farthing in it approached again. Lenox and Frost both turned to him with something like displeasure, and he shrank back slightly, repentant already.
“Yes?” said Frost.
“My apologies, sir. Another letter for Mr. Lenox.”
Lenox and Frost glanced at each other. “When did it come?”
“Not five minutes ago, sir. Once again when the porter at the front desk was occupied.”
“Christ,” said Frost. “What are those constables doing? Phelps, go and speak to the men stationed outside and ask them who has been in and out.”
Lenox was staring at the letter on its salver, and felt his heart beating heavily in his throat. There was a small circular shadow lodged in the lower left-hand corner of the envelope. He didn’t need to open it—but he did, more carefully this time, not letting the farthing inside drop to the ground.
He held it in his palm. “Twice,” he said. “In two hours. That’s very peculiar.”
Frost looked at him with a face traced with guilt, perhaps because he was glad that it was not he who was the target of these messages, whatever they meant.
It was hard for Lenox not to feel as if there was a pistol trained on the back of his neck—and he wondered what he could possibly do to feel safe.
What if the Farthings had been lying? And this was their second threat?
Jane and Sophia would have to leave London; that much was clear.
Phelps returned from his rapid inquiries: Nobody had been seen coming into the building, or leaving a note. Plenty of men had left in the last twenty minutes, of course.
“But that means…” Lenox thought for a moment. “Could someone from inside be leaving these notes?”
“Within the Royal Society?”
As Frost glanced around, Lenox slowly revolved, studying everyone he saw with new eyes, down to the inspector himself. His initials were TF, after all, Timothy Frost, a fact they had joked about more than once.
And then suddenly he realized, with a start, that someone was missing from the scene: Leigh.
“Where is Leigh?” he asked Frost.
Frost glanced back into the emptying room. He scanned it quickly and looked back at Lenox. Both of them had the same thought simultaneously: they had lost him in the muddle of receiving this second letter.
Lenox turned and sprinted for the building’s exit. He had to push his way among several small groups of departing fellows, none of them sober, until he could run out into the chilly air of the outdoors, praying that a bullet didn’t greet him there.
He stood close to the constable on duty there and looked left and right.
His eyes alit on Cohen, and seeing his sturdy, intelligent face, Lenox felt relieved. “Cohen,” he said. “Where has Leigh gone?”
“He and Lord Baird went ahead in a carriage, according to the porter. I know Leigh went of his own accord, saw him go.”
“Thank heavens.”
“It was only a two-person fly. I wouldn’t fit. I’m waiting for a cab to follow on. An address in Chilton Street, where Lord Baird’s laboratory is housed. They’ve a plan to meet Rowan at the rail station—to have tea in paper cups, an idea that tickled his lordship no end.”
Lenox nodded, a little puzzled that it was suddenly Baird’s laboratory, not Rowan’s, to which they were headed. He turned his gaze up the street, waiting for a cab to appear. “I’ll go with you,” he said.
“Of course, if you wish,” said Cohen.
Except that then, suddenly, an alarm sounded in Lenox’s mind. He whipped his head back to Cohen. “Chilton Street, you said?”
“Yes. Why?”
Lenox felt the blood drain out of his face. “Christ,” he said. He turned up and down the street, looking without hope for a cab. “A two-person fly. Come, we have to go now—a cab, I need a cab, Cohen. My friend’s life depends upon it.”