Frost was in equal parts pleased and frustrated, Lenox found, arriving to meet him at Scotland Yard—pleased to have found the murderer of Middleton, frustrated that he could not extract a confession from him. A careful search of both Rowan’s home and his laboratory on Chilton Street had turned up no incriminating papers.
“Even if we found Leigh’s missing articles,” Frost said, “they aren’t enough to convict him of murder. Some scientific papers, in the possession of such a man. What jury could find that unusual?”
“Was there nothing at all out of the ordinary?”
“Nothing. And yet we now definitively know that he owns the building that houses the Blue Peter, the very public house of the Farthings itself! We are leaning mightily upon the gang’s members we have in custody to implicate him, but they are holding steady, filthy, gap-toothed, knockabout lot that they are.”
“Hm.”
“Sooner or later we shall have to let them go. Meanwhile Anderson and Singh may well have murdered a woman in Cheapside last night. Unconnected. A baker’s wife.” Frost sighed. “Ugly, ugly, ugly.”
Leigh was present again to offer his consultation, and he and Frost and Lenox went through the case point by point, searching for the moment when Rowan might have exposed himself. There was the typewriter, but that was weak proof; Middleton’s meetings at the Collingwood, but those were highly circumstantial; Beaumont, who had finally returned, looking, according to Frost, as scared as a schoolboy who had seen a mouse, could not attest that he had ever seen his partner in conversation with Rowan. The connection to the Farthings had existed for years.
Leigh grew graver as this litany of misses was stated. “What is our recourse, then, gentlemen?” he asked.
Frost and Lenox looked at each other uncomfortably. The courts were odd. Many a sixteen-year-old boy had been hanged on slender evidence; but on the other hand, a well-bred person, testifying on his own behalf, without more than another man’s word against him, always stood a chance. Then there was the slippery matter of juries, which so stubbornly followed their own logic. Lenox had once attended a trial at which a boy of thirteen, who had stolen a horse in plain sight of twenty-five people, was convicted of stealing a bridle—the horse following along quite incidentally, the jury explained, which happened to free them from the responsibility of sending him to the gallows. Very sensible, their prevarication, in that case.
But it showed the unpredictability of the thing. In three months’ time Rowan might easily be free.
Frost and Lenox explained the situation to Leigh, who listened carefully. At last, he said, “I think it is my turn to play detective again, then, since you have had yours, gentlemen.”
“What do you mean?”
But he wouldn’t be drawn out; saying, only, that he had to pay a call to the Royal Society.
At Chancery Lane again that afternoon, Lenox was surprised to receive a call from Graham. He appeared, with his small unflappable smile, at around three o’clock.
“You’re most welcome!” said Lenox. “Here, sit. Will you take a cup of tea?”
“I would, very gratefully,” said Graham.
Lenox popped his head out and asked their landlady to fix it. Coming back, he said, “I am surprised to see you here. Parliament is in session this evening, is it not?”
“It is. I am to speak.”
Lenox smiled. “It has been too long since I came and sat in the gallery. But then, it has been a busy time.”
“Have you had a case?” asked Graham.
“Indeed I have—the one to do with my old friend Leigh, which I mentioned when we dined.”
“And is it resolved?”
“It is—for now.”
Lenox told the story once again, and Graham, as he generally did, asked a few probing and thoughtful questions. He was extremely curious about Rowan; the father, he said, had several seats in the House at his command, and held one for himself on the Tory side, though it was rare to see him attend. This was the kind of political trivia that had once been at Lenox’s own fingertips, but now he was surprised to hear it.
When they had exhausted the subject of Rowan and Leigh, however, Graham said, “I am here on other business.”
“Business? Are you?”
“There are strong motions under way to release this agency from its post in Parliament.”
Lenox, taken aback, repeated, “Motions?”
“Yes. I have heard of it several times today already—and given our particular affiliation, I feel certain I am not hearing the worst of it. Word has been spreading. Too intrusive; too little use. One of the gentler terms I heard was ‘incompetent.’ It feels like a campaign against you.”
Lenox ought to have been disturbed by this news, but instead he was confused. “Incompetent,” he said. “And yet we have resolved the most recent cases Mr. Cheesewright has put before us. As for an intrusion—I know Lord Sumlin—”
“Not a serious person.”
“He has been complaining. But I cannot imagine Dallington affecting the daily interactions of any of the House’s Members. I don’t doubt you in the slightest, you understand—I am only taken aback.”
Graham’s lips tightened in thought, as he considered this. “We know that there are Members who wish you ill.”
“Monomark.”
The agency’s old partner, LeMaire, had become a rival, under the unscrupulous patronage of Lord Monomark, an eagle-eyed and vindictive press baron. “There are also people you voted against—the average rub of disagreement that you find in politics.”
“They have held their tongues till now, if it’s them—the Wickstroms and Killingsworth-Smiths of the world.”
“Perhaps they have found their moment,” said Graham, shrugging.
The tea came in. The old friends passed an amiable twenty minutes drinking it, and yet Lenox saw that something was amiss in Graham, and when the latter departed, offering as his apology for visiting so quickly the evening schedule of Parliament, he felt again that Graham must, perhaps, have been unlucky in love. Lenox had invited him to Hampden Lane to dine the next night—offering Leigh as an inducement, “a capital fellow, you know”—but Graham regretfully declined, busy as ever.
When he had gone, Lenox, sipping the sweet final ounces of his tea, had a realization that should have been obvious but struck him as significant: Rowan must have an office at the Royal Society, in addition to those at his home and in Chilton Street.
He sent a note asking Frost to meet him there, and at a little after six o’clock they were again in the building’s large and charming rotunda.
Rowan’s office was in an aerie overlooking London’s smoking rooftops. There was a large appointment book on the desk, and Frost and Lenox both made a beeline for it. In the event it was rather drear—tidy inked reminders of very specific duties at the Society—but Lenox was intrigued to see that the day of Middleton’s murder had an appointment not far from the solicitor’s office in it.
“Perhaps that is our angle,” he said to Frost. “Tracking his movements upon that day.”
“I’m going to fetch his secretary to see what he can remember. It was scarcely a week ago.”
But the secretary was gone for the day, and as the light failed Lenox and Frost had to examine the room alone. They found nothing resembling Leigh’s papers—many, however, in Rowan’s own hand, describing various actions of the microbe. Were these the plagiarisms? Lenox put them in his valise to show to Leigh.
They left, each a little discouraged, but agreeing that they would return the next morning to speak to those who had been closest professionally to their quarry. A tacit agreement had emerged in the conversation between them, somehow: They couldn’t leave it to an amateur scientist to find proof of a murder in the very heart of London, their city.
That evening Leigh was out, and Lenox and Lady Jane had the kind of old, happy supper that he remembered so well from his bachelor days, when they were only neighbors, and yet near enough that neither needed an invitation to enter the other’s house—days when their love had been unspoken, perhaps even unrealized, and yet, like a spring within the earth, moving with cautious ceaselessness toward the day it would surface. When he went to bed, it was in a state of contentment.
A voice woke him in the dead of night. “Sir,” it said, low, but urgent, from the doorway. “Mr. Lenox. Sir.”
Lenox struggled up to his elbows, still half away. He glanced at the dark lavender light behind the diaphanous curtains. The late calls of a detective had skilled him in guessing the time over the years. Just three o’clock, he would have said.
“What is it, Kirk? Is Sophia all right?”
“She is, sir.” There was an unwonted note of sorrow and sympathy in the undemonstrative butler’s voice. “It’s Lord John, sir. Mr. Cheesewright has sent word for you. His Lordship has fallen from the roofs of Parliament—three stories—altogether deprived of consciousness—may not live the night.”