Every day in that first two weeks of April, a different parcel—often several—would come to the house at Hampden Lane, addressed for Leigh. They contained ever more mysterious contents, nets, wooden cages, oscilloscopes and microscopes, weather gauges. All of them went into Leigh’s ad hoc study, where they piled up as he sorted them with tender care into a pair of enormous trunks.
“A person would think you were setting out for the jungles of the Amazon,” said Lady Jane critically one day, as Leigh opened a package containing several blank logbooks.
“I learned a long time ago that it is all the jungles of the Amazon, Lady Jane, looked at in the right light.”
“What nonsense.”
Leigh smiled. “Yes, probably.”
He had another project upon which he was working, too. One day Lenox came into the house and Leigh was measuring the doorway. “What are you doing?” he asked his old friend.
“Nothing.”
“Come now, you must answer that question in a man’s own house.”
Leigh smiled. “Well, it’s a surprise.”
Lenox frowned at him. “I don’t want anything that you doubt might fit through this doorway.”
“In fact it will be invisible.”
“Eh?”
Leigh smiled, in his sphinxlike way, and walked off, humming.
As Rowan’s trial approached, word seeped out into London that he was, in all likelihood, going to be convicted. It was hard to say what had prompted the change—the sudden escalation of the newspaper coverage, perhaps, or alternatively Rowan’s eviction from the rolls of the Royal Society.
Frost and Lenox were often closeted together, going over their case notes in hopes that they might help the Queen’s Counsel in his prosecution of the case. Lenox was set to testify. So was Leigh; the thing keeping him in London—except, except, Lady Jane kept saying, he certainly did seem fond of Matilda Duckworth’s company.
“What bothers me,” Frost said one morning in the coffee room at Scotland Yard, “is Middleton.”
“What do you mean?”
“I like a tidy case. You and Leigh have survived. Middleton—we still don’t know the circumstances of the meeting they had, the one that led to his death. Did Middleton object to something Rowan asked of him? Or did he simply know too much? Was it the Farthings who shot him, or Rowan? I would like to know.”
Lenox looked troubled. “We may never.”
“Yes, and that’s why I say it bothers me.”
In fact, the case held a few surprises still.
On the sixteenth of April, a day when the whole world seemed green, Lenox was working at the offices at Chancery Lane. Dallington was in his office, door closed, and Polly was out with Anixter, tracing a necklace that had been pawned by the impulsive daughter of a wealthy yeast merchant, who had used the money to elope to Spain.
These days Lenox had delegated some of the administrative work that had dominated his winter months, and he had the pleasure at that moment of reading a letter from one of his correspondents with the Liverpool constabulary, a bright young fellow named Thestreet who had read one of Lenox’s essays on crime scenes and was asking for his assistance in the solution of a double murder near Anfield.
At a little after noon, Frost came in, his face flushed with excitement. “What is it?” asked Lenox immediately.
Dallington, having apparently heard Frost’s entrance, limped into the room from next door. “Yes, I’d like to know, too,” he said. “Is it about Rowan?”
Frost nodded. “One of them has turned. One of the Farthings.”
“Which one?”
“Singh.”
They had caught him the night before. He and Anderson had been separated a month or two before, and Singh had been charged, that week, with the murder of a rival gang member. He had been caught in the act—sheer good luck, Frost said—and now, facing the gallows, was willing to give away what information he could. All he wanted was to be shipped back to India.
“I can’t imagine that even if we do, we’ve seen the last of him,” said Frost. “He’s thoroughly British now. But it will be worth it if he brings down the Farthings before he goes.”
“He’ll testify against Anderson?”
Frost smiled. “Everyone except Anderson.”
“Loyalty among—well, ‘thieves’ is even too kind a word, I suppose,” said Dallington.
Nearly everyone at the Yard had been jostling to get at Singh, once he had cut his deal. Frost had had to wait until midnight. But it had paid off.
“It was Rowan who killed Middleton,” he said. “All that preceded it occurred exactly as we suspected. Rowan hired the Farthings, at a decent rate of pay, mind you, which surprised me, and sent them after Leigh. But Middleton was his own business. After he had killed Middleton he apparently came to the Blue Peter in a panic, and had to be talked down.”
“What were the circumstances of his killing Middleton?”
“As Rowan explained it to Anderson and Singh, Rowan went to the solicitor’s office at his invitation. There, Middleton demanded more money of him.”
“Gambling debts, perhaps,” said Lenox. “That would also explain why they met when Beaumont was out of the office.”
“Yes. According to Singh, Rowan grew confrontational, and it was then that Middleton pulled out his pistol, hoping, I suppose, to reassert control of the conversation. Instead Rowan panicked, he told the Farthings, wresting the gun away from Middleton and shooting him. He justified it by saying that Middleton’s blackmail would never have ended. Then, in the same breath, he screamed at the gang’s higher-ups, why wasn’t Leigh gone, what on earth were they doing, that sort of thing. Singh said that most men who spoke like that to his bosses would have had their throats slit. But Rowan had certain protections.”
“His social standing, his ownership of the buildings.”
“Yes, exactly. After that he was a less honored presence among the gang, however. According to Singh they still planned to murder Leigh, even after Rowan’s arrest.” Dallington and Lenox exchanged grim glances. “But the news that Rowan had been sending out threats, in the shape of those farthings in envelopes, pushed them away. They had a pigeon at the jail tell him it was all off.”
“A sight too feudal, I suppose,” said Dallington.
Frost, who had taken a seat and pulled out his pipe, tapped it happily against the arm of the chair. “He’ll hang now. Thank heavens.”
“Singh will testify?”
“Oh, yes. He’ll do nothing but testify for about eighteen months. Fifty different cases. If nobody gets to him at Newgate, after that he’ll receive new papers and a ticket to Calcutta. It’s his lookout what happens from there.”
It was good news. After Frost had gone, Dallington congratulated Lenox. “And yet, I always find it melancholy, a man’s execution,” said Lenox.
“Do you? So did Middleton, I am sure.”
“The point must be that we are better than to replicate what we are punishing.”
Dallington shook his head. “I cannot agree. A man like Rowan—given every advantage, every chance to be a civil member of society, he is the first who should know that killing a fellow human forfeits his own rights as one.”
“That is the general run of thought,” Lenox said. “As time passes I feel less and less sure it is mine.”
“You have a soft heart.”
He smiled. “So have you.”
“I? No, I am a blight on the criminal class.” Dallington smiled, too. “Just at the moment I’m hoping to put a fellow in Camden Town on the stanchion next to Rowan if I can.”
“The fellow who drowned his wife?”
Dallington nodded soberly. They discussed the case for some time—the woman’s family had hired the agency to chase down the finer shades of the truth, hoping that they would make the Crown’s case irrefutable—and Dallington seemed absorbed and contented by the work. More moments like this; fewer like the other kind; that was the road back, perhaps, when someone had experienced what Dallington had. The restoration couldn’t be expected all at once.
Lenox dined with Graham at Parliament, where they discussed in granular detail a new bill that was going to appear that evening. It was an extension of what Lenox considered his own gladdest moment as a politician, which was the Adulteration of Food, Drink, and Drugs Act, passed in 1872. The bill had outlawed a few dozen substances commonly found in food—chalk and alum in bread, for instance, which almost certainly made people sick, copper in pickles, for color, even something as innocuous as arsenic, used in many foods to add tang, but which chemists, including McConnell, had persuaded Lenox might be mildly poisonous.
The Tories had cried bloody murder—government overreach!—but they had squeaked the bill through.
“We are hoping to add about fifteen substances to the list,” Graham told him, as they sat back after eating, sipping a fine port. “Our goal is to allow every child to be able to drink water safely.”
That was a lofty goal—nearly everyone, child and man, drank either beer or strong tea, which were both rightly considered safer, from first thing at breakfast to last thing before bed—but Lenox nodded. “Then I believe it will come to pass.”
“The manufacturers are unhappy.”
“When were they ever happy? And yet I observe that they prosper.” Graham, looking out at the silvery flow of the Thames under the spring sun, smiled. “Last fall, the daughter of a manufacturer was presented at court for the first time. Even Lady Jane, who is a liberal soul, was unhappy about it. But I doubt there could be a clearer sign that the next age will belong to them. Restrict away. They won’t stop turning coins into paper.”
Lenox returned to the office from their lunch in a contemplative mood—still no mention of a betrothal, and he thought that it must be concluded Graham’s gambit had been unsuccessful, which made him sorrowful—and was surprised to find that Frost was there again.
“Frost!” he said, hanging his hat. “Has something else happened?”
Frost, before so pleased, looked devastated. “It’s Rowan. Gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”
“Just that—gone.”
Lenox’s heart lurched. “Where is Leigh?”
“I have no idea.”
“No, you couldn’t. I’m not thinking. Come—let’s go find him—come with me, and you can tell me on the way.”
Apparently Rowan had heard the news of Singh’s apostasy that morning, and by some bribery had convinced his guards to let him go. There were nine of them on duty. Frost wanted all of them fired, or transferred, though it would only have taken one to slip him out, and Rowan could have offered each of the nine their salary ten times over without noticing the absence.
As they came to Hampden Lane, Lenox felt his heart pounding.
But Leigh was there—standing in the front hallway, with the strangest look on his face.
“What is it?” Lenox asked, though he was the one with news to deliver.
Leigh shook his head. “Have a look at this letter,” he said.
“From Rowan?”
“Yes. In his bizarre way, I suppose there is nobody who loves science more. I have decided it will be exceedingly useful too, what he has sent—he is right in that.”
Leigh,
If you are to live as you, and I cannot, I must know what the microbe is. I will be on the Continent by the time you read this, and likely never in England again; but I will look to the journals.
This may help us meet there more often.
Rowan
Enclosed was a check written to Leigh, drawn on the London bank Coutts, for twenty-five thousand pounds.