Lenox recounted none of this history in response to Polly’s question. All he said was that he and Leigh had been friends at school together—but that Leigh had spent the ensuing years abroad.
Polly tilted her head thoughtfully, as the carriage juddered along. “I don’t wish to be indelicate,” she said, “but your friend wouldn’t be the first gentleman in London to be enticed into spending the night away from his hotel room.”
Anixter frowned pointedly, which Lenox thought was a little bit rich given that he had called at every port from here to Bombay with Her Majesty’s Navy, an association not remarkable for its high morals ashore.
“Yes, but I think he would have written that he couldn’t come, after the alarmed tone of his first letter,” Lenox said. “That’s what worries me. He is not an inconsiderate person.”
Polly nodded. “A fair point.” She thought for a moment, then added, “My own father was at Eton.”
“I’m amazed he stayed out of prison long enough to have a daughter.”
“Ha, ha.” She drew her arms around herself. “I don’t envy your poor Mr. Leigh a night out, either. It’s colder than a witch’s heart.”
“They say it warms up during a snow and gets colder afterward.”
“That sounds like balderdash.”
Whether it was true or not, the cold told in the streets of the capital: As Lenox stepped down from the carriage he had a long view of the street, tapering into the distance, and saw that the chimneypots were smoking furiously from each house along the way. He hoped Jane and Sophia weren’t so very cold. He knew from his childhood that certain rooms in a country house could never be coaxed into real warmth, no matter the number of fires lit in their hearths.
“Why are we here, then?” Polly murmured to Lenox as they entered the hushed entryway of the lobby.
“I want to find out who paid for Leigh’s room.”
“Paid for it?”
“He wouldn’t have stayed here of his own choice. At least I don’t think he would. He would have found someplace simple, and preferably closer to a park.”
“Perhaps he’s changed.”
Lenox smiled. “No. He hasn’t changed.”
There was a short line at the clerk’s desk, and as they took their place in it, Polly said, “He’s a natural philosopher, you said?”
Lenox shrugged. “Yes. Or a ‘scientist,’ as McConnell keeps insisting the more up-to-date term is. A generalist of some sort anyhow. We had lunch together—oh, ten years ago, I suppose, and my impression then was that he was some sort of a jobbing scientist, taking whatever work he could find, acting as shipboard apothecary. He had gone on a great many sea voyages, jumping aboard ships wherever they happened to be going. Rather romantic.”
“Not successful, then. In spite of being at Harrow.”
“He was expelled from Harrow and never went up to university at all—no, not traditionally successful. But happy, I hope. His coat was in tatters when we dined, as if mice had been at its edges. He was very sunburned, too. If I recall he had just been in Brazil.”
“And you’ve no idea what’s drawn him back to London now?”
The answer to that was complicated, given Leigh’s note. Lenox was spared from offering it when the clerk greeted them, inviting them forward.
Lenox was about to speak when he realized something: His letter was gone. Leigh had apparently claimed it within the last hour. And yet the key was still there, on its hook.
“Is Mr. Leigh in?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“He was just by?”
“Sir?”
“I see the card I left for him earlier is gone.”
“Ah! No, sir, his secretary was here.”
“His secretary.”
“Yes, a red-haired young man. He took Mr. Leigh’s letters.”
“Did this person say where Mr. Leigh was waiting for his letters?”
The clerk looked blank. “No, sir.”
“I see.”
“Can I take another message for you?”
Lenox glanced at Polly. She shook her head. The same thought had occurred to them both: that this secretary, this supposed secretary, might be the very person Leigh feared. For his part Lenox felt that his friend was unlikely in the extreme to employ a secretary.
And so Lenox declined the clerk’s offer. He then asked under whose auspices Leigh was staying at the Collingwood—who was paying for the room—and the clerk immediately grew suspicious and then silent, which would have been Lenox’s reaction, too.
He looked happy when Lenox and Polly turned and left.
“Where now?” asked Polly.
“I’m going to find him,” said Lenox grimly. “But first I suppose we had better go back to my house to be sure he hasn’t popped up there, or had my letter from this ‘secretary’ and replied to it. Unless you would prefer me to drop you in Chancery Lane.”
“No. I’m curious now.”
In fact there was a guest waiting at Hampden Lane, but it wasn’t Gerald Leigh. It was Thomas McConnell, one of Lenox’s closest friends.
He had a telegram himself. “Jane and Toto are still in the country,” he said, holding it up. “I stopped by to see if you thought we ought to go down and retrieve them. Hello, Polly.”
“Hello, McConnell. We were hoping that Lenox here had received a letter. Kirk?”
The butler, hovering nearby, stepped forward and said that no letter had arrived.
“Were you working overnight, Thomas?” Lenox asked.
McConnell looked at him inquiringly. “How did you know?”
“Iodine on your right cuff. A tired face. Your collar crimped in a neat line, where your stethoscope loops it.”
“Ah! Yes, so. As it happens I was there overnight. It was a hard one as well with this weather,” said McConnell. “New patients.”
McConnell was a physician. A Scotsman, he had come to London riding a crest of academic success—papers published, a brilliant future foretold—and immediately become one of the most respected practitioners in Harley Street. Then he had made an extremely illustrious marriage, which nearly ruined him.
His wife was one of Lady Jane’s cousins and also one of her closest friends, a sprightly and feckless young person named Victoria Phillips, though everyone, from dukes down to the gossip columnists of the penny papers, called her Toto. When she had defied her family and married McConnell—who was well but not nobly born—they had insisted that he sell his practice before the marriage take place. The idleness that this decision let him in for, combined with the tempestuousness of both his own character and his new wife’s, had made for several dark years, full of long periods of estrangement and, in his case, drink.
Two things had pulled him back from the edge: the daughter he and Toto had had, and, more recently, his return to work, at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, where indigent children received treatment without any charge. It was here that he had evidently been working through the previous night.
The three of them had moved into Lenox’s nearby study, where McConnell perched on the arm of a chair, and Polly took a seat behind the detective’s desk and studied the small swinging silver clock there, its gears visible through glass.
“I would go down to the country if it weren’t for the case Polly and I are working upon,” Lenox said.
Over the years McConnell had assisted upon innumerable matters for his friend, as a medical man. “Is it a serious one?”
“A friend of mine, recently returned to London.”
“Anyone I know?”
“No—as I told Polly, he’s been away from England these thirty years. A very fine chap, though. Gerald Leigh.”
McConnell, who had just been flipping idly through a copy of Punch, looked up suddenly. “Not the Gerald Leigh,” he said.
“What do you mean, the Gerald Leigh?”
“Not the scientist? The colleague of La Rhome?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. He would be about our age. He’s been aboard ships most of the last decade, I believe.”
McConnell’s eyes were wide. “That’s him. Gerald Leigh. He’s traveled extensively in South America, I know. Several of his most profound discoveries occurred there.”
Lenox frowned. “Profound?”
McConnell wasn’t listening, however. “You’re telling me that Gerald Leigh is in London!”
“I earnestly hope he is, anyhow.”
“Yes—missing! My God! We must find him!”
“I concur.”
Polly, drawn in by McConnell’s reaction, said, “What makes this fellow so noteworthy?”
McConnell looked as if he didn’t know where to begin. He shook his head. “I think him probably the finest living British scientist. There are those who would cite—oh, Meriweather, Ashgate. But I would argue with them all down to the end of the matter, I assure you.”
McConnell began to describe some of the works Leigh had published in recent years, and soon Lenox felt an odd displacement, the kind that happens when it turns out we have misestimated someone. Or perhaps only misunderstood: the description McConnell was giving didn’t fit Gerald Leigh, perhaps, and yet in a strange way it did, too.
Lenox interrupted to say, “Do you have any idea why he would have been in London? A conference, a meeting?”
McConnell frowned. “There are no great conferences impending. Where was he staying?”
“The Collingwood.”
At this the doctor brightened. Punch was curled in his hand, forgotten. “Why, that’s where all of the guests of the Royal Society stay, of course, per immemorial custom. But Gerald Leigh is not on the Society’s schedule. I would have noticed immediately.”
“The Royal Society!” said Lenox. “Can he really have been their guest?”
It was the most august of institutions, located in a beautiful alabaster building on Carlton Terrace.
McConnell looked at him with chastising solemnity. “It is Leigh who would bring honor to the Society, Charles, and not the Society who would bring it to Leigh. I know for a fact that he has been invited to speak there dozens of times—so often that he ceased replying to the invitations some time ago, according to a friend of mine who is a fellow.”
There was a wistful inflection to that word, for to be a fellow of the Society was perhaps McConnell’s truest ideal of happiness.
“We could ask after him there,” said Polly.
“May I come?” McConnell asked.
“Aren’t you tired from working overnight?” she said.
“I’ll pull the carriage if it means shaking hands with Gerald Leigh.”
Lenox shook his head. “You may come,” he said. “But not to the Royal Society. I suddenly have an idea where he might be.”
It took just over an hour to find him.
Three stops in that time; two angry encounters; and a few pieces of tidy detective work.
And there, at the end of it, sitting at a small table, dressed more shabbily than ever, a copy of the newspaper and a huge bowl of coffee in front of him, sat Lenox’s old friend, looking very much changed and also utterly the same.
“My God, Charles!” he said, rising, as the detective, in his breast, felt a huge surge of relief to find his friend among the quick. The mystery was solved; the mystery could begin. “How did you find me? Never mind that—thank goodness you did, thank goodness you did!”