Graham returned at ten past two that afternoon. He looked exhausted. He didn’t waste time on either an explanation or an apology for his long absence. “There’s been another letter to the Challenger, sir,” he said.
He set a folded piece of paper down in front of Lenox, who had been lingering over the remains of his lunch, thinking. He picked up the letter. “This is a copy?”
“Yes, sir. Transcribed from memory immediately after I left rather than from the letter itself, unfortunately. I had to look over the constable’s shoulder.”
“Why’s that?”
“The editor at the Challenger was reluctant even to let him see it, sir. Much less myself.”
“Well done then.”
“I cannot promise its exactness, sir.”
Lenox was reading. “I’m sure it’s close enough,” he said distractedly.
“We shall have the true wording when the Challenger publishes it, I would imagine, sir.” Graham glanced over at the silent grandfather clock in the corner of the room. “They plan to run it at six this evening.”
Lenox followed his valet’s eyes to the clock, then settled back in his chair to read the letter carefully.
Sirs,
Did Cain wait a month? Patience likely suited Abel better—he had all of eternity before him, after all. Cain must have wished to return to violence as soon as possible. It is addictive, gentlemen—murder, I mean. Murder is addictive. I would be surprised if Cain’s first was his last.
Yet I find no difficulty in imagining a wait of one month more. I have committed a second perfect crime. I observe already a livelier reaction to this one than to the first. I am gratified. The month will give me the pleasure of watching further, unwatched myself, and laying my marvelous plans.
The magical number of every civilization on earth, from the Angles to the Saxons to the Zulus, is three. Why? Impossible to say. Nevertheless, after a third perfect crime, I shall slip beneath London city’s surface again. Rather like a body slipping into the water! In a century perhaps the world will know my name—Cain’s name. Until then, as Abel did, I will wait.
In faith,
Your ponderous correspondent
Lenox read the letter through twice.
Then he leaned back. “Any thoughts?” he said to Graham.
“He seems madder this time.”
“Yes. It was written closer to the commission of the crime. His blood was stirred up.” Lenox tapped the letter against the table. “No less pretentious.”
“Indeed not, sir.”
“A great deal of biblical fervor.”
“Arrogance, too, sir.”
“I wonder why he calls himself ponderous.”
“Perhaps it may be a joke, sir?”
The detective sat back in his chair thinking. “Perhaps. He does not strike me as a joking sort.” Remembering himself, he gestured for Graham to sit. He rang the bell, which produced the housemaid, Clara, whom he asked to bring more tea. “It was awfully clever of you to get this, Graham.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I should double your pay.”
“I agree, sir.”
“Well, I’m not going to, that would be absurd.”
Graham smiled his inscrutable, very occasional smile. This was his favorite part of his job—there was no question about that—and though Lenox’s remarks would have seemed rudely commercial in the circumstances to an outsider, to the two of them it was quite obviously a placeholder as they thought about the letter; a form of mutual reassurance, the banter.
Neither had experienced anything like that day yet. They were groping their way through it together.
“What’s next, sir?”
“I’m told that in Lady Hamilton’s household, May is the month they clean the rugs.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“I have only secondhand information. It’s hard to be sure whether Mrs. Huggins is acquainted with Lady Hamilton herself. But do not be surprised if you are moving about the rooms and there are rugs missing.”
There was a pause as Graham tilted his head, acknowledging Lenox’s humorous tone. “Just so, sir.”
“Mm. I suppose.”
“May I inquire about your morning, sir? Have the police come to any firm conclusions?”
“Ah. Yes. They did, didn’t they.”
They had. Two men had been placed under arrest that morning as Lenox lurked behind the proper police force assembled at Bankside: one, the clerk from the Customs House, Nathaniel Butler, who had stumbled upon the body; and two, the half-drunk seaman who had been slumbering on the shingle nearby and then been slumbering in the police wagon.
Inspector Exeter, blundering fool that he was, had made both arrests.
Before he entered into a description of his morning, though, Lenox said, “Tell me, Graham, what do you make of these spectacles?”
They were still lying on Mrs. Huggins’s unblemished handkerchief. “They’re broken, sir.”
Lenox laughed. “Remind me to cut your pay in half.”
Graham gestured toward them. “May I?”
“By all means.”
The valet picked them up and studied them in the clear daylight. At length, he murmured, “Shortsighted, male.”
Lenox nodded. “My first two conclusions as well.” The width of the bridge of the nose and the width of the frame were both strongly indicative that the crushed spectacles had been a man’s. “What else?”
“They’ve been repaired, I believe, sir.”
“Twice, you’ll observe.”
Graham frowned; then recognition appeared in his eyes as he saw what Lenox meant. One hasp was of a slightly different color both from the other and from the original silver color of the frame. There was also a small solder at the bridge. “Glasses more worth replacing than repairing if one could afford it, sir.”
Lenox nodded again. It was this that had led him to conclude that the owner was neither affluent nor destitute. “Anything else?”
Graham and Lenox occasionally played this sort of schoolboy game, and Graham studied the spectacles at length in the silence of the room. (There had been a popular cheap magazine called The Confounder when Lenox was an undergraduate, which offered a new set of deductive games each month. They had competed over that, too.) “Not that I can see, sir.”
“What do you think of the maker’s mark?”
“A fairly standard one, sir.”
“Not stamped with any excise number.”
All goods made in London shops had to be. Graham looked again. “Ah. Not a Londoner.”
“Perhaps not originally. And the name of the maker is Lancashire.”
“From the north perhaps, then, sir.”
“I wondered. A name can travel.”
Graham put the spectacles down. “Where are they from, sir?”
Lenox frowned, before realizing that Graham was asking about where he had found the spectacles, not their origins.
He described discovering them underneath the plank that had borne the second victim’s body. Then he added how struck he had been that all of it was dry—the board, the glasses, even the sand underneath the board.
“I looked up the tides.”
“And?”
“I don’t think the body could have been brought there by the water. It didn’t rise that high onto the shore. Whereas the trunk at Walnut Island was ‘heavily sodden,’ if you’ll recall. It had been in the water for some time.”
“Interesting, sir.”
“Yes, I thought so.”
“It must have been easier to place the body there, sir, than to leave it to the chance of floating, being scavenged or overturned.”
Lenox shook his head. “Perhaps. But what keeps returning to me, perhaps only because of that silly headline, is the myth of Ophelia, floating in the water. And then, more importantly, much more importantly, that her clothing was wet. Why would her clothing alone have been wet, Graham?”
The valet’s eyes widened as he took in the significance of this observation. “Curious, sir.”
Lenox laid a gentle finger on the edge of the spectacles. He was unbecomingly proud of himself. Nobody else had noticed these details—though perhaps Field had noticed, arrested the fellow, and was sitting down to luncheon.
Somehow Lenox doubted it.
To Graham, he said, “Has it occurred to you how exactly these spectacles match the description we came up with from the first letter to the Challenger? The clerk, underpaid, overeducated, resentful?”
“It did occur to me, sir, yes.”
“But then how did they come to be under the plank? They have this chain to prevent them from falling. Something, incidentally, that made me wonder if their owner worked in low light, always bent over his work. A common accessory in that profession.”
Graham nodded. “Yes.”
“You can tell from the glass that they were broken only in the last day or two. Dirty, but not grimy. The edges of the glass still gleaming. Of course, it could be pure chance.”
“But if not, how does it add up, sir—dry board, wet clothes, broken spectacles?”
Lenox paused, sighed, and then said, truthfully, “I don’t know.”