The next morning, Lenox was up at a little before six o’clock. Not much later he was standing in the chill air by the river, his arms long behind his back, stretching out the muscles in his chest and shoulders. He wore light shoes of white cotton and a dark blue tunic, left over from his Balliol days.
He took a moment to gaze around. The world was so fragile at this hour; so individual, each tree, in the early pink light, utterly itself, still unblended into the busy day. The buildings across the Thames were quiet, alone with themselves. The secretive water rose and fell, rose and fell.
With a last stretch of his arms, he stepped into the little scull that bobbed along the bankside. It dipped low to one side as he settled into his seat, then regained its equilibrium.
He had seen Graham as he left the flat by St. James’s Square that morning. “There you are,” he’d said. Graham was arranging the morning newspapers, which had been dropped at the door. “Good heavens. Where on earth did you get off to yesterday?”
“I apologize, sir,” said Graham. “I was absent—well, accidentally, sir. It was in reference to the case. I thought you would want me to pursue it.”
“Did you find anything?” Lenox asked.
“Not yet. I need just the morning, sir.”
Lenox looked at him curiously. “Take the afternoon, if you need that too. I’m late, and meant to be on the two nineteen to Markethouse, but take the afternoon, obviously, take as long as you need. Consider yourself relieved of all other duties. You can come down to the country by train later than I do if need be.”
“Very good, sir. I do not anticipate missing the train. But my apologies again, sir.”
Lenox waved a hand. He was already walking to the door. If you were on the river too late, it became fairly impassable. “You can disappear for a year if you like,” he called. “But leave a note. Back shortly.”
Lenox had never been a superior rower—there were lads in the first boat at Oxford quite literally twice as fast down a river—but he had always been a happy one. It had been part of his life longer than he could remember. There was a pond at Lenox House that he and Edmund had raced across countless times in thick-planked dullard rowboats, and as a schoolboy, Lenox had once finished first in lightweight pairs. He placed upon the small medal from that day a far greater value than he did any of his academic prizes.
Now he steered this small, lissome craft out onto the Thames. It was a scull Harrow had sold off the year before to make room for newer models, and he had snapped it up when he heard the news. It suited him perfectly. He liked to go out before dawn, when he still had a chance at fairly clear racing. There was a specially fitted little mirror in the bow of the boat that enabled him to see what lay behind him, and his eyes had somehow managed the trick of looking at it continually without focusing on it, so that he could take in the scope of the sky, too, and the great ships with their crisscrossed nettings, nearly as intricate as life.
He rowed west for about twenty minutes, looped a small islet with a single hut on it, and then returned, pulling for his life.
There was something he loved in the contrast between the immense physical effort rowing took and the noiseless glide of the scull; in the pounding of his heart and the stillness of the city. The inattention to his own thoughts—he had a very active mind—let him in on a higher, wordless form of attention, he sometimes thought.
When he had gotten back, Collins, the boathouse keeper, helped him stow the scull and its oars, then gave him two towels, one cold and wet, the other dry. He would scrub the scull down shortly. Lenox thanked him cheerfully, red faced and already feeling the increased optimism he always did after a strenuous exercise, and walked home with the second towel around his neck, occasionally scrubbing his sweat-soaked hair.
The day was just starting. His clothing attracted two looks from black-suited, black-hatted gentlemen on their way to the countinghouses. By the time he was home, it was bright, the light of the morning gone.
He felt better. Even the 2:19 train to Markethouse did not daunt him—or panic him quite so much, at least, for he still felt its full imminent weight.
He sat with the newspapers and ate a gratuitously enormous breakfast (Mrs. Huggins looked on with a conflicted mixture of admonition and pride) of eggs, kippers, bacon, toast, marmalade, tea, and suet pudding.
When it was gone to the last scraping, he lit a pipe, settled back contentedly in his chair, put his feet up, and began to examine the papers more closely.
The story of the Thames Ophelia had been rounded into smoothness by time, the aggregation of opinion and fact turning it into a tightly made snowball.
The general opinion had it that the author of the letters to the Challenger was a lunatic, perhaps escaped from one of the madhouses. Lenox—who did not doubt that his quarry was a lunatic, but had a very different opinion of what he would look like outwardly—read with interest various philosophical experts who ruminated on the intellect of such a soul. They seemed to agree unanimously that he would probably be homeless, likely prone to bursts of violence, dangerous at close quarters. Not Lenox’s opinion, either.
Field, however, cautiously endorsed it to the Caller, to which he had granted his lone interview. They ran Lenox’s portrait again. Its analog in real life burned red.
Walnut Island was revived and combed through. Poor Nathaniel Butler got a decent coal-raking.
The Challenger’s circulation had doubled, Lenox read in an editor’s note from their own pages.
Not an insignificant fact, even if exaggerated; he stored it, with dozens of others, in his roving, searching, hoarding mind. It could even be a motive for murder.
When Mrs. Huggins came in to freshen his teapot, she said, “If I could have just two hours of your time this morning, Mr. Lenox, I believe we could satisfactorily resolve several outstanding issues that require our immediate attention.”
“Two hours?” said Lenox, blanching.
“I have recommended at previous moments—it has fallen on deaf ears, I know!—that we have a meeting each morning to address the continuing maintenance of the household. In Lady Hamilton’s—”
“This is a very, very busy time,” Lenox said, trying desperately to head her off. It was clear she was in an undemocratic mood. “Even half an hour would be difficult to spare at the moment, Mrs. Huggins.”
“At a bare minimum I must ask, if I am to continue in my role—”
“Mrs. Huggins!”
“If I am to continue in my role,” she went on doggedly, “I must ask for an answer to the first nine questions on the list I presented you. Sir.”
Lenox looked at the list, which he had forgotten. Since yesterday, he had been successfully able to elude her, his time consumed by the case, but he knew when he was pinned. This was the Mrs. Huggins of the previous seven months. Anyhow, no English aristocrat can defy a nursemaid for longer than a day or two. This was probably the likeliest way to beat the country in a war, in fact.
“Very well,” he said. “Before lunch.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said.
It was in a considerably gloomier cast of mind that he returned to the papers. It did seem hard that he should pay this woman to yell at him. But he perked up when he heard the sound of the door—it was Graham, he could tell from the footfall.
The valet looked tired, though as usual, he was dressed unimpeachably, and his face was impassive. “There you are,” Lenox said.
“Good morning, sir. Are you at your leisure to discuss the case now?”
“Always.”
“I have not been so successful as I hoped I might be,” he said, “but I have at least identified the type of trunk in which the first victim was found.”
Lenox brought his feet down from the table. “But that’s marvelous.”
“I had hoped to track down its exact source. My hopes were high yesterday afternoon. I passed a shipping and luggage store, and stopped in. I drew a picture of the trunk, and to my surprise, they all said that though it was of a common enough sort, in those dimensions it seemed certain to them to come from a manufacturer in Manchester called Wilton’s. Apparently it is most commonly sold for overland trips in England and Scotland, because it conforms to the luggage racks in the cars of nearly all British Railway transport trains.”
“Good heavens, Graham, what a brilliant discovery.”
“I wired Wilton’s—without your permission, I am afraid, thinking the time might be—” But Lenox waved a hand, hurrying him up; the money was well spent, of course. “At any rate, they were not able to say what the mark meant. It is not theirs.”
“The trunk, or the mark?”
“The mark. The trunk is most assuredly theirs.”
This caused Lenox a moment of pause. At last, he said, “Are the trunks cheap or expensive?”
“Expensive, sir.”
G957. “And they were sure nobody else might have made it, this trunk?”
“From my description, they seemed extremely sure it was theirs. They alone have ‘F-shaped holes’ in the brass around the lock—that is their signature.”
“Our trunk had F-shaped holes.” He could picture them. “It’s conclusive.”
“I note, as well, sir, that they did not commence production of the trunk until after the HMS Gallant was permanently retired.”
Lenox’s mind was racing. He had many thoughts now; many thoughts. He sprang to his feet and ran to the door. “Beautifully done, Graham. Pack my things for the country, please—if you have the energy—don’t bother if you don’t—I’ll be back.”
He was gone for two hours, which he used to see first Mayne, and subsequently Exeter and Field.
It was a productive use of his time. Finally he felt they had momentum. He returned to the flat at a sprint, hazardously close to his train’s departure time.
Fortunately, Graham was waiting in the hall. “Your luggage is in a taxi downstairs, sir. I think we can still make it.”
“Thank goodness,” said Lenox.
Just at that moment, however, Mrs. Huggins appeared. Her face was thunder. Lenox realized, with a plunging feeling, that he had utterly forgotten his word to her.
She had realized the same. “I have been deceived, sir. I have, in my long career, endeavored to be conscientious about—”
“Mrs. Huggins—”
“My position here being what it is, I see no choice but to tender—”
“Mrs. Huggins,” he interjected desperately, one eye on the ticking seconds of the carriage clock on his front hall table, “do you know cats?”
This brought her up short. “Cats, sir?”
“Cats, yes. Those animals you see with tails, and everything like that. They eat birds.”
“Do I know any cats?” said Mrs. Huggins. “To begin with, they don’t all eat birds—they are very loving—”
“Listen, I must be off, but I have been thinking, and I have realized that what this house needs is a cat. I’ll be away for a few days, but can I leave the selection of the cat in your responsibility? It would mean the world to me if you could handle it.”
“Oh!” She looked much changed. “I—I suppose I could.”
“Thank you so much, Mrs. Huggins. I leave it entirely in your hands, about the cat. Color, and if it has—whiskers, I suppose?—do they all have whiskers?—anyway, everything—all the details—whiskers and all—”
“Very good, sir,” she said solemnly, and watched without speaking as Lenox and Graham, released from her ire, took their rapid leave.