Graham was in Lenox’s room (when each boy turned fourteen, they had moved from the east wing of the house, where the several small rooms comprising the nursery were warrened, to the south wing, where the bedrooms befitting adults were situated) and was brushing his suit there.
“Good evening, sir,” he said.
“Good evening, Graham. They were civil to you downstairs?”
“Exceedingly so, sir. Mr. Crump shared a glass of wine with me from his personal cellar.”
That was the butler, a stern old fellow. “That was decent of him. I say, Graham, about that trunk.”
“Yes, sir?”
Lenox was loosening his cuffs, preparing to change. There was a bowl of hot water at the mirror into which he dipped his hands and face, and he patted them dry with a towel. “You said it was sold primarily for train trips.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lenox shook his head in frustration. “Then I am more convinced than ever that these two women are not from London.”
“Sir?”
In his meeting with Mayne that morning before departing for Lenox House, Charles had described Graham’s inquiries about the Walnut Island trunk.
Mayne and Exeter, who had been present, said that Field’s investigation was heavily focused on four prostitutes missing near Shoreditch. Three of them were of the precise physical description of the victims.
Nevertheless, Lenox saw two difficulties in the search, which made it exasperating that Field had expended so much time upon it. The first was that prostitutes were a fluid population—they might return home to the country, go to another part of the city, or to another city altogether, for that matter. Take up with a single suitor. Save enough to buy an apprenticeship in a dress shop. Virtually anything.
(“Still, you must concede that four is a high number,” Mayne had said.
“I’m not sure,” Lenox had replied. Exeter had looked outraged at this impudence, but Lenox was already more confident with Mayne, if still deferential. “We don’t know how many there are in general.”)
The second was that they had only two victims, not four, to account for, and both had died within the few days before their discovery.
Lenox took a fresh shirt from Graham. “I think they were transported by trunk. One of them, at least. And our killer—bear in mind he believes himself to be committing the perfect crime, and is at a very minimum quite clever—stenciled the name of the HMS Gallant on one to make it seem local to London.”
“Throw us off the scent, sir.”
“Yes,” said Lenox. “The question is what it means that both bodies were found on the river.”
“Doesn’t it imply that the man lives near the river, sir?” asked Graham.
This had been the working theory of the police, and until now the two of them had accepted it.
Lenox tilted his head, thinking. “It’s possible,” he said. In his room there was a small leatherbound book he had received from his aunt Martha before he left for school. It was filled with intricate maps of London. He went and got it from the shelf now. “On the other hand. Consider: He would want to spend as little time as possible in public carrying the bodies. Do you agree?”
“Of course,” said Graham.
Lenox found the page he was looking for. “Let us theorize, then.” He turned the book to Graham. His finger was on a spot. “Look at this spot.”
“Waterloo Bridge, sir,” Graham said.
Lenox nodded. “Two train stations within a stone’s throw of it. Charing Cross and Waterloo. The two busiest in London, perhaps?”
“One would need to look at the numbers, sir. Victoria Station and King’s Cross, among—”
Lenox waved a hand. “But—”
“Yes, sir,” said Graham, making a rare interruption to concede the point. “Among the busiest, certainly.”
Lenox tapped the book. “Then I think it is this. Our murderer is going to another city to commit these murders, returning by rail, and then disposing of the bodies on the river as quickly as he can. He is coming into Charing Cross or Waterloo to do it.”
Graham frowned. “But why, sir, would he risk traveling across England with a corpse, and then be so immediately eager to get rid of it?”
Lenox smiled, shaking his head. “Yes, that’s the question. My first instinct would be to say that he has killed two women from a population small enough that they would be noticed. But we might well have heard of that—a village missing two women, for instance.”
“Most likely, sir.”
“Therefore I think we must look to motive.”
“Motive, sir.”
“Our Walnut Island trunk—designed to deceive. Our Ophelia—never floated upon the water, merely left upon the bank. Again, designed to deceive.”
“There is method to the madness, you think, sir,” said Graham. “The perfect-crime business.”
Lenox had sat back upon the bed, and crossed one leg over the other. The fire at the other end of the room was low, and the evening was cold. Still, he stared at the page. “Yes, I think he knows a hawk from a handsaw,” Lenox muttered.
If he wasn’t purely a madman, chasing the “perfect murder,” what was he, this killer?
A bell rang. Cocktail hour. That must mean someone had arrived, and Lenox registered dimly that he had heard a carriage a few minutes before, though he had assumed that it was the mail or the butcher or someone like that.
But it was no doubt Jane’s father, the Earl of Houghton.
“Your tie, sir,” Graham said.
He put it on Lenox as the latter stared down at the map of London. “You realize one person this implicates.”
“Sir?”
“Nathaniel Butler.”
Graham and Lenox’s eyes met in the mirror. “A trip from Birmingham to Charing Cross, sir?”
“Yes, exactly. Two trips, in the dead of night.”
Graham accepted this impassively, though Lenox, who knew him, saw that he still didn’t believe Nathaniel Butler capable of the murders. “The heavier or lighter of the black jackets, sir?” he asked.
“Eh?” Lenox was distracted, still staring at the map. “Oh. The heavier, I suppose.”
“It’s true the wind is southerly, sir.”
Lenox smiled.
Over the next days, Lenox, his father, and his mother settled into a happy pattern.
The single rule of these happy hours was apparently that nobody mention Sir Edward Lenox’s health; or at least, nobody did. There had been two years when Edmund was at school and Charles wasn’t, which Lenox was reminded of. (They weren’t all that distant, after all.) He and his mother spent their mornings together, while his father attended to the estate; except that instead of doing his schoolwork—though he and Graham did doggedly continue to take cuttings from the newspapers—Lenox was now focused obsessively on the case, making list after list, drawing maps, immobile in thought for extended periods as he tried to circle closer to the personality of the person he was chasing.
At lunch all three of them read. It had been a shock to Charles when he learned at the age of nine or ten that there were families that didn’t do this: the soup coming in (always something fresh and full of vegetables, soup being his father’s favorite food, though Edmund would argue him into a powder, tirelessly, that soup couldn’t be a person’s favorite “food”), then a chop and some potatoes, and usually fruit from the hothouse for dessert, each of the three absorbed in some kind of reading. For his father, generally a Parliamentary report or a biography; for his mother, a novel or poetry; for Charles, though in his youth he would have been reading a tale of adventure, the reports of London newspapers.
Lenox had always considered this silent state of affairs highly companionable, though Elizabeth had once said they all ought to be institutionalized.
Then, in the afternoon of these few days, he and his father would find an hour or two to spend together. On the first they shot again, then bowled cricket to each other on the great lawn as Terrance fetched the cherry-red balls, calling fours and sixes (quite unfairly, Lenox thought) by eye. Eventually Lenox’s father ran short of breath, and Charles bowled to the old servant, who would only tap the ball, but whom it was impossible to spin anything whatsoever past: a truly maddening state of affairs.
The second day, Lenox and his father went on a long ride over the whole land.
Lenox had grown up on horseback, and his father never looked more natural than atop his beloved charcoal gray gelding, Clarence, a beast of great sensitivity and almost human intelligence. His father had an extremely light seat, a formal refinement in riding that had always seemed to his son to arise from the earth itself, through the animal, and into his limbs, as though by some mysterious ancestral grace.
Lenox loved to ride with his father almost more than anything on earth. It had nearly always been Edmund (who, though he adored horses, looked like a sack of wheat tied to a saddle when he was aboard one) who took these sorts of rides with Sir Edward, however. Lenox had understood that this was part of his elder brother’s birthright, and that some transmission of—what? duty, knowledge, familiarity?—took place on their outings.
But occasionally his father would invite him, and the two of them were a more natural pair, could ride far harder together; and even now Charles took a childish pleasure in that.
They rode very hard now, floating as lightly as two tufts of down across the great upslope that lay west of the house, two miles in all.
At the top, his father pulled up, breathing heavily, grinning.
“I do love a thundering good ride better than anything,” he said, smacking Clarence’s haunch proudly.
“Likewise,” said Charles, heart pounding from the exercise.
His father stared back the long distance toward the house and the pond for a while. “Most anything,” he said, clarifying.
They rode back. Soon enough it was time for supper. Three or four times a week Lenox’s parents had someone or other to dine (often just a particularly close friend of his father’s named Johnson, who owned a good deal of farmland) or went out themselves.
There was no reading at supper, of course. (That would have been indisputably eccentric.) To Charles’s surprise, they were both inordinately curious about his life in London, his parents. They quizzed him endlessly about his friends, about which public houses and shops received his custom, about whether he ever saw Lady Quilt or that young Cynthia or the Reverend Marblehead, about what hour he rose, about Mrs. Huggins. Even about his case.
At any rate, three days passed in this contented state of affairs; “most anything” the closest Edward Lenox came to acknowledging his position; and then the doctors began to arrive.