Lenox wobbled into consciousness late the next morning, first barely aware he was there, then aware that it was unpleasant to be there, then finally awake enough to realize that he was awake. It was late. Cripes, could suns be this bright? Who allowed that? With intense irritation, he pulled a pillow over his eyes.
He had the most awful taste in his mouth. He reached blindly and realized, with gratitude, that there was a glass of cider with chips of ice in it next to his bed. Graham, bless his soul. He sipped it and then shoved the pillow on top of his face again.
He felt shame down to the bottom of his soul. Twice in two weeks, to be as hungover as a parson, when for three years at Oxford he had kept a clear head.
As he lay there, the night began to return to him in bits. Above all he remembered the gliding, carefree, dizzyingly happy feeling of dance after dance with Lucia Chatham—she had scratched Laurence off her card for the ninth dance and given it to Charles, to scandalized murmurs in the room, which had seemed quite funny to them at the time—and the equally happy sensation that Elizabeth, sitting with the other married women along the side of the grand pink and gold room, so many of them much older than she, never stopped watching them. He had a vague recollection of her face growing dark, and the wholly unbecoming gladness that it gave him to wound her. How awful a part of him. Then there had been the orchestra packing up, the final drinks, the thinning of the crowds, the grandiose plans with Hugh and Lucia and Eleanor for day trips the following afternoon.…
Could his father really be dying?
Deep in the night, when it had finally been time to go home, he’d realized that through the whole night this question had been passing through some deep and wintry ravine in his mind, on a journey that even he could see only from afar.
Lenox had never been a drinker, and in the cold, lonely moonlight outside his flat he had, in a moment of lucidity, wondered if this was why he had agreed with Lucia to scandalize everyone at the ball, to be the center of attention, to drink too much.
He forced himself up onto his elbows, blinking hard and angrily at the windows. Next to the glass of cider was some toast. He ate it, and when it hit his stomach, he felt immediately a little more human. (“A morning head lasts twenty minutes at your age,” he remembered his mother telling him when he set out for Oxford. “Treasure that. It will all change when you’re thirty. Then again when you’re forty.”)
He reached for a notebook next to his bed. The last page he had written in was from his trip to the police warehouse in Ealing. It was headed with that name:
EALING
Shoes ✗
Door ✓✗
Trunk ✓
Flowers ✓
Spectacles ✗
Shilling ✓✗
Strangulation ✗
Lenox studied this for some time. Where he had made a checkmark, he felt fairly confident; an x, still confused; both, he thought he had some idea of what was going on.
He pushed the small white button on his side table, which was wired to clang a bell in the servants’ quarters. He rarely did this, since he considered it, if not rude, at least imperious. But his limbs felt as though they were full of wet sand, and he desperately wanted some more iced cider, some toast, and some very strong tea.
It was Graham who appeared. “Hello,” said Lenox moodily.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Ha! A wry observation. What time did I come home?”
“I did not notice the hour, sir.”
“Please be so kind as to stop lying.”
“Four o’clock, sir.”
“Hm.” Lenox rubbed his face. “What time is it now?”
“Just before eleven.”
“It’s not looking likely that I’ll make six o’clock church service.”
“No, sir.”
“I suppose I’ll go to hell.”
“I couldn’t speculate, sir.”
Lenox held up his list. “I want to ask you something. But could you get me some more of that—more of both of those?” He gestured at the cider, the toast. “They are the only reason I’m speaking to you this politely.”
“Not at all, sir. As for the—”
Just then a raw-cheeked young footman came in without knocking (he had been employed for under a month here, Roger was his name, a very decent fellow of around fifteen with bright orange hair) and bearing a silver tray with the things Lenox had asked for, and also tea, milk, sugar, and a plate of digestive biscuits. He put it on the small circular dining table near Lenox’s bedroom window about as inelegantly as any human possibly could have done, then withdrew, tripping over the threshold on the way out.
“He’s doing very well for someone who was born nine days ago,” Lenox observed.
“Come now, sir,” said Graham, smiling.
That chastisement was quite right. None of these people were responsible for his condition—and it was base in him to take it out on them.
He vaulted out of the bed, ignoring the screech of his nerve endings, and went to the breakfast table. “I apologize.”
“Not at all, sir.”
“And the papers?”
“Would you like to read them in here?” Graham asked.
“I cannot face Mrs. Huggins.”
The bedroom was a place she did not breach, at least not while Lenox was present. “She has been mostly absent, sir,” said Graham.
Lenox looked at his valet curiously. “Absent?”
“Yes, sir,” said Graham, with an imperceptible shrug. “I have seen her—dressed to go outdoors—now and again. But she has mostly been away from the apartments, sir.”
“Anyway, I don’t mind eating in here. I’ll take the papers if it’s not too much trouble.”
“By all means, sir.”
Graham was at the door when Lenox had a thought. “Wait. Graham.”
“Sir?”
Lenox was staring down at the list in his hand. He took a sip of tea.
“Do you remember my telling you how bothered I was by the shoes of the second victim? The Ophelia?”
“I do, sir.”
Lenox studied the list in silence for another moment. “I think,” said Lenox slowly. “I think I know why they bothered me.”
“Why, sir?”
“They were not part of the picture.”
“The picture, sir?”
“The delicate nymph, laid out upon the board. The flowers, the white dress—wet, don’t forget, though the board was dry! And yet she was wearing the kind of shoes that Mrs. Huggins might.”
Graham tilted his head, thinking. “The significance is not quite clear to me, sir.”
“Haste,” said Lenox. “Something in his plan went wrong.”
“Such as, sir?”
But Lenox was in a study, staring at his piece of paper. Finally, he looked up and said, “No word back from Wilton’s?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Hm. Tomorrow, perhaps.” He looked at the paper and muttered, “By God, I’d like to get him.”
The sun flashed across the window, and Lenox winced. He looked up. At the ball the evening before, he had met Lord Billingsley, who was the current and 17th Earl of Sedgewood. The Sedgewoods and the Lenoxes were related, though the Sedgewoods were much grander—they would have considered the Lenoxes a cadet branch of the family, while the Lenoxes, who were as prideful as the next group of men and women God had chosen to place on earth, considered themselves in key respects better than the Sedgewoods.
Nevertheless, Billingsley and Lenox’s father were deep friends, with twined roots. There were few men the earl met on equal terms, but Edward Lenox was one of them.
Charles, drunk, had greeted his second cousin with affection—he had spent many weeks at Sedgewood House as a child—and was taken aback when his relative’s lined old face remained stony.
He couldn’t remember the exact words. That nobody else would say it, but Charles was making an embarrassment of himself as a detective; that his father deserved better; his brother; that he had better not expect to remain in society much longer if he chose to stay on this course.
No doubt the old earl, deferred to by probably tens of thousands of people in the course of his life, had expected Lenox to immediately internalize this piece of chastisement. But now, with morning come, all he could think was that he had a strong feeling about the door; he was sure he knew about the trunk; and he was quite certain that if his hunch was right, he would have his hand on the murderer’s collar the next day.
Let them try and stop him then.