Mayne stooped down to help Cairn. Lenox vaulted the manager, half-tripping over his bulk, righted himself, and then went to find Jonathan Pond.
It didn’t take long. The records room was a long dusty hall, with bookcases lining either side of a central corridor. Slumped back against one of these bookcases was a young man in a clerk’s standard-issue black suit and white shirt. He had a bullet hole in his temple.
He was also still alive.
Lenox, who had taken such forensic interest in violence these past seven months, read about it over and over, cataloged it, clipped it from the newspaper, pinned each variety of it entomologically in its place, felt a complete change overtake him, seeing it in person.
He stood frozen, suppressing the urge to run.
A detective. By God. What had he been thinking?
Behind him he could vaguely hear the arrival of people drawn by the noise, as well as the ministrations of Mayne.
He forced himself down to one knee. Pond’s eyes were wide, terrified. He was gulping, strangled, as animal as a horse with a broken leg. He tried to speak, but either couldn’t or didn’t. He gave a great convulsion, and then, blood pouring from the corners of his mouth, heaved a breath.
It was his last; he was dead.
Lenox, who had seven months before spent most of his days in the golden sun of Oxford, debating whether to have another biscuit from the tray in the common room, found himself staring for the first time at a person who had been living one second, dead the next.
The moment lasted three eternities. Finally, Lenox heard Mayne behind him. Cairn, his carefully slicked hair fallen obscenely out of shape, like the day, had staggered to his feet and was following the Commissioner of the Yard.
“This was Mr. Jonathan Pond?” Mayne said.
“It—it is,” said Cairn, and then, without warning, half turned and vomited into the space between two of the tall bookshelves.
“Oh hell,” Mayne muttered.
Lenox stooped down lower by the body. He had already recovered his composure—a little bit of it, anyway. (Was this what his friends who were soldiers experienced? His cousin Josiah Lenox, in the Dragoons, Elizabeth’s husband, a dozen Old Harrovians he knew in the Coldstreams and the Grenadiers?)
Very gently, he touched the shining spectacles that hung from a chain around Pond’s motionless neck. “Brand new,” he said quietly.
Mayne stooped next to him, his face red. He wasn’t used to working out of the office. “Yes.” He stood up. His face was grim. “Now the mystery starts, I’m afraid.”
Lenox nodded, standing. He had been thinking the same thing. “The two women.”
Almost immediately the press arrived, within what seemed like a shockingly short time, ten minutes perhaps. Two of them had already managed to insinuate themselves into the building by the time Mayne and Lenox had returned to the main office, leaving Pond under the guard of the constables. They’d already gotten Pond’s name and begun to ask questions when Middleton appeared at Cairn’s office, dragging one in each hand.
Mayne gave them a dressing-down—but of course, they already had enough to begin writing their articles, as he knew full well.
“If the headline is anything other than ‘Third Murder Averted,’ you’ll both be in my sights,” he told them angrily. “Dead in my sights, I tell you. Interfering with a police investigation, among other things. Middleton, take their names and credentials. I know this one, Capston from the Mail.”
Graham had followed Middleton in to find Lenox. “What’s the scene outside?” Lenox asked. “Have you looked?”
“Only through the windows. Bedlam, sir. Press, crowds.”
“Stay close, would you. Second set of eyes and ears.”
“Of course, sir.”
Cairn, having been taken to the washstand to clean himself, was now back in his office. He was very obviously much shaken. Lenox left, going to Corcoran’s office at the corner of the building.
Here, as he’d expected, he found a bottle of brandy on a small table beside an enormous brown chesterfield. He took three glasses and poured healthy slugs, bringing them back. Ostensibly this was an act of generosity toward Cairn, and indeed it did steady him—he slicked his hair back into its careful shape after the first swallow, a marginal return to decorum—but Lenox needed it, too.
Even Mayne looked grateful.
They took some basic information about Pond (address—a lodging house in Kensington—salary, history).
Then they began to pull the clerks in one by one. None of them had much to say against Pond; nor for him. He was a quiet little fellow, according to one, and another said that he was fairly good at his job—airs, though, uppity, rather “literary.” A third clerk said that he had quite liked Pond, though the fellow drank every once in a while and when he did grew pontifical and swaggering, and also had been shirking since Corcoran took away to look for his daughter.
Lenox glanced at Cairn to see if this was a surprise, but evidently the senior manager could be no further destabilized that day—his brandy glass had been drained to the last drop, and he was gazing vacantly into space.
“What would you have said of Pond?” Lenox asked him curiously between interviews.
“Eh? Why—nothing!” said Cairn, crumpled down in his chair. “That he was a clerk at Corcoran and Sons! Not a job to throw away! And you mean to tell me that he was somehow involved in these two murders you see plastered everywhere—in the news—and the company—”
Here he trailed off. “Would you please tell us about Eliza Corcoran one more time?” Lenox asked.
Cairn walked them through the timeline again. She had eloped about five weeks earlier with this Peter Leckie character. (Gretna Green was infamously the first village across the border from England and into Scotland, which had much more tolerant laws regarding marriage.) She and her husband stood to inherit the firm if her father approved the match; he was the “son” of Corcoran and Sons, and, since he was a widower, Eliza was his only family. Even after her elopement, he had retained hopes that he might draw Eliza back to reason, Cairn said—that was why he had finally left the business two weeks before.
“It was a mad thing to do,” Cairn said. “The firm is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. She could have married a duke.”
They resumed their interviews with the clerks. All of them agreed that it had been a strange period. Mr. Corcoran himself seemed to inspire a great deal of awe in them. He was evidently a short, thin man, but possessed of the iron will of a towering magnate, and two or three clerks mentioned how strange it had been to see him so out of countenance over his daughter.
None of them could even remember Pond mentioning the “perfects”—which seemed odd, in retrospect.
When they were finished with their interviews, Lenox, Mayne, and Graham checked in with the constables in the warehouse, who were conducting their own interviews for the sake of thoroughness, then made their way through the remarkable throng of people outside, some press, some civilian, all shouting questions at them.
“My heavens,” said Mayne after he had struggled, red faced, into a police carriage.
Lenox, Exeter, and Graham just barely made it in after him. The four then went together to Pond’s lodgings.
His salary had been ninety pounds a year, too little to do much beyond subsist and hope on in this great city. He was apparently a northerner—several of the clerks had commented on his Birmingham accent, “Brummie”—who had come here to seek his fortune.
The house of Mrs. Hutchinson was brick, with a small forecourt where a lone chicken made its residence. There was an advertisement for two rooms to let in the window. It would be three soon enough.
“So you had us wire all over creation when the answer was on Bankside, eh, Lenox,” Exeter said as they climbed the stairs.
“At least he found the answer on Bankside,” said Mayne shortly.
Mrs. Hutchinson herself, a scowling woman who could have stood on her toes without brushing a five-foot ceiling, let them in. “Good Lord, more of ye,” she said.
“More of us?” said Mayne.
To their surprise, they found that Exeter’s partner, Inspector Sinex, was already in the room. He nodded curtly at Mayne, ignored Exeter, and glowered at Lenox and Graham. “What are they doing here?”
There was a very tense moment and then Graham said, perfectly calmly, “What are you doing here?”
Sinex whirled on the valet. “That’s none of your bloody business.”
It did seem strange. He said he had gotten the address from Cairn, and, not wanting to wade into the mess from which the other four had come—the whole warehouse, the clerks’ offices—he had come here to begin his part of the investigation.
He held up a thick stack of papers: the Challenger. “A popular paper,” said Mayne, frowning.
Sinex shook his head grimly. “No. Look at the dates.” All four of them leaned forward. “Ten copies each from the dates of the publication of the two letters. Trophies of his first publication.”
It was growing darker now, and they called upon Mrs. Hutchinson to bring in candles. She grumbled, but Lenox handed her a few shillings, telling her to use them for her costs, and she cheered up and said she would go to the corner shop for more. Mayne added a few shillings of his own and requested a sandwich. By the time she had returned, Mrs. Hutchinson was much chattier (“I barely ever saw the boy after he moved here in May, out vast early, in vast late, these clerks, you know”) and was warmly enough inclined toward them to offer them a pot of tea.