They remained for several hours, going carefully through the possessions of the dead man. By the end of half an hour, they were all more or less certain that he was their criminal, their self-described perfect criminal—though a more imperfect outcome to his endeavors could hardly be conceived.
It was a plain room, with a small bed, a teas-maid, an armoire, a desk, and a chair. There was one black suit in the closet, along with two white shirts and a rather shabby brown tweed suit next to them, perhaps his northern suit.
He had left behind nothing quite so definite as a journal. But when Lenox looked down at his list of items at the end of the evening, it seemed overwhelming proof of Pond’s guilt.
The first thing they found were flowers pressed in a copy of the Bible, each of which matched one of those from the overwhelming profusion of flowers on the second body.
“Where did he get the money for those, I wonder?” Lenox asked out loud. “They must have been five pounds at least, those flowers. A week or two’s wages.”
“Perhaps a week’s salary on flowers doesn’t seem very much when you have a vision,” said Graham.
Sinex was holding up a small stack of papers. “Look at this.”
Lenox and Mayne came over: a series of doodles of a woman lying on her back, eyes closed, presumably dead, covered in flowers. “Well,” said Lenox, sighing.
“One of the clerks mentioned that Pond was a good draftsman,” Graham said.
“Yes—gifted.”
Exeter looked at Lenox as if he were mad. “He was sick in the head.”
“There have been gifted men who were sick in the head before, and there will be again,” said Lenox, handing the drawings to Mayne. “It is one of the world’s many flaws.”
It was Graham who had the idea to bring out Pond’s clothes to inspect them; when he pulled the brown tweed suit out, sand fell from its cuffs, and it smelled distinctly of the riverside, in a way that his black suit did not.
But the most unsettling discovery was Lenox’s own: beneath the mattress, there was an envelope with two locks of dark, curly hair in it.
They were divided by sheets of paper. A third space was open.
Mayne crossed himself. “May the Lord preserve them,” he said.
But who would the third woman have been? There was one tantalizing clue. On the reverse of one of the drawings was the name Susan, written twice.
There were other artifacts of life in the room. On the desk was a small row of books, mostly schoolboy novels. There were a few short but affectionate letters signed by Pond’s mother; Lenox made a note of her address in Birmingham. There were Pond’s pay stubs from Corcoran and Sons. In a small lockbox, which Sinex levered open with suspicious adroitness, were a few coins, a pound note, an old train ticket, and a small cameo portrait.
Lenox studied it in the candlelight. “Dark, curly hair,” he said.
Finally, when it was too dark to see anything, Mayne sighed. “Well, we shall reconvene in the morning, gentlemen.”
There was so much Lenox still wanted to know. But they had covered the room thoroughly, and the press had found its way here now.
The three men of the Yard were taking the evidence back to headquarters. “Is there any point stopping back at Bankside?” Lenox asked.
“Not that I can see. You have your badge, however—” Sinex snorted. “—so feel free to do as you please.”
Mayne, Exeter, and Sinex ignored the journalists outside and pushed through. Lenox and Graham trailed them by ten feet or so, thanking Mrs. Hutchinson (who had been strongly encouraged to remain mum for her own safety, and looked properly cowed at the idea that she would be a target) and followed their example in ignoring the journalists.
Graham and Lenox escaped the press, then walked a block or two in silence. At last Lenox said, “There’s no point in it, but I think I would like to go back to Bankside.” An overwhelming day.
Graham nodded. “I feel similarly, sir.”
They got into a hansom. Lenox spent the drive brooding, trying, trying, trying to put the pieces together, to figure out whom Jonathan Pond had killed, and why.
How could two women simply disappear?
Lenox wasn’t convinced that his wires across Britain had been useless. Mightn’t the bodies have come to London by train? His thoughts returned to that little cameo in the lockbox. And the name: Susan.
There was still an enormous crush of people outside Corcoran and Sons, just barely held at bay by a hastily strung rope and a row of constables. It was like a carnival. Lenox showed his identification and pushed through.
There were two clerks remaining in the large office with fifteen desks in it. Both looked up when Lenox and Graham came in.
“Still here?” Lenox said.
“The business doesn’t stop for much,” one of them said ruefully—Jones, Lenox remembered his name would be. “Large shipment tomorrow.”
“Will it be a distraction if we look through Mr. Pond’s desk?”
“Not at all, sir,” said Jones. “Let us know if we can help.”
“Thank you,” said Lenox quietly. He felt sorry for them. They had known Pond. He stood there for a moment, hands in trousers, and at last said, “Tell me, can you believe it of him? Of Pond? That he was a murderer?”
The two clerks glanced at each other. But after a beat both nodded, reluctantly. “He wasn’t a bad chap,” said Jones. “Or never seemed a bad chap. But he had very grand ideas of himself. He was very down on most of us—cutting, you know. And then, I suppose the rest of us have … He never had a girl that he spoke of, or any interest but his literary goings-on.”
“He kept to himself,” added Carrington.
Lenox nodded. “Thank you.”
For the first time, he began to believe that they had really caught a murderer. But he hadn’t expected it to be like this! The terrible inconclusiveness of it—Pond’s death—Cairn’s pale face, and his thudding fall—the whole vivid, awful afternoon …
He went to Pond’s desk and sat down heavily in the chair. “You take the left set of drawers, I’ll take the right?” he said to Graham.
There was nothing much here, paper, an old inkwell, Corcoran and Sons stationery, an old newspaper (not the Challenger but the Times), another of Pond’s pay stubs. But there was one thing that Lenox found that struck him—a short list of goods, seemingly all different varieties of fur from Canada, bound in on a steamer named Fortitude.
“Look at that, Graham,” he said.
Graham studied it for a moment. “I cannot see anything remarkable, sir,” he said.
“It’s the handwriting.”
Recognition dawned in the valet’s eyes. “Of course,” he said. “Identical, sir.”
Lenox wasn’t sure why it made his heart so heavy: yet here it was, a fact, that the handwriting on this list was identical to the handwriting of the first letter to the Challenger. Pond was their man.
Perhaps he would feel better when he could say who the victims were; perhaps in time he would care that they might have saved a life, one that Pond had planned to take sixteen days hence.
Was it cowardice or determination that made a man shoot himself rather than facing the consequences of his acts?
At last they bade goodbye to Jones and Carrington, still working by their low green-shaded lamps, and went home.
“I think that was the longest day of my life,” Lenox said as he turned the key in the door.
Inside, it got slightly longer.
Mrs. Huggins, looking infinitely harassed, was trying with a desperate air to coax a great fleet of kittens, nine or ten of them, fifteen possibly, a hundred for all Lenox knew, back into a wicker basket.
She stood up, bright red, the first time she had been discomposed in their entire acquaintance. “They won’t be any trouble, sir,” she said.
Lenox burst into a laugh, and felt a huge release within. Life would go on; sooner or later. “It’s quite all right, Mrs. Huggins—it’s quite all right—here, I can catch the gray one. Graham, that orange one is just at your ankles, grab him up.…”