The city to which Lenox returned after five days’ absence was somehow more, not less, obsessed with Jonathan Pond. That surprised him.
The fashionable thing now was to say that he had been as good as his word: he had committed the perfect crime. This viewpoint rather breezed over his suicide, but was otherwise compelling.
“Randomness. That’s the key to it. Kill someone completely random, and they’ll spend perpetuity attempting to figure out what you did and why you did it. Rather brilliant, really.”
That was Lord Markham speaking—the young, porcine toff who’d cut Lenox dead only three weeks before—at a very sparkly cocktail party in his broad-beamed house in Half Moon Street. Lenox’s position had changed during his absence. It was known that he had been in on the kill, as it were—there at Pond’s last breath. There was a certain prestige to this. You couldn’t call him a detective quite, people were saying now. He was more of an adventurer. He didn’t mind a bit of violence if it came his way. Indeed, wasn’t it rather glamorous, what he did? So the word went around London.
Markham had written him personally twice, virtually begging him to come to this party. Now he gave his opinion on Pond. “Eh, Lenox?” he said.
They had all looked down on Markham at school for exactly this quality, being a know-it-all and a bore, but Charles, his mind only half there, said, “Oh, yes, I’m sure that’s probably about right.”
Markham nodded with deep self-satisfaction. “They’ll be chasing their tails down at the Yard for a while, I guess.”
Lenox had come because he’d been hoping that Elizabeth would be here. Most people were—most people in his London, his small London.
But not she. He knew she was in town. Lenox had called upon her twice (in the morning, at the appropriate hour), and she had been out on her own calls. Or perhaps—his fear—in, but “out.” Either way he was miserable. Whenever he thought of the letter, he wanted to melt into a puddle of shame.
The only person in whom he confided this misery was his friend Hugh, whose forlornness in love was so constant that it amounted to a variety of good cheer in circumstances such as these.
“She’s a brick,” was Hugh’s analysis. “She’ll let it go. Or maybe she loves you, you know.”
“No.”
“You can never say. I’ve seen more lost causes pulled back from the brink than you would believe.”
Lenox, heartsick, half-leapt at this idea. The trouble was that he didn’t know what would be worse, though, reciprocation or rejection. He could never compromise her. He would rather eat crushed glass than say the word “divorce” to her face.
But in the last three or five weeks he had somehow begun to think of her so constantly, so deeply, other women had come to him to seem such diffident and insubstantial creatures, that the idea that she might love him was impossible to keep himself away from, though he would have thought better of himself if he could.
Two mornings after his return from St. Petersburg, he and Graham were sitting at the breakfast table. Graham had been very assiduous in his researches into their case—the Clarkson case—and come up with nothing, very exactly nothing. As he said, however, with a certain angry glimmer in his eye, he was still gathering information.
They sat in the quiet late spring light and clipped articles. More than half were about Pond. The media had tracked down his mother, who seemed slightly addled, and would admit only that she would miss the half pound he sent back to her each month, though she had wept copiously in front of the correspondent from the Telegraph. They’d found a few old friends to testify that he was a decent chap—but not very many, and certainly the image of him that emerged from his village was of a silent, rather reticent, queer person, studious and guarded.
One paper had discovered a young woman who had rejected his proposal, before he’d come to London; she had dark, wavy hair, and many saw this as a galvanizing incident to the young madman. Her name was Ella Beth Williams, however; not Susan. Otherwise, there were a huge number of articles with headlines like POND’S BLOOD-SOAKED JOURNALS, made up wholly, or, in more reputable papers, MURDERER’S MOTIVE REMAINS MURKY.
“That one’s true enough,” Lenox said with a sigh as he cut it out.
He turned it to Graham, who had looked up. “Ah. Yes, sir.”
Lenox sat back, tossing his scissors onto the table with a clatter. “I have tried to stop thinking about it, to turn my mind slowly to what the identity of the two women may be, but I—”
He went into a long silence, staring at the branches as they dipped and rose in the breeze.
At very great length, Graham said, “Sir?”
Lenox started. “What’s that?”
“You said you’ve tried, sir, to stop thinking about something?”
“Oh.” Lenox shook the cobwebs out of his head and sat up. “I only meant that I’ve tried to let it all go. But there are—there are details that have been bothering me. Beyond the most obvious one, of wondering who the two women are.”
“You think Pond guilty, though, sir?”
“Oh, certainly, that has been proved. It’s only that I am trying to understand the exact dimensions of his guilt. For a wild moment, I even entertained the idea of an accomplice.”
“What are the details that are bothering you, sir, if it is not impertinent to ask?”
Lenox smiled a melancholy smile. “You can ask me anything, Graham,” he said.
There were three things that had bothered him through his trip to St. Petersburg, faint echoes in his mind at first, but more insistent as time passed, more and more insistent. He told them to Graham now.
The first was the nature of the second victim’s death—Ophelia, as the press had named her. She had died of poisoning, he was nearly certain from consulting Courtenay, but there had been an attempt to make it look like strangulation.
“And the other two points?”
The second was Pond’s spectacles. They seemed wrong to Lenox, somehow—that they had been crushed directly beneath the door that he must have carried down to the waterside. They had been on a chain, for one thing. Perhaps they had been in his pocket just at that moment, but even then he wondered how they would have ended up underneath the door.
“I have thought, myself, sir,” said Graham, “that perhaps Pond intended to push the door into the water, and see how far it might float—like the trunk.”
Lenox pursed his lips. “I’ve thought about that, too. It was such a staged, odd scene, that part of me thinks he wouldn’t have wanted it overturned—the door, the body—but part of me wonders whether he wasn’t interrupted, just as you suggest.”
“What is the third detail, sir?”
“I am almost embarrassed to admit it, but—well—I have the strangest feeling that there is some face I saw twice.”
Graham frowned. “A familiar face. Can you recall where, sir?”
“No.”
“Perhaps at the warehouse? One of the clerks?”
Lenox paused, and then shook his head slightly. “I don’t think so. No.”
“Interesting, sir.”
It was no more than a feeling along the back of his neck, a sense of recognition—misplaced recognition, like being sure he’d seen someone in a crowd that he recognized, only to tap their shoulder and find that he had been mistaken.
Graham watched him respectfully, despite the vagueness of this last point. Lenox sighed. It was very thin porridge, he knew, his three questions.
He shoved the papers to the side. One of the cats was down at his feet, and he gave it a distracted stroke. “Listen,” he said. “Tell me everything there is to know about Clarkson. Pond is gone, but we still have our twenty pounds to earn. We might as well earn them.”