The offices of the rag known as the Challenger lay toward the cheap end of Fleet Street. Every English newspaper was quartered along this avenue, high and low; this was low. The better class of newspaper inhabited the other end of the Fleet, which was so ancient that it had been a principal route through Roman London.
Graham and Lenox alighted from a hansom cab at Ludgate Circus at a little after three o’clock. The Challenger was housed in a two-story building that tilted slightly left and no doubt gave a tremendous amount of business to the adjacent Ludgate Arms, a pub with a low, skulking, treacherous look to it. Despite stiff competition, journalism was probably the best-lubricated profession in the city.
NEW-MADE PIES, the pub advertised in its window.
“Interesting choice a half block from the home of Sweeney Todd,” Lenox said, pointing toward the words.
This character, the villain of a penny dreadful called The String of Pearls, was most vivid in Londoners’ minds at the moment, despite being fictional. More than three-quarters of people in a recent newspaper poll had believed him to be real.
“Intentional, perhaps,” said Graham quietly in reply.
“Good point.”
Lenox knocked at the door, Graham a step behind and a step to the side of him.
A porter answered. “Yes?”
Lenox held out a half-shilling. “Here to see the editor.”
The coin vanished so quickly that it might have been a street trick. The door opened a tick wider. “Up, right, up, left.”
They followed these directions, and were soon entering a large room filled with a surprisingly healthy glow of sunlight. The Challenger was a paper for the masses, but evidently the pennies of the masses added up; the building wasn’t much to look at, but here inside all the desks were handsome, and the men seated at them wore natty suits as they churned out their copy, shouting to each other across the room, paper littered everywhere.
“Is the editor here?” Lenox asked of a random fellow with greasy dark hair tucked behind his ears.
He pointed at a door. “But you won’t sell him anything, guv. He’s bought it all and sold it for twice what he paid already.”
“Thanks. I’m buying, not selling,” said Lenox.
“Watch your pockets then.”
The door of this lone private office was ajar. Outside sat a woman. Lenox smiled at her and handed over his card. It said CHARLES LENOX on one line, then an address on the next. (He hadn’t been able to bring himself to add the words PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR between the two.) It was very plainly an expensive object, the address equally plainly an expensive one, and she sat up straighter.
“I would very much value three or four minutes of Mr. Kennington’s time,” Lenox said.
“Mr.—are you an acquaintance of Mr. Kennington?”
Lenox, his eyes always moving, had noticed the name on the masthead of an open copy of the Challenger they had passed. “He’ll want to see us.”
She hesitated, but a Briton could nearly always be counted upon to pay obeisance to class, and she said, rising, “Follow me.”
A bulldog-looking person behind an absolutely enormous desk, a desk the size of many maids’ bedrooms in London, glanced up as they entered. “Who’s this?”
“This is Mr. Charles Lenox,” the woman said. “And—sir?”
“Oh, only his valet, madam,” Graham said, with a hard t.
“Valet,” repeated Kennington. He accepted the card from his secretary. Between the valet and the card, he was as impressed as the secretary, ready to give them a moment. “I see. What is it that brings you across town, Mr. Lenox?”
From more salubrious precincts—was implied.
Lenox handed over the clipping of the letter about the perfect crime. “We’re here about this letter.”
Kennington looked at it briefly and handed it back. “Well?”
“Is it real?”
Kennington got a cautious look on his face. “It is, as it happens.”
“Might we ask how it came into your possession?”
He glanced at his pocket watch. “Miss Adams, fetch the cart of incoming letters.”
The secretary left. “Does that mean you still have it?” Lenox asked.
“Should do.”
There was a silence. “It’s a handsome office,” said Lenox.
“What’s your concern with the letter?”
“Ah.” He had been ready for that question. “There is a family whose son has disappeared. No doubt gambling in Monaco, but we have promised to follow every lead.”
Kennington frowned. The valet and that explanation didn’t add up. “You’re doing this for money?”
Lenox shook his head. “No, not at all. Just curiosity. I’ve always been interested in crime. Take them as they come. I assisted late last year on the Marbury case.”
This was a curious matter of some six months before, tangentially involving a friend, which Lenox had helped solve by slipping information anonymously to the Yard. (Now he wished he had done it in person.) It was the case he thought of as his “first,” even though he hadn’t been the primary detective. It was after Marbury that he had decided once and for all to follow his instinct and pursue this line of work; after Marbury that he and Graham had begun clipping the newspapers.
The editor’s curiosity was evidently satisfied by this explanation. “I was in gutta-percha for a while, myself, then rubber. Bought this thing last year. Circulation has doubled. We’ll be moving up the street in the next year or so.”
Lenox raised his eyebrows. “Congratulations.”
“Bloody stories and tearjerkers—that’s what people want, you know.”
“I don’t think there’s any question about that.”
“Easier than gutta-percha. Ships sink.” He paused. “You’re very young.”
“I thank you.”
Kennington laughed and pointed at Graham, though he had barely appeared to notice him. “Anyhow, you’d have to walk awhile to find the man who’s going to fool this valet of yours. I’ll just tell you that for free, since you aristocrats never know anything yourselves. But I’ve looked into a few faces in my day.”
Just then Miss Adams came into the room, pushing a file box on wheels. It appeared that the Challenger kept thorough records. It wasn’t what Lenox would have expected.
Thorough, and thoroughly organized, too. Within just a moment, Kennington had found the letter.
He held it out and then, as Lenox reached to take it, pulled it back. “A trade.”
“A trade?”
“One story. A crime story. Put me onto it sometime. In the next month or two, say.”
Lenox thought, and then nodded. “I accept your terms.”
“Word as a gentleman?”
Graham no doubt noticed the way that Lenox’s posture stiffened slightly—the anger he felt at the question even being posed—but Kennington and Miss Adams would have missed it. Lenox nodded once more. “Yes, you have my word as a gentleman.”
Kennington nodded in turn at the deal he’d struck, then passed the letter to Lenox. “It arrived four days ago, I believe.”
Four days!
That was a piece of absolutely crucial information. Also a frightening one.
Lenox did some quick calculations. He had reckoned that the one-month “anniversary” referred to in the letter would be four or five days off, at the earliest, May 7 perhaps—today being the second.
But it might be much, much sooner. It might be this very day.
The idea chilled his blood. “You waited to publish it?” Lenox asked.
“Figured the fellow for a crank. Still do, but we had a few spare column inches to fill, and it’s excited a fair bit of reader interest. We’ll probably run a follow-up head on it in the next day or two.”
“How did the letter arrive?”
“Miss Adams?” Kennington said.
Evidently the secretary was responsible for such matters. “Unstamped, under our door, sir, in the middle of the night. Must have been very late, as we don’t generally print until three. Between four and six, nobody is in the building.”
Lenox nodded. “Thank you.”
“Not at all, sir.”
“Is there a spare desk where we could look the letter over?”
Kennington said there was. “Miss Adams will show you. Don’t forget my crime story, Mr. Lenox. Goodbye, valet.”
A moment later, Lenox and Graham were at an empty table in the newspaper’s main room, both standing, leaning over to stare at the thrice-folded letter and the small blue envelope it had arrived in. Miss Adams had left them to their own devices.
The text was identical to that which the Challenger had printed. “Cheap paper,” Lenox noted.
“Perhaps for anonymity,” Graham suggested.
Lenox shook his head. “No. Because it’s a cheap pen, too.”
“Can you tell, sir?” Graham asked.
Lenox pointed. “Look how often he has had to go back to his inkwell. The splotches come every other word, almost. One of those metal nibs that are a dozen-a-penny. The ink’s no good either.”
“I see.”
Lenox frowned. “Admirable penmanship, however.”
“Yes, indeed, sir.”
“And you see the other clue that goes along with admirable penmanship, of course.”
“Sir?” said Graham.
Lenox, all of his twenty-three, was not free of arrogance, the undergraduate vice. “Come, you can see here, Graham, where he has erased his pencil lines. Faint but distinct. Beneath each line of the letter.”
Now Graham frowned. “I cannot see the significance of that, sir.”
“Oh. Oh.” In what he hoped was a delicate way, Lenox said, “We never had lines beneath our—we were smacked on the hand if we wrote crookedly, at Harrow, with the chalk. In its chalk-holder, a great long wooden rod. I can still feel it.”
“Sir?”
Lenox elaborated. “Well, it’s only at the free schools that one is taught to write line upon line.”
“Is it, sir?”
“I think because it is considered useful if your field is clerking.” Lenox thought back to his lessons. “A gentleman’s writing mustn’t be too—too perfect, you see.”
“Ah. Yes, sir,” said Graham. “I see.”
His face remained impassive. He was a fellow, Lenox’s valet—or butler, perhaps, if you wished to use the slightly grander word—who learned from every direction, indiscriminately, his mind as sharp as the head of a newly fledged arrow. He would absorb this piece of information as he had every other one (that asparagus was eaten with the fingers, for instance, that one said “sofa,” not “settee”) and store it away forever.
Lenox felt a twinge of guilt. He smoothed the paper under his hand. “I think we have a picture of our man, at least,” he said.
“Sir?” said Graham.
“Come, we’ll discuss it in the hansom. We must go to Scotland Yard as quickly as possible. If the writer of the letter keeps his promise, they’ll have only a day to prevent a murder. Not five or six, as I’d thought. It may even be a matter of hours.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lenox shook his head grimly. “It’s bad, very bad, that we are the first to follow up. If the Yard cannot solve the matter, we may only hope that the next murder is not so brutal or random as the one at Walnut Island.”