It was around noon the next day, and Mayne was staring at Lenox as if he had two heads. After a long moment, he said, “Repeat that once more.”
“I—”
“No. Wait. Wilkinson!”
This bark brought forth Sir Richard’s secretary, as dapper as ever in a suit of lawn. “Sir?”
“Where would we have the Ophelia’s body?”
Lenox observed that even Sir Richard, in this moment of extremity, had resorted to using the press’s nickname. “In Heathgate, sir. There is quite a backlog of corpses.”
“Was it not put forward to the front of the queue?” said Sir Richard angrily. “I asked that it be.”
Wilkinson looked pained. “The coroners have quite a latitude, as you know, sir, and there are—”
“Asinine. Completely asinine. Never mind. It will take fifteen seconds to prove or disprove Mr. Lenox’s theory. Tell them in no uncertain terms to pull the body out. We will send someone along very shortly.”
Here he gave Lenox an irritated look. Youth, Lenox knew, was a state of being perpetually embarrassed; he had thought that perhaps he had grown past it, but for the moment he sat as if under his headmaster’s gaze.
Wilkinson nodded crisply and left, and Mayne asked Lenox, again, to repeat his theory.
Inspectors Sinex and Field were currently at the apartments of Eliza Corcoran and of Theobald Cairn, respectively, to see what they could discover. Cairn himself was still on the loose. As for Lady Elizabeth Gray—Lady Jane, as Lenox had briefly received reprieve to call her—she was under heavy guard on a floor of the Savoy Hotel. She was the daughter of an earl, the daughter-in-law of another, and the wife of a future third; there were constables lining the halls. It was only a miracle that the Queen hadn’t dedicated a regiment.
Similar notice—and similar, if lesser, protection—had been extended to the families of all those who had investigated Cairn, since he had proved that he had investigated the vulnerabilities of the men investigating him. Would it be a surprise if he went after Field’s family?
Lenox did wonder if Cairn had actually intended Elizabeth harm, or if he had merely been buying time, sending Lenox, at the least, off on a chase. The telegram to Elizabeth had merely said FRIENDS WILL BE WATCHING YOU, hideously. Sent in at Waterloo, the train station closest to Corcoran and Sons.
Which in no way meant that Cairn had boarded a train. The return address might be merely another sleight of hand, from a murderer who had shown himself adept at them over and over, disciplined, ingenious, and elusive.
The Ophelia’s disguise, if Lenox’s hypothesis proved correct, would be Cairn’s most unusual of all.
“My theory is simple, I suppose,” said Lenox in the level lie of a voice that he had used during his most nerve-racking tutorials at Balliol. “Five or six weeks ago, Cairn learned some piece of information to his disadvantage, involving the firm. Who knows if he had been of a violent temperament before then? It would not surprise me. Nor would it surprise me if the madness was always there, but has only cracked open now.
“His first victim was Eliza Corcoran. That seems very clear to me from his lie in describing her looks and from the timing of her disappearance. I don’t know if there is a fellow called Leckie, or if he was another of Cairn’s inventions. What I do think I know is that she was the woman in the trunk marked G957 that washed up on Walnut Island, and which Cairn designed to look as if it had belonged to the HMS Gallant.
“His second deception was the letter.” Lenox paused and took a deep breath. “And here we come onto the shores of speculation, sir.”
“Yes, I should say we do,” Mayne retorted, not happily.
“Under my theory of the matter, the second woman was, as I have said, Eliza’s father. George Corcoran.”
There was a long silence.
This was the fifteen-second test to which Mayne had referred. “There were perhaps a dozen of us who examined her.”
“And because of the letter, all of us were anticipating a woman—a woman, Sir Richard. The letter was very clear upon that point.”
“She had long dark hair.”
“Did you examine it closely?” Lenox asked. “I acknowledge that I did not.”
“No,” Sir Richard admitted. He looked tired. He had the whole constabulary under his supervision, a dozen other irons in a dozen distant fires.
“Moreover,” Lenox said, “the body was bedecked in flowers—absolutely covered, head to toe.”
“At the time you thought this was a poetic gesture.”
“Yes, indeed. But it served a practical purpose. It covered the corpse’s body entirely—superfluously, layer upon layer of flower. We all remarked upon that.”
Mayne was looking away from Lenox, through the window at Whitehall. “The face did have very heavy white makeup on it, didn’t it,” he murmured at last.
Lenox nodded, encouraged. “An inch thick. The brilliance of it from Cairn’s perspective—well, he is fiendishly brilliant, I think, sir. The second murder was brilliant in three ways. In the first place, the disappearances of a twenty-year-old daughter and a fifty-year-old father would be very different from the investigation of two women of indeterminate age.
“In the second, his use of the river in the first murder meant that he could place the body within a stone’s throw of Corcoran and Sons, and we would assume that it might have come from anywhere along the river at all.”
Mayne nodded. “You were always agitated about the dryness of the body and the bier.”
“And third,” Lenox said, “Cairn, as the firm’s senior manager, controlled the outflow and inflow of all information about the Corcorans. He could have placed them in Scotland for the next six weeks without any trouble, as far as the employees and suppliers and traders were concerned. He had been at the firm for ages. His work was beyond reproach.”
There was a knock at the door. It was Inspector Field, buttoned up to his beard as usual, looking grim. “Come in,” Mayne said.
Field was holding a bundle of papers. “We were deceived. Jonathan Pond did not live with Mrs. Hutchinson.”
“What?”
“We have discovered that it was Cairn himself who rented that room. Every last shred of evidence in it, the whole case against Pond, was planted there by him. Pond’s real rooms are in Vauxhall.”
“The landlady said that he rented the room only a month ago,” Lenox murmured. “And that she barely saw him.”
Field nodded. “We found the address at Cairn’s. Two of my constables immediately went to Vauxhall and discovered a great deal of correspondence with Eliza Corcoran. She and Pond have been secretly engaged for some time. In the second-to-last letter he received, she expressed some fear about her father’s reaction, but her last letter is overjoyed. Her father was delighted and had promised that the whole business would be Pond’s.”
“He was the third victim, then,” Mayne said. “The letters did promise a third murder.”
Lenox nodded shortly. He had not forgotten looking into Pond’s eyes as the young clerk died. “Yes.”
“Field, come in. You may as well hear this theory.”
Field looked as if there were few things on earth he wanted less than to hear a twenty-three-year-old cub’s theory about a murder, the focus of decades of his attention. But he came in and sat down.
To his credit, he believed it much more quickly than Mayne. “Makes sense. You’ll recall that the elder Corcoran was described to us as very slight and thin, under five feet six inches. A wig would do for the hair. We never questioned that it would be a woman.
“Meanwhile, there were enough clues that if we did associate the murder with Corcoran and Sons, we would immediately find Pond. The spectacles. The letters in his desk. The rented room, obviously. Cairn must have been able to mimic his handwriting.”
“All these clerks are fairly able in that respect. Wilkinson does my own hand to a fineness.” Mayne sighed. “But what if we had never found Pond? Eventually the Corcorans would have been missed.”
“Easy,” said Field. “Pond kills himself and leaves a note in his own hand—in his rented room.”
Mayne nodded slowly. “Now the question is how to find the bastard, I suppose.”
Field winced. He was known to be very religious. Mayne put up a hand, apologizing. “Anyhow,” said Field, “Lenox, you must be congratulated.”
Lenox felt himself flush. “Thank you, sir.”
His skepticism had fallen gratifyingly away. “I think it’s the fourth finest piece of detection I’ve seen.”
“What are the first three?” Mayne asked Field.
“Oh, those are mine,” Field said mildly. “But the boy is only twenty. And he started out with the disadvantage of going to Oxford. In time he’ll overcome it. Hang on to him, Sir Richard.”