Lenox and Graham were up very late that night. It wasn’t for any particularly exigent reason; they were merely untangling Cairn’s methods and motivations to their satisfaction, going over the same facts again and again.
“Think of his deceptions. Not one of them was bad.”
It was around midnight. Graham—who had spoken these words—had dropped the “sir” from the end of his sentences an hour or two before, and even loosened his tie.
“No.” Lenox ticked them off with his fingers. “The stencil for the Gallant. The letters—giving us the date of the second murder, telling us that it would be a woman, ensuring that we thought his motive merely vainglorious, not practical. The flowers, the shilling, the white makeup, the rented room full of proof against Pond—proof just subtle enough, such as the flowers in the Bible, to make the investigators proud of their discovery.”
“The performance as Johanssen. It was quite brilliant to take a vacation and become another person, briefly.”
“The performance as Cairn!” Lenox remarked. “Never would I have suspected that rough-and-tumble sailor, just out of a drunken brawl, as living within seven post codes of the fussy and well-dressed senior manager at Corcoran and Sons. Merely as an actor he did so well.”
Mrs. Huggins, who, to her credit, had stayed stolidly up with them, came into the room. One of the cats trailed her. “Would you like me to freshen your tea?” she asked.
“Oh, heavens,” said Lenox, standing. “I’m so terribly sorry, Mrs. Huggins. No, it’s still warm—no, please, retire for the night. Take the morning off. We’ve only lost track of time. Unforgivable to keep you up so late.”
“Not at all, sir,” she said.
“Are the cats—they’ve had milk, and all that kind of thing?”
She looked at him as if this were a risible question, but said, “Yes, sir, they have been fed.”
“Oh, good. Good.”
“If that will be all, sir?”
“That will be all.”
It was not close to all for Graham and Lenox, however, and not much later it was Lenox who went to the kitchen to boil more water for their tea leaves.
He was in an old school sweater full of holes. A part of him was still vibrating with the joy of Field’s compliment of him in Mayne’s office; another part still, residually, anxious about Elizabeth, though he knew logically that she was safe; and in still another he was thinking only of his father.
“What about the strangulation, sir?” Graham asked when Lenox was back. His formality had returned during Lenox’s brief absence. “Why feign it?”
“To make it seem like a crime of passion? Wouldn’t you think? To match the letter.”
Graham frowned. “Yet in the Walnut Island case, it really was strangulation.”
“A young woman,” Lenox said. He winced. “Perhaps Cairn didn’t fancy the risks of a confrontation with Corcoran, and resorted to poison, but wanted the methods of murder to match.”
“Possibly,” said Graham.
Lenox frowned. “He must have been days in making the plan, though, because he had the clothing of a sailor, and the beard, too. His hair was all fallen about.”
Graham nodded slowly. “If Corcoran really did hire a private investigator—”
“Another skillful deception!” said Lenox. “This whole Leckie business.”
“But what would he have said when the investigator returned?”
Lenox shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. He helped Corcoran hire the investigator.”
Graham nodded wonderingly. “Good Lord, the effort and expense.”
“He was well paid for many decades, and a bachelor. He evidently staked everything on these murders. The question is why,” Lenox said. “That is what I still don’t understand.”
“What I still don’t understand,” said Graham, “is how someone so methodical could have mentioned the Matilda!”
“It was his only error. Listen—I’ve no doubt it was a jarring morning for him. He had adopted the character, but it must have been a near miss with Nathaniel Butler, if Cairn was discovered close by enough to be detained. For all we know, he actually intended to push the body on the board into the water and was more or less caught in the act.
“Anyhow, he would have had the Matilda in the back of his mind, given that she was expected soon with a shipment of their wares. He was caught, and he blurted it out.”
“Mm.”
“And I let him right off the hook, didn’t I,” said Lenox bitterly. “What I have learned, above all, is to examine every body carefully when one has the chance. At least I shall take that knowledge forward.”
In the next hours, they went on discussing the case. Graham speculated that perhaps Cairn had some reason to believe that if Pond and Miss Eliza Corcoran never married, he stood some chance of taking over the business himself.
Long service, after all.
But could a man’s character remain hidden for so long? Thirty long years of work—and then the sudden, brutal outburst of violence, as calm as a bank deposit, as carefully plotted as a trip to Asia.
The next morning, as the search for Cairn continued all over London, Lenox went to see Lady Jane—Elizabeth, as he knew he must call her—at the Savoy.
She had friends surrounding her. One of them was her husband’s cousin Mrs. Edward Taylor, a young lady of sturdy appearance, whom Lenox had met many times. “Well, here is the hero of the hour,” she said.
Her tone was not kind. “How do you do, Mrs. Taylor?” said Lenox.
“Would you care for a cup of tea?” Elizabeth asked him, far more solicitously.
He rubbed his eyes. “Indeed I would, if you could spare it. I was up very late, and up very early.”
“The price is your story,” Elizabeth said, rising to fetch a teacup from the sideboard of the hotel room herself. “All the papers will say is that the London police are in hot pursuit of an anonymous senior shipping manager named—what was it, Cousin?”
“Theobald Cairn,” said Mrs. Edward Taylor without hesitation.
Lenox raised his eyebrows. “There are details of the story that I’m not entirely sure are quite right to repeat in mixed company.”
He had been to the Yard that morning: the second victim, the Ophelia, had indeed been male.
If there was a single sentence designed to elicit Mrs. Edward Taylor’s sympathetic interest, it was this one, however, and soon Lenox was telling them the entire tale, beginning to end.
“Good heavens, Charles,” Elizabeth said when he had finished. “I must say, I think you’re brilliant.”
“I’ve always thought so.”
She smiled. “Stop that.”
He smiled in return. He was grateful to Cairn in this one respect, perhaps—that the events of yesterday had returned his relationship with his childhood friend to its normal footing. “Only joking, of course.”
“What a glorious beginning to your career.”
Lenox shook his head. “I don’t know that I shall continue as a detective, as it happens.”
“No?” said Mrs. Edward Taylor.
He thought about Pond’s face, and the brutal infinite twenty minutes when he had thought Elizabeth dead, and the ugly reality of seeing a body, a corpse, and shook his head once more. “No. I think my first case will be my last. There is a good deal of traveling I would like to do. Perhaps when I return I will have some idea of how I might most profitably use my days.”
“You won’t go immediately?” said Elizabeth.
“Oh! No. No, not until—not for some while.” She looked at him, understanding as well as he did what he had been going to say, or what he meant, anyway, about his father. “Anyhow, I tell a lie. I have another case, and there is a certain Mr. Rupert Clarkson whom I intend to call upon this morning.”
“Who is he?” asked Mrs. Edward Taylor, frowning. “Do I know that name?”
“I doubt your circles overlap, ma’am,” Lenox said, taking a sip of his tea. “An unrelated matter.”
“You will have to postpone your travels until this Cairn villain is caught,” said Elizabeth’s cousin.
“The Yard have that well in hand.” Indeed, they had been all through Cairn’s rooms, and were interviewing his sister this morning. All the ports were alerted to his appearance. “My own utility is at its end.”
“That can never be true of a capable man,” said Mrs. Edward Taylor very finally, with the pomposity of a person for whom cliché is the only real wisdom.
“No,” said Elizabeth stoutly. “That is true.”
She was so young—nineteen!—and yet Lenox, several years her elder, and until the fall before having, out of habit, thought of her as of very nearly belonging to a different generation, looked at the wisdom and the intelligence in her face, and renewed his word to himself. He could not marry her;
well, he would not marry;
and he would not be a detective;
the price was too high, this feeling too sickened for all its exhilaration;
and he would go to Lenox House and spend as much time with his father as he could;
and he would write down every minute detail he could remember about their trip to Russia;
and then he would travel;
except that now, before all that began, before he could begin not marrying and not detecting and writing down and traveling the far reaches of the earth and being a person, a real live adult, he would go and see about Rupert Clarkson.