A letter arrived at the Challenger that afternoon and was published that evening. The hue and cry went up all across London, and Lenox first learned about it as he passed a newsstand, going home from seeing Clarkson.
The letter was different in tone from the previous two, though it bore a similarity to them, too.
31 May, 1850
Sirs,
Few people know the world’s shipping passages more intimately than I do, despite never having ventured outside of England myself. Now, it would appear, is the moment to take advantage of that knowledge; by the time this letter reaches you, I shall already be far from these shores.
Nevertheless, I wish to convey three small truths.
1) Since the game is up, I may as well tell you that my aim—and nobody could have come closer!—was to take possession of the firm of Corcoran and Sons. I wrote George Corcoran’s will myself, knowing his hand as well as my own; I was to be vested as 51 percent owner in the event that his daughter was deceased at the time of his own death, with various family members receiving the remainder. (To aspiring criminals reading this: Be just avaricious enough, and no more.) It was the least reward I had earned through twenty-eight years of scrupulous service. Scrupulous acting, I may add. Pond’s suicide (attributable, as I envisioned it, to the madness of having Eliza reject him in favor of her father, which would have accounted for his anger at both of them) would have been the ideal coup de grâce. Alas—the world loses a work of art, in losing my crime.
2) In that light, it is some comfort that the crimes remain, if I say so myself, perfect. My previous crimes, which you will never discover, were perfect, too—but they were less challenging, since they did not involve my own acquaintances.
3) Any attempt to trace my whereabouts will result in a direct attack on my pursuers and their families. This I take as my personal insurance policy against the absurd society which would put a mind as brilliant as mine to such inadequate use.
Yours very sincerely,
Theobald Cairn
Graham, who had come along to see Clarkson, also had a paper. He and Lenox finished reading at the same time. “That is our man,” Lenox said. “What do you make of it?”
“I think he is a very brilliant and a very mad person, sir.”
“As do I.” Lenox stood, ruminating, on the corner. It was early evening, the trade in the street quiet and amiable. “That phrase—‘my previous crimes’—gives me a chill. I wonder which bodies are buried where.”
Graham nodded, unsettled as Lenox rarely saw him. “Yes, sir.”
“If this is our introduction to the profession, I suppose we had better see the ugly parts of it right at the outset.”
“I suppose so, sir.”
Their walk home took them across the river. Around the curve was Bankside; to the west, a ways, Walnut Island.
How sordid it all seemed.
There had been bridges across the Thames for two thousand years or so. The first one had been built by the Romans, who had asked themselves what they should call it, and replied, very sensibly if perhaps not with the keenest sense of creativity, London Bridge.
It had been rebuilt and half-rebuilt fifty times since then. Its towering two-tiered presence was visible off to their right. Beneath them were various small craft, traveling the river; a fishing boat with its nets out, a junk collector, a shallow little flat-bottomed skiff upon which two boys were entertaining themselves. The water was dark, both always still and always moving.
Lenox struggled to step back from the case, to assess his role in it. Was this it? Was Cairn to go unpunished? He felt disgusted with himself. The torment of it was that Exeter was quite right—if not for Lenox’s arrogant little on-the-spot scraps of detection, they might have hauled Johanssen in.
As if reading his mind, Graham said, about three-quarters of the way across the bridge, “It occurs to me, sir, that the police would have been unlikely anyhow to hold Johanssen—Cairn—at Newgate for very long.”
“How’s that?”
“In the first place, I suspect he might have told them that he saw Nathaniel Butler, the clerk who discovered the body, committing the murder, sir.”
“But the Matilda.”
“Yes. I was getting to that, sir. He was playing the inebriate, at the time, and at that very moment a ship called the Mariah was docked nearby. She was due to depart that day on a one-month voyage.”
“The Mariah.”
“I looked through the old naval gazettes this morning. There are two able seamen upon her lists named Johanssen. Brothers, no doubt.”
Lenox stopped. “My goodness.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He meant the Mariah. He only misspoke.”
“Precisely, sir. No doubt the Matilda had been on his mind.”
“If he had merely said the Mariah, we might never have caught him at all.”
“Indeed, sir. Or if you had not gone for that row, or if you had not spotted the juggling boy.”
They walked on in silence for some time, and then, after they had taken the four steps off the old wooden bridge and into the streets of North London again, Lenox said, “He really was so close to getting away with it, wasn’t he.”
The thought made him feel ill. “No, sir,” said Graham, shaking his head and frowning. “We would have found him.”
“Perhaps. You are better at this than I am, you know. You would have found him, I reckon.”
Lenox felt a strange absolution in this moment, for whatever reason. It made little sense. Though perhaps it had to do with how far off Field’s investigation had been, not to mention Exeter’s and Sinex’s. (He had suspected Sinex himself, in fact, briefly.) They had at least cleared Jonathan Pond’s name.
What a few weeks it had been! Two cases; two resolutions; neither party satisfied.
For Clarkson, whom they had just visited, had cut up pretty rough.
Lenox and Graham had gotten to his rooms in the Strand at around half noon, just as Clarkson was beginning his lunch. He invited them to sit, though not to join him in the meal.
It was a densely packed old place, not musty but accumulative, with old books in Moroccan leather piled high in the shelves (Quarterly Review of Midlands Engineers was a typical title), big, dark, heavy furniture, rock samples under glass, compasses, astrolabes.
“How do you find yourself, Mr. Clarkson?” Lenox asked as they sat.
He scowled. “Very unhappy, sir,” he said. His facial expression, his close-shaved white hair, and his spectacles gave him the look of a banker in that moment, an Ebenezer Scrooge. “I have not been to Dulwich these three weeks. I find myself quite paralyzed. And by something so trivial!”
“Yes, as five pounds,” said Lenox.
“As five pounds!” Clarkson banged a fist upon the table.
Lenox glanced at Graham. “I wonder if you might tell me how you came to live in London,” Lenox said. “Did your family set you up in business as an engineer?”
“My family! Ha. No, it was not my family.”
“How then did you begin?” Lenox asked again lightly. “It must have been a challenge—and you have ascended very high.”
He gestured around him, and Clarkson actually followed his gesture, looking at the spacious room, the expensive paintings on the walls, the footman waiting faithfully nearby to clear his filet of salmon.
“It was a challenge, to be sure,” he said. A subtle change came over his face—nostalgia, pride, though both remained contained within his usual curtness. “It was many years ago now.”
“Fifty?”
“More. It is funny that you should mention the sum of five pounds, in fact,” he said. He chuckled. “That is precisely the sum with which I came to London initially, believe it or not.
“From a very early age, I had a mechanical aptitude, you see. I could have been a farmer, like my father. But even at six, at seven, I could fix the equipment on the farm better than he or any of his hands could. For some time, I went to school in the mornings and worked in the afternoons. But I stopped at twelve. That was when he allowed me to hire myself out to other farms to mend their equipment.”
“What was your wage?”
Clarkson laughed, delighted at the question. “Pennies an hour,” he said. “It seemed fair enough at the time. We were deep in the country, of course.
“I was always a frugal lad. I had nine elder brothers and sisters—one among them still alive, and she has visited me in Dulwich—and I certainly learned to look after myself. At fifteen, I had saved five pounds. I was determined that I should come to the city. How I even had heard of the city, I am not quite sure—but I was determined.”
“Five pounds, was it indeed,” Lenox said in a mild voice.
But Clarkson was already in the midst of his reminiscences—and, ignoring this gently pointed interjection, went on with his story, which in the fluency of its telling seemed like one he had told many, many times before.