The case: a month was a dangerous amount of time, as he tried to remind himself every hour. Just long enough to let it slip through one’s fingers.
After he had visited the offices of Sir Riley Callum and Thomas McConnell, he returned home. The papers, which he had taken with him and read along the way back, were full of nothing but the Thames Ophelia, as she was now universally known. His own name did not come up again, blessedly. He had taken scissors in the small leather valise he carried, and even as the carriage rattled, he carefully sliced the stories he wanted to preserve for his archive. It reassured him not to miss a day of the practice.
When he returned home, he found that Graham’s own newspapers had been dissected and sorted, too.
“How do you do, sir,” Graham said, greeting him near the breakfast table, where he had been.
“The rug is back.”
“Yes, sir,” said Graham.
It did look cleaner. “Mrs. Huggins!” shouted Lenox.
The housekeeper appeared after a moment. “Sir?”
Lenox glanced at the clock. It was only ten, but he was starving. “Could you please ask them to make me a sandwich with cold chicken and some of that chutney you made, if we still have any. And a pot of tea. And see if we have any shortbread biscuits, those square ones, and if we don’t, please fire the cook. Then go get some yourself, because I want those, too.”
“I’ll—I’ll bring the food, sir,” said the housekeeper, who perhaps hadn’t foreseen her employer’s having accomplished enough business of an unpleasant nature in the morning that he would be in quite such a cavalierly commanding frame of mind. “Just a few moments, if you please.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Huggins. The rug looks marvelous, incidentally.”
“Oh, I’m pleased you think so, sir!” she said, and looked positively happy for the first time in a long while.
Lenox felt guilty. “Well, not at all, not at all. And don’t really fire the cook.”
“We have shortbread, sir.”
This was the first thing that might have passed as a joke in the long tripartite acquaintance of Lenox, Graham, and Mrs. Huggins, and as she withdrew, the detective and the valet exchanged a look of raised eyebrows.
“Well,” said Lenox, sighing. “Walnut Island.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m going to the dockyards after I eat. You read the papers this morning, from the look of it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They’ve not gotten far.”
“That was my conclusion, too, sir.”
Lenox threw himself down into a chair. “It may in fact be possible that we are the ones who can do it, you know,” he said.
“I hope we may help, sir.”
Reading between the lines—for of course outwardly, the press’s opinion being of paramount importance, everything was presented in terms of the rapidest progress, Field was “intensely focused on a handful of suspects,” Mayne was “confident an arrest would be made within the week”—the police themselves had made no advancement whatsoever.
That was to say, there was no name to attach to either woman; nobody had come forward to claim the body, or had recognized the sketch of her face distributed by police; the papers reported no new witnesses.
Fleet Street would soon grow restless. Innumerable articles, all with nothing to say.
Except that of the Challenger, of course. It published the two letters the murderer had written under a banner headline so large and provocative that Lenox had spotted it thirty times that morning already.
“You looked into Nathaniel Butler?” Lenox asked, shuffling through the clippings he had pulled out of his carrying case. He pointed to Graham’s usual chair. “Please, sit.”
“I did, sir,” said Graham.
“And?”
“I believe he is innocent, sir.” He pushed across a piece of paper. “To begin with, he was away from London for three days on either side of the first murder.”
“That would be a perfect crime,” Lenox pointed out.
“Very true, sir, and yet it would be hard to imagine a less perfect crime than the second. He reported it to the police himself. That seems very stupid.”
“Or the act of an obsessive.”
“Perhaps. But a third obsession, sir, in addition to the letter writing and the—” Graham’s imperturbable face looked briefly perplexed, and then he alit on the word. “The symbolism, sir? Furthermore, I met Mr. Butler in prison.”
“How did he strike you?”
“He is utterly bewildered and afraid, sir. I wouldn’t credit him with the intelligence to plan a luncheon.”
“Hm.”
“He was wearing glasses with a chain on them, I feel bound to report as well.”
Lenox considered this, tapping the table with a finger. Then he picked up the dossier Graham had prepared and began to read it.
All the relevant details of Butler’s life (date of birth, current address, employer, salary) were here. He was married and had two children. He was relatively prosperous by a clerk’s standards—his wife had brought two adjacent townhouses into the marriage—which was another strike against Lenox’s portrait of the killer. Though it was important, he thought, not to let that become binding in his thoughts.
“It would be just like Field to arrest this poor clerk and prove right,” he said. “Where was Butler during the week he was away from London?”
“Visiting his mother in Birmingham, sir. She is ailing, and he was owed vacation. His family was with him.”
“You have confirmed this?”
Graham nodded, and Lenox trusted the nod implicitly. “Still, he might have returned in the night to do it. Not all that far, Birmingham.”
“Anything is possible, sir.”
“Alas.”
Lenox’s early lunch arrived, and he fell upon it like a horde of Visigoths sacking a city. It was gone before long. He swirled the last of his tea, drank it off, and then, picking up his newspapers so that he might finish clipping them along the way, left to go to the dockyards.
He arrived at the navy’s own shipping yard half an hour later. This was an enormous and busy building just along the river, with a heavy smell of fish and old seagoing equipment.
He knew that a friend of a friend, or really a friend-of-several-friends, a fellow he’d met once or twice, was in charge here, Captain William Ampleforth. He sent his card upstairs and was beckoned up not much later. He was here to cross his t’s and dot his i’s, as his most odious schoolmaster had exhorted them every day to do with completely unthinking repetitiveness. (“Boys, you’ll conquer the world if you’ll only…,” and so forth. Thus far none of them had conquered the world that Lenox could see, his old schoolmates. For the most part, they seemed to be drinking in various London clubs and bars.)
Ampleforth was a genial and generous soul, red cheeked, that particular kind of round-faced naval homebody who feels best at home in an officers’ mess. He immediately offered Lenox a tot of rum, and they drank together. Then they discussed the murders, which were all anyone was talking about along the river, according to the captain.
Lenox explained that he was looking into them.
“Bloody mess,” Ampleforth said. “This clerk they’ve arrested is the man, I suppose?”
“He may be.”
“There’s plenty of violence for an Englishman to do at sea,” Ampleforth said, shaking his head. “This chap needs Bedlam.”
“He’ll get it,” Lenox replied.
“Anyhow, what was it you wanted from me?”
“Ah yes. It’s about a seaman’s trunk. Have you ever seen one that belonged to the Gallant?”
“I imagine so. Why?”
Lenox explained about Walnut Island. It was news to Ampleforth—evidently, to his credit, not a regular reader of the Challenger. (The other papers would get the murderer’s letters into the evening editions.) “It had ‘HMS Gallant’ stenciled on its lid,” Lenox said, “and on the bottom was printed ‘G957,’ which I assume is because it was issued by the ship. No other markings.”
Ampleforth frowned. “G957?” he said.
“Yes. Why, does that seem unusual?”
“Not unusual so much as not usual, if you see what I mean. We’re not too precious about our lockers in the navy, so long as they match the dimensions. Most sailors are on a dozen different ships before they’re nineteen.”
Lenox was puzzled. “Hm. I see. So that marking—”
“It wouldn’t have come from the Gallant, anyhow. Just the manufacturer’s mark, I suppose.”
“And what about the stencil on the lid?”
“Well, that would be quite normal—except I would have expected it to be scratched in with a knife.” Ampleforth thought of something. “Look here, draw me a picture of this trunk, would you?”
Lenox did so as quickly and well as he could, its brass handles, its rounded top. Ampleforth took it and immediately shook his head. “No, no, no,” he said.
“What is it?”
Ampleforth turned the sheet around. “If there is one thing we value aboard a ship, it is space. Well—water, but after water, space.” He started to sketch himself. “Look. A seaman’s trunk is always flat, like this, so it can be stacked. Always.”
Lenox felt a buzz of excitement, as yet still mysterious. “I see.”
“What’s more, I’ve never seen a trunk yet with just two markings on it.”
“Perhaps it could have come from a private ship, not a naval ship?”
“They have the same exact customs, when it comes to that kind of thing, a thousand times in a thousand. All their men are retired from our service. And anyhow, it says the Gallant’s name on it.”
Lenox sat back. He was deeply uneasy. It was like the board from the second murder not being wet; he had made the mistake of believing what he had been manipulated to believe, that it was a seaman’s locker he had been dealing with, first because the articles they had clipped said so, second because of the words HMS GALLANT on its lid.
“Then what kind of locker is it?” Lenox asked.
“I’ve no idea at all. I’ll tell you what, ring for my clerk. Let’s ask him.”
Ampleforth hit a bell. Meanwhile, for the first time, Lenox had the feeling of his mind meeting the murderer’s own—the planning it had taken to stencil HMS GALLANT on the box, the careful misdirection, the hideousness of the two women’s deaths, the dry board but the wet clothing—and he felt a chill of fear somewhere deep inside.