They failed.
It was wretchedly hot in London by that night. Though it had been a warm, pleasant day, the evening papers reported that when the sun set the temperature was at a record high for London. This would have been bad enough, but the streets were also peculiarly breezeless, leaving the heat to radiate into the eerie air, unsoftened, from every city stone, every iron gate.
Lenox tossed and turned in his bed. He was uneasy. That afternoon at three, several dozen constables, assisted by thirty-five members of the Grenadiers sent by the Queen herself, had simultaneously raided the large and small opium houses of Battersea.
They had gone nine to each, cutting off front and back entrances, striking all at once so that nobody would be tipped off. But they hadn’t found the Duke of Dorset.
Nor had any of the dozens of minor thieves or opium fanatics they’d turned out known anything—nothing at all, returned the reports to Mayne, at Scotland Yard, one after another after another, despite immense promises of reward and reprieve.
There was also a huge population of minor criminals in the clumped low-slung drinking holes that clung like gray old seashells around the south side of Westminster Bridge, respectable boatmen and bargemen, too, and not one of them had seen a carriage of the description they were seeking pass at any time around nine o’clock. Nor thereafter. Despite this being quite literally the only place besides Parliament or his own house to which Bury Street could have most quickly transported the kidnapped duke.
At eleven o’clock, Lenox gave in to his wakefulness and lit a candle. He felt as if he were baking—his windows open, but the air outside utterly dead, the leaves as still as statues.
Suddenly he realized somewhere within that it was going to rain before the night was out, one of those pieces of natural insight, left over from his childhood in the country, that he never quite knew where he stored. He wondered if a dozen streets away his brother Edmund felt it, too.
He paced the bedroom by candlelight, thinking. The block of ice in the basin on his bedside table was a pool of tepid water now. He dipped a small towel in it nevertheless and wiped his brow.
Finally, at midnight, he went downstairs. There he discovered that he was not alone in his sleeplessness.
“Hullo, Graham,” he said.
“Good evening, sir,” the butler said. He rose from the chair by the door, tucked into a miniature alcove, that he often used as a discreet way station. Despite the heat he was in a proper suit. He laid his book aside. “May I get you anything?”
“Oh, no, I’m just awake.” Lenox’s mind felt a little overheated by the weather, and by his doubts. “Awake, awake.”
“Is it anything specific, sir?”
“Primarily the duke being kidnapped.”
Graham, in the low light of the hallway, smiled. “Yes, sir,” he said.
Lenox sat down opposite Graham, on one of the chairs that lined the hallway. “You know you can read in my study if you’re up at night,” Lenox said.
“Thank you very much, sir,” Graham said, in a way that firmly rejected the notion.
Lenox sat for a moment, chin in his hand. “It’s the matter of the carriage going down Bury Street that bothers me so much,” he said. “Piccadilly was fifty yards ahead of them, and instead they turned right. Piccadilly would have meant certain safety. Whereas Jermyn Street, then Bury Street—either could have been blocked, and Bury Street brought them within sight, through the alley, of the Carlton Club, the very scene of the crime! Madness!”
“You believe the apple seller, sir?”
“Oh, without a doubt. I have tested his memory pretty thoroughly.” He sighed. “It’s such an odd decision. The only reason they would have made it is to get to the other side of the river, Battersea. And nobody there saw them. Someone should have.”
“You feel sure of that?”
“Absolutely sure. Yet the constables were relentless, according to Mayne. Nobody south of Westminster Bridge saw a thing. They have turned over every rock.”
“Perhaps the carriage didn’t cross Westminster Bridge, then, sir,” said Graham.
“Perhaps.” Lenox sat there, contemplating this. “But nothing this side of the river is closer by Jermyn Street. It would have to have been someone who didn’t know London in the slightest.”
Saying this, he thought of Pendleton.
“Yes, sir.”
They sat in silence for a little while, Lenox tracing triangles of geography in his mind, going over and over what Mayne had told him about the massive police effort to find the duke.
At times like this he felt a sort of nausea of confusion, the feeling a doctor must have when a diagnosis lies just beyond his grasp, a writer when the plot won’t come together.
It inclined him to a broad and undignified kind of despair. He was twenty-six—how soon hath time, that subtle thief!—and he had achieved nothing, he thought glumly. The police despised him, and any man or woman of his own class might dismiss him without a thought for this odd folly of his profession.
“Sir,” said Graham, after a long silence.
“Yes?” Lenox replied, looking up after a beat out of the oceanic lethargy of his thoughts.
“I’m going to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen, if you’d like one.”
“Oh. Why, all right. Thank you, Graham.” He mustn’t give in to melancholy. “I would eat some of that cold plum pudding if it happened to be in the larder, too.”
Graham smiled. “Of course, sir.”
Lenox pulled the little leather book of quotations from Shakespeare out of his pocket—he had found himself carrying it around all day—and, after stroking its soft cover with his thumb, opened it at random again.
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit and lost without deserving.
—Othello
He read this carefully, but it did not strike him as particularly interesting. When he closed the book, rather, he thought of the duke’s son, Corfe, whom he had visited earlier that afternoon.
He was a tall, fit lad, who was dressed but still very pale and keeping well back of the crowd, coughing, reclined on a sofa. Still, he had not seemed delirious, despite Ward’s statement. He had been with the duchess and with his sister, Violet.
This daughter, who completed the quartet of the family, had returned from their house in the country by private train car when she heard the news of her father. Few women could have been more eligible socially, but at thirty it seemed exceedingly unlikely now that she would marry. Lenox had heard of her—of this misfortune—before the duke had ever solicited his aid. Meeting her, Lenox observed that she was very sweet but painfully shy, with a large nose and small eyes: none of her mother’s beauty and perhaps twice her kindness. Of the three it was she who had asked the most intelligent questions. It was also evident that her brother loved her dearly.
As Lenox went over the meeting in his mind, Graham returned with a tray bearing two glasses of water and two plates of cold plum pudding. “Would it be presumptuous of me to join you, sir?” he asked.
“No. Imagine asking that, Graham! How many times did we go divvy on a plate of chips from the caravan outside Balliol?” Lenox took a mouthful of the pudding, deliciously sweet and cool. “Ah, that’s good.”
They sat up for a while longer. At around one o’clock, Lenox at last went back upstairs and fell into an overheated rest, sheets kicked aside. At four he vaguely sensed, through sleep, that the heat had broken; it was raining.
The relief of the rain was enormous. Half still in sleep, skin cool, he knew that he could find the answer if he was just patient and didn’t think too hard.
He lay there, listening to the hard rain, watching the branches lash around outside.
And then he had it.
He rang the bell for Graham’s room—the hour be damned—and got dressed as quickly as he could. The valet appeared soon, dressed himself.
“Sir?” he said.
“Would you come with me somewhere?”
“Of course, sir,” said Graham. “Shall I have the carriage taken out?”
Lenox looked into the rain. Rousing the groom and warming the horses at this hour would take twenty minutes. “We’ll chance a cab if you have two umbrellas and a pair of decent boots.”
If the duke hadn’t been in South London, if nobody in the all-seeing population of Battersea had spotted him in a single one of its nooks and hideaways, then—he wasn’t in South London.
That was the crucial fact.
And where else could doubling back to Bury Street have led the kidnappers? Suddenly it all seemed as clear as the water of a stream, the clues snapping into place: 1) that improbable bloodstain, 2) the ransom note tapped against Mayne’s knuckles, and 3) the driver’s account.
The only thing he still didn’t understand was how the stolen painting fit in.
A few moments later they were walking hunched under umbrellas down Hampden Lane, looking up and down the street for a taxicab. At last a slow old rambler passed by on Brook Street, its horse in very little hurry.
They got in. “Dorset House, please,” Lenox said.
“V’good, sir,” said the driver.
It was an open cab. “Not tired?”
He was an old man, who had an umbrella himself, hooked into his trap. “Sleep less, a’ my age, sir. Specially on a night so infernal ’ot as this one used to be.”
It was a wet but uneventful cab ride—until, just as they were turning through St. James’s Park, Graham said, in a low voice, “I believe we are being followed by a hansom.”