Idly he examined the pocketknife Halifax had been killed with, as if it might unfold not just three knives and a compass, but, more useful than any of these, some kind of answer to this puzzle.
Suddenly he spotted something he hadn’t seen before.
Along the broad side of the smallest knife was a faint inscription. He had believed Tradescant’s statement as true, that the pocketknife had been unmarked, but then these words were all but faded from wear and would have been easy to miss in the wrong light. The white sun helped Lenox read them now.
For my son, Aloysius Billings, they said, July 1861.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
So the knife that had killed Halifax belonged to the first lieutenant of the Lucy.
Lenox retracted the blade into its groove and considered what he ought to do. After several unhurried moments of reflection, he went down to the wardroom and sought out McEwan.
“Which of these is Lieutenant Billings’s cabin?” he asked.
“The one three to the left of yours, sir.”
“What is his servant’s name?”
“Mr. Butterworth, sir.”
“Thank you.”
Lenox counted three doors and knocked on the third. There were footsteps within it and Butterworth came to the door, a jaundiced man, too tall to be aboard a ship. Even answering the knock he was stooped over, nearly brushing the beams of the ceiling with his head.
“Sir?”
“Is Lieutenant Billings within?”
“No, sir. He’s on duty.”
“I didn’t see him on the quarterdeck.”
“Indeed, sir? He should be off shortly.”
“I’ll check back.”
Lenox returned to his own cabin and made a provisional list of clues, simply to organize his own mind: the penknife, the surgical incisions in Halifax’s torso, the missing blue shirt, the unusual fact that Halifax was not on duty but nevertheless on deck, and finally the medallion.
This he pulled from the handkerchief he had been keeping it in. (Pockets might be unloved within the navy, but Lenox retained his own.)
“McEwan, could you bring me a basin of warm water here at my desk?” he called out.
The warm water came, McEwan trotting it to Lenox. With a bit of rag and a sliver of grayish hand soap, Lenox set about cleaning the medallion.
It was, as the captain had initially observed, roughly the size of a large coin, a crown, say, but made entirely of sterling silver. When the blood was gone from the object’s surface it sparkled again as if newly polished, which perhaps it recently had been, in particular if it were a treasured element of one officer’s formal dress.
Lenox pulled out the magnifying glass to look at the object more closely. (This magnifying glass was one of his favorite objects, a present from his friend Lord Cabot, which had an ivory handle and gold rim, small enough to fit into a breast pocket.) Just as he was about to do so, however, there were footsteps in the wardroom and he abandoned the medallion and the magnifying glass to discover whose they were.
It was Billings, as he had hoped.
“Hello, Mr. Lenox,” said the lieutenant.
Lenox scanned the man’s face for guilt, an action that he had never found particularly edifying, given the variety of men’s demeanors and the basic inscrutableness of the brains behind them, but nonetheless performed out of habit.
“I hoped it would be someone I might ask a favor of. Lieutenant, do you carry a penknife, or a pocketknife, about your person?”
Billings’s reaction, which Lenox carefully watched, was one of seemingly legitimate surprise. “No,” he said, “aboard ship I only have a compass and a short telescope with me, in general, as you may see.”
He motioned to where these two objects, the second a brass tube no bigger than a half-burned candle, hung from a cord around his waist. Now that he thought of it Lenox perceived that both were worn as Martin wore his, perhaps in imitation.
“Ah, of course.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Do you have a penknife at all?”
“I do, in my cabin.”
“Could I borrow it, by any chance?”
Billings frowned. “You may, of course—but is it possible that you don’t carry one, or that McEwan doesn’t?”
“Oh, yes,” said Lenox, rather lamely. It was a barefaced lie. “And just when I want to shave my pen down, to write a letter home, you know.”
“Come into my cabin and I’ll fetch it for you.”
They went into Billings’s roomy cabin, which was unadorned to the point of austerity. On the desk, set in a slight circular depression in the wood so that it wouldn’t rock, was a silver christening cup, much battered and dented but lovingly polished. Poking up from it was a quill and a short length of string spilled over the side.
“Should be in here,” said the officer, and started to root around in the cup. When he didn’t find it he actually picked the cup up and turned it over on his desk, fluttering chits of paper and old bits of rubber out with the quill and the string.
“Mr. Billings?” said Lenox.
“How strange. It doesn’t seem to be here. I say, Butterworth!” he cried out toward the galley.
Lenox opened his palm and extended it out. “Lieutenant, is this it?”
“Why—and so it is! Where did you find it?”
“This was the weapon that killed Lieutenant Halifax.”
Billings was struck silent by this information. Only after a moment did he manage to ask if Lenox could repeat what he had said.
“This was the weapon that killed Halifax, I’m afraid. Tradescant believes it to be such, at any rate, and his reasoning is sound so far as I can see.”
“That cannot be.”
“It was in the corpse, underneath the stomach.”
Billings, who had been close to vomiting when they inspected Halfax’s body, inhaled sharply as if to steady himself, and for good measure took two deep breaths. “I suppose it might have been stolen from my cabin,” he said.
“Who would have had the opportunity?”
“Sailors are in here occasionally, on errands. Any officer, of course, and their servants, might have slipped into any of the wardroom cabins.”
“The purser’s mate, for instance, or the surgeon’s?”
“Yes. Our cook. There must be twenty people, thirty. More.” Now something occurred to Billings. “But look here—why did you go through that foolery of asking whether I had a penknife?”
“It was a shabby trick, and I apologize. Will you shake my hand?” Lenox asked. “In my profession—I suppose I should say my former profession—it is necessary occasionally to be deceitful. I didn’t believe that you killed Halifax, but I wanted to judge your reaction.”
Billings was perhaps too honest to make a diplomatic reply, but he shook hands and said, “Yes, I see.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll just keep the knife—not for long.”
“It was given me by my father,” said Billings, “when I first sailed. I hold a great attachment to the object, foolish though that may be.”
“I shall take good care of it.”
“Well, if the situation requires it, I can scarcely refuse.”
“Thank you.”
“Am I a suspect?”
“Everyone must be,” said Lenox. “But I don’t think you killed Halifax, no. Nor do I suspect Carrow, for he was on watch, and among men. Nor the surgeon, nor the captain if it comes to it. Everyone else is fair game at the moment.”
“What will you do?”
“Begin interviewing people.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In his mind Lenox was all but persuaded that someone of the wardroom—a neighbor of his, in other words—had committed this deed. He was open to the possibility that a sailor had murdered Halifax, but didn’t the theft of Billings’s penknife at least suggest proximity to his cabin? Moreover, didn’t Halifax’s midnight rendezvous with his murderer suggest an equal, rather than a subordinate relationship—in other words a gentleman of the wardroom, who might reasonably have asked a second lieutenant to meet him in secret?