Well — something of a success. One of the partners, the Frenchman LeMaire, had left the firm during its initial wobbles, certain that it would never make a profit, and founded a competing agency of his own. Fortunately, just when LeMaire’s pessimism seemed as if it might have been quite clear-eyed, the three remaining partners had found their feet. In part this was because the other two were superb: Lord John Dallington, an aristocrat of nearly thirty, and Polly Buchanan, an enterprising young widow who worked as “Miss Strickland” and was a specialist in all the small mysteries the middle class produced, stolen silver, vanished fiancées, that sort of thing.
An even greater percentage of their success came from Lenox, who had theretofore been far and away the least productive of them all. The difficulty had been some resistance in him, at first, to treating it as a business—a gentleman by birth, with a private fortune, in his previous life he had been an amateur detective, working from his town house in the West End, taking cases as it pleased him.
When he had finally realized — after those crushing first months, after LeMaire’s departure — that he was actually in trade now, his attitude had changed. With systematic determination, he had set out with a new idea: that he would win clients from the City, the business world. Using all of his many contacts from Parliament and the social sphere in which he and his wife, Lady Jane, moved, he had amassed some two dozen regulars just like Newby, who kept Lenox, Strickland, and Dallington on retainer. They were the agency’s prizes, their names and files kept in a small gray safe, secure from the snooping eyes of anyone who might be willing to offer them to LeMaire. The firm regularly checked in on each of these clients, and also remained on call should anything unusual occur — a work stoppage, the theft of materials or money, bookkeeping discrepancies. Lenox and his colleagues prided themselves on handling such issues much more quickly and adeptly than Scotland Yard could. That speed and discretion was where they made their fees worthwhile.
The triumph of this strategy — the agency had had to hire four additional detectives now, and several more clerks — had come at some cost to Lenox. It was the beginning of October now, and he hadn’t personally handled a case since July. Instead he spent a great deal of his time managing men like Newby and delegating their problems to the firm’s active detectives, Atkinson, Weld, Mayhew, and now Davidson. Polly had her small but lucrative cases to handle—“Miss Strickland” continued to advertise in the papers — and Dallington his own idiosyncratic custom, much of it criminal, which came in part from the close work with the Yard that Lenox had handed down to him upon taking up his political career.
And in fact, that was precisely the kind of work that he had returned to this field to do. He loved above all the pursuit, the infinitesimally small details upon which a murder investigation might turn, the dirt in a shirt cuff, the abrasion on a windowsill, the missing ten pounds. Well; he would return to it, in time. At the very least, dealing with Newby was vastly, incomparably better than the dismal state of affairs he had experienced from January through the spring, when he had had no clients, had contributed nothing, had been a positive millstone around his partners’ necks.
Shouldn’t he be appreciative for that?
Yes, he thought, with resolve — and for the rest of the morning he handled the business with great good cheer, just as he had past midnight the evening before, putting his signature to papers, assigning work to the clerks and detectives, making time for a rapid and humorous cup of tea with Dallington, and glancing in his free moments at the account book, which was pleasingly crosshatched and filled in and prosperous-looking.
By noon, therefore, he was in an excellent mood. “Pointilleux!” he called out.
The young Frenchman appeared, one hand on the doorway, head popping around it. “Yes?”
“Are you still investigating that break-in in Bayswater? The butcher’s shop?”
Pointilleux nodded and stepped into the office. He was actually LeMaire’s nephew — had stayed behind after his uncle left, a serious, pleasant presence, very young, and beloved by them all, only in part because he’d kept faith in their project. Though he was barely nineteen, they assigned him some of their smaller cases, as part of an agreement they had made to train him. “I am come to suspect the wife very strongly. She has conduct an affair of the heart with the constable.”
“Then take the afternoon off,” said Lenox.
Pointilleux’s face opened into a beam. “Ah!” he said. “Excellent! I will!”
Lenox, pleased at having atoned for his previous irritability, bade the young man good-bye and then turned his eyes to his own appointment book. What was next? He knew there was a meeting with Carter later that afternoon, an important client who owned a cloth wholesaler in Lambeth. But was his lunch hour spoken for?
And then Lenox’s own face fell, his heart with it. All the vim he felt from having achieved so much on a Monday morning vanished.
He was engaged to have lunch with his brother, Edmund, he remembered now; in fact, he had to leave soon, if he was going to get to the restaurant on time. With a sigh, he rose and fetched his hat from its stand, dreading how difficult it had become to see one of the three people in all the world that he cared about the most.
CHAPTER TWO
He stepped out into Chancery Lane and looked left and right for a cab. In that instant, at least, he could see London through Newby’s eyes — chaos. Toward the Holborn end of the street there were two carriages hopelessly wedged together, as they stood abreast almost exactly as wide as the lane, and closer to Lenox was a great congregation around the local coffee stand. The young clerks of the businesses along this avenue liked to gather here; there was a great bright copper boiler over a brass-handled smudge pot, and its hawker in his green smock was calling out “Cup and two thins, only a penny, mind!” to all who passed. Two of Lenox’s own clerks were standing nearby, eating their two thins — pieces of bread and butter, thickish ones in fact — with between them a piece of cold beef, another ha’penny.
Lenox turned up toward Holborn. What he knew and Newby didn’t, of course, was the secret regularity that existed within this commotion. Though it looked like there was a mad press at the coffee stand, every person knew his place in line, and even now one of the carriages at the top of the road was sliding forward, the other one just backward. Both would be on their way within a minute or two.
Even the swarming walkers on the pavement — the only secret there was to keep to the right and walk at a steady pace. There were men of the city who traveled four or five miles to work by foot every morning and read their newspapers the whole way without lifting their eyes, because they were so confident of their paces.
As he reached the corner, he came to a man selling newspapers, with large placards on his cart announcing the most recent news about the disappearance of Muller, the great German pianist.
The fellow tipped his cap. “Mr. Lenox, sir,” he said.
“Anything new in there, Parsons?”
“Not a mote o’ news, sir, no. ’Tis the midday edition, however.”
“Ah, well, give me one for the ride, then.”
“Much obliged, sir,” said Parsons, taking his coin.
Lenox found a hansom cab and settled into it for the westward journey, scanning the headlines.
They were all about Muller. It was this mystery that Pointilleux believed he had solved that morning — an error by which he had perhaps become a true Londoner for the first time, for seemingly every soul in the metropolis believed that they and they alone knew the answer to the puzzle that had so trialed and tribulated Scotland Yard this past week. Across every class that autumn, in the butchers’ stalls at Smithfield market, on the crowded buses full of clerks and respectable widows, in the glittering drawing rooms of Hanover Square, Muller was the only subject of speculation.