There was a moment of nervous laughter when Bailey tripped again, but they walked, hunched, without too many missteps, until the light grew brighter.
They came to a wooden panel with slats. Lenox felt a fluttering in his stomach. It was not large, barely big enough for a thin man to slip through. In fact, Bailey’s shoulders were nearly too large to pass through it.
But he thought he would just be able to squeeze himself, he said. “Shall I go first?”
“By all means,” said Lenox.
“Any guesses where we are within the theater?” asked Dallington.
“I don’t know it well enough,” said Lenox.
“We’ve been going in the direction of Took Street, the side street,” said McKee. His voice was tight and unwilling, but apparently he had decided their help was worth having. “I can’t say exactly where we’ll come out, though.”
Soon they knew. They emerged into the light, one, two, three, four, to find that they were standing in an office — and staring into the dumbfounded face of the theater’s owner.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “How in heavens have you gotten into the aeration system?”
“Aeration?” said McKee.
Fifteen minutes later they had reunited with Broadbridge, Polly, Thurley, and the others, and told the theater’s owner — his name was Greville, a handsome broad-chested man with a brown beard — how they had come to be in his office.
He came and looked at the drop door himself, leading them back to the dressing room through the backstage area. “I didn’t have the faintest idea it was there,” he said. “I didn’t build the place, of course.”
Lenox looked at him sharply. “No idea at all?”
Greville shook his head. “None. I have thought for five years that the wooden panel in my office was part of the theater’s aeration system, which I was assured when I bought the theater was the most modern thing going. No risk of disease among the actors or stagehands.”
“Where were you for Muller’s final performance, may I ask, Mr. Greville?” Dallington said.
“I have told these gentlemen a dozen times — I was in the audience! It was the finest concert I have ever heard, I’ve told them that, too! I never went backstage.”
McKee nodded. “Yes, we’ve confirmed it. He was in the owner’s box the whole time, with a party of fifteen.”
“Mr. Muller never played more sensitively, more beautifully,” said Greville. “It was transporting, gentlemen, the beauty of his gift — I could have listened to it forever. What a loss, if he is gone. And Margarethe, a quiet but sweet — I am at a loss, I am terribly perturbed, gentlemen, terribly perturbed.” He looked it. He ran a handkerchief across his pale brow, and sat down in a chair near the door.
“And after the concert?” said Lenox.
“And here she is upon this very sofa! My God. The poor woman. In my own theater.” Greville shook his head. “What were you asking, though — yes, the concert. After it ended, I stayed for a moment in my box, joining in the applause, and then I made my way backstage, to add my congratulations to those of the other people present. Of course, I was never able to see Mr. Muller.”
Lenox nodded. It seemed clear, now, that the German had left his dressing room through the corridor, gone to Greville’s office, and from there gone directly to the street by the theater owner’s own door, which led outside.
Muller could have slipped straight in among the departing crowds by such a stratagem. Lenox saw Broadbridge realizing that he had received both a solution and another problem: Why on earth would anyone wish to kill Muller’s sister? And where was Muller now?
Back at the Yard, they discussed this for a long while — a conversation that had culminated in Broadbridge hiring them on, and Polly shrewdly holding out for a higher rate, since, as she pointed out, the case would draw them from their usual work. Broadbridge had agreed to her terms without protest.
“Just find this blasted German,” he said.
“Certainly we will try,” Polly had said.
“I can scarcely bear to think about tomorrow’s newspapers. Margarethe Muller? They’ll turn her into a saint within the next eight hours, and her death into the bloodthirstiest thing this side of the Crusades. Damn them all, Fleet Street.”
Now, in Chancery Lane, Lenox, Dallington, and Polly sipped their cups of tea, rain still beating loudly against the windows. Hadley seemed miles and miles away, both literally and figuratively — Lenox had scarcely been back in London eighteen hours, and yet he was wholly absorbed by the two puzzles here, the one at their office, the other at the Cadogan Theater.
He considered this and felt a wave of guilt: Edmund. He didn’t want to linger in the capital while his brother needed him. The days were shortening; dinner would be terribly lonely at Lenox House, Edmund and his papers and the portraits, the awful small talk with the servants, somehow more solitary than solitude.
Still, Muller, the agency, another few days, two or three days …
As if reading his thoughts, Dallington said, “How shall the three of us proceed, then? Charles, will you stay in London? For my part, I can abandon all of my other work. The one case that needs urgent attention I’ll give to Atkinson.”
“Yes, it’s the same with me,” said Polly. “Anixter can keep everything in hand for a day or two. Honestly, I cannot imagine anything better for the agency than solving this case, short of us laying our hands on the treasure of the Flor de le Mar, and that’s in Sumatra, and probably doesn’t exist.”
“Which makes it harder to find,” said Dallington.
Polly smiled. “Precisely, my fair fellow. The point is that it’s worth more than money to us to solve the case. With any luck it will be in the evening papers that the Yard has hired us.”
Dallington looked at her quizzically. “How?”
“I’ve written to the reporters I know, that’s how, you gull.”
The young lord laughed. “Well done.”
“I’ll stay,” said Lenox, “and I have an idea of where to start.”
“Oh?” said Dallington. “Where?”
“With Greville and Thurley.”
“They both have alibis,” Polly pointed out.
“That’s fine,” he said. “What I want to know, then, is why both of them are lying. And who else knew that you could remove that chandelier in Muller’s dressing room so effortlessly, and what was above it?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
There was a thick fog the next morning, the kind you could find only in London; Lenox thought of Esther Summerson in Bleak House, arriving in the city and asking whether there hadn’t been some enormous fire. It was somewhat wistfully that he told Jane over his soft-boiled egg about all the fresh air he had inhaled, riding upon the heaths of Sussex.
When he had finished his breakfast, he checked his watch. He was due to have coffee with his friend Graham at ten o’clock, at the latter’s invitation, and had fifty minutes until then: just enough time to take Sophia to her favorite place in London. He stole her away — wrapped in about thirty layers of wool — from the nanny, and they walked toward Green Park.
“Where are we going, Papa?” she asked.
“Where do you think?”
She looked ahead, frowning with thought. “George’s,” she said at last.
That was her friend Georgianna, who was older than Sophia, five — the daughter of Thomas and Toto McConnell. “No,” he said. “Guess again.”
“I can’t guess.”
He pointed ahead. “What does that green thing look like?” he asked.
“The park.”
“And what’s there?”
Her eyes widened. “The circus?” she said, scarcely daring to hope.