It was the proprietor here who inadvertently gave them the clue that sent them to the baths.
“He would have been in later in the evening, probably,” Polly was saying, pressing him. “Around ten o’clock.”
“Ah, there I lose you. I am generally at the Couch Street Baths after six o’clock.”
“Couch Street? Is that where the Germans go?” Lenox asked.
Mr. Frank, who spoke excellent English, said, “The working Germans, sir.”
The working Germans. Muller, by contrast, was well-off. Lenox looked in Baedeker: There were two pages, there, dedicated to the wonders of the Jermyn Street Baths …
And indeed, these were the most luxurious baths in London by a wide margin — not a place to Lenox’s taste, but many people swore by it, and after they had raced there and located the manager, he told them that yes, a small German man with a mustache and a receding hairline did come in. When? Generally very late — eleven, or twelve. Was that uncommonly late? Not at all. They didn’t close until four in the morning, of course, and only for an hour or two then.
It would have taken a very dim person not to perceive that they were after the missing German pianist, and, having put two and two together, this manager grew extremely agitated and excited.
“Is he here? Is he here?” he asked, a brilliantined forelock of hair falling down upon his forehead and quivering there as he repeated the question, and then offered vehemently his utmost assistance, whatever he could do at all, the reputation of the baths, gentlemen (“and Mrs. — ma’am,” he added, to Polly).
The small company, impatience mounting, retreated to a nearby chophouse, before finally returning to the baths at half past eleven.
“I wonder where LeMaire is now,” said Dallington as they went in. “Probably China.”
“Hopefully far from here, if we’re correct,” said Polly. “I want the glory for ourselves.”
It had started to drizzle, and Dallington said maliciously, “I hope he’s stuck out in the rain somewhere.”
The baths were spectacular, Lenox had to admit as they walked through. They were set up in a series of connected rooms, each tiled in a different brilliant pattern, all with divans and sofas and chairs at their edges, turbaned servants standing close by at every turn. Their little crew made for an odd intrusion upon the leisure of the prosperous gentlemen who were using the baths, but they only received glances of curiosity, no challenge to their progress.
Following the manager, Smythson, they passed through the hot room, then the “very hot” room, which wasn’t pleasant, then the sluice room, where they didn’t pause at the waterfalls of cool water, though Thurley, in his three-piece wool suit, red as a beet, looked as if he wouldn’t have minded.
After that it was the massage room, the cool room, the plunge pool — room after room after room, the steps in a sequence that aspired toward what must have been a nirvana-like relaxation.
“You haven’t seen him, Mr. Thurley?” Nicholson whispered after each room.
“No,” said Thurley. “And it is exceedingly unpleasant to examine these fellows so closely when they’re — when they’re disrobed. I don’t like it a bit, and I don’t blame them for disliking it either, I can tell you.”
“Stick it out a bit longer,” said Dallington encouragingly. “If we find him, I’ll treat you to a bath myself.”
Thurley, who liked a lord, colored and said, oh, it was an honor to help, no remuneration necessary, though of course anyone might find it refreshing to enjoy a bath, after suchlike exertions.
And then, in the middle of this speech, the theater’s manager spotted him: the man that all of London had been looking for.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
He was even smaller than Lenox remembered.
They found him in the sitting room just beyond the last of the baths, a large chamber that had been decorated marvelously, such that it could easily have been the inner sanctum of a Turkish palace, he thought. All of the men in it, as they entered, were dressed “à la Turque,” having been wrapped in robes and turbans by attendants against the cool air, then seated on comfortable sofas to be served flavored tobacco, sweet coffee, and honeyed pastries.
“There he is,” Thurley said.
Even as he said it, the little man, sitting in an armchair and reading a book, saw them.
He stood up right away, with an uncertain expression on his face. He looked absurd in his turban, his sparse graying chest hair emerging from his robe.
“Hello, gentlemen,” he said, when they approached him.
“Take word back to Polly to get going,” Lenox murmured to Pointilleux.
“Mr. Muller?” said Nicholson.
The little German nodded. He was standing up very straight. “Yes, it is I. I let her die. There is no point to deny it.”
He spoke in a squeaky German accent, which took some of the gravity away from this admission. Everyone in the room was staring at them, and Nicholson asked Smythson if they could speak somewhere more private. The manager led them to a little side room nearby, which was overly bright. Muller was extremely docile; he sat with them readily, asking only if he might have a glass of brandy. Smythson dispatched someone to bring it.
“I am Inspector Nicholson, Mr. Muller,” said the man from the Yard.
Muller sitting, nodded. “Very well.”
“You say you killed this woman? Tell us, please, who was she?” asked Nicholson.
Muller smiled. “Who was she! It is a strange thing to love a madwoman, gentlemen. Love her I did, however. She—she was Katharina Schiller, the beautiful Katharina Schiller, famous throughout Berlin society, the companion of my heart. Nobody has ever understood me as she did. Nobody ever will again, either, alas.”
“Why did you kill her?” asked Nicholson.
Muller hesitated. Lenox thought he knew why.
Poisoning—it had been on his mind all day, ever since his return to London.
It bothered him. Men who killed their lovers almost always did it out of passion, and by passionate means, a gun, a blow.
They were supposed to believe that Muller, on the other hand, had murdered this woman by the most premeditated of methods, and at the theater no less, the place and time when having to dispose of a body would be least convenient to him.
He stepped forward. “Mr. Muller didn’t say that he killed Miss Schiller. He said that he let her die.”
Nicholson looked at the pianist quizzically. “Mr. Muller? You’ve given us all a great deal of trouble — I do think you might favor us with an explanation of what you did and where you’ve been.”
At that moment the glass of brandy arrived, and Muller drank most of it in a single draft. Then he studied the glass for a moment, before taking a deep breath and responding.
“I could never have broken it off with her in Berlin,” he said. “Her father … her personality … well, I could never have broken it off with her in Berlin, gentlemen. Yet if I was to survive another day with my sanity intact, I had to leave her.
“And here, with the success that has met me in London, far from home, I felt — finally, I could tell her that it was finished, our affair. The day she died, I informed her that I would be traveling on to Paris alone, to meet my real sister, which meant that it would not be convenient to me to have her travel with me any longer. I was very tender, you know! I told her that we would always be friends.
“She left my dressing room without a word. Just before I was to go on that night, however, I found her there again. She had her own key to the theater and to the room. She had insisted on that when we arrived. In my dressing room she had poured two glasses of wine from a bottle she had brought with her.
“Little did she know how transparent her offer of a final glass of wine in friendship was! She had told me many times that she would rather kill me than lose me. When her back was turned for an instant at a knock at the door, I switched our glasses. Yes, it was thus that I killed her. I expected her to take a sip and taste the bitterness, and see that I had found her out. Instead, when I took a sip, she laughed like the madwoman she was and drank the entire glass before I could stop her.