Lenox was examining the body. “Nothing on her person, no money, no identification. No signs of violence either,” he added.
“Poison, perhaps,” said Dallington.
“Do you think Muller killed her?” asked McKee.
Lenox shrugged. “I couldn’t guess. But your constable ought to fetch the medical examiner—and then, gentlemen, I propose that we investigate this tunnel that passes above Mr. Muller’s dressing room.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Broadbridge had been reluctant to climb the stepladder and investigate the tunnel himself. McKee, meanwhile, had been the opposite, raring to lead the inspection. In the end, Bailey, Lenox, Dallington, and McKee climbed through the small square in the ceiling, in that order. Each had a candle.
They entered a dim corridor, just barely high enough to walk down, not wide enough for two people to have passed each other. At its distant end, Lenox could see a spark of light—some kind of exit.
First they looked around the area where Margarethe’s body had lain. They didn’t find anything there until Bailey’s large boot made a hideous crunch.
They crowded around and saw, beneath his foot, broken glass.
“A wineglass,” said Dallington. “You can see the stem.”
“Blimey,” said Bailey.
“A second wineglass,” Lenox murmured.
There was a moment of silence, and then McKee said, “Let’s move along, unless there’s anything else.”
Slowly, they proceeded away in a single line down the corridor.
“Is this the only entrance from above or below?” Lenox asked.
“It’s all uncommon smooth so far,” said Bailey.
“One entrance, one exit,” Dallington said.
Indeed, as they had gone down the corridor, Lenox had looked closely for another drop door, anything rough or uneven along the four walls, and found nothing.
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 T
hurley.”
“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.
“Yes, the circus.”
She whooped happily (and not very demurely) and dropped her piece of gingerbread, but was in such ripping spirits that she didn’t care.
A few minutes later they came to Green Park—and here he was, the fellow in the red-and-white striped shirt, with the straw hat, standing over a tiny little proscenium made of cheap wood. It was nothing to the grandeur of the Cadogan, but Sophia wouldn’t have traded.
“THE CIRCUS,” she bellowed as she broke into a run, and Lenox, laughing, had to shush her, catching up with her and holding her hand.
He passed over a shilling, and she sat upon a tiny stool. The owner of the circus drew back the curtain, and a small crowd gathered—watching for free, or at any rate on Lenox’s coin, though the hat would be passed around when it was over.
Sophia was rapt, her hands clutched together in anticipation. Soon it began: Two small bright yellow canaries (for it was the canary circus) in military jackets hopped out onto the stage, chirping. Their owner placed a miniature cannon between them, and instantly they went to work with their beaks, first dropping a small ball in the muzzle, then running back to the breach and lighting it with a tiny match. After a moment of breathless expectancy, the ball popped six or eight inches forward, and everyone applauded.
The circus continued, the canaries walking along a tightrope, dancing with each other formally, and, for a finale, playing an inexact but fairly convincing game of billiards.
As they walked back toward Hampden Lane, Sophia described the entire thing to Lenox in minute detail, as if he hadn’t been there, becoming so absorbed in the telling that occasionally at some important moment (“and then the other bird hopped on one feet”) she stopped and stood stock-still to concentrate, staring into the distance. Her father listened very carefully.
After he restored her to her nanny, he took the short drive to Parliament, where Graham met him at the Members’ Entrance, which of course it had been Lenox’s prerogative to enter himself until the previous year. He looked tired, a compact, sandy-haired man about Lenox’s own age. He shook his former employer’s hand warmly, though.
“What’s it now?” asked Lenox.
“Ventilation,” said Graham shortly.
Lenox sighed and shook his head in sympathy. His own experience within these grand, honey-colored walls had taught him that “ventilation” was a word that politicians could use to exact almost any cruelty upon the poor, such was the fear of disease spreading by “bad air.” Buildings might be leveled, tenants evicted, children parted from their parents—all of that and more had been done under Lenox’s gaze in the name of ventilation, though in actuality that word was most often merely a fig leaf for the moneyed interest that wanted a certain building torn down, and a different one put up …
Meanwhile, nobody had any interest in the ventilation of some of the tenements he and Graham had seen in their tours around the slums of Clare Market, where dozens of abandoned boys and girls lived side by side, each renting a few feet of space at night, few in anything more than underclothes, all far too many dozens of hours from their last real meal.
Graham had entered Parliament the year before, after having spent two decades as Lenox’s butler, or more accurately as his butler, assistant in detection, confidant, and friend—an astonishing rise, but one for which his intelligence and strategic nous made him signally qualified. In the last few months, he had made the tenements of East London his primary concern, despite representing a district in Oxfordshire, the county from which he hailed; in British politics, Members in the Commons were often only tenuously affiliated with their constituencies, a very different system than say the American one, where one had to be resident in a state to represent it in Congress.
“What now?” Lenox asked.
They had walked through a long hallway and come into the comfortable paneled quiet of the Members’ Bar. A few men nodded toward them, and a fellow named Baltimore came and shook Lenox’s hand warmly.
“Your brother has been kind enough to support my Tenement Act,” Graham said when they were seated, “but I fear it may not pass. We haven’t the northern vote.”
“Too many factory barons?”
“That’s precisely it.”
Lenox smiled. “I don’t miss those headaches. But what can you give the Tories for their support? What do you have to trade?”
“That’s the trouble—nothing. I have already voted on their side three times this year. I cannot do it again.”
“You’re a man of your word. Promise them you’ll vote with them next session.”
“They do not count on me still being here. You know that they’re running a strong candidate against me, Armitage.”
“Yes,” said Lenox. “Edmund told me.”
Graham waved to a passing waiter and asked him for coffee—and in that transient gesture Lenox perceived that his friend was finally comfortable here, finally felt as if he belonged. “Even if I am forced out, I hope I will pass this bill before I go,” he said. “It would be worth the defeat.”
“Then promise them the world,” said Lenox. “And either give it to them next session, or apologize that you cannot.”
Graham brightened slightly. “Yes. Perhaps that’s right.”
They fell quickly back into their old, familiar ways. There was still just a hint of deference in Graham’s speech—a silent “sir” at the end of his sentences—but it didn’t prevent them from having a lively exchange, about Muller, about Hadley, about Graham’s long evenings in the House, leavened with gossip about Disraeli and Victoria and the next vote.
When their coffee was cold, Graham seemed to hesitate. “What is it?” Lenox asked.
Graham leaned forward in his armchair and said, “I wonder if you would give me your advice upon a personal matter.”
“You needn’t even ask.”
Graham looked troubled for a moment—paused—and then said, “The truth is that I am contemplating the estate of marriage.”
Lenox smiled. “This is wonderful news. You contemplate it not conceptually, I take it, but as regards a specific young person?”
Graham nodded. “Miss Abigail Winston. I believe you know her. She lives in Hampden Lane.”
“The housekeeper at Dawkins’s house?” Lenox knew her by sight, a pretty, amiable woman of around thirty-five, with a beautiful smile. “I think it’s a wonderful idea.”
“I
am concerned that my current position … that perhaps it is less suitable, on either side, than it might have been once.”
“Perhaps you ought to quit and come be my valet again.”
Graham smiled. “Do you think so?”
Lenox leaned forward now, too. “Since you have asked my advice, I won’t pretend that I don’t have any,” he said. “If you feel that this marriage would make you happy, I think you ought to declare as much to Miss Winston without waiting another minute. Life is long, but it’s short, too, you know. I would do it this afternoon.”
A wave of relief swept over Graham’s generally imperturbable face. “Do you think so?” he asked.
“I’ll be there with the silver fish-slice myself, if you’ll have me.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Graham said, looking into the distance, and not as if it were ventilation on his mind. “I don’t doubt that you’re right.”
Their conversation continued for some time. Eventually Graham saw him off, and at a little before eleven Lenox arrived at the office in Chancery Lane, where Dallington and Polly were waiting for him.
“You’re late,” said Dallington, who was at the door in his overcoat.
“I’m sorry,” said Lenox.
“Well, it’s usually me who’s late, anyhow. We ought to go, though. Polly wants to take Anixter and speak to the people at Muller’s hotel. You and I are marked for the Cadogan Theater. Did you see the papers last night, by the way?”
Lenox handed his valise to a clerk, and they turned back for the door of the office. “Yes, I did.”
Dallington grinned. “We’d better damn well solve it. Oh, I say, before we go—you had a telegram this morning. No, two telegrams.”
“Who from?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Let me fetch them, then, just another minute if you don’t mind.”
They were sitting on his desk. Both were from Edmund. Lenox frowned, wondering what they could be.
He had his answer soon enough, and as he read them he felt a chill run through him. That morning there had been an attack in the village of his youth—in Edmund’s constituency—in gentle old Markethouse.
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