Barnard’s employ. The man himself had no involvement in the matter (Lenox had since had plenty of opportunities to observe and note how clean Barnard kept his own hands) but almost incidentally the detective had discovered that a sum of nineteen thousand pounds was missing from the Mint’s new batch of currency. Such a small sum, in the context of the vast numbers involved, and yet such a large sum in the context of the world! Exeter and his family might have lived on it their whole lives! It was this nineteen thousand pounds that had changed Lenox’s opinion of Barnard — before, he had seen him as a petty, vain, but tolerable man. Now Lenox recognized him to be perhaps the most powerful and dangerous man in London.
There was no doubt of it — Barnard was a fiendishly clever sod, and he had played his hand very carefully and very well over the years. Now Winston Carruthers and Simon Pierce were dead because of him, and perhaps Hiram Smalls and Inspector Exeter, too.
But why? He remembered Dallington’s crucial bit of information — Carruthers was corruptible. Had Barnard for some reason bribed the man and then elected to silence him?
Lenox scanned the rest of the sheet, his private and carefully compiled dossier. For muscle Barnard used the Hammer Gang, a group of East Londoners each with a green tattoo of a hammer curled around one eyebrow. Though he had a large staff in his home and at the Mint, he didn’t seem to have any particular trusted assistant.
Then something clicked into place —
Geneva — what could be there? Since retiring from the Mint (doubtless much richer than when he had begun the job, thought Lenox bitterly) he had been consulting with the government on several minor issues but had in general been very quiet.
It was ominous.
All of this flurried through Lenox’s mind in a matter of moments as he held the single sheet that defined George Barnard’s misdeeds. Then he thought that the case needed more than he and Dallington could do and called for his carriage.
It was a long drive to his destination, perhaps thirty minutes. Oxley Crescent was a small neighborhood on the southern edge of London, full of closely spaced but pleasant houses, each with a small porch and garden in front. It was to a white house with dark shutters and a charmingly askew chimney that Lenox came when he needed Skaggs.
Skaggs’s wife answered the door, an insistent and gregarious creature who first shed a tear over poor Inspector Exeter, then scolded Lenox for coming to take her husband away again, and finally insisted he kiss the baby slung low on her hip, all as a toll before he could get through to the house.
Rupert Skaggs, a man who had once been the best middleweight boxer for a two-mile radius, was fearsome looking, with a bald head, a fat, intelligent face, and a long scar across the left side of his neck, but in truth his wife and his three children had lent him some docility, and he was quite happy in his little home. His looks still often came in handy, however; he was the best private investigator in England, if you asked Lenox. Once Skaggs had found a job as a waiter in order to gather information for him, and since then Lenox had never doubted him. He was forced to pay for Skaggs out of his own pocket, but then, he always reasoned, what higher purpose than justice was money for? Besides, less loftily, Skaggs always saved him so much time and effort — much of the unrewarding work of detection belonged to him, under Lenox’s supervision.
“Hello, Mr. Lenox,” said Skaggs with a pipe in one hand. He had come onto the porch at his wife’s call.
“How do you do, Mr. Skaggs?”
“Passably well. I haven’t seen you for some time.”
Now, this was true — and true because of Dallington. Lenox shifted slightly. “No, and I’m very sorry to call on you so late in the evening. I hope I haven’t interrupted supper?”
“No, not quite yet.”
“That’s all right then.”
“Will you come in, Mr. Lenox? Business has been going well, but I always enjoyed our work together. Thank you for the silver rattle you sent after Emily was born.”
They walked inside and sat together in Skaggs’s business room, a small square space at the very front of the house that just barely fit two chairs and a table.
“You’re quite welcome, I’m sure — and in fact I come on work today, too.”
“What sort of work?”
“You’ve heard about Inspector Exeter?”
“Aye, I have. It’s very sad,” said Skaggs solemnly.
“It is,” agreed Lenox.
“Are you trying to find out who killed him?”
“I think I know, in fact.”
“Do you!?”
“Perhaps — yes, I think so.”
“How may I help, Mr. Lenox?”
“I need you to go to Geneva, to follow a man.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Lenox sat with Skaggs for some time, giving him all the details about Barnard’s flight across the Channel (because Skaggs had once helped Lenox track Barnard once before, he wasn’t surprised to be spying on such an illustrious man), and then left Oxley Crescent. He was due to see Lady Jane that evening, but his mind was racing. Instead he had his carriage drop him at McConnell’s house, sending it home with a message to Jane that he would be an hour or so later than he had promised.
“Hullo,” said the doctor with plain surprise when Lenox came into the drawing room.
“How are you? How is Toto?”
“She’s sleeping at the moment.”
“I know it’s late, but I wondered whether you might go see Carruthers’s rooms with me now? There should still be a constable on duty, watching them.”
“Gladly,” said McConnell, standing up. “I don’t need my medical kit for any reason?”
“Well — perhaps. Just in case.”
“It’s by the door. Let me fetch it.”
“Shall we walk? I sent my horses home.”
“To be sure.”
A little while later the two men had set out for the dead man’s apartments and were talking seriously about Gerald Poole. Lenox still didn’t want to tell anybody about his suspicions of George Barnard, a well-respected man, though he could scarcely hide his revulsion when the name came up in conversation. Now, however, he focused on Poole’s innocence rather than Barnard’s guilt. He explained to the doctor his theory that Pierce’s murder was a cover-up for Carruthers’s, a red herring.
“It strikes me as crucial that Carruthers’s hands were inky and there was a pen on the table but no paper close at hand.”
“You think the person who stabbed him took the paper?”
“Yes, I do, and it seems beyond chance that Carruthers should have been writing a paper that the murderer wanted just when the man came in.”
“What about Pierce?”
“Nothing missing from his house, which Smalls couldn’t have entered anyway, or he would have been discovered. Pierce had evidently been reading, after a week that was in fact rather less busy than usual at
