work.”
“I see.”
“Finally — could Smalls have been anything other than hired help? I have a difficult time believing that he would have any cause for revenge against Pierce, a mostly anonymous journalist.”
The house in which Carruthers had kept his rooms was a low-slung place, brown on the front, with three floors and perhaps five tenants, if anybody lived in the basement. The door was open when Lenox tried the handle, and he and McConnell followed a soft noise up two flights of stairs.
The noise turned out to be the sonorous snoring of a sleeping constable, a portly gentleman with a red face who was sitting on a chair in front of a closed door.
“Excuse me?” said Lenox in a soft voice.
The constable fairly jumped out of his seat. After a few furious shakes of his head he seemed to return to the world. “Who are you?” he said.
Lenox stuck out his hand. “My name is Charles Lenox, and this is my colleague Dr. Thomas McConnell.”
“Pleasure,” McConnell murmured.
“Inspector Jenkins sent word, I hope, that I might be coming by?”
The constable rubbed his eyes and blinked very fast, then gave his head a few more furious shakes, as if he were trying to teach it a lesson for falling asleep, and then said, “Oh, quite, quite. The door is open. Shall I come in with you?”
“Only if you like,” said Lenox.
“Perhaps I’ll just sit here and — and watch out for everything?”
“All right.”
The apartment they entered was, Lenox assumed, as Carruthers had left it. There were three connected rooms, all decorated in the same rich, cloying style, with gilt everywhere, clothes lying at random on the floor and the tables, and expensive-looking liqueurs strewn among a vast number of books and newspapers. It looked to Lenox like an indulgent life, one perhaps made possible — or at any rate deepened in its luxury — by its inhabitant’s corruption.
“He died here,” said Lenox, pointing to a large round table near the fireplace.
McConnell, his leather kit in his right hand, looked the area over. “No blood.”
“He would have slumped forward, I suppose, and the blood would have fallen down the back of his shirt but no farther.”
Lenox went over all the rooms vary carefully, pulling out books and riffling through them, using a match to explore under tables and chairs, raking through the coals of the fireplace, and checking behind pictures for any bumps. McConnell meanwhile went through Carruthers’s medicine chest.
“He had a touch of the gout,” said McConnell when they met at the door again. “Nothing much else.”
“I’m not surprised, with all the champagne and rich food here.”
“Did you discover anything?”
“One thing — in the bedroom there’s a square patch of floor where the wood is much darker than everywhere else in the room, as if the sun had never hit it.”
“Oh?”
“He must have moved something recently. I just wonder…”
“What?”
“Perhaps he saw his enemy coming and moved his files as insurance. It’s a bit surprising that none of these chests contains a single note about his work, isn’t it? One sheet, yes, but the murderer would have had a difficult time escaping with a chest of files.”
“Of course.”
“Would you mind stopping by his office with me? It’s just in Fleet Street.”
“Not in the slightest.”
They left the apartment and passed the constable, who was again peacefully asleep; in the street they hailed a cab. Rain had started to fall, the dark night illuminated only by smudges of bright yellow light from the blurred streetlamps.
Mr. Moon was working late, putting the paper to bed. He was far from happy to see Lenox but impatiently agreed that the two men could look into Carruthers’s office.
“Where is it?” Lenox asked.
“You’ll have to figure that out for yourself,” said Moon.
As they walked out Lenox and McConnell both started to chuckle, and as they went down the hall they were laughing heartily at Moon’s rudeness.
Eventually they did find Carruthers’s office, which had a pleasant view of Fleet Street. Unfortunately, the room was tidy and utterly bland, without so much as a stray sheet of paper blemishing the three clean desks. All of the drawers were empty, except for pens, ink, pencils, and pieces of string, and the bookshelf had only a dictionary on it.
“It’s a marvel it’s so clean,” said Lenox. “After that apartment.”
“Perhaps he didn’t spend much time here?”
“Or else he liked a Spartan office, whatever his home was like.”
“It’s a shame.”
“Or else…” Lenox hailed a passing man. “Excuse me, but did Winston Carruthers have another office?”
“Who are you?”
“Charles Lenox. I’m looking —”
The man grinned. “The detective, yes. I don’t know about another office, unless you mean the empty room that was technically his just there, but he had only one office — the Cheese.”
“The Cheese?” said McConnell.
“Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.”
Lenox laughed. “Thank you.”
He remembered Dallington’s account of the pub, with its famous buck rabbit (toast drowned in beer and cheese) and its talkative tender, Ransom. “One more stop?” he asked.
“To be sure.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The pub was crowded, cheery, and warm, with red-nosed, white-haired fellows lining the bar, trading bawdy jokes and laughing uproariously, as only men in their cups will. The front room, which contained the taps, was narrow and brightly lit, with a fire reflecting off of the brass above the bar and long time-scarred benches opposite, under a series of paintings of idyllic country scenes. A plaque under the paintings proudly declared that the Great Fire of 1666 had leveled the place. From the back emanated the unmistakable smell of the stables.
The bartender was a keen-eyed, sturdily built chap with sallow cheeks and dark hair.
“Ransom?” asked Lenox when he caught the man’s attention.
“No, I’m Stevens. He’s weekdays.”
“It’s all the same — I came to ask a question.”
“Yes?”
“I understand that Winston Carruthers often worked here?”
“Aye, many a night. Who are you, may I ask?”
“Charles Lenox. I’m helping Scotland Yard. Could you show me where he worked?”
“It was a little room in back. Here, Billy!” He motioned to a lad passing by with a tray of glassware. “Take these gents up to the burgundy room.”
Billy led them up a narrow flight of stairs and down a hallway. The burgundy room was a smallish, windowless place that fit four tables. Three of these were evidently open to patrons, though none of them was taken, but the fourth, in the back left corner of the room, boasted a scratched old brass sign that read RESERVED FOR W. CARRUTHERS.
