A Beautiful Blue Death

“No, I can tell her.”

“As you please.”

Lenox stood up. “All the same, George, you won’t mind if I look into a few of my ideas?”

“Not at all. But in the end, we’ll see what the Yard thinks of it.”

“Of course.”

“Have you had enough to eat?”

Lenox took a last sip of tea. “Delicious, as always,” he said. They drifted out into the main hallway, where he saw a familiar face.

“Mr. Lenox, sir, how do you do?”

“Very well, Inspector Exeter”—for it was the sergeant himself—“though this matter weighs on my mind. We must do our best for her.”

“Aye, well said, Mr. Lenox.”

Barnard said, “You know this man, then?” Lenox nodded. “Look here,” Barnard went on, addressing Exeter, “you’ll figure this out straightaway, won’t you? I’ve no doubt you’re as incompetent as the rest of them.”

“No, sir,” Exeter said. He glanced at Lenox with a sort of uneasiness.

“Sure you are. But on this one you suspend your usual stupidity, all right?”

“Yes, sir. It’s in good hands, sir. You can trust me.” He smiled weakly.

Barnard turned his attention to Lenox. “I hope you’re coming to the ball next week?”

“Of course.” The ball was an annual event at Barnard’s. Of the winter balls it was the best known, and while during the season there would usually be several such affairs on a single night, nobody dared to throw one opposite his.

“Farewell, then,” said Barnard. He looked intently at the flower even as he said it, and Lenox was left with the inspector from Scotland Yard.

Exeter was a large man, with black bushy eyebrows, a matching mustache, and thick pink features. He wore a full uniform wherever he went, and his helmet drooped over his eyes. He swung a blackjack around by its leather hoop seemingly without cessation, excluding the times when he put it to other use, most often when he dealt with what he called the lower orders.

London’s police force was barely thirty-five years old. Sir Robert Peel had organized the first Metropolitan Police Force in 1829, when Lenox was a lad, and as a result the men who joined were called either peelers or, more likely, bobbies. Its powers were new and uncertain, and Exeter represented both the good and the bad in the institution: the better chance of public order, and the risk of the abuse of the power needed to maintain it.

When he entered the force, Exeter had recently retired from the military and had chosen to become a beat man, walking the streets at night and taking the word beat for each of its several meanings. A quick series of retirements and deaths within the Yard had seen him promoted beyond his ability, and hard work had allowed him to rise even higher. He was now one of the half dozen most prominent detectives on the force, and also among the least naturally talented or intuitive of his rank.

There was no point, for Lenox, in trying to tell himself that he did not dislike Exeter. The man was a snob toward those beneath him, and a cloying sycophant to those above, unless they happened to come under his power, when he dropped all pretense of respect and became merciless. And yet, thought Lenox, I don’t envy him, having to deal with a man like Barnard. That beastly talking-down to. He thought guiltily that he was glad he could afford— literally—not to put up with a man like Barnard. If only Exeter had been slightly more intelligent.… But then, he thought, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

The housekeeper brought Lenox his hat and his coat, and as he put them on he said a final word to Exeter.

“If I may give you one piece of information, Inspector—the girl was murdered.”

“That sounds like an opinion to me, Mr. Lenox.”

“It is not, Inspector. Good day.”

And he walked out through the heavy doors, trying to imagine a way in which he could solve Prue Smith’s murder without access to any of the suspects, for he knew he had probably entered the house in a professional capacity for the last time during this case.

Chapter 9

London on a winter midday held few pleasures for Lenox. There was smoke in the air, which made his eyes tear, and there were too many people along the sidewalks, fighting for the thin path of cobblestone without snow piled atop it. And yet he felt more determined today than he had yesterday evening. In part because Exeter was involved.

He had set himself just one task for the day, or at least until Graham told him what he had discovered, and that was to see if he could trace the bella indigo that had killed the young maid. In the meanwhile, he was walking toward the Houses of Parliament, after having run a morning’s worth of overdue errands, to have lunch with his older brother, Edmund.

His brother held the seat of Markethouse, the town attached to their family’s estate, Lenox House, and while he was not active in the Parliament, exactly, he attended when he could and could be counted to vote along party lines. He was, like Lenox, a liberal, and he approved of the reforms of the last thirty years, but he was also a baronet and held a good deal of land, which made him generally well-liked on both sides of the aisle—or at least accepted as a known quantity.

His full name was Sir Edmund Chichester Lenox, and he lived with his wife, Emily, a pretty, plump, motherly woman whom everyone called Molly, and his two sons, in the house where he and his brother had both grown up. He had two distinct personalities, Lenox always felt: his more businesslike demeanor, in the city, and his truer self, the man who resided at home and felt most comfortable in old clothes, out for a day of shooting or riding or gardening. He was two years older than Charles and, while they looked alike, Lady Jane always said they were instantly recognizable as themselves. Edmund was the same weight and height, but he looked softer, and his manner, while equally polite, was somewhat more eccentric, a trait no doubt cultivated by the solitude of Lenox House in comparison with London.

The two brothers were immensely fond of each other. Each envied the other his pursuit—Lenox followed politics passionately and longed, from time to time, to stand for Parliament himself, while Edmund adored the city and often felt, rather romantically, that to crisscross it wildly, searching for clues and people, must be next to bliss. Occasionally he tried to solve the local crimes at Markethouse from his armchair, but the newspaper rarely yielded up anything more spectacular than a stolen policeman’s helmet or a missing sheep: poor fodder, he felt, for a budding detective. As a result, the first thing he always asked his brother was whether he was on a case.

Lenox walked through St. James’s Park and then went a short distance along the Thames to Westminster.

He loved going to the Houses of Parliament. He and his brother had gone with their father as children, and he still remembered eating lunch there and watching the debates from the visitors’ galleries. These days, he often visited his brother or one of his several friends there.

The buildings had burned down in 1834, when he was a boy, and had been rebuilt over the next few years. And then they had added the tall clock, called Big Ben, only five or six years previously—was it 1859? For Lenox’s money, Parliament was one of the two or three most beautiful buildings in London, in that yellowish stone unique to England, with its high towers and intricately carved walls. Its vastness alone was comforting, as if generations could rise and fall but these eight acres, these halls and rooms, would keep England safe. Nobody, on the other hand, would ever care about Big Ben.

The public, when it visited, entered at Westminster Gate, but Lenox went to a small door on the other side of the building, facing the river, and there, waiting in the hall, was Edmund. This was the members’ entrance—straight ahead, up a staircase, were the chambers of government. To the left and the right were the members’ rooms, which were closed to the public. If you took a right, you went to the dining rooms and smoking rooms of the House of Lords and the Queen Empress; to the left and you were in the branch dedicated to the House of Commons. The