“He said he hadn’t. Only picked up the note, there, on the desk.”
“I see,” said Lenox.
The open window puzzled him, but no doubt it would all come clear. He stepped back into the center of the room and got on his hands and knees. There was nothing on the floors—not even dust, to speak of—under the desk or the bureau, or under the small table, or in plain sight. Except for one thing. In the middle of the room, on the floor just next to the desk, were three or four drops of something. He scratched at one with his fingernail: wax.
He thought about this for a moment, filed it away, and then thoroughly examined the space under the bed, trailing his fingers along the underside of the mattress and shining a candle against every dark corner.
So! he thought. We have only the desk and the body. He stood up and walked toward the desk.
It was a thin piece of deal, without drawers but with sturdy legs. On top of it were an empty glass, with the stain of some drink on its lip; a new candle, which had never been lighted; a small brown unmarked bottle made of glass, with a rubber stopper; and a smooth piece of paper, the suicide note.
“A suicide, on the face of it,” said Jenkins.
Lenox thought for a moment. He would mention what he had seen (or rather, seen the absence of) in a few moments. He wanted to be unencumbered by Jenkins’s awe or embarrassment (who could predict which) while he looked at the desk.
“Indeed,” he muttered. “Indeed.…”
He leaned over the desk on his fists and read the note.
The note was unsigned.
“Is James her fiance?” Lenox said.
“Yes.”
“He’s in service here?”
“Yes.”
Lenox thought for a moment and nodded. He would take the glass and the bottle home to examine.
But before anything else, he thought wearily, it was time to disillusion the young detective.
“Jenkins,” he said, “you think this is a suicide?”
“It seems clear enough, sir.”
“I need you to fetch James for us. But don’t bring him into this room. Find a table somewhere.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Jenkins—had it occurred to you that there should be a pen on this desk? Something that crossed my mind.”
The inspector frowned. “A pen?” he said.
“To write the note.”
“Perhaps it’s in a pocket?”
“Maids’ uniforms don’t have pockets, a relic of the time when their omission was thought to make stealing more difficult.”
Jenkins looked at the body. “And nowhere in the room?”
“No,” said Lenox, trying to make his voice kind.
“But she could easily have carried the note around with her.”
“I don’t think so,” Lenox said. “If you look at it, the paper is uncreased and unwrinkled.”
Jenkins stared at the desk. “Well, perhaps she took the pen and then replaced it,” he said.
“In the grip of suicide? Unlikely. There’s a chance, but I’d lay odds that we find it’s a murder. Someone wrote this with their own pen and left it here. Notice the small squiggly letters—probably somebody trying to hide their handwriting. Forger’s tremor.”
Jenkins sighed. “Yes, you’re right, I imagine.” Then he looked up and said, “I’ll find the fiance.”
Lenox nodded. Then, thinking, he looked at the desk and the doorway until he was satisfied and turned to the bed.
“Thomas,” he said. “The body.”
Chapter 4
Thomas McConnell had moved to London from Scotland, where he had grown up, shortly after the conclusion of his formal medical education. He was a doctor. He opened a practice on Harley Street within six months of his arrival, advertised as a specialist in surgery, and set about making his name. This he had done quickly and impressively; he was open to new techniques, and his skill with a scalpel was surpassing. By the time he was thirty, he had one of the leading practices in all of London.
And then, when he was thirty-one, he married. More specifically, he married up—to Lady Victoria Phillips, who was nineteen at the time. McConnell was handsome, had a fair amount of money, and came from a good family. But in each of these respects, the civilized world agreed, he was infinitely inferior to Toto Phillips, who had beauty, fortune, and a name by any standard you cared to choose.
She married Thomas McConnell in the year she came out, because, her friends knew, he was different from the men of her milieu and generation. Those men had been her friends from birth, and they would always be her friends. But she could never have married any of them. Thomas was manlier, less dandy, less corrupted by money, and he had ideas: about books, about plays, about the cities of the Continent, about beauty, about her beauty, about her. Their wedding was a celebrated one, because while he had married up, he hadn’t married so far up as to disqualify him from benefit. The Prime Minister—Toto’s father’s friend from public school—had come, along with half of Debrett’s.
For the first three years, Thomas and Toto were happy. It was during this time that Lenox first met McConnell. Lady Jane was, after a fashion, Toto’s mentor—they were first cousins but treated each other as aunt and niece, Toto’s mother having succumbed to a fever when her daughter was only eleven. So Lenox was thrown together with the young couple a good deal. Thomas had reduced his practice, and he and his wife went out most evenings and traveled widely together. He accepted with goodwill her social schedule, and she accepted with equal goodwill their yearly visits to his family in Scotland.
But the first three years had ended, and the halcyon days of their marriage had ended with them. Thomas had all but abandoned his practice by then, and he began to drink too much. Toto had taken to spending six months of the year at Longwell, her father’s estate in Kent, just outside of London, while her husband remained in the city.
There had been a further deterioration, to the point, after five years of marriage, that the couple rarely appeared in public and were said not to be on speaking terms. But something had relented—either they had given up or they had resolved to make the best of things—and they were now, aged thirty-six and twenty-four, settling into the long view of life. It could end in two ways, Lenox had always thought: either in cold politeness, or in a new, quieter kind of love. Toto was so young, and McConnell so idealistic. But perhaps they would learn to compromise. At any rate, they had seemed kinder to each other the last few times he had seen them together. Lady Jane thought so too, and she was reliable about things like that.
But there had been a casualty of the past six years. Toto was still one of the most important women in London’s highest social circles, but Thomas was no longer as brilliant as he had been, in any sense of the word. He no longer performed surgery, and, perhaps more sadly, he no longer possessed the golden shine of a handsome young man with ideas and ambition. He had been through the worst of the drinking, but he still drank far too much to wield a scalpel. There had been so much money after he married Toto that he no longer needed the practice, so it had eventually been sold for a song to a young Phillips cousin. All that work, building the practice up, his own place—that, too, absorbed by his wife’s family.
He now studied all sorts of minor subjects in his spare time, from chemicals to psychology. For a while now marine life had been predominant among these interests—McConnell collected samples of rare cold-weather fish and mammals, the prize of his collection being a perfect Eastern Dolphin. Every few years he took trips, sometimes
