The review was thorough but inconclusive. The first man they interviewed had a great scrape across his right forearm, but claimed—and in the captain’s opinion it seemed probable—that a rush of rope from a slack sail had given him the burn. Two or three more had such shipboard injuries. Evers had a great welt on his chest, which he said came from a drunken stumble down the streets of Plymouth.
“What did you land on?” Lenox asked.
“Dunno. Sir. I woke up with it.”
“It looks fresh.”
“It’s only from yesterday.”
Two more men had injuries that looked older than eight hours. In the end Martin, Tradescant, and Lenox dismissed the men; Lenox marked two in his mind for continued observation, but felt relatively sure that he had ended up down another blind alley.
“Back to work for me, then,” said Martin.
“Have you slept?” asked Lenox.
“Tonight. You’ll continue to look into this?”
“Yes.”
Lenox took to the quarterdeck. In the early afternoon the sky was hot and brilliant, cloudless.
Idly he examined the pocketknife Halifax had been killed with, as if it might unfold not just three knives and a compass, but, more useful than any of these, some kind of answer to this puzzle.
Suddenly he spotted something he hadn’t seen before.
Along the broad side of the smallest knife was a faint inscription. He had believed Tradescant’s statement as true, that the pocketknife had been unmarked, but then these words were all but faded from wear and would have been easy to miss in the wrong light. The white sun helped Lenox read them now.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
So the knife that had killed Halifax belonged to the first lieutenant of the
Lenox retracted the blade into its groove and considered what he ought to do. After several unhurried moments of reflection, he went down to the wardroom and sought out McEwan.
“Which of these is Lieutenant Billings’s cabin?” he asked.
“The one three to the left of yours, sir.”
“What is his servant’s name?”
“Mr. Butterworth, sir.”
“Thank you.”
Lenox counted three doors and knocked on the third. There were footsteps within it and Butterworth came to the door, a jaundiced man, too tall to be aboard a ship. Even answering the knock he was stooped over, nearly brushing the beams of the ceiling with his head.
“Sir?”
“Is Lieutenant Billings within?”
“No, sir. He’s on duty.”
“I didn’t see him on the quarterdeck.”
“Indeed, sir? He should be off shortly.”
“I’ll check back.”
Lenox returned to his own cabin and made a provisional list of clues, simply to organize his own mind: the penknife, the surgical incisions in Halifax’s torso, the missing blue shirt, the unusual fact that Halifax was not on duty but nevertheless on deck, and finally the medallion.
This he pulled from the handkerchief he had been keeping it in. (Pockets might be unloved within the navy, but Lenox retained his own.)
“McEwan, could you bring me a basin of warm water here at my desk?” he called out.
The warm water came, McEwan trotting it to Lenox. With a bit of rag and a sliver of grayish hand soap, Lenox set about cleaning the medallion.
It was, as the captain had initially observed, roughly the size of a large coin, a crown, say, but made entirely of sterling silver. When the blood was gone from the object’s surface it sparkled again as if newly polished, which perhaps it recently had been, in particular if it were a treasured element of one officer’s formal dress.
Lenox pulled out the magnifying glass to look at the object more closely. (This magnifying glass was one of his favorite objects, a present from his friend Lord Cabot, which had an ivory handle and gold rim, small enough to fit into a breast pocket.) Just as he was about to do so, however, there were footsteps in the wardroom and he abandoned the medallion and the magnifying glass to discover whose they were.
It was Billings, as he had hoped.
“Hello, Mr. Lenox,” said the lieutenant.
Lenox scanned the man’s face for guilt, an action that he had never found particularly edifying, given the variety of men’s demeanors and the basic inscrutableness of the brains behind them, but nonetheless performed out of habit.
“I hoped it would be someone I might ask a favor of. Lieutenant, do you carry a penknife, or a pocketknife, about your person?”
Billings’s reaction, which Lenox carefully watched, was one of seemingly legitimate surprise. “No,” he said, “aboard ship I only have a compass and a short telescope with me, in general, as you may see.”
He motioned to where these two objects, the second a brass tube no bigger than a half-burned candle, hung from a cord around his waist. Now that he thought of it Lenox perceived that both were worn as Martin wore his, perhaps in imitation.
“Ah, of course.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Do you have a penknife at all?”
“I do, in my cabin.”
“Could I borrow it, by any chance?”
Billings frowned. “You may, of course—but is it possible that you don’t carry one, or that McEwan doesn’t?”
“Oh, yes,” said Lenox, rather lamely. It was a barefaced lie. “And just when I want to shave my pen down, to write a letter home, you know.”
“Come into my cabin and I’ll fetch it for you.”
They went into Billings’s roomy cabin, which was unadorned to the point of austerity. On the desk, set in a slight circular depression in the wood so that it wouldn’t rock, was a silver christening cup, much battered and dented but lovingly polished. Poking up from it was a quill and a short length of string spilled over the side.
“Should be in here,” said the officer, and started to root around in the cup. When he didn’t find it he actually picked the cup up and turned it over on his desk, fluttering chits of paper and old bits of rubber out with the quill and the string.
“Mr. Billings?” said Lenox.
“How strange. It doesn’t seem to be here. I say, Butterworth!” he cried out toward the galley.
Lenox opened his palm and extended it out. “Lieutenant, is this it?”
“Why—and so it is! Where did you find it?”
“This was the weapon that killed Lieutenant Halifax.”
Billings was struck silent by this information. Only after a moment did he manage to ask if Lenox could repeat what he had said.
“This was the weapon that killed Halifax, I’m afraid. Tradescant believes it to be such, at any rate, and his reasoning is sound so far as I can see.”
“That cannot be.”
“It was in the corpse, underneath the stomach.”
Billings, who had been close to vomiting when they inspected Halfax’s body, inhaled sharply as if to steady
