Where was Beaumont?
He felt intensely vexed, closer and closer to some essential truth, still too far to hold it within his grip.
At that moment the same porter who had brought him the envelope with the farthing in it approached again. Lenox and Frost both turned to him with something like displeasure, and he shrank back slightly, repentant already.
“Yes?” said Frost.
“My apologies, sir. Another letter for Mr. Lenox.”
Lenox and Frost glanced at each other. “When did it come?”
“Not five minutes ago, sir. Once again when the porter at the front desk was occupied.”
“Christ,” said Frost. “What are those constables doing? Phelps, go and speak to the men stationed outside and ask them who has been in and out.”
Lenox was staring at the letter on its salver, and felt his heart beating heavily in his throat. There was a small circular shadow lodged in the lower left-hand corner of the envelope. He didn’t need to open it—but he did, more carefully this time, not letting the farthing inside drop to the ground.
He held it in his palm. “Twice,” he said. “In two hours. That’s very peculiar.”
Frost looked at him with a face traced with guilt, perhaps because he was glad that it was not he who was the target of these messages, whatever they meant.
It was hard for Lenox not to feel as if there was a pistol trained on the back of his neck—and he wondered what he could possibly do to feel safe.
What if the Farthings had been lying? And this was their second threat?
Jane and Sophia would have to leave London; that much was clear.
Phelps returned from his rapid inquiries: Nobody had been seen coming into the building, or leaving a note. Plenty of men had left in the last twenty minutes, of course.
“But that means…” Lenox thought for a moment. “Could someone from inside be leaving these notes?”
“Within the Royal Society?”
As Frost glanced around, Lenox slowly revolved, studying everyone he saw with new eyes, down to the inspector himself. His initials were TF, after all, Timothy Frost, a fact they had joked about more than once.
And then suddenly he realized, with a start, that someone was missing from the scene: Leigh.
“Where is Leigh?” he asked Frost.
Frost glanced back into the emptying room. He scanned it quickly and looked back at Lenox. Both of them had the same thought simultaneously: they had lost him in the muddle of receiving this second letter.
Lenox turned and sprinted for the building’s exit. He had to push his way among several small groups of departing fellows, none of them sober, until he could run out into the chilly air of the outdoors, praying that a bullet didn’t greet him there.
He stood close to the constable on duty there and looked left and right.
His eyes alit on Cohen, and seeing his sturdy, intelligent face, Lenox felt relieved. “Cohen,” he said. “Where has Leigh gone?”
“He and Lord Baird went ahead in a carriage, according to the porter. I know Leigh went of his own accord, saw him go.”
“Thank heavens.”
“It was only a two-person fly. I wouldn’t fit. I’m waiting for a cab to follow on. An address in Chilton Street, where Lord Baird’s laboratory is housed. They’ve a plan to meet Rowan at the rail station—to have tea in paper cups, an idea that tickled his lordship no end.”
Lenox nodded, a little puzzled that it was suddenly Baird’s laboratory, not Rowan’s, to which they were headed. He turned his gaze up the street, waiting for a cab to appear. “I’ll go with you,” he said.
“Of course, if you wish,” said Cohen.
Except that then, suddenly, an alarm sounded in Lenox’s mind. He whipped his head back to Cohen. “Chilton Street, you said?”
“Yes. Why?”
Lenox felt the blood drain out of his face. “Christ,” he said. He turned up and down the street, looking without hope for a cab. “A two-person fly. Come, we have to go now—a cab, I need a cab, Cohen. My friend’s life depends upon it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Cohen, to his credit, didn’t ask any questions. He removed a whistle from his pocket and blew it loudly, hoping to attract a cab. Lenox had started to sprint toward Piccadilly, in case it didn’t—there would be a cabstand there.
Then he pulled up. A better idea had occurred to him, and he reversed his path some ten or fifteen steps, turning down a side street that housed, he thought he remembered, a coaching inn. Cohen followed him.
He found it just where he had recalled, with some fleeting satisfaction in the distant part of his brain not consumed by dread.
He ran up to the chest-high lower door, whose top half was swung open. “Give me a horse,” he called. “A pound for a horse—a guinea—I only need it for thirty minutes.”
This was such an astounding offer that six or seven faces popped up at once, and within a minute a horse was being led to him, saddled and bridled. She was a bay mare, brown all over save a black nose and one black foot.
“Is she fast?” said Lenox, vaulting into the seat.
“Lord no,” said the boy who had brought her.
“Damn,” he muttered, but he had already spurred the beast out into the cobblestoned street, leaving his purse behind with Cohen, to pay and to give the stable his address. The junior detective had instructions to follow him to Chilton Street in a cab when this was done.
The mare might not have been fast, but she was fast enough. In Lenox’s boyhood it had been common to see men on horseback in the streets, but now it was rare, and in many places outright illegal, because it caused confusion and traffic among all the other horses needed to keep London moving—the cart horses bearing everything from carrots to silks, the cab horses, the carriage horses.
But there was nothing to beat it for speed. Lenox wove in and out of the rutted paths that the teams followed. He had forgotten his gloves at lunch, and soon his hands were stinging; he wrapped them more tightly around the reins, leaning forward to urge his horse onward.
The buildings flew by. For a brief, singing moment, as he turned down Oxford Street, he had an uninterrupted stretch of several hundred yards ahead of him, and he took her down it pell-mell, the horse snorting and straining, moving faster than she must have in many years. Lenox had always felt supremely natural on horseback, and even in these circumstances he registered the physical joy of riding.
In the East End of London, the streets became dense, stopping abruptly, forking off into tines without warning, the dark tenements concealing all but a thin ribbon of sky above. Lenox took his turns slowly, in part so that he didn’t break his neck, in part because his horse, no doubt unaccustomed to such strenuous exercise in the cold, was panting and trembling.
His only hope was that Baird was taking the turns slowly, too.
Chilton Street. It was entirely possible that he was wrong, and this trip to the laboratory an innocent excursion, marked by minor coincidence—as no doubt all of life would appear to be, had one sufficient information.
On the other hand, on the other hand …
As he rode, somewhere in the back of his mind he thought of all that he knew about the president of the Royal Society. It didn’t add up to much. He was well-born, that was clear, and in his manners well-bred. Had he been at Oxford? Lenox thought so.
Was he a murderer? Lenox would have said, flatly, no. He had seemed nothing but jolly, all throughout lunch. And what could his motive be, old Lord Baird, at the end of a distinguished career?
But Chilton Street—a stone’s throw, literally the distance of a stone’s throw, from the Blue Peter.
After the coincidence of Middleton’s visits to the Collingwood, it was too much.
Lenox turned onto Chilton Street with a last burst of speed. He had to cross several avenues until he approached number 80, which Cohen had been dead certain was the address he had overheard the porter giving the cab driver. Thank goodness for the small ha
bits of attentiveness all detectives picked up.
Ahead of him was a small conveyance. Was it the right taxi? Lenox’s horse, with white lather on her flanks, the poor beast, he spurred on harder, just as the fly pulled away from the pavement. As he got closer, Lenox saw it was empty.
“You!” he called. “Did you just leave two men here?”
The driver turned back with an unpleasant look. “Who’s asking?”
Lenox reached in his pocket frantically and held up a shilling. “Well?”
“Yes. Number 80.”
Lenox flicked the coin at the man. “There’s another if you hold this horse for ten minutes. And another for each ten-minute period after that. I have your cab number if you steal the horse. Tie her up at the least.”
He was already down from the saddle as he delivered this speech, running for the door.
Motive, he thought wildly, his mind still working on the problem. What could the motive be? Not money. But then, what?
His mind flashed upon the queer little encounter he had had the night before with Mr. Bartram, the amateur scientist, in the moonlit courtyard below the Royal Society.
He reached the door and found it bolted tight.
Ought he to knock? He looked up and down the façade of what he saw now was a large, rather lovely white house, out of place in this makeshift neighborhood.
He saw that there was one window slightly ajar, halfway down the long row of them. He ran to it—but it was barred.
He looked through the bars, and saw, inside, Leigh, with his hands up. Lenox’s heart lurched. And behind Leigh, pointing a gun at him casually, the other hand lodged in the pocket of his jacket, was the president of the Royal Society.
But not Lord Baird. Alexander Rowan.
Of course. A misdirection: that was why the plan to visit Rowan’s laboratory had changed so suddenly. It wasn’t Lord Baird behind all of this trouble. He wasn’t even sure Lord Baird had a private laboratory. It was Rowan.
And in a flash it returned to him, the ardor with which Rowan, not Baird, had worked to entice Leigh to return to London for a second time. A scholarship for a Cornwall boy to the university of his choice! It was such a canny offer: attractive to Leigh’s sense of honor, his pride.
And then, since Leigh had been back in London, every attempt to isolate him—Rowan’s absolute insistence that Leigh stay at the Collingwood, and then his repeated and equally insistent, indeed nearly desperate, invitations for Leigh to come after supper and have a late drink at his club. Then, finally, this trip to the laboratory.
All of them, opportunities for the Farthings to do their work.
Except that they had tracked Anderson and Singh, while Wasilewski was down in New Scotland Street, no doubt refusing, in sullen silence, to answer questions.
Which had left the thwarted Rowan to do the job himself.
It took ten seconds, perhaps fifteen, for all of this to connect in Lenox’s mind. He watched, in that time, as Leigh turned and then sat in the small wicker chair to which Rowan had gestured. It was like watching a play: the same impossibility of joining in, the same sense of tragic inevitability.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, Lenox saw something—next window over, there was a lone little ledge with a box of juniper bushes along it. If he climbed that, he could maybe, just maybe, reach the second story.
He went and tried to pull himself up. No luck. He put his foot on the bars of the window, but it slid down sideways. Then he had an idea. He removed his coat and slung it over the juniper box and pulled.
It held his weight. He walked very slowly up the side of the building, his arms straining, and then lurched to a seat on the windowsill. His body was trembling, hot despite the cold air. He turned to the window and checked it.
Locked, too.
There was nothing for it but to wrap his jacket (a present from Lady Jane—torn and muddied now, but if it saved Leigh’s neck!) around his fist and break the window, hoping that he might muffle the sound enough that Rowan missed it.
He did this, scraping himself lightly on the wrist as he reached in and turned the brass knob from the inside. Then he was in.
It was a shadowy room with mismatched furniture and a dark, squeamish smell. Lenox could tell immediately that this came from next door: the laboratory, he imagined.
How could he approach them without being seen? How could he dispossess Rowan of that gun?
Middleton’s gun, in all probability.
He was saved from answering these questions. “Turn slowly,” said a voice behind him.
The detective turned and saw Rowan, with Leigh a step ahead of him, hands up again. “Rowan.”
“Sit there,” Rowan ordered. “You, too.”
“You scoundrel,” said Lenox.
“Sit, I said.” When they had followed his instructions he studied them for a moment, then said, lifting his gun so that it was pointed directly at the center of Leigh’s chest, “I suppose two will fit into my story as easily as one.”
Lenox shook his head. “No they won’t, if a third knows.”
Rowan considered this, then shrugged. “We shall see,” he said, and fired the pistol.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Time stopped; then it resumed.
The bullet had flown wildly wide of Leigh, splintering a wall.
All three men were equally taken aback. The gun had been directed straight at Leigh’s sternum, and Lenox couldn’t believe the luck of it, the sheer improbable impossible luck.
Rowan’s reaction was to stare down at the firearm. It was obvious what he was thinking: Perhaps Middleton had had its sights adjusted oddly?
Lenox rose, almost involuntarily, and Rowan, coming to himself, said, “Sit, I warn you!” and cocked the pistol. “I shan’t miss again!”
“Rowan, for heaven’s sake, remember yourself,” said Lenox. He obeyed, though, sitting, hands hovering above his shoulders. “Why on earth should you want to go to prison?”
“I don’t.”
“Then why kill us?”
Lenox was only talking. His heart was fluttering as furiously as a leaf snagged on a rock in a stream. He glanced over at Leigh. Rowan stared at both of them. “I should have thought it was obvious. I am an ambitious sort.”
Lenox, evenly, said, “Ambitious.”
“Yes.”
“But my heavens, you are preeminent in your field, Rowan. The president—the president!—of the Royal Society!”
“Ah,” said Rowan ruefully—and now that he had collected himself, he was utterly steady, in gesture, in tone, in every aspect of his person besides the gun in his hand, the courtesy of the drawing room lingering in his movements. “But that job requires only that you be tactful, brilliant, agreeable, fair-minded, gentle in manner, firm in decision, friendly, and intelligent.”
“My God! And is there anything else?”
“Yes,” said Rowan shortly. “Genius.”
There it was, Lenox thought—had time to think, even in the pressure of the moment. Two scientists. One a genius, and one not.
Rowan lifted the pistol with a straighter arm, aiming now just left of the center of Leigh’s chest, to accommodate for the swerve of the last shot. “Bartram!” shouted Lenox.
He had only been trying to buy them a moment, but Rowan glanced over at him, for the first time a real irritation flaring into his aristocratic features. “Bartram! What has that little toad been telling you?”
“Well.” Lenox appeared to be contemplating the question, but really he was calculating. If Rowan fired again, Lenox gave himself a fifty-fifty chance of survival; he would vault at the man in the moment, praying to overpower him before he could fire again. His slackness of reaction in chasing Townsend blazed up vexingly in the back of his thoughts. Older now. “He says that there has been fraud committed against Leigh.”
“Fraud?”
Lenox glanced over at Leigh.
And in his old friend’s face he saw—something strange.
It
was not mirth, not delight. But confidence. Suddenly, as sometimes he was wont to do in pressured situations, Lenox flashed upon a distant and irrelevant memory: Leigh’s devil-may-care confrontation of Tennant, the Harrow hats stacked upon his head, defiance in his eyes.
Leigh spoke. “I suspect that Mr. Rowan has decided to claim my work. I submitted several papers to the Society late last year, the first I have chosen to publish on the microbe.”
“And your work involves the microbe,” said Lenox to Rowan. “Gerald trumped you, I take it?”
A bitter, half-mad laugh escaped Rowan. “Trumped. That is a word.”
“I fear our Mr. Rowan is not a scientist of original thought,” said Leigh, sounding genuinely sorry. “The first thing in his singularly blessed life that has not been his to pluck down ready-made from the branch.”
Both Lenox and Rowan stared at him, Rowan’s face darkening, and Lenox, desperately, trying to tell Leigh not to antagonize their murderous adversary.
But it was too late.
“More fool you,” said Rowan.
He lifted the gun, and fired it once more, both Leigh and Lenox rising in concert from their chairs in the millisecond that it was clear he was going to act again.
There was an odd explosive sound, quite unlike a gunshot. Lenox, in the confusion of the moment, saw only a bright red burst of light, immediately gone, and then Rowan recoiled, dropping the gun, falling to the ground with an agonized cry.
“Quick!” said Leigh. “The gun!”
Lenox was ahead of this piece of advice, already having covered the ground to Rowan. He picked up the gun and pointed it. “Don’t move.”
“Don’t fire it!” Leigh said.
But as they caught their breath, it became clear that Rowan was no longer a threat. He was writhing on the ground, clutching his arm underneath him, moaning incoherently.
“What on earth has happened?” said Lenox.
“I did it in the cab Rowan forced me into,” said Leigh. He was heaving breath, like a ship bailing water. “A little wad of paper from my day’s program, jammed in the flintlock. I had a second, less than a second, when he was standing up out of the fly—but I slotted it in there as perfectly as you could wish. I saw it slip in. I’ve never been happier.”
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