Keys on a ring, seven, none marked, none unusual

            Billfold, twenty pounds in notes, three in coin

            Pocket watch and chain, silver, embossed TJ

            Pouch shag tobacco

            Meerschaum pipe

            Underground ticket, unpunched

“Nothing relevant to his work, then,” said Lenox, sifting through the box to check its contents against the list. They matched.

“No, unfortunately. Perhaps the keys.”

“And yet I wonder.”

“Eh?”

“The ticket is unpunched. I imagine it was for his nightly trip home. Did he take a cab here, then? Was he meeting someone at seven? We can ask his sergeant at the Yard—Bryson, I believe was his name.”

“Yes, Bryson.”

“We can also ask his wife if she expected him later than usual. Then there’s the money.”

“What about it?” asked Nicholson.

“It seems like a great deal to me. I’m carrying four pounds at the moment and would have imagined that I was above the average even on Portland Place.”

“True. I’m only carrying shrapnel.” Nicholson drew a few coins out of his pocket, more of them copper than silver. “Enough to get home or have a meal in a pinch.”

“I wonder if the three pounds was Jenkins’s pocket money, and the twenty for some other purpose.” Out of delicacy Lenox did not say it, but he couldn’t imagine that the inspector earned more than two hundred fifty pounds a year. That meant he had been found with nearly a tenth of his annual wages upon his person—odder and odder. “Again we might ask Madeleine Jenkins, or Bryson.”

Nicholson looked up at Lenox warily. “Perhaps you and I had better stick together after all.”

Lenox smiled. “You want to make sure you’re getting your fee’s worth, I’m sure.”

“Will you still take your fee, then?” asked Nicholson, rather surprised.

It pained Lenox to do it, but he nodded. For the first time he realized a strange truth: He was in trade. He had thought of the agency as a sort of clubhouse, but in fact he had broken the centuries-long sequence of Lenox sons who hadn’t dirtied their hands with business. He felt himself flush, and then said, “I wouldn’t for myself—because it’s Jenkins—but I have partners to think of.”

“Yes,” said Nicholson. “I understand.”

It was good for his self-regard, perhaps, thought Lenox. Humility. And then, it wasn’t as if he were selling grain from a cart. Nevertheless it took him a moment to regain his concentration.

“Let’s go to the Yard, in that case,” said Lenox. “There’s not much time to spare. I’ll just speak to McConnell.”

McConnell, having prescribed some medicine or other to his impromptu patient, was now standing by the police wagon with his arms crossed, smoking and patiently waiting. “There you are,” he said when Lenox came to him. “It’s getting rather late. Perhaps you could push us off now, and I could write you a note telling you what I find? Toto will be wondering where I am.”

“Yes, by all means—or you can skip it altogether.”

“No, no. I doubt I’ll find anything, but because it is Jenkins—no, I will do as thorough a job as I know how, and hope it turns something up.”

Nicholson had come out and waved to the driver and the constables nearby. The body could go. McConnell opened the back of the wagon and stepped inside. As he was about to swing the door shut, Lenox saw Jenkins’s boots, protruding from under the sheet that covered him on the stretcher.

On an impulse he reached out as McConnell was closing the door. “Wait,” he said.

The shoelaces still bothered him. Quickly he removed the unlaced shoe and examined it, turned it over. Nothing. Then, just to be safe, he unlaced the other boot and turned it upside down.

A very small envelope, smaller than a playing card, fluttered to the ground. Lenox bent down and picked it up. On it were written two words, which McConnell and Nicholson crowded around to read. All three of them looked at one another in surprise and consternation—for the envelope said, in Jenkins’s crabbed hand, Charles Lenox.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The southward drive from Portland Place to Scotland Yard, which was situated not far from the river, was slow that evening, the streets clotted with theatergoers, with young men in spats and top hats on their way to late suppers, with vendors hawking fried onions and potatoes on one of the mildest nights of the year thus far.

“Would have been faster to take the underground,” Nicholson observed angrily at one point, shooing away a man with a yoke slung around his neck, offering pint pots of ale from a large tray.

Of course they all would have been home faster still had Jenkins not been murdered, and Lenox, for his part, was ready to be patient. He stared out at the gaslight flicker of the city. First Baker Street, then Park Lane, the stylish hotels along it facing Hyde Park. There was too much to consider: on a human level, the death of his friend; on an investigative level, the nearness of it to Wakefield’s house, and Jenkins’s concealed missive to him. It had been unnerving to see his name upon that envelope.

More and more, his thoughts circled back to Wakefield.

The marquess was not one of these subtle madmen, showing a fine face in public and working from the shadows upon his designs. He was simply malevolent, a wicked soul, one of those freak remainders that the mathematics of genealogy produces. Certainly there was nothing else in the Wakefield line, long stewarded by sensibly avaricious aristocrats, to have foreshadowed his existence.

Lenox had first heard of him more than a decade before, when the young heir had been forced to leave Hatting House for the Continent—for Spain, if Lenox recalled correctly—after whipping a stable hand into a coma. He had been angry because one of his hunting dogs, a fool puppy, had eaten cyclamen and died. The stable hand had lived, though he had lost one of his eyes. Nor had this been a first incident. There had been some violence toward a housemaster at Winchester, and later Wakefield’s wife had left him two months into their marriage amid reports of intolerable cruelty, a young woman named Effie Maher, though not before conceiving the child who would become his son and heir. Much of the blame had attached to her, however, as she left; it always did to the woman, until the man was proved beyond doubt to be at fault.

That didn’t take long. At this time Travers-George was still only the heir to the marquessate, and therefore under some control by his family. When his father had died he had come into the full allocation of rights and perquisites belonging to his rank, however, and nobody had been alive any longer to check his behavior. If he had been born Jack Smith in Whitechapel he would have been hanged half a dozen times. He had thrashed a bobby; killed one of his own racehorses with a rifle out upon the turf at Goodwood; harassed a young woman who did not return his affections into retreating to Shropshire, terrified for her safety. Yorkshire was certainly too hot to hold him, and now he lived on the fringes of respectable society in London: His companions were men of the turf, or aristocrats drummed out of the military, or those striving families who lived on the edges of good neighborhoods and to whom the title of marquess inspired such awe that no imaginable behavior short of murder on their doorsteps could have barred him from their dinners and dances. And possibly not even murder on their doorsteps.

All of this would have been enough to draw Lenox’s attention—but what had made him so set upon seeing Wakefield in prison (he would have to be tried in the House of Lords, of course, which was what made his prosecution a trickier matter than that of Hughes, or Anson, or Wilchere, or any of the other six names on his list) was something else altogether.