“We must go tonight nevertheless, I fear,” said Lenox. He hesitated, looking around the office, his hands in his pockets. This felt wrong to him. “Has somebody woken up Jenkins’s sergeant? His constables?”

An officer of Jenkins’s rank would have had as an immediate subordinate a subinspector, with the rank of sergeant; below these two would have been a pool of revolving constables, generally two at a time. The four men would attack each case in concert, drawing more constables from the Yard when Jenkins judged that they might require greater manpower.

“I don’t think so,” said Nicholson. “I suppose word might have reached them, but it happened too late for the evening papers, and all of them will live some way out on the underground. I imagine they all went to their homes at six o’clock. I wish Inspector Jenkins had done the same.”

A terrible thought struck Lenox. “I hope they have not come to any harm themselves.”

Nicholson’s eyes widened. “Good heavens. You don’t think they’ve been murdered, too?”

“I don’t know. I hope not. It depends whether they were involved in whatever case brought Jenkins to his end, at least as long as we do not believe this was a random act of violence.”

Nicholson put two fingers between his teeth and whistled down the hallways sharply. A constable, in his high bobby’s hat, came striding briskly down to Jenkins’s office. He was short and pimply, and couldn’t have been more than eighteen, working the less desirable evening shifts during his first year or two on the job, junior to everyone. “Sir?” he said nervously.

“Send word that Sergeant Bryson and Jenkins’s constables—whoever they are now—are to report for duty this evening.”

“Sir.”

“Send telegrams. I expect them here within the hour. You have their names and addresses?”

“They will be on the rotation list posted out front, sir.”

“Good, see to it immediately.”

“Sir.”

As the young man walked away, Lenox looked once more around the office. It was surprisingly free of personal affect, but even so it seemed intensely sad: the room waiting for Jenkins as he had left it, its few objects gathered together into the shape of his absence, the ashtray, the small silver cup given him once by the government of Belgium, the aquatint of Victoria. One of his daughters bore that name, if Lenox recalled correctly.

Next to the silver cup, he noticed, was an empty rectangular space. He frowned. There was a kind of organized chaos of objects everywhere else on the desk—a pouch of tobacco, a stack of newspapers, some correspondence (including, rather embarrassingly, two notes from creditors to whom Jenkins owed money), a small ship in a bottle—but there, toward the back left, was this empty area. Ringed with objects, it looked suddenly as noticeable to Lenox as a pale rectangle on a wall from which a painting has been removed.

“Look,” he said to Nicholson. “This space. You don’t suppose someone’s taken papers from it, do you?”

Nicholson, who had been studying one of Jenkins’s open case files for a second time, shrugged. “It might be. Perhaps he took them home with him. More likely it’s nothing at all.”

Lenox felt uneasy, however. Jenkins had been a careful investigator. “Did his door lock?” he asked Nicholson.

“They all do, yes.”

“And yet we didn’t have to unlock it when we came in. It was open.”

“Perhaps he left it open.”

“Perhaps.”

Still, it was hard to imagine Jenkins taking the care to write a note to Lenox and triple-tie it in his shoe, then leaving the crucial file on Wakefield—for Lenox thought it must be about Wakefield, all of this, the coincidence too great to imagine otherwise—in plain sight upon his desk, door open. That would have been stupidly careless. Jenkins had not been a careless fellow.

There were footsteps in the hall, more than one pair. The young constable reappeared in the doorway. “They’ve been sent for,” he said. “And you have a visitor—visitors. Lord John Dallington and Mrs. Polly Buchanan.”

Dallington and Polly rounded the door now, crowding past the constable. “There you are, at last,” said Dallington, his generally imperturbable face flushed with anxiety. “Is it true?”

Lenox nodded. “I’m afraid it is.”

“What can I do?” asked the young lord. “I’m here. Put me to work, Nicholson, if you like.”

“And me,” said Polly, who was half a step behind him. Her face was full of concern, too—but her eyes were cast toward Dallington, not Lenox.

“For the moment, anyhow, one of you might wait here,” said Lenox. “Or indeed both of you. Nicholson and I mean to go see Jenkins’s wife.”

“Why does one of us need to wait here, then?” asked Dallington.

Lenox explained that they had called in Jenkins’s subordinates. “They’ll know where he kept his current paperwork, and what he was working on,” said Lenox. “They may also know if Jenkins was meeting anyone tonight.”

“I’ll stay,” said Dallington. “Polly, you’ve already had your evening disrupted—shall I put you in a carriage home first?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll stay with you here. I may be able to help.”

Dallington didn’t object. “Very well, thank you.” He turned back to Lenox. “Do you have any sense of what might have happened, Charles?”

Lenox hesitated. It wasn’t the moment just yet to disclose to Nicholson his thoughts on the Marquess of Wakefield. He felt he needed more information first. The Yard would find it difficult enough to pursue an aristocrat if they had substantial reason for suspicion. In this instance they didn’t, not yet. “Only that it relates to a current case of his,” said Lenox.

They knew each other well enough that Dallington had observed his fraction of a moment’s pause, Lenox was sure. “How do you know?” was all that the young lord said.

In response to this question, Nicholson and Lenox described the sequence of events that the course of the night had unfolded: the circumstances of the murder, Jenkins’s insistence that Lenox be called in (Polly looked surprised at this but said nothing), the twenty pounds in the inspector’s billfold, and finally the note in his shoe.

“May we see the claim ticket?” asked Polly at the end of this account.

Lenox produced it, and Dallington and Polly inspected it. “Presumably it is important enough that he didn’t want to leave it with his notes. They may offer some explanation.”

“Or he didn’t know what it was himself, and hoped you might make the link if he … if he was murdered,” said Dallington.

“It doesn’t belong to the luggage counters at Paddington, Liverpool Street, or Charing Cross,” said Polly.

Lenox looked at her curiously, smiling. “Yes, I drew the same conclusion. And it’s not from any of the better hotels. They print their tickets on finer paper. But how did you know?” he asked.

“I make a point of remembering them when I see them,” she said. “In my old firm I dealt with a great number of lost property cases.”

Nicholson and Dallington looked impressed. As for Lenox—there had been moments, in the past few months, when he had come to suspect that Polly had the brightest future in this field of any of them. Dallington had a great deal of talent, LeMaire a methodical mind; Polly had both. She was capable of insight and of deep organization. She saw structures—like the claim tickets—in a way that Dallington did not, in a way that was invaluable to anyone looking for patterns within the flurrying indiscriminate totality of London’s crime.

So did Lenox. “Funny you say that. I keep these every time I receive one. The book I keep of them is at the office. I was going to check it before I went home this evening.”

Now Polly looked at him curiously, and nodded slightly. He wondered how much the past months had depreciated her opinion of him, and whether he might raise it up again. He hoped he might. “Good,” she said.

They spoke for a few more minutes, and then Nicholson looked at his watch again and said that he and Lenox had better be going; they agreed to separate, and Lenox and Dallington, at any rate, said they would rendezvous again the next morning in Chancery Lane.