Toto frowned at her daughter. “You shall too, or your father will know about it.”

She was holding Bear’s ear with her small fist. “Shan’t and won’t.”

Lady Jane smiled mildly and said, “Charles, tell us about Jenkins while George rests.”

This was a clever stratagem. The child already looked tired, as if Lenox’s arrival had reminded her that it was late, and after only a moment or two of adult conversation she was half-asleep on top of the dog. Lenox lifted her carefully up and carried her out to Toto’s carriage, where Toto waved a silent but cheerful good-bye. Back inside, Sophia’s nurse was taking her up to bed.

“You know how to end a party,” said Jane as they walked back up the steps. “You must have been terribly unpopular as a bachelor.”

Lenox smiled and took her hand as they reentered the house. In the front hall he stopped at the table and looked through the calling cards on the silver rack—left by their visitors for the day, cleared at midnight—and at the stack of post next to it. Nothing very interesting. Jane, next to him, put a hand on his shoulder and kissed his rough cheek.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“Just a bit.”

“I’ll have Kirk fetch something. Will you tell me what’s happened about Jenkins?”

What had happened about Jenkins—it was a story that could fill many inches of column space. “I will. Have the evening newspapers arrived?”

“They’re on your desk.”

“I just want to glance at them. I’ll be along to the dining room shortly.”

“Let’s eat in the drawing room, it’s more comfortable. Will roast pheasant do?”

“Handsomely,” he told her, and then went to look at the papers.

A glance was enough to tell him that they had been fortunate for a second straight day—Wakefield’s body had been discovered just too late, probably by half an hour or so, to make the presses. The morning papers, broadsheets and rags alike, would be full of the matter, of course—the death of one of the highest peers in the land—but the papers of this evening contained only news of Jenkins.

When Dallington and Lenox had uncovered Wakefield’s body aboard the Gunner, the whole apparatus of Scotland Yard had churned once again into motion. First there was the constable who patrolled the dockyards (Helmer made himself scarce, perhaps wishing to avoid the nuisance of any questions about his semilegal brothel), and soon a fleet of his kind followed. After only fifteen or twenty minutes Nicholson had arrived.

“Is it true it’s Lord Wakefield?” he’d said. “That’s what I was told.”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“Heavens. This will mean a great deal of attention.”

“I should imagine,” said Lenox. “We would like to consult upon this murder, too, if you don’t mind.”

“Mind! I’ll pay both of you, but for pity’s sake, help me, help me.”

Nicholson smiled faintly as he said this, looking gray and washed-away, as if he had barely slept, and Lenox was reminded how much he had enjoyed working with the inspector that winter, before the opening of the agency. He was refreshingly without pridefulness, but sharp, too, and competent.

“The three of us together will crack it,” said Lenox. “At any rate let us hope this is the end of the deaths.”

“One a day might be reckoned too many by some, yes,” said Nicholson, shaking his head.

Lenox had sent for McConnell. The Yard’s medical examiner hadn’t been long in arriving, but he was a harassed and overworked fellow, and would admit himself that he didn’t have the training McConnell did. The body showed no obvious signs of violence, which was odd.

“Poisoning, do you think?” asked Lenox as a swarm of constables lifted the trunk up to the topdeck.

“I don’t think it was natural causes,” answered Dallington, staring behind them with his hands in his pockets.

“The salt to preserve his body, I suppose. The voyage to India is long and hot.”

Dallington nodded. “Enough so that I doubt the salt would have done the job.”

Lenox had shrugged. “It would have kept the smell down long enough that the ship was unlikely to turn back to London. Forty miles would have been enough, from what I’m guessing of the economic interests of the ship. Perhaps four.”

“True.”

“And very likely when they discovered the body, in two or three weeks, they would have buried it overboard. Sailors are madly superstitious about a dead body on board. They’re a breed of people that can find an omen in every seahawk, of course. A corpse is almost too ominous to conceive for them.”

“Then the body would have been gone, with a cannonball at its feet, to the bottom of the ocean,” said Dallington, “and no evidence that it was Wakefield at all. We might still have been chasing him, thinking he had absconded in the middle of the night after killing Jenkins.”

“Yes,” said Lenox. “Word to the Continent, police officers everywhere looking for him, hundreds and thousands of hours wasted. Now only one thing remains to be discovered.”

“What’s that?”

“Who paid to ship him to India?”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Helmer hadn’t been able to tell them the answer to this question.

They went almost straightaway to his little stall, which was now, predictably, empty, the women who had occupied it before evidently not caring to make the acquaintance of the members of the Metropolitan Police force. Helmer, perhaps aware of his uneasy position, was now eager to help, though the prospect of a payout had gone. To Lenox’s surprise, he kept excellent records. Unfortunately even his precise ledger didn’t tell him who had let storage space AFT119.

“That’s one of the captain’s spaces,” he said.

“The captain rented it?” asked Dallington.

“No, no. It only means that it’s a standing order—that the same person ships out in that space every time the Gunner goes to India. We call those the captain’s spaces, always have. See, look here. I have a list of spaces available for the next run right here.” There was a little diagram of the ship’s hold. “The squares that are cross-hatched are the ones I’ve rented. The ones that are blacked out altogether—those are the Gunner’s standing orders, the captain’s spaces. Four dozen, say. One of them belongs to Admiral Benson, I happen to know, because I stow it up for him.”

“What does he ship?”

“Scotch whisky, crates of the stuff. Don’t know if he’s selling it or drinking it.”

“I’m sure he would appreciate your discretion,” said Dallington.

Helmer looked indignant. “Which you’re the police, ain’t you?”

Lenox didn’t answer the question, since it put him rather in a false position. “Who stows up the spaces if not you?”

“The owners.”

Dallington and Lenox exchanged looks. “We’d better ask Captain Dyer, then,” said Lenox.

“I think it’s a capital idea,” said Helmer. He was at constant pains to prove he had nothing to hide, was even willing to let them take his ledger away with them, as long as he could make a copy first. Who knew where the ledgers for his secondary, less salutary business were kept. One problem at a time. “Though he’ll be wanting to set sail. The Gunner’s nothing without she’s on schedule.”

Lenox and Dallington went back out from Helmer’s stall into the open air of the docklands. Dyer was standing on the forecastle of his ship, arms crossed, observing the constables on their business. He looked out of countenance. This was a severe disruption to his plans, of course. Lenox knew from his time on the Lucy that the forecastle was the preserve of the common sailor, but the quarterdeck of the Gunner, which the officers alone were permitted to use, was at the moment dominated by the trunk with Wakefield’s body. Its lid was open, the ivory relief of the corpse just visible above its edge.