Lenox stood and smiled. He counted fifteen seconds and then walked toward the door of the room in which he had been sitting most of the night, careful to avoid moving past the windows, where his silhouette might be seen. His joints ached. His eyes felt at once tired and alive with alertness. It wouldn’t be more than a moment now.

It was frigidly cold down on the street, and he was thankful, as he stepped into the snow on the pavement, for his rather odd-looking brown cork-soled boots, which he had ordered specially because they kept out the damp. The rest of his dress was more formal, his daytime attire: a dark suit, pale shirt, dark tie, dark hat, the only gleam of brightness on his person coming from the silver of the watch chain that extended across his slender midsection. He lit a small cigar, put a hand in his pocket, and stood to watch, his curious hazel eyes trained across the street.

“Come along, quickly,” he said to himself under his breath. Chiltern Street was growing busier. Two carriages passed in quick succession.

Then suddenly the brick house opposite—the one into which Hughes had slipped so quietly—burst from stillness into commotion. A dozen lamps blazed to life, and a dozen voices to match them. When Lenox heard an aggrieved shout, he smiled. It was done. Hughes was captured. He dropped his cigar into the snow, stamped it out with his foot, and then, looking up and down the street to make sure no more carriages were coming, stepped briskly across to witness his victory at firsthand.

Thirty minutes later Hughes was secured in the back of one of the two wagons from Scotland Yard that stood on Chiltern Street. Enough people were awake and about that a small crowd had gathered nearby, their curiosity triumphing over the cold. Lenox was outside the house with Inspector Nicholson, a tall, bony, hook-nosed young man with a winning grin, which he wore now.

“He took the money in addition to the letters. Couldn’t resist it, I suppose. Greedy chap.” The dozen pound notes sitting alongside the letters in the desk had been Lenox’s idea—their theft would make Hughes’s crime easier to prosecute. “We’ll need them for evidence, but you’ll have them back in a month or two. Along with the rope and the bell.”

Lenox looked up at the thin string toward which Nicholson gestured as he said this, hard to discern unless you were looking for it. It ran tightly overhead from one side of the street to the other; Lenox had used its bell to warn the constables waiting in the Dwyer house, the one that Hughes had entered, in case the thief was armed. Certainly he had shown time and again that he was not above violence. “There’s no rush at all about the money,” said Lenox, returning Nicholson’s smile. “Though I’m afraid I must be off now.”

“Of course. The agency?”

“Yes. Our official opening.”

When Lenox had left Parliament, he had agreed to a proposal from his protégé, Lord John Dallington, to begin a detective agency—a venture that he had contemplated at first with reservations, but that filled him increasingly now with excitement. It would be the best in London. The founders were determined of that.

The young inspector extended a hand. He was one of the few men at the Yard who didn’t look upon the new agency with territorial suspicion, or indeed outright disdain. “I wish you only the very best of luck. Though we’ll miss the help you’ve given us over the last months, of course. Six of the seven names.”

“Some scores to settle.”

“And not bad publicity, I imagine.”

Lenox smiled. “No.”

It was true. Lenox had devoted the months of November and December to tracking down some of the old criminals whose freedom had rankled in his bosom, when Parliament had deprived him of the time to try to take it from them. Now the press that would gather in Chancery Lane an hour hence to take photographs and write articles about the agency’s opening would have a ready-made angle: Lenox’s return to detection prosecuted with single-minded determination over the past months, and resulting already in a safer London. It would bring in business, they hoped.

What a day of promise! Hughes in a cell, his partners waiting for him, the brass plate upon their door—which read LENOX, DALLINGTON, STRICKLAND, AND LEMAIRE—ready to be uncovered. Hopefully the broken window of yesterday had been mended; hopefully the office was tidied, ready for the eyes of the press. How right it had been to leave Parliament, he saw now! A new year. The energy one drew from embarking upon a new challenge, a new adventure. He walked briskly down the street, too happy with life to worry about the cold.

Had he known how miserable he would be in three months’ time, he would have shaken his head bitterly at that misplaced enthusiasm.

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CHAPTER TWO

“Hughes is taken, then? I won’t miss seeing him swan about at parties, as if butter wouldn’t melt on his toast.”

“In his mouth, you mean.”

“In his mouth, then,” repeated Lord John Dallington irritably. They were in the agency’s office at Chancery Lane. It was a well-lit and well-appointed set of rooms, with a large, bright, central chamber full of clerks, and branching out in four directions from this a quartet of private offices in which each of the four detectives would work independently. “Neither way makes any sense. He took the letters?”

“And the money.”

Now Dallington smiled. “Well done, Charles.”

The house in Chiltern Street in which Hughes had been arrested belonged to Alfred Dwyer, patriarch of a cadet branch of a very grand ducal family. His beautiful eldest daughter, Eleanor, was betrothed to her cousin the Earl of Campdown, who would one day inherit the dukedom—a surpassingly eligible match, from the perspective of the Dwyers, and an acceptable one as far as the present duke was concerned.

It was known in certain circles, however, that as a sixteen-year-old Eleanor Dwyer had been desperately in love with her dancing instructor, a German named Stytze, and that there existed, in some dark corner of the world, letters between them of a compromising nature. These letters were the grail of every blackmailer in London. In fact they did not exist—Alfred Dwyer had bought and destroyed them years before—but Lenox had employed the rumor of their survival, with Dwyer’s permission and the use of his house while the family were away for Christmas, to ensnare Hughes.

As Nicholson had said, Lenox had devoted much of November and December to a list of seven names. Each of them had, at some maddening moment, eluded Lenox’s grasp. There was Anson the burglar, who had almost certainly slit the throat of a baker named Alcott in 1869; Lenox ran him to ground in Bath, where he was in the midst of planning a spectacular assault upon the Earl of Isham’s row house. (Bath was known for having a police force so loose and disorganized, compared to London’s, that many of the age’s most intelligent criminals had now shifted their sights to its prizes.) There was Walton the housebreaker, who stole only rare wine. Chepham, the ugliest character of the lot, a rapist. The half-French Jacques Wilchere, who still played cricket quite admirably for Hambledon and for his home nation. Parson Williams, an impostor, owned a variety of clerical uniforms. Hughes was the only highborn member of this offensive coterie, which explained why Dallington had had the opportunity to grow weary of seeing his face in London society. All six were now in the care of Scotland Yard.