The sergeant nodded quickly. “Oh, yes, sir. Did you want me to go now?”

“I do. You can take two constables from the pool.”

“And a lad of ours, if you wouldn’t mind,” said Lenox.

Armbruster took out a brightly polished gold watch, whose chain was stretched taut over his belly. “Of course, sir,” he said. He looked rather dispirited, and Lenox wondered what his plans for the evening had been.

Lenox and Dallington left the Yard not long after—Nicholson was going to read over Armbruster’s initial report again, and gave them a copy so they could do the same—and stopped into Chancery Lane, where they informed Pointilleux that he would be accompanying several members of the police force on a canvass. He reacted with a momentous wordless nod, took the information Dallington handed over, and set off at a rapid clip to meet Armbruster and his men.

After he left, Polly appeared in the doorway of her office. She was wearing an unadorned blue dress and had her hair under a bonnet. There was ink on her fingers. “How is the case proceeding?” she asked.

“It seems to me that we have a great deal of information and not quite enough,” said Dallington. “How has it been here?”

“Very busy,” said Polly. Suddenly she looked tired. “LeMaire has left. And there was a new matter for me, a young governess whose mistress has accused her of an inappropriate friendship with the gentleman of the house, quite inaccurately. She was close to hysterical, the poor dear. Penniless, it goes without saying, but I felt we must assist her.”

Dallington was moved. “By all means. Can I help?”

Polly looked at him quizzically. “Can you spare the time?”

When the three had met the year before—Polly had been an independent detective then, fresh to the business and full of new ideas—a friendship had sprung up between all three of them, but especially, perhaps, between Polly and Dallington. It made sense. They were of the same age, the same class. Both had been rather battered in their turn by the gossiping classes of London’s salons. Above all, they had the same wry, not altogether serious way of looking at the world. It was enough to madden some people—those who took the world very seriously indeed. Lenox wondered what Alfred Buchanan had been like, Polly’s short-lived husband. He must remember to ask Jane.

For a while, as Lenox recalled, it had seemed inevitable that Dallington and Polly would fall in love. Indeed, there was a moment when it seemed to him that they had already fallen in love. Like most ironists, Dallington was at heart a romantic, easily moved, and there had been glimpses in his face of something like passion, which Lenox had observed when Polly was talking, or even merely when she was in the room. As for Polly, early widowhood had trained her to wear a mask, but Lenox had imagined that he detected a softness in her, too.

Yet here they were, several months later, and the two were only colleagues—considerate of each other, particularly he toward her, but if anything slightly more distant than they had been in the first months of their friendship. Was their business the cause of this very faint separation? The struggles of the agency? Had something passed between them?

At any rate, Lenox could see in his protégé’s eyes that at least on one side there were still feelings of love lurking beneath whatever conceptions of professionalism and respect had stilled them. He wondered if Polly felt the same way. He hoped she did. There were few men he had met finer than John Dallington, and few men who more deserved a wife’s love. Nevertheless, it was not difficult to conceive of him as one of those eternal bachelors, aging into affectionate courtliness, going home to an empty sitting room every evening. There was something proud—untouchable—in his bearing. Lenox wondered if too many doors had been barred to him, in his wild days, for him to be quite comfortable with the traditional gestures of wooing. He was like Polly, in this regard: Each had a mask of proud self-sufficiency, and underneath it a need to be loved.

“He certainly has the time,” said Lenox quickly. “There’s nothing else we can do today on behalf of Jenkins and Wakefield, whereas it seems as if there’s a great deal to do here. Dallington, I’ll go to see McConnell. We can meet again here in the morning.”

“If you’re sure?” said the young lord.

“Absolutely.”

“Then perhaps I will stay and help Polly.”

So it was that Lenox rode alone to McConnell’s in the waning spring light, jotting a few overdue thank-you notes as the carriage moved through the West End.

At the door the doctor greeted him with a grim smile.

“What?” asked Lenox, reading McConnell’s face. “The port?”

“Yes. Poisoned. Come in and I can show you.” McConnell led Lenox up to his laboratory again, where he demonstrated the chemical test he’d used, as well as the controlled test he’d done on an identical port that he’d sent his butler down to Berry Brothers to buy that morning. “Can’t be too careful.”

“There’s no doubt, then?”

“None at all. The Yard’s chemists are bound to find what I did. In fact, the quantities were unusually high. The marquess must have had a copper-bottomed constitution to survive as long as he did. Have you found the fellow who poisoned him yet?”

“Not yet,” said Lenox.

“I can’t imagine Berry Brothers will be altogether pleased to know that their product has become … well, a weapon of murder.”

“The manufacturers of the Webley will sleep well enough tonight, I’m sure,” said Lenox. He paused and stared at the beakers and glass bowls on McConnell’s wooden tables. “The question I have is whether Wakefield had time to murder Jenkins before he was murdered himself—or whether Jenkins knew that Wakefield was in some kind of trouble. He may even have been trying to help him. Though I doubt he could have imagined someone was poisoning the man.”

There was a knock on the door downstairs, and a moment later Shreve, the McConnells’ butler, appeared in the doorway of the library. “A visitor, sir. He is most insistent upon his need to see Mr. Lenox.”

Behind Shreve was a bobby. “Is one of you Mr. Lenox?” he asked.

“I am, yes.”

“Inspector Nicholson sent me here to look for you. You’re to come with me at once. There’s been another attack at Portland Place.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Lenox looked at the doctor. “I know we’ve asked too much already, but if you could—”

“Of course,” said McConnell.

The three men went outside to Lenox’s carriage, which was waiting in the weak warmth of the spring sun. The bobby knew nothing of the circumstances of the attack, not even whether there had been another murder or not. He had just been told to come and fetch Lenox. The drive didn’t take long, and as they pulled into Portland Place Lenox looked anxiously through the window and after a moment said out loud that he thought there wasn’t another corpse; there was a single constable at the door of Wakefield’s house, not the whole circus that would gather in the event of a death.

He was right. Inside the house Nicholson was talking in a low tone to a young man. Both looked up at the arrival of Lenox and McConnell, and Nicholson said, “Ah, here’s Mr. Lenox now. He’s been working closely with us to investigate your father’s death. Lenox, this is the … well, the Marquess of Wakefield.”

The young man stuck out his hand. “Joseph Travers-George,” he said. “Thank you for your assistance. I know that Scotland Yard are doing all they possibly can to get to the bottom of all this. Rotten business.”

The new marquess spoke emotionlessly, as if he were thanking Lenox for his assistance with a banking transaction, not a criminal investigation. This squared with the upbringing he had no doubt received, an emphasis on stoicism, and then his father had been no prize. Whether or not it was seemly, not all deaths were mourned equally.