“You told us yesterday, didn’t you, that you aren’t accustomed to working in the field? That you are generally employed in the back offices?” Armbruster was silent at this. Lenox went on, “Take those facts together, then: You live nowhere near the part of London where Jenkins was killed, you generally work in this building, which is not a hundred steps from the Tube station where you would find your train home, and yet you were first upon the scene of the crime, as Inspector Nicholson here told us when we arrived. That was why you had charge of it, was it not?”

“It was,” said Nicholson. “He sent the fellow who found the body to fetch a constable and watched over it himself.”

Lenox nodded. “It must have been then that you looked through Jenkins’s pockets. You were very thorough—you even untied one of his shoes. But I suppose you were interrupted before you could get it off.”

Nicholson’s gaze had hardened now. “What were you doing near Regent’s Park that evening?” he asked.

“And what were you doing when I arrived,” said Lenox, “with a thick sheaf of papers, clamped tightly under your arm?”

“I didn’t have any papers,” said Armbruster. There was menace in his heavy face now.

“In fact you did,” said Lenox. “And if I had to guess why, I’d say it’s because you watched Jenkins’s office closely, saw when he left, slipped in, took the papers, and then followed him to North London to be first on the scene when he was murdered. You had to hold the papers—there was nowhere you could safely leave them. The only questions that remain are where the papers are now, and whether or not it was you who killed him.”

There was a tense silence in the room. “This is all mad speculation,” said Armbruster at last. “You have no proof that I’ve done anything.”

Pointilleux, who had been sitting quietly, widened his eyes slightly and then said, “I see now! This is why you have done such a bad job with the canvass, last evening!”

“I didn’t do any such thing,” said Armbruster.

“You did!”

“You had better give it up, Armbruster,” said Lenox. “If you were merely working for someone, you can avoid being hanged, anyway.”

For a fleeting moment the threat seemed to work. The sergeant’s face wavered. But he held firm. “This is all nonsense,” he said. “Inspector Nicholson, if you require nothing else?”

“I require a great deal else,” said Nicholson. “Sit there. Your desk and your home are going to be searched thoroughly before you leave this office.”

“As you please,” said Armbruster, and he sat back, unperturbed.

Lenox’s heart fell. They could search both his desk and his home all they liked, but they wouldn’t find anything—the fleeting reaction in the sergeant’s face told as much. “Was it Wakefield who was paying you?” he asked.

“Nobody was paying me.”

“Or Hartley? Francis?”

“You’re talking rot,” said Armbruster. “I was in the neighborhood on a social call, and I happened to see a fellow in distress. I ought to be getting a ribbon from you lot, not an earful about how I killed him. It’s a disgrace.”

“Yes, it’s a disgrace,” said Lenox.

Nicholson had gone to fetch two constables from the pool. When he returned, he said, “They’re going over his desk.”

“They won’t find anything,” said Lenox.

Nicholson shook his head. “No, I don’t think so either. And yet this chap lied to us now several times—about the watch, about the papers, for now that I put my mind to it I remember as well that you were carrying some kind of papers, Armbruster, and why on earth would that have been? You’d no need to take work home.”

“They were probably personal papers,” the sergeant said. “I can’t even remember them myself.”

It was maddening: to have someone who knew the truth about two murders sitting here before them, and to be unable to make him give it up.

CHAPTER THIRTY

That afternoon was Jenkins’s funeral. Lenox and Dallington rode together to it, and Lenox used the time to tell his protégé about the interview they had conducted with Armbruster.

“Where is he now?” asked Dallington.

“Still in Nicholson’s office, waiting for them to search his desk and his house. He’s not happy about having to sit there for hours, but they can’t arrest him. For all I know he’s marched out of the office already. He seemed more confident as time went on, I’m sorry to say. There was a moment when I thought he might break down, but if he doesn’t we’re flummoxed.”

Dallington turned his head, his face philosophical. “Still, it was well done to spot him, the scoundrel.”

Lenox hesitated, then said, “No, it was badly done. I realize that now. I would have been much better off observing him, building a case against him.” He shook his head. “I was too excited to have put it together, after Pointilleux described how incompetent the canvass was.”

He half-expected Dallington to object to this self-criticism, but the younger lad said, “Perhaps, I suppose.”

In all the months of the agency’s existence it was the closest he had come to offering any criticism of Lenox. He felt it keenly. “Armbruster will betray himself in the end, I hope. Something in his office or in his house that he didn’t count on us finding.”

“I hope so too,” said Dallington.

The funeral was at a church called St. Mary’s. They arrived a bit early and found Nicholson standing on the church’s steps, changed from his daily clothes into a subdued gray flannel suit, with a black bowler hat on his head. He greeted them.

“Any news?” asked Lenox.

“None. He won’t talk, and there’s nothing unusual in his desk. I’ve left instructions he’s not to move. But as you said, I doubt we’ll find much. All society’s going to hell anyway,” said Nicholson moodily. “Marquesses murdering and getting murdered. Police sergeants stealing papers.”

Dallington smiled gently. “And they say the Queen and Princess Beatrice have been seen smoking cigarettes at Balmoral.”

Nicholson shook his head. “It’s extremely distressing to think of it coming from inside the Yard.” He looked at Lenox. “Do you think Armbruster killed Jenkins himself?”

Lenox shook his head. “I think he did a job for money. The new watch tells us that. He took the papers and he made sure—or tried to make sure—that there was nothing incriminating on Jenkins’s person. At the scene and since, he’s dragged his feet and tried to slow down the investigation.”

Nicholson nodded. “The soup, the slow and incomplete canvasses.”

“But I would hazard that was his full role. I could be wrong, of course.”

“Who paid him, then?”

Lenox shrugged. “Andrew H. Francis, I suppose.”

“Yes. Him.” Yesterday and that morning the Yard’s clerical staff had done extensive research in the directories of London and still hadn’t found Andrew Francis—or at any rate not one who corresponded to the description they had of him, young, aristocratic, wealthy, well dressed. Lenox had begun to wonder whether it was a pseudonym. “The fellow shot an inspector of the Yard, poisoned a nobleman and arranged for him to be shipped to Calcutta like a slab of mutton, and we can’t find hide nor hair of him. Either he’s a genius, or we’re a pack of fools.”

“We’ll find him,” said Lenox. He wished he were as confident as he sounded.

“How?” asked Nicholson.

“By carrying on. After the funeral I mean to start with what Pointilleux found—that list of houses that Wakefield owned. If Jenkins thought it was significant, I’m certain it was.”

They spoke for another few minutes, and then the bells of the church chimed, and all of the people engaged in similar conversations on the steps turned toward the enormous oak doors of the church and began to walk inside.

The service was long. There were several hymns, followed by a warm eulogy from the Lord Mayor of London, a redoubtable figure in black velvet breeches with a silver-headed cane. The turnout was excellent in this respect—there were three Members of Parliament present, the entire upper echelon of the Yard’s administrative staff, and more off-duty bobbies and inspectors and sergeants than could be counted. Behind the final pews of the church were a few loose lines of standing men, and their stolidly endured discomfort over the eighty minutes was its own kind of testimonial to Jenkins, the church too full because he was so mourned.