Lenox laughed bitterly. “According to whom? To Obadiah Smith. It all circles back around to him. Think of it, the brazenness of it! The gun that killed Jenkins—sitting on the table in the front hall. The port that poisoned Wakefield—Smith would have been the fellow who ordered all the wine and spirits for the house, and more significantly the fellow who poured it every night.”

“And the attack on Smith himself?” said Nicholson.

“To divert attention—and to scare me off, with that ‘warning.’ The wounds were ugly but superficial, McConnell told us as much from the start.”

The three men sat in silence for a moment. Dallington looked slightly stunned. “He seemed such an easygoing fellow.”

“He was always very affable with us,” said Lenox. “And extremely eager to help, if you recall—to point us toward Francis.”

Nicholson shook his head. “But why? How? Wakefield and Dyer had their scheme running smoothly, the women at the Slavonian Club smuggled into London aboard the Gunner, St. Anselm’s. How does Smith come into it?”

Lenox shrugged. “I’m not precisely sure. But you recall the names on the schematic of the ship’s hold, John?”

“Some of them, anyhow.”

“There was one we skipped past—between Berry’s Herb and Pharmaceutical and, I don’t know, Jones, or Hughes.”

“Smith,” said Dallington in awe. “He had a hold of his own on the ship.”

“I would bet that the Smith on the schematic is named Obadiah in the Asiatic’s files. Legally, he was bound to use his own name. As was Wakefield. And it must have given Dyer some assurance that their names were there, that he had some proof he hadn’t acted alone, if he were caught.”

The cab ahead of them turned down a dingy side lane. The street was too small to follow down without attracting notice, and Lenox quickly called up to the driver to continue on for another twenty yards, then jumped from the door as it slowed. He ran back just in time to see Smith and the cook—his wife? his lover?—unlocking a red door halfway down the street.

“Let’s arrest him,” said Nicholson.

“He may be armed,” said Lenox. “If I had to guess, he and the cook are going to take what they can put their hands on and flee—the Continent, probably. As long as Wakefield and Jenkins were silent in their graves, Smith was safe, but he’s Armbruster’s big card to play, to keep himself out of jail.”

“Honor among thieves,” murmured Nicholson once more.

They went to the red door. The street was empty, unnaturally quiet for the center of the city. Lenox felt his heart racing. He wasn’t as young as he had once been, and he let Nicholson turn the handle of the door.

The entranceway of the building was covered in dirt and dust, dark as midnight except for a kerosene lamp casting a sallow triangle halfway up the wall. From the second floor came muffled voices.

“Softly on the stairs,” murmured Nicholson.

As they mounted the steps, however, it was clear that Smith wasn’t expecting to be followed, or at any rate didn’t feel obliged to keep his voice down. He was nearly shouting, and a hoarse woman’s voice was responding. Miss Randall, Lenox supposed. Their words were indistinct.

On the landing of the second story Nicholson took out his bludgeon. They stood by the door for a moment and listened.

“I tell you, we have to go this minute!” Smith was saying. His voice was different here, in the eastern rather than western half of London, and Lenox had the flashing thought that in another lifetime he might have been an accomplished actor, so convincing had his act as a pleasant butler been for so long, a figure of minor importance, unworthy of attention. “Armie will have them here within the hour.”

“He won’t peach on us.”

“He will!” Smith’s voice was becoming hysterical. “I heard it from the Yard with my own ears. Good God, are you hoping to be hanged? Every woman in that house will be lining up to point a finger at you.”

There was a pause. “Very well. Let me pack my bag, then.”

“Finally, some sense.”

Nicholson had waited long enough. He nodded at Dallington and Lenox and after a moment of hesitation burst through the door, calling out, “Scotland Yard!”

The two amateur detectives followed closely on his heels. Smith, standing in the middle of the room, was the first figure they saw, his face white with anger and surprise, and behind him Miss Randall.

Between them was a high stack of banknotes, bundled into piles—and next to it a satchel.

And then Lenox almost burst into laughter: because sitting in an armchair next to the fire was a third person, the one Smith had been addressing, and who had been returning his words in perfect English. It was Sister Grethe.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The look of incomprehension that had been habitually fixed on her face was gone. She raised a gun at them.

Lenox disliked guns, though not as much he disliked knives. He had been shot at a dozen times in the course of his career as a private detective, and witnessed several other weapons fired, and in his experience the shooters tended to overestimate their own skillfulness, unless the range was very close. Whereas even the most modestly coordinated simpleton could make a knife hurt, at close enough quarters.

Here, unfortunately, the range was very close.

“Gun!” cried Lenox, and dodged left as sharply as he could.

Dallington, no fool, did the same, and within an instant both of them were muddled into a crowd with Smith and Miss Randall, at whom, they hoped, Sister Grethe wouldn’t be inclined to shoot.

But Nicholson, with real bravery, took the opposite tack, charging her. Just as Lenox heard the bang of the gun go off, Nicholson bowled over both the old woman and the chair she was sitting in.

There was a fraction of a second in which Lenox was sure Nicholson was dead—then, behind him, the bullet ricocheted off the ceiling over his head, chipping clear a large chunk of plaster. He felt his chest constrict and his breath stop, then start again. The plaster fell, and at the same moment the gun dropped to the ground and skittered across the floor.

Smith darted forward, but Dallington, who was just behind him, used the butler’s own momentum against him, shoving him in the direction he was moving so that he stumbled, out of control, past the gun and into the wall.

Just as Miss Randall began to realize that she might try for the gun on the floor, Lenox leaped forward and grabbed it.

For a moment they all stayed exactly as they were—breathing hard, tense, recovering from the rapid sequence of events. Sister Grethe and Nicholson were still in a crumpled mass on the floor, Smith not far from them on his backside. Dallington stood ahead a few feet. Lenox and Wakefield’s cook stared at each other warily—but he had the gun.

Once, in the case of the September Society, one of the shots intended for Lenox had hit him—a superficial wound, but there was a scar as its evidence, and sometimes when they were arguing Dallington would remind Lenox that it had been he who tackled the shooter. There had also been a case in ’64 when Lenox had come within a hair’s breadth of being shot by a gamekeeper on a farm in Nottinghamshire: The squire who owned the hunting preserve had noticed only after several rather dim-witted decades that nearly all of his family’s silver had vanished, and twelve hours after taking up the case Lenox had discovered that it was sitting, a veritable treasure, under the frigid one-room hovel in which the gamekeeper lived. The gamekeeper had been less delighted than his master by that piece of detection and opened fire upon them. Unsuccessfully, thank goodness.

Still, this was been the closest a bullet had come to striking him since those two occasions. That piece of plaster had been very low above him.