The answer must be money, and Lenox surmised, on the day he and Dallington went to see Nicholson, that Dyer must have gone to Lisbon to sell off the women in his holds. From there he could have sailed the Gunner to Calcutta—confident that no ship could outrun her on that route—and then left her with the Asiatic. He and his crew might well have dispersed there, leaving the company to replace them, perhaps eventually returning to London overland.

With all this in mind, Nicholson asked the British navy in Portugal to investigate the city’s brothels, to ascertain whether there was any that might have taken women from the Gunner in the past. (“Though asking the British navy to look at a city’s brothels seems like a redundant request,” Dallington had pointed out.) With the assistance of the Portuguese police, who were eager to aid the country that brought so much foreign trade into their cities, they raided half a dozen houses and questioned the women working there.

Finally, at one of these, belonging to an aristocrat named Luis Almonte de la Rosa, they found success: Several of the women had been at the Slavonian Club, and were paid no more now than they had been there. Emboldened by the assurances of the navy that they could have their freedom, they recounted their own stories of the Gunner, which had brought them first to London and then here.

The emergence of this second criminal consortium, far away in a different country, returned the story to the headlines for several days. After that it gradually faded, in abeyance until the trial of the last living member of the criminal trio who had planned it all began.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The weeks after Smith’s arrest were rainless and bright, the soft, light days of spring hardening toward the heat of summer, women walking with fans in hand, men in suits of lighter cloth. Along Chancery Lane, the dogs belonging to each shop lingered in the shadows of their doorways, their instincts for adventure and alarm dormant while the sun was up.

At the detective agency one story above street level, business had resumed.

“What about you, Dallington?” asked Lenox.

They were sitting at the conference table. “Two new cases over the weekend. One a woman of middle age whose husband has been missing for four years—she wants proof that he’s dead, so that she can remarry. The other is from a fellow who saw our names in the papers. He was defrauded of three hundred pounds by an itinerant salesman. Offers to split whatever we can recover. It will probably lead nowhere, of course, but I thought I might put Pointilleux on the trail, if we don’t need him here.”

Lenox nodded. “And Polly?”

For Polly was still there; she had declined Monomark’s offer. Now, as a fly buzzed against the warm windows, and she sat in the meeting that Lenox had begun by reporting that he had no new cases, she looked as if she might regret it. Briskly she tapped her pen twice against the sheet of paper in front of her, then offered up her usual list of small and middling clients, many of them women—good, steady business.

Eleven percent. Since the day LeMaire had announced he was leaving, the words that had rattled around Lenox’s mind were those two, eleven percent. That was the trivial proportion of the revenue the firm took in for which he was responsible. Could he blame the Frenchman for leaving? Or Polly if she had chosen to go?

The difficulty was that the previous autumn he had viewed this return to detection as a pleasure, a fulfillment of his private wishes—not as a business.

Today that changed.

“Thank you,” he said to Polly when she had finished. Then he paused. “As you both know, my official, paid involvement in the Jenkins murder concluded on Friday. I’ll still be helping Nicholson, but only in an unofficial capacity. That makes this a good moment to address the future of the firm, I think. I told you I had a plan, and I do.”

Both Polly and Dallington looked at him more alertly, eyes enlivened by their curiosity. With each other, in the last week, they had been stiff, polite. Polly had been most animated when she told them about her second meeting with Monomark.

“At first he tried to cajole me into accepting,” she had said. “Then I asked him about the articles in the Telegraph.”

Dallington had raised his eyebrows at that. “What did he say?”

“He turned bright red and asked me if I was certain once and for all that I declined the position. I said I did. He stood up and walked out then—leaving me with the bill for tea, no less.”

They had all seen the result of that meeting the next day, when the Telegraph had blared a headline: LEMAIRE FOUNDS DETECTIVE AGENCY. Monomark’s second choice, evidently, but quicker than Polly to accept the offer. The article below the headline described precisely the kind of agency that Monomark had offered Polly control of. Indeed, the newspaper baron’s fingerprints were all over it. The subheadline read TO BE PREMIER FIRM IN ENGLAND, and a quote from a high official at Scotland Yard, probably one of Monomark’s cronies, said, “Certainly LeMaire’s will be our first and only choice should we ever require outside assistance in a criminal investigation.”

LeMaire’s firm was already up and running, with daily advertisements in half a dozen papers, favorable stories in the press, and even fairly positive word of mouth. Within a month, Lenox had privately reckoned, he might well take half of their business. If he did that they might as well shutter the firm.

Fortunately, he did have a plan. What was more, it was Monomark who had given him the idea for it. At their morning meeting, he asked Dallington and Polly—the words were directed at Polly, really, for he knew Dallington would never leave—to draw up the last drops from their reservoirs of faith in him. He would return that evening with news.

He took his carriage then and went to Parliament, where he spent a long, tiring day—but a triumphant one.

At six o’clock that evening, as the Members began to make their way through the hall outside the Commons into the benches for the evening session, Lenox stood, watching them wander in as he had for so many years, until he felt a tap on his shoulder.

He turned and saw his brother. “Edmund!” he said. He felt himself smiling. Throughout the course of the case they hadn’t seen each other. Edmund was his closest friend, and it was an unusual length of time for the two of them to have gone without each other’s company. This was a happy coincidence.

“Charles, what on earth are you doing here? I could have stood you a late lunch, or an early supper for that matter.”

“I was here on business, alas. Do you have time for a quick glass of wine now?”

Edmund checked the large clock on the wall. “Quickly, yes,” he said. “But what the devil do you mean, business? They had pheasant with chestnut sauce and cranberries this afternoon, too, your favorite thing.”

They went to the Members’ Bar, mostly empty now, and after they ordered their drinks they sat, Lenox asking what the subject of the debate that evening would be. Foreign trade, Edmund answered. That was the dullest of subjects Parliament could take up, in his opinion, though one of the most important.

“Better you than me,” said Lenox.

“Molly says that Jane is having a dinner party this weekend?” said Edmund.

“Yes, can you come?”

“Molly has bought a new dress already, so I imagine we can. She’s down in London so rarely these days that she says she never knows the city fashion until she’s walking out the door, dressed in the last season. But since Teddy is ashore for leave, she can’t tear herself away from home. Speaking of which, you must come down soon.”

Edmund still lived mainly at Lenox House in Sussex, where they had grown up. “We thought of coming in July.”