Lenox sat with Skaggs for some time, giving him all the details about Barnard’s flight across the Channel (because Skaggs had once helped Lenox track Barnard once before, he wasn’t surprised to be spying on such an illustrious man), and then left Oxley Crescent. He was due to see Lady Jane that evening, but his mind was racing. Instead he had his carriage drop him at McConnell’s house, sending it home with a message to Jane that he would be an hour or so later than he had promised.
“Hullo,” said the doctor with plain surprise when Lenox came into the drawing room.
“How are you? How is Toto?”
“She’s sleeping at the moment.”
“I know it’s late, but I wondered whether you might go see Carruthers’s rooms with me now? There should still be a constable on duty, watching them.”
“Gladly,” said McConnell, standing up. “I don’t need my medical kit for any reason?”
“Well-perhaps. Just in case.”
“It’s by the door. Let me fetch it.”
“Shall we walk? I sent my horses home.”
“To be sure.”
A little while later the two men had set out for the dead man’s apartments and were talking seriously about Gerald Poole. Lenox still didn’t want to tell anybody about his suspicions of George Barnard, a well-respected man, though he could scarcely hide his revulsion when the name came up in conversation. Now, however, he focused on Poole’s innocence rather than Barnard’s guilt. He explained to the doctor his theory that Pierce’s murder was a cover-up for Carruthers’s, a red herring.
“It strikes me as crucial that Carruthers’s hands were inky and there was a pen on the table but no paper close at hand.”
“You think the person who stabbed him took the paper?”
“Yes, I do, and it seems beyond chance that Carruthers should have been writing a paper that the murderer wanted just when the man came in.”
“What about Pierce?”
“Nothing missing from his house, which Smalls couldn’t have entered anyway, or he would have been discovered. Pierce had evidently been reading, after a week that was in fact rather less busy than usual at work.”
“I see.”
“Finally-could Smalls have been anything other than hired help? I have a difficult time believing that he would have any cause for revenge against Pierce, a mostly anonymous journalist.”
The house in which Carruthers had kept his rooms was a low-slung place, brown on the front, with three floors and perhaps five tenants, if anybody lived in the basement. The door was open when Lenox tried the handle, and he and McConnell followed a soft noise up two flights of stairs.
The noise turned out to be the sonorous snoring of a sleeping constable, a portly gentleman with a red face who was sitting on a chair in front of a closed door.
“Excuse me?” said Lenox in a soft voice.
The constable fairly jumped out of his seat. After a few furious shakes of his head he seemed to return to the world. “Who are you?” he said.
Lenox stuck out his hand. “My name is Charles Lenox, and this is my colleague Dr. Thomas McConnell.”
“Pleasure,” McConnell murmured.
“Inspector Jenkins sent word, I hope, that I might be coming by?”
The constable rubbed his eyes and blinked very fast, then gave his head a few more furious shakes, as if he were trying to teach it a lesson for falling asleep, and then said, “Oh, quite, quite. The door is open. Shall I come in with you?”
“Only if you like,” said Lenox.
“Perhaps I’ll just sit here and-and watch out for everything?”
“All right.”
The apartment they entered was, Lenox assumed, as Carruthers had left it. There were three connected rooms, all decorated in the same rich, cloying style, with gilt everywhere, clothes lying at random on the floor and the tables, and expensive-looking liqueurs strewn among a vast number of books and newspapers. It looked to Lenox like an indulgent life, one perhaps made possible-or at any rate deepened in its luxury-by its inhabitant’s corruption.
“He died here,” said Lenox, pointing to a large round table near the fireplace.
McConnell, his leather kit in his right hand, looked the area over. “No blood.”
“He would have slumped forward, I suppose, and the blood would have fallen down the back of his shirt but no farther.”
Lenox went over all the rooms vary carefully, pulling out books and riffling through them, using a match to explore under tables and chairs, raking through the coals of the fireplace, and checking behind pictures for any bumps. McConnell meanwhile went through Carruthers’s medicine chest.
“He had a touch of the gout,” said McConnell when they met at the door again. “Nothing much else.”
“I’m not surprised, with all the champagne and rich food here.”
“Did you discover anything?”
“One thing-in the bedroom there’s a square patch of floor where the wood is much darker than everywhere else in the room, as if the sun had never hit it.”
“Oh?”
“He must have moved something recently. I just wonder…”
“What?”
“Perhaps he saw his enemy coming and moved his files as insurance. It’s a bit surprising that none of these chests contains a single note about his work, isn’t it? One sheet, yes, but the murderer would have had a difficult time escaping with a chest of files.”
“Of course.”
“Would you mind stopping by his office with me? It’s just in Fleet Street.”
“Not in the slightest.”
They left the apartment and passed the constable, who was again peacefully asleep; in the street they hailed a cab. Rain had started to fall, the dark night illuminated only by smudges of bright yellow light from the blurred streetlamps.
Mr. Moon was working late, putting the paper to bed. He was far from happy to see Lenox but impatiently agreed that the two men could look into Carruthers’s office.
“Where is it?” Lenox asked.
“You’ll have to figure that out for yourself,” said Moon.
As they walked out Lenox and McConnell both started to chuckle, and as they went down the hall they were laughing heartily at Moon’s rudeness.
Eventually they did find Carruthers’s office, which had a pleasant view of Fleet Street. Unfortunately, the room was tidy and utterly bland, without so much as a stray sheet of paper blemishing the three clean desks. All of the drawers were empty, except for pens, ink, pencils, and pieces of string, and the bookshelf had only a dictionary on it.
“It’s a marvel it’s so clean,” said Lenox. “After that apartment.”
“Perhaps he didn’t spend much time here?”
“Or else he liked a Spartan office, whatever his home was like.”
“It’s a shame.”
“Or else…” Lenox hailed a passing man. “Excuse me, but did Winston Carruthers have another office?”
“Who are you?”
“Charles Lenox. I’m looking-”
The man grinned. “The detective, yes. I don’t know about another office, unless you mean the empty room that was technically his just there, but he had only one office-the Cheese.”
“The Cheese?” said McConnell.
“Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.”
Lenox laughed. “Thank you.”
He remembered Dallington’s account of the pub, with its famous buck rabbit (toast drowned in beer and cheese) and its talkative tender, Ransom. “One more stop?” he asked.
“To be sure.”