The Vanishing Man Page 13

  “It’ll turn out for you. Listen, Theo, could I have a moment in the duke’s study?”

  Ward turned back to him. “By all means. His Grace said we should accommodate you however possible. I warn you that there is still blood there—and three footmen the duke has ordered to stay in the room at all times, on rotations like a ship’s. The largest footmen, blast them.”

  “I understand.”

  Lenox pocketed the letter and they went up by a back staircase he didn’t know. Soon they were inside the duke’s study.

  Lenox approached the painting, briefly attracting the attention of the three immensely tall, cow-eyed footmen standing in the middle of the room, their numerousness apparently the duke’s final idea of a defense for the portrait. But Ward waved them off, and Lenox, leaning in close to the portrait, for the first time read the poem that floated in an extremely fine serif hand next to the head of William Shakespeare. How foolish of him not to have looked at it more closely to begin with. He would add that to the notebook he kept of the errors he made—a document that gave him great joy.

  Ward watched him curiously, though he betrayed no particular interest in what Lenox was doing. As for the young detective, his hazel eyes were just inches from the elegant gold scroll. He read the words:

  Forty miles from Charing Cross,

  then back one further apple’s toss,

  under fields of wheat-grown gold,

  doth laze a buried story told.

  Lenox read the poem twice more, committing it to memory.

  Beneath it was a confused squall of black ink, like the elaborate scrolled marks that sometimes appeared at the bottom of poems in fine old books.

  He stepped back, so that he was nearly leaning against the duke’s desk chair, and turned his attention to Shakespeare’s face. It was very difficult not to see brilliance in the little daubs of brown, specked with white, that were his eyes. The genius of his and every age.

  Only now, though, did he notice that in Shakespeare’s right hand, held carelessly, was a lily. In faint handwriting beside it were the words Nomen Mariae, BV.

  He wrote these words down in his notebook.

  There were brand-new braces at the corners of each portrait’s frame and also on each side, six in total, bolted into the wall. Anyone who wanted to remove this painting would either have to spend a great deal of time on the task or cut the canvas out. It was no longer a matter of simply removing it from a hook, as it had been with the missing portrait.

  What exactly had Alexander Arnold Craig been doing?

  Lenox saw that there were indeed two screws gone from the new brace. He looked to the ground, stooped, and picked them up, next to the great roped-off stain of blood. Tiny brass things, the screws. They weighed close to nothing in his palm; had cost Craig his life.

  He went into the hall and wrote several pages in his notebook at a rapid rate—he was bursting with ideas—then closed it with a satisfied snap.

  “I will visit the duke in the morning, if you don’t mind,” he told Ward.

  “Not at all. In fact I could pick you up—I have to bring some papers to him. Eight?”

  “Perfect,” said Lenox. They shook hands. “Chin up. You’ll still be Prime Minister one day.”

  The fastest path to a high place in Parliament, should you be unlucky enough not to have a close relative with a seat to give away, was the kind of job Ward had now, secretary to a great gentleman.

  “Ha. Chancellor of the Exchequer would be enough for me,” Ward said. “I’ve always liked numbers.”

  Lenox smiled. “I shall remember that if the selection is ever in my power. Actually, I once thought I would go into politics. Impossible, of course, now that I have embarked upon all this bother.”

  “But you have Edmund just by,” said Ward.

  “True enough. I can always lean on him if I have a mind to invade France. And in the meanwhile”—he was allowing himself to feel just slightly pleased, because he was sure he was on the right trail now—“being a detective isn’t all bad.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Lenox departed into the bright heat of the June day. Even on this quiet street there were carriages trotting by, and he knew that a trip to the East End, where he wished to go, would take the better part of two hours right now. He squinted into the sunlight, wondering what to do.

  Then he had an idea. Straight across the street from Dorset House was a high stone rail overlooking the Thames. He leaned over it to see what was beneath him. On the quay, he saw, there were two or three small craft floating.

  He cupped his hands and called out, “Down there!”

  The men, in conversation, craned their necks up. “Aye?” one replied.

  “How much to drop me near Whitechapel? Tower Bridge, say?”

  They conferred for a brief moment, until one looked up and said, “These are junk boats, sir.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  They put their heads together again, this time for longer, until the same man said, “Half-sovereign?”

  It was not much more than a hansom cab would cost, and would take a fraction of the time. “It’s a bargain,” Lenox said.

  “How will you get down, though, sir?”

  But Lenox had already begun to answer that question. There was a black ladder hammered into the sides of the wall, which was thirty-odd feet in height, and he had swung himself over, to a loud, startled buzz of protest from the men below. No matter—he was climbing down. With the sublime and silly confidence of youth he felt pleasure in the lark of it, the danger, knowing that he wouldn’t lose his grip.

  At the bottom there was a drop-off of about his own height, and his newly hired chauffeur came and caught him with an “oof” as he came down. The half-sovereign was already in Lenox’s hand.

  The boat was small. It smelled of fish, but Lenox, perched on a gunwale opposite Smiley (that was the fellow’s name), only noticed for a moment, because soon they were zipping down the Thames, Smiley with the rudder and the string that controlled his one small, patched sail in a single hand, manipulating them together expertly. The wind happened to be theirs, and he moved among the larger ships with ease.

  Along the way he touched his cap to perhaps two dozen people, and Lenox, who loved nothing more than being on the water, partook secondhand in the glories of these associations, touching his own hat, too. The Thames seemed its own waterborne city.

  “Never done this before,” Smiley commented when they were halfway. “An easy payday, with due respect, sir.”

  “An easy and enjoyable conveyance for me, Mr. Smiley,” said Lenox.

  He tipped an extra shilling when they arrived, and in a quarter of the time it would have taken by cab, Lenox was walking up the street to the Dovecote.

  He had two reasons for wanting to be in this part of town. One of them was Maggie McNeal, but Bonden must come first.

  Unfortunately, none of the fifteen or so men inside the pub was he, despite his remark that he might be here. Lenox went to the bar, disappointed.

  The same angular man was standing behind it. He asked Lenox if he wanted ale again. Lenox said why not and, when he received it, asked if Bonden had been into the Dovecote that morning.

  “Thaddeus Bonden? Why, he’s directly behind you, sir,” said the barman, with a look of surprise. “If he were a tiger he’d bite.”

  Lenox turned around.

  And there he was, too, sitting at a small table with his pipe in his mouth. Lenox had passed him twice, and both times taken him for a stranger.

  “How in heaven’s name do you do that?” he asked angrily, lifting his tankard and taking the stool opposite Bonden.

  “Sometimes at sea it pays to be very still.”

  “What a delightfully informative thing to know,” said Lenox. “Thank you. Truly.”

  Bonden almost smiled. “Are we going picture hunting?”

  “I hoped you would have the time.”

  Bonden finished off his drink. “I do. But if we wai
t fifteen minutes or so, we might hear a bit of information to our advantage first.”

  “Then we shall wait. Do they have food here?”

  “I cannot recommend it.” That was a serious statement coming from someone accustomed to ship’s rations. “But,” Bonden added, “there is a woman around the corner who makes a very decent vinegar chicken with hot potatoes and mashed turnips. One of the navvies will run round to fetch it for you if you give him a penny.”

  A boy of ten or so did just that, and soon Lenox was drinking his cool ale and eating a delicious plate of food, which had come under a cloth napkin with a crust of warm bread. He ate heartily, Bonden watching, and when he was done sat back, contented.

  Now he felt braced for their expedition. He had heard so much about his companion’s magical sense for where things were hidden, concealed, misplaced that he was eager to see him in action. But they waited patiently, and after thirty minutes a man came in who spotted Bonden right away.

  He had a broad belly and a heavy beard and clattered his way to their table with no pretense toward stealth, saying hello to everyone whether he knew them or not. He looked and sounded roaring drunk.

  “Bonden,” he bellowed. He asked if someone named Bosun was there. (But weren’t there hundreds of Bosuns? thought Lenox.)

  Bonden shook his head and said no, Bosun wasn’t there.

  “Good,” the man said. He went to the bar and ordered two pints of bitter. “He knows I’d kill him where he stood if he came in here.” He said this so plainly that Lenox felt a wave of alarm. When he came and sat, the man chucked a nod at Lenox. “Mutton shunter?”

  “No,” Bonden and Lenox both said.

  “Join a choir and save our ears, boys,” the man said mildly at this simultaneous reply.

  A mutton shunter, in these parts, was a police constable—so-called since they were known for wearing long muttonchop whiskers. “What news?” said Bonden.

  The man drank the first pint in one draft, set it down empty, and shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.

  Bonden nodded. “Fair enough.”

  The man stood up. “If anything changes about that you’ll know it first.” He glanced at Lenox. “Good day, gentlemen.”

  As the man retreated to the back of the pub with his second pint of bitter, Bonden stood up. He left his sealskin coat there—it was a warm day—in, apparently, the full faith that it would be there upon his return.

  “The painting is not for sale in London, according to Mr. Berendo, who you just met,” said Bonden, leading Lenox out of the Dovecote. “So we may begin to look for it.”

  “Very well,” said Lenox. “Where to go?”

  Bonden looked at him warily. “You asked to stick by me today,” he said. “But you must follow me and pay attention, and that’s all, if you please.”

  “Whatever you like,” said Lenox. “Lead the way.”

  And what followed was, in fairness, one of the most interesting mornings that Lenox had ever spent in London.

  The first thing they did was board an omnibus bound straight westward, the direction from which Lenox had come. Only toward the end of the trip did he realize that they were going to the duke’s house. For an alarming moment Lenox thought Bonden was going to knock on the door—but they debarked the omnibus at the end of the street, just next to Parliament. It was here that Bonden’s investigation began.

  Almost immediately, Lenox came to understand how Bonden had followed them so subtly, and how he had disguised himself at the Dovecote.

  He had a gift for slipping his body into small areas where a person would never look twice. The overwhelming part of it was his use of the landscape, which he treated in a way that Lenox had never seen anyone do, not even pickpockets. (He had once paid three shillings to follow a pickpocket for the day. A highly illuminating experience.) He had an uncanny gift for standing just athwart of a tree, Bonden, or a quarter step inside a doorway.

  This was harder with two of them, but the sailor often gestured to Lenox, primarily with his elbows, where he ought to stand. His hands stayed in his pockets, and soon Lenox’s did, too.

  Was this learned shipboard? In port? On some distant island where he had been marooned?

  What was certain was that Lenox could not learn these tricks quickly. Perhaps the most remarkable gift Bonden had was for silence; not the silence that comes from not speaking, but some strange deeper silence that created a cocoon around them.

  They began by staring for a good hour at the duke’s house, from various angles. Bonden’s eyes, alert, hawklike, mostly still, seemed to take in every stone of the building one by one. Occasionally he moved five or ten feet. On the pavement, people passed them without—though they were an unlikely pair—so much as a glance.

  At long length, Bonden strode west away from the house, then switched directions, making a loop so that he could see it clearly from the rear.

  In that hour, the only thing he said was, in a low voice, “I doubt very much that anybody went through that window.”

  “How do you know?” Lenox asked.

  For he thought the same. But Bonden did not reply.

  They spent the next hours in the streets around the duke’s house. At first Lenox was baffled as to why. He was also glad that he was fairly tall, for Bonden could consume great yards of pavement when he wished, until he would stop suddenly but unnoticeably, light his pipe, then remain where he’d stopped for as long as he liked, unseen.

  Only slowly did Lenox see the pattern that Bonden was tracing: He was examining every street near the duke’s house in detail.

  Was this wise? Was it foolish? Lenox had time to think it over, as they stood and stared at, seemingly, nothing, until eventually he realized Bonden’s method: to start at the very center of the object’s existence and then make slow circles away from it, considering each place the object might be.

  In a way this was ludicrous. The painting could be halfway to Indochina by now. Yet on the other hand, Lenox almost believed that Bonden would ultimately make his way even to that outermost circle if it happened to be in Indochina—there was something so dogged, so unrelenting, in his method.

  He wondered, in one of the many silent moments they had, if you could do the same thing with a dead body: retreat from it in the most careful concentric circles, gathering impressions. He was making a note of the idea in the notebook he kept in his breast pocket when a low motion from Bonden, barely visible, asked him not to do it.

  At five o’clock, he said they had done enough for the day. They had done scarcely anything that Lenox could discern.

  Yet Lenox’s faith was intact, and just before they parted Bonden seemed to confirm it. “I think I know where it might be,” he said.

  “Do you!”

  “I think—I do not know. I may well be wrong. There are two things to check. Could we meet tomorrow?”

  “Of course, though I am not free until the afternoon.”

  Bonden nodded. “I will call on you then.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  They parted not far from the duke’s house. Outside, the summer sun was just beginning to dip, filling the old streets with dusty golden light. He checked his watch. It was half past six. At this hour the city would be overcrowded in every direction between here and the east side, yet he very much wished to go there again—this time to inquire about Miss Maggie McNeal, the maid who had disappeared the day before from the Dorset household, with either suspicious or grievously unfortunate timing.

  He took a chance and looked over the stone rail again. His man Smiley was there, and he called down.

  “Ahoy,” the riverman cried up, grinning, when he saw Lenox’s face.

  “Any chance of another ride? I need to go to Whitechapel, so somewhere near Katharine Pier. Same rate.”

  Smiley looked at the clock on the shipping tower across the Thames. “At this hour?”

  Lenox was, for better or worse, unafraid of Whitechapel at night, possessing as he did a sturdy pair of fists
and a quick sprint. “Yes.”

  Smiley shouted, “All right. If you can go now.”

  Lenox again scaled nimbly down the wall leading to the dock, then crossed the pebbly strand along the Thames. Smiley asked again if he was sure and, when Lenox said he was, helped him into the boat—it was mostly full of cockles now—to travel down the river, this time nearer to the city’s poorest, most thickly populated environs.

  There was no more beautiful way to watch the sunset than from the river, and Lenox enjoyed the ride, the wind stinging his eyes. By the time they had reached their destination, it was nearly dark. “Are you sure you’re all right here, guv?” said Smiley, tying on.

  “I’ll manage. Cheers,” said Lenox.

  He hopped off the boat in the East End with thanks, flipping the coin to Smiley, who caught it in his hat, saying he was happy to make a sovereign any day Mr. Lenox chose, then turned back upriver to sell his day’s haul of cockles.

  Lenox strode up a gangway and was soon in the busy weave of close-crossed lanes here. Before long he had reached Garnet Street—a rough-and-tumble but brightly lit thoroughfare, doing all sorts of busy trade even at the dinner hour, full of horses, boys, men, shopkeepers, bill stickers, newspaper criers.

  “Excuse me,” he said to a lad who was sprinting by.

  The boy stopped. “’S’it?”

  “Is there a large boardinghouse for single maids on Garnet Street?”

  The boy gave him a lascivious look. “Yes.”

  Lenox sighed and handed him a halfpenny. “Where?”

  The boy pointed up. “Not on Garnet proper, like—on Blossom, your second right, can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Tell the misses I said hello.”

  “I certainly shan’t,” said Lenox, but the boy was gone already.

  He went to the tiny Blossom Street, and there, indeed, he found a small respectable-looking brick house, which had posted on its door a severe malediction against any male visitors who might be coming in the evening. He knocked, and was answered by a broad-shouldered, ruddy woman, holding a broom, who looked as if she had probably had fifteen children, seen five husbands into the ground, and could still put away more rum than most of the punters in the Dovecote.