Gone Before Christmas Read online

  He was also, most unhappily, in love.

  “How many did you finish with?”

  Lenox asked this question as he peered into an oval mirror and straightened his tie. He had a bright face, a very short-clipped beard, light brown hair and eyes, and a lean build.

  He still did not quite believe himself to be an adult. But evidently he was, for he was the possessor of these airy and spacious rooms in the heart of Mayfair.

  This one, large and central, had the air of a gentleman’s club. There were books scattered about it, comfortable armchairs, handsome oil paintings on the wall, though the brightness of the windows meant it was less confined and musty than most rooms in a gentleman’s club. It also contained (to his knowledge) no slumbering gentlemen, whereas gentlemen’s clubs generally did in Lenox’s experience. It did have tokens here and there of his two great interests besides detection. These were travel, and the world of ancient Rome. There was a small—but authentic—bust of Marcus Aurelius tilted window-ward on one bookshelf, and everywhere were numerous stacks of maps, many of them much-marked and overcrossed with penciled itineraries, fantasies of adventure. Russia was his current preoccupation.

  It was this room in which he spent all but his sleeping hours.

  “Ten articles, sir,” said Graham, who also spent a great deal of time here.

  “Evens, then. Shall we go over them this afternoon?”

  “By all means, sir.”

  Normally they would have compared their findings immediately. Graham—sharper than all but a few of the fellow students that Lenox had known at England’s greatest university—had become his most valuable sounding board as he began on his new career. Every morning they each read the same set of papers and cut out the articles they thought were of any interest, however oblique, to the matter of crime in London.

  They rarely matched more than seven or eight of their selections. (Ten was about an average total.) Half the fun was in seeing where they hadn’t overlapped. The other half was in the immense chronology of crime-related articles that Lenox, who was by nature a perfectionist, a completist, had managed so far to accumulate.

  This morning he had had an engagement, however, so they would have to wait to add to their archive.

  Lenox donned a light overcoat. Graham saw him to the door. “A very happy birthday, Mr. Lenox, sir.”

  “Ah! Yes. I didn’t know you had remembered. Thank you, Graham, thank you very much. Are my gloves handy?”

  “Yes, sir. In the pocket of your coat.”

  Lenox patted his pockets and felt them. “There they are.” Then he smiled. “Handy? Did you catch that?”

  “Very good, sir.

  “It was a pun. Gloves, handy.”

  Graham nodded seriously. “One of these retroactive puns you hear so much about, sir, conceived only during its accidental commission.”

  Lenox grinned. “On the contrary, very carefully plotted, and then executed flawlessly, which is what really counts.”

  He checked his tie in the mirror once more, and then left; he bounded downstairs with the energy of a man who had youth, money, and the prospect before him that day of breakfast with an amiable party.

  On the sidewalk, however, he hesitated. Something had stuck in his mind. Worth bothering about? Reluctantly, he decided that it was, yes.

  He took the stairs back up two at a time. Graham was tidying away the remains of breakfast, and looked up expectantly when Lenox entered. “Sir?”

  “The one about the month anniversary?” Lenox said. “You saw that?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Lenox nodded. “I assumed—but it was in that dishrag, the Challenger.” This was one of the least reputable newspapers in England. “Still, if today’s May second—pull out the clippings from April eighth to the thirteenth, say, would you? Perhaps even the seventh and the fourteenth, to be careful.”

  “By all means, sir.”

  Lenox felt better for having coming back upstairs. The letter had bothered him, fraud though it likely was. He touched his hat. “Obliged, Graham. Good luck with Mrs. Huggins.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Stay clear of her, I say.”

  Graham frowned. Mrs. Huggins was Lenox’s housekeeper. He neither desired nor enjoyed having a housekeeper, but his mother had insisted immovably upon her employment when he moved to London, and both Lenox and Graham were in the midst of dealing with the consequences of that insistence. “Well—”

  “No, I know. Close quarters back there. Anyhow, I shall be back before long. Till then.”

  This time Lenox went downstairs and strode into the streets without turning back.

  From St. James’s Square he walked up Pall Mall, with its imposing row of private clubs, most of them cream-colored, many with impressive columns, all with sentries at their doors. There was a scent of tobacco on the breeze. The sky was smoothing from white into a pure blue. No clouds.

  He had been twenty-three for ten hours.

  Rum, he thought. It felt a very advanced age. Yesterday, or thereabouts, he had been fourteen; then in a flash, nineteen; tomorrow, no doubt, he would be white-haired, his grandchildren (or the younger members of a gentlemen’s club) ignoring him as he sat in his comfortable spot by the fire.

  Ah, well, such was life.

  The clip they had both taken from the Challenger that morning, May second, remained on his mind as he walked. He had always had a very good recall, and the piece had been short. He ran over it in his mind, once, twice, again, probing it mentally for points of softness, susceptibility.

  Sirs,

  It has been roughly a week shy of one month since I committed the perfect crime.

  Perhaps in doing so I should have foreseen how little remark the press would make upon it, and how little progress the police make in solving it. Nevertheless, it has been an anticlimax—especially as murder is a crime generally taken quite seriously (too seriously, if we are honest with ourselves about the numerousness and average intellectual capacity of our population) in our society—to witness how little comment my own small effort has aroused.

  I therefore give you advance warning that I shall commit another perfect crime to mark my anniversary. A second woman. It seems only just, to my mind. Perhaps this declaration will excite the generally sluggish energies of England’s press and police into action; though I place no great faith in the notion.

  With regards,

  A correspondent

  Far and away the likeliest thing was that this letter had been the composition of an editor at the Challenger who needed to fill three inches of column; the second likeliest was that it was a hoax; the third likeliest was that it was a harmless delusion; and far down the list, four or five spots, was the chance that someone had, in fact, committed a perfect crime, a little less than a month earlier.

  Four or five spots, though—not so far, really, down the list, as to make it impossible. “Roughly a week shy of one month” was a strange turn of phrase, too. It gave them a window of time in which the crime might have been committed, and Lenox cast his mind back to the period, which was populated with several crimes of interest.

  Most of them solved, however. None of them perfect, either, that he could recall. But Graham would pull the clippings. And hadn’t there been—

  But now Lenox found that he was turning up Singletary Street, which put him in sight of Markham’s. Soon he would be sitting next to Elizabeth. His heart began to beat a little more quickly, and as he opened the door of the restaurant where his older brother had arranged a birthday breakfast for him, the letter slipped out of his mind.

  Chapter Two

  Charles’s brother, Edmund, who would one (hopefully distant) day be Sir Edmund Lenox, eleventh baronet of Market House, was his only sibling. They greeted each other with an affectionate handshake at the door of a comfortable, paneled little room. Aside Edmund was his young wife, Molly, who was pretty and countryish, not most at home in London.

  “Happiest of birthda
ys, my dear fellow,” Edmund said.

  “Well, thank you.”

  “I remember when I was twenty-three.”

  “I would be worried if you couldn’t remember three years ago.”

  “Halcyon days,” said Edmund, with mock rue.

  Molly kissed him, laughing. “Happy birthday, Charles.”

  “Thank you, my dear sister.”

  The two brothers looked similar, but Edmund was fuller in the shoulders than Charles, who was more naturally willowy, of middling height but always reckoned tall because he was slender.

  They had grown up in the Sussex countryside—and those were, in truth, halcyon days; each of them a horse for his tenth birthday, swimming in the pond next to Lenox House during summers, longstanding family traditions at Christmas, two happy parents, on to Harrow (one of the nation’s pair of great public schools) at thirteen, and then, like toppling dominos, to Oxford.

  Lenox was at an age when his childhood felt at once very near and very far. So much had intervened between that tenth birthday and this twenty-third one, as if the previous one had happened both that morning and a hundred years ago. (His horse at Lenox House, Cinder, was fifteen now. Imagine that!)

  In this room, coming across to greet him one by one with hearty handshakes as they noticed him, were representatives from all these phases of his life. Their amiable fat-jowled older cousin, Homer Lenox, was sipping a glass of warm negus by the fire, speaking to Aunt Martha, whom they had both loathed as children and now rather liked. Lenox’s particular friend from Harrow, Hugh Smith, strode over, and there were Oxford friends, too, a part of Lenox’s little set in London here. A happy, small gathering, whose constituents, one would have said, bespoke a celebrant of exceptional good fortune. And the Lord knew it was true his life had been fluid, untroubled by larger worries, essentially without difficulties. He was deeply conscious of it.

  Except that now he had made this queer decision to become a consulting detective.

  Lenox knew, though he was determined to ignore the fact, that during these first seven months in London he had become a joke. To think of it too much would have pained him, however.

  At any rate, among these twelve or so people, he was yet loved.

  Soon they were all seated, and he found himself next to Elizabeth. They had said a brief hello earlier, but now she turned to him with a face ready to be pleased, fingers running idly along a silver necklace she often wore.

  “Well—tell me, Charles,” she said, “are you going to see Obaysch?”

  He gave her a look of consternation. “Not you, too.”

  She looked at him with reproach. “Don’t be a curmudgeon.”

  “I?”

  “Yes, you!”

  He looked at her and smiled. She was a pale-cheeked young woman of nineteen, in a blue dress, with lively dark eyes and even, white teeth. They were very close friends, perhaps even what you would call best friends.

  She had been married for just more than three months now. Snapped up in her first season.

  “I take it you’ve been, then?” he asked.

  “Of course. He was quite a sight, the dear. Still just a baby.”

  Unconsciously she touched the spot where a gray ribbon encircled her dress; she must, Lenox thought, his reflex for observation never switched wholly off, have thought every day since her marriage of the quickening that would mean she was with child.

  “From what I hear he wallows a great deal.”

  “There are people I could say the same of,” she said, looking at him dryly, and turned slightly away to take a spoonful of soup.

  Lenox laughed. The waiter arrived with his soup, and he picked up his spoon. “I am never entirely certain how personal your comments are.”

  “Good,” she said.

  Their conversation was the same one happening in variations all over the city, because at the London Zoo, just then, was the greatest commotion the metropolis had witnessed in many years, probably since the Queen had introduced the city to Prince Albert. This Obaysch was a hippopotamus: the first in Europe since the time of the Romans, the first in England itself—well, ever, inasmuch as any learned person at the Royal Academy was able to discern. Ten thousand people (an enormous number, perhaps twenty times the average) were visiting the creature each day.

  He was a plump potato-shaped fellow, at least according to the illustrations Lenox had seen in the papers and the descriptions that even very exalted members of the aristocracy, who wouldn’t deign to look at certain foreign royals but had visited the hippopotamus with breathless excitement, had provided him.

  “What tricks does he do?” Lenox asked Elizabeth.

  “Tricks!”

  “Yes, tricks.”

  She looked appalled. “I don’t know if you have fully grasped the dignity of this animal.”

  “Haven’t I?”

  “Tricks indeed.”

  Great ceremony had preceded the hippopotamus; it had traveled up the Nile with an entire herd of cattle to provide it milk, a troop led with pride by Sir Charles Augustus Murray, Her Majesty’s consul to Egypt, who had enjoyed his triumph for less than a fortnight before finding his august reputation permanently attached to the new nickname “Hippopotamus Murray.” (No matter how admiringly he was addressed in this fashion, it seemed doubtful to Lenox that Murray could feel quite content with it, after his long and distinguished career.) Now there were vendors selling little hippopotamus figurines outside of the zoo. The rulers on the continent were sick with envy. Children played hippo in the streets.

  The next step was to find Obsaych a mate, and the energies of many stout Englishmen in Egypt were no doubt being squandered on that project even as they ate their soup.

  “Anyhow,” Elizabeth went on, “when I’m in the country there will be few enough spectacles. I ought to enjoy those in London while I can.”

  She was moving to her new husband’s estate in the autumn, to take up her rightful position as the wife of the heir to an earldom, second or third lady of the county.

  That meant there were good works in her future, visits to the vicarage. Some glamor, too, to be sure—but country glamor. Because of her personal qualities, she deserved, in Lenox’s estimation, both high position and high excitement. She would have only the former in her life beginning that autumn.

  “You’ll return often, I hope, however,” said Lenox lightly, though his heart beat a little more quickly. He had never proposed, and felt a familiar dull pain at his lack of courage. He had missed his chance. Sometimes, late in the small hours of the night, he wondered if he had missed his only chance. What woman could equal her? “Your friends here will miss you.”

  She pushed back against the insinuation of his question slightly—at least in her posture, in her voice, a certain formality entering them, though never anything like unfriendliness. “Oh, yes, I imagine, when James finds it necessary.” She leaned forward slightly to address the young gentleman on Lenox’s left; a third. “Hugh, have you seen the hippopotamus?”

  Hugh gave them a scornful look. “Have I seen the hippopotamus. Yes, no fewer than six times.”

  “Six!”

  “I consider him more of a brother than anything.”

  “Disgraceful,” said Lenox.

  “You’re outnumbered,” said Elizabeth. “This is a table that looks favorably upon Obsaych. Hugh and I won’t hear a word against them.”

  Across from them, deep in conversation with Eleanor Arden, another of their set, was Lenox’s aunt. He appealed to her as a last resort. “Aunt Martha,” he said, and the table fell silent as she looked up. “Tell me that you, at least, haven’t condescended to visit the London zoo in the past two weeks. The old ways still mean something.”

  She hesitated—a gray-haired and portly older woman, resplendent in a spangled dress of gold and red—and then said, “I must admit that I instructed my driver to pause there yesterday.” Everyone at the table burst into kind laughter. “One likes to keep abreast,” she protested in risin
g volume.

  When the soup had been cleared and there was a lull in the conversation, even the hippopotamus parts of it, Edmund stood up. He lifted his glass. “What about a toast?” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” said one or two people, and lifted their glasses, too.

  “Charles moved to London in the fall, as you all know,” said Edmund. “So far he has not been imprisoned, lost money in a three-shell game on the Strand, or eloped to the continent with a dancer.”

  There was laughter, and Lenox called out, “Give me six weeks.”

  “He has also,” Edmund said with stout, awkwardly footed pride, “begun his very significant work as a detective—very significant work, very.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Hugh.

  “I am proud of him for it, and I think we ought to have a double toast to him for it. Join me, please. Two cheers for Charles.”

  As they cheered, Lenox felt himself blush, a little hollowness in his throat and chest of embarrassment. He would have preferred no reference to his work. But he accepted the toast—said thank you—all here loved him—the moment passed—and soon the conversation again became general.

  It was beneath the station of all those present here to have a profession, unless it be politics, arms, or God. It had been many generations since the families of any of them had done work with their hands, season upon season, year upon year, century upon century.

  A gentleman scientist, fine, or in an eccentric case an explorer, a collector, an equerry, a horse-breeder.

  But even the most eccentric of these would never have dreamed of taking work as a detective. England’s caste system was too inflexible to allow for it. It was this fact that had poisoned Lenox’s seven months here. Only unto illness, not death, and mostly for his poor parents, but still, still.

  Making it worse was how desperately little headway he had made. He was laughed off in Scotland Yard (he had tried repeatedly to make allies there) and laughed off in a different kind of way at the parties—where he was still welcome, but more often than before because of his brother, or because of Elizabeth, Eleanor, Hugh, his friends. In the fullness of these seven months he had had two cases, precisely. And this despite charging no fee! He had solved both; one a pitiably simple matter of a missing fiancé (he had an extant family in Bournemouth, unfortunately for the young woman who had entreated Lenox to find him so that she could marry him) and one an embezzler at a mid-size firm in the city.