A Beautiful Blue Death

Chapter 41

His business done, Lenox set out for McConnell’s house.

“What can you tell me?” he said when he arrived, skip-straight past hello.

“Not much.”

“I see.”

“Come upstairs?”

“Yes, of course.”

They walked to McConnell’s private room and then went down to the end of it, where the doctor kept his four or five large tables, his equipment, and his cabinets full of bottles.

“Mr. Potts,” McConnell said, “is not your man—at least not on the strength of the sample you gave me from the bottle in his valise.”

“No?”

“What he had was a bottle of very nasty poison.”

“What?”

“Poison for insects. Perfectly harmless for human beings.” McConnell laughed. “Sorry for the joke.”

“Why would he have it?”

“Ah, I asked around. Bit of an amateur entomologist, I understand. Studies bugs, you know. I think he made a study of northern water beetles that the Royal Academy published.”

“Ah.”

“The knife gave nothing away either. Relatively clean. No fingerprints, although they would be inconclusive, anyway. Drenched in blood, of course. No powders. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Lenox sighed. “It’s all right,” he said. “I am close to a solution; I can tell I only want a missing piece. But that piece!”

“I’m sorry, Charles.”

“Quite all right, quite all right. Well, I must be off.” He thrust his hands into his jacket pockets and began to walk back toward the door with McConnell at his side.

But then he felt something at the bottom of his pocket. “Hang on a moment.” He extracted the object; it was a crumpled leaf, the one he had discovered by Barnard’s house. “I don’t suppose you know what this is, Thomas?”

“It looks like a leaf.”

Lenox chuckled. “Could you find out what it is, though?”

“Yes, of course. It will take me an hour or so. I must look into a few books.” He pointed upward, at the library that surrounded the balcony of the room.

“Will you come over when you do?”

“Yes, indeed,” said the doctor.

Lenox handed the leaf over gingerly. “I’ll be off, then,” he said. “You shall find me at home. I plan to smoke my pipe and solve the case.”

“Ambitious.”

“As ever, Thomas. Well—goodbye.”

“You’ll find your way out?”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

Lenox left McConnell hurrying back to his tables, where he would place the leaf between two glass sheets. He soon found his carriage again, said goodbye to the somnolent Shreve, left his salutations to the lady of the house, and went home.

Once there he removed the boots, found his slippers and a comfortable old jacket, and, as he had promised, lit a pipe and sat before the fire, thinking. Here was the problem: Effectively, he could remove every suspect from suspicion: Potts, Duff, Claude, Eustace, Soames, poor devil, and Barnard himself, who would seem to have no motive whatsoever and who also lacked opportunity, for he had been on the spot immediately after Soames’s death. He couldn’t have gone through the window and come around that quickly.

He smoked his pipe, waited for visitors, and mulled it over. But he didn’t have, any longer, the feeling of being blocked. He felt instead as if he were circling closer.

About an hour after he had arrived home, McConnell came in, looking flushed from the cold but pleased.

“I’ve got it,” he said.

“Yes? Already?”

“I was lucky to find Tilney in—but let me begin at the beginning.”

“Would you like a cup of tea or anything?”

“Certainly—I skipped tea.”

“Graham?” said Lenox, and the butler withdrew.

“Japanese maple, my dear Charles. Called Acer palmatum. An exceedingly rare tree here in the West. Many of the leaves look like normal maple leaves, you know, but as you can see”—he took the two plates of glass with the leaf between them out of his pocket and handed them over—“these are lace-leaf, more deeply cut and of a different shape.”

At this moment the tea came in and each man took a cup, as well as a piece of toast.

“How did you find this out?”

“I went around to an acquaintance of mine on Bond Street. I doubt you know him: John Tilney. Cares for no company but that of his oldest friends, who are all, like him, past seventy, but I daresay he has made as close a study of trees as any man in the kingdom. He has a virtual forest of exotic trees at Talliver Point, his house in the country. Fascinating old man. And now, this is the interesting part: He says they’re hardy trees but susceptible to English frost. As a result, only the botanical gardens here in London stock them—and those would have gone bare some months ago. So somebody has preserved this leaf for at least a month.”

“Fascinating,” said Lenox, as the wheels revolved in his mind.

“It is indeed. Something I never would have imagined knowing, you see.”

“Nor I.”

“And you know, Barnard has an interest in rare trees.”

“Yes,” said Lenox thoughtfully. “And I know for a fact that he was in the botanical gardens recently. Eustace might have been too.” He sighed. “Or anybody, for that matter.”

McConnell smiled. “There is great pleasure in true work, Charles. At times I almost think of returning to it full-time.” He was flushed now with excitement, not cold.

Lenox paused. “It makes me happy to hear you say that,” he said quietly.

“But at any rate, I must be off. Thanks ever so much for the tea—and for all the interesting pursuits of the case, sad as it is.” McConnell stood, shook hands, and went quickly on his way.

Lenox ran his fingertips over the glass and began to ponder, but at that moment the front door opened again—it seemed to be off its hinges, practically, it had opened and closed so often that day—and Lenox went into the front hall to see who had come now.