The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Lenox looked at Polly with a kind of despair. He realized he was crestfallen at this news, far more so than he had been at LeMaire’s abdication. Even in just the few months they had been working together, he had come to trust her implicitly. He couldn’t imagine what Dallington must be feeling. “Is that correct?”

She shook her head once and turned away, and Lenox could see that despite her aloof expression there was some high emotion stirring in her breast. She looked back at him, skin pale but cheeks red with feeling. “I’ve had a proposal,” she said.

“Of marriage?” asked Lenox, confused.

“No, no,” she said. “A business proposal.”

“From whom?”

“I would prefer not to say.”

Dallington laughed severely and stood up from the desk he’d been leaning on. “Yes, why tell us? We’re the competition now, after all.”

“Please don’t be unfair, John,” said Polly. “You must see that we’re struggling.”

“Businesses always struggle at the beginning. That doesn’t mean you walk out on your friends.”

“I wouldn’t, in the normal course of things,” said Polly. Her voice was tightly controlled, as if she were trying not to cry. “I should hope you would know that.”

Lenox held up a hand. “Can somebody tell me what’s happened?”

Polly explained. That afternoon, a gentleman’s assistant had left his card for her there at the office, inviting her to come take tea with him at the Langham. (“Where else, of course,” Dallington interjected. “Vulgarity upon vulgarity.” The Langham was a new and enormous hotel, which had cost some three hundred thousand pounds to build — an astonishing sum.) She had gone, thinking it might be a case, and, given the name upon the card, which was known to all of them, almost certainly a remunerative one.

When she had arrived, however, the gentleman in question had presented her with a different idea altogether: that they go into business together. It was simple, he said. He believed in her talent, in her innovations, in the specialists she had hired, and above all in the idea of a detective agency. There was money to be made.

But the agency she had founded with Lenox, Dallington, and LeMaire had gone about the business all wrong. Bad press. Too little backing. Four overseers rather than one. He knew business, he said, and a firm like theirs needed a single guiding hand — a single guiding vision.

To his surprise, Lenox realized that he was inclined to agree at least with this latter point. Too much of their time had been spent coming to agreement upon small matters. Four voices upon each subject was too many.

Polly went on. This businessman, Lord — and here she nearly said his name, but stopped herself — he had a plan. He already had an office selected, and showed her several designs. It would be called Miss Strickland’s, as her own business once had been.

Above all, it would be substantial. Ten detectives working under her — all trained precisely to her specifications. Specialists of every variety. Security. Clerks. He could guarantee an enormous splash, and an immediate and significant client: himself. His multitude of businesses saw dozens of incidents, large and small, that were beyond the purview or the interest of Scotland Yard but interrupted his efficiency.

That was the beauty of his idea, he explained: It was a wonderful idea for a business in its own right, but even if it operated at a slight loss, for some time, it would make him money. An in-house detective agency.

And Polly, in addition to a handsome salary, would own half of the business.

It took her five minutes to describe all of this, a little longer than it might have otherwise because Dallington, uncharacteristically, interrupted her continually with a succession of small, wounded sarcasms.

When she had finished, Lenox was silent for a moment. Then he said, “If I were your brother, I would tell you to do it.”

He looked at Polly and saw that all the anxiety and tension in her face washed away at his words, replaced by relief. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s it exactly. I would be a fool not to consider it. It has nothing to do with my … with my faith in either of you, or in our agency.”

“Ten detectives,” muttered Dallington. “What a load of nonsense.”

“Can you not tell us the identity of this benefactor of yours?” asked Lenox.

She shook her head. “I cannot. It was a condition of the offer he made me.”

“And it was you he wanted, not either of us,” said Lenox.

Even as he asked the question he wished he hadn’t, because the answer was very obvious — and what’s more, probably astute. Polly was sharp, young, and she had run a business of this sort before. With very great grace, she said, “He wants just one person — and had heard my name through a friend, I think. I believe it might just as easily have been either of you he approached, but a friend told him my name, and then he had his assistant research my history, and—”

“I understand, of course,” said Lenox.

“Then you’re farther along than I am,” said Dallington. “I could never turn my back on either of you.”

Lenox looked around the office, with its tidy rows of books upon the shelves, its hopeful lamps at each clerk’s desk, its well-ordered air of prosperity. Not six months before, he had been in Parliament! Strange to think of that, anyhow.

He found that he didn’t want to look at Dallington. His friend was nearly vibrating with disappointment, and Lenox understood, without quite articulating it to himself, that it wasn’t simple professional disappointment.

“How long do you have to decide?” he asked.

“I said that I needed two nights of sleep,” said Polly.

“Then you should have them,” said Lenox. “Why don’t we conduct our business as we usually might tomorrow, and meet the morning afterward? That will give all of us time to think.”

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. Time to think.”

“And time to steal our list of possible clients, too,” said Dallington.

Polly’s face, which had been apologetic since Lenox arrived, flashed with anger for the first time. “You’re a scoundrel to say that to me,” she said.

Without looking at either of them again, she walked toward her office and went inside, closing the door behind her. Dallington, who had gone pale, stared at the door for a moment.

There was a long silence.

“It will be all right,” Lenox said. “Whatever happens.”

Dallington didn’t look at him but went on gazing at Polly’s door. Finally he said distractedly, “Yes, yes. Of course.” But he looked older than he ever had before, his youthful face suddenly hollow and worn, the carnation always at his breast a mockery of the naked emotion in his eyes. A lock of his black hair had fallen onto his forehead.

Lenox realized that it was Jane, not he, who would be the best companion for Dallington at the moment. “Will you come have supper in Hampden Lane?” he asked. “We can let Polly’s temper settle. Whatever comes of this professionally, we are all too close now for our friendships to end. She’ll see that in the morning, as will you.”

“D’you think so?” asked Dallington, still not looking away from the door.

“Get your things. We can find a cab outside, and I’ll tell you about Jenkins.”

Some spell broke at that name, and after a beat Dallington shook his head and turned to Lenox, forcing a smile. “Yes. Let’s have supper.”

In the cab on the ride toward Hampden Lane (despite all of the distractions of the evening, Lenox found himself studying the horse that pulled it, after Hepworth’s aside about the taxi horses of London) Dallington recovered some of his righteous indignation, though it was redirected now. He spent most of the way inveighing against the anonymous lord who had approached Polly.

“Sheer theft,” he said. “It’s our idea, a detective agency.”

Lenox shrugged. “That’s the marketplace, I’m sorry to say.”

“I wish I knew who he was, the upjumped bastard,” said Dallington.

The conversation continued in that vein for some time. Only when they were in front of Lenox’s house — where two men in dark cloaks stood at attention, Clemons’s men — did Dallington say, “What was it that you discovered, after all? I’m sorry I didn’t ask before.”

“St. Anselm’s isn’t a convent,” said Lenox.

Dallington frowned at him, puzzled, and for the first time fully engaged by Lenox’s news. “Then what is it?” he asked.

“I think — I may be wrong — that it’s a brothel.”