“Shall we talk to Reverend Tilton, then, Mr. Lenox?” asked Jameson.
It was then that it came to Lenox, in a flash of revelation. Could it be that — was it even conceivable? Was the coincidence too great? One way to find out.
“Reverend Tilton,” he said, walking toward the man, “do you mind if I ask you what your first name is?”
Tilton turned around. “Ah, Mr. Lenox. How do you do?”
“Well enough, thanks.”
“Silas — Silas is my first name. But may I wait until the end of chores to meet with you?”
“Certainly,” said Lenox. He turned to Jameson and said in a low voice, “Arrest that man if I give you the signal, will you?”
“What — Tilton?” said Jameson, confusion all over his face.
“Trust me.”
Lenox went over to one of the boys sweeping the courtyard. “Hello,” he said.
“How do you do, sir,” the small boy said.
“I’m Charles.”
“My name is George, sir.”
“Could I ask you a favor? Could I see the back of your neck?”
George shrugged in a puzzled way, and before he could resist Lenox had swept up his hair and taken a look. Tilton shouted and began to run toward them.
“Jameson!”
Jameson subdued Tilton despite the startled looks of everyone else in the courtyard — and with some skepticism in his eyes, too.
“Well, Mr. Lenox?” he asked. “What’s happened?”
Lenox looked at Tilton. His thinness no longer looked ascetic or godly, but angry and cruel; his wild white hair suddenly sinister, rather than eccentric. Gently Lenox turned George around so that Jameson could see the back of his neck. And there, tattooed freshly on the skin, were two clear letters—ST.
“The ST for Silas Tilton, of course,” Lenox said, lighting a small cigar at the same table at John o’Groats. Jameson sat across from him. It was about two hours later, and Tilton, refusing to speak, was down at Scotland Yard. They had found a piano string with traces of blood on it in his office, though, after a long search, and the curate (innocent of any knowledge of the deed) had confirmed that his superior was out at the time of the murder.
“I understood that — though little else, I have to confess. How did you know? And why on earth would Tilton have wanted to kill Jigg?”
“I can only answer your second question with an educated guess, I’m sorry to say. As for your first question — the orphans’ shaggy hair was the slightly out-of-key note in the picture that made plain the other ones. There was Tilton mentioning Norwich, first of all.”
“Norwich, sir?”
“I may not have told you — he said something inadvertent about the place, about it being different than London, I think.”
“I’m still not quite sure why that matters, Mr. Lenox.”
Lenox took a sip of his ale before he answered. “Jigg was from Norfolk, according to the Plug brothers. Well, Jameson, you walk these streets every day. How often do you find one person here who wasn’t born in one of the Dials, much less two on the same street, both living in the same church, from the same county?”
“Hardly conclusive, if you’ll excuse me saying so, sir.”
“Not at all. But it lent credence to the second point that returned to me in the courtyard. You’ll remember me telling you, I hope, that according to the Plugs Jigg entered the orphanage in Norfolk at two, not certain whether his parents were dead or had abandoned him. But Tilton — I’ll leave the ‘Reverend’ out if it’s all the same — said that Jigg had lost his parents in a fire. Clearly Philip Jigg was much closer to his longtime friends the Plug brothers than to a clergyman he had only met a few times, rather by the way. How did Tilton have such specific information?”
“I see what you’re getting at. Dashed clever, Mr. Lenox.”
“Luck and intuition more than anything else, I’m afraid. It just flashed upon me in the courtyard that there was too much coincidence in the thing — two people from Norwich, an orphan and an orphan-master, and then that small, nagging detail about the fire — all I know is that it felt like deeper water than it had first seemed. And when the lads’ hair was so out of the ordinary … well, as I say, it triggered that rare certainty you’ll come across someday that there’s ominous work afoot.”
“I don’t understand the tattoos — why so great a risk for so little reward?”
“I’m afraid that there I have to fall back on pure speculation. I’d say that it was the most significant way in which Tilton cowed the lads, made them wholly his. Pure folly, you’re right. But then I think part of him was utterly mad.”
“Motive, then? For Jigg, I mean,” said Jameson, a mouthful of steak and peas slightly muffling his words.
Lenox thought back to the painful skinniness of the boys in the courtyard and the browbeaten look in their eyes after Tilton had gone off. It pained him. “I suspect,” he said, “that Tilton was running the orphanage for a profit. Not uncommon. Parliament gives money to the church, the church squeezes every last halfpenny out of it by working the boys, feeding them next to nothing, making them earn money — think of that music the one lad was copying out, must have been at sixpence a page, I’d say — and a man like Tilton can suddenly afford a new silk hat or a box at the theater.”
Jameson looked at Lenox pensively. “I’ll have them send someone around this evening to make a full accounting, sir.”
“The curate seemed a nice enough chap — hadn’t anything to do with the orphanage, only the refectory, you’ll remember, and I suppose he’ll give them a good meal this evening. A first step, at any rate.”
The troubled look didn’t leave Jameson’s face. “All the same.”
“Yes, absolutely, do,” Lenox said.
“I’m still not sure how that links Tilton and Jigg, though, Mr. Lenox.”
“Oh — well, I suppose that Jigg threatened to go the police when he first stayed at the refectory and saw the orphans in Tilton’s care.”
“But why would Jigg notice? Or care?”
“That’s simple enough. I imagine you’ll find that Jigg grew up in Tilton’s orphanage up in Norfolk.”
As Lenox’s carriage rattled toward the Devonshire Club (he was due for a drink with his friends Lord Cabot and Thomas McConnell), he thought over the case again. Simple enough, in its way, if unexpected. As he had told Jameson, Martha Morris’s question had also helped him in that moment of clarity: Why would John Mason have stayed at St. Martin’s? In all probability, exactly for the purpose of meeting and threatening Lenox or Jameson or whoever had come around to investigate the case. No doubt Tilton had been in business with Black Sammy and asked for a hand in the matter. A sordid business, Lenox thought to himself …
Through his window he watched the moonlight, dappled over the lampposts and high white houses of Park Lane, sparkling in the spring drizzle that had begun to fall. His happiness wasn’t complete, perhaps. He knew that he had helped in some small way, of course, and for that he was glad. But at the bottom of that gladness was the memory of the young girl begging with her fake wound, the young, fearful boys who didn’t stand all that much better a chance without Tilton than with him — and the awful knowledge that in the end he hadn’t really helped at all, and that perhaps he would never be able to. Still, he had done some small good that day. The orphans would have better lives, perhaps, and Silas Tilton go to the gallows. It was enough.