“I don’t think so,” Lenox said. “If you look at it, the paper is uncreased and unwrinkled.”
Jenkins stared at the desk. “Well, perhaps she took the pen and then replaced it,” he said.
“In the grip of suicide? Unlikely. There’s a chance, but I’d lay odds that we find it’s a murder. Someone wrote this with their own pen and left it here. Notice the small squiggly letters-probably somebody trying to hide their handwriting. Forger’s tremor.”
Jenkins sighed. “Yes, you’re right, I imagine.” Then he looked up and said, “I’ll find the fiance.”
Lenox nodded. Then, thinking, he looked at the desk and the doorway until he was satisfied and turned to the bed.
“Thomas,” he said. “The body.”
Chapter 4
Thomas McConnell had moved to London from Scotland, where he had grown up, shortly after the conclusion of his formal medical education. He was a doctor. He opened a practice on Harley Street within six months of his arrival, advertised as a specialist in surgery, and set about making his name. This he had done quickly and impressively; he was open to new techniques, and his skill with a scalpel was surpassing. By the time he was thirty, he had one of the leading practices in all of London.
And then, when he was thirty-one, he married. More specifically, he married up-to Lady Victoria Phillips, who was nineteen at the time. McConnell was handsome, had a fair amount of money, and came from a good family. But in each of these respects, the civilized world agreed, he was infinitely inferior to Toto Phillips, who had beauty, fortune, and a name by any standard you cared to choose.
She married Thomas McConnell in the year she came out, because, her friends knew, he was different from the men of her milieu and generation. Those men had been her friends from birth, and they would always be her friends.