Lionel Garside

Lionel Garside is 48 and a homeopathic physician, American by birth, with a small career in Boston and another, longer one in London. He was born in Dayton, Ohio, the son of a grocery clerk, and studied at schools that gave out diplomas quickly. He was a mail-order remedy salesman, worked in suburban clinics and ended up in a surgery on a long street in the English capital, with a brass plate he polishes every morning.

He spends the day in the surgery, a room with moss-green walls, an oak desk with a clean blotter, two worn leather armchairs for patients and a glass cabinet with bottles he calls little friends. Above the fireplace, a brass scale and an antique globe that spins with one finger. He always eats the same sandwich for lunch, writes prescriptions in a round schoolboy hand and closes the door at six, not a minute late.

He is short and thin, with pale skin, bald at the crown, with thin brown hair at the sides. He wears thick-lensed, gold-rimmed glasses that make his eyes bulge, and a well-pressed gray suit with a bow tie. He travels without the mustache, which has left the upper part of his lip paler and a few days' stubble on his chin. He has a gentle voice, a clerk's patience and the habit of apologizing before saying anything.

He says his wife is dead, God rest her: she went to California in February to see a sick relative, caught pneumonia and was cremated there in March. He received the news by telegram. He travels as John Ellery, his mother's name, and justifies the shaved mustache by the July heat. A widower, he says, has the right to cross the sea in peace. As for the Camden house, he points to the former lodger, Mr. Quint, who he says kept a key, and says it would be good to start the conversation there.

Lionel knows that a husband who travels under another name and another face, bound for another continent, can only be treated with suspicion. When the detective presses him to confess before Quebec, the gentle voice does not change: he has nothing to confess, he says, besides a shaved mustache. It may be the serenity of a man who owes nothing to anyone. It may be someone who rehearsed too much to lose his composure. The detective will have to decide which.