A Death in the Small Hours clm-6

by Charles Finch

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Lenox sat in the sunroom with Lady Jane and Sophia for a few pleasant moments, during which he told his wife about Frederick’s plans to give up the house, and she reacted more calmly than he had — thought it was a sensible idea. Perhaps she was right.

  After they had discussed it Lenox said good-bye to his wife and his child, called Bear and Rabbit, put on his black topcoat, and set out for Plumbley.

  The clean air had already invigorated him. Few men felt more at home in London than Lenox did, yet even he had to acknowledge the difference it made to his heavy lungs and his stinging eyes to be away from the metropolis. It was a worsening problem; on one day earlier that month the mixture of yellow fog and coal smoke — what residents called the London Particular — had been so bad that the police ordered the streetlamps lit during the daylight hours, not much after noon. Then there were the cattle the year before, brought in from just such a place as this for an exhibition of livestock, who had suffocated to death. It sounded like a joke, but it wasn’t. Even every Englishman’s favorite accessory, the tightly furled black umbrella, had become that color largely to guard against the discoloration of the polluted air that a white umbrella in London invariably suffered.

  The countryside was so beautiful. It was that season when the end of summer and the beginning of autumn get muddled, and one never seemed to know whether to dress for the impending October frost or the lingering September heat. In the small houses he passed on the grassy lane, there was a feel of homeward-turning, of less time outdoors, as if in anticipation of winter, with firewood stacked outside of each chimney again and, visible in the dim windows, congregations by the warmth of the stove, just while the morning chill lasted.

  As he walked, he cut a solitary figure, slender, fingers occasionally dragging along the stone wall that guarded the path. The two retrievers gamboled around his feet as he went, one black and one golden. Neither ventured too far from his heel, except once in a while to contemplate for a longer moment some especially arresting scent in a clump of grass along the side of the road, like a scholar who turns a page back to read it again. When whichever dog had been detained by a particular odor was finally satisfied with his interrogation of it, he would sprint forward in bounds to catch up with the pack. As for Lenox he stopped twice during the mile and a half walk, almost as if he had forgotten something at home. Both times his eyes rose to the meadows along the path and his face broke into a radiant smile. He would pause in his steps, then carry on his way, eyes to the ground again, his expression slowly returning from joy to meditation. What had come to his mind, each of these times, was Sophia; what drew his thoughts back away from her were Captain Musgrave, his black dog, and the drawing of the hanging man.

  Soon the lane brought him to a small stream, which meant he was close to town. The dogs barked a duck, strolling along its bank, back into the water, and then circled proudly back to their master for praise.

  “There’re two of you,” Lenox said chidingly and nipped Bear on the ear with his fingers.

  At the path’s final turn, a grove of trees gave way and revealed Plumbley. He stopped, happy to look upon it again.

  It was an ancient place of habitation, set at a low point among the few miles of serene countryside that surrounded it, near the strength of the stream. It was entered in the Domesday Book as Plunten, and then round about the year 1160 took the name Plumton; two centuries later it was Plomton; soon enough thereafter it was Plum’s Lea; then Plumley, and now, finally, for the past hundred years or so, Plumbley. Whence that superfluous B came no local historian had satisfactorily deciphered, but now, planted where it was, it showed no signs of moving. What was certain was that, as they had nearly a thousand years ago, when they give the village its name, plums still grew on the lea near the great wood. Locals would tell you that they tasted dreadful off the branch but made for a fair jam.

  It was an industrious place, full of handsome rows of gray houses. It had two public houses, the Royal Oak (named for the tree in which Charles the Second, pursued by Roundheads, had concealed his august personage) and the King’s Arms, which were in a semipermanent state of war, each with fierce partisans; a smithy; a butcher’s; a school; and a lovely village green. As Lenox walked down Woodend Lane, toward the fruit and vegetable seller’s, he could see twinned above Plumbley its two highest points, the small spire of St. Stephen’s church and the cupola of the town hall, freshly painted white, its resting bell, slightly louder than the church’s, ready to beat out the time as twelve o’clock in, oh, what now — he looked at his pocket watch — three minutes. Good, the shops wouldn’t have shut for lunch yet.

  Fripp had replaced his broken window. Stenciled upon it in gold letters was w. F., PURVEYOR, and leaning against the window was a green signboard with white paint that said, in three lines, FRESH FRUIT, FARM VEGETABLES, and OPEN YEAR-ROUND. As Lenox pushed the door open a bell rang. It was a tight space, with crates nailed up tidily along the walls, overflowing with cabbages, potatoes, apples, and much more.

  The fruit-and-vegetable seller himself, now five or six years beyond sixty, was at his counter, hunched over a piece of wax paper, intent on some piece of work. He was a wiry, short man, in the pink of health, with fastidious circular spectacles and a carefully maintained black moustache.

  He looked up. “Why, Charlie!” he said.

  Lenox, who had known Fripp for some thirty-odd years — since Charles was ten — said, “Hello, Mr. Fripp.”

  Fripp took off his spectacles. “I heard you might be at the great house — but tell me, are you still a batsman?”

  Lenox smiled. “If you’ve a spot for me.”

  “If we’ve — we’ll only just make the numbers now you’re here, you know.”

  “How are the King’s Arms this year?”

  “They have a devilish spin bowler, Yates, from after your time. But welcome! And you married, too!” Fripp came around from the counter and shook Lenox’s hand.

  “And our side? The Royal Oak team?”

  Here Fripp began a lengthy, obviously much rehashed description of all the many virtues and vices of the cricket players who frequented each evening the same public house he did. Lenox half listened, as he did so gathering a few choice pieces of fruit to the counter. He would take them back to Jane.

  “Is there fig jam left?” he asked in a break during Fripp’s voluble recollection of his wicket-keeper’s poor eyesight.

  “A few jars left, yes. Shall I wrap one in paper?”

  “Two if you would.” Fripp crouched down beneath the counter, rooting among his preserves. Lenox raised his voice slightly. “By the way,” he said, “my uncle told me about your window. Terrible business.”

  “Yes, it was,” said Fripp, rising with the jars in hand. “And then Wells got the same thing.”

  “I heard. Do you have any idea who might have done it?”

  “None, and I still don’t feel at ease in my mind about closing up the shop alone. Did your uncle show you the hanging man?”

  Lenox’s face was severe with sympathy. “Yes. I didn’t like the look of it.”

  “Nor did I.”

  “You cannot think who might have done it?”

  “I would stake my life that nobody in Plumbley wishes me that ill,” said Fripp. “Even at the King’s Arms, you know, it’s only a friendly joke we have with each other.”

  “What do you and Wells have in common?”

  Fripp considered this. “Not very much, I suppose. He rarely takes a pint. His father liked to come into the Oak on occasion, and shopped his fruit and vegetable with me here for many years. The son does, too, but sends his maid around. He’s grown very prosperous.” He snorted.

  “I heard.”

  “Sells grain and seed to half the farmers in Somerset, it sometimes seems. What similarity could he have to a small shop like this one?”

  “And personally? Do you share any family, any friends?”

  “Not except insofar as everyone
does, in Plumbley.”

  “What do you make of Captain Musgrave?”

  “Mr. Ponsonby mentioned the captain, did he? I can only say that’s he’s treated very fair with me, buys in his fruit and vegetables weekly, though I know he gives his custom to a butcher in Clamnor, four miles over the country, and not to Richards, here in town.”

  “Do you think he has been using Catherine Scales unkindly?”

  “I think a village knows how to gossip.”

  “Yet when do villages go very wrong in their judgments?” asked Lenox. “Generally they seem to know their business.”

  Fripp frowned. “Well, perhaps over time. But the captain hasn’t been here longer than six months.”

  “Do the symbols mean anything to you?”

  “Nothing particular-like, if you mean that, though I daresay I can tell as well as the next gent what a picture of a man hanged up by his neck is meant to say. S’nothing good.”

  They spoke for a few more minutes then, rather unprofitably, about the case. Lenox paid for his fruit and his jam and left, steering the subject before he went to the kinder subject of cricket, and departing with advice about covering shots and leg-breaks in his ears. Then, the dogs at his heels again — they had waited, ears forward and staring in after him, by the door — he set out to meet Plumbley’s police force.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Once, as a boy visiting Everley with his mother, Lenox had been scrubbed on his cheeks with soap and water, placed in a stiff collar and a blue coat, and fetched by the purposeful guidance of a junior footman into a wooden seat upon the town green. Alongside the young Lenox then had been his mother and a much younger Frederick. They watched in silence, among a crowd of some hundred or so people, as a man in a tall hat — later revealed to Lenox to be a bishop, that most awesome of creatures after the Queen — took to the church’s porch.

  “Will Mr. Somers, M. A. Oxon, please rise!”

  A tremulous young man, with a long, wet nose and thick eyeglasses, a book under his arm, had stood up from his seat at this request to join the bishop in front of the crowd. The great clergyman — his powerful brow knitted with solemnity, his gray and brown hair stiff against the wind — then led Somers to the door of the church, took him by his two wrists, and placed his hands against the door of the church.

  “Now the living is his,” Lenox’s mother had said to him. She was a religious woman. “He will be a shepherd to these people, Charles. So goes the tradition.” Then, after a beat, she added in a whisper, “But did you ever see such a silly thing for grown men to do?” and laughed her light laugh.

  As he walked the town green outside of Fripp’s, this was the memory that came back to him. He wondered if the man was still there, or if he had moved on to grander things. Funny that he remembered that name, Somers, when so many of the details he had once known about for more important matters had been sifted away from his mind into oblivion.

  The office of the police force of Plumbley was in a humble shingled building next to the church on the town green, two stories, with the upper floors occupied by the town clerk, its record-keeper, and its historical documents, and the lower by Oates and Weston, the men Lenox had come to see, and the single jail cell over which they presided.

  He knocked at the door. A moment later it opened to reveal a very young, red-cheeked boy, his face still downy. He wore a constable’s uniform. As one got older it became harder to guess the ages of young people, Lenox had found, but this boy couldn’t be far past eighteen. “Yes?” he said.

  “Mr. Weston, I presume?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Charles Lenox. I’m staying at Everley.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wonder if I might see Mr. Oates.”

  “You—”

  Weston’s opinion of whether Lenox might see Oates was irrelevant, because now a meaty hand had taken him by the shoulder and Oates himself was barging ahead. He was a very large man with a trim, sandy mustache, and a slow, honest, rather stupid face. “Mr. Lenox?” His voice was very deep.

  Lenox extended his hand. “How do you do?”

  “Honored to meet a member of Parliament, sir. We ain’t had one in Plumbley since the last election.”

  “Is it Mr. Cortwright who sits for you here?”

  This was a gentleman who had bought his seat in Parliament much as men might buy trinkets for their watch-chain. He came to sit on the benches, oh, once a year, perhaps. There was of course no mandatory attendance. “The same,” said Oates. “Last election he bought every man in town as much beer as they could drink, if they signed down to vote for him.”

  “Ripping drunk we got, too,” said Weston, his face ardent with the memory of that wonderful day.

  “Not true,” said Oates sternly. Behind the older constable’s back, however, Weston winked at Lenox. “Your uncle said as you might come in, Mr. Lenox. Used to be a detective, did you?”

  “In a quiet way.”

  “If you can answer for these broken windows and this church door I’ll thank you — but then I reckon you won’t be able to, no, not by a long shot. It’s the damnedest thing I’ve seen in a dozen summers on this job. What’s the point of it, I ask you?”

  “I’m curious to hear the story in your own words.”

  The quality of the average constable in the bucolic parts of England varied greatly. London itself had only had an official police presence for the last forty-odd years, since Sir Robert Peel had established the Metropolitan Police Force at Scotland Yard. (The members of the new troop had been called “bobbies” in honor of the founder’s forename.) It was only in the last ten years that, by law, every town in Great Britain had perforce to hire and pay someone specifically to impose the law.

  Oates seemed a fair credit to the profession. There was perhaps no great enterprise in him, but then one could glimpse a certain rural doggedness in his character that might serve just as well for a provincial police constable as cleverness. His relation of the facts of the crimes — the broken windows, the paint on the church door — tallied exactly with Frederick’s tale, though he offered precious little in the way of new information. This out of the way, Lenox was free to ask a few questions.

  “Tell me, has there been more crime than usual in Plumbley, over the summer?”

  Oates shook his head. “No, sir, the normal quantity, or perhaps even rather less. But then, you can ask your uncle about that. He’s sitting in two days.”

  “Is he, though?”

  “Yes. Every Monday, in fact, because there’s often one or two cases of drunkenness after the weekend.”

  Frederick, like the long succession of squires of Everley before him, was a magistrate. These men occupied an interesting place in the legal system of England; they were generally local lords or landowners, chosen for their family name rather than training or merit, and they differed vastly in their expertise and judicial temperament. All of the small crimes of Plumbley and its environs came before Frederick. If he felt a case was beyond his purview, for instance if it was unusually violent, he might send it up to the monthly petty session, which consisted of either one or two magistrates in a more formal setting, with more witnesses, or even the quarter session, for which all the justices of the peace in the county met four times a year. The great murders and robberies went to the Courts of Assizes, which ran circuit from London all over the country, and might only come into one’s jurisdiction once in a year. Yet it was the judgment of the magistrates that affected the most people. Juries had convicted ten thousand or so men in the past year, magistrates eighty thousand.

  “Perhaps I’ll sit in with him,” said Lenox. “Have any of the crimes in the past months been unusual in their nature?”

  “Not in particular,” said Oates. “Your garden variety, Mr. Lenox.” He gestured at Weston. “We had this one up for fighting over a lass. Fine example.”

  Weston snorted. “As if I cared a buttercup for her.”

  “She’s married now.”


  “And very happy I’m sure I hope she’ll be.” Then the young man added, with a spice of rebelliousness, “Not that it will be easy, with that fool of a—”

  “Enough there,” said Oates sharply.

  “Do you have a list of the crimes other than the vandalisms?”

  “We could knock one together if you gave us a day or so.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Now, Mr. Fripp and Mr. Wells — can you tell me what you think they have in common?”

  The two constables looked at each other. Oates spoke. “They both own shops, less than ten houses apart from each other. We think it might be an attack on the shops of Plumbley.”

  “But then how to account for the church door?”

  “Well, precisely,” said Oates. “And the other shops untouched, too.”

  “Both men have been in town a long time, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps they’re being menaced in the hopes that they will pay off their attackers,” said Lenox. “Are they the two richest shops?”

  “Wells is doing all right—”

  “Better than all right!” said Weston.

  “But as for Fripp, I don’t think he puts much by. His house is paid for, but his tab is running at the Royal Oak, I know.”

  “Is it long past due?”

  “Not too far, and not for too much. You won’t find a motive there,” said Oates.

  Lenox looked down at a slip of paper he had brought. “The Roman numeral on the church door. Twenty-two.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have any thoughts about what it means?”

  “We can’t make head nor tail of it,” said Oates.

  “Do any of the street numbers in town go that high? Could it be a date, a time, a numbered gravestone? Who knows Latin, or would be likely to use it? What if it’s not a number? Could it be a message, ‘two down, two to go,’ that sort of thing?”