The September Society clm-2

by Charles Finch

  “A dead cat?” the voice said. “Has your grade of case declined?”

  Lenox smiled, and said, “Why, hullo, McConnell. How good of you to come.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The bedroom was narrow and dark, with only a diamond-shaped window letting any light in. Like the sitting room it was plain, and like the sitting room it was untouched by the scout-the bed unmade, books strewn on the floor by an armchair that stood under the window, and clothes on the floor by the wardrobe. Still, the room retained the amiable hominess that was recognizable in the sitting room. Lenox liked George Payson, no mistaking it.

  Lady Payson was sitting by the grate, which McConnell had lit.

  “Much too chilly in here,” he had said. “No evidence in it, is there?”

  Now he and Lenox were walking gingerly through the room. Its only remarkable point was the dead cat lying in the center of it.

  “Will you tell me what I ought to know?” McConnell said.

  The doctor hadn’t looked better in years; not since before he began to drink. He was a tall, handsome Scot, with wry and caring eyes. A talented surgeon, he had let his practice lapse after making a brilliant marriage to a young, charming, beautiful, rich, and high-strung woman called Toto. The marriage had been a rocky one, however, at some points even on the verge of divorce. The sorrow of those first years had driven McConnell to drink. Recently, though, as the doctor had unbended and Toto had grown, things had been better. The secrets of a marriage are impenetrable, but the secrets of a man are not: McConnell was happier, especially when he worked with Lenox. Toto was, too. Both were older and sadder, but they had made it to the other side. Or so their friends ardently hoped. McConnell still had the sunken eyes of the flask, yet there was some jolliness in his face that Lenox could only ascribe to the partial reconciliation with Toto.

  Lenox briefly explained the outline of the case. “Hope I haven’t called you here for naught,” he said.

  “I daresay the cat will be as interesting as anything else that comes my way this week. Animal, vegetable, mineral, you know-I’m not a real doctor any longer, I’ll take them all.”

  He smiled as he said this, though Lenox detected in the smile a customarily wan aspect.

  The cat itself was white and glossy, well taken care of, without any markings at first glance. It was stabbed once through the neck. Turning on a lamp, Lenox leaned down to verify that the weapon was indeed a letter opener. It was of the old-fashioned kind, he saw, broad and silver, inscribed with a cursive P. McConnell stooped down with Lenox and ran his hand through the cat’s fur.

  “Only the one wound,” he said. “Odd, that.”

  “Why?”

  McConnell stroked his chin. “Have you ever tried to stab a cat?”

  “Oh, dozens of times.”

  He laughed. “But really, cats aren’t docile, you know. They squirm and dash about. I love dogs, myself-a good Scottish terrier.”

  “In a murderous mood, you mean?”

  “Don’t joke, there’s a good fellow.”

  “You’re right, though, it would have been difficult.”

  “Even for a strong man-it wouldn’t matter. There would be more than one mark, as the person tried to hit the right spot. In fact, there would probably be seven or eight lighter ones, I’d guess. Here there’s a single deep one.”

  “So either two people did it,” said Lenox, “or the cat was drugged.”

  “I’ll find out for you.”

  “Let’s lift it.”

  McConnell gingerly worked the letter opener out (it was plunged straight through to the floor) and dropped it into the pocket of a cloth bag he had brought. Rigor mortis had set in, and the body was stiff. He picked the cat up and dropped it into the main pouch of the bag.

  “What’s this?” said Lenox.

  In the blood on the floor was a damp red note, which had been stabbed through at its center by the letter opener. He picked it up and examined it. One corner was untouched by blood, and he saw a blue edging on it. Writing paper. It was folded in half, and he opened it.

  “It says… it says, ’x12/43 21 31 25/x2.’ “Lenox looked at McConnell, puzzled. “Any meaning you can gather?”

  “That’s your area.” The doctor held out a little bag, and Lenox, after making sure there were no markings anywhere else on it, placed it inside.

  “What kind of code could it be?” Lenox muttered. “I wonder.”

  He walked across the room, stooping here and there to look. He found little of interest, and nothing so singular as the collection of objects on the Indian rug. Still, he left with one thing: On the bedside table was an empty dance card for a ball that had apparently taken place the night before at Jesus College, with a note on the reverse that said, Yes, sir, that will be fine, and was signed Roland Light. According to Lady Annabelle, this was the hallway’s scout, who cleaned the rooms, lit the fires, and made meals. Otherwise, their inspection yielded nothing.

  “Bit of lunch?” McConnell whispered.

  “I shall have to look after Lady Annabelle.”

  “See what she means to do.”

  “Yes, all right,” said Lenox.

  She was sitting by the coals, warming her hands. There was a dazed look in her eyes.

  “Shall I ever see my son again?” She felt for her necklace.

  “I certainly hope you shall, Lady Payson.”

  She turned to him. “Can I trust you?” she said. “Are you a good enough detective?”

  “Fair enough, yes. If you would like to go to the police, I recommend it wholeheartedly.”

  “Oh, the police,” she said with a wave of her hand.

  “At any rate, I think the best thing now would be rest. Perhaps you should withdraw to your brother’s house.”

  “Perhaps,” she said tiredly. “What do you mean to do?”

  “This afternoon I shall interview whomever I’m able to find. This evening I’ll consider all that I’ve learned. Tomorrow morning, I think, I shall return to London. I have plenty to work on.”

  “Leave Oxford!”

  “Only for a day, possibly two, Lady Payson. And I will not leave without an ally in place here.”

  “Who?”

  “I cannot answer that, I’m afraid.”

  Gradually it was settled that she would leave, and with a great deal of trouble Lenox managed to send her off in her handsome, dejected carriage, with a promise of keeping in close touch.

  McConnell was waiting in the courtyard of Lincoln eating an apple, his cloth bag at his side.

  “Saw her off?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Lenox thoughtfully. “Poor woman.”

  “She barely seems to be holding on.”

  They set off up the High and turned onto Cornmarket Street, then into St. Giles. A little ways up St. Giles at number 12, Lenox led McConnell into the familiar doors of the Lamb and Flag-one of his favorite pubs in Oxford, companion to the Turf in that respect. (Inevitably a tour of Oxford becomes a tour of its pubs.) It was an old coaching inn, the kind that had been so important to British travel in the eighteenth century but had only just straggled into modern times, where horses could be fed and stabled, groups could meet and stay the night before traveling north, and there was always a pint and something good to eat available, no matter how late or wet it was. It was still the best place to order a cab or fly in Oxford. St. John’s College had always owned it, since 1695. There was a distinguished look about it-a place where kings had slept and beggars had drunk, all within the six or eight dim rooms, odd shaped and illogical, crammed under their ancient black beams.

  Lenox and McConnell sat at a table overlooking a broad field by St. John’s, talking easily. They had been working together more and more frequently in the past few years, and an intimacy had sprung up between them. For half an hour they lingered over a pint of beer before McConnell decided to order lunch.

  “What do you reckon is safe?” he asked when they looked over the menu.

  “Oh-I’ve e
aten all of it in my time,” said Lenox.

  He didn’t have anything now, however, having eaten a large breakfast. McConnell ordered the round steak with a fried egg and mashed potatoes, and both of them ordered pints of autumn ale. The fat, red bartender brought it all out, along with a cold chicken sandwich and a bottle of beer that Lenox meant to save for later.

  As the two men talked and drank, the detective recalled his undergraduate days in these rooms; but his happiness and nostalgia were tinged with anxiety over George Payson, whom he knew he would like.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  O n some unrecorded day in the 1090s, perhaps a little earlier, perhaps a little later-the Battle of Hastings still in memory, at any rate, and the Domesday Book not more than a decade old-an anonymous cleric and one or two students gathered by appointment in a small room (was it at an inn? in a church?), and the University of Oxford was born. Soon students from the University of Paris staged a minor revolt and joined those unremembered pioneers, and Oxford began to flourish. It was the first university in England and one of the few in Europe; before a century had passed it was the greatest institution of higher learning in the world. It had an astonishing number of books, for one thing-hundreds. Thanks to these books and the men who taught from them, generations of clergymen began to share, in their far-flung parishes, an Oxford education, an Oxford way of thinking and teaching. Thus was created a world of ideas, a world of the mind, which collapsed the difference between Devon and Yorkshire, which for the first time aligned the beliefs of the people all over England-and indeed, Europe.

  Then on some equally uncertain day in the 1200s, one of the constituent colleges of Oxford began, perhaps Merton College, perhaps University College, probably at first just a house where students could rent a room and have a meal; and then slowly, as the years washed over them, the colleges consolidated, joined by other colleges, until sometime in the 1400s when Oxford truly began to look and feel like Oxford.

  There was something that age bestowed, Lenox thought. A depth and richness to the afternoon light in the windows; a kind of holiness even in the buildings that weren’t religious. When you became a student at Oxford you realized both your own mortality, in the flow of this near-millennium of students, and also the small particle of immortality that attaches to you when you begin to belong to an immortal place.

  Lenox strode across the cobblestones of the forecourt of Balliol College, the site of his undergraduate days, gazing at the high windows he had once known so well. There was a smile upon his face, that mostly happy but slightly sad smile people have when they go back to a place they have loved. This had been a place of wonder for him, cut loose as he was from childhood and the halls of Lenox House, with new friends and new studies. Even the few streets of central Oxford had seemed huge to him, lined with a bewildering number of shops stretching the quarter mile from St. Giles to St. Aldate’s, from St. John’s College to Christ Church.

  He was older now and felt it. Nearly forty. Unmarried still. Caught up with some of his dreams, fallen behind in others. He had thought since he was a boy that he would enter Parliament, and it had never happened. He had wanted a son. That was what he had found: The things one assumed would happen sometimes never did. It was a lesson his undergraduate self wouldn’t have understood.

  For an hour or so Lenox sat in the Balliol courtyard and thought about the case; one result of this brown study was the increased seriousness he now saw that it merited. The distracted manner in which George Payson had greeted his mother the morning before had tended rather to mitigate the case’s depth than add to it; Lenox remembered that all students had private lives that they guarded from all but their friends, and thought that if he had seen his mother even an hour early in his day he also would have been distracted. Too close a rub against his independence. With the step back, now Lenox saw that the strange, almost intentional dishevelment of Payson’s room, along with the presence of the white cat, which since he had seen it in the flesh had grown more eerie than comical, could hardly be anything but grave.

  As he stood up and left, he was more puzzled-but had a better grasp, too, of what he was puzzled about.

  Although now he had to shift into a different mood.

  Being a detective requires many skills, and just then he was an actor, attempting a kind of genial frivolity: He was leaning up against the gilt steel front gate of Lincoln, where he had just come from Balliol, and pretending that he was George Payson’s carefree visiting uncle. He swung his cane and hummed a tune, looked around curiously, and all the while waited for the right person to come out of the gate-a student who wouldn’t mind a few prying questions. As he waited he read the Times.

  The stories in the paper were comfortably familiar. There was a long article condemning the new speed limits that had been introduced that summer, of two miles per hour in towns and four miles per hour in the countryside. An infringement on people’s daily lives, the editor argued. There was an update on the search for John Surratt, who had fled to Canada and then across the Atlantic after being implicated in Abraham Lincoln’s death. (Like many other Englishmen, Lenox had a deep admiration of the president and had closely followed the American Civil War. He thanked God it was over.

  The death counts listed in the papers alone could throw him into a horrible mood for days.) The Austro-Prussian War was just over as well, making it a good year for lovers of peace. Then there were the reports of the first months of marriage of Princess Helena, Victoria’s third daughter, who had been wed that summer to… Lenox peered at the paper to sound out the name for himself… to Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. Gracious. And most thrilling to Lenox, who had his age’s deep love of the new and revolutionary, the Atlantic Cable was nearly complete. As he understood it-and he would be the first to admit that he didn’t quite-the cable would allow people to telegraph between Europe and America! What would my grandfather have said, thought Lenox? Brave new world…

  All the while he had his eye on the slow trickle of students coming in and out of the college. He passed the first one up, a tall, censorious-looking fellow in glasses. The second wouldn’t do either, a terrified first-year from the looks of him. The third shot out of the gate as fast as he could and didn’t give Lenox a chance to approach. The fourth student, though, evidently a temperate second-year, judging from the flower in his buttonhole, looked hale and likely. Lenox threw out a studied word, relishing his role.

  “Oh-I say there, would you mind stopping a moment? I’m Charles Payson-awfully sorry to trouble you.” He shook hands with the student, who looked bewildered but nodded politely, as if strange men introduced themselves to him at random moments throughout every day.

  “I thought I might bother you. You see, my nephew is here in Lincoln-George Payson-and I thought I’d pop in on him while I was passing through Oxford, you know, but I can’t track him down.”

  “Ah,” said the young man, who had brightened at Payson’s name.

  “You couldn’t tell me the name of a friend of his, could you? It’d be a favor.”

  “I shouldn’t want to give out information that might… well, I don’t know what it might do.”

  “No, quite understandable,” said Lenox. He looked up at the sky. “You know, I was at Lincoln too. Great place, isn’t it?” He sounded even to himself like a bluff clubman up from London, the role he had decided he would play. “Games and youth, I mean. Full of promise. Well, please, be on your way. Sorry again to stop you.”

  The young man said, “Oh-I suppose it can’t hurt. His uncle, you say? Father’s brother, I guess?”

  Lenox nodded.

  “Well, they’re a real trio-Payson, Bill Dabney, and Tom Stamp. Dabney and Stamp live in three rooms toward the front of the Grove Quad-by Deep Hall, you may remember, through that old stone stairway.”

  Lenox hadn’t the faintest idea of where the place was in Lincoln, but nodded cheerfully. “Beautiful there, ain’t it?” he said, inwardly thinking that perhaps he
should have been on the stage. He had already formulated a military history for himself if the conversation somehow wound its way there.

  “It is. Good luck finding Payson. Nice chap, your nephew.”

  “Cheers,” said Lenox and shook the boy’s hand.

  Lenox walked into the college whistling a low tune and contemplating which story he would tell the porter to gain entrance to the college. Luckily, however, the porter’s head was turned toward a student requesting his mail, and Lenox was able to walk into the Front Quad without any trouble. The Grove Quad-a piece of luck-was marked clearly, through the back corridors of the front square, and he followed it with the young second-year’s instructions in mind.

  In the Grove Quad there was bright green ivy on the walls and covering even the doors, but he found the right one without too much difficulty and walked up the stairwell. He knocked on the first door he saw. The bleary-eyed student who opened it appeared to have come straight from bed.

  “Dabney and Stamp?” Lenox asked.

  “Next floor up and to the left,” said the young man and unceremoniously closed the door.

  Climbing the stairs, Lenox found the spot easily enough. The door was ajar. He knocked, and a fair-haired young man came forward. The room behind him was a bit of a mess, and from the look of the desk where he had been studying, it was work, not sleep, that made this one bleary-eyed. Still, he seemed pleasant.

  “Bill Dabney?” Lenox asked.

  “No, I’m Tom Stamp,” he said. “May I ask who you are?”

  “Charles Lenox.” They shook hands. “I’m here because I was hoping to have a word with you and your roommate about George Payson.”

  “Are you a relation? Something of that sort?”

  “No, I’m a detective.”