The September Society clm-2

by Charles Finch

  Most important, Bill Dabney’s parents had arrived from Birmingham, or rather nearby Kidderminster, a town on the River Stour famous (it was a dubious fame) for its carpet factories. Mr. Dabney, a squat, solid man with a Midlands accent that made every word sound heavy in his mouth, was a farmer. He grazed cattle as well, and did both jobs prosperously from the fashionable look of his fluttery and tiny wife, who spoke in a high-pitched voice. Lenox met with them at their hotel in St. Giles Street at a little after ten thirty.

  “Of the Sussex Lenoxes?” were the first words of Mrs. Dabney.

  “Yes,” said Lenox.

  “A pleasure to meet you,” she said, the appraising look gone from her eye. “I was saying to Mr. Dabney only the other day that a visit to Sussex would be just the thing for us. The air there is clean, very clean indeed, and I’ve heard the parkland is handsome, very handsome indeed. And all the small villages!”

  There was a great deal more like this before Lenox was able to turn the conversation to their son, and then it was Mr. Dabney who answered.

  “What is he like?” said Lenox.

  “Alive, we pray.”

  “I should think he is, Mr. and Mrs. Dabney.”

  “Do you?” Now it was the farmer’s turn to bestow an appraising glance upon Lenox. “I hope you’re right.”

  “It would help to know what he was like-what he looked like, what his personality was like, whether he would go anyplace special besides home in a crisis.”

  “For the last question, no, I don’t think so-he loved Oxford and Kidderminster most, always said he’d finish in one of the two places. He was a happy child, Mr. Lenox, loved to play on the farm, he did. Knew every animal by name, plowed every row of seed by my side. Which isn’t to say he neglected his studies, however.”

  “Always very bright,” added Mrs. Dabney. “Studied very hard, and earned his place at Oxford quite easily.”

  “Did you ever meet Tom Stamp or George Payson?”

  “Yes indeed, he brought them to Kidderminster,” said Mrs. Dabney. “We have a house to accommodate a number of guests.”

  “How long did they stay there?”

  “A week, Mr. Lenox, last year. Then went down to Stratford for two nights. Over winter break.”

  “What did you make of George Payson?”

  “Lovely manners,” said Mr. Dabney. “A fine young lad. Took an interest in the farm as well.”

  A picture was forming in Lenox’s mind of Dabney’s character. Solid, proud, middle class, and above all intelligent-that was the part of his personality that everybody from Hatch to Stamp had mentioned. He decided to move on to a more speculative sort of question.

  “Would he be the sort of lad to follow George Payson simply out of loyalty? If this case centered on George, for example, rather than the other way around”-Lenox was thinking of the Jesus ball-“would it be like Bill to drop everything to help a friend?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Dabney-but was halted by her husband’s obvious introspection. All three of them fell into a momentary silence.

  “Yes, I think so, Mr. Lenox,” he said finally. “You see, in the Midlands we’re slower to change. My family has been on the same farm for three generations. We don’t tend to flash between London and Oxford and the countryside, really. We like to get used to things. We like to stay put. We’re not changeable”

  “I see,” said Lenox.

  “So I think the answer is yes. Bill would have been very loyal to his friends. Almost stubbornly so, I’d reckon.” He paused. “But with that said, Mr. Lenox, if in fact this matter was primarily about George Payson, bless his soul, why would Bill still be gone? Wouldn’t he have come back?”

  Instantly Lenox saw where the younger Dabney’s sharpness came from.

  “A point well taken, Mr. Dabney. I think the answer must be fear. Perhaps neither lad realized how serious the matter was until George Payson was murdered. If I understand what Bill is like, he may have been savvy enough to recognize the danger and go on concealing himself.”

  They spoke for about twenty minutes longer, and over the course of that time Lenox saw the tremendous sorrow and worry that underlay Mr. Dabney’s deliberate manner and Mrs. Dabney’s flightiness-the anxiety about their only son. He disliked seeing people at their weakest, their most vulnerable, as his job continually forced him to do. Did it give him a skeptical attitude about human beings? It wasn’t impossible.

  He thanked them when they parted and promised to keep in close touch. Leaving them at their hotel, he went to the Bodleian, where he did another hour of fruitless research. Just before getting up to go find some lunch, he wrote Goodson a short note, saying that he no longer thought it possible that Bill Dabney had been behind George Payson’s death, as they had once speculated. It seemed improbable after that meeting.

  He fell ravenously to a chop of beef with potatoes, peas, and gravy at the Bear and had a glass of shandy with it. After polishing it off he sat at his old table, initials carved into its surface, and drank a coffee while he looked out the window. The days had been getting colder, and the warmth of the coffee was renewing. In the warm, low-ceilinged Bear, he felt almost content-though all the while knowing that the case, getting colder by the minute, awaited him outside.

  Before going back to the Randolph to consult with Graham-who he thought should perhaps shadow Goodson on the trail of Geoffrey Canterbury-Lenox took a quick walk through the old stone courtyards of Corpus Christi, close by the Bear.

  Corpus was perhaps the most learned college, famous for its classicists and humanists despite being the traditional terrain of the Bishops of Winchester. Erasmus, with whom Lenox was at the moment wrestling as he read The Praise of Folly, had once famously praised its library for containing books in Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek. Balliol had always been more outgoing, more athletic, than places like Corpus Christi, the reason it produced more politicians and explorers than writers and clergymen. Still, Corpus was a small gem, like one of its giant neighbors, Merton and Christ Church, in perfect miniature. Peering in through the windows of the library he saw rows of students with their heads bent over Homer, Herodotus, Cicero, Josephus. It gave him pleasure to think of them so gravely setting out for lives devoted to knowledge, to the great tradition of thought-it gave him pleasure that this went on even after George Payson’s death.

  Back at the Randolph there was another note from Dallington. It was somewhat surprising: Dear Lenox-in lieu of further instructions from you I spent a bit of time thinking about the note under that blighted cat, and think I may have come up with something. At school we used to have the Eton cross-tip, a code we wrote notes in so that they’d be indecipherable to the Beaks. Just substituting numbers for letters, really, like this: x/1/2/3/4/5

  1/a/b/c/d/e

  2/f/g/h/ij/k

  3/l/m/n/o/p

  4/q/r/s/t/u

  5/v/w/x/y/z You catch the drift, I’m sure-the letter k would be represented as 25, or the letter v would be 51. We had to combine i and j to make it work. Oh, and an x in front of a number meant it was simply a number (so you could write “Meet at 330” in code without some ass wondering what 330 meant). Well, have another look: X12/43 21 31 25/x2 Plain as day, that translates to: 12/SFLK/2 At first I thought it was rot but then I asked the pater what he thought, and he said why of course it must be the 12th Suffolk, 2nd Battalion-which needless to say rang a bell. Have you looked it up yet? The regiment and battalion of your lads, Wilson and Lysander. According to my encyclopedia, the 12th Regiment of Foot was raised in 1685 as the Norfolk Regiment of Foot. Got madly decorated for the Fourth Mysore War (sounds like a laugh) in 1799. Currently commanded by Robert Meade. Hope this helps. Here at the ready. Dallington.

  Lenox had been meaning to look up the 12th Suffolk 2nd to see if any other names were familiar. He hadn’t, but upon reading this he left the room quickly. Why would Payson leave two clues, both the September Society card and this note, pointing to that regiment, that battalion? Would he have counted
on somebody-perhaps Hatch, perhaps Stamp-recognizing the Eton cross-tip? Dallington had been at Eton, but was it common to other schools as well, the code? It had been remiss of him not to research it.

  It took very little time in the Reading Room of the Bodleian to find a military history of the last hundred years devoted to the 12th Suffolk, which contained at least four battalions. Rapidly flipping through the pages, Lenox read that the 2nd usually had about eight hundred men at a time, which would mean about fifty-five officers, which would mean that in the last century there had been some three hundred officers in the battalion. A page was cited where their pictures and names were given. He flipped to it and almost at once found Lysander, then searched for his picture-younger, but without a doubt him.

  Then, more methodically, he scrolled through the fifty-five names. Twenty-six of these would form the September Society. (Why was it called that? His mind racing, Lenox asked himself all the questions he had been saving.) Henry Nelson, Mark Noakes, Matthew Ottshott, Tim Patterson…

  Lenox froze.

  The next name in the list-he read it, reread it, triple-checked it.

  James Payson.

  Could it be? It must be right-yes, it was right.

  James Payson had served in the 12th (Suffolk) Regiment of Foot, 2nd Battalion.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Now, a while later, sitting on a bench in Balliol, Lenox watched the students mill around him. Gossip had long since run wild about Dabney and Payson, and he overheard many students talking about the two now and then, though the majority of conversation was still devoted to boat races and undergraduate plays, rugby and tutorials. His mind was going over and over the few dim personal memories he had of James Payson, smoothing them out like water over rocks; there had been a period of six months or so when their London sets had mingled, and Lenox and Payson had seen each other once or twice a month, a desultory acquaintance springing up between them.

  His people were from Worcestershire, near Evesham, where they maintained a dilapidated castle that had been given to the family by George II after some ancient service done to the crown during the War of Jenkins’s Ear. He remembered this because Payson had always made a joke about the absurdity of the war that had founded his family, so to speak. (During a fraught time in the relations between Britain and Spain, a sea captain named Robert Jenkins had been captured by Spaniards and had his ear cut off; when he came back and triumphantly showed it to the Houses of Parliament, the Prime Minister-Walpole?-had declared war. Lenox knew at least that much of the story from his schooldays.) Payson had been the second son and black sheep of his family-fiery tempered, commonly found in low company. It was inevitable that he would find his way to London, given those traits, and having been sent down from Oxford, for public drunkenness, he had somehow acquired a place in-well, in the 12th Suffolk 2nd, as it would seem.

  He had been handsome, tall, upright in his bearing, with a mustache and a forthright manner, but his eyes had always looked dangerous. When he had convinced Lady Annabelle West to marry him, people had predicted ill of it-and after six months of hard use she had fled from him, seeking refuge in a small town in Belgium, where her brother moved to protect her. She was three months pregnant, and other than a somewhat startled state of mind had been in decent health. By the time the baby was born in Brussels, six months later, James Payson had gone to India with his battalion. The book had said of that time that the battalion was by and large bored, despite occasional skirmishes with the locals. On their return two years after leaving England, they had left behind twenty men and two officers dead, James Payson one of them. The book didn’t give the reason for his death.

  Indeed, if Lenox remembered correctly, the reason had always been somewhat obscure. As he had originally heard the story when at Oxford, Payson had been shot dead for cheating at a card table with his fellow officers, but the regiment’s commander had hushed matters up. Another story had it that Payson had been killed in battle, some skirmish with local rebels on the border between India and that bloody area of Bengal that the British East India Company had just claimed in the Sepoy Mutiny a few years-perhaps a decade-ago.

  Whoever shot him, and for whatever reason, he had arrived in England with a bullet lodged just above his heart. Lenox and Edmund, who had known Payson slightly, had been to the memorial service in London, though not to the funeral in Evesham. In death Payson had acquired twice as many friends as in life, and the papers had reported about his death extensively. Perhaps, Lenox thought, he’d ask Dallington to go back and track down their reports.

  Trying to align the facts in his mind, he thought: Well, Payson would have been eligible for the September Society-which might mean either that some benefit or some evil would accrue to his son-which might mean that the younger George Payson had been killed out of revenge, perhaps, though surely a long-dead feud wouldn’t have been reason enough-and was this why they hadn’t killed Bill Dabney?

  Suddenly he realized that of course George Payson had been leaving him clues all along, because there was the September Society card with black and pink lines on it, the crude image of the Payson arms. It had obviously linked his father, with whom he would have been most likely to associate the crest, to the 12th Suffolk 2nd. Same with the note underneath the cat.

  How daft I’ve been, Lenox thought. I have to return to the clues he left, see what they mean.

  Then he thought about the man all the undergraduates at Lincoln called Red-James Kelly. For that had been the second shock of the afternoon. After finding James Payson’s name in the officer’s rolls, Lenox had gone back and scanned the name of every man who had served with him. There, listed as a transfer from the Royal Pioneer Corps, was James Kelly.

  Red. He had been in India-with Lysander, with Butler, with Payson. What could be more likely than that they would delegate a murder, give the order, and watch it done as they had so many times?

  And how had Red ended up at Lincoln at the same time as James Payson?

  He thought about these coincidences for a while, until finally, stopping a passing undergraduate with a wave of his hand, Lenox said, “Do you mind if I have a quick word?”

  “Not at all,” said the lad, who had big ears and red cheeks as well as a fiercely cut head of blond hair. “Are you looking for your son?”

  “No,” said Lenox, half regretting the word, “no, I used to be here at Balliol, and I’m visiting for a day or two.”

  “Having a jolly time, I hope?” said the young man patiently.

  “Yes, thanks. Good to see it all again. At the moment I was wondering-if I wanted to take a long walk hereabouts, where would you recommend I go?”

  “Well, sir,” he said, “there are two options. You could walk up north, just walk past Wadham and keep on, and then you’ll reach the parks. Beautiful cricket pitch there, though they reckon they’ll build a new one, and a fair amount of meadow to walk about on. I often walk the leas there myself.”

  “Sounds charming. What’s the other?”

  “Just past Christ Church Meadow is a fair bit of open field and stream, plus of course the Thames-or rather, the Isis, as you’ll remember we call it here.”

  “Do students go there often?”

  He nodded. “Many students walk there, certainly.”

  “Perhaps I’ll try that,” Lenox said. “Thanks very much for your help.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I’m Charles Lenox, by the way.”

  “Hopkins,” the lad said. They shook hands. “Gerard Manley Hopkins. A pleasure to meet you. Have a good walk-I’m off to see my professor.” With a wave he tramped off toward the Balliol lodge.

  Lenox was thinking of the muddy boots and walking stick Payson had left in such an oddly prominent spot of his sitting room. What did they indicate? Along with his harried, anxious attitude when he met his mother just before disappearing, perhaps that he already knew the trouble he was facing-that he had already walked past Christ Church Meadow, looking for a place to hide? Even
that he had met Geoffrey Canterbury before the ball at Jesus?

  Lenox left Balliol and started walking down Broad Street. It was midafternoon by now, and it occurred to him that perhaps he should return to London. Goodson was in charge on this end, and to Lenox’s eyes everything seemed to indicate the participation of the September Society in London. Hatch aside… but then, perhaps he would leave Graham here to keep an eye on Hatch-and, more important, Red. Could he ask Graham to look after the porter, too?

  He stopped in to see Goodson and told him about finding George Payson’s father’s name in the rolls. They had a long conversation about its significance.

  “Any luck with Canterbury?” Lenox said at last.

  “A constable in Didcot may have traced him to that neck of the woods, but I’m not hopeful. He’ll have disappeared already. I’m thinking of taking your advice, doing a closer search behind the Meadow.”

  “I don’t think it can hurt,” Lenox said and told him about the walking stick and boots in Payson’s room.

  “I confess,” said Goodson, “that I’m a little low in my spirits. Nobody has come forward to say that they saw something; nobody can find this Canterbury fellow.”

  “I felt the same.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s why I thought I might track back down to London to follow the September Society lead-this Payson lead.”

  “As you wish.”

  “There’s nothing I can do here?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You’ll keep an eye on Hatch and Red?”

  “Aye.”

  The two men shook hands and said good-bye. “For now, anyway,” Lenox said.

  “Keep in close contact.”

  “I will.”

  Outside, Lenox turned his footsteps toward the Randolph. Canterbury, he thought-what could have compelled Payson to meet Canterbury?