“Where did you come by this money?” asked Frederick.
Fontaine was silent, his face expressionless. Even when Rodgers tried to bully him into speaking the Frenchman remained that way, perhaps secure in the knowledge that the law could not compel him to speak, and finally Frederick sentenced the man to thirty days in jail without the option of a fine, for the violent mistreatment of his common-law wife. He would be tried in Bath for his crimes there. When he had gone out, Lenox asked Frederick if this was about the usual run of cases he saw.
“Lighter than usual, perhaps,” his relative said.
“Exceeding light,” said Rodgers with great firmness.
“But this next one is a bit novel. Call him in, then, would you, bailiff?”
A very handsome, dark-eyed young man came in, willowy and with flowing dark hair. He wore a bottle-green blazer made of velvet.
“The lady in question is here?” asked Frederick of Rodgers.
“Arrived half an hour ago, Your Worship.” Then he added, “In a curricle, too.” This was a very quick, superior sort of conveyance, two horses for one or two passengers.
“Bring her in, please.”
“Very good.” Rodgers leaned out into the hall, made a beckoning motion, and then announced, as a beautiful young woman came in with a footman for company, “Miss Louisa Pershing.”
“Miss Pershing,” said the magistrate, rising. “May I introduce myself, and my cousin. My name is Frederick Ponsonby and this is Charles Lenox. May I ask you to sit, here, yes, just near me, and give me an account of this little matter?”
Miss Pershing was only too happy—it was dreadful what a dishonest man could achieve. The trust of a young person—society today—and so Miss Pershing, who looked perhaps better in repose than in conversation, nattering as she did, eventually produced her tale. One morning she had been walking in the flood meadow near her father’s property with her small dog, a toy fox terrier, when a brutish man, passing by, had simply picked up the dog and stormed away. Miss Pershing’s grief was evident and real as she recalled this, and Lenox, who loved his own dogs, felt a pang of sympathy for her.
Two mornings afterward a handsome young man—and here she pointed to the accused—had come to her house, saying that he had heard of her misfortune and, admiring her from afar for so long, taken it upon himself to find the dog. He had achieved this, and now it would only take three pounds to recover the animal. If he had had three pounds, of course, even his final three pounds on the earth, it would have been his pleasure, his signal honor …
It was a familiar old story. In the end the handsome fellow and his brutish partner extracted eighteen pounds from the young woman.
The man himself only spoke once. “We returned the dog!” he cried, when Miss Pershing had broken into fresh tears. “It was a service well rendered!”
Here Oates stepped in. “Sixth dog they’ve caught ’em taking, here and around. It’s a pretty living, too.”
“Set him to gardening,” Rodgers muttered, unsolicited.
The young man looked heartbroken at this suggestion. Frederick, with a thank-you to Miss Pershing, said that he had better wait until the Petty Session to sentence the man, the matter lying as it did somewhere between blackmail, extortion, and dog-theft. (For many years this last had been the most serious of those crimes, when rich men’s dogs could cost as much as workhorses.) With that decision he thanked Oates, Weston, and Rodgers, and adjourned the court, looking relieved to be done.
For his part, Lenox’s mind kept returning to the strong, silent Frenchman, to what secret precisely he might have been keeping, and to why he had so much money to spread around Bath.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
That afternoon Lenox walked into town to see the grain merchant, Wells. The shop, not far from Fripp’s, was a big, shiny affair, with a bright coat of hunter green paint on it and in the windows an enormous iron scale with counterweights for measuring large quantities of grain, seed, and flour.
Nobody was inside at the moment, however, except for a man behind the counter.
“Mr. Wells?” said Lenox.
“I am. Who’s asking?”
“My name is Charles Lenox, sir.” He shook hands. “I’m staying with my cousin at Everley, at the moment.”
Wells’s manner shifted just slightly toward the deferential. “Oh?”
“I’m also trying to help him—and Mr. Oates and Mr. Weston—discover who’s been vandalizing the town. Including your shop, I understand. Your window was broken?”
“We’d string the lout up by his thumbs, if I had my way, who did this,” said Wells.
“What happened?”
“It’s a short enough story. Old Fripp, down the road, had his window broken, and along about six or seven days later they did mine. Same kind of rock, same picture wrapped around it.”
“Do you have the picture?”
“I gave it to Oates.”
Lenox looked around. “Your shop seems to thrive.”
“Thank you, sir. It’s not been easy.”
“Does Captain Musgrave shop here?”
Wells was a purposeful-looking man. He had a dark mustache and was dressed in a black apron with a bow tie. He betrayed no real emotion at Musgrave’s name. “Not any longer.”
“He did once, then?”
“He doesn’t have much in the way of livestock or farmland,” said Wells, “but he stopped his cook buying her flour and corn here.” The word corn, here in Somerset, referred to any kind of grain—oats, barley, wheat.
“And the clock that was stolen from you—who knew it was here?”
“Anyone who’d been in the shop the last fifteen years, I suppose. That’s all, if you want to round them up.”
Lenox looked at him levelly. “Thank you.” He had noticed that in a small back corner of the store, next to a padlocked door, there was a narrow band of lighter, newer floorboards, mismatched with the timeworn ones they lay alongside. “And this is your expansion?”
“Yes. We can keep more stock with the new shelves there,” he said. “It’s been a good year for business.”
“Would you mind if I examined the place they took the clock from?” said Lenox.
Wells gestured toward a shelf over the door, now empty. “Be my guest. Do you want to stand on a stool?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
As Wells brought a stool over, Lenox asked, “Did the thieves come in after the rock, through the window?”
“They reached through it and unlocked the door. Left it standing wide open.”
Lenox ascended the stool. “How did they get the clock down? Was this stool standing here?”
Wells nodded. “The same one.”
“It’s very rickety—I wouldn’t like it if you let go at the moment. Makes me think there were two of them. Was it heavy, the clock?”
“Yes. Why?”
“It would require a man taller than I am or stronger to fetch down a heavy object from this position. You have a high-ceilinged place here, and I don’t doubt most men would have dropped the clock, including you. It would have been difficult for one man to take it away very quickly.”
“True enough,” said Wells, his voice grudgingly impressed.
“What I wonder is why they risked it, knowing the town must have been watchful after the first incident.”
“They’re scoundrels.”
Lenox tested the shelf’s sturdiness, decided he trusted it, and then hauled himself up, rather laboriously, so that he was resting on his forearms, feet off the stool. “Hold steady down there,” he called.
“Be careful,” said Wells, sounding alarmed.
There was nothing interesting on the shelf, except the lighter-colored wood where the four feet of the clock must have stood for many years. As he was coming down to the stool, though, and drew eye level with the window, he saw something: In small lettering in the windows it read F. W., PURVEYOR. It gave him pause. He filed the information away for later.
�
��Who do you think did these things?” asked Lenox, when he was on the ground again. “Captain Musgrave?”
“I wish I could say.”
“Are you afraid?”
“No,” said Wells, but his eyes shifted slightly—or so Lenox thought.
“There’s no shame in fear.”
“I said I wasn’t, thank you.”
Lenox was silent a moment, looking around the shop. “Very well, then,” he said. “If you think of anything further to tell me, you can go through Oates, or you can find me at Everley. I hope we may catch him for you.”
“Here’s Mr. Oates, now,” said Wells, gesturing toward the door, behind Lenox.
Lenox turned just as the constable came in. “Hallo, Oates,” he said.
“Mr. Lenox, sir. How about that last chap?”
“The dog thief?”
With more animation than he had possessed before in Lenox’s company, Oates launched into the story of Miss Pershing and the dog thief to Wells. The detective, as soon as he politely could, left the shop.
It was just darkening, now, the sky a twilight pink above the rising hills in the distance. A feeling of sweet melancholy filled Lenox’s chest as he gazed out upon it. He looked forward to the evening, the wood fire in the dining hall—his uncle still abjured coal, one of the last stubborn few—the good night to Sophia, the civilized and quiet supper, still served, out here in the country, à la francaise, with the dishes on the table where anyone could scoop themselves a potato when they wanted one, rather than, as all over London, à la russe, the Russian style, with the footmen serving from the left. Much more companionable that way.
In the still evening air he realized that what he felt was a sense of being home. Beyond a certain age one made a home for other people—for Jane, for Sophia—and lost that childhood sense of refuge and security. Perhaps it was because Frederick reminded him of his favorite person, his mother … but no, Lenox pushed that thought back, painful as it was. Even ten years later he didn’t like to think of her being gone.
He and the dogs stopped on their way into the post office. At any rate it was what Plumbley called a post office; as so often in the country it was the front room of the home of an older woman, who in exchange for a small stipend received the mail and passed it on to the postman. (A funny quirk of the language, as the Times had pointed out recently, that in Britain the Royal Mail delivered the post, while in the United States, the Postal Service delivered the mail.)
Lenox knocked on the door and was called in. The dogs were welcome here—there was a bowl of water set by the door for them, which they took turns lapping at—and they tumbled in alongside him. “Hello, Mrs. Walsingham,” he said. “Any post for the Hall?”
“Nought but a telegram. But that is indeed for you, sir,” said the redoubtable old specimen sifting through a pile of letters.
Idly Lenox wondered whether she knew all the gossip in town—so easy for a wax seal to fall open!—or whether she was honest. Surely the latter. They would have perhaps taken the job from her otherwise. Telegram in hand, he thanked her and left.
He was sure it would be his brother who telegrammed him, with further advice, but here he was out. In fact it was from his friend Thomas McConnell, a sometime Harley Street physician of Scottish descent, married to Jane’s cousin and dear friend Toto. In other times he had helped Lenox with his cases, an impromptu medical examiner, but those days were long past. What could he be writing to say, urgently enough to wire rather than write a letter?
The telegram answered that question.
DALLINGTON MAKING A FEARFUL ROW ABOUT THE WEST END STOP THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW STOP TALK OF THE CLUBS STOP STARTED AT THE BG TWO DAYS AGO STOP SHALL I TELL THE DUKE OR WILL YOU STOP NO WISH TO CAUSE THEM PAIN STOP REGARDS MCCONNELL
Lenox’s step slowed as he read this, and his heart fell. The BG would be the Beargarden Club, a haunt of many young and debauched aristocrats. Not coincidentally it was where Dallington’s letter to Lenox—perhaps his final piece of professional duty on the murder of Arthur Waugh—had been sent in. So.
Lenox went back to Everley with this telegram in hand, much preoccupied, thinking the entire way about what he should do. When he arrived he went straight to see Jane, who was writing at her desk, a curl of hair fallen fetchingly over her absorbed, concentrating face.
“Ah, Charles!” she said, smiling and looking up when she realized he was in the doorway. “How are you?”
“Unfortunately I think I shall have to go up to London,” he said, and handed her the telegram.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the end it took a very short while for detective to find detective: Lenox ran Dallington to ground ninety-odd minutes after the train from Bath arrived in London. Now he was walking down Villiers Street, a slim cobblestoned lane that lay directly in the shadow of Charing Cross station. It was dark and cold out, with a bitter, penetrating rain.
He stopped at a dim, unmemorable little doorway with a sallow lantern flickering above it, the name GORDON’S stenciled in black on its glass. Another hundred steps on he could see the Thames and the lights of Hungerford Bridge, and the intrepid small craft that even at this hour, in this weather, were out on the water, scavenging, ferrying, on whatever mysterious errands their pilots had in mind. Lenox had always felt more comfortable in stately, leafy, daytime London than in its dark and secretive nighttime brother. He had had his adventures in both.
Gordon’s Wine Bar was down a stairwell, and Lenox had to stoop to take the steps one by one. By the bottom his eyes had adjusted to the candlelight. The ceiling was formed by a succession of low, steeply curved vaults, so that some parts of it left five feet above your head and some five inches, rather like a cave or an old Roman bath. Its stone walls and columns were smudged black here and there with smoke. Everywhere—under and around the scratched tables and uneven chairs, beneath the bar, above the bar, hung from the ceiling—there were pallets of red wine in clear bottles marked only with a few swipes of chalk.
The bartender, a saturnine, white-haired man with a large belly, was backed by seven great oak casks, marked amontadillo, madeira, port, and so on. (Why was it all Portugese, the wine? Many years before a canny British trade envoy had agreed that his country would buy solely wine from that country if she bought her cloth solely from England. It was one of the most unbalanced bargains ever struck, and the reason that every stolid insurance man in Lambeth drank something as exotic as Port, or Portuguese, wine.) Occasionally one of the quiet customers would sidle up to the bar with his glass and the bartender would fill it from a cask. At the small tables there were men sitting alone, others playing chess, others reading newspapers, the majority of them with the eyes and the complexions of the committed drinker.
This quiet was broken, however, by occasional shouts and laughs from some deeper recess of the place. Lenox followed the noise to a stooped semicircular door, very heavy, which he opened to reveal a group of ten or eleven men and women in a brilliantly candlelit room.
The scene was one of loud debauchery. There were empty bottles by the dozen, women sitting on men’s laps, cards, dice, and cigars flung across every surface.
“The chap with the wine! Capital fellow!” shouted a carrot-haired young man, who happened to be near the door. Then, drunkenly, he said, “But you’ve forgotten the wine. Foolish thing to do, it was your only job.”
Dallington hadn’t turned, yet, but Lenox could see his profile. He looked far gone. His eyes were barely open, and the two women on his lap—prostitutes, almost certainly—couldn’t coax him to awareness. Occasionally with great effort he would stretch one eye open and murmur something incomprehensible, and take a sip of a greenish liquid in a small, bell-shaped glass that never left his hand. Even at this advanced remove from his senses, a carnation stood fresh in the lad’s buttonhole.
Lenox set back out into the main room after a moment. His stomach flipped when he thought he had seen someone from Parliament, a young secretary, but upon closer examinati
on the resemblance was only vague. He walked straight to the bartender. “How long have they been in there, in the back room?” he asked.
“Who’s asking?”
“Have they paid?”
“Very regular.”
“And the women?”
Here the bartender assumed a look of almost total, blank stupidity. “Don’t know.”
“Lord Dancy and William Lawrance can drink themselves to Gehenna, for all I care,” said Lenox, and registering the bartender’s surprise, added, “Yes, I know them all, the idlers, and half their parents. But I do need one of them out. The dark-haired one, with the carnation in his buttonhole.”
“John Best.”
“Yes, why not.” The bartender stared at him for a long moment, and then Lenox realized that he was waiting for the transactional element of the conversation to begin. “Do you have anyone to roust him out for me?”
“And who are you?”
Lenox took out the brown, calfskin billfold that Lady Jane had given him two birthdays past, and removed a pound note. “Get me two strong men and have a cab waiting at the top of the stairs.”
“They’re good for that in the next two hours,” said the bartender. “Don’t want to disturb their group.”
Lenox doubled the amount now. The sum was what a housemaid might make in a month of work. “Haste, please,” he said. “I’ll wait here.”
The bartender paused and then, imperceptibly, nodded. He swiped the notes into his waist—for a panicked moment Lenox wondered if he was simply going to steal them—and then, by way of consecrating their deal, poured a glass of red wine from a bottle under the counter. “My finest,” he said.
A Death in the Small Hours Page 8
