A Death in the Small Hours

by Charles Finch

  “Thank you.” Lenox took a grateful draught of the wine.

  Fifteen minutes later two men appeared, looking grim, and it only took them a moment to drag a dark-haired young man up to the bar.

  It was the wrong one. “For the love of heaven,” said Lenox and, leading them and the bartender—and a few mildly interested onlookers—back to the door, said, “That one.”

  They pulled Dallington out. He couldn’t stand under his own power. Lenox liked a drink, now and again, but this looked like something different, very like illness. He was glad to have dispatched a message, when he arrived in London, to McConnell, asking him to come to Hampden Lane.

  Dallington just opened his eyes enough to register Lenox’s presence. He didn’t seem surprised. He put up a token resistance against the men dragging him upstairs—enough to make them pause, though they could have carried on—and said, with titanic effort, slurring badly, “The one in the red dress, the red dress.”

  Lenox nodded. “Wait at the cab for a moment, if you would,” he said to the men.

  He went once more to the back room and found the girl with the red dress, gave her a bill folded in half, and left the room. He felt no sense of judgment, only one of fatigue and sorrow.

  Lady Jane’s two closest friends on the earth, once she had married her closest, were Toto McConnell and the woman she called Duch, the Duchess of Marchmain, Dallington’s mother. It was a new and rather shiny title, three generations old, and both the Duke and Duchess disliked it—but it made them public figures. Beyond that, they were both so wildly happy, so immensely obliged, at the change in John … it was no surprise to him when Jane had agreed he should come to London and handle the lad himself, rather than telling the boy’s parents.

  At Hampden Lane Lenox had time, before the servants had recovered from their surprise at seeing him, to see his own house dark and uninhabited, and whether because of the rain or the kind of evening he had had, it struck a chord of deep sadness somewhere within him. He shook it away and, with the coachman, Staples, dragged Dallington into the study and laid him, half-crumpled, upon the couch.

  Soon McConnell arrived, full of authority and good sense. In truth he had had his own battle with alcohol, but they had been far more private than this, had indeed occasioned relatively little notice beyond his friends. This made Lenox angrier: there were people’s reputations at stake besides the young detective’s.

  McConnell forced Dallington to sit up and examined him very carefully, splashing water over his face, asking him questions. Lenox retreated a discreet distance, though not far enough that he couldn’t hear. Well.

  At last McConnell finished. “He’ll be fit enough in a week’s time, with rest,” he said. “If he had gone on drinking much longer I would have worried, however, about poisoning. His liver is in a fragile state to start with, and he’s feverish. We must hope it doesn’t progress.”

  Together they managed to get Dallington into a bed upstairs, loosening his tie and removing his shoes. Then they sat together in Lenox’s study for a long while, speaking in the hushed, comfortable tones of old friends called out on some unexpected duty together late at night, smoking their short cigars. Finally, at two or three in the morning, McConnell said he had better return to Toto—and of course to George, his daughter, was what went unsaid, for it never did to care too much about one’s children. Lenox understood.

  The detective went to sleep in his own bed then, and stayed there very late into the morning.

  He subsequently wished that he had risen before he did. For when he finally went to his study, it was to discover upon a silver salver on his desk a telegram that turned his heart to ice:

  CHARLES YOU MUST RETURN IMMEDIATELY STOP THERE HAS BEEN A MURDER STOP ALL SAFE AT EVERLEY THANK GOD STOP TOWN IN A STATE OF PANIC STOP EARLIEST TRAIN POSSIBLE STOP PONSONBY

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Six hours later Lenox stood on Plumbley’s town green. At his side was Oates, the police constable, who was much shaken.

  “Are you sure you can carry on?” Lenox asked.

  “I can,” said Oates.

  “If you need to retire for a few hours—”

  “No, no, nothing of the sort.”

  “So he was lying upon this spot.”

  “And a knife between his shoulder blades, as dirty and cowardly a way—” Oates stopped himself. “Yes, he was lying here, sir. The poor fellow.”

  Lenox had returned by the first train. Unsure what to do with Dallington he had simply dragged the young man—coherent but wan—from bed, had two footmen place him by the window in the first-class car, and brought him along. He was lying in a bedroom at Everley now. Dr. Eastwood was busy with the more serious matter of an autopsy, but had promised to check in on the lad that evening. In the meanwhile Lenox and Frederick—his face a mask of calm, his emotions, when you spoke to him, deeply disturbed—had come to the center of town, where they had found the corpse upon the green. A shock of red hair was the first thing visible, in full view of St. Stephen’s church, of Fripp’s, of Wells’s, and of the rows of mild shops and houses that squared it off. Once he had brought Lenox to the scene of the crime, Frederick had left to go see the lad’s numerous family members in their homes.

  The green was not large—you could walk from end to end in perhaps a minute and a half, and easily have a conversation across it at a quiet moment—and Lenox was persuaded somebody in the houses must have seen something.

  He restated this opinion to the constable now.

  “I sent word around with the women. Nobody has come forward,” said Oates. “And everybody loved the boy.”

  “Yet after the crimes of the past few weeks I would have imagined many open eyes, open windows.”

  “Nobody has come forward,” repeated Oates stubbornly. “And everybody loved the boy.”

  The boy—his body found corkscrewed, knife in its back, his face, according to Oates, full of horror—was also one of the few people in town Lenox had known.

  It had been Weston.

  Lenox’s first thought when he heard this news, arriving in Plumbley, was of the constable’s rather winning description of his polling-day drunkenness. His second was of the victim’s extreme youth. Nineteen! He had barely lived. It grieved Lenox powerfully.

  Of course he knew that in all likelihood one day longer in Plumbley would not have altered his understanding of the case, or prevented the violent assault upon Weston, and yet he resented Dallington for fetching him back to London at such a crucial moment.

  A sort of voluntary commission of deputies had sprung up now, men from across the town. Wells and Fripp, as well as the pub owners, usually implacable enemies, were among them, a group of ten or twelve. They ringed the square, answering questions from their neighbors and protecting the site of the crime from trampling feet. Lenox wished they had left the body for him to examine in situ, but understood why Oates had felt that to be impossible.

  In the back of his mind, like the nuisance of a bee buzzing against a window, an idea or a thought was trying to come through, something that bothered him. Something about Weston? About the vandalisms? It had been there all morning, a low hum of agitation. There was no use doing anything but waiting for it to come out on its own.

  Methodically, he began to circle the site where the corpse had lain, very slowly. “Where did he live?” he asked, eyes still to the ground.

  “In a pair of rooms behind the police station,” said Oates.

  “Did he have any help?”

  “A charwoman who came in mornings, fixed a few meals for him. She didn’t live in, obviously.”

  “There’s no chance she would have been there at night?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. We might easily ask her. She arrived to work this morning and found us all here, looking at his body. Half killed her, it did. She went straight home for a glass of malmsey.”

  Lenox stopped and wrote this down in his notebook, then continued, eyeing the ground in his broadening circles. So far
he had seen nothing, but there was light left and he was a patient man. “Did he ever go out so late in the evenings?”

  A dozen witnesses had confirmed that they had passed across the town green at 11:00, when the King’s Arms closed, and there had been no body upon it then.

  “I don’t know,” said Oates.

  “But it wasn’t part of his duties to patrol the village?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Not even after the vandalisms?”

  “No, sir. Perhaps it should have been.”

  Wells, Fripp, Weston, the church doors. What connected them? He had reached the outer perimeter of the town green now, and he went back to the spot where the corpse had lain. He began his circles again. “Then he must have been called out,” said Lenox. “Have you looked in his rooms yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “If we’re lucky there may be a message. If we’re luckier still it may be signed.” He made another note now. “I would also like to go through his effects.” He didn’t want to say the words, but there was always the chance, however out of character it might have seemed, that Weston had been the vandal. Drawings, paint, any of it might still be in his rooms.

  “We can go directly after we finish here, if you like,” said Oates. “It isn’t a hundred yards.”

  “And his family?”

  “He was my second cousin, of course.”

  “Other than you?”

  “His mother is dead—which, thank God, if you don’t mind me—and his father has been dead many years. Half of the doors in Plumbley were open to him, of course, by way of cousinship or friendship.”

  “Who was he close to?”

  “The lads his age, of the Royal Oak, I suppose.”

  Lenox made another note. He was circling back inward now, slowly beginning to despair of finding any clue here on the green. “And the man who found the body …”

  Here was the most interesting fact of the case. Oates’s face, which Lenox glanced up to see, darkened. “Captain Musgrave, yes.”

  “He is amenable to being interviewed, I suppose, this afternoon?”

  “He had damned well better be.”

  “Then perhaps we should go there directly. I can see nothing on the green itself of much interest. Unless—”

  “Mr. Lenox?”

  They were in the corner of the green closest to the church and the police station next door, meaning they were also close to Weston’s rooms. “Where is his doorway? Does he have one from the outside?”

  Oates pointed to a small alcove behind an iron gate in the police building. “Just there.”

  Lenox started to walk the line, examining the ground as minutely as he had examined the green. The deputies around this part of the green made way for him, men he didn’t recognize. “Was he found in shoes, or barefoot? In nightdress, or in a suit of clothes?”

  “In shoes, and in a suit of clothes.”

  “Suggestive.” His eyes were glued to the ground. “Had anyone seen him at the pubs?”

  “No, and I know that he went to his rooms after we knocked off, at six or so. Said he was tired.”

  “There you are!”

  “Sir?”

  Lenox was stooped over. Just by the iron gate was a small pile of cigar ends. Carefully he picked one up. “These are the cigars he smoked, as I recall—correct? Yes? He was in shoes and clothing, you say, at such an hour of the night. I think we may conclude that he was waiting for someone. For at least twenty minutes or so, judging by how much he smoked. On the other hand there are no cigar ends on the green. Either he stopped smoking or the meeting was short.”

  Oates seemed to go pale. “If Weston was waiting to meet someone—does that mean he knew his murderer?”

  Lenox nodded. “I fear so.”

  “It may have been the vandal himself who asked him to meet,” said Oates.

  “The thought had crossed my mind. Come, I want a look at his rooms now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Suddenly, with a spark of comprehension, he knew what it was that had been bothering him all day, that vexing near-thought that had thrummed in his brain. “Oates,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “Something occurs to me. About Weston and the vandalisms.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The date today, do you know what it is?”

  Oates’s face crunched with confusion, until it dawned on him what Lenox meant. “That Roman numeral, the bastards,” he said. “It’s the twenty-second, isn’t it?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Before they went into the rooms where Constable Weston had lived, Lenox had a thought. He walked toward Fripp, who was positioned in sight of his storefront. “Will you do me a service?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Fripp immediately.

  “You’re here every day. Would you knock on doors in the square, whether you like the people behind ’em or not, and ask if they saw anything strange last night? Oates has already canvassed them, but a second try can’t hurt.”

  The fruit-and-vegetable man nodded. “If they saw anything you’ll hear of it.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Fripp.”

  The rooms Weston had occupied in life lay directly behind the police station, through a large walnut door or, alternatively, through the side gate where the cigar ends had been dropped. Lenox and Oates took this second point of entry.

  There were two rooms, as bare and tidy as monks’ cells, leading one into the other. In the first there was a small round table with three much-scratched chairs around it, a comfortable armchair by a grate, the coals in it half-gray, still usable, and along one wall a shelf of thirty or forty illustrated novels. Lenox flipped through these carefully, looking for odd scraps of paper, but Weston had evidently been too organized for that.

  “I take it he liked these stories?”

  Oates nodded toward the book Lenox was holding. “That one, there, was his favorite. Dick Turpin.”

  The illustrations were garish and violent. Dick Turpin had been England’s most famous highwayman during the century before this one, and his tale was still widely told. Oates was right; the spine of this book was creased from use. “Most of the books are about criminals.”

  “He never wanted anything but to be a police officer,” said Oates. He spoke stiffly.

  “Then I am heartily glad he was able to do it, while he was alive.”

  “I suppose.”

  On the walls of this first room there was only one framed image, a mezzotint showing the cathedral at Salisbury. “Constable,” said Lenox.

  “Sir?” said Oates, who was standing behind him.

  This play on words had been inadvertent; instead of trying to explain, he said, “Is there a kitchen attached? I see he has the leftovers of a meal here.”

  Indeed, there was a plate with lamb and peas sitting on the table, as well as half a candle and another illustrated novel, this one about the thief-taker Jonathan Wild. It was marked with a blank scrap of paper.

  The second room, like the first, was largely vacant but not without its comforts. There was a soft bed, still made, presumably, from the day before—Weston had never gotten into it before his meeting in the small hours. Lenox knelt to the ground and looked beneath. Stored there was a stout low-slung trunk, which, when opened, proved to contain his clothes, nothing else. On the nightstand was another book.

  “The world can ill afford to lose such a reader,” Lenox muttered.

  “Yes.”

  “And yet—”

  “Sir?”

  Lenox sighed. “I hope these tales of adventure didn’t tempt him into some rash or reckless crack at heroism.”

  “Such as?”

  “Meeting the vandal alone, for instance. Would he have come to you?”

  “Oh, certainly. He was never a rebellious sort, you know. Very respectful.”

  “Mm.”

  The walls in this room were entirely bare, and the only remaining furniture in the room was a desk. It had no drawers, but on top
was a stack of papers. “Shall I look through those?” said Oates. “Him being my cousin.”

  “I think we had better both do it,” said Lenox.

  The constable looked pained. “But it seems wrong, don’t it, to—”

  “Our debt is not to his privacy,” said Lenox.

  “But—”

  To put an end to the objections Lenox sat down and began to scan, with great care, the first sheet of paper. It was only a note from a cousin in nearby Cramton, full of prosaic news, but the detective nevertheless read it over with great diligence. Then he moved onto the next note, and the next. In all he sat at the desk for perhaps twenty minutes, reading and passing on the papers to Oates when he was done.

  His reward for all this was nil.

  At last he stood up. “I suppose the rooms are a blind alley, then,” he said. “Though it is sometimes valuable to learn about the character of the victim.”

  “His character?”

  “I knew he was amiable, which these letters prove, but I did not know about his taste for adventure novels. I did not know about his tidiness—that cannot be attributable solely to the charwoman—and it makes me think he had a well-ordered mind for police work. I wonder how that reflects upon his meeting on the green last night.”

  Oates grunted as if to say that yes, plainly they were both wondering that. “Next, then?”

  “Tell me, did he come and go as he pleased from the police rooms, on the other side of this door?”

  “He had a key to lock it from the inside, but from our side it was never locked. He could go in and out as he pleased. Certainly I didn’t mind.”

  “In that case let us look at his desk there.”

  “You could scarcely call it a desk—there aren’t any papers in it. He did mostly footwork, to be honest, Mr. Lenox. I handle the papers, like.”

  “Nonetheless.”

  They went through to the next room. Lenox’s mind was busy; that Roman numeral, XXII, was beginning to obsess him. The hanging men and the black dog, too. If one of them had been a threat—and if this was a coincidence it was rather a wild one—they all might have been threats. Were they to be read in conjunction, or separately?