“Is it?” said the doctor, his eyes still laughing.
“Yes! One can hire a group of tour guides, mountain men. It’s very occasionally dangerous, but I have a friend from the Travelers’ Club who might go with me.”
They talked about Morocco for a little while longer; then Lenox took advantage of the lightness of their conversation to slide in a dangerous question. “Is everything all right these days, Thomas?” he said nonchalantly.
It went against every instinct in Lenox to put such a question to his friend, but Lady Jane had been worried about Toto (McConnell’s young, beautiful, tempestuous wife was Jane’s cousin) and had asked Lenox to see what he could find out. Her instincts tended to be correct—at any rate, better than his—and it was possible that McConnell’s happy appearance that morning might only have been because of the prospect of a new case, or a momentary renewal of his spirits. Who knew?
“No, no, quite all right,” said McConnell.
“Oh, good,” said Lenox. “Please excuse—I mean to say, it was out of bounds …”
There was a moment’s silence. McConnell’s open, friendly face was downcast now. “To be honest, actually, Toto and I have been rowing a bit. Nothing serious at all, mind you!”
“I’m sorry,” said Lenox. And he was.
“Well, too much of that. Would you like to hear what I’ve found out about the dashed cat?”
“Certainly,” said Lenox.
“The animal was poisoned, as we originally conjectured; not enough poison to kill it, but enough to put it out for a good long time.”
“As you originally conjectured, not me. But pray go on.”
“It was poisoned about an hour before it died. That fact points to premeditation, clearly. Well-taken-care-of animal—expensively bred, I should say, though really I’m more expert when it comes to dogs.”
“Any indication about the weapon?”
“Ah, yes—a letter opener, with the letter P engraved on it, as we both saw. Dates back about twenty years—it has a manufacturer’s mark from the 1840s.”
“Did you ever know James Payson?”
“The lad’s father? No. What was he like?”
“Terrible temper … had an awful scar on his throat. An unpleasant chap. At any rate, what else did you find?”
“The remaining question is, of course, why did someone want to send the young fellow this kind of message?”
“Do you think so? I see it rather differently.”
“Oh yes?”
“I think Payson himself killed the cat. Longshanks, they called him.”
“No, really? Why on earth would he have done that?”
“A better question would be, why would the people hunting him down have done it? It immediately makes his disappearance suspect, doesn’t it? I think if I kidnapped somebody, I would want to make everything he left behind seem as normal as possible.”
“Something in that.”
“And then consider that there was that cryptic note underneath the cat. Maybe he felt he couldn’t leave a note in plain sight, so he had to kill the cat to conceal it. Difficult to focus on finding a letter when there’s a dead cat in the middle of the floor.”
McConnell laughed wryly. “Yes, I grant you that. But why not write a more explicit note?”
“Perhaps he felt that even with the dead cat there, he couldn’t risk it. Did he know Bill Dabney was in danger? Perhaps. Or perhaps he feared for his mother’s safety, Stamp’s safety. Any of a dozen reasons.”
McConnell frowned. “But here’s my trump card, Lenox—the cat had been fed poison an hour before it died. If Payson were in a rush, he couldn’t have afforded an hour.”
“I would make the same argument about our criminal, or criminals—they would be less inclined to linger in their victim’s room than anybody, wouldn’t they? In a college with round-the-clock security, where anybody unusual would instantly stand out? As for Payson, I should say that he saw the danger coming early. That would explain his detached and anxious behavior with his mother, with whom he was usually on such good terms. Or alternately, perhaps he found the cat poisoned and decided to put it to use, the poor thing.”
“What on earth do you think it means?”
“There you take me into deeper waters. It’s difficult to gauge whether the cat was merely used to conceal a message, or whether it was in itself a message—to us.”
There was a pause while McConnell seemed to consider something. At last he laid his fork and knife down and said, “You know, it really is good of you to use the word ’us,’ Charles.” It had plainly been difficult for him to say.
“Pure self-interest,” said Lenox. “I’d drop you in a second if you weren’t so useful.”
Both men laughed. They resumed eating, and the conversation moved into other areas; while Lenox still enjoyed it, he saw the spark of involvement dying away that had lit McConnell’s face while they talked about this poor, absurd cat. Soon the Scotsman laid down his fork and knife altogether, his eyes fell slightly, and he pulled a flask from his side pocket.
A short while later McConnell had gone back to his hotel to turn in, and Lenox had started toward the Mitre (his fourth pub of the day, he thought with a smile) to find Andy Scratch.
He was a big, hale young man with a friendly face. Lenox found him, as predicted, playing cards with the man behind the bar, who was small and strong-looking—an ex-jockey or bantamweight boxer, perhaps. A little pile of peanuts that marked their debts to each other sat between the two men.
“Could I have a word?” Lenox asked Scratch.
“Certainly. What are you drinking?”
“Oh—a half of bitter, please. Thanks.”
Scratch nodded at the bartender. “Do you mind, Bob?” The bartender went down to the tap, and the lad said, “How can I help you?”
“It’s about George Payson and Bill Dabney. They’re missing.”
“Dabs and George? Never! I saw them in hall only two evenings ago!”
Hall at Oxford, no matter the college, was always a pleasure; it was what everyone who had been there thought of first when Oxford came up. Students sat at the lower tables, eating, drinking, and mostly laughing, while the fellows gazed on sternly from the high table. There was a long-winded Latin grace, always a great deal of wine, and the nostalgic sparkle of candlelight and crystal. At Balliol, Lenox had sat with the same people for three years, many of them to this day his dearest friends. There was one tradition of hall that was universal in Oxford and Cambridge: pennying. If one could surreptitiously bounce or drop a queen’s-head penny into a tablemate’s wineglass, the glass’s owner would have to drink its entire contents in one go to “save the Queen from drowning.” As a result, much of supper was spent with one’s hand covering one’s wineglass …
Lenox again outlined the situation. The young man was amiable enough, and the half pint went quickly, but he wasn’t able to offer much help. Lenox asked him to keep an eye out for his friends and thanked him for the drink.
As the detective was parting, though, he said, “By the way, do you know what the September Society is?”
“Of course I do,” said the young man. “My father was a military man himself.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lenox sat at the Turf Tavern, sipping a pint of stout. He was in a small window seat near the bar that had once been famous for belonging to Jack Farrior, the noted professor of maths at Merton. Every morning at eleven, old Farrior came to the Turf to work on his great theorem of prime numbers, which he said would build on Gauss’s work. He knew he had done enough for the day when there were six empty glasses on the table—he asked the bartender to leave them there so that he could tell. Wrestling with the great mathematical problems of the day and unable to count to six without assistance, as Edmund had always joked.
Farrior had once caught Lenox and his friend Christopher Compton invading Merton to steal the fellows’ Christmas pudding. The pudding took a month to make and spent most of that time buried
underground in a patch of earth on Christ Church Meadow, to absorb the earth’s dampness. Stealing it was Lenox’s third-year practical joke. The two lads had glided silently down the river on a stolen punt to come toward the meadow from its other end, disembarked, and begun digging. Things were going perfectly until Farrior stumbled upon them. It was an incriminating scene. They were both covered with dirt and had shovels in their hands and dark clothes on.
He stared for a moment. “What’s two plus five?” he had said, chewing on the end of his pipe.
“Seven,” Compton had said. “Last I checked.”
“How about three plus four?”
“Also seven, I should say.”
With a twinkle in his eyes, Farrior had said, “I myself hate Christmas pudding. Have since I was a boy. Tastes of ashes.” Then he had walked away, leaving Lenox and his friend in fits of laughter as they finished the job. It was still part of Balliol lore, passed down to each incoming class along with the theft of the Wadham chandelier and the transfer of several deer from Magdalen’s deer park to the Brasenose courtyard.
There was such a multitude of memories and associations here! He loved this little, many-roomed tavern, its low ceilings and smell of barley, its black casks of ale, its glass decanters of brandy. It was part of his love for Oxford.
Upstairs to his room in a moment. First he wanted a few more seconds to think.
Before him was a book he had borrowed from Andy Scratch, called The Heroes of Punjab. It told the story of the Anglo-Sikh wars, which were by now about twenty years in the past. One chapter briefly mentioned that the September Society had been created after the war by the surviving lead officers of the forces there during the period. The Society maintained close bonds, according to the book.
The question was: Why did a society of former military officers want anything to do with George Payson and Bill Dabney? What on earth connected them? Or was it a false lead? Swallowing the last of his beer, he decided he needed to look into Bill Dabney a bit more. In good time. For now, to bed. It was only half past ten, but he was completely and entirely exhausted. Still, it was a tiredness tinged with satisfaction, the end product of a long, good day of work.
Lenox woke up later than usual the next morning, Monday, with the rays of the sun striping his sheets. He pulled the bell by his desk and stood up to put on his robe and slippers. In about ten minutes there was a sharp knock on the door, and young Thomas Tate came in with a tray that once again must have weighed about what he did. Lenox gave him another sixpence and thanked him with a smile, before fixing himself a quick cup of tea. Always important to have that first gulp so that one could feel human again.
He ate at the table by the windows that peered into New College. It was a pretty, clear day, when yellow leaves hung thick on the branches and a breath of wind scattered another dozen to the ground. The sun was watery but bright, and the sky a pale, early blue. Perhaps because Oxford had so little to do with factories and trains, or perhaps because it was in a valley, shielded by its depth, there was rarely the blinding fog of London here. It refreshed Lenox. In twenty years it might not be any longer, but for now Oxford was still the country, with meadows at the end of every street and many roads made only of dirt. Cleaner air, and birds still giving morning voice to their songs.
The September Society. Could it be an accident? One thing was a relief to him: If the boys had been either of them murdered, even if their bodies had been thrown in the Thames, something would have come out by now. Lenox had instructed Graham to wire up any accounts of unidentified bodies, and the only report that had come was of an elderly man discovered in Covent Garden, stabbed to death without identification on his person. Nothing had been reported closer to Oxford.
He ate a last bit of toast and poached egg, took a last swallow of tea, and looked at his watch. Quarter to nine. He just had time to interview Professor Hatch before catching the 11:50 to Paddington.
Hatch’s house, which was located only a few steps away at 13 Holywell Street, was an old, narrow stone place with four windows facing the street and a green front door. It was painted white, and to match the door there was a green roof. Rather nice for a professor.
A maid answered the door and led Lenox into a front drawing room that was small and close, filled with science journals spilling off of bookcases. Very little light made its way through the blinds.
The professor took quite a long time to come down, and after a while Lenox realized that he might have woken the man. When at last he came into the room he was a surprisingly tall and hearty chap, indeed strong, though with sallow skin and black circles underneath his eyes. He had a mustache and wore an impeccable dark suit.
“John Hatch,” he said.
Lenox introduced himself, and the two men shook hands.
“How may I help you?” Hatch said.
“Nobody has seen Bill Dabney or George Payson in two days, and I’m trying to find them.”
Hatch looked genuinely puzzled, if not all that concerned. “I’m afraid I’m not the most likely man to have seen them,” he said. “Though I’m sorry to hear of it. Have you checked around much?”
“Yes, a bit. Oxford is such a small town that it seems probable that a friend or a classmate would have caught sight of one of them. When did you last see them?”
Hatch considered the question. “Both about a fortnight ago. I had a small gathering here at my house for the students I advise, as I often do. Bill and George usually came.”
Lenox made a note on his pad. “Any idea where they may have gone?”
“None at all, unless they went home.”
“No.”
“Then I don’t, I’m sorry to say. London? Your guess is as good as mine.”
“What are they like, the two boys?”
“Both bright. Above middling, anyway, though I really couldn’t say with any expertise. Medicine is my field, not classics or history. Dabney was more introverted than Payson. Both the sort of gentlemen to be popular in a place like Oxford. Payson was at Westminster like myself, so we had that in common. I don’t know what else to say.”
“Have you heard of the September Society?”
“Can’t say that I have, no.”
“Have you noticed Dabney and Payson pulling apart from the other students at all?”
“Not the sort of thing I’d be likely to notice. I’m not in college much, except for hall, and then I sit with my colleagues at high table.”
“Did you know they kept a cat?”
“Did they?”
“It was found dead.”
“That seems odd.”
“Decidedly.”
“I could use the body in class, if you like.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“Well, it’s the same to me.”
“Was either of them at all in trouble, that you knew of? Financially? Did they break rules?”
“Just in normal amounts. Financially, I couldn’t say. Not really my place, is it?”
“Some might say it was.”
“No,” Hatch said firmly. “Not quite done.”
“You speak as if you were more friend than advisor to them.”
“I admit that, to be sure. Oxford’s a dull place, Mr. Lenox. I don’t mind a coupe of champagne or a glass of beer here and there. I miss London something devilish. And the lads and I have more in common than I do with the dons.”
There was a strange kind of unease in the air. Lenox couldn’t put his finger on it.
“You don’t know anything about Dabney’s background, then?” he said.
Hatch raised his eyebrows in contemplation. “Certainly not much. I know he’s from north of here, somewhere in the Midlands, I believe. I know that he shares digs with Thomas Stamp, rather a friend of the two boys.”
“You haven’t met Dabney’s parents?”
“No. The master will have, Banbury.”
“Payson’s?”
“Oh, yes, his mother. Father’s dead, I heard.”
<
br /> “How did his mother strike you?”
“A little bit rattled by life, perhaps? Introspective, I would call it.”
Lenox nodded. “Is there anything else you can think of? Anything relevant?”
“No, not particularly. Sorry.”
“Oh—by the way, when did you start giving your parties?”
“I’ve been here many years. Began with them straight away.”
“I see. Thanks again.”
Lenox showed himself out. A decidedly strange man, he thought to himself. Why had he stayed in Oxford for eight years if he didn’t like it? Walking briskly past Trinity College, Lenox also thought how unusual it was for somebody innocent to lie twice in twenty minutes to a complete stranger. For one thing, Stamp had mentioned that Dabney and Payson took the cat to Hatch’s parties and let it wander around his house. For another, he and Scratch had both said that the last party was four nights before, on Thursday, not eight or nine, and certainly not a fortnight.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Before he left, Lenox stopped by Lincoln College again.
Hall was still open for breakfast, and there were loose groups of students framed in the windows, eating, studying, and lingering until classes began.
He took a walk around the Grove Quad and the Fellows’ Garden, thinking. Each of the lads would miss a tutorial today; they hadn’t been at meals for some time; their friends, beyond Stamp, would begin to mark their absence. The police would have to be involved, he thought. He would write them from London.
He went to Stamp’s room and knocked on the door.
“Had your collections?” Lenox asked him.
“Yes,” said Stamp, pushing his blond hair away from his face as he constantly did. “Brutal. We had a question on Cromwell’s protectorate that you wouldn’t believe. I couldn’t even understand it, much less answer it. Some bother about predestination and right rule and I don’t know what.”
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