Home by Nightfall

by Charles Finch

  Aside from the dread possibilities of what might have befallen the pianist, his disappearance was known to be an embarrassment to the Queen and her retinue. She was part German herself, of course, Prince Albert had been entirely German, and many of their retainers were, as well. All of them had watched Muller perform on his opening night; now the Queen’s cousins across the channel were extremely aggrieved at the disappearance of one of their finest artistic exports.

  Lenox had seen him play and had to admit the fellow was magical—a short, slim, swarthy, balding, unprepossessing person, and yet when he sat before a piano, suddenly transformed into the most sensitive and subtle conduit of artistic beauty. His pauses, his rhythms, gave new meaning to music that a whole audience had heard dozens of times, and thought they knew.

  Where could he be?

  The room showed no sign of violence; nothing was discomposed or shifted, except that Muller’s black silk evening jacket was thrown across an armchair, and that glass of wine had been emptied, as Lenox knew from a private conversation with Inspector Nicholson. In the same conversation, Dallington and Lenox had offered the assistance of their agency, free of charge, and been immediately rebuffed. The Yard was extremely sensitive, at the moment, to any implication that they might be failing in their duties, Nicholson said. It wouldn’t do.

  “But of course you are failing in your duties,” Dallington had replied. “A pig with a magnifying glass would be as much use as the lot down at the theater.”

  Nicholson frowned. “A pig couldn’t even hold a magnifying glass.”

  “I won’t have you besmirch pigs in my hearing,” said Dallington moodily. He desperately wanted a chance to find Muller; indeed, Lenox suspected that he had been absent from the offices so much that week because he was conducting his own investigation. “Some of the finest chaps I ever met were pigs.”

  “Well, as you know, I’m not on the case myself, though I would very much like to be. Anyone who finds Muller, particularly alive, is guaranteed promotion.”

  “I still think you ought to come work for us,” Lenox had said.

  They’d been sitting in the Two Princes, a dim pub with a bright little coal fire and very good ale. Nicholson, packing his pipe, had shaken his head. “I love the Yard. I’ll never leave, if they’ll keep me.” Both Dallington and Lenox must have looked doubtful, because he had felt compelled to add, “It’s my Oxford, you see.”

  Lenox nodded. He liked Nicholson. The three had grown close earlier that year, working together on a case. “So then,” said Lenox, “can’t you ask to be put on the case?”

  “I have. McKee is protecting his turf very carefully.”

  “We kept a pig when I was a boy,” said Dallington, taking a sip of his dark beer. “His name was George Washington.”

  “What an utterly fascinating story,” said Lenox.

  “He could eat thirty potatoes in a sitting if he got a head of steam up.”

  “Thirty potatoes? Really, I mean to say, you ought to tell people about this at parties.”

  Dallington had looked at him suspiciously and then broken into a laugh, which Nicholson joined. Nicholson shook his head as it died down, tapping his pipe on the table to pack it more tightly. “Ah, that glass of wine,” he said. “The two stewards swear up and down that they filled it after the intermission, when Muller was already back out playing. But then where could he be?”

  Lenox pondered the question as the cab moved across Grosvenor Square, in the direction of his brother’s house. Parsons had told the truth—there was nothing new in the midday paper, though there was a great deal of specious theorizing. When he stepped down from his cab he had learned no fresh information. Alas. Well, here he was: his brother. He took a deep breath, bracing himself.

  Sir Edmund Lenox was two years older than Charles, and they had passed their childhoods as close as two brothers could be, first at their family home, Lenox House, in Sussex, then together at Harrow School, in London, and finally two years apart at Oxford. Their paths had diverged slightly after that. Edmund favored the country, Charles the city, and when their father died, and Edmund inherited both the baronetcy and the house, he had married and settled there. Then, however, around his thirtieth birthday, he had won the parliamentary seat of Markethouse, the village nearby, and since then he had divided his time more or less equally between London and the country. That had pleased his younger brother; for the past fifteen years, he’d been able to see a great deal of Edmund, between the time he was up for Parliament and the two weeks that they all spent at Lenox House over Christmas, by custom.

  Edmund’s house in the city was the same one Lenox’s family had lived in during the season since the early part of the century, a bright, airy, wide-windowed, white-walled town house on a Mayfair side street.

  Now, however, it was darkened—a black cloth wrapped around the door knocker, an unlit candle in the front window, black crepe lining the flower boxes, which ought at least to have had mums in them, at this time of year.

  Lenox, a lump in his throat, reached up to the cab’s seat and paid the driver, who accepted the money with a finger to his hat and then whipped his two horses onward to their next fare.

  The younger brother stood on the pavement for a moment, looking up. His brother’s dear, beloved wife, Molly, was dead, aged only forty, and though Edmund had kept his demeanor even, in the five weeks since it had happened, anyone who knew him even slightly saw how impenetrable, how implacable his grief was. He had become a ghost of himself, and Lenox had realized to his horror that it wasn’t impossible to imagine that Edmund might follow, soon, behind his wife.

  CHAPTER THREE

  They walked together to White’s. This was Edmund’s favorite club, where they got a quiet table near the window. Was the waiter unusually solicitous, or was it merely good service? Lenox saw his brother calculating the chances on either side of the question while they ordered their luncheon.

  “Well then,” said Edmund. “Muller. You must have some idea?”

  “None at all!” said Lenox cheerfully.

  There was a very faint flicker of interest in Edmund’s face. “No?” he said. “Not even a conjecture?”

  “Do you have one? I should be very happy to take it and pass it off as my own, in particular should it prove correct.”

  “I? No, I have not followed it very closely,” murmured Edmund.

  Lenox would have greatly preferred it if his brother had been experiencing a more dramatic and tragic grief—if he drank too much wine, or refused all food, or stormed about the turf near Lenox House at midnight. Instead, he was passably social, drinking a little wine, eating a few bites of food. He was simply not altogether there. In the soft, luminous whiteness of midmorning, sunlight falling in slants through the windows, it looked as if he were already half departed from the world.

  How quickly it had happened! Molly had been a plump, pretty woman, with red cheeks and dark hair, of excellent but not especially illustrious stock. Edmund had met her at a Sussex dance. Then and later she had been countryish, quick to laugh, happy to chatter, even a bit silly at times—very different from Lenox’s own sharp, cosmopolitan wife, Lady Jane Grey, though the two had grown close across the years, being married as they were to a pair of brothers. She had been the type of person who enlivened a room, Molly, and since Edmund himself was rather quiet, a reflective soul, they had been a wonderful match. And she had been a woman of parts, too, fine at the pianoforte, and a really quite superb draftsman, who had left behind her hundreds of small, endearing, utterly accurate drawings of the people and places she had loved.

  Her death had been fast—shockingly fast. A mild headache on a Tuesday; a fever on the Wednesday; better on the Thursday and planning out her social calendar; very weak indeed on the Friday but optimistic she would see the illness out before the weekend; then, on Saturday morning, badly feverish, and by the afternoon, unconscious, the best doctors from three counties called to her bedside. On Sunday, dead.

  O
ne of Lenox’s closest friends in the world was a physician named Thomas McConnell, a Scotsman who had often helped him in his criminal investigations.

  “What killed her?” Lenox had asked after the funeral. “It would be nice to know.”

  They had been walking down the lovely avenue, lined on either side with lime trees, which led toward Lenox House. McConnell, a rangy fellow, given perhaps too much to drink at moments in his life but a surpassingly excellent doctor, had shaken his head sadly. “I cannot say, exactly. A fever.”

  “But you have spoken to Lincoln, Hoare?”

  It had been a lovely day, one of those true summer days of September in Sussex, still, bright, mild, a few clouds in the brilliant blue sky. “There are moments when I congratulate myself on belonging to an age of sophistication, Charles—none of the slime-draughts and silver bark and bloodletting of last century, all remedies that killed more than they saved. We know infinitely more than our grandfathers did. And yet something like this—delirium … a fever … chills? We are no closer to understanding precisely what killed her than the Romans would have been. Go back farther, if you like—the ancient Egpytians.”

  “Poor Molly,” Lenox had said.

  “Poor Edmund,” McConnell had replied, shaking his head. “The dead are at least beyond whatever harm this world can do them.”

  McConnell worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital, which served severely ill children, regardless of whether they could pay—a charity that was one of the great credits to the empire, or so Lenox thought. McConnell had seen children die. “Yes,” Lenox had said. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  As he and his brother ate lunch now, talking with simulated engagement about political matters, Lenox tried to think of what he could do to help. The five weeks since that day with McConnell might have been five seconds for his brother. Edmund’s face, his mood, were no different, his shock still total.

  What made it so difficult was his brother’s essential sweetness. London and his career as a detective had together sharpened Lenox into hawkishness, observance, and cynicism, not all the way perhaps, but far enough that there was little enough that could catch him off guard. Edmund, however, had never been altered, not from boyhood. Even as he maneuvered in Parliament—for he had reached a high position there—it was not through cunning but through his good nature, the ease with which people loved him, that he attained each success. He was intelligent, to be sure, but he had held on through the long years to his country openness.

  Part of the credit for that was in all likelihood due to Molly, Lenox realized now.

  “I’m down to the house in two days’ time,” Edmund said, as the waiter took away their plates.

  Lenox frowned. “On Wednesday?”

  “Yes. There’s a lot to look after—I’ve been away too long. They’ll want to know about the horses, and I hear that some of the tenants have complaints.”

  “Mather can deal with all of that,” said Lenox.

  This was the fellow who managed the estate, a young, energetic person, nephew of the old steward, who had retired to the village. “On the contrary, he needs a great deal of assistance,” said Edmund.

  Fortunately their coffee came then—for Lenox was extremely concerned, and he managed to conceal it only by busying himself with milk and sugar. He and Jane had invited Edmund to stay with them after the funeral, but he had declined absolutely. At least, though, he had been in London, and one way or another they had managed to see him most days since then. He would be terribly isolated in the country. He had friends there, but none closer than a twenty-minute gallop. And it was where Molly had died.

  “Are you sure that it will be tolerable—mentally, that is?” said Lenox, with great care in his voice.

  Edmund actually laughed. “Ha! No, no, I am not,” he said.

  “Skip it, then.”

  He waved a dismissive hand. “No, I must go. It was urgent two weeks ago. Now it is past urgent.”

  “You will be very gloomy down there, Ed.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  This was typical enough. Edmund wasn’t resistant to talking about his state of mind, particularly with Charles and Jane, and he did not pretend to be happy. It didn’t seem to help him, though. If Charles asked him, he answered truthfully and politely, but every word of his reply was filled with a monumental sense of the pointlessness of such conversation, how little it had the power to change anything. The subject would move toward politics then, or Sophia, Lenox’s daughter—and there at least Edmund could give his honest attention, with the part of his self that still remained down here among the living.

  Lenox had a thought. “What if we came for a visit?”

  Edmund frowned. “To Lenox House? I hope you’ll still be there at Christmas.”

  “No, now. Wednesday.”

  “I couldn’t possibly ask you to do that. The agency alone takes up so much time.”

  “Are you being witty? It would be a positive relief to get away from the city. Dallington can manage the queue for a week or two.”

  “What if they ask you to help find Muller?”

  “They won’t, the devils.”

  Edmund considered this. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s better that I spend these ten days there myself. It will be very dull, you know—all business, every day.”

  There was a brief pause, and then Lenox decided that he would simply be honest. In a low voice, he said, “I think there is nothing I can do to help you now, Edmund, but if it would make you even slightly less alone to have company at Lenox House, I would like to come with you. I know Jane and Sophia would, too. Please allow us. At least then I will feel better, whether or not you do.”

  Edmund looked at him levelly. “Very well,” he said. “As you please.”

  “Ah, thank you,” said Lenox. He leaned back in his chair and hailed the waiter. “Will you have a biscuit with your coffee?” he said to Edmund.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Well, I call that foolish, because I know something you don’t know—which is that they have the biscuits with raspberry jam in them. We passed a plate on our way in.”

  “In fact, I did know that,” said Edmund. “They have them at every meal.”

  “That’s the best case I’ve heard yet for London being the center of civilization,” said Charles, and then said, to the waiter, “We’ll take as many biscuits as you can fit on a plate.”

  “Very good, sir,” said the waiter.

  Edmund, stirring his coffee, thought for a moment and then said, with a glimmer of interest, “Really, though, nothing about Muller? Nothing at all?”

  Lenox smiled. “I think until we get more information we’ll just have to assume the butler did it.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  To leave London meant to miss out on a great deal of work, and that afternoon Lenox tried to clear as much from his calendar as he could. It wasn’t easy. He would ask Polly to take the meetings he couldn’t shift—she was far better at dealing with clients than the mercurial Dallington—and his only ongoing investigation, one that he was making privately into the criminal behavior of a fellow named William Anson, was a long, slow one, without any immediate necessity for action.

  It wasn’t until seven that all three of the partners were in the office, and Lenox, putting his head around Polly’s door, asked if they might have a quick word. She said she would be with him in a moment. Dallington was playing checkers against himself at his desk when Lenox came in and asked the same question. “Yes,” he said, standing up. “Is everything all right?”

  “Oh, fine,” said Lenox.

  They met in Polly’s office; each partner had a small private room off the large central area, which was full of slanted clerks’ desks. LeMaire had had one, too, but since he had vacated it three of their new detectives had gone shares in it, tight-quartered but comfortable. There was also a large meeting room toward the front of the suite, overlooking Chancery Lane, but this was an informal gathering. />
  Lenox told them that he had to leave for ten days.

  “Ten days!” said Polly.

  “Yes, unfortunately. I’ve pushed as many meetings as possible to tomorrow or the other side, but I was hoping you might take those I can’t.”

  She furrowed her brow. “I suppose. I’m stretched already.”

  “How so?”

  She sighed. “Too many cases. I would have bitten off your hand if you offered me that problem in the spring, but here we are.”

  She was a pretty, vivacious young woman, of good birth, though somewhat slighted socially. This was for two reasons: first, because she was inclined to speak her mind, cuttingly from time to time, and second, and perhaps more to the point, because she had been widowed young, making her an unpredictable quantity and earning her widespread blame for her attractions. “John, are you busy?” asked Lenox.

  He didn’t look it, the duke’s son, handsomely turned out as ever, but he nodded. “Terribly,” he said. “I was out at dawn this morning, and I’m seeing a fellow about a dog in half an hour.”

  “It’s not an ideal moment for one of us to leave,” said Polly.

  “You were playing checkers against yourself five minutes ago,” Lenox pointed out to Dallington.

  He frowned. “I sometimes do that when I need to think.”

  “Fair enough. I suppose I can try to cut the trip short—particularly if you wire to tell me that things are becoming unmanageable here. But I would prefer to go.”

  “Ten days, though!” said Polly. “Where are you going?”

  “To stay with my brother.”

  Both of their faces changed simultaneously.

  “Oh, I see,” said Polly.

  “Take all the time you want, of course,” said Dallington.

  “I won’t take any more vacation this year, you have my word on that.”

  “Charles,” said Dallington firmly, “you must go stay with your brother as long as you like. We can manage very easily. I was telling Polly only this morning that you were next to useless.”

  She laughed, and though Dallington’s face remained impassive, appropriately considerate of Lenox’s feelings, a pleasure passed just visibly through it. The truth was that Dallington loved to make Polly Buchanan laugh; he had been something like in love with her ever since they had discovered she was the mysterious Miss Strickland, nearly two years before.