Home by Nightfall

by Charles Finch

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  With Graham’s removal to another, more exalted station, Lenox’s valet in these days was an extremely earnest young Yorkshireman named Pierson, not more than seventeen years old (“He looks about six,” Dallington had commented), who’d previously been a footman of the household. He had short hair and a scrubbed red face. He never spoke a word if he could help it.

  As far as Lenox was concerned, however, he was worth his weight in gold, for a simple reason: He moved quickly. After receiving the telegram, Lenox returned by cab to Hampden Lane, and once he was there told Pierson to have his things ready for a return to Sussex as soon as possible. Seven minutes later, barely long enough for Lenox to interrupt Jane and Toto’s morning chat and explain why he was going, Pierson was standing in front of the house with two bags, his fingers between his teeth, whistling for a cab.

  They just made the 12:01 train, and two hours later they were back at Markethouse.

  No dogcart waiting for Lenox this time, nor any warm welcome. Indeed, the station was unnervingly empty—its usual population of coffee sellers, cart drivers, and hangers-about all gone. In town, he presumed. Markethouse hadn’t had a violent crime in at least two years, to his knowledge, and then it had been a domestic matter.

  Lenox told Pierson to find his way with the bags to Edmund’s house; a cart would be by sooner or later. He himself set out on foot for the brick and stone towers of the village, rising not far beyond the treeline. He carried only Edmund’s telegrams, which he read yet again as he walked:

  Request return at once STOP attack here upon SS STOP knife wounds STOP hovering nr death STOP stationed Bell and Horns STOP all at LH safe STOP Ed.

  And then the second:

  Request again your return STOP see previous STOP Edmund

  Edmund’s style was more laconic than Dallington’s. LH was Lenox House, to be sure, but who or what was SS? He hadn’t bothered to wire his brother back more than a word to indicate that he was on his way.

  At the edge of town he finally met someone, a girl of fifteen or sixteen in a bonnet and a dark wool cloak, from her dress and carriage obviously of fair birth, reading as she walked the muddy road.

  “Excuse me,” said Lenox, “I was wondering if you might tell me who has been attacked in town. My name is Charles Lenox. My brother lives here.”

  In London he would never have addressed her, and even in the country not with more than a nod, not having ever made her acquaintance. But she seemed to understand that it was an emergency. She had her book at her side, finger marking her place. Lenox noticed that it was from the village’s library—Dickens. She said, “The mayor of the town, I’m sorry to say. I’m Adelaide Snow.”

  Lenox bowed to her out of automatic politeness, but his mind was running pell-mell toward the town hall. The mayor—Stevens Stevens, that was his SS. They’d stood together on the steps of the Bell and Horns only a few days before. The abbreviation must have seemed obvious to Edmund.

  “Thank you, Miss Snow,” he said. “May I assume that your father is Alfred Snow, who lives on the old Wethering land?”

  “That’s him. And your brother must be Sir Edmund Lenox?”

  “Yes, he is. Indeed, I had better go see him now. Thank you very much for your time.”

  “Good luck,” she said, turning to look back toward the village. “Your brother went over our gamekeeper’s cottage with a fine-toothed comb, though the books and blankets and dog were all gone from it. Twice! I always told Father he ought to let the little place, but he said he didn’t trust having someone live on his land. Well, he’s had that anyway, and without anything in return for his trouble.”

  “Did he find anything new, my brother?”

  “I don’t know, I’m sorry.”

  “Not at all. Thank you very much, Miss Snow. A pleasure to meet you. Good day.”

  “Good day.”

  She walked away slowly, lifting her book again after a moment to read. Lenox stopped for a beat to look after her, considering that library book. Our gamekeeper’s cottage.

  He turned his steps toward town again. Soon he arrived at its edge.

  It was mayhem. Every sentient person in Markethouse was evidently gathered in the square, and he could hear them even from a few streets off. When he came into sight he realized that all the villagers had abandoned their posts, as if it were a holiday, including both the workers from the factory and their managers. Almost everyone seemed to be roaring drunk. Certainly the Bell and Horns could never have done more business. Two boys in black neckerchiefs were running continually to and from the bar with pints of ale, which they sold faster than they could bring. Just down from the pub, near the fountain, a group of women had gathered, while children too young to be in school darted in and among their apron strings, earning cuffs on the ear if they jostled anyone out of a moment’s gossip.

  Lenox approached the public house and saw Bunce, Clavering’s tall, thin associate, the night watchman, peering out across the square. “Bunce!” he said.

  “Ah! Mr. Lenox! Clavering will be powerful happy to see you—powerful happy. I was just sent out what to look for Mickelson, but I reckon they’ll be happier when I’ve brung you. They’re all gathered upstairs, your brother, too.”

  “Mickelson?” said Lenox. That was the owner of the springer spaniel he and Edmund had watched sprint away from the gamekeeper’s cottage and across Alfred Snow’s meadow. “Why him?”

  “The dog still ain’t found,” said Bunce. “We wondered if he might have had a previous owner, as it were.”

  Not a bad thought, but Lenox knew from the barman that Mickelson had bred the dog from a pup.

  Lenox told Bunce as much. Still, he had an idea. “Do you think you might find him anyhow? I have a favor to ask him.”

  “Certainly,” said Bunce.

  “In the meanwhile, they’re upstairs, you say?” asked Lenox.

  “Yes, we can go there now.”

  The Bell and Horns was a coaching inn. This meant that downstairs it housed a many-roomed pub, with an enormous blackened fireplace opposite the bar. Every bench around it was crammed at the moment, all of the barrels of ale sure to be gone before five o’clock.

  Upstairs were rooms to let for the night, as well as a small private dining room. It was here that the town’s leading men were gathered.

  “Charles!” Edmund said when Lenox came in. “Thank goodness you’ve come.”

  “Stevens?” said Lenox. “How bad is it?”

  All the men in the room—including Clavering, the town’s banker and solicitor, and perhaps half a dozen of the more prosperous market vendors—shook their heads doubtfully in unison. Very bad, their faces seemed to suggest.

  And indeed, Edmund said, “Pretty bad, we think.”

  “When did it happen? And where?”

  “Early this morning, at his office.”

  “Has the office been disturbed? Can I see it?”

  Edmund nodded. “We had to remove him, obviously, but otherwise it’s untouched. Clavering, would you like to come with us?”

  “Perhaps Bunce should take them,” said one of the men, a large fellow with heavy jowls and a white mustache. “Clavering can help us organize these patrols we’ve been discussing.”

  Edmund nodded again. “Good idea.”

  “Patrols?” said Lenox.

  “We have to do something to calm the town,” the same man said, with his white mustache. Lenox thought he recognized him as a merchant. “People are in a right agitated state.”

  “Where is Stevens?” asked Lenox.

  With Dr. Stallings, several voices told him at once—the same doctor who had seen through Mrs. Watson’s son’s fake illness.

  “Stallings is not very hopeful,” Edmund added.

  “Understating it, that,” said Morrow, the banker. “He’s called in Reverend Perse.”

  Lenox nodded thoughtfully.

  He was used to the aftermath of violence—arriving in its wake—and though no
body had exactly said anything negative, he didn’t think he had ever been in a room as full of despair as this one.

  “Chins up, fellows,” he said, voice hard, not sympathetic. “Stevens is still alive. Clavering’s patrols will watch the streets. Meanwhile, my brother and I will figure out who did this, and they’ll be in a jail cell within a day or two.”

  “Well said,” put in Edmund.

  “This will all be over before next market day.”

  At that moment Bunce came in with a heavyset, grizzled man—Mickelson. He had a sour face. “You asked for me, gentlemen?” he said.

  Lenox introduced himself. “I understand your spaniel is the one that was stolen,” he said. “I wondered if you might give us something of his—a blanket he’s lain on, for instance.”

  “Why?”

  “We might set a scenting dog after him. There’s a chance he’s still with the person who stole from the market and took our horses. Not to mention attacking Stevens, of course.”

  Eyebrows rose around the room: a good idea. Mickelson nodded, grudgingly. “I’ll send a boy back home. It may take a while.”

  “Fine,” said Lenox. “Thank you. Now, Bunce—can you take me to the mayor’s office?”

  “By all means, sir.”

  Bunce led him out of the room, and soon the two brothers were following his long stride down the slope of the town square, toward the town hall at its base.

  With his brother, Charles could be slightly more pensive than he had been in the little private dining room of the Bell and Horns. “What on earth happened?” he asked.

  “The devil knows. The attack occurred some time before seven o’clock this morning.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Stevens’s secretary—that young girl in the large spectacles, you remember, the one who follows him like a shadow—found him unconscious when she arrived at seven. He was just barely breathing.”

  “Did Stevens always get to work so early?”

  “No. In fact, the assistant usually arrives at eight, a minute or two before him, but Stevens had asked her to come in at seven. The annual budget is due to be submitted in six days, from what I understand. A busy time of year.”

  Lenox filed that piece of information away. The budget could be controversial in Markethouse, against all odds—what money went to the market, what money went to the council, the mayor’s own salary. According to Edmund, who attended when he could, the meetings had grown heated in the past.

  “And what was done to him, exactly?” asked Lenox.

  “He was slumped over an armchair. Blood everywhere, and six or seven wounds.”

  Lenox saw Bunce, ahead of them, wince. “Back or front?”

  “Oh, directly to his face and his chest. He saw whoever attacked him. Look, we’re here. You can see the office where it happened for yourself.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The town hall was a two-story building the width of about four houses, topped with a large black-iron clock that had never worked in Lenox’s memory. In days when their mayor had been less able than Stevens Stevens, the villagers had noted that fact as ironic—but Stevens had looked into the expense of fixing it and dismissed it as frivolous within his first year in office, and revisited the issue only to reach the same conclusion every five years since.

  That was the kind of mayor he was.

  For that reason it seemed almost impossible to Lenox that anyone could feel such violent emotion toward him—six, seven knife wounds, to his head and chest, which meant looking into his face. Early in the morning, not in the drunkenness of midnight. What could their dry, pedantic mayor, whose whole life was bent toward the ledger, have done to inspire such passionate hatred?

  Of course, that led directly to the second question he had: What, if anything, did this have to do with Arthur Hadley?

  Stevens occupied a large corner office on the second floor of the town hall. Two men were sitting outside his door. One was, judging from his modest black suit and tie, clearly an office clerk, the other was wearing a gray uniform and tall black hat, with a torch dangling from his belt. Edmund explained that these were Stevens’s chief clerk and the building’s watchman. They had been stationed here since the attack to make sure nobody entered the mayor’s office.

  “What time do you come on generally?” asked Lenox of the watchman, whose name was Sutherland.

  “Ten minutes before eight o’clock each morning, sir, which is when the building is opened.”

  “Is there a night watchman?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Is the building locked when you arrive?”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  “How many people have keys?” asked Lenox.

  “Only three—myself, Mr. Stevens, and the charwoman, who stays behind every evening to clean from seven to eight o’clock.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Mrs. Claire Adams.”

  Bunce interjected. “She’s Mrs. Watson’s sister.”

  Lenox and Edmund exchanged a startled glance. “Elizabeth Watson? Hadley’s charwoman?”

  “Yes. She’s housekeeper to the Malone family, but cleans here five evenings a week to make extra money.” Then he added, in a quieter voice, “Her husband, you know.”

  Sutherland nodded knowingly.

  “What about her husband?” asked Lenox.

  There was a beat of silence, and then Sutherland said, simply, “Gone.”

  Lenox decided to leave that for later. He said, “And was there any sign of forced entry here this morning when you arrived? A broken window, a jammed door?”

  Sutherland frowned. “No, not that I saw.”

  “Was it locked when you arrived this morning?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Peculiar. Perhaps you could check around the building again now for any signs of a forced entry, while I look at the office.”

  “If you wish, sir.”

  Lenox turned to the clerk. “And you might tell us what Mr. Stevens’s planned meetings for the day were.”

  “Miss Harville would be better able to inform you of that than I am—but I can look in her desk if you like.”

  “Miss Harville is Stevens’s secretary,” said Edmund. “The one who found the body.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Downstairs in the ladies’ lounge,” said the clerk. “She is … perturbed.”

  “We must speak with her next,” said Lenox.

  The clerk, who had on round glasses and struck Lenox as rather like Stevens, a local boy with ambition, said, doubtfully, “You can try. She’s a bit frantic. We always warned him that it was no good having a woman for a secretary, but he always did, several in a row.”

  It was true that this was unusual. “Why did he, then?” asked Lenox.

  “He said they were sharper,” said the clerk, and then went on, with a trace of bitterness in his voice, “and less womanish than the male clerks he had.”

  Lenox, father to a strong-willed daughter, smiled fleetingly. “Very well. Please tell her that we mean to come speak to her soon, after we look at the office. Incidentally, where were you this morning?”

  “I? With my family—my father, my mother, and six besides. Then I breakfasted at the coffeehouse on the corner, Taylor’s. I do most mornings.”

  Lenox hadn’t liked the note of animosity toward Stevens in the clerk’s voice, but his alibi sounded solid. “And your name?”

  “Van Leer, sir.”

  “Thank you, Van Leer. After you’ve told Miss Harville we’re coming to see her, please come back and resume your watch here, if you don’t mind.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lenox turned back to his brother and Bunce. “Bunce, if you could send a telegram for me, by Mrs. Appleby, I would be grateful.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Lenox scrawled it quickly and handed it over with a shilling—a note to his friend Thomas McConnell, asking if he would consider coming down that afternoon for an hour’s work. I
t was Tuesday, fortunately, McConnell’s day off from Great Ormond Street Hospital. Tuesday: Lenox wondered if Hadley was traveling for his work with Dover Assurance or had decided to give himself the week at home since his unnecessary trip to Chichester.

  When Van Leer, Bunce, and Sutherland were all gone, and the two Lenox brothers stood alone before the door to Stevens’s office, Edmund said, “Lord, Charles, I wonder if you know what a holy terror you are, issuing orders to everyone you meet.”

  Lenox shook his head unsmilingly. “It’s no joke, an attack with a knife. We must move quickly.”

  “Shall we go in? I’ll admit to a bit of trepidation. This will be the first time I’ve seen it, too—I’ve been at the Bell and Horns all morning.”

  “Lead the way,” said Lenox.

  They went in.

  Because Stevens’s office stood on the corner of the second story, in a village full of low buildings, it received a great deal of light, nearly blinding them as they entered. A large desk dominated the room. It was covered with tidy stacks of paper. A pair of spectacles sat on the leather blotter directly in front of the desk chair. Opposite, facing the desk, were two large brown leather armchairs, studded with bronze tacks in long trails from leg to arm to back and down again.

  One was drenched with a thick, dark substance.

  Lenox, who recognized the suffocating smell of it, winced. Edmund took a moment longer, and then he, too, winced. Though the chair was brown, it was obvious from a glance that it was blood pooled on it.

  “Look,” said Lenox.

  He was pointing at the floor. “What? Oh!” said Edmund.

  In the deep blue of the carpet, there was a distinguishable darkening. Lenox knelt down and dabbed it with his handkerchief. It came up a brownish red. Blood, too, a few hours spilled. He looked carefully at the carpet and said, “It starts here, at the side of the desk. None behind the desk, at least that I can see.”

  Edmund watched. “He might have been stabbed behind the desk and then staggered forward, hoping to make it to the door to cry for help.”

  Lenox nodded. “Yes, it’s possible. But it’s awkward to stab someone seated behind a wide desk like this, isn’t it—to get so close? And then, six or seven slashes with a knife—there would likely be blood sprayed straight on the desk, right away. But there isn’t any.”