Home by Nightfall

by Charles Finch

  He looked younger—and Lenox realized, knowing Edmund as he did, that it wasn’t simply the news that James would return home. It was the letter itself. What did it mean to be left alone to take care of the children, when it was two of you who had brought them into the world together? It was a part of Edmund’s burden that Charles hadn’t quite considered; he had thought of the companionship that was gone, the love and care, but less of how solitary and grave Edmund’s responsibilities as a father had become.

  James would be all right. That was why he looked so relieved.

  “That will be a treat,” said Lenox.

  Edmund sighed and smiled wanly. “Yes. Only Teddy to tell, now. And who knows, James may be able to tell him with me. Teddy’s always looked up to his brother.”

  “I know it. So have I!”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Lenox hadn’t been joking, but he let it pass.

  The supper that evening was the nicest one they’d had yet. Atherton came, and afterward the five of them played cards in the convivial blaze of fire and candlelight, drinks and small biscuits on the table with the cards, the dogs sleeping on the thick rug, and Toto losing so steadily and spectacularly that she owed them a theoretical fortune by the end of the night.

  She declared that she hated Sussex.

  “You might as reasonably say that you hate this deck of cards,” said Edmund.

  “I do hate this deck of cards, that’s what you don’t know about me, Edmund Lenox.”

  “Shall I deal out one more hand?”

  “Oh, go on.”

  Lenox asked Atherton, who had been in Markethouse until just before supper, what he had heard about Calloway and Stevens.

  “Pickler told me confidentially that he’d heard Stevens had cloven feet—Dr. Stallings had found them upon examination. Part devil.”

  “Pickler the milkman?”

  “That seems implausible,” said Lady Jane.

  “Oh, the rumors are out of control. Nobody ever trusted him an inch, if you believe what they say now—but I swear I am astonished at it all, astonished. I freely admit that I saw Stevens every market day for the last twenty years, and I never had him down as anything except a human abacus. And I consider myself a pretty good judge of character, let me assure you.”

  Every farmer Lenox knew considered himself a uniquely penetrating judge of character, and most of them couldn’t tell a parson from a murderer. Atherton shook his head, and Lenox merely nodded sagely. “Yes, of course.”

  “Tell me, what did he do—exactly? There is every kind of gossip abroad.”

  Lenox glanced at Edmund. “I think we must keep it to ourselves. He’s gone now.”

  “But tell me this—he was bad? We aren’t ruining the name of a good fellow, are we now, for local sport?”

  “No,” said Edmund. “He was a second devil. His name ought to go straight through your thresher.”

  Atherton accepted this, sipping his whisky. “And Mad Calloway has been freed. People were lining up Clifton Street, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. There was smoke from his chimney. Then he came out at five and posted a letter. Mrs. Appleby was cordial to him when he did it, from what I hear.”

  Lenox and Edmund exchanged glances. If Calloway had written to his daughter, he had done foolishly. On the other hand, it might have been hard to resist. There was no doubt a great deal for him to say. Ten years!

  Toto put down a card. “The knave of diamonds. Can you beat that, Charles?”

  At a little past noon the next day, Toto and her daughter, along with Pointilleux, who had spent the last thirty hours dead asleep, took the train headed back for London, waving at them all on the platform from the window.

  After the train had gone out of sight, Edmund said, “How much longer do you plan to be here?”

  “We have nothing urgent to take us back to London,” said Lady Jane, taking Sophia by the hand and leading her down the few small steps. The carriage was waiting for them. Lenox knew that she had canceled, oh, twenty or thirty appointments to be here with Edmund. “How long will you be in the country?”

  “Another week. But you must go, really. I shall be fine.”

  “No, no,” said Lenox.

  “What about the missing pianist, though?”

  In truth, Lenox had thought about little else in the past day. That morning after breakfast he had lain out all of the papers from the previous week and read through them avidly, using Lady Jane’s nail scissors to cut out a dozen intriguing scraps of information he hadn’t seen.

  “Perhaps I might stop and wire Dallington on the way home, if you wouldn’t mind taking Jane and Sophia,” he said. “I can walk the rest of the way.”

  “It’s a cold day,” said Edmund.

  Indeed, the sky was a severe gray, the trees bending in the wind and scattering more and more of their leaves, which fluttered down to rest in their soft layers for the winter.

  “I have my cloak,” Lenox said. “Tell Waller to keep lunch warm, and I’ll be back in time to eat with you.”

  He walked into town with his collar turned up. Despite the cold, six or seven people were gathered near the little ledge at Mrs. Appleby’s house where the mail arrived and left; Markethouse had been in a breathless conversation for several days, and it didn’t look likely to stop anytime soon. Lenox went forward to the postmistress and asked if he could send a wire.

  “Certainly,” she said, “and you can take one. I was just about to send it to Lenox House, but it’s easier to give it to you now. In from London this morning.”

  “Thanks,” said Lenox, accepting the slip of paper.

  It was from Dallington.

  Polly and I closing in STOP haven’t slept days STOP hopeful of success STOP will send word to Queen’s Arms of whereabouts every few hours in case you are free to return STOP Dallington STOP

  Lenox felt his nerves tighten and hum. A solution. What could it be? He remembered his last communication with Dallington, when he had suggested that Muller might not be the victim of this crime—indeed, that he might have been the murderer of the woman they had found, either Margarethe Muller or, if the real Margarethe was indeed in Paris, per the reports they had received, her impostor.

  He thanked Mrs. Appleby distractedly—“Didn’t you need to send a wire?” she asked his retreating back—and tried to calculate how quickly he could be at the Queen’s Arms.

  Could he leave, though? There was Edmund.

  His brother quickly disposed of that question upon Charles’s return to Lenox House. He had Sophia dandled upon his knee, where she was studying with intense concentration his pocket watch, but he was able to muster his authoritative squire’s voice. “You must all three go. I’ve gotten far too little done since you came down.”

  “There was a murder,” Lady Jane pointed out.

  “Never mind. I’ll follow you to London in only five or six days. We’ll see each other then.”

  “Are you quite sure?”

  “Absolutely sure.”

  Lenox looked at Lady Jane. “Darling?” he said.

  “You take the soonest train. Sophia and I will follow you.”

  Lenox nodded. He wouldn’t have gone if his brother hadn’t received that letter from James, but he seemed just enough improved to desert. “Lend me a horse, Ed, and then I can get a train direct from Chichester at 2:12.”

  Edmund stood up, putting Sophia gently on the ground. “I’ll ride with you so I can bring the horse back.”

  “You’ll pack my things, Jane?”

  “Go!”

  Lenox nodded and bent down to kiss his daughter on the top of her head. “Thanks. On our way, Edmund. Hopefully we don’t lose the horses this time.”

  Lenox and his brother had spent their whole youth riding together, except for two appalling autumns when Edmund had been allowed to ride with the hunt and Charles had still been forced to ride with the children, hanging back as the adults thundered over the heather.

  Now, galloping across the co
untryside, he felt the years fall away—the cold sharp air stinging his skin, the tears forming involuntarily in his eyes and then streaming away in the wind, the happy blur of the fields they crossed toward the low spires of Chichester. Occasionally a slight turn of his head or a roll in the landscape would give him a glimpse of his brother’s serious face, and he would feel his heart fill with affection.

  They arrived at the train station with nine minutes to spare. Getting down from his horse, Edmund said, “Thank you for coming to visit, Charles. It was a nice time for it. Useful, too, as turned out.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Do you have anything to read on the train?”

  “Blast it, no.”

  Edmund nodded toward the stationmaster’s small hut. “He sells newspapers and scones, though I warn you they’re both about equally edible.”

  Lenox smiled. “See that Jane gets on the train safely, would you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And don’t stay down here too long.”

  Edmund sighed. “No—I need to be back in Parliament soon, at any rate. Good-bye, Charles, safe travels.”

  They shook hands, and Lenox turned toward the platform.

  A little over eighty minutes later, he was flying through the door at the Queen’s Arms. All he had noticed on his dash from Paddington was the smell—the rich, middlingly unpleasant, river-and-waste-and-horse scent of London, which one forgot after any time away, and also after any time back, which meant that it existed only on in-between days like this one.

  It was pungent.

  The Queen’s Arms was the pub across from their office on Chancery Lane. Behind the bar was the reliable taverner named Cross. “Had word not ten minutes ago,” he said before Lenox could speak. “Said to tell you, at the theater.”

  “At the theater,” Lenox repeated.

  “That’s all he said, sir.”

  “Thank you, Cross.” He put a coin on the bar. “Have your next on me.”

  “Thankee, Mr. Lenox.”

  The cab he had taken was waiting outside for him still. He stepped into it and gave his directions to the Cadogan, desperately curious what he would find.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  When they finally picked up Muller’s trail, it was nearly midnight.

  They were deep in the recesses of the famous Jermyn Street Baths: Dallington, Lenox, Pointilleux, their lanky friend Nicholson from Scotland Yard, Thurley, the manager from the theater, and a friendly waddling constable named Cartwright who had never made an arrest before. (Out of his hearing, Dallington had made some rather cruel guesses as to why that might be, mostly to do with Cartwright’s weight and almost supernatural stupidity—but he had been the closest constable to the entrance of the baths.) Poor Polly, though she had worked herself three-quarters to death on the case, had been barred admission from the inner rooms of the house, as a woman. Instead of going with them, she had taken up a post in the front hall and started writing out a list of journalists for her assistant, the hulking ex-seaman Anixter, to go and collect.

  When Lenox had arrived at the theater earlier that day, he had spotted Dallington, and the young lord—looking fresh, as he always did, whatever exertions he subjected himself to—came straight over.

  “There you are.”

  “You’re close?” said Lenox.

  “Yes, old Greville broke.”

  “The theater owner.”

  “He’s in a state. Did you know that was a wig, that tearing fine head of hair he had? Underneath it he’s only got a grizzled bare pate, I can tell you, and right now he’s weeping in the box at the Yard.”

  Lenox, whose own close-cropped brown hair was still blessedly full, but nevertheless thinner than it had been when he was on Dallington’s side of thirty, said only, “What did he tell you?”

  “You were right on two counts. First of all, that woman was Muller’s lover, not his sister. His sister really was in Paris, is in Paris, I suppose. Second, it all came down to the chandelier. Muller couldn’t have known about it—nor about the passage above his room.”

  “And?”

  “We told Greville he would hang for the murder if he didn’t come clean. That flustered him. I’m no admirer of Broadbridge, but he can certainly put the fear of Jehovah into a chap.

  “According to Greville, it all happened at intermission. Muller came offstage and told him, immediately, that he had a problem. Well—the problem was a dead woman.”

  “Poisoned, though?” Lenox asked.

  “Eh?” said Dallington.

  “Nothing, nothing. Go on.”

  “Greville has never sold more tickets at a higher price, and he made a quick calculation. It didn’t count on Muller running. He’s greedy. He told Muller about the chandelier and the passage. I suppose he thought that nobody would miss a German woman without a single friend in London, and that they might go on selling tickets together for another week at least, and deal with the problem then. Only Muller did a runner.”

  “And now you’re on Muller’s track?”

  “Actually we’ve come back here because we lost it,” said Dallington. “At this moment Polly is asking Greville where Muller could possibly be—what he knows in London. We already asked him, and we’ve chased down every place, without finding any fresh sign of him. We want to see if Greville can think of anywhere else Muller might be.”

  “Which places did Greville already give you?”

  “Muller’s hotel, the York, though of course that’s been torn into a billion pieces. Two restaurants, Thompson’s and Wilson’s. A pub called the Earl of Thomas, where he liked to have a glass of port alone before his concerts; Green Park, where he took his morning walks; and the music shops on Lillard Street.”

  “No sign of him at any of them.”

  “None. We asked pretty forcefully at the music shops in particular.”

  Lenox frowned. “No, he wouldn’t go there if he had any intelligence, which I think we can assume he has. It’s funny, though—Thompson’s and Wilson’s are in very different directions, and neither is close to the theater.”

  “So?”

  “Is there a bookshop nearby?”

  “Hatchards.”

  “Yes, of course, that’s right. Give me fifteen minutes to get there and back—don’t leave.”

  Hatchards, with its sober hunter green exterior and comfortable interior, was the best bookstore in the West End. A bookseller nodded at Lenox and asked if he could help.

  “Where is your travel section?”

  “At the rear of the store, sir. Let me show you.”

  The shop carried a shelf’s worth of guides to London in foreign languages, including three in German.

  The first of these was useless, but in the second, Lenox saw with a little thrill, two of the restaurants recommended with the highest number of stars, three, were Thompson’s and Wilson’s.

  He confirmed that the third guide didn’t have the same offerings, then bought the second one, which was by Karl Baedeker, and ran back to the theater with it, heart beating quickly.

  He found Polly and Dallington speaking to Nicholson and interrupted them. “Look here,” he said.

  “Oh, hello, Lenox, welcome back,” said Polly, tiredly but sunnily. “We’ve just heard that LeMaire is still at the York. Out of ideas.”

  “Oh, good. But look—Thompson’s and Wilson’s.” He stabbed at the page with his finger. “Every German I’ve ever met has traveled out of a guidebook.”

  Dallington’s eyes widened. “Yes!”

  Polly nodded slowly. “So what do we do?”

  “Muller knows a very small section of London. I think we can cover it all today.”

  And indeed, in the course of the afternoon and evening they had several tantalizing glimpses of him. No, he had never eaten at the Florence, as far as the manager of that restaurant could remember—but the highly touted tobacconist the next street over had had a German fellow answering to Muller’s description in the shop twice. Moreo
ver, he had bought the same kind of cigars that Thurley (enlisted as an aide) remembered Muller smoking.

  What had he been wearing? Where had he come from? The tobacconist couldn’t answer, but a little ways off, at Thompson’s again, Lenox pressed the manager there for every detail of Muller’s visits. Had he ordered dessert? Cheese? Coffee? The manager admitted that he hadn’t ordered coffee, which led him to recall for the first time that perhaps Mr. Muller had mentioned that he liked a refreshing walk before he took his postprandial coffee, when declining it at the restaurant.

  It was this that led them to Frank’s, the most heartily recommended coffeehouse in Baedeker’s book. It was owned by a German and carried the latest editions of the German newspapers, apparently.

  It was the proprietor here who inadvertently gave them the clue that sent them to the baths.

  “He would have been in later in the evening, probably,” Polly was saying, pressing him. “Around ten o’clock.”

  “Ah, there I lose you. I am generally at the Couch Street Baths after six o’clock.”

  “Couch Street? Is that where the Germans go?” Lenox asked.

  Mr. Frank, who spoke excellent English, said, “The working Germans, sir.”

  The working Germans. Muller, by contrast, was well-off. Lenox looked in Baedeker: There were two pages, there, dedicated to the wonders of the Jermyn Street Baths …

  And indeed, these were the most luxurious baths in London by a wide margin—not a place to Lenox’s taste, but many people swore by it, and after they had raced there and located the manager, he told them that yes, a small German man with a mustache and a receding hairline did come in. When? Generally very late—eleven, or twelve. Was that uncommonly late? Not at all. They didn’t close until four in the morning, of course, and only for an hour or two then.

  It would have taken a very dim person not to perceive that they were after the missing German pianist, and, having put two and two together, this manager grew extremely agitated and excited.

  “Is he here? Is he here?” he asked, a brilliantined forelock of hair falling down upon his forehead and quivering there as he repeated the question, and then offered vehemently his utmost assistance, whatever he could do at all, the reputation of the baths, gentlemen (“and Mrs.—ma’am,” he added, to Polly).