Home by Nightfall (10 page)

“It's got me foxed,” admitted Lenox.

“What would be your best guess? If you
had
to guess, without hedging, I mean?”

That had been Edmund's favorite method of inquisition for his younger brother since childhood (
If you
had
to give up either toffees or licorice forever, which would it be?
), and Lenox smiled.

He glanced down at the other cuttings. There were vanishing, evanescent little fragments of information in them: that Muller had asked for a second sandwich wrapped in a napkin just before he played the concert, for instance, indicating that he might have been planning to travel (though of course he could have just been hungry); that he had quarreled with his manager before the first recital in London. An enterprising young journalist had traveled to Dover and reported that at least one gentleman answering to Muller's description and, crucially, traveling without luggage, had been on the evening packet to Lille the night of his disappearance.

Still, none of that answered the basic question: Where had the German gone directly after he finished playing?

A thought occurred to Lenox. “I suppose if I had to guess,” he said, “I would hazard that it's all for publicity. Muller's sitting right now in a room in the house of the owner of the Cadogan Theater, reading penny novelettes, eating cakes, and waiting. The owner of the theater is rubbing his hands together gleefully, planning how to spend all of the money he'll rake in next week when Muller makes his triumphant return from the dead.”

Edmund thought about that for a moment. “Interesting. Yes—what price wouldn't people pay to see him after such an absence?”

“There you have it.”

Edmund lifted his paper again to cut it and said, “I can tell you that I would pay a pretty steep price to meet whoever left that chalk drawing on Hadley's stoop.”

“Mm.”

After speaking with Clavering earlier that day, they had walked through the rain to Hadley's house. Mrs. Watson had answered the door, greeting them in a low tone. “He's not well, Mr. Hadley. His nerves.”

“Is he in bed?” asked Lenox.

“In his sitting room—but wearing his slippers.”

She'd said this as if it meant he were next door to death. In fact, Hadley had indeed seemed somewhat broken down, and when Lenox asked after his state of mind, he confessed that he had barely slept.

“I keep seeing that face in the window,” he said. “I know that somebody has been in the house. That's the problem. I have half a mind to check in at the Bell and Horns and stay there until this is all over.”

Edmund and Lenox had nodded sympathetically and asked a few questions. Was Mr. Hadley aware of the other thefts in the village? Did he have anything at all to do with the market? The answer was no in both cases. They went over what he remembered more slowly then, though nothing useful came of it, except, perhaps, that Hadley was more inclined to think that it had been a woman's face that he'd seen in the window than a man's.

“Do you remember the person's hair?” Lenox had asked.

Hadley had shaken his head. “Nothing so distinct, Mr. Lenox. It's only a feeling, you understand. I would never swear to it.”

At last they had come, gradually, to the subject of Mr. Hadley's gemstones. Charles had suggested that Edmund be the one to bring it up, and he had—a surprisingly capable assistant. “You're certain the sherry was the only thing that was missing when you returned from Chichester last Thursday?” he had said.

“Yes, quite sure.”

Edmund had nodded. “Good, good. I only asked because I know you mentioned your collection of gemstones. I am pleased to hear that it is intact.”

For an instant of an instant, Lenox thought he saw something flare in Hadley's eyes—something possessive, something angry—but when he looked again, it was gone, as surely as if it had never been there. “They are all as they were,” Hadley said, “though it is not such an astonishing collection as all that, only a hobby.”

“Are they under lock and key?” Edmund asked.

“They are now, though the cabinet is not very—not a citadel, if you take my meaning, not impenetrable. Fortunately, I don't advertise their presence, so it would take a thief some time to discover them.”

“I might suggest removing them to a bank,” said Lenox.

Hadley nodded. “Yes, perhaps.”

But it was plain he was only being polite. “What is the collection, precisely?”

“They are rough gemstones—uncut, unpolished—some very valuable, some, many of my favorites, in fact, entirely forgettable, at least from a monetary point of view. Such stones have been my passion since I wandered over the cliffs with a chisel as a boy, Mr. Lenox. I am fortunate enough to have attained some expertise upon the subject. Indeed, I have published articles in several small journals, and been in communication with leading scientists in London.”

Hadley's ardor wasn't at all uncommon. Theirs was an age of fanatical amateur geologists, who roamed the countryside in clubs, covering twenty and thirty miles in a day with ease. (Prince Albert himself, Queen Victoria's late husband, had been one of these men.) Many of them, recently, had taken to visiting the quarries near Oxford, where they were uncovering most remarkable fossils, unknown to science, with elements common both to birds and lizards; the eminent naturalist Richard Owen, an acquaintance of Lenox's, whom many of these amateurs revered, and to whom they took any bones that they struggled to identify, had given these ancient animals the collective name
Dinosauria.
The press—abjuring Latin—called these strange beasts “dinosaurs.”

Gemstone collectors were a subset of this cultishly zealous group. If Hadley was a known figure in that particular field, he might well have attracted the wrong sort of attention.

Lenox nodded, understandingly. “That's excellent,” he said. “But I would consider removing them to a bank, as I said, or failing that precaution I would at least consider buying a safe. I am far from persuaded that the crimes of which you have been a victim are at their end.”

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The next day was Saturday: market day, which might as well have counted as two days of the week here. In the morning, Lenox rode again, his muscles loosening slowly as he went, for he was sore as the devil from the previous two mornings' rides. It was gray and wet still, though bracingly open. He wished Jane and Sophia were here to take the air. He might miss any number of things about London—his office, his friends, his clubs, the noise, the light—but he didn't miss the soupy fog that rolled through the streets this time of year, troubling every pair of lungs in the street.

When he returned to Lenox House, Edmund was again gone, though it was scarcely eight o'clock. “Where is he now?” Lenox asked Waller.

“Out upon a walk as he was yesterday morning, sir. He gave me to understand that he does not expect to return for a period of one to two hours.”

Lenox was vexed; he wanted to get to the market early, before it grew too busy, and interview the stall-holders who had been the victims of the thefts Clavering had described. After lingering over breakfast, checking the window every other minute for Edmund's return, he decided he would go on his own. He asked Waller to tell his brother to meet him in town.

To save time, he borrowed an old dray horse from the stables, Matilda, a gentle, lolloping beast, fifteen years old and still just about faster than a man on foot. She carried him to the square, nuzzled him when he patted her mane, and gracefully accepted an apple from his pocket. He found a boy in the square—a local, who spent market day hanging around the central square to do odd jobs—and gave him a penny to take her back to Lenox House.

“Don't hire her out to your friends for rides on the way, either, or I shall hear about it,” said Lenox. “There's another halfpenny if you find me within the hour with the news that she is home.”

With that finished, he stood at the top of the square, gazing down at the gentle slope. Dozens of stalls were crammed higgledy-piggledy into it, the noise and smell already impressive.

“Lo there, oysters?” called a fellow passing him, with a yoke around his neck and a tray hanging from it full of cracked oysters. A pepper box and a salt cellar hung from his belt.

“Later, perhaps, thank you,” said Lenox.

There were other wandering vendors of this type, selling ale in flagons, coffee in tin pots, apples, flowers, long braided strings of turnips and onions. A teenaged boy had rock sugar for a farthing. A bargain: As Lenox knew from his boyhood, with careful husbandry a medium-sized piece of rock sugar could be made to last through a full market day.

Then there were the stalls. Cockerels, more substantial varieties of fruit and vegetable, trout (from Edmund's and Houghton's waters, almost certainly), fat pheasants, white sugar in twisted brown wax paper. What an infinity of things to buy! Down the west lane were the patent medicine sellers—all fraudulent, McConnell had assured Lenox, and most of the medicines simply alcohol, though many in the lower classes all across England swore by their effects with sacral fervor—and down the east lane were stalls selling jewelry, muslin, bombazine, perfume, soapstone carvings, slippers, sponges, cloaks, squares of glass, penknives, anything you could imagine. Out in front of these stands, knife-cleaners and tin-menders sat on low stools, the tools of their trade close at hand. Down near the fountain, a barber was warming water over a small covered fire to give his shaves and cuts.

“Mr. Lenox?” said a voice.

Lenox turned. “Constable Clavering, how do you do?”

Clavering looked overrun of his capacities, but he nodded bravely. “Hoping for uneventful, sir,” he said. “Uneventful would be ideal.”

“I wonder—could you point me in the direction of the sellers who were stolen from, the last two weekends?”

They spent the next hour going from stall to stall, Clavering walking with the assurance of a man who knew precisely where every stray potato in this marketplace had fallen.

None of the vendors could explain the thefts. Lenox asked them to describe any customers who had stood out, but the crowd was too various and bustling to allow for such recollection—yes, there were regulars at each stall, and among the irregulars most of the faces at least were familiar. That still left two or three in every ten who were strangers, or whom the vendors had only seen once or twice.

The most audacious of the thefts had been the half wheelbarrow of carrots. “Gone,” the fellow who had missed them said to Lenox, his astonishment undiminished by time. “Gone! Simple as that. Talked to a customer for a moment or two, turned back to the barrow I'd been unloading, and it was gone.”

“You didn't see anyone lurking about?”

“There are always boys in and around the market. But we've never had a problem—always deal very severely with anyone caught stealing, several months in jail from the magistrate, 'cause we all know Markethouse needs the market, don't we?”

Clavering nodded emphatically at that.

It made Lenox think, this. The two sets of crimes were very different. On the one hand, there was the simple theft of necessities—food, blankets. On the other, there was the rather uncanny victimization of Arthur Hadley, including the telegram, the chalk drawing, and the sherry.

Were these crimes necessarily related? he wondered.

He spent the next half hour moving around the market. He saw a great many people he knew. There was Mrs. Nabors, who had been the housekeeper at Lenox House some years before, but had been fired when she'd been found selling the house's food from the back door; apparently she had continued in that business, for she had a stand full of meat pies and gave Lenox a very dirty look as he passed it. He saw Mad Calloway again, wandering with his herbs, simples, dandelion greens, mushrooms, and nettles, stopping occasionally to accept a coin for a bunch of them. And he spotted Mrs. Watson's older boy, in full health apparently, sprinting up an alleyway with a group of children around his age.

He found Edmund near the Bell and Horns at a little before eleven o'clock. He was with the mayor of Markethouse—a slender, staid-looking man whose name was, for some reason that had gone into the ground with his parents, Stevens Stevens. It was really the only notable thing about him.

“Hello, Mr. Stevens,” said Lenox.

“Hello, Mr. Lenox. Wet day, isn't it?”

“Clearing, I would have said.”

The mayor looked up doubtfully. Lenox had known him for forty years, since he was a swottish, pedantic boy at the village school, and more or less the same look of circumspection had been on his face the whole time. He had never in that time evinced any vivacity except a complete, joyful absorption in numbers. Markethouse—a market town, after all—liked that, and his rather stooped figure, permanently hunched forward from a lifetime of peering over his glasses at balance sheets, inspired a fond confidence. He'd run unopposed several times in a row now.

“I don't know—it could be more rain,” he said. “I find these Saturdays exhausting, though of course necessary, too. Louisa, could you run inside and fetch me a glass of sherry with an egg beat up in it, and a sandwich if they have it?”

The young secretary next to him, a girl of fifteen or sixteen with thick spectacles, clutching a stack of loose papers, said, “Roast beef or cheese?”

Stevens pondered this question as if a great deal hung upon it, hemming and hawing, were they the same price, they were, interesting, before deciding upon roast beef.

The glass of sherry Stevens had asked for reminded Lenox of Hadley, and he said to the mayor, “Do you know a man named Arthur Hadley? He lives in Potbelly Lane.”

Stevens shook his head. “Sir Edmund has just been asking me the same question. I do not. I fear that my work has kept me indoors much of the summer, when I ought to have been out, behaving sociably. In politics, as you gentlemen know, that common touch is vital.”