Home by Nightfall (9 page)

Still, Lenox had always felt with pride that it was one of the prettiest of country houses, a small jewel of its kind, the pond serene and fringed in each season with different lovely green shoots and flowers, primroses or cowslips or cyclamen. Being back now—the ride that morning, and indeed seeing Houghton, whom he associated so strongly with the country—gave him a wistful, loving, affectionate feeling for the place. He was very fortunate to have grown up here. He was conscious that in Edmund's absence, just for this moment, he must play its host. It was a duty that birth, to his great fortune and occasional sadness, had precluded him from ever truly performing. He could do it momentarily now. He rang the bell for hot coffee, gestured for his brother-in-law to sit down, and asked what the chess problem had been that morning, and whether the skies looked likely to clear.

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Hello, Sir Edmund!”

This was the bright greeting of Mrs. Appleby, the postmistress for Markethouse, later that day. “Hello, Mrs. Appleby,” Edmund said.

“Ah, and Mr. Charles Lenox. I thought I saw a letter addressed to you last evening. Only here for a short visit, I take it?”

“No, I'm—” Lenox stopped himself. “Yes, in fact! Only a short visit. How did you guess?”

“Oh, London rarely spits 'em back out.”

She was a stout, rosy-cheeked, white-haired woman, who worked from a windowsill in her house with a small ledge in front of it. There she gathered parcels, letters, and, most importantly, behind the counter, telegrams. There were only two telegraphs in the village.

It was nearly noon; Edmund had taken a longer walk than he anticipated. “We're helping Mr. Hadley, of Potbelly Lane, with a small private matter,” Lenox said. “I understand from him that you two have an arrangement about telegrams.”

“Certainly we do. Always shut the window and bring 'um to him straightaway. Him and the doctor. I s'pose I would do the same for you, Sir Edmund, if the Prime Minister was to write.”

“No fear of that,” said Edmund.

“You brought Mr. Hadley a telegram from Chichester last Thursday?” said Lenox. “A week ago?”

“I did. Only it wasn't from Chichester.”

“Excuse me?”

Mrs. Appleby looked at him as if he were slow-witted. “It wasn't from Chichester.”

“Where was it from?”

“Massingstone.”

That was a village four miles north of them. “That's the opposite direction of Chichester,” Edmund said.

“So 'tis!”

“How many people work at the post office in Massingstone?”

“Four,” said Mrs. Appleby.

“They deal with more telegrams than you, then?” said Lenox.

“Oh, many more, dozens more a day.”

Another mystery.

Charles and Edmund put a few more questions to Mrs. Appleby—she hadn't kept a copy of the telegram but would swear that it came in from Massingstone, she could see the initials before her eyes even now; no, the figure of the little girl in chalk they showed her didn't mean anything to her, though she couldn't rightly say that she liked the look of it—and then left her window with thanks.

“Very curious,” said Edmund.

They were walking across the square. “Mm.”

“I'm beginning to believe that Mr. Hadley is in danger.”

“Something rotten is going on, all right,” said Lenox, studying the ground as he walked with a knit brow. He looked up at Edmund. “But if you wanted to harm a fellow, would you clear him out to Chichester? No, it's something in the house, I think.”

“The bottle of alcohol?”

Lenox shook his head. “Would it surprise you at all if this pale-faced man or woman had swiped the sherry to steady their nerves? And kept the bottle, not guessing it would be missed so quickly?”

“That's plausible.”

“No, it's not the sherry that concerns me. For my part, I keep returning to the gemstones.”

They were going to see Constable Edward Clavering. “Here we are—turn here,” said Edmund.

Clavering was Markethouse's sole police officer, although in times of trouble he could enlist the help of several volunteers, and there was also a night watchman who walked the streets and had the power of arrest in exceptional circumstances. Lenox wanted to talk to him, too—and as luck would have it he was with Clavering, a beanpole named Bunce.

Lenox had only a passing impression of Clavering, who was a tall, bristle-mustached, thick-faced, stupid-looking fellow, standing at attention now outside of the sole jail cell in Markethouse. He took off his hat immediately upon seeing them, deference to the local squire's presence.

“How do you do, Sredmund?” he said.

“Very well, Clavering, very well—and you?”

Clavering frowned. “
Not
well, I don't mind telling you, sir, since you're back in town, and glad we are to have you.
Not
well.”

“No?” said Edmund, concerned.

“May I ask who this gentleman is?” asked Clavering, nodding to Lenox.

“This is my brother, Constable. His name is Charles Lenox. He's a consulting detective in London, though at the moment he's working on behalf of Mr. Arthur Hadley.”

Lenox nodded. “How do you do?”

“A detective!” said Bunce wonderingly.

“Is Mr. Arthur Hadley having a trouble now, too?” said Clavering. He brushed his hand across his forehead, looking overwhelmed. “Add him on the list, then, for he ain't the only one.”

“Why, what's been happening?” asked Edmund.

“All sorts,” said Clavering. “All sorts. Day on day. And starting at the market, worst luck yet.”

Charles and Edmund nodded somberly. The market was essential to life at Markethouse—what had given the town its name, of course, many centuries before, and what kept it prosperous now. The market occurred every Saturday, fifty-two times a year, without fail, whether England was at war or peace, without regard for who had left or entered the world, as regular as sunrise. It was the closest market for the citizenry of eight villages and their environs, and drew sellers from farther away still. You could buy anything there: a bag of walnuts, a Spanish guitar, a herd of cattle, a tin pot, a painted cabinet, a glass of stout.

It ran on Saturday because that was the day when employers paid wages, and many of the attendees of the market shopped for the week. For that reason it stayed open well into Sunday morning, hundreds of stalls humming through the night. Markethouse's church had always had erratic attendance.

“What happened at the market?” asked Edmund.

“And what's been happening generally?” Lenox put in.

“Theft,” said Clavering pointedly, shaking his head.

“Theft,” Lenox repeated.

Bunce nodded, and Clavering removed a small notebook from his breast pocket. “Which it is this, sir, in the last ten days, the following have gone missing: two chickens, from a house in Cow Cross Lane; four shillings in change, from three various market stalls; a half wheelbarrow of carrots, also from the market—a half wheelbarrow!; a springer spaniel, name of Sandy, belonging to a farmer who had stopped to wet his whistle at the Bell and Horns; several blankets and a cloak, from the church basement; a box of candles, from Mr. Woodward's stall at the market; and just this morning another chicken from a yard in Victoria Street.”

“My goodness,” said Edmund, and the concern on his face was real.

“The dog may have run off,” Clavering added, “but the owner thinks not. It were a very obedient dog.”

“Is this an abnormal amount of crime?” asked Lenox.

Clavering's small eyes widened slightly. According to Edmund, he was a conscientious but not dazzlingly gifted officer of the law. Then again, the chief qualification for the job he held was to stand under the hot sun in a thick uniform without looking uncomfortable each year during the school prize-giving, and evidently he was an eminent hand at that.

“Is it an abnormal amount of crime? Well, put it this way: It's as much as we had in the whole entire preceding year all together,” he told Lenox.

“Are there not often thefts at the market? That surprises me.”

Edmund interjected here. “Never. The vendors of long standing have a strong interest in self-policing. No forgiveness. Permanent expulsion, fines and jail if they can manage it. They'd use the gallows if we let them.”

Clavering nodded. “And as for chickens, they roam more or less free in Markethouse, and nobody dreams of stealing them.”

Bunce agreed. “Can't recall the last time a chicken went missing.”

Lenox felt an idea percolating in the back of his mind. “The blankets and the cloak in the church, whose were they?” he asked.

“The blankets belong to the church. Itinerants occasionally sleep on the porch there in winter, though we encourage 'um on their way with a hot meal and a penny or two. The cloak belonged to the pastor himself, Reverend Perse.”

“Very interesting indeed,” said Lenox. “Have you observed anything else peculiar happening?”

Clavering shook his head. “No. That's enough for me, mind.”

“More specifically,” Edmund said, “we were wondering if either of you had observed anything in Potbelly Lane, last Wednesday or Thursday, perhaps, though really any day at all.”

Clavering shook his head again, but Bunce said, “I have.”

“Have you never!” said Clavering, turning to look at him indignantly. “And you didn't saw fit to tell me?”

“I forgot.”

“Forgot! Haven't I enough on right now, without secrets? My
goodness,
” said Clavering, with cutting disdain in these last two words.

“What did you see?” asked Lenox.

Bunce's answer shouldn't have surprised him, but it did. “There was a chalked drawing on a stoop there. Tolerably odd one, too.”

Lenox raised his eyebrows. “Was it this?” he asked, pulling from his pocket the drawing Root, the solicitor, had made.

“That was it,” said Bunce.

Clavering looked unhappy. “Now what?” he asked. “Was something else stolen?”

“A bottle of sherry,” said Edmund.

“Dear me, dear me,” said Clavering. He took out his notebook and wrote that down. “A bottle of sherry, too. From Mr. Hadley?”

“Yes,” said Lenox.

“Heavens.”

“Tell me, this is a small village—has anyone returned recently, or has there been any new face people are talking of?”

Clavering and Bunce looked at each other and smiled grimly, a passing moment of amusement in a serious day. “What?” asked Lenox.

“None except you, sir. You haven't been stealing chickens, have you now, Mr. Lenox?”

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Late that afternoon, the two brothers sat in the drawing room, Lenox on the sofa under old Sir Albion, Edmund in an armchair by a window, which was running with rivulets of rainwater. Each brother had a cup of tea, and each was reading. At the far end of the room a steady orange fire burned in the hearth, its susurrating crackle a homely, comfortable pleasure. Occasionally one would recite something out loud to the other—Lenox from a pile of cuttings that had arrived for him from Lady Jane about the disappearance of Muller, Edmund from the evening edition of the
Markethouse Gazette,
which Waller had brought in not long before.

“Nothing on the thefts in it?” asked Lenox. “Or on Hadley?”

Edmund shook his head. “The leading story is about the market tomorrow. Apparently it is ‘scheduled to run as per usual.'”

“Seems a bit thin for the top news story.”

“The whole newspaper is only four pages long,” Edmund pointed out.

“I don't know how they fill that many.”

Edmund, cutting the second and third pages with a penknife, smiled. “Well, then, tell me what's happening in London, where you can fill a newspaper just with stories of murdered musicians.”

Lenox shook his head. The cuttings were interesting but inconclusive. The newspapers, especially the
Telegraph,
blared the news of LeMaire's entry as a new assistant to Scotland Yard, all of them giving summaries of his experience and qualifications, as well as making prominent reference to his detective agency. Invaluable publicity.

In fairness to him, he had already, perhaps, chased down one lead: A cabman swore that on the night of Muller's disappearance he had taken a man in a dinner jacket, just such as Muller had been wearing during his performance, from the Cadogan Theater to Paddington Station. He recalled it clearly because the gentleman had been wearing no hat and no coat. Nor had he carried any luggage, which was odd for someone well dressed and on his way to Paddington.

It did sound like Muller—and Paddington Station had trains at that hour that could carry him all over the Isles, and from thence by boat to Europe, certainly. LeMaire's men were currently interviewing the employees at Paddington and felt confident of further success.

“And they are kind enough to inform us,” said Lenox, “in an irritating little boxed note, that LeMaire—well, I shall read it to you.
Monsieur LeMaire is no doubt familiar with the word ‘cabriolet,' which in the language of his native shores means ‘a little leap,' the precise sort of motion that a British carriage of one horse, or ‘cabriolet,' makes—and whence, as a result, the word ‘cab' has descended to us, in one of the many portmanteaux of our two nations. Perhaps this knowledge gave him the special insight needed to find the cabman who may have driven the German pianist to Paddington Station.”

“Ha!”

Lenox shook his head. “No doubt it was that—he was pondering the word ‘cabriolet' in his office for a few leisurely hours, and finally it inspired him.” Edmund snorted. “Daftest thing I've ever read.”

“I do wonder where he is, though. Muller, I mean, not LeMaire. Fancy, just disappearing like that.”