The September Society (28 page)

Now Lenox realized that Dallington was too far-gone with drink to pay him any notice.

“Perhaps another time,” he said. Nodding to Dallington’s friends, he rapidly turned and left the bar, then the hotel.

It was a bitter disappointment. He wasn’t exactly certain why. As he walked the short way home, however, he slowly realized how much this new attachment—friendship, even—had meant to him. A detective’s work was so isolated, and while Lenox had come to accommodate the isolation, had agreed to it as a condition of the work he loved, the lad had seemed to offer a kind of professional companionship he hadn’t known before. Even Jenkins, for instance, would grow gradually more conservative. He would begin to believe, if imperceptibly at first, that the Yard should be the sole authority over crime in London. The critical thing about Dallington was that in some significant way he was like Lenox. In his background. It had been gratifying to have an ally.

As he turned into Hampden Lane, Lenox decided to visit Lady Jane. With a dull thud of fear in his chest he realized that they might actually find themselves alone. When Kirk led him into the house a moment later, however, Lenox heard voices. When he came to the drawing room he stopped. It was the man he had seen at the door twice before, the tall, lean
one who had both times worn a long gray coat. Now he stood as Lenox came into the room.

Lady Jane looked flustered, and sounded it, too. “Charles, how are you?” she said. “I’m so glad you’ve come. Won’t you meet Michael Pierce? Mr. Pierce, this is Charles Lenox, my particular friend.”

“How do you do, Mr. Lenox?” said the man, striding forward with his hand outstretched.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Lenox said. “Have I come at an inconvenient time, Jane?”

“I was just leaving, in fact,” said Michael Pierce. “Good day, my Lady. Good day, Mr. Lenox. I’m pleased to have met you.”

Lenox’s mind was racing. He hadn’t heard the name before. They had been sitting next to each other, not across from each other, which meant they were more than simply formal friends.

What followed was the first strained conversation of Lenox and Jane’s long friendship. They weren’t curt, precisely, but neither of them could find exactly what to say. At last they alit on the subject of his case.

“It’s going well enough,” he said.

“When will it be over?”

“Tomorrow, perhaps.”

“That will be a relief.”

Stiffly, he said, “Yes, it will. How is Annie, if I may ask?”

“Very well. Recovered, in fact.”

“I found out something about the gun that did it.”

“Did you?”

“Circumstantially it’s linked to the September Society.”

“How awful.”

“Yes.” It was horribly impolite, but he couldn’t help himself from saying, in a strangled voice that sounded nothing like his own, “I hadn’t met Mr. Pierce before.”

“You wouldn’t have. He’s a friend of my brother’s from school, only recently arrived in town from the colonies in Africa. He knows very few people.”

Why did she still look so flustered?

“Oh, yes?”

Miserably, Lenox said, “Perhaps I ought to introduce him about.”

“Yes, perhaps.”

He stood. “Well, I had better go,” he said. “I’ll speak to you soon.”

As he walked down the long hallway, and out again into the street, he thought that he had never felt unhappier in all the years of his life.

D
abney was sitting in a chair at the far end of the library, reading. When Lenox came in he marked his place in the book and laid it to the side.

“Hullo,” he said. “Have you had a productive time out?”

Lenox again marveled at how Oxford had moderated his parents’ Midlands accent. “Productive enough,” he said. “We’ll know it all by tomorrow evening, or I’d be very much surprised. I’ve arranged to infiltrate a meeting of the Society.”

“Good,” said Dabney with a firm nod. “How can I help?”

“I’m afraid you can’t. I shall have to go alone.”

“I’ll come into the meeting with you.”

“It won’t be that easy.”

“Have you convinced the Society that you’re someone you’re not? Or are you going to hide and observe from within the room?”

“I’m going to hide and observe, as you say. It’s their annual meeting, the Society’s most important evening of the year.”

“Then I shall come and hide as well.”

“I’m afraid it would be far too precarious. You might easily hinder me.”

But Dabney was insistent. “See here, Mr. Lenox, you’ve been very kind to take me in, but I promised George that I would stick by him until his trouble was over, and though he’s died I mean to keep that promise.”

They wrangled for another moment over the question, and then Lenox relented. “If you must, then,” he said. “I meant to ask a second man anyway, but he was unavailable.”

“I’ll be happy to follow your lead—just as long as I’m involved.”

“Incidentally, perhaps you can help with something.” Lenox pulled his small notebook from his pocket and flipped back to an early page in it. “I believe Payson left behind clues about his departure in his room. I’d like to run them past you to see if they make sense.”

Dabney nodded amenably. “Fire away.”

“I think your friend realized that he had very little time to leave his room, somehow. Perhaps an hour, but not longer. And he decided to do something bold: to kill the cat you two shared.”

Dabney blanched. “Longshanks? Has Longshanks been killed?”

“Oh—yes. I’m sorry.”

The lad waved it off. “It’s no great loss in the end. Though I did love that cat.”

“I don’t think he died in vain, if it’s any consolation. I think George killed Longshanks because he needed a tangible, striking demonstration that he hadn’t simply disappeared to a party in London or gotten waylaid some other way. Hence its double death, if you will: first by drugging, then by stabbing. He needed to signal—to me, to the police—that something strange had happened. His mother, as you may know, is rather high-strung, and perhaps even I would have attended her anxiety with less patience if there hadn’t been this bizarre signpost. There’s also the fact that the September
Society’s seal has a wildcat on it. So Longshanks served multiple purposes. Killing him was really a brilliant, even necessary solution.”

Dabney nodded. “It sounds like George—he was fearfully clever. What was the poison that killed the cat?”

“Laudanum.”

Dabney nodded again. “George had insomnia from time to time, particularly when he had heavy work. He used laudanum to sleep. That makes perfect sense.”

Lenox’s confidence rose with this confirmation. “I think the key to the scene in his room was the line of ash he left by the window. The window was just at hand, and the line of ash was scattered, as if it had just been disrupted. As fanciful as it sounds, I think he had—”

“To check whether somebody had been in the room while he was gone! He mentioned that to me once or twice, thought it clever—from some book he read, that’s right.”

Two for two, excellent. Lenox said, “Perfect. Dead on. It was left to set the scene; an artificial clue. Nobody actually disrupted the ash. It was his way of telling us that the room had been staged, and at the same time indicating that the room had probably been trespassed in his absence—”

“Which was why he had to leave clues rather than simply a letter,” said Dabney.

“It was quick thinking. I have all the admiration in the world for the lad, I have to say. We know as well that he specifically sent down to the scout before he left, asking that his room remain undisturbed!”

“Did he?”

“What’s puzzling, though, is the line of ash by your campsite in Christ Church Meadow. Why would he have wanted to draw attention to it? Wouldn’t you have preferred us to think that it belonged to some tramp?”

“I remember him doing it—I smoke a pipe every so often,
you see, my country ways—and he said he ought to, just in case somebody smart enough to figure it out came along.”

“Did you ask what he meant?”

“No. I wish I had.”

“It’s even more peculiar because there was no indication that you were going to leave, was there, before he died?”

“No, we certainly meant to stay. George was playful, though. Who can say?” Both men thought silently for a moment. Then Dabney asked. “What’s the next clue?”

“There are a number of clues relating to his father, which further research has subsequently borne out. A September Society card with pink and black pen marks on the back, meant to indicate the Payson crest; and of course the note underneath the cat, which read ’12 Sflk 2,’ his father’s battalion, in a strange code called cross-tip.”

“Yes,” said Dabney. “It really does seem to hang together.”

“Which means that I already
know
what happened. I simply haven’t thought about it in the right way yet.”

“What else is there?”

“The walking stick and the walking shoes.”

“He loved that walking stick. It was his grandfather’s.”

“The shoes were muddied, as was the bottom of the stick. It was clear that he had just been on a long walk. But he left them both
in his armchair
. The stick, perhaps—but his shoes? I imagine he sat in that chair by the grate a good deal—”

“Yes,” Dabney agreed.

“So it seems to me that he was drawing attention to them. But why? I think they were a memento of his long walks out past Christ Church Meadow to meet Geoffrey Canterbury. I think he intended them to reveal that he had been acting out of the ordinary.”

“How do you mean?”

“One thing that everybody has said was that you’d be far more likely to find Payson in the pub than on a long walk.”

“True,” said Dabney with a fond laugh.

“So for the walking boots and the walking stick to have been so heavily used was out of the ordinary, and for him to put them on the armchair was doubly out of the ordinary. After all, why not just leave them by the door for the scout to clean?”

“But he met Canterbury—whoever that is—at the Jesus ball.”

Lenox shook his head. “Only the night before he disappeared. It must have been urgent. I think Canterbury must have warned him he had to leave, or at least agreed on a signal that he ought to leave. For their earlier meetings they would have gone outside the city of Oxford, I should guess. A place where they both would have felt invisible, perhaps in a neighboring town, some public place.”

After a gray morning it had become sunny and warm. During the lull in conversation Lenox looked out through the window and felt a sense of being closer than he had yet to the solution.

“Is that all of the clues?”

“No, there was one more.”

“What?”

“On the rug in his sitting room—the rug that had once been his father’s, bear in mind—was a small assembly of things. They were too far from the table by the window to have fallen there accidentally, I thought, and they were almost overly random. Too meticulous, like the line of cigar ash. I think they were another signal.”

“What sort of objects?”

“A tomato, a bit of string, and a fountain pen.”

Dabney scratched at the nape of his neck, where his hair was beginning to come in. “I remember that fountain pen.”

“All three of them were—”

Lenox froze.

“Were?”

“Red,” said Lenox softly, almost as if to himself. “Would you mind if I asked you a question?”

“Of course not.”

“If you’re not bill dabney, who are you?”

T
here was a long, long pause.

Lenox was ambivalent about using guns in his work as a detective—although he loved to hunt—but now his mind kept drifting toward the small pistol in his desk drawer. This stranger was sitting between Lenox and the desk, but he still thought of making a run there. He had a notion of who this fake Dabney actually was, but at the moment he didn’t feel especially confident about his notions. It had taken him long enough to figure out that Dabney was an impostor.

At last the young man said, more curiously than angrily, “How did you know?”

“It was a few things.”

In fact it was three things, each of which had been slightly puzzling: the hair, the ash, and the voice.

“Do you know who I am, then?”

“A friend, I hope.”

“I certainly mean no harm.”

Lenox took a deep, measured breath. He felt the control of the situation was in his hands again, for some reason.

“Are you George Payson?” he asked.

“I am,” said the dead man. He held out his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Lenox.”

“Dabney, then? Dead?”

“Yes, Bill’s dead.” Payson’s face remained impassive as he said this. Or perhaps it was a mask of impassivity. There seemed to be a kind of hysteria lurking behind it.

“Did you kill him?”

There was a long, almost frightening silence. Then Payson buried his head in his hands and started sobbing. It was then that Lenox knew he was safe.

“I did in a way. I might as well have,” he said, choking back a sob. Looking up, he asked, “What gave me away?”

It had been the voice, in the end. What Lenox had at first mistaken for an Oxford polish in the lad’s accent had in fact been the tones of a cosmopolitan and aristocratic young man. Then there was the puzzling nature of the second line of ash. As they had been discussing it, Lenox had noticed for the first time how genuinely out of key it was. Why would Payson have made the line of ash in the meadow
before
Dabney died, when he fully expected to stay there? The only solution was that he had left it as a clue
after
he had first realized the seriousness of his position—that is, after Dabney’s death.

Then there was the hair. Shorn from the entire body, McConnell had said. Why?
Because George Payson’s hair was red
. It was too easily identifiable. And then, the decomposition of the body had made reliance upon the corpse’s clothing and accessories for identification necessary …

Lenox explained this. Then he said, “You must have shaved Dabney’s head and body after he died. That’s when you would have seen that you were the real target, and that if you died the heat would subside a little bit.”