A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Six hours later Lenox stood on Plumbley’s town green. At his side was Oates, the police constable, who was much shaken.

“Are you sure you can carry on?” Lenox asked.

“I can,” said Oates.

“If you need to retire for a few hours—”

“No, no, nothing of the sort.”

“So he was lying upon this spot.”

“And a knife between his shoulder blades, as dirty and cowardly a way—” Oates stopped himself. “Yes, he was lying here, sir. The poor fellow.”

Lenox had returned by the first train. Unsure what to do with Dallington he had simply dragged the young man — coherent but wan — from bed, had two footmen place him by the window in the first-class car, and brought him along. He was lying in a bedroom at Everley now. Dr. Eastwood was busy with the more serious matter of an autopsy, but had promised to check in on the lad that evening. In the meanwhile Lenox and Frederick — his face a mask of calm, his emotions, when you spoke to him, deeply disturbed — had come to the center of town, where they had found the corpse upon the green. A shock of red hair was the first thing visible, in full view of St. Stephen’s church, of Fripp’s, of Wells’s, and of the rows of mild shops and houses that squared it off. Once he had brought Lenox to the scene of the crime, Frederick had left to go see the lad’s numerous family members in their homes.

The green was not large — you could walk from end to end in perhaps a minute and a half, and easily have a conversation across it at a quiet moment — and Lenox was persuaded somebody in the houses must have seen something.

He restated this opinion to the constable now.

“I sent word around with the women. Nobody has come forward,” said Oates. “And everybody loved the boy.”

“Yet after the crimes of the past few weeks I would have imagined many open eyes, open windows.”

“Nobody has come forward,” repeated Oates stubbornly. “And everybody loved the boy.”

The boy — his body found corkscrewed, knife in its back, his face, according to Oates, full of horror — was also one of the few people in town Lenox had known.

It had been Weston.

Lenox’s first thought when he heard this news, arriving in Plumbley, was of the constable’s rather winning description of his polling-day drunkenness. His second was of the victim’s extreme youth. Nineteen! He had barely lived. It grieved Lenox powerfully.

Of course he knew that in all likelihood one day longer in Plumbley would not have altered his understanding of the case, or prevented the violent assault upon Weston, and yet he resented Dallington for fetching him back to London at such a crucial moment.

A sort of voluntary commission of deputies had sprung up now, men from across the town. Wells and Fripp, as well as the pub owners, usually implacable enemies, were among them, a group of ten or twelve. They ringed the square, answering questions from their neighbors and protecting the site of the crime from trampling feet. Lenox wished they had left the body for him to examine in situ, but understood why Oates had felt that to be impossible.

In the back of his mind, like the nuisance of a bee buzzing against a window, an idea or a thought was trying to come through, something that bothered him. Something about Weston? About the vandalisms? It had been there all morning, a low hum of agitation. There was no use doing anything but waiting for it to come out on its own.

Methodically, he began to circle the site where the corpse had lain, very slowly. “Where did he live?” he asked, eyes still to the ground.

“In a pair of rooms behind the police station,” said Oates.

“Did he have any help?”

“A charwoman who came in mornings, fixed a few meals for him. She didn’t live in, obviously.”

“There’s no chance she would have been there at night?”

“I shouldn’t think so. We might easily ask her. She arrived to work this morning and found us all here, looking at his body. Half killed her, it did. She went straight home for a glass of malmsey.”

Lenox stopped and wrote this down in his notebook, then continued, eyeing the ground in his broadening circles. So far he had seen nothing, but there was light left and he was a patient man. “Did he ever go out so late in the evenings?”

A dozen witnesses had confirmed that they had passed across the town green at 11:00, when the King’s Arms closed, and there had been no body upon it then.

“I don’t know,” said Oates.

“But it wasn’t part of his duties to patrol the village?”

“No, sir.”

“Not even after the vandalisms?”

“No, sir. Perhaps it should have been.”

Wells, Fripp, Weston, the church doors. What connected them? He had reached the outer perimeter of the town green now, and he went back to the spot where the corpse had lain. He began his circles again. “Then he must have been called out,” said Lenox. “Have you looked in his rooms yet?”

“Not yet.”

“If we’re lucky there may be a message. If we’re luckier still it may be signed.” He made another note now. “I would also like to go through his effects.” He didn’t want to say the words, but there was always the chance, however out of character it might have seemed, that Weston had been the vandal. Drawings, paint, any of it might still be in his rooms.

“We can go directly after we finish here, if you like,” said Oates. “It isn’t a hundred yards.”

“And his family?”

“He was my second cousin, of course.”

“Other than you?”

“His mother is dead — which, thank God, if you don’t mind me — and his father has been dead many years. Half of the doors in Plumbley were open to him, of course, by way of cousinship or friendship.”

“Who was he close to?”

“The lads his age, of the Royal Oak, I suppose.”

Lenox made another note. He was circling back inward now, slowly beginning to despair of finding any clue here on the green. “And the man who found the body …”

Here was the most interesting fact of the case. Oates’s face, which Lenox glanced up to see, darkened. “Captain Musgrave, yes.”

“He is amenable to being interviewed, I suppose, this afternoon?”

“He had damned well better be.”

“Then perhaps we should go there directly. I can see nothing on the green itself of much interest. Unless—”

“Mr. Lenox?”

They were in the corner of the green closest to the church and the police station next door, meaning they were also close to Weston’s rooms. “Where is his doorway? Does he have one from the outside?”

Oates pointed to a small alcove behind an iron gate in the police building. “Just there.”

Lenox started to walk the line, examining the ground as minutely as he had examined the green. The deputies around this part of the green made way for him, men he didn’t recognize. “Was he found in shoes, or barefoot? In nightdress, or in a suit of clothes?”

“In shoes, and in a suit of clothes.”

“Suggestive.” His eyes were glued to the ground. “Had anyone seen him at the pubs?”

“No, and I know that he went to his rooms after we knocked off, at six or so. Said he was tired.”

“There you are!”

“Sir?”

Lenox was stooped over. Just by the iron gate was a small pile of cigar ends. Carefully he picked one up. “These are the cigars he smoked, as I recall — correct? Yes? He was in shoes and clothing, you say, at such an hour of the night. I think we may conclude that he was waiting for someone. For at least twenty minutes or so, judging by how much he smoked. On the other hand there are no cigar ends on the green. Either he stopped smoking or the meeting was short.”

Oates seemed to go pale. “If Weston was waiting to meet someone — does that mean he knew his murderer?”

Lenox nodded. “I fear so.”

“It may have been the vandal himself who asked him to meet,” said Oates.

“The thought had crossed my mind. Come, I want a look at his rooms now.”

“Yes, sir.”

Suddenly, with a spark of comprehension, he knew what it was that had been bothering him all day, that vexing near-thought that had thrummed in his brain. “Oates,” he said.

“Sir?”

“Something occurs to me. About Weston and the vandalisms.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The date today, do you know what it is?”

Oates’s face crunched with confusion, until it dawned on him what Lenox meant. “That Roman numeral, the bastards,” he said. “It’s the twenty-second, isn’t it?”