A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Oates arrived at the great house not long after breakfast adjourned. “Have you that note?” he asked. “The one in Weston’s pocket?”

Lenox nodded. “Has it rung a bell?”

The constable, stoutly, said, “I don’t know that I was myself last night. Perhaps if I could see it again.”

“Yes, sit and have a think while I speak to Freddie.”

Lenox had expected his cousin to look exhausted, but perhaps the local certainty of his fragility had been overblown; he looked galvanized, ready to fight. “Shall we collar him today, Charles?”

“I hope we may.”

“How can I be useful?”

“You know of Carmody’s tale, about the two horses?”

“Yes.”

“I should have asked him for a more detailed description. Perhaps you could have someone do that, while Oates and I inspect the spot in the wood to which he referred. After that we shall call on Musgrave, but if you would spread the word about, to see if two riders have been spotted at any of the coaching inns — perhaps, for instance, the cart drivers who frequent these roads might have noticed them.”

“Very well.”

“On top of that I would like another canvas of the town green. Someone, besides Carmody, must have seen something, someone who had been in the pubs, perhaps. I can do it myself, but it will take time. Would the pub owners help us?”

“They will,” said Frederick.

Lenox rose. “Good.”

“The vandalisms — they must be linked to his death, mustn’t they?”

“I think so, yes. I think they were darker in nature than I suspected.” He nodded decisively. “Very well. We’ll reconvene here this evening.”

When Lenox went back to find Oates, the officer was sitting, brow knitted, the note loose and forgotten in the fingertips of one hand. “Anything?” said Lenox.

“No. And yet I feel so sure — the meaning seems so close.”

“Take your attention off of it,” said Lenox. “Sometimes that helps. Here, let’s go see Carmody’s clearing.”

Not quite half an hour later they stood there, a treeless ridge at the center of a dense wood. At some points the trees had been so close together it was hard to imagine horses passing between them, but there had certainly been horses here, and men, too. The ground was scuffed with hoofprints and kicked-up sod — it was damp still — and there was evidence of a makeshift fire. Perhaps the two murderers had grown cold, but would they have risked someone stumbling upon them?

There was one further remnant of their occupation of this site; Lenox, as he had at the town green, inspected the site minutely, but the only clue he found had been visible from the start, a brown glassale bottle, empty but with an alcoholic odor. A stiffening drink before they had met Weston, perhaps. The name on the bottle was Grimm’s — according to Oates a brewery that was popular throughout Somerset. No lead there.

Oates, the inspection complete, was ready to leave — it had started to drizzle — but Lenox stayed him. “Is this clearing well-known in Plumbley?” he asked.

“Fairly so. The children will play here from time to time, and Weston and I have rousted our share of vagrants and fruit pickers, itinerants, like, from it.”

“If I passed along this road and by this wood for the first time I would never have known it was here.”

“No.”

“And it’s some ten minutes’ walk in. Hardly an intuitive place to stop.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you not find that strange, that our out-of-town visitors knew of it?”

Oates shrugged. “There are plenty’ve folk who know this switch of the countryside by heart.”

“From outside Plumbley?”

“Perhaps.”

Lenox stood, thinking, for a moment. “I just wonder,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Let’s carry on.”

They were on foot, and it took them ten minutes to get back to the road and, from there, another fifteen to walk to Musgrave’s house.

This time the butler admitted them without demur to a handsomely furnished drawing room, long and rectangular. On one of the room’s long walls, painted directly onto the plaster, was a series of French paintings — not quite to Lenox’s taste, cherubim chasing each other through pale blue and pink landscapes. Between each painting in the sequence stood a plinth with a marble bust upon it. Opposite this long wall was a range of windowed doors, showing off a serene little stretch of garden.

Lenox took a spot on an ornately carved cherrywood sofa with blue cushions, and Oates balanced himself on the very front edge of a chair nearby. He seemed better today, his face calm again. Both men soon had cups of bone china placed before them. In ten minutes they held only the dregs of some excellent coffee; Captain Musgrave was making them wait.

It gave Lenox time to ponder the man’s character. What to make of a person who came to Plumbley and furnished a house this way — the butler, the coffee, the cherubim? When Dr. McGrath had lived here in Church Lane this had been a comfortable, unspectacular place. Now it looked like a Parisian drawing room. Was Musgrave a cruel epicure, particular in his tastes, unkind to his wife when she failed to meet them?

Most soldiers would not answer to such a description. There was also something that had left Lenox uneasy from the start. If Musgrave were truly the type to act such a tyrant, if his exertion of will over his modestly born wife was so total — even to the point that the village suspected him of some violence against her — why would he ever have acceded to move to the place of her birth? A place to which he had no connection himself?

Finally they saw him approach the French doors from the garden, a great bounding dark bloodhound at his side. Oates and Lenox both stood.

“How do you do?” Musgrave said. “Please excuse me for keeping you.”

“Not at all,” said Lenox, bowing slightly at the waist, hands behind his back.

“You are Charles Lenox, I presume?”

“Yes.”

Musgrave extended a hand. “Captain Josiah Musgrave.”

He was a very pale, red-cheeked, slender man, with black hair and dark eyes. No doubt he was considered handsome, though a critical eye might have quarreled with the set of his jaw, thrust slightly too angrily forward.

He had yet to acknowledge Oates, who was standing in front of his chair. Lenox, making a rapid judgment of Musgrave’s character, decided on an appeal to class. “You see now, Captain Musgrave, that I may summon the law enforcement if you wish me to do so. But perhaps it would be better to speak as two gentlemen.”

Musgrave inclined his head. “Just so.”

“Oates, my uncle is at Mr. Carmody’s house. Perhaps you might go there and aid him?”

Oates, to his credit, shot Lenox a look of canny comprehension, and nodded his way out of the room.

“Would you like more coffee?” Musgrave asked.

Best to preserve the tone of a social call. Lenox assented.

He would have to tread carefully. There were men in Scotland Yard now trying to raise this art of detection to a science, and much of their concentration had been devoted to the art of interrogation. Lenox admired and respected their efforts — in fact wished that he might donate some of his own time to such studies — but he had also found that too rigid and systemic an approach to this sort of interview could be counterproductive, hindering rather than helping the interviewer.

For instance: The wisdom of these men at Scotland Yard dictated that the first step in such an interview was to begin by attempting to shock one’s interlocutor into confession. So that Lenox should, by rights, have said to Musgrave without preamble, “Why did you murder Weston last night?”

He suspected that this might not work with Musgrave, who seemed self-protective and perhaps slightly brittle in his temperament, liable to suspect effrontery even where none was intended. Lenox had a great many questions, and he didn’t want to scare Musgrave’s coolness away.

He began, therefore, by saying, “You have heard of the murder two evenings past?”

“Yes, a terrible thing.”

“It is pro forma, but I must ask you some questions.”

“Why me?”

“You were seen walking upon the town green an hour or so before the murder.”

“Surely you cannot suspect me? An officer in the military?”

“No,” said Lenox, and then, making his voice confidential, “we believe we may apprehend the criminal sooner than we had dared hope, in fact.”

“Ah. Good.”

It was difficult to tell what emotion passed through Musgrave’s face now, if any. His black dog, which had been sitting upright, slumped into a curled shag at his feet.