A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Dallington had still not returned by five that evening. According to Frederick, who presided over the cakes and the sandwiches — in addition to Lenox and Lady Jane an old and unmarried woman of the parish, Miss Wilson, was in attendance, as apparently she was each Thursday — that morning the duke’s son had asked the kitchens for roast beef on a roll, tucked it into his pocket without so much as the benefit of a napkin to wrap around it, and been off before seven.

When they heard a footstep in the hall, then, all of them looked expectantly toward the door for him.

It was Oates, however. Lenox and his cousin went out to greet the constable, who had taken off his helmet and stood, rather drenched, in the hall. “It’s Musgrave, sir,” he said. “Sirs.”

“What of him?” asked Freddie.

“He’s done a scarper.”

Lenox raised his eyebrows. “He’s left town?”

Oates, who again looked and spoke as if he had taken a few drinks in the King’s Arms that afternoon — not quite enough for full impairment, but hardly a professional quantity either — pulled a notepad from his pocket. “Reported by Mrs. Flora Criscombe, Musgrave and his household in three coaches, with equipage, headed on the road to London.”

Lenox turned to Frederick. “Does he often travel?”

“Oates?”

“Not since he moved into Church Lane, in my memory, and what it is, I reckon he’s done poor Weston and — and now — and knows we’re getting close to him,” said Oates, slurringly.

Lenox felt badly for the man; at the same time he wished for a more professional ally. “To so incriminate himself would be exceedingly stupid, and Musgrave did not strike me as a stupid gentleman.”

“No,” said Freddie. “Has his wife gone with him?”

“Only a footman was left behind,” said Oates. “He was covering the furniture when I knocked on the door.”

“Where did he say Musgrave had gone?”

“He didn’t know. He—”

“I say it would be foolish of Musgrave to leave,” Lenox interjected, his chin in his hand, arms folded, eyes cast down with concentration, “but if there is some devastating piece of evidence soon to arise it would, perhaps, be wise in him to go to the continent.”

“And he took poor Catherine Scales, too,” Frederick murmured. “I dread to think of the life he’s leading her.”

Lenox turned to a servant. “Fetch me my hat and coat, please, would you?”

“Charles?” Frederick asked.

“We must look over the house. If he left in haste perhaps there is some evidence to parse. Oates, will you come with me?”

“Of course.”

Frederick was looking rather askance at Lenox, who smiled, reading his thoughts. “We cannot stand upon much refinement in this business,” he said “Certainly Musgrave has not.”

They directed the carriage to Church Lane, and were there only a few minutes later — luckily the horses had been warmed already, from their evening exercise. The house was dim.

“Does the footman you met live in?” asked Lenox.

“I don’t know,” said Oates, and thumped the door with his nightstick. “That should rouse him if he does.”

There were no footsteps inside, and the doors were locked. Oates, tapping his nose, went to work on the lock with a small metal rod he took from his pocket, and soon had the door open.

“It’s an interesting brand of police work,” said Lenox, disconcerted.

“If he killed Weston it’s better than he deserves.”

They went inside. The rooms already looked as if they had been vacant for months, drop cloths on the furniture and over the paintings, that peculiar stillness of an unlit and uninhabited house. Each man took a candlestick and lit a candle, and they started their way into the place.

The lower floor revealed nothing to them, despite an extended survey of it, and finally Lenox, with a mixture of compunction and determination, suggested they seek out the sleeping quarters. They went upstairs.

These rooms, too, were disappointing. One of them quite evidently belonged to Mrs. Musgrave — its wardrobe full of women’s clothes, its dresser scattered with bottles of scent and old scraps of ribbon — but whatever evidence it might have offered of her daily life beyond these objects had already been scrubbed away.

It was Oates, to his credit, who remembered that they ought to look in the basement. They went down the narrow staircase with careful steps, Lenox for his part made slightly uneasy by the dark, the close walls.

“How many servants did Musgrave have?” he asked, in part to break up the eerie silence.

“At least four,” said Oates. He seemed more sober now. “Here are their bedrooms. Shall we look in them?”

“Yes, certainly.”

The servants’ bedrooms were to the left of the stairwell, down a thin hallway, while the enormous kitchen, dominated by a vast oven, was off to the right. They turned left, tipping their own candles to spark the candles in sconces along the walls, providing further light.

These rooms, too, were cleansed of any sign of their former occupants, though Lenox and Oates inspected them all carefully, ultimately finding a few small pictures, a child’s toy, and a great deal of bed linen. It wasn’t much help.

“The kitchen,” said Lenox.

The pantry was still full — and here, at last, he found something. Oates was sifting through stacks of plates on the other side of the room, and Lenox called him back.

“This was next to the tea chest,” he said.

“What is it?”

Lenox held up a small cloth bag. Written on a tag, hanging from its drawstring, was Mrs. Musgrave’s sugar, one teaspoon to be included with her morning pot of tea.

“Her sugar?” asked Oates.

“Yet here is a fat jar of sugar, as you can see,” said Lenox, gesturing toward the open cupboard.

They both stared at the bag for a moment, indecisively, until Oates, too quickly for Lenox to object, dipped a finger in and tasted the bag’s contents.

“Not sugar,” he said shortly. There was a pitcher of water standing nearby, and he swirled his mouth and spat into the sink. “Bitter.”

Lenox nodded. He drew the bag’s string tight and put it in his jacket pocket. “We shall have to see what it is, then. Dr. Eastwood might help us. Certainly my friend McConnell could. In fact I may send a little of the powder to each of them.”

“I hope Cat’s life isn’t in danger,” said Oates. “Such a pretty girl, she was.”

Energized by their discovery, Lenox and Oates continued to look as closely through the kitchen and the rooms around it — the servants’ dining room, the washing room — as they had upstairs. It must have been ninety minutes they had been here now, perhaps longer. They traced each other’s footsteps to double their work.

Nothing new came up, however, for all their looking.

“Shall we leave, then?” asked Oates.

Lenox looked around. “Have we looked everywhere?”

Oates pointed at a bucket of slop underneath the sink, old carrot peelings and the like, and said, smiling wearily, “Not in there.”

Lenox sighed. “Perhaps we should, just to be thorough. It’s as good a hiding place as any. Will you start on it? Don’t worry, I’ll do the other bucket in a moment.”

“I suppose,” he said. “This stuff’s only fit to give to pigs anyhow.”

As Oates dug into the slop, Lenox closed the cabinets he had opened, then began to extinguish the candles in the hallway.

He heard a yelp from behind him. Oates. He ran back toward the kitchen.

“What is it?” Lenox asked him.

Oates was standing over the bucket of compost, his hands filthy; in one of them he was holding something. It was too dim, with the candles gone, to tell what.

Oates had inspected it over his own flame. His eyes were wide. “It’s a knife,” he reported. “I nicked myself. And I think where there’s older blood on it, too, sir.”