A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER TWO

The light rain of the afternoon had thickened into a torrent by the evening. It emptied the streets of London, and even up close the streetlamps, paced fifty feet apart along the pavement, were no more than shrouded yellow smudges against the darkness, while the buildings of Pall Mall loomed above like great, lightless cliffs. As for the driver of Lenox’s carriage, he and his horses alike were soaked to the bone — though upon closer inspection one could in the dimness around the driver’s face perceive a small dot of orange, growing faint and then brightening every so often: his inextinguishable cigar.

He didn’t remove it to call down. “Here we are, sir.”

“Thank you kindly,” Lenox answered and climbed out of the carriage.

It was a short, wet walk into his destination, Brooks’s, one of the gentlemen’s clubs along Pall Mall. Lenox was not a member here, preferring the less erratic and more civilized air of the Athenaeum or the Reform nearby. Certainly the average member of Brooks’s was quite highly born — royalty were upon its rolls — but they were also almost uniformly wild men, who gambled at cards for days and nights on ends, jousted with cues across the snooker table, and placed with each other the oddest sorts of bets in the infamous club book. This lay open on a marble plinth in the warm, comfortably carpeted entry hall where Lenox stood now; the entry that caught his eye read:

“Oh, dear,” said Lenox to himself.

“There you are!”

Lenox turned and saw his companion for the evening, Lord John Dallington, coming down the club’s grand staircase. He was a handsome, compact man of perhaps twenty-seven or twenty-eight, wearing a black velvet blazer with a carnation affixed to its buttonhole.

“Hello, John,” Lenox said.

“Have you been peeking into the club book?”

“No — or rather—”

“Good. There’s a bet I have with Ollie Pendleton which I don’t think you ought to know about — all on the up and up, I swear. It’s to do with stealing a certain horse from a certain stable. Damned impudence to call a lock unbreakable — sheer hubris — but never mind, it’s neither here nor there. Come along, let’s go up, I’ve reserved us the small room by the library. The wine is open.”

Lenox smiled. “Cork it again, then — I have too much work to feel mutton-headed in the morning, these days. Not to mention a daughter.”

“How is she, then? Happy, healthy? And Lady Jane?”

“They’re flourishing, thank you.”

“I’m glad you’ve been able to get away, nevertheless. I’ve got a tricky one this week.”

Lenox felt a quickening of anticipation. “Oh?”

“It’s a poisoning in Belsize Park.”

“Have I read about it?”

Dallington, climbing a step ahead of him, shook his head. “It hasn’t made the papers yet, because the chap who was poisoned is hanging on to life like a limpet. He’s comatose, unfortunately, which means he’s roughly as communicative as one too, ha, ha.”

Lenox and Dallington sat down to supper once a week when both were in town, always at Brooks’s. It was a strange and unexpected relationship. For many years Lenox had heard of the younger man only distantly, the disappointing youngest son of one of Lady Jane’s closest friends. Dallington had been sent down from Cambridge under a cloud of angry rumor, and after that had proceeded to investigate every alehouse, gambling pit, and gin parlor in London, usually with a string of unnameable women and several debased aristocratic companions. By the time Lenox first really got to know him, Dallington’s reputation had been hopelessly blackened.

Yet now Dallington was probably the premier private investigator in London. Lenox himself had occupied that position for many years, before the whole business of Parliament took his attention away from crime, and during the time when it was still his primary pursuit Dallington had come and asked to be his protégé. Lenox had been deeply suspicious at first, but within a matter of months the young man — neither as pure at heart as Lenox would have wished, nor the wastrel his reputation would have had one believe — had saved his mentor’s life and helped to solve the detective’s thorniest case in years.

These days they were firm allies, and while Dallington still came to Brooks’s, he was a tamer creature, given over more and more to detection. Like Lenox he felt a passion for it; in fact Lenox envied him. While he saw Parliament as a duty — or in fact more than that, a complex of duties, ambitions, and vanities — detection had always been his truest vocation. Now these suppers, at which they discussed Dallington’s cases, held for him his favorite relaxation of the week.

They came into a small room, papered dark blue, full of portraits of old members — many now snoozing in the House of Lords, solid ancient Tories, no longer the fire-breathing rascals of their youth — and sat at table, which was laid out for supper.

Dallington rang a small bell. “Are you sure you won’t have a glass of wine?”

“One, perhaps.”

“That’s more like it — just one, there, no, not to the top, apologies. Ah, and here’s the waiter. What would you like to eat, Lenox, guinea fowl or beef?”

“Guinea fowl.”

“For two, then, and bring all those things you bring, too, please, potatoes and carrots and mustard, if you don’t mind.” The waiter, who was terrible at his job but too stupid to blackmail any of the men he served, and received therefore a princely remuneration, smiled, nodded, and left.

“A poisoning?” said Lenox, too curious for preliminary chatter.

Dallington retrieved a small notebook from his jacket. “I’m glad you’re here, in truth, because I have my suspicions but I can’t confirm them.”

“Tell me the details.”

“The victim is a solicitor in Belsize Park, Arthur Waugh. He—”

“How did you come by this case?”

Dallington smiled. “Inspector Jenkins didn’t like the look of it.”

“Ah — the old story.” Lenox had received cases in the same way, once upon a time. Scotland Yard’s men couldn’t always devote the time or resources to an investigation that an amateur could. It gave him a pang that they went to Dallington now, though he tried not to show it. “Go on, then.”

“This Waugh was apparently a rotten apple. His first wife died five years ago, and it seems almost certain that he killed her, but all of the servants swore up and down that she had fallen down the stairs. It couldn’t be disproved.”

“He married again, I take it?”

“Yes, and it’s she that I suspect, Florence Waugh. Four evenings ago, after supper, Arthur Waugh fell ill. Before supper he had had a toothache, for which he took a dose of laudanum, but he often did that.”

“It was his usual prescription?”

“Yes.”

“Go on.”

“About an hour after he went upstairs to bed his servants heard him crying out for help, and called for the doctor. By the time the doctor arrived Waugh was comatose.”

“How much of the laudanum was missing?”

“Precisely what I asked. The answer was that much more than usual was gone, certainly much above his usual dose. So his wife and servants all confirmed.”

“Separately?”

Dallington laughed. “You taught me one or two things, Charles. Yes, I asked each of them separately. I don’t believe it was the laudanum, though — I think his assailant drained half the bottle in the sink to try to make it look that way. Waugh was in rude health and certainly not suicidal — pigheadedly in love with life, from the sound of it, if anything — and he had been taking laudanum for years without incident.”

“What did the doctor say?”

Dallington turned a page in his notebook now. “You anticipate me again. I spoke to him this morning and he believes that it was antimony poisoning. That or arsenic, though arsenic is much more difficult to come by, arousing suspicion as it does when one tries to order at the chemist’s.”

“Does it? How do you know?”

“I tried it on, once, to see what they would say. On a different case.”

Lenox was impressed, as he had been repeatedly at these suppers, with the younger man. There was a doggedness there that the outward flair of personality concealed. “I take it there was skin rash?”

“You’ve seen antimony poisoning before, then?”

“Oh, several times. There was an ironmonger in Fulham who killed his son with it, I’m sorry to say. The woman he wanted to marry refused him because he had a child and she had no great longing to be a mother. An appalling thing. What did this Waugh look like?”

“There was a red rash all over his hands and arms, but Florence, his wife, said that it had been there for days.”

“And the servants?”

“They hadn’t noticed, but it’s not conclusive. His vomiting and headache might have been from an overdose of laudanum.”

“Would she have had access to antimony?”

“I canvassed the chemists in the neighborhood but none of them, including the one she frequents, remember her buying anything unusual at all.”

“Of course it would have been the easiest thing in the world to disappear onto a crowded omnibus and go to the other side of London.”

“Exactly.” Dallington sighed. “So you can see — I feel strongly that something nasty is afoot, but it looks so hard to prove.”

There was a noise at the door; the waiter had returned with a heavy tray, and set out a variety of dishes and pots in front of them, all appetizingly fragrant and warm on that cool, wet night. He fixed a few more logs onto the fire in the hearth and withdrew. Dallington poured from the bottle of wine without any objection from Lenox.

“Shall we eat, then, and I’ll give you the rest of it afterward? In the meantime tell me of Sophie. Does she roll around on the floor yet? Has she got any children her own age she plays with?”