A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The Plumbley police station had a back room with a table and chairs in it. The transfer of Wells from his shop’s cellar to that room — a distance of perhaps fifty yards — took place quickly, in under a minute. Still it wasn’t quick enough to prevent people from seeing. Freddie had ventured outside and found a bedlam of people pressed up against the windows of the police station, hoping for a glimpse of the suspect.

Now he returned to the room and sat with Archer and Lenox on one side of the table, Wells on the other, a pitcher of water and several glasses between them. Oates stood in the corner, watching.

Dallington was out looking for the farmhand Jack Randall, with the aid of Oates’s temporary subordinate, the farmer, Mr. Hutchinson. As Lenox pointed out, Randall might have been involved or there might simply have been an uncommon quantity of false coin passing around Plumbley. Meanwhile Archer had sent a telegram back to his headquarters to report of the arrest and to ask that Fontaine be questioned about his relationship with Wells.

“Tell it from the start, please, Mr. Lenox,” said Plumbley’s constable. His wits seemed sharper today, uninterfered with by any morning tipple. “I still don’t claim to understand it all.”

Lenox shrugged. “Mr. Wells can recount the story better than I can.”

Wells was silent.

“Help him along, perhaps,” said Frederick. The squire looked heartily disappointed to be in the room, even in his relief at having caught the criminal.

“It was greed, I suppose. The grain shop Mr. Wells inherited was not as prosperous as he would have wished, and when he took control of it he must have been on the lookout for a new way to create income for himself. Only he can tell us how he came to acquire the machine, though I suspect it was from someone in Bath. The police in the big cities are so alert to coining now that the shofulmen in London have moved their business entirely to the country. Perhaps he had a smaller machine at first and the expansion of the store — so minimal on the ground floor, but enormous in the cellar, and permitting the creation of a secret space — only came after he had saved enough money to build it. But I suspect that he borrowed the money.”

“The vandalisms,” muttered Freddie.

“Yes. I think his partners in Bath were unhappy with his payments to them. Did they take your clock in partial payment, Mr. Wells?”

Wells was silent.

“Why should he lack for money to pay them?” asked Archer. “We saw what he had down there!”

They had inspected the machine in Wells’s cellar for some time — an elaborate miniature processing plant of tools and dies, crucibles, melting pots, bars of copper, brass, and silver, coal fire, and machinery. It would send Wells to prison for life on its own, the murder charge aside.

“Most counterfeiters are caught,” said Lenox, “because they circulate the false coin too freely. I imagine Mr. Wells owed his money in the Queen’s true coinage, and perhaps didn’t feel like paying. Or perhaps he was frightened to take too much of it to the bank at a time.”

“But the third vandalism, Charles?” said Frederick. “The black dog?”

“Mr. Wells? No, you do not wish to speak? Anyhow I feel I can say with some assurance that he murdered Mr. Weston.”

“How?” said Freddie.

“Last night Mr. Carmody and I paid a visit to a certain stable in town. He identified the horses he had seen in the clearing, the ones that were intended to make us believe the murderers had come in from out of town. The stable belonged to Mr. Wells.

“And in fact I had my suspicions about the horses in that clearing. It is not a location, in my opinion, that a criminal from beyond Plumbley’s borders would know — so much easier to hitch your horse to a post on a country fence that a rich man’s steward might check once a week. Those woods are much walked-in by locals, however. Including Mr. Carmody, nearly every night.”

“Carmody,” said Wells, with a derisive snort. It was the first word he had uttered.

All four men were silent, hoping he would go on.

“Yes?” said Archer at last, but Wells had remembered himself.

“Then there was Carfax,” said Lenox.

“The young man at the Royal Oak,” said Freddie. “I wondered what you might have asked him.”

“What nickname have they taken to calling you, with your carriage and gold watch chain, Mr. Wells? Around Plumbley?”

It was Oates, smacking his head, who offered the answer. “Swells! Of course! How daft have I been!”

Lenox nodded. “Weston used the slang his friends did, writing that coded note. But why murder him, Mr. Wells? Did he see you making a payment? Perhaps you were bringing coins out of the cellar? I know that he had a good vantage of your shop from where he stood, smoking his final cigars.”

Oates was pacing now, angry. “Is that what it was, Frank?” he said. “Did my cousin catch you?”

No response was forthcoming.

“I don’t understand,” Frederick said after a moment. “The vandalism. Why not write him a note? Why go to the trouble of smashing windows?”

“That would introduce all sorts of unnecessary risks,” Lenox said. “The handwriting might be matched, the note might fall into the wrong hands, Wells himself might have held it back for blackmail. The vandalisms achieved the same end without the possibility of incriminating the vandals. Or their boss.”

“But smashing a window in a small town — that has its own risks,” said Frederick.

“Yet they did get the clock, the closest object of value, before they went. If they hadn’t made the mistake with Fripp’s the town would still have been sluggish.”

Oates stood up. “So the vandalism yesterday — the police station …”

Lenox nodded. “I was coming to that. I don’t think you saw them after all, Mr. Wells, did you? Didn’t you break the window with the rock and the helmet yourself? Another diversionary tactic. To try to pin it all on a gang of outsiders. Clever, in an insular village like Plumbley.”

“I didn’t do it,” said Wells. “None of it.”

Frederick stood up, then. The room went silent, in anticipation, and as if to prolong this sense he slowly poured a glass of water for himself. Then he offered to pour some for Wells, with a gesture, but the prisoner declined.

“I knew your father well,” said Frederick, still standing. “He was a good man.”

“Oh?”

“And you have a son, do you not?”

“You know I do,” said Wells.

“Is he — what, sixteen?”

“Yes.”

Frederick shook his head. “Sad. Very sad.”

Wells looked uncertain for the first time. “What?”

“Your father kept the shop in his name and yours, in case he should die, did he not?”

“Yes.”

“Have you done the same for your son?”

“What of it?”

“A life sentence in prison, for a boy that age.”

The terrible truth seemed to come alive in Well’s eyes as they widened. “No!” he said. “The boy had no idea about the dimmicking — had no — Mr. Ponsonby, play it fair with me!”

Frederick shook his head. “Justice demands that the owners of the store that held that machine come to trial, Mr. Wells. You and your son, both of you.”

Oates, his face unhappy, said, “Weren’t as if you gave Weston a chance to have much longer than sixteen years, either.”

Lenox weighed in now. “But Freddie, if Mr. Wells confessed to the murder — you’re a magistrate, you might have a word with them.”

Frederick took this in, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him. “Yes, that’s true,” he said. “Mr. Wells? What do you think of buying your son’s freedom back?”

There was a brief thrust of defiance in Wells’s face, but as he looked at the four men surrounding him — all of them free to return to their hearths now, their happy families, their own children — something gave way.

“Yes, then,” he said. “If you’re willing to drag a sixteen-year-old boy to prison for it, you can have my confession. I was there when Weston died.”