A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

His realization came when he was asleep. He woke with a wrench, heart thudding, mind slow and fast at once. In the blind night he could not yet understand what. He stood up, poured himself a glass of water, and tried to collect his wits, waiting for his brain to catch up with his sense of panic.

Then he realized: Wells.

This was a relief, actually. It wasn’t Sophia, wasn’t Jane, wasn’t Edmund in trouble, but as his senses returned he did see with three o’clock clarity (sometimes mistaken, sometimes revelatory) that it all felt wrong, about Wells. There was an error somewhere in the chain of logic.

He tried to calm himself. What were the details nagging at his thoughts? What had he overlooked, in his eagerness to solve the case, an old hack coming out of retirement? He cursed his pride.

The small room adjoining their bedroom, which he had been using as a study, was strewn with papers, books, pens, inkpots, flowers from the garden, tobacco. He went in and lit the lamp, shut the door so he wouldn’t wake his wife. Two more sips of the water and his breathing had slowed to normal.

To begin with there was the knife. Perhaps the circumstances of its discovery had biased him toward thinking the knife was a meaningful clue — but how many concealed knives covered in human blood could a village like Plumbley possibly hold?

Still, it was not the knife that had roused him from sleep.

It was the black dog.

How had they accounted for that fourth vandalism? The first, upon Fripp’s shop window, had been an accident; the second, when the thieves took Wells’s clock, a message and a repossession; the third, a XXII upon the church door, had been a message to Wells from his partners in Bath, more certain and less dangerous than a private note, of when they would come for the money — and a reminder perhaps that they were not afraid to vandalize the village.

But the black dog that had appeared upon the church door five days before Lenox arrived: what accounted for that image? How stupid it was not to have asked Wells! Where had he even been when—

Here, Lenox suddenly perceived with a sinking heart, was his greatest misstep: They had never checked Wells’s alibi. What had the man said to him, in the grain shop? Lenox had a gift for remembering alibis, and he ought to have remembered this one sooner: My servants can attest to my presence at home yesterday evening. I was up rather late, past two in the morning, working on my books, and at least two of them stayed up with me, fetching drinks, managing the fire. They’ll tell you I never left my study.

What was the meaning of this? He had been quick to offer the statement, certainly. Too quick? It had the feel of a manufactured alibi, asking his servants to stay up late with him, and then mentioning that time, two in the morning, that put him just clear of possible responsibility for Weston’s death.

There was nothing substantial to disprove Wells’s guilt, and the man had admitted it himself, freely and openly. Why on earth would he have done that if his alibi were solid?

Still, that black dog … and with the knife, and Musgrave’s abscondment, he wondered if there was a connection between Wells and the captain.

There must be some kind of explanation, he thought. He would speak with Dallington in the morning.

He felt heavy in his limbs and knew that, without much effort, he might fall back to sleep. It was necessary that he speak to Wells again — pose him these few questions, perhaps challenge him on his eagerness to provide an alibi — but it could wait until morning.

Lady Jane stirred when he returned to bed. “Are you quite well, Charles?”

“Hush now, go back to sleep.”

“Is it your speech?”

“Yes,” he said. “Just looking over it.”

He knew it was what he ought to have been doing, less than a week from the most significant moment of his professional life, but there was no need to have lied. For the thousandth time since he entered Parliament he thought about the modest disappointment it had been to him — how he had loved politics so ardently from the outside, longed to be like his father and his brother, and how since achieving that aim, though he did his duty with great care, it had never excited his passion quite the way crime did. He couldn’t recall waking up in the middle of the night over Parliament, and though it racked his nerves to worry about Wells there was a thrill to it as well, the thrill of his mind doing what it was best suited to do.

He woke several hours later without remembering that he had fallen asleep. The morning was again rainy, the sky steel-colored and sifted with cloud and mist, the outlandish green of the gardens more stark and differentiated than on a sunny day.

Lenox was an early riser, and most mornings in Everley he had used the time to ride out on Sadie. He would delay that pleasure now, until he had seen his cousin, Dallington, and Wells, in that order. He went to the butler in the front hall.

“Nash, is my cousin in his study?”

“No, sir, Mr. Ponsonby is upon the road to Bath with Constable Oates, accompanying Mr. Wells.”

Lenox had forgotten. “Damn it all,” he said. “They left early?”

“Yes, sir, by Mr. Ponsonby’s carriage.”

“I think he might have waited.”

“Sir?”

“Oh, nothing. Could you ask Chalmers to set up Sadie for me?”

“Mr. Chalmers is driving the coach to Bath, sir, but his assistant will—”

“Yes, yes, that’s fine.” Then Lenox had a thought. Could he overtake them upon the road to Bath? “When did they leave?” he asked.

“Fifty minutes since.”

It was no good — they would have covered too much of the distance. “Well, I’ll take the horse, anyhow.”

After Nash had left, Lenox realized something; his uncle would have had to stop and fetch both Oates and Wells. His carriage tended to move at a pretty stately pace, too. If Sadie took up a canter, perhaps …

Lenox ran to the breakfast room, tucked a piece of sausage into a piece of toast, gulped it down with a half-cup of coffee, and then went out to the stables. Nash, altogether in less haste, was just arriving.

“Never mind,” said Lenox. “Tell my wife and Lord John that I’m riding after my uncle.”

“Yes, sir.”

By a stroke of good fortune Sadie was already warm and saddled, because Chalmers, that good man, had left word behind that she was to be prepared for Lenox from eight in the morning. He stroked her mane and offered her an apple, which she took from his palm with stupid and good-natured excitement, and then stepped up to the saddle.

“There is only one road to Bath from here, correct?” said Lenox.

The boy who had been left in charge of the stables — he couldn’t have been above thirteen — nodded and pointed. “Yes, sir. And nice catch, sir, in the game.”

Lenox laughed. “Out for a single run, however.”

“It was hard luck, sir.”

“Do you play?”

“Next year, I hope. I’m a wicket-keeper.”

Lenox lifted his hat and made a note in his mind to have a catch with the boy upon his return — but now there was no time, if he wanted to chase down his quarry. He dug his heels into the horse’s side and she dug her powerful back legs into the turf and bounded forward, almost immediately pushing herself into a hard run. Lenox had to clamp down his hat with his hand.

He had been riding over the fields since he arrived in Plumbley. He preferred that to riding along the road, but there was no question he was faster upon the dirt, even in wet weather. Sadie fled through the miles, after three or four still not even in any kind of sweat. He slowed her to a trot for a moment, thinking he ought to rest her, then decided he could trot all the way home if need be — he would catch up with Frederick, Oates, and Wells now if he could. He had seen a few old carts along the road, and one or two solitary riders, but it was relatively empty — the rain, perhaps.

As a result he saw the fresh rut of their tracks very clearly. There was a hard shoulder to the road that Sadie ran along. Good — another advantage in speed. Chalmers might be stopped and taking the mud off of the wheels right now.

Lenox rode hard for forty-five minutes before he started to doubt whether he would catch them at all. He was out of breath, Sadie too, and Lord knew how long ahead the carriage had gotten. Even at a brisk trot Freddie’s horses kept a pretty lively pace.

Yet just as the first thought of turning back entered his mind he saw something a quarter mile down the straight road. It was a black hump in the middle of the path.

“That had better be a log,” he muttered as he rode along toward it.

It was not; with a pulse of alarm throughout his whole body he saw that the figure was human, and in no very great state of health.

“Hoa!” he called down to Sadie when they were close and clicked his tongue; without any jerk in the saddle she pulled up. Down the road he shouted, “Hello? Hello?”

When there was no response he fairly leapt from the horse, trusting the beast to stay where she was — which she did — and ran to the body, falling to his knees beside it, praying that it was not Frederick. He turned the body onto its back.

It was Chalmers, dead. Upon his white shirt was a great bloom of bright red blood.