A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Or was he dead? Crouched over Chalmers, Lenox thought he saw a flutter in the man’s closed eyelids. Quickly he put two fingers to his throat and then waited, not breathing himself to make his hand more steady.

Yes, a pulse. It was barely there, but the groom was alive.

The question was what to do now. There had been a turnoff to the village of West Buckland less than a mile before, but down the road two miles was a larger village, Wellington. Would he have a better chance of finding a competent doctor there?

Chalmers’s pulse was so inconstant, his breath so shallow, however, that Lenox decided he would go to the closer town and pray for the best. He stanched the wound — in the upper stomach, near the ribs — with a towel from Sadie’s saddlebag, then took off his own riding jacket and wrapped it as tightly as he could around Chalmers’s midsection. When this was done he pulled the man up and over the horse’s haunch, very gingerly. Then he mounted the horse himself and nudged her into motion.

It was a delicate operation, riding to West Buckland; he wanted speed, but he didn’t want to jostle Chalmers. Fortunately the village was close — in fifteen minutes he had reached it. His heart lifted when he saw that there was a doctor’s red cross painted on a white sign over a door on the cobblestoned Main Street, just next to the pub.

“Doctor!” he called out to the empty street, still on his horse. “I need a doctor! A police constable, too!”

Nobody came out. He rode up just alongside the door and kicked it hard, trying to rouse somebody, but to his despair there was still no answer.

Just then a man appeared several doors down, pale, young, and with ink-black hair. “May I help?”

“Where is the doctor?”

The young man took in the situation. “A wound? The doctor is — well, perhaps I should look.”

“Are you a doctor?”

He shook his head. “A veterinarian. But the doctor, by this hour—”

He had an honest face. “What, drink?”

“Bring him here,” said the young man, and then called back into his office for his assistant. “What is his malady?”

“I found him upon the road, shot,” said Lenox.

The young man nodded, calmly. Together the three of them took Chalmers past several waiting dogs and cats, one goat, and into the young veterinarian’s office.

“I need to find the men who did this,” Lenox said. “Do all you can for him — spare no expense. I am at Everley, but I shall return soon.”

“You’re leaving him here with—” Lenox handed the young surgeon a card. The lad looked at it and nodded. “Mr. Lenox.”

“I or one of my friends shall return, you have my word of it.”

In the street several boys were gawking at Sadie, touching the place on her withers that was slick with blood. “What happened, sir, please?” asked one of the boys.

“Where is the police station?” asked Lenox. The same boy pointed down the street. “You shall have a half-crown if you give this horse water and oats.”

The boys burst into activity—“There, sir, it’ll be a moment,” “Oats and a carrot, I say”—and Lenox strode toward the police station.

The constable there was quick-witted, fortunately. He had heard of Wells’s arrest, knew Lenox’s name, and agreed to help. The only question was what they should do.

“There are so many paths they might have taken off the main road,” said the constable, Jeffers.

“My uncle is in that carriage,” said Lenox. “Alive, I hope. I mean to go after him. Fortunately the ground is wet.”

“What can I do?”

“Telegram to Bath, go to Plumbley and tell—” But Lenox didn’t know who to tell. Then he remembered. “Send word for a John Dallington at the big house, and tell a Mr. Fripp.”

Jeffers nodded, somber. “Anything else?”

“The man to telegram in Bath is Archer. You may try any of them, though. They should be apprised of the situation immediately — and tell them to send men, if they can.”

Lenox and Jeffers shook hands and the detective flew from the station, handed over his half-crown to the boys, and vaulted himself aboard Sadie, who with all the eagerness in the world turned her head again in the direction of the road.

He would never forgive himself if anything had happened to his uncle, he thought.

Out upon the road again he passed a carriage almost immediately, not the one he was looking for, and realized with dismay that he could no longer be sure which of the fresh carriage tracks in the mud belonged to Frederick’s. Neither did he have a pistol, a constable, any means of convincing Wells to give up his cousin — for he was still convinced of Wells’s intimate involvement in the business. Lenox worried that he might do more harm than good. Still he rode on.

What did Wells intend to do with Freddie? Lenox had yet to fully consider the circumstances because finding Chalmers in the road had driven him so definitely to action, not reflection. Presumably Wells had some plan to which the groom — but not Frederick, or indeed, Oates — was superfluous. Did he mean to hold them hostage? Had Chalmers simply been the one who fought back, and been shot for his troubles?

Then, though he was riding pell-mell, a realization came to Lenox in slow motion: If Wells had commandeered the carriage, he must have had an accomplice in his actions.

Why? For the simple reason that there was no chance Oates, Frederick, Chalmers, or Wells had been carrying a gun, and what Chalmers had suffered was a gunshot wound.

Perhaps Musgrave, or one of the coiners from Bath, had met Wells out here on the road. Perhaps the foreknowledge of that plan was what had made Wells seem so sanguine, so untroubled, in their interview the day before. Interested in the cricket, even. He had known he would be free again soon.

Think, Charles, he chided himself.

The rain began to come down harder. It cooled Sadie, but it slowed her, too. Lenox brought her to a trot for a moment to get his cloak from one of the saddlebags, and while he was in there fumbled out a cube of sugar. It had fallen into the mud but he knew she wouldn’t mind — he wiped it against the saddle, blinking away the raindrops, and gave it to the horse, who was breathing heavily but seemed in no danger of outrunning herself.

The difficulty with the scenario was in its planning. How would Wells have been in contact with Musgrave, or with any of his accomplices in Bath? Even if he had, why would they risk coming out to see him? Clearly when Musgrave had left Plumbley he wasn’t worried about Wells shouldering the blame for Weston’s death.

As he was mounting the horse again, Lenox felt a chill.

Who were the three men in the carriage, now? Wells. Frederick. And Oates.

It was impossible. Oates with his fleshy, impassive, unintelligent face, his grief over his cousin.

Yet wasn’t he the most logical co-conspirator? There had been no evidence of another carriage stopping where Chalmers had fallen — only the one, Frederick’s. And Wells couldn’t have overpowered Oates, Chalmers, and Frederick together, even with a gun.

Lenox shook his head, yet a flood of inconsequential memories, small oddities of behavior, returned with great force to his mind. It was true that Oates had behaved strangely at moments. He hadn’t wanted Lenox to look at Weston’s correspondence, arguing overmuch for the boy’s privacy. Had he been afraid of a note implicating him? Or the canvas of the town green: Oates had uncovered nobody to help them, while Fripp had produced Carmody within ten minutes.

And the note from Weston to Oates! “Swells” seemed such an obvious nickname for the grain merchant, and all the lads in the pub had known it at once. Wouldn’t the constable have recognized it immediately? Wouldn’t Weston have used only a nickname he was sure his cousin would understand?

Lenox’s resistance to the idea was weakening. He hoped it wasn’t Oates — but, he thought, who had been in the grain merchant’s shop the first time Lenox visited? The constable.

Lenox remembered, too, Wells’s somewhat unusual insistence that he stay in Oates’s custody, the man from whom he should have most feared retribution. Beyond that there was Wells’s alibi, and his true, convincing outrage when he was asked if he had killed Weston. What if Wells had only confessed because he knew he had a way out? That Oates would spring him?

It had already, after only a few hours, been a long day, and these small, agitating thoughts, arriving in Lenox’s mind unbidden, seemed wrong, inaccurate. For half a mile of riding he dismissed the possibility from his mind.

Until, that is, he remembered a phrase from McConnell’s letter: The only fingerprints on the knife belonged to Constable Oates.

How many dozens of times in his experienced had it been the murderer who found the body, who found the weapon? Hadn’t Oates found the knife in the slop bucket at the last possible moment, that morning in the basement of Wells’s house, at the last throw of the dice?

With a terrible sense of dread Lenox began to fear that the accomplice wasn’t Musgrave at all. That it was Plumbley’s police constable. That Weston’s own cousin had murdered him.