A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER EIGHT

Frederick stood again and began to pace the small room, hands behind his back, brow furrowed. “It began not a few weeks ago, in late August. In a larger town — in Bath, say — I doubt it would have been much remarked at all, or if it were then they wouldn’t have taken it very seriously, but of course Plumbley is a very small village.”

“Six hundred people as I recall, or thereabouts?”

“When you were a child, yes. Perhaps nearer eight hundred now. The curate could tell you an exact figure. He’s been collating the parish registers. At any rate, one sees very few unfamiliar faces in the village. Occasionally a traveling salesman of some sort will pitch up and stay at the Royal Oak for an evening, or a sister from London or Taunton will be resident with one of the townspeople for a month’s vacation. Yet I can say with almost perfect certainty that there has been nobody here over the course of the time in which these vandalisms have taken place who is unknown to me.”

The chessboard forgotten, Lenox slouched back in his chair, eyes sharp and narrow with attention. “What about over the past year, to take a longer view of things? Has there been anyone new come to town during that time?”

“Captain Josiah Musgrave and his family, yes. He moved into that pretty little house — it has an acre or two attached to it — that Dr. McGrath used to live in, down at the bottom of Church Lane. I’ll come to him.”

“Pray go on.”

“You remember Fripp, the fruit-and-vegetable seller? I mentioned him in my letter?”

“I do. Is his shop still just off the village green?”

“That’s the one — little place, not much room to move about inside, but it’s by way of being an institution here, not unlike the saddler’s or the butcher’s. Very little change there.”

“He still has the cricket bat nailed over the door?”

“Yes, and he’s eager to see your form — but that’s for another time. Here, wait there a moment.”

“As you like.”

Frederick stood and went to his cherry-wood desk now, pipe locked into his teeth, and sorted through the rich profusion of papers, books, and old teacups that concealed the desktop beneath them. At last he found what he had been looking for. “There we are,” he said in a quiet voice. “I don’t like to look at it, myself.”

He passed a piece of paper to Lenox. Upon it, in dark ink, was a stick figure, something akin to a pictograph, of a man hanging by a noose.

It sent a chill up Lenox’s spine.

“This was in Fripp’s shop?”

“In a manner of speaking. One morning Fripp arrived at his shop — he lives with his mother, who is a very ancient personage, on the Mill Lane — and found all of his front windows broken. There were two or three rocks inside that had evidently done the job. A piece of paper was wrapped around one of them with this image upon it.”

“Crudely drawn.”

“Yes.”

“This is the original?”

“No, that’s a sketch, a fairly accurate one, I can confirm, as they sent for me straight away, my being the magistrate.”

“Was anything taken from the shop?”

“No — at least, not anything of value. Perhaps they swiped an apple or two as they went, whoever did it.”

Lenox studied the simple outline of the hanging man. “Not a happy sight.”

“No, and it frightened the poor man half to death.”

“I can imagine. He must be close to seventy,” said Lenox. “He was in the shop when I was a boy.”

“Yes, and his mother well over ninety. They’re a hardy lot, the Fripps, but I cannot blame him for reacting unhappily. There was something horrifying about it, Charles, I swear to you — just a mute picture but I shouldn’t like to gaze upon it again. It had an ominous feel.”

“Who is the police constable in the village?”

“There are two: There is Oates, a good man, who’s been in the job twenty years or more, and his new assistant, a boy, not much past eighteen, named Weston.”

“They haven’t been able to find anything?”

Frederick sat opposite Lenox again, his amiable face now grave. “Patience. We’re still near enough the beginning of the thing.”

“Go on.”

“Fripp was panicked, naturally. He thought it might be a threat of violence — violence at a minimum, in fact, or worse still of murder.”

“Had he any cause to believe he had enemies?”

“None. He chaffs the fellows at the King’s Arms, the other pub in town, about cricket, but really, I cannot imagine … anyhow, after that morning a few of the local men set up a watch around Fripp’s house and his shop. That lasted a week. Then the second incident happened, on the other side of town, and rather diverted everyone’s attention.”

“What was the second incident?”

“It was identical, only it happened to a different man.”

“Who, now?”

“Wells, the grain merchant.”

“He must be even older than Fripp.”

Freddie shook his head. “No, you’re thinking of the father, who’s been dead for three or four years. His son runs the shop now, Frank Wells, a lad of only thirty or thirty-two. Means business, though. He has much the most prosperous shop in town, and really the only one in Plumbley that attracts people from other villages, in order that they might buy. He’s built it up to no end from when his father owned it, and it was a rather sleepy place. I’m afraid it’s gone a bit to his head — a gold watch chain, a carriage for his mother. Last year they expanded the building, that high-beamed Tudor place on the corner of St. Stephen’s Street. It was a hellish noise, and caused a great fuss because he brought men in from Bath to do it, rather than hiring locally. Ironic, you see.”

“And the crime was the same?”

“Yes. All the windows broken, rocks found inside the shop, one of them wrapped in a paper with the same drawing. This time whoever had done it took something of value out of the shop, however.”

“What?”

“A brass clock that sat above the doorway. It was there in his father’s day, too. Frank Wells minded that far more than the windows.”

Lenox’s brow was furrowed, the beginnings of half a dozen ideas in his mind. “What did Oates and Weston make of it, your constables?”

“That the criminal was emboldened at going free after the first vandalism.”

“What do Fripp and Wells have in common? But no — perhaps you’d better finish by telling me about the crimes. How many of them were there in all? If they can be called crimes?”

“If they can be … certainly they are crimes! I would give the man who did it thirty without the option today, if I could. But to answer your question there have been four, the most recent not five days ago.”

“Was the third crime another broken window?”

“No. This time — you recall the white doors of the church?”

“Yes.”

“Someone had painted on them, in black paint, writ very large, a roman numeral: XXII. Twenty-two, as I scarcely need to inform you.”

“How strange.”

“Yes.”

“The curate had it whitewashed immediately. Then, three nights later, this image appeared on the same door.”

Frederick passed across another slip of paper. Like the hanging man it was eerie: a black dog, very simply drawn, and again with an air of definite menace.

“And nothing in the last five days?” Lenox asked.

“No.”

For some time Lenox was silent. Finally, he said, “It’s bizarre, to be sure, but how can you be sure that it wasn’t schoolchildren all along?”

The older man sighed, and swirled the last sip of port in his glass before drinking it down. “We congregated, a few of us men who are concerned with the village’s well-being: Mr. Crofts, who has a little land west of here, a very fine gentleman; Dr. Eastwood; Mr. Kempe, who lives now in the old parsonage. There are only thirty-two boys in the village who are of any age to make that sort of mischief. In the end we asked their parents to keep them under lock and key until the problem had been sorted. It seems extreme, I know, but as I said before this is Plumbley, not one of your great cities like Bath, like Taunton. The symbols were very menacing, Charles.”

“What happened?”

“The Roman numeral appeared on the door of the church, overnight. We checked in with all of the parents, and none of the boys had been out past dark.”

“Boys are very sneaky, you know.”

“I had your brother and yourself here once upon a time, did I not? We enquired carefully, however, and though of course it is not a certainty I think it unlikely that any of those thirty-two boys did this. For one thing the images are so strange and unlikely, and for another, I know the boys. None of them are a bad sort. Not that we haven’t had those, through the years, but most of them have gone off or grown up.”

“I wonder,” said Lenox, “whether the second pair of crimes, the defacement of the church doors, is connected with the first pair.”

Frederick shook his head firmly. “We might go fifteen years without one incident like any of these,” he said. “When there are four in as many weeks they must be connected.”

“Yes, very likely.”

“The village is trying to pretend that nothing is wrong. Meanwhile all the shops are barring their windows and people are afraid to walk about after dark. It’s a terrible state of affairs. I do wish you would put your mind on it.”

“I shall be rather busy with my speech,” said Lenox, and then, seeing Frederick’s disappointment, added quickly, “But I mean to think it over, perhaps even have a word with one or two people. Yes, you may count on that.”

Though he fooled himself that he made the promise on Frederick’s behalf, in some deeper part of his mind he knew that it was for himself, too; and there swelled up inside him the pleasure of anticipation.