Home by Nightfall

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Late that afternoon, the two brothers sat in the drawing room, Lenox on the sofa under old Sir Albion, Edmund in an armchair by a window, which was running with rivulets of rainwater. Each brother had a cup of tea, and each was reading. At the far end of the room a steady orange fire burned in the hearth, its susurrating crackle a homely, comfortable pleasure. Occasionally one would recite something out loud to the other — Lenox from a pile of cuttings that had arrived for him from Lady Jane about the disappearance of Muller, Edmund from the evening edition of the Markethouse Gazette, which Waller had brought in not long before.

“Nothing on the thefts in it?” asked Lenox. “Or on Hadley?”

Edmund shook his head. “The leading story is about the market tomorrow. Apparently it is ‘scheduled to run as per usual.’”

“Seems a bit thin for the top news story.”

“The whole newspaper is only four pages long,” Edmund pointed out.

“I don’t know how they fill that many.”

Edmund, cutting the second and third pages with a penknife, smiled. “Well, then, tell me what’s happening in London, where you can fill a newspaper just with stories of murdered musicians.”

Lenox shook his head. The cuttings were interesting but inconclusive. The newspapers, especially the Telegraph, blared the news of LeMaire’s entry as a new assistant to Scotland Yard, all of them giving summaries of his experience and qualifications, as well as making prominent reference to his detective agency. Invaluable publicity.

In fairness to him, he had already, perhaps, chased down one lead: A cabman swore that on the night of Muller’s disappearance he had taken a man in a dinner jacket, just such as Muller had been wearing during his performance, from the Cadogan Theater to Paddington Station. He recalled it clearly because the gentleman had been wearing no hat and no coat. Nor had he carried any luggage, which was odd for someone well dressed and on his way to Paddington.

It did sound like Muller — and Paddington Station had trains at that hour that could carry him all over the Isles, and from thence by boat to Europe, certainly. LeMaire’s men were currently interviewing the employees at Paddington and felt confident of further success.

“And they are kind enough to inform us,” said Lenox, “in an irritating little boxed note, that LeMaire — well, I shall read it to you. Monsieur LeMaire is no doubt familiar with the word ‘cabriolet,’ which in the language of his native shores means ‘a little leap,’ the precise sort of motion that a British carriage of one horse, or ‘cabriolet,’ makes — and whence, as a result, the word ‘cab’ has descended to us, in one of the many portmanteaux of our two nations. Perhaps this knowledge gave him the special insight needed to find the cabman who may have driven the German pianist to Paddington Station.”

“Ha!”

Lenox shook his head. “No doubt it was that — he was pondering the word ‘cabriolet’ in his office for a few leisurely hours, and finally it inspired him.” Edmund snorted. “Daftest thing I’ve ever read.”

“I do wonder where he is, though. Muller, I mean, not LeMaire. Fancy, just disappearing like that.”

“It’s got me foxed,” admitted Lenox.

“What would be your best guess? If you had to guess, without hedging, I mean?”

That had been Edmund’s favorite method of inquisition for his younger brother since childhood (If you had to give up either toffees or licorice forever, which would it be?), and Lenox smiled.

He glanced down at the other cuttings. There were vanishing, evanescent little fragments of information in them: that Muller had asked for a second sandwich wrapped in a napkin just before he played the concert, for instance, indicating that he might have been planning to travel (though of course he could have just been hungry); that he had quarreled with his manager before the first recital in London. An enterprising young journalist had traveled to Dover and reported that at least one gentleman answering to Muller’s description and, crucially, traveling without luggage, had been on the evening packet to Lille the night of his disappearance.

Still, none of that answered the basic question: Where had the German gone directly after he finished playing?

A thought occurred to Lenox. “I suppose if I had to guess,” he said, “I would hazard that it’s all for publicity. Muller’s sitting right now in a room in the house of the owner of the Cadogan Theater, reading penny novelettes, eating cakes, and waiting. The owner of the theater is rubbing his hands together gleefully, planning how to spend all of the money he’ll rake in next week when Muller makes his triumphant return from the dead.”

Edmund thought about that for a moment. “Interesting. Yes — what price wouldn’t people pay to see him after such an absence?”

“There you have it.”

Edmund lifted his paper again to cut it and said, “I can tell you that I would pay a pretty steep price to meet whoever left that chalk drawing on Hadley’s stoop.”

“Mm.”

After speaking with Clavering earlier that day, they had walked through the rain to Hadley’s house. Mrs. Watson had answered the door, greeting them in a low tone. “He’s not well, Mr. Hadley. His nerves.”

“Is he in bed?” asked Lenox.

“In his sitting room — but wearing his slippers.”

She’d said this as if it meant he were next door to death. In fact, Hadley had indeed seemed somewhat broken down, and when Lenox asked after his state of mind, he confessed that he had barely slept.

“I keep seeing that face in the window,” he said. “I know that somebody has been in the house. That’s the problem. I have half a mind to check in at the Bell and Horns and stay there until this is all over.”

Edmund and Lenox had nodded sympathetically and asked a few questions. Was Mr. Hadley aware of the other thefts in the village? Did he have anything at all to do with the market? The answer was no in both cases. They went over what he remembered more slowly then, though nothing useful came of it, except, perhaps, that Hadley was more inclined to think that it had been a woman’s face that he’d seen in the window than a man’s.

“Do you remember the person’s hair?” Lenox had asked.

Hadley had shaken his head. “Nothing so distinct, Mr. Lenox. It’s only a feeling, you understand. I would never swear to it.”

At last they had come, gradually, to the subject of Mr. Hadley’s gemstones. Charles had suggested that Edmund be the one to bring it up, and he had — a surprisingly capable assistant. “You’re certain the sherry was the only thing that was missing when you returned from Chichester last Thursday?” he had said.

“Yes, quite sure.”

Edmund had nodded. “Good, good. I only asked because I know you mentioned your collection of gemstones. I am pleased to hear that it is intact.”

For an instant of an instant, Lenox thought he saw something flare in Hadley’s eyes — something possessive, something angry — but when he looked again, it was gone, as surely as if it had never been there. “They are all as they were,” Hadley said, “though it is not such an astonishing collection as all that, only a hobby.”

“Are they under lock and key?” Edmund asked.

“They are now, though the cabinet is not very — not a citadel, if you take my meaning, not impenetrable. Fortunately, I don’t advertise their presence, so it would take a thief some time to discover them.”

“I might suggest removing them to a bank,” said Lenox.

Hadley nodded. “Yes, perhaps.”

But it was plain he was only being polite. “What is the collection, precisely?”

“They are rough gemstones — uncut, unpolished — some very valuable, some, many of my favorites, in fact, entirely forgettable, at least from a monetary point of view. Such stones have been my passion since I wandered over the cliffs with a chisel as a boy, Mr. Lenox. I am fortunate enough to have attained some expertise upon the subject. Indeed, I have published articles in several small journals, and been in communication with leading scientists in London.”

Hadley’s ardor wasn’t at all uncommon. Theirs was an age of fanatical amateur geologists, who roamed the countryside in clubs, covering twenty and thirty miles in a day with ease. (Prince Albert himself, Queen Victoria’s late husband, had been one of these men.) Many of them, recently, had taken to visiting the quarries near Oxford, where they were uncovering most remarkable fossils, unknown to science, with elements common both to birds and lizards; the eminent naturalist Richard Owen, an acquaintance of Lenox’s, whom many of these amateurs revered, and to whom they took any bones that they struggled to identify, had given these ancient animals the collective name Dinosauria. The press — abjuring Latin — called these strange beasts “dinosaurs.”

Gemstone collectors were a subset of this cultishly zealous group. If Hadley was a known figure in that particular field, he might well have attracted the wrong sort of attention.

Lenox nodded, understandingly. “That’s excellent,” he said. “But I would consider removing them to a bank, as I said, or failing that precaution I would at least consider buying a safe. I am far from persuaded that the crimes of which you have been a victim are at their end.”