Home by Nightfall

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

After having seen Edmund off, Lenox decided that he ought to go to the house of Dr. Stallings to gauge Stevens’s chances of survival and discover something about the attacker. On his way, he stopped in at Potbelly Lane and knocked on the door. Mrs. Watson answered. Apparently Hadley was away on business, having left at his customary hour, around seven o’clock. He had done the same the day before, too, Monday. He was on his regular schedule again.

Mrs. Watson said she had heard about Stevens, yes. Strangely, she didn’t seem very sorry, though she was curious. It wasn’t anything she said, exactly, that gave Lenox this impression — more something in her tone. It bothered him.

“Your sister cleans at the town hall, I understand?” he said.

“Claire? Yes, she works like a galley slave, too, sir, keeps it right tidy.”

“Does she like Stevens?” asked Lenox. “Do they have much cause to interact?”

“You’ll have to ask her, sir. I don’t know, do I?”

It was still there, that tone of voice. “She wouldn’t have been there this morning?”

Mrs. Watson shook her head. “She gets to the Malones’ at six o’clock and leaves at four. Then she makes tea for her three boys before she goes and puts in two more hours at the hall, bless her. We take the boys at ours to eat as often as we can.”

Lenox remembered that Claire Adams’s husband was—gone, that was the word Sutherland had used. “She lives nearby?”

“Two doors down from me. But you won’t find her there, she’ll be at the Malones’.”

“Please tell Mr. Hadley when he returns that I’ll call on him this evening,” Lenox said.

“Yes, sir, I certainly will.”

Next Lenox went to Stallings’s. There was a crowd of people in front of it; not unusual. In London one often saw crowds of hundreds in front of the homes of the dying, if they were even moderately well known.

Stallings’s butler admitted Lenox after checking with his master. The lights of the house were dimmed. In the front parlor, Lenox met two people, who introduced themselves as Stringfellow and Allerton — the first the deputy mayor (a part-time job, for Lenox knew that he was also prominent in the local grain trade), the second the town’s chemist, that notorious drunk.

He looked decently sober now, at least. “How is he?” asked Lenox.

“Fading quickly,” said Allerton.

Stringfellow shook his head. “I thought I might be mayor one day when Stevens took his rightful place in Parliament. Not this way.”

“Stallings is with him?”

The question answered itself — from a swinging white door, the doctor emerged. He nodded at Lenox. “Mr. Lenox,” he said.

“I hear that he’s not well.”

“No,” said Stallings curtly. “His breathing is ragged; his eyelids are fluttering; he sweats profusely. All the symptoms of catalepsy induced by trauma and loss of blood.”

“What can you tell me about the attack?”

“That is not my field. He was attacked with a sharp object of some sort obviously, not a powerfully sharp one though, perhaps even something like a letter opener. I cannot hazard anything more than that.”

Lenox recalled the letter opener on Stevens’s desk. It didn’t look as if it had been used in a violent stabbing — but of course it could have been wiped clean. “I see. How long do you think he will live?”

“If he remains in his current condition, thirty or forty hours. Or, if he improves, thirty or forty years.”

“I have asked a friend, Thomas McConnell of the Great Ormond Street Hospital, to come down and look at the wounds — not as a medical matter,” Lenox hastened to add, lest he offend the doctor’s professional pride, “but as a criminal one. Would you consent to him seeing Stevens?”

To his surprise, Stallings agreed readily to McConnell’s consultation. He said that he welcomed another opinion; that nobody could call him closed-minded; and so on. Only after Stallings went on for a few moments about the variety of medical insights did Lenox realize that he might be outmatched, this imperturbable village doctor, even afraid, unaccustomed to this sort of patient — seemingly as phlegmatic as usual, but in fact shaken.

Lenox promised to stop by with McConnell later. In the drawing room he said good-bye to all three men, then left the house.

What next?

He trudged in the direction of the Bell and Horns. Though he was pleased Edmund had found Cigar, he wished his brother were here with him; he would have been glad of someone to turn over his thoughts with. He was also curious about what Edmund had found on his second, daylight viewing of the gamekeeper’s cottage on Snow’s land. That was still their closest encounter with the criminal, after all.

The great matter now was to find the connection between Hadley and Stevens — and more to the point, to discover why Stevens had been attacked and Hadley had not. Was it a matter of opportunity or of motive?

One thing was sure: He would hardly feel comfortable in Hadley’s shoes, out roaming the countryside unprotected.

The next few hours were frustratingly slow. At the Horns, Clavering was still interviewing people — a thankless errand, when everyone in Markethouse had something to say and nobody in Markethouse had anything to tell. Lenox stopped in quickly enough to ascertain that Clavering hadn’t discovered anything vital.

He also picked up a piece of flannel that Sandy, Mickelson’s springer spaniel, often wore around his neck, according to Bunce — the person who passed it on — to keep fleas off his face. Lenox took it with a smile (“It’s been years since I had fleas”) and tied it up in a piece of brown paper, which he sent back to Lenox House by one of the pub’s boys.

His next stop was the Malone household. There, he had a brief interview with Claire Adams, Elizabeth Watson’s sister, who hadn’t been in the town hall since the night before, still had her key, and yes, she could show it to him this instant. She produced it, tied on a thin string around her neck. She did seem shaken by the news of the attack — though, like her sister, somehow not quite devastated. She had been at the Malones’ that morning from six o’clock. Mrs. Malone confirmed this to Lenox before he left — that Claire Adams had been in the household the entire time — and was all the more plausible because she seemed almost sorry to report the news, a petty, gossiping person, who would have been only too happy to believe that her maid could have killed the mayor.

McConnell, bless him, arrived on the 3:40 train.

He found Lenox at the Bell and Horns, and Lenox thanked him profusely for coming down. “Not at all,” said the doctor.

“I wouldn’t have asked you so urgently, except that it’s very close to home for me. It is home, in fact. I hope you can stay over?”

“I have to go back this evening, I think. But you can stand me a local Markethouse dinner first if you like.”

“With pleasure.”

They walked across the square, back toward Stallings’s house. McConnell drew looks from the congregation outside it, a stranger on a day when any stranger was bound to attract attention; he was a rangy, handsome man, with curly graying hair and a face worn by a long decade of drink and unhappiness, but now restored, in some measure, to youthfulness — he was a happy father, finally a happy husband to Jane’s effervescent cousin Toto, and most importantly once again a full-time physician, working at the children’s hospital.

Thanks to Lenox, McConnell had a vast experience in criminal medicine, and as he leaned over Stevens’s body — the victim did indeed look fearfully pale, Lenox saw upon his first glimpse — he examined him with an assured and practiced air, unwrapping his bandages tenderly, feeling his forehead, listening to his heart.

Stallings stood back. “A faint arrhythmia, I believe,” he murmured at one point. “Not unusual?”

McConnell nodded. “Yes, quite right.”

Stallings looked pleased. “A short knife, I would have guessed?” he ventured now.

“That’s a bit more difficult to say. If you’ll give me a moment—”

“Of course, of course.”

Stallings and Lenox stood in silence as McConnell, with great, great care, examined Stevens by the fading light from the windows. He spent an endless amount of time on each wound; the mayor never flinched, and to Lenox’s untrained eye he looked past rescue, four-fifths dead, closer to walking with his ancestors than to walking in Markethouse again.

At long last, McConnell neatly redressed Stevens’s wounds, placed a thin sheet over him, and then stepped to the basin in the corner of the room to wash his hands. When that was finished he looked at the two men and nodded toward the door, indicating that they ought to speak away from the patient.

Once they were in Stallings’s office, McConnell, his face grave, shook his head. “He’ll be gone before nightfall I think.”

“Oh, dear.”

“He lost too much blood, and it was not a strong constitution to start with — overwork, lack of exercise, alcohol. Dr. Stallings, is that accurate?”

“I would not have called him more given over to alcohol than other men. A glass of sherry with lunch. Overwork, certainly.”

“Well — perhaps. I see the signs in a certain venous lethargy. Leave that aside, anyhow, and we can agree that he was singularly ill suited to survive such an attack.”

“Would he do better in London?” Lenox asked.

McConnell shook his head. “His whole fate is in his body’s reaction now. That will determine whether he lives or dies. There is nothing more that medical attention can do for him. Thus far the signs are not hopeful.”

“And what about the attack?”

“Ah. There I can be more definite.” McConnell ran his hand through his hair, gathering his thoughts. “I’m sure Dr. Stallings observed that the wounds are mostly clustered well below Mr. Stevens’s sternum. There are seven of them. Six are very shallow, one slightly deeper, and all of them were dealt in the same flurry. Lenox, you recall my study of wound patterns in East End stabbing victims. The attacker was right-handed.”

“Anything else?” asked Lenox, slightly disappointed at this vagueness.

But McConnell had an arrow remaining in his quiver. “Yes, this: that based on the height, depth, and nature of the wounds, I think it overwhelmingly probable that you are looking for either a woman or a boy.”