The September Society

CHAPTER THIRTY

The next morning, Lenox saw Inspector Goodson. They spent about an hour aligning their knowledge of the case, Goodson working primarily in Oxfordshire, his energy at the moment devoted to finding the man who called himself Geoffrey Canterbury, while Lenox’s interest was now mainly in the September Society.

Lenox wrote a note to Rosie Little, updating her and encouraging her to be brave, then went to see Timothy Stills, Jane’s cousin at Oriel, for a pleasant half hour. As he walked away, his mind turned to his own troubles: Lady Annabelle had reappeared on the scene and was speaking vocally to anybody who would listen about both Goodson’s and Lenox’s incompetence.

Most important, Bill Dabney’s parents had arrived from Birmingham, or rather nearby Kidderminster, a town on the River Stour famous (it was a dubious fame) for its carpet factories. Mr. Dabney, a squat, solid man with a Midlands accent that made every word sound heavy in his mouth, was a farmer. He grazed cattle as well, and did both jobs prosperously from the fashionable look of his fluttery and tiny wife, who spoke in a high-pitched voice. Lenox met with them at their hotel in St. Giles Street at a little after ten thirty.

“Of the Sussex Lenoxes?” were the first words of Mrs. Dabney.

“Yes,” said Lenox.

“A pleasure to meet you,” she said, the appraising look gone from her eye. “I was saying to Mr. Dabney only the other day that a visit to Sussex would be just the thing for us. The air there is clean, very clean indeed, and I’ve heard the parkland is handsome, very handsome indeed. And all the small villages!”

There was a great deal more like this before Lenox was able to turn the conversation to their son, and then it was Mr. Dabney who answered.

“What is he like?” said Lenox.

“Alive, we pray.”

“I should think he is, Mr. and Mrs. Dabney.”

“Do you?” Now it was the farmer’s turn to bestow an appraising glance upon Lenox. “I hope you’re right.”

“It would help to know what he was like-what he looked like, what his personality was like, whether he would go anyplace special besides home in a crisis.”

“For the last question, no, I don’t think so-he loved Oxford and Kidderminster most, always said he’d finish in one of the two places. He was a happy child, Mr. Lenox, loved to play on the farm, he did. Knew every animal by name, plowed every row of seed by my side. Which isn’t to say he neglected his studies, however.”

“Always very bright,” added Mrs. Dabney. “Studied very hard, and earned his place at Oxford quite easily.”

“Did you ever meet Tom Stamp or George Payson?”

“Yes indeed, he brought them to Kidderminster,” said Mrs. Dabney. “We have a house to accommodate a number of guests.”

“How long did they stay there?”

“A week, Mr. Lenox, last year. Then went down to Stratford for two nights. Over winter break.”

“What did you make of George Payson?”

“Lovely manners,” said Mr. Dabney. “A fine young lad. Took an interest in the farm as well.”

A picture was forming in Lenox’s mind of Dabney’s character. Solid, proud, middle class, and above all intelligent-that was the part of his personality that everybody from Hatch to Stamp had mentioned. He decided to move on to a more speculative sort of question.

“Would he be the sort of lad to follow George Payson simply out of loyalty? If this case centered on George, for example, rather than the other way around”-Lenox was thinking of the Jesus ball-“would it be like Bill to drop everything to help a friend?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Dabney-but was halted by her husband’s obvious introspection. All three of them fell into a momentary silence.

“Yes, I think so, Mr. Lenox,” he said finally. “You see, in the Midlands we’re slower to change. My family has been on the same farm for three generations. We don’t tend to flash between London and Oxford and the countryside, really. We like to get used to things. We like to stay put. We’re not changeable”

“I see,” said Lenox.

“So I think the answer is yes. Bill would have been very loyal to his friends. Almost stubbornly so, I’d reckon.” He paused. “But with that said, Mr. Lenox, if in fact this matter was primarily about George Payson, bless his soul, why would Bill still be gone? Wouldn’t he have come back?”

Instantly Lenox saw where the younger Dabney’s sharpness came from.

“A point well taken, Mr. Dabney. I think the answer must be fear. Perhaps neither lad realized how serious the matter was until George Payson was murdered. If I understand what Bill is like, he may have been savvy enough to recognize the danger and go on concealing himself.”

They spoke for about twenty minutes longer, and over the course of that time Lenox saw the tremendous sorrow and worry that underlay Mr. Dabney’s deliberate manner and Mrs. Dabney’s flightiness-the anxiety about their only son. He disliked seeing people at their weakest, their most vulnerable, as his job continually forced him to do. Did it give him a skeptical attitude about human beings? It wasn’t impossible.

He thanked them when they parted and promised to keep in close touch. Leaving them at their hotel, he went to the Bodleian, where he did another hour of fruitless research. Just before getting up to go find some lunch, he wrote Goodson a short note, saying that he no longer thought it possible that Bill Dabney had been behind George Payson’s death, as they had once speculated. It seemed improbable after that meeting.

He fell ravenously to a chop of beef with potatoes, peas, and gravy at the Bear and had a glass of shandy with it. After polishing it off he sat at his old table, initials carved into its surface, and drank a coffee while he looked out the window. The days had been getting colder, and the warmth of the coffee was renewing. In the warm, low-ceilinged Bear, he felt almost content-though all the while knowing that the case, getting colder by the minute, awaited him outside.

Before going back to the Randolph to consult with Graham-who he thought should perhaps shadow Goodson on the trail of Geoffrey Canterbury-Lenox took a quick walk through the old stone courtyards of Corpus Christi, close by the Bear.

Corpus was perhaps the most learned college, famous for its classicists and humanists despite being the traditional terrain of the Bishops of Winchester. Erasmus, with whom Lenox was at the moment wrestling as he read The Praise of Folly, had once famously praised its library for containing books in Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek. Balliol had always been more outgoing, more athletic, than places like Corpus Christi, the reason it produced more politicians and explorers than writers and clergymen. Still, Corpus was a small gem, like one of its giant neighbors, Merton and Christ Church, in perfect miniature. Peering in through the windows of the library he saw rows of students with their heads bent over Homer, Herodotus, Cicero, Josephus. It gave him pleasure to think of them so gravely setting out for lives devoted to knowledge, to the great tradition of thought-it gave him pleasure that this went on even after George Payson’s death.

Back at the Randolph there was another note from Dallington. It was somewhat surprising: Dear Lenox-in lieu of further instructions from you I spent a bit of time thinking about the note under that blighted cat, and think I may have come up with something. At school we used to have the Eton cross-tip, a code we wrote notes in so that they’d be indecipherable to the Beaks. Just substituting numbers for letters, really, like this: x/1/2/3/4/5

1/a/b/c/d/e

2/f/g/h/ij/k

3/l/m/n/o/p

4/q/r/s/t/u

5/v/w/x/y/z You catch the drift, I’m sure-the letter k would be represented as 25, or the letter v would be 51. We had to combine i and j to make it work. Oh, and an x in front of a number meant it was simply a number (so you could write “Meet at 330” in code without some ass wondering what 330 meant). Well, have another look: X12/43 21 31 25/x2 Plain as day, that translates to: 12/SFLK/2 At first I thought it was rot but then I asked the pater what he thought, and he said why of course it must be the 12th Suffolk, 2nd Battalion-which needless to say rang a bell. Have you looked it up yet? The regiment and battalion of your lads, Wilson and Lysander. According to my encyclopedia, the 12th Regiment of Foot was raised in 1685 as the Norfolk Regiment of Foot. Got madly decorated for the Fourth Mysore War (sounds like a laugh) in 1799. Currently commanded by Robert Meade. Hope this helps. Here at the ready. Dallington.

Lenox had been meaning to look up the 12th Suffolk 2nd to see if any other names were familiar. He hadn’t, but upon reading this he left the room quickly. Why would Payson leave two clues, both the September Society card and this note, pointing to that regiment, that battalion? Would he have counted on somebody-perhaps Hatch, perhaps Stamp-recognizing the Eton cross-tip? Dallington had been at Eton, but was it common to other schools as well, the code? It had been remiss of him not to research it.

It took very little time in the Reading Room of the Bodleian to find a military history of the last hundred years devoted to the 12th Suffolk, which contained at least four battalions. Rapidly flipping through the pages, Lenox read that the 2nd usually had about eight hundred men at a time, which would mean about fifty-five officers, which would mean that in the last century there had been some three hundred officers in the battalion. A page was cited where their pictures and names were given. He flipped to it and almost at once found Lysander, then searched for his picture-younger, but without a doubt him.

Then, more methodically, he scrolled through the fifty-five names. Twenty-six of these would form the September Society. (Why was it called that? His mind racing, Lenox asked himself all the questions he had been saving.) Henry Nelson, Mark Noakes, Matthew Ottshott, Tim Patterson…

Lenox froze.

The next name in the list-he read it, reread it, triple-checked it.

James Payson.

Could it be? It must be right-yes, it was right.

James Payson had served in the 12th (Suffolk) Regiment of Foot, 2nd Battalion.