The September Society

CHAPTER THREE

That night in the small hours, just past four o’clock, Lenox lay dreaming beneath the heavy covers of his bed when there was a knock at his door. At first it just nudged his consciousness, and he turned over, hugging the blankets close to his chin. At the second knock, however, he started out of his rest.

“Yes?” he called out.

“May I enter, sir?”

“What? Oh, yes, certainly, Graham. Come in.”

Graham opened the door and came a few feet into the room.

“Just a social visit, then?” Lenox said with a smile.

“I’m afraid you have a guest, sir.”

“Who is it?” he said, sitting upright and blinking his eyes awake. “Is anything the matter? Is it Jane?”

“No, sir,” said Graham, and Lenox’s shoulders relaxed an inch. “It is Lady Annabelle Payson.”

Annabelle Payson? He had met her once or twice. She must have had a pressing reason to come, as it was well known that she detested London. At eighteen she had made a spectacularly unhappy marriage to James Payson, a captain in the army and lad-about-town in the forties, who had moved her into his West End flat. They had had one son before he died off in the East (some said shot over a card table, though others said it was in battle), and now she lived entirely in the country with her brother.

“Has she said why she’s come, Graham?”

“No, sir, though I might venture to say that her ladyship seems agitated.”

“Very well,” Lenox said with a sigh. “It’s a bit of a bother. Do give her some tea, though, won’t you? And I’d like a cup myself. I’ll be down as soon as I can.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Decent of you to be so stoic about the interruption to your own rest, by the way.”

“Not at all, sir,” said Graham.

After the butler left, Lenox went to the west window of his bedroom, which stretched from his knees to the ceiling. Outside there was a dense fog, though he could make out a few figures on Hampden Lane, heads bowed, on late errands of mercy and menace. The sound of wet leaves dropping from the trees made its way to him. And a small smile crept onto his face. A cup of tea, and who knew what after that? Another case in play, and all the better that it came at this hour. These late ones were often the most interesting.

He appeared downstairs a while later, changed from his striped blue and white pajamas into a gray suit.

“How do you do, Lady Annabelle?” he said.

He could have answered his own question: She was not at all well. A gaunt and frightened-looking woman, she wore a dark brown dress that bespoke her long widowhood. Once she had been pretty but no longer. She was several years older than Lenox, perhaps forty-five. He racked his brains for a memory of the terrible Payson. Handsome; awful temper; that mystery around his death. He had fought somewhere or other and picked up a violent red scar on his neck, Lenox remembered. It was the strangeness of his death more than anything else that stood out in his scant memory of the man.

“I’m terribly sorry to bother you, Mr. Lenox,” she said, worriedly clutching at a long stone necklace she wore.

“No, no, don’t be,” he said. “I’m an early riser anyway.”

“I should have waited until morning, I know, but sometimes a problem is so burdensome that one feels it cannot wait.”

“Of course,” he said. “You wouldn’t have slept. What is the problem?”

“I need your acumen, Mr. Lenox.”

“And my discretion?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

Lenox shrugged. “Well, if you’ve come to me I suppose you haven’t gone to the police.”

“That’s correct, Mr. Lenox, you’re correct. You see, in the first place, I wouldn’t want to go to the police. But in the second place, I think the police would have laughed. I know you won’t laugh.”

“Certainly not, no.”

“You can’t go to the police and simply say, ’There’s a dead cat in my son’s rooms at college,’ can you. They’d think you mad.”

“A dead cat?”

“Yes, Mr. Lenox; that’s the root of all the problems.” Again she reached for her necklace.

Wearily he thought, Oh, no, not one of these.

“You seem preoccupied, Lady Payson. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Yes, please,” she said as he motioned to Graham, “but Mr. Lenox, will you come to Oxford with me?”

“I suppose that depends,” he said. “Is the problem a dead cat? Is that the only problem?”

She seemed slightly calmer. “It’s certainly not the only problem.”

“What is, then?”

“I’ve come because my son, George, has disappeared.”