A Death in the Small Hours

“Mr. Wells?” said Lenox.

“I am. Who’s asking?”

“My name is Charles Lenox, sir.” He shook hands. “I’m staying with my cousin at Everley, at the moment.”

Wells’s manner shifted just slightly toward the deferential. “Oh?”

“I’m also trying to help him — and Mr. Oates and Mr. Weston — discover who’s been vandalizing the town. Including your shop, I understand. Your window was broken?”

“We’d string the lout up by his thumbs, if I had my way, who did this,” said Wells.

“What happened?”

“It’s a short enough story. Old Fripp, down the road, had his window broken, and along about six or seven days later they did mine. Same kind of rock, same picture wrapped around it.”

“Do you have the picture?”

“I gave it to Oates.”

Lenox looked around. “Your shop seems to thrive.”

“Thank you, sir. It’s not been easy.”

“Does Captain Musgrave shop here?”

Wells was a purposeful-looking man. He had a dark mustache and was dressed in a black apron with a bow tie. He betrayed no real emotion at Musgrave’s name. “Not any longer.”

“He did once, then?”

“He doesn’t have much in the way of livestock or farmland,” said Wells, “but he stopped his cook buying her flour and corn here.” The word corn, here in Somerset, referred to any kind of grain — oats, barley, wheat.

“And the clock that was stolen from you — who knew it was here?”

“Anyone who’d been in the shop the last fifteen years, I suppose. That’s all, if you want to round them up.”

Lenox looked at him levelly. “Thank you.” He had noticed that in a small back corner of the store, next to a padlocked door, there was a narrow band of lighter, newer floorboards, mismatched with the timeworn ones they lay alongside. “And this is your expansion?”

“Yes. We can keep more stock with the new shelves there,” he said. “It’s been a good year for business.”

“Would you mind if I examined the place they took the clock from?” said Lenox.

Wells gestured toward a shelf over the door, now empty. “Be my guest. Do you want to stand on a stool?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

As Wells brought a stool over, Lenox asked, “Did the thieves come in after the rock, through the window?”

“They reached through it and unlocked the door. Left it standing wide open.”

Lenox ascended the stool. “How did they get the clock down? Was this stool standing here?”

Wells nodded. “The same one.”

“It’s very rickety — I wouldn’t like it if you let go at the moment. Makes me think there were two of them. Was it heavy, the clock?”

“Yes. Why?”

“It would require a man taller than I am or stronger to fetch down a heavy object from this position. You have a high-ceilinged place here, and I don’t doubt most men would have dropped the clock, including you. It would have been difficult for one man to take it away very quickly.”

“True enough,” said Wells, his voice grudgingly impressed.

“What I wonder is why they risked it, knowing the town must have been watchful after the first incident.”

“They’re scoundrels.”

Lenox tested the shelf’s sturdiness, decided he trusted it, and then hauled himself up, rather laboriously, so that he was resting on his forearms, feet off the stool. “Hold steady down there,” he called.

“Be careful,” said Wells, sounding alarmed.

There was nothing interesting on the shelf, except the lighter-colored wood where the four feet of the clock must have stood for many years. As he was coming down to the stool, though, and drew eye level with the window, he saw something: In small lettering in the windows it read F. W., PURVEYOR. It gave him pause. He filed the information away for later.

“Who do you think did these things?” asked Lenox, when he was on the ground again. “Captain Musgrave?”

“I wish I could say.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No,” said Wells, but his eyes shifted slightly — or so Lenox thought.

“There’s no shame in fear.”

“I said I wasn’t, thank you.”

Lenox was silent a moment, looking around the shop. “Very well, then,” he said. “If you think of anything further to tell me, you can go through Oates, or you can find me at Everley. I hope we may catch him for you.”

“Here’s Mr. Oates, now,” said Wells, gesturing toward the door, behind Lenox.

Lenox turned just as the constable came in. “Hallo, Oates,” he said.

“Mr. Lenox, sir. How about that last chap?”

“The dog thief?”

With more animation than he had possessed before in Lenox’s company, Oates launched into the story of Miss Pershing and the dog thief to Wells. The detective, as soon as he politely could, left the shop.

It was just darkening, now, the sky a twilight pink above the rising hills in the distance. A feeling of sweet melancholy filled Lenox’s chest as he gazed out upon it. He looked forward to the evening, the wood fire in the dining hall — his uncle still abjured coal, one of the last stubborn few — the good night to Sophia, the civilized and quiet supper, still served, out here in the country, a la francaise, with the dishes on the table where anyone could scoop themselves a potato when they wanted one, rather than, as all over London, a la russe, the Russian style, with the footmen serving from the left. Much more companionable that way.

In the still evening air he realized that what he felt was a sense of being home. Beyond a certain age one made a home for other people — for Jane, for Sophia — and lost that childhood sense of refuge and security. Perhaps it was because Frederick reminded him of his favorite person, his mother … but no, Lenox pushed that thought back, painful as it was. Even ten years later he didn’t like to think of her being gone.

He and the dogs stopped on their way into the post office. At any rate it was what Plumbley called a post office; as so often in the country it was the front room of the home of an older woman, who in exchange for a small stipend received the mail and passed it on to the postman. (A funny quirk of the language, as the Times had pointed out recently, that in Britain the Royal Mail delivered the post, while in the United States, the Postal Service delivered the mail.)

Lenox knocked on the door and was called in. The dogs were welcome here — there was a bowl of water set by the door for them, which they took turns lapping at — and they tumbled in alongside him. “Hello, Mrs. Walsingham,” he said. “Any post for the Hall?”

“Nought but a telegram. But that is indeed for you, sir,” said the redoubtable old specimen sifting through a pile of letters.

Idly Lenox wondered whether she knew all the gossip in town — so easy for a wax seal to fall open! — or whether she was honest. Surely the latter. They would have perhaps taken the job from her otherwise. Telegram in hand, he thanked her and left.

He was sure it would be his brother who telegrammed him, with further advice, but here he was out. In fact it was from his friend Thomas McConnell, a sometime Harley Street physician of Scottish descent, married to Jane’s cousin and dear friend Toto. In other times he had helped Lenox with his cases, an impromptu medical examiner, but those days were long past. What could he be writing to say, urgently enough to wire rather than write a letter?