see his own house dark and uninhabited, and whether because of the rain or the kind of evening he had had, it struck a chord of deep sadness somewhere within him. He shook it away and, with the coachman, Staples, dragged Dallington into the study and laid him, half-crumpled, upon the couch.
Soon McConnell arrived, full of authority and good sense. In truth he had had his own battle with alcohol, but they had been far more private than this, had indeed occasioned relatively little notice beyond his friends. This made Lenox angrier: there were people’s reputations at stake besides the young detective’s.
McConnell forced Dallington to sit up and examined him very carefully, splashing water over his face, asking him questions. Lenox retreated a discreet distance, though not far enough that he couldn’t hear. Well.
At last McConnell finished. “He’ll be fit enough in a week’s time, with rest,” he said. “If he had gone on drinking much longer I would have worried, however, about poisoning. His liver is in a fragile state to start with, and he’s feverish. We must hope it doesn’t progress.”
Together they managed to get Dallington into a bed upstairs, loosening his tie and removing his shoes. Then they sat together in Lenox’s study for a long while, speaking in the hushed, comfortable tones of old friends called out on some unexpected duty together late at night, smoking their short cigars. Finally, at two or three in the morning, McConnell said he had better return to Toto — and of course to George, his daughter, was what went unsaid, for it never did to care too much about one’s children. Lenox understood.
The detective went to sleep in his own bed then, and stayed there very late into the morning.
He subsequently wished that he had risen before he did. For when he finally went to his study, it was to discover upon a silver salver on his desk a telegram that turned his heart to ice:
CHARLES YOU MUST RETURN IMMEDIATELY STOP THERE HAS BEEN A MURDER STOP ALL SAFE AT EVERLEY THANK GOD STOP TOWN IN A STATE OF PANIC STOP EARLIEST TRAIN POSSIBLE STOP PONSONBY
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Six hours later Lenox stood on Plumbley’s town green. At his side was Oates, the police constable, who was much shaken.
“Are you sure you can carry on?” Lenox asked.
“I can,” said Oates.
“If you need to retire for a few hours—”
“No, no, nothing of the sort.”
“So he was lying upon this spot.”
“And a knife between his shoulder blades, as dirty and cowardly a way—” Oates stopped himself. “Yes, he was lying here, sir. The poor fellow.”
Lenox had returned by the first train. Unsure what to do with Dallington he had simply dragged the young man — coherent but wan — from bed, had two footmen place him by the window in the first-class car, and brought him along. He was lying in a bedroom at Everley now. Dr. Eastwood was busy with the more serious matter of an autopsy, but had promised to check in on the lad that evening. In the meanwhile Lenox and Frederick — his face a mask of calm, his emotions, when you spoke to him, deeply disturbed — had come to the center of town, where they had found the corpse upon the green. A shock of red hair was the first thing visible, in full view of St. Stephen’s church, of Fripp’s, of Wells’s, and of the rows of mild shops and houses that squared it off. Once he had brought Lenox to the scene of the crime, Frederick had left to go see the lad’s numerous family members in their homes.
The green was not large — you could walk from end to end in perhaps a minute and a half, and easily have a conversation across it at a quiet moment — and Lenox was persuaded somebody in the houses must have seen something.
He restated this opinion to the constable now.
“I sent word around with the women. Nobody has come forward,” said Oates. “And everybody loved the boy.”
“Yet after the crimes of the past few weeks I would have imagined many open eyes, open windows.”
“Nobody has come forward,” repeated Oates stubbornly. “And everybody loved the boy.”
The boy — his body found corkscrewed, knife in its back, his face, according to Oates, full of horror — was also one of the few people in town Lenox had known.
It had been Weston.
Lenox’s first thought when he heard this news, arriving in Plumbley, was of the constable’s rather winning description of his polling-day drunkenness. His second was of the victim’s extreme youth. Nineteen! He had barely lived. It grieved Lenox powerfully.
Of course he knew that in all likelihood one day longer in Plumbley would not have altered his understanding of the case, or prevented the violent assault upon Weston, and yet he resented Dallington for fetching him back to London at such a crucial moment.
A sort of voluntary commission of deputies had sprung up now, men from across the town. Wells and Fripp, as well as the pub owners, usually implacable enemies, were among them, a group of ten or twelve. They ringed the square, answering questions from their neighbors and protecting the site of the crime from trampling feet. Lenox wished they had left the body for him to examine
In the back of his mind, like the nuisance of a bee buzzing against a window, an idea or a thought was trying to come through, something that bothered him. Something about Weston? About the vandalisms? It had been there all morning, a low hum of agitation. There was no use doing anything but waiting for it to come out on its own.
Methodically, he began to circle the site where the corpse had lain, very slowly. “Where did he live?” he asked, eyes still to the ground.
“In a pair of rooms behind the police station,” said Oates.
“Did he have any help?”
“A charwoman who came in mornings, fixed a few meals for him. She didn’t live in, obviously.”
“There’s no chance she would have been there at night?”
“I shouldn’t think so. We might easily ask her. She arrived to work this morning and found us all here, looking at his body. Half killed her, it did. She went straight home for a glass of malmsey.”
Lenox stopped and wrote this down in his notebook, then continued, eyeing the ground in his broadening circles. So far he had seen nothing, but there was light left and he was a patient man. “Did he ever go out so late in the evenings?”
A dozen witnesses had confirmed that they had passed across the town green at 11:00, when the King’s Arms closed, and there had been no body upon it then.
“I don’t know,” said Oates.
“But it wasn’t part of his duties to patrol the village?”
“No, sir.”
“Not even after the vandalisms?”
“No, sir. Perhaps it should have been.”
Wells, Fripp, Weston, the church doors. What connected them? He had reached the outer perimeter of the town green now, and he went back to the spot where the corpse had lain. He began his circles again. “Then he must have been called out,” said Lenox. “Have you looked in his rooms yet?”
“Not yet.”
“If we’re lucky there may be a message. If we’re luckier still it may be signed.” He made another note now. “I would also like to go through his effects.” He didn’t want to say the words, but there was always the chance, however out of character it might have seemed, that Weston had been the vandal. Drawings, paint, any of it might still be in his rooms.
“We can go directly after we finish here, if you like,” said Oates. “It isn’t a hundred yards.”
