A Death in the Small Hours

“Being in prison? I knew the risks.”

“Why did you do it?” asked Lenox

Wells shrugged. “I didn’t want to live out my life looking for farthings that had slipped down between the floorboards, like my father. It’s no easy life, being a grain merchant. The big boys in London are after your customers, the marketplaces, people will go to Bath and Taunton. It was a losing proposition.”

“We have a few questions.”

“All right.”

“Where is the knife that killed Weston?”

“With the man who killed him, I expect. Or tossed into a ditch nearby.”

“It would not be in Captain Musgrave’s house, I suppose?” said Lenox.

Wells narrowed his eyes, genuine bemusement on his face. “Why would it be there?”

“Musgrave was not your compatriot in all this?”

Wells laughed. “I know you heard about his getting angry with me for saying hello to Cat Scales — Catherine Musgrave, she must be now — because you asked. No, we wasn’t compatriots, as you say.”

“Randall and Fontaine worked for you,” Dallington said. “Who else?”

Wells clammed up. “Nobody.”

“How much coin could you produce in a month?” asked Lenox. It was a question to which the boys from London were eager to know the answer. They had run the machine but feared pressing it too hard, lest it break.

“Don’t know. Made them as fast as I could.”

Lenox decided he would leave the technical questions about the casting, the tools and dies, to other men. “Who sold you the machine?” he asked.

Wells laughed out loud. “A man with a hat,” he said.

“Come, Wells, tell us and the judge may be lenient with you.”

“It’s not worth my skin, I told you already. I want Bessie and the boy to lead long lives, gentlemen.”

The remaining few questions they asked took them down no new path. With a sigh they shook Wells’s hand — who offered it quite generously — and left.

“We have our man, anyhow,” Dallington said to Lenox after they had bidden Oates farewell.

It was a certainty — a peace of mind — that Lenox would wish he still had not long afterward.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

His realization came when he was asleep. He woke with a wrench, heart thudding, mind slow and fast at once. In the blind night he could not yet understand what. He stood up, poured himself a glass of water, and tried to collect his wits, waiting for his brain to catch up with his sense of panic.

Then he realized: Wells.

This was a relief, actually. It wasn’t Sophia, wasn’t Jane, wasn’t Edmund in trouble, but as his senses returned he did see with three o’clock clarity (sometimes mistaken, sometimes revelatory) that it all felt wrong, about Wells. There was an error somewhere in the chain of logic.

He tried to calm himself. What were the details nagging at his thoughts? What had he overlooked, in his eagerness to solve the case, an old hack coming out of retirement? He cursed his pride.

The small room adjoining their bedroom, which he had been using as a study, was strewn with papers, books, pens, inkpots, flowers from the garden, tobacco. He went in and lit the lamp, shut the door so he wouldn’t wake his wife. Two more sips of the water and his breathing had slowed to normal.

To begin with there was the knife. Perhaps the circumstances of its discovery had biased him toward thinking the knife was a meaningful clue — but how many concealed knives covered in human blood could a village like Plumbley possibly hold?

Still, it was not the knife that had roused him from sleep.

It was the black dog.

How had they accounted for that fourth vandalism? The first, upon Fripp’s shop window, had been an accident; the second, when the thieves took Wells’s clock, a message and a repossession; the third, a XXII upon the church door, had been a message to Wells from his partners in Bath, more certain and less dangerous than a private note, of when they would come for the money — and a reminder perhaps that they were not afraid to vandalize the village.

But the black dog that had appeared upon the church door five days before Lenox arrived: what accounted for that image? How stupid it was not to have asked Wells! Where had he even been when—

Here, Lenox suddenly perceived with a sinking heart, was his greatest misstep: They had never checked Wells’s alibi. What had the man said to him, in the grain shop? Lenox had a gift for remembering alibis, and he ought to have remembered this one sooner: My servants can attest to my presence at home yesterday evening. I was up rather late, past two in the morning, working on my books, and at least two of them stayed up with me, fetching drinks, managing the fire. They’ll tell you I never left my study.

What was the meaning of this? He had been quick to offer the statement, certainly. Too quick? It had the feel of a manufactured alibi, asking his servants to stay up late with him, and then mentioning that time, two in the morning, that put him just clear of possible responsibility for Weston’s death.

There was nothing substantial to disprove Wells’s guilt, and the man had admitted it himself, freely and openly. Why on earth would he have done that if his alibi were solid?

Still, that black dog … and with the knife, and Musgrave’s abscondment, he wondered if there was a connection between Wells and the captain.

There must be some kind of explanation, he thought. He would speak with Dallington in the morning.

He felt heavy in his limbs and knew that, without much effort, he might fall back to sleep. It was necessary that he speak to Wells again — pose him these few questions, perhaps challenge him on his eagerness to provide an alibi — but it could wait until morning.

Lady Jane stirred when he returned to bed. “Are you quite well, Charles?”

“Hush now, go back to sleep.”

“Is it your speech?”

“Yes,” he said. “Just looking over it.”

He knew it was what he ought to have been doing, less than a week from the most significant moment of his professional life, but there was no need to have lied. For the thousandth time since he entered Parliament he thought about the modest disappointment it had been to him — how he had loved politics so ardently from the outside, longed to be like his father and his brother, and how since achieving that aim, though he did his duty with great care, it had never excited his passion quite the way crime did. He couldn’t recall waking up in the middle of the night over Parliament, and though it racked his nerves to worry about Wells there was a thrill to it as well, the thrill of his mind doing what it was best suited to do.

He woke several hours later without remembering that he had fallen asleep. The morning was again rainy, the sky steel-colored and sifted with cloud and mist, the outlandish green of the gardens more stark and differentiated than on a sunny day.

Lenox was an early riser, and most mornings in Everley he had used the time to ride out on Sadie. He would delay that pleasure now, until he had seen his cousin, Dallington, and Wells, in that order. He went to the butler in the front hall.

“Nash, is my cousin in his study?”

“No, sir, Mr. Ponsonby is upon the road to Bath with Constable Oates, accompanying Mr. Wells.”

Lenox had forgotten. “Damn it all,” he said. “They left early?”

“Yes, sir, by Mr. Ponsonby’s carriage.”

“I think he might have waited.”

“Sir?”