A Death in the Small Hours

“My uncle is in that carriage,” said Lenox. “Alive, I hope. I mean to go after him. Fortunately the ground is wet.”

“What can I do?”

“Telegram to Bath, go to Plumbley and tell—” But Lenox didn’t know who to tell. Then he remembered. “Send word for a John Dallington at the big house, and tell a Mr. Fripp.”

Jeffers nodded, somber. “Anything else?”

“The man to telegram in Bath is Archer. You may try any of them, though. They should be apprised of the situation immediately — and tell them to send men, if they can.”

Lenox and Jeffers shook hands and the detective flew from the station, handed over his half-crown to the boys, and vaulted himself aboard Sadie, who with all the eagerness in the world turned her head again in the direction of the road.

He would never forgive himself if anything had happened to his uncle, he thought.

Out upon the road again he passed a carriage almost immediately, not the one he was looking for, and realized with dismay that he could no longer be sure which of the fresh carriage tracks in the mud belonged to Frederick’s. Neither did he have a pistol, a constable, any means of convincing Wells to give up his cousin — for he was still convinced of Wells’s intimate involvement in the business. Lenox worried that he might do more harm than good. Still he rode on.

What did Wells intend to do with Freddie? Lenox had yet to fully consider the circumstances because finding Chalmers in the road had driven him so definitely to action, not reflection. Presumably Wells had some plan to which the groom — but not Frederick, or indeed, Oates — was superfluous. Did he mean to hold them hostage? Had Chalmers simply been the one who fought back, and been shot for his troubles?

Then, though he was riding pell-mell, a realization came to Lenox in slow motion: If Wells had commandeered the carriage, he must have had an accomplice in his actions.

Why? For the simple reason that there was no chance Oates, Frederick, Chalmers, or Wells had been carrying a gun, and what Chalmers had suffered was a gunshot wound.

Perhaps Musgrave, or one of the coiners from Bath, had met Wells out here on the road. Perhaps the foreknowledge of that plan was what had made Wells seem so sanguine, so untroubled, in their interview the day before. Interested in the cricket, even. He had known he would be free again soon.

Think, Charles, he chided himself.

The rain began to come down harder. It cooled Sadie, but it slowed her, too. Lenox brought her to a trot for a moment to get his cloak from one of the saddlebags, and while he was in there fumbled out a cube of sugar. It had fallen into the mud but he knew she wouldn’t mind — he wiped it against the saddle, blinking away the raindrops, and gave it to the horse, who was breathing heavily but seemed in no danger of outrunning herself.

The difficulty with the scenario was in its planning. How would Wells have been in contact with Musgrave, or with any of his accomplices in Bath? Even if he had, why would they risk coming out to see him? Clearly when Musgrave had left Plumbley he wasn’t worried about Wells shouldering the blame for Weston’s death.

As he was mounting the horse again, Lenox felt a chill.

Who were the three men in the carriage, now? Wells. Frederick. And Oates.

It was impossible. Oates with his fleshy, impassive, unintelligent face, his grief over his cousin.

Yet wasn’t he the most logical co-conspirator? There had been no evidence of another carriage stopping where Chalmers had fallen — only the one, Frederick’s. And Wells couldn’t have overpowered Oates, Chalmers, and Frederick together, even with a gun.

Lenox shook his head, yet a flood of inconsequential memories, small oddities of behavior, returned with great force to his mind. It was true that Oates had behaved strangely at moments. He hadn’t wanted Lenox to look at Weston’s correspondence, arguing overmuch for the boy’s privacy. Had he been afraid of a note implicating him? Or the canvas of the town green: Oates had uncovered nobody to help them, while Fripp had produced Carmody within ten minutes.

And the note from Weston to Oates! “Swells” seemed such an obvious nickname for the grain merchant, and all the lads in the pub had known it at once. Wouldn’t the constable have recognized it immediately? Wouldn’t Weston have used only a nickname he was sure his cousin would understand?

Lenox’s resistance to the idea was weakening. He hoped it wasn’t Oates — but, he thought, who had been in the grain merchant’s shop the first time Lenox visited? The constable.

Lenox remembered, too, Wells’s somewhat unusual insistence that he stay in Oates’s custody, the man from whom he should have most feared retribution. Beyond that there was Wells’s alibi, and his true, convincing outrage when he was asked if he had killed Weston. What if Wells had only confessed because he knew he had a way out? That Oates would spring him?

It had already, after only a few hours, been a long day, and these small, agitating thoughts, arriving in Lenox’s mind unbidden, seemed wrong, inaccurate. For half a mile of riding he dismissed the possibility from his mind.

Until, that is, he remembered a phrase from McConnell’s letter: The only fingerprints on the knife belonged to Constable Oates.

How many dozens of times in his experienced had it been the murderer who found the body, who found the weapon? Hadn’t Oates found the knife in the slop bucket at the last possible moment, that morning in the basement of Wells’s house, at the last throw of the dice?

With a terrible sense of dread Lenox began to fear that the accomplice wasn’t Musgrave at all. That it was Plumbley’s police constable. That Weston’s own cousin had murdered him.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The rain was gone forty minutes later, the weak yellow of the sun glittering in the branches of the trees, blackened by their wetness, that lined the road. Lenox had lost all track of the carriage ruts, and nearly all hope, too. The thought of Oates working with Wells was too terrible to contemplate, but it solved so many niggling doubts. It explained Wells’s behavior.

Now was the time to turn back. He had no way of knowing where Wells had taken Frederick — Wells and Oates, perhaps. His horse was getting genuinely tired. If Jeffers, the constable from West Buckland, had done as he said he would, by now they knew in Bath and Plumbley what had happened, and surely massive reinforcements would be patrolling this road soon.

Then there was Chalmers. Was he alive? If he was, could he tell them anything?

Yet something drove Lenox on. It was simple enough: his cousin, his mother’s dearest friend within her family, was in the hands of a man, perhaps of two men, who had proved they didn’t scruple at violence. If there was some chance of stumbling across them he had to try for it. He prayed for luck.

In the end, however, it wasn’t luck but design that helped him.

As he was cantering along — a gallop now was too much for Sadie, who had white froth at her mouth — he saw, half-trapped in the mud of the road, a bright blue ribbon. He stopped the horse and got down, realizing with a fizz of joy as he did that it was Frederick’s. It was the same ribbon, given to him by the garden society of Somerset, that he wore every day in his lapel.

Lenox knew Freddie; he would have dropped it from the window of the carriage on purpose. It was never the sort of thing to come loose on its own, either. How many times had Charles told his cousin of the importance of the trail of breadcrumbs in his cases, of small clues?

The question was why he had dropped it here, of all places.

Lenox looked around. The road had narrowed, vast tangles of maple branches intertwining to form a cathedral ceiling overhead. There was no evidence that he could see of a carriage stopping. Perhaps farther down the path.

He mounted the horse again and rode on, very slowly this time, his eyes scanning the space among the trees and along the ground. Nothing so far.

After a short distance, not above a tenth of a mile, he saw a shingle attached to a post. It read: