Home by Nightfall (7 page)

Meanwhile the boy was quietly eating a piece of bread—having apparently gone without, while his
ruse de guerre
to avoid school was in action, but having given up now. He did indeed look to be in fine health, now that he was upright. Mrs. Watson rushed him out then, saying that he could at least make the afternoon lessons—and he went, hair flattened, a slate and chalk tied to his belt, and a sprig of mint in his hand to sweeten his breath when he made his excuses to the teacher.

At last, this comedy of errors concluded, their interview could resume.

 

CHAPTER NINE

“Please tell us what you did on Thursday of last week, then, the next day, Mrs. Watson,” said Lenox, “beginning when you arrived at Mr. Hadley's house in Potbelly Lane. Was it at seven o'clock?”

Mrs. Watson, who looked as though she had never experienced a more eventful hour in her life, fanned her face, took a deep breath and a long sip of tea, collected her thoughts, and then nodded, trembling slightly. “Yes,” she said. “It was seven o'clock in the morning, as usual, sir.”

“And you found Mr. Hadley in a state of some consternation?”

“Sir?”

“Mr. Hadley was upset?”

She shook her head. “Not that I noticed at first, sir. I banked the coals, you know, sir, and fixed his tea and breakfast—he sleeps late on a Thursday, after traveling the previous three days—and when he came downstairs at half past, he was very friendly-like, sir, which is just as usual, you see.”

Hadley, a peaceable soul, smiled at her encouragingly. “Go on, Mrs. Watson,” he said.

“As I was cleaning the sitting room, where he sits and works at his desk, sir, he mentioned that he thought he had seen someone in the house last night—but I said to him quite honest that I had gone at five as usual. Then, of course, he was called away to his fire at Chichester.”

“You remained in the house,” Lenox said.

She nodded stoutly. “I did. Immediate upon him leaving, I locked up every door and window in the place, because I was not quite happy to be left there alone.”

Lenox shot a meaningful glance at Edmund, upon whom this new fact was not lost. Hadley, too, frowned. “Then how could someone have entered the house while I was gone?” he asked.

“It certainly would have been much more difficult, and suspicious, than if you had actually left all the doors and windows unlocked while you flew to Chichester, as you thought you had,” said Edmund.

“Mrs. Watson, you heard nothing? Nobody entering?” asked Lenox.

“No, sir.”

“And the first you heard of the missing sherry was that evening, when Mr. Hadley came to see you?”

“Yes, sir.” She grew defiant. “And you may search the house up and down—and it may please you to know that I do not even care for sherry! And nor does Mr. Watson, and the boys are too young to drink spirits, except on Saturdays.”

“We certainly don't think you took it,” said Hadley. He looked perturbed. “I wish we knew who had.”

Lenox ran through several more questions. He asked Mrs. Watson if the chalk figure was familiar to her (Hadley had replicated it upon a piece of paper), which it was not, and in detail about the construction of the house, which he presumed she knew as well as her master, if not better—specifically if there was anywhere that might have concealed a person who wished to hide. She was adamant that there was not.

Hadley looked horrified. “You think someone might have been in my house
the entire time
?” he asked.

“I don't know,” said Lenox.

“I tell you it's not possible,” said Mrs. Watson,
sirs
forgotten in her certitude. “After I locked the doors and windows I looked the house through and through. There's nowhere a person could have hid, not under the beds, not in a closet. Nowhere.”

Lenox went on to ask her in detail for her activities Thursday, so that they might try to estimate which hours she had been in the kitchen, and therefore less likely to hear someone enter by the front door. She thought she had gone back there at around noon, perhaps a little earlier, and come out to clean the front rooms at one o'clock. Nothing had been disturbed or altered in that interim. The front door had still been locked—she had checked, some of Mr. Hadley's nervousness having rubbed off on her before the telegram drew him away to Chichester.

At last they left, with their thanks. Mrs. Watson told Mr. Hadley that she would be to Potbelly Lane directly, now that her son's health was “improved,” which seemed a rather inaccurate word to Lenox, though he made no comment upon it.

“I hope that was of some assistance to you, gentlemen,” said Hadley.

“It was entertaining, at any rate,” Edmund answered.

“May I ask what course you now mean to pursue, Mr. Lenox?”

Lenox checked his pocket watch. It was just past one o'clock, and after so much exercise before breakfast, he found that he was famished. “I would like to look at your house,” he said, “and then speak with your neighbors. But first, I think I may need to eat something. Is it convenient for you if we call at your house in an hour's time, Mr. Hadley?”

“More than convenient. I wait upon your leisure, Mr. Lenox.”

“Thank you.”

“The house is number seven, with the blue shutters. I will be there.”

Soon the brothers were alone. “Well!” said Edmund, as they walked down the quiet streets of Markethouse, in the direction of the Bell and Horns. “You have brought me a far more interesting morning than the tenant rolls would have.”

Lenox shook his head, doubtful. “I cannot say I like it.”

“I'm surprised to see you look concerned,” said Edmund. “From what I understood, you missed this sort of thing, with all of your administrative duties.”

“I meant that I don't like a case I don't understand,” said Lenox.

“How do you mean?”

Lenox shrugged, then said, “What facts do we have? To begin with, how many crimes have been committed? One? Three? None? A missing bottle of sherry—there are a dozen innocuous explanations that present themselves for that. Would Mrs. Watson sincerely have wished us to search her house? Because
I
think Mr. Hadley is a gentle employer—very easy to take advantage of.

“And then, can we even be sure that the bottle was there in the first place? Mightn't he have been primed for some oddity by the evening before, and forgotten that he finished it?”

“I found him very convincing,” said Edmund.

“Well—yes. But the chalk figure, the face in the window. Nobody except Hadley saw them. He has no witnesses to confirm his story. Are we to believe it without any cavil? He might be losing his grip on reality.”

“Hm.”

“Then again,” said Lenox, as they strolled onward past a small churchyard, its trees pleasantly orange and red, the whistle of wind in them just audible, “there is the matter of the call to Chichester. That, at least, is verifiable. Indeed, I think we must verify it for ourselves before we proceed.”

Edmund nodded. He was taking tobacco from a small pouch in his coat pocket as they ambled, and packing it in a pipe with two fingers, face full of thought. “There are three possibilities, then,” he said. “First, that Hadley is mad, or badly mistaken. Second, that one of these things is suspicious—the face in the window, say—and the rest are easily explained, the chalk figure a child's drawing, the sherry mislaid or stolen…”

“And third,” said Lenox, “that it is all connected, and something very strange indeed is afoot in your little town.”

Edmund smiled. “Our little town, I think you are entitled to say, Charles, given that you have permanently returned. Tell me, is it wrong that I hope for the third possibility to be true?”

“Ha! No, of course not. It is exactly always what I hope for, you know—secretly.”

As the brothers walked on, talking about poor Hadley's troubles, Lenox almost thought he saw a look of peace in Edmund's face—the absence, anyway, of that carefully managed anguish that had drawn it inward for the past five weeks.

They ate a pleasant lunch at the Bell and Horns (Lenox was congratulated on his return to the parts by three different people), and after they had scraped their plates clean of the delicious spongy cake with which they rounded off the meal, and sipped their pint pots of ale down to nothing, they betook themselves to Hadley's house.

“Are you sure you can spare the afternoon?” asked Lenox of Edmund on the way. “I'm happy to proceed on my own—or drop it altogether.”

“There's nothing on earth I would rather be doing,” said Edmund. Then, a shadow passing over his brow, he said, “Other than spending time with the boys, obviously.”

“That goes without saying,” said Lenox, and then added quickly, in the hopes of distraction, “We're skipping over the most intriguing question of all, by the way.”

“What's that?”

“Hadley's collection of gemstones. How much is it actually worth? And how carefully did he look to see that none of them were missing?”

 

CHAPTER TEN

Hadley's neighbors on Potbelly Lane were an unfortunate combination: useless and extremely talkative. All of them knew Edmund by sight, as their Member of Parliament, and more than one had some issue they thought ought to be brought before the Commons—the Land Act, taxes, suffrage, in one instance a missing cat. They all admitted cheerfully that they had seen nothing, not the previous Wednesday nor the previous Thursday.

With one exception. Opposite Hadley's small, well-maintained house, which was white with a handsome blue trim, there was a ramshackle place, the remnant of an earlier architectural era—not a row house, but a gingerbread cottage with smudges of green garden on either side of it.

Here they discovered a retired solicitor named Root. He hadn't seen anyone entering Hadley's house on the previous Wednesday or Thursday. Intriguingly, however, he had seen the chalk drawing.

“You did?” said Lenox.

Root nodded. “Yes. I spotted it coming out of my house on Wednesday evening. It was still light out, so probably not after a quarter to seven. Awfully peculiar, you know. I wasn't likely to miss it.”

“Could you draw it for us?” asked Lenox.

“I'm not much of a hand at drawing.”

“Even a rough approximation would help.”

Root accepted a scrap of paper and a nub of charcoal, then spent a careful forty seconds at the table next to his door, tongue in the corner of his mouth. When he showed them the result of his work, Lenox felt excitement. It was nearly identical to the image Hadley had provided them. Something concrete, then, something to confirm that Hadley wasn't simply going mad. If anything, Root's figure had slightly more detail to it.

“Braids in the hair,” murmured Lenox.

“Yes,” said Root. “There weren't many distinguishing marks to the drawing, but I recall that one. And the mouth—that was what gave me rather a jolt. It wasn't a smile, as you would expect. Nor a frown. A straight line.”

“Expressionless,” said Lenox.

“Yes. There was something unsettling about it.”

“What did you think of the drawing at the time?” asked Lenox.

“Well, I thought enough of it that I stopped and looked at it for a moment before going on into town. I suppose I assumed some children had done it.”

“Even though Hadley doesn't have children?”

“I didn't give it all that much thought, you know, not enough to inquire of myself what children would have done it.”

“And now? What do you think?”

Root frowned. He was an older, acute man, contemplative. He had come to the door with his finger holding his place in a book. “If I consider it again,” he said, “though I'm not certain, I think perhaps it seems too … too expert for a child to have drawn it. Of course, I may only be ascribing that impression to it now, since two gentlemen have come to my door and asked me about it, including my representative in Parliament!”

Lenox nodded. “I understand. And you're sure you saw nothing else—nobody unusual loitering in the area of Mr. Hadley's house?”

“Only Mrs. Watson, whose family I have known sixty years.”

“Are you that long in this district, sir?” said Edmund, sounding surprised.

“I grew up here—left for London for thirty years, where I had offices in High Holborn, and now am back, in my mother and father's old home, though I spend the coldest months of the winter on the Continent, for my health. I know you by sight, however, Sir Edmund. It is a pleasure to meet you in person.”

Edmund put out his hand. “The pleasure is mine,” he said.

Root took the hand and dipped his head deferentially. They spoke for another few minutes, but the solicitor wasn't able to add any information to that which he had already given them. Nevertheless, as Lenox and Edmund walked across the street toward Hadley's, they were both animated—a clue, confirmation of a clue.

“Is this what it's always like?” Edmund asked.

“It's usually a good deal more frustrating than this. And there are a great number of doors slammed in your face, and occasionally slop thrown after your feet. And curses behind your back.”

“I say, that would be thrilling.”

“Well, I doubt Hadley is the man to do any of that, and here we are at his door,” said Lenox, “so you will have to wait your treat out.”

The chief impression Hadley's house gave was of unimpeachable tidiness. If he said there had been six bottles of liquor in the liquor stand, Lenox believed that there had been six bottles of liquor in the liquor stand. In the compact entry hall, there was a table with a clock on it, polished to a gleam, an empty calfskin card stand (no visitors that morning, at least), a paperweight, and a stack of precisely a week's newspapers, the
Times.
Lenox counted them surreptitiously with his finger. Here was another signal, like the collection of gemstones, that, while Hadley's house was small and he kept only a part-time servant, he was well off; the
Times
cost nine pounds a year, not an inconsiderable sum, and most men even of the middle class merely rented it for an hour's use each day, which cost a little above a pound per annum. (Lower down the scale, it was possible to rent the previous day's paper for about a quarter of that price.) Money: always something to keep in mind when a crime had taken place. Hadley's could have made him a target.