“No. And yet I feel so sure — the meaning seems so close.”
“Take your attention off of it,” said Lenox. “Sometimes that helps. Here, let’s go see Carmody’s clearing.”
Not quite half an hour later they stood there, a treeless ridge at the center of a dense wood. At some points the trees had been so close together it was hard to imagine horses passing between them, but there had certainly been horses here, and men, too. The ground was scuffed with hoofprints and kicked-up sod — it was damp still — and there was evidence of a makeshift fire. Perhaps the two murderers had grown cold, but would they have risked someone stumbling upon them?
There was one further remnant of their occupation of this site; Lenox, as he had at the town green, inspected the site minutely, but the only clue he found had been visible from the start, a brown glassale bottle, empty but with an alcoholic odor. A stiffening drink before they had met Weston, perhaps. The name on the bottle was Grimm’s — according to Oates a brewery that was popular throughout Somerset. No lead there.
Oates, the inspection complete, was ready to leave — it had started to drizzle — but Lenox stayed him. “Is this clearing well-known in Plumbley?” he asked.
“Fairly so. The children will play here from time to time, and Weston and I have rousted our share of vagrants and fruit pickers, itinerants, like, from it.”
“If I passed along this road and by this wood for the first time I would never have known it was here.”
“No.”
“And it’s some ten minutes’ walk in. Hardly an intuitive place to stop.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you not find that strange, that our out-of-town visitors knew of it?”
Oates shrugged. “There are plenty’ve folk who know this switch of the countryside by heart.”
“From outside Plumbley?”
“Perhaps.”
Lenox stood, thinking, for a moment. “I just wonder,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Let’s carry on.”
They were on foot, and it took them ten minutes to get back to the road and, from there, another fifteen to walk to Musgrave’s house.
This time the butler admitted them without demur to a handsomely furnished drawing room, long and rectangular. On one of the room’s long walls, painted directly onto the plaster, was a series of French paintings — not quite to Lenox’s taste, cherubim chasing each other through pale blue and pink landscapes. Between each painting in the sequence stood a plinth with a marble bust upon it. Opposite this long wall was a range of windowed doors, showing off a serene little stretch of garden.
Lenox took a spot on an ornately carved cherrywood sofa with blue cushions, and Oates balanced himself on the very front edge of a chair nearby. He seemed better today, his face calm again. Both men soon had cups of bone china placed before them. In ten minutes they held only the dregs of some excellent coffee; Captain Musgrave was making them wait.
It gave Lenox time to ponder the man’s character. What to make of a person who came to Plumbley and furnished a house this way — the butler, the coffee, the cherubim? When Dr. McGrath had lived here in Church Lane this had been a comfortable, unspectacular place. Now it looked like a Parisian drawing room. Was Musgrave a cruel epicure, particular in his tastes, unkind to his wife when she failed to meet them?
Most soldiers would not answer to such a description. There was also something that had left Lenox uneasy from the start. If Musgrave were truly the type to act such a tyrant, if his exertion of will over his modestly born wife was so total — even to the point that the village suspected him of some violence against her — why would he ever have acceded to move to the place of her birth? A place to which he had no connection himself?
Finally they saw him approach the French doors from the garden, a great bounding dark bloodhound at his side. Oates and Lenox both stood.
“How do you do?” Musgrave said. “Please excuse me for keeping you.”
“Not at all,” said Lenox, bowing slightly at the waist, hands behind his back.
“You are Charles Lenox, I presume?”
“Yes.”
Musgrave extended a hand. “Captain Josiah Musgrave.”
He was a very pale, red-cheeked, slender man, with black hair and dark eyes. No doubt he was considered handsome, though a critical eye might have quarreled with the set of his jaw, thrust slightly too angrily forward.
He had yet to acknowledge Oates, who was standing in front of his chair. Lenox, making a rapid judgment of Musgrave’s character, decided on an appeal to class. “You see now, Captain Musgrave, that I may summon the law enforcement if you wish me to do so. But perhaps it would be better to speak as two gentlemen.”
Musgrave inclined his head. “Just so.”
“Oates, my uncle is at Mr. Carmody’s house. Perhaps you might go there and aid him?”
Oates, to his credit, shot Lenox a look of canny comprehension, and nodded his way out of the room.
“Would you like more coffee?” Musgrave asked.
Best to preserve the tone of a social call. Lenox assented.
He would have to tread carefully. There were men in Scotland Yard now trying to raise this art of detection to a science, and much of their concentration had been devoted to the art of interrogation. Lenox admired and respected their efforts — in fact wished that he might donate some of his own time to such studies — but he had also found that too rigid and systemic an approach to this sort of interview could be counterproductive, hindering rather than helping the interviewer.
For instance: The wisdom of these men at Scotland Yard dictated that the first step in such an interview was to begin by attempting to shock one’s interlocutor into confession. So that Lenox should, by rights, have said to Musgrave without preamble, “Why did you murder Weston last night?”
He suspected that this might not work with Musgrave, who seemed self-protective and perhaps slightly brittle in his temperament, liable to suspect effrontery even where none was intended. Lenox had a great many questions, and he didn’t want to scare Musgrave’s coolness away.
He began, therefore, by saying, “You have heard of the murder two evenings past?”
“Yes, a terrible thing.”
“It is pro forma, but I must ask you some questions.”
“Why me?”
“You were seen walking upon the town green an hour or so before the murder.”
“Surely you cannot suspect me? An officer in the military?”
“No,” said Lenox, and then, making his voice confidential, “we believe we may apprehend the criminal sooner than we had dared hope, in fact.”
“Ah. Good.”
It was difficult to tell what emotion passed through Musgrave’s face now, if any. His black dog, which had been sitting upright, slumped into a curled shag at his feet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Perhaps you could begin by telling me something about yourself,” said Lenox.
Musgrave shrugged. “There is little enough to tell. I was born to two excellent parents in Bath, who purchased me a commission in the Tenth Regiment of Foot when I was still in an Eton jacket. I took up my commission some twelve years ago, and sold it out in 1870, just before it looked like being worthless.”
Parliament had decreed the year after that, in ’seventy-one, that men could no longer buy or sell their way into military office. “And subsequently settled here?”
“My wife is of a delicate constitution and wished to live near her childhood home.”
“You met in Bath.”
“Yes,” he said shortly.
“Are your parents there?”
“They are both deceased.”
“And how have you found Plumbley?”
“It is not to my taste, I confess to you.”
“But you stay?”
Musgrave was silent. “You may see that plainly enough for yourself, yes.”
“You do not find the people of th
e town congenial?”
“I never met a more tired social circuit in my life, and — excepting your relation, I mean,” said Musgrave, realizing his solecism. “I have not had the pleasure of much of his acquaintance but he seems a capital fellow.”
“And the shopkeepers, the men and women in church?”
“Am I expected to take notice of them?”
“What did you make of the vandalisms?”
Musgrave smiled maliciously. “Foolish superstitions of a foolish village.”
“Then you do not ascribe to them any connection with Mr. Weston’s death?”
“I had not thought of it.”
“It has been noted in the village that you have a black dog, of course.”
“I wonder whether there are ten thousand black dogs in the county? More, very likely. No, it is because I am new here that people do not like me. Have you noticed, Mr. Lenox, the intense moral pressure that a village feels it has the right to bring to bear upon any of its members? That is why I take joy in their panic over these childish symbols in the windows. It serves them right, the yattering halfwits.”
Lenox — who felt fairly confident he had a sense of the captain’s character now — said, “Let us turn, then, to the evening of Mr. Weston’s murder. The accounts we have received place you upon the town green at half past eleven. Is that accurate?”
“It may be. I did not have a close eye upon my pocket-watch.”
“Did you cross the green at the beginning or at the end of your walk?”
“Both. I went to the Yew Walk. The town green lies between the walk and Church Lane.”
“And you would not care to venture a guess as to whether you were going out or returning, at half past eleven?”
“Returning, I should imagine.”
Lenox made a note in his mind — important not to introduce the formalizing element of the notebook, just when they were talking so easily — to ask Carmody which way Musgrave had been walking, toward or away from Church Lane.
The dog was an alibi of sorts.
“Was your wife with you?”
“No. She would have been retired for several hours by then.”
“Is it a custom of yours, to walk at that time?”
“There is no specific time of day when I walk him.” He gestured toward the dog. “When the fancy takes us.”
“What is he called?”
“Cincinnatus. Cincy, inevitably.”
Lenox nodded. “I have my dogs with me, from London. They prefer the country air.”
“He has never known anything else.”
“Did you see anyone while you were walking the dog, Captain Musgrave?”
“One or two people, yes.”
“Did you know them?”
“I saw Mr. Fripp. Mrs. Tolliver, a widow who lives in Gold Street. One or two others, to nod to. In London of course I wouldn’t know them, but in a small village, you see, these civilities …”
“Were any of the people you saw behaving suspiciously?”
Captain Musgrave pondered this quickly, then said, “No.”
Lenox thought of the clearing, the horses, the bottle of ale. “Did you recognize all of them?”
“Yes. By face, even if I couldn’t place their names.” A footman came in from the hall, to pour more coffee. “Not now,” Musgrave said sharply.
The footman blanched, his visage transformed by fear, and quickly withdrew. Ten minutes of conversation with him might be valuable. Or with any of the servants. They still hadn’t spoken about Musgrave’s wife.
Almost as if by prearrangement, at that moment a piercing scream went up in a far corner of the house. It was a woman’s voice.
Musgrave stared steadfastly ahead, pretending not to have heard it. Good manners dictated that Lenox do the same, but his investigative instincts did not, and he made a point always to sacrifice the former for the latter when they came into conflict.
“It is impolite, but necessary, to ask whether that was your wife, Captain.”
“There is no other woman in the house.”
“She does not keep a lady’s maid?”
“No.”
That was unusual. Perhaps it was to keep her isolated. “I understand that she has not been well?”
“She is receiving excellent care.”
“From Dr. Eastwood?”
“From a doctor who comes from Bath. None of these countrified barbers when it comes to the health of my wife.”
“May I see her?” Lenox asked.
“Certainly not.”
“If I were to return with Constable Oates, he—”
“Was she seen upon the town green? Is she a suspect?”
“No.”
Musgrave’s face was dangerously composed. “In that case, nothing short of legal compulsion shall grant you an audience with her.”
Lenox had asked the questions he wished to ask. Now he risked a gambit of the kind that Scotland Yard might approve. “You keep her a prisoner, from what I understand?”
Musgrave stood up, his rage near to overflowing. “You should be ashamed to repeat the lazy gossip of stupid women, Mr. Lenox. You will see yourself out.” He strode to the door, Cincinnatus on his heels — such a pompous name for a dog! — before turning back. He was shaking. “Would that it were a different age, that I might see you at dawn tomorrow with a pistol in hand,” he said, and then left the room.
Lenox, quite unperturbed — he had been glared at by men with a dozen murders to their credit, in gin mills east of the Isle of Dogs, so it was unlikely that Musgrave’s genteel ire would much frighten him — sat for some moments, considering the interview.
This man was certainly capable of violence. He had been in the military and he had a temper, but why would he have killed Weston? Were his answers, straightforward and occlusive at once, evidence of any larger concealment?
At length Lenox stood, pocketing a couple of the macaroons from the plate on the table, waved good-bye to the cherubim, and walked out.
There was a snarl of inconsequential, linking facts that he felt confident lay at the heart of the case. The question now was to order them for himself, if possible to add to them, and to reduce them, finally, to their common element. He was closing in, he knew. It vexed him that for the moment he could not see how, or if, Musgrave fit into it all.
Outside the rain had intensified and steadied, and he regretted not bringing an umbrella. He hunched further under his coat, lit a small cigar, and puffed it meditatively as he began the short walk back to town.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Lenox had no real plan, now, except for a period of calm reflection — perhaps he would have lunch at one of the town’s public houses — but found himself walking in the direction of the village green.
Frederick was there, outside of Fripp’s shop. Honoring Lenox’s request, he had arranged for a further canvass of the houses that had a view of where the crime had taken place — there were men knocking on doors. It was obvious from his face, distracted and with a dissatisfied clench around the eyes, that his efforts thus far had been unavailing.
“Charles,” he said. “Oates is speaking to Carmody now.”
“Excellent. I have a question to add to his.”
“Was Musgrave a help?”
“I don’t know, yet. Have you turned up anything here?”
“Not yet. I spoke to Jones, at the Royal Oak, however, and asked him to direct any coach drivers who come along toward me, before they leave again.”
“Have there been any yet?”
“No, but there should be a flurry soon. I mean to have lunch there, so that I may catch them.”
“I was about to do the same — with regard to lunch, I mean.”
“Then we shall go together.”
A small, murmuring crowd had gathered on the steps of the church, Lenox noticed. He shot a quizzical look at Frederick.
“Gossip,” the older man said. “Nothing more.”
“Still, gossip may be us
eful.”
“Oh?”
“I’m going to speak to them, and then to Carmody. Shall I see you in the Royal Oak in half an hour?”
“Half an hour,” Frederick responded with a nod.
Fripp was standing among the people on the church steps. As he walked toward them Lenox heard the name Musgrave spoken.
“How do you do, Mr. Fripp?” said Lenox.
“Charlie. Do you know these ladies, my boy?”
“I don’t.”
Fripp said a flurry of names, which Lenox immediately forgot. “What are you speaking about?” he asked.
“These women are afraid, unfrortunately,” said Fripp. “They feel—”
“Last night I locked my front door for the first time in fourteen years,” said a stout middle-aged woman, a child braced under each arm.
“Why did you lock it back then?” Lenox asked, curious.
“Rabid badger roaming the town,” the woman answered immediately.
There was a chorus of gratified concurrence at this recollection. Lenox just managed to stop himself from asking what the difference between a locked door and an unlocked door was to a badger. “You suspect Musgrave?”
All of them did, vocally. “Why would he want to harm Mr. Weston, though?” Lenox asked.
“Mischief-making,” said a woman, thin as a flagpole and with a great beak of a nose emerging from a tightly tied bonnet. “And what he’s done to that poor girl I shudder to think. As was Cat Scales, I mean.”
“His wife,” Lenox said.
“That’s her.”
Wells’s grain shop was very close by, and so after Lenox had doffed his hat he stopped in. The shop was empty, its fine bronze weights and barrels of grain awaiting their next customer. Wells himself stood behind the counter, jotting in a ledger. He looked up as the door opened.
“Mr. Lenox,” he said. “Have you found my clock yet?”
“Soon, I hope. I wanted a quick word.”
Wells laid his pencil down. “By all means.”
“I take it you saw nothing from the shop, late last night?”
Wells sighed and shook his head. “I was home several hours before Weston died. I dearly wish that I had been here.”
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