Home by Nightfall

by Charles Finch

  Hadley nodded but said, “Without intending any disrespect, Mr. Lenox—I think you are perhaps accustomed to the Metropolitan Police, which is of a very different order than our local police forces, here in the country. I deal with loss and fire and theft for a living, and you cannot imagine how hidebound, how immobile, how very contrary, a small village constable can be.”

  Charles looked to his brother, hoping to appeal to him for a better account—but saw, to his surprise, that Edmund was nodding. “It is quite true. Clavering’s a very good fellow, but not one of your cunning London sharps.”

  “Indeed?” said Lenox. He thought for another moment. In truth, he was intrigued. The pale face, the drawing of the girl, the bottle of sherry. He turned to his brother. “Edmund, you know my days here are yours.”

  Edmund nearly smiled. “In that case, I happily transfer ownership of them to Mr. Hadley, at least temporarily—and hope that he will accept mine as well, for I am exceedingly curious about what on earth all of this can mean. In Markethouse, too, as he says!”

  “Very well,” said Lenox. “Mr. Hadley, I will take the case.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mrs. Watson, the charwoman, lived with a family of six in two rooms on Drury Street. This was one of the small lanes toward the western end of town, near Markethouse’s only factory, which manufactured tallow. It was the poorest part of the village—there was an unpleasant smell from the factory at most hours, much worse in the summer—but it was still nothing like the poverty of London. Penned in front of most houses were a few chickens or a pig, and more often than not a small vegetable garden grew alongside them.

  The charwoman was not at work in Hadley’s more middle-class street, closer to the square, because one of her children was ill; Hadley had given her permission to take the day.

  “It’s only the second time it’s happened these two years,” he’d told them in Edmund’s breakfast room, speaking in a forgiving tone, and Lenox’s ears had pricked up at that. Anything out of the ordinary was worth noting.

  “Has she been behaving peculiarly at all, your Mrs. Watson?”

  Hadley had furrowed his brow. “Mrs. Watson! Not at all. As reliable as the church bells, she is.”

  Now they arrived at the house where she lived. The young boy who answered the door didn’t look sick. “Do you want to buy a toad?” he asked.

  “No,” said Edmund.

  “What about two toads?”

  “Can they do anything interesting?”

  “They’ll leap something tremendous,” he said, with fervent sincerity. “I can give you both for sixpence.”

  “George!” cried a voice behind the boy, before they had the time to answer. It was Mrs. Watson, hurrying forward. “Gracious me, Mr. Hadley, how sorry I am—George, get out of the house this instant—with your brother ill, no less—go!”

  The little boy ran off without looking back at them, and Mrs. Watson, though flummoxed by the appearance of her employer and two strangers who were obviously gentlemen, made a fair show of guiding them into her small, extremely warm kitchen. Another boy was lying in some straw in the corner, a long string bean of fifteen or so, his face waxy, his eyes fluttering. Mrs. Watson put a kettle on for them without being asked.

  “Is he all right?” asked Edmund, frowning.

  Mrs. Watson glanced down at the boy. “Him? He’ll be well enough soon, I hope.”

  “Should he see a doctor?” asked Edmund.

  The charwoman looked at him for a moment, and then realized that her face must have betrayed how stupid the question was, because she said, “It’s a very gracious thought, sir, but not just yet, I think.”

  Only if the boy was actually dying, of course, Lenox realized, maybe not even then. “I know that Dr. Stallings would come visit if we asked him,” he said. “Edmund, why don’t we send a note and ask him? It’s not ten minutes’ walk.”

  “I call that a capital idea.”

  So the note was written, and the boy next door enlisted to take it to Stallings, and they sat in the boiling hot kitchen, sipping flavorless boiling hot tea—and waited. Mrs. Watson, a rough, raw-faced, but kindly woman, was too polite to inquire why they had come, and the three men didn’t wish to disturb the boy. At last, Lenox suggested they remove themselves to the next room for a moment.

  Here they were able to interview the charwoman.

  She offered an account that mirrored her master’s: She had worked for him for two years, six days a week, Sundays to herself, cooking, cleaning, mending, sewing, shopping, no, the duties was not onerous, sir, yes, she was quite happy in her position. With these initials out of the way, Lenox was able to pose a few more probing questions.

  “Can you cast your mind back to last Wednesday?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “What time did you leave Mr. Hadley’s house?” he asked.

  “At five o’clock,” she said. “Same as every day, sir.”

  “When you left, was there anything chalked on the steps of the house?”

  She shook her head, face firm. “No, sir. Absolutely not. I would have seen. I always sweep the steps, last thing, before I go.”

  “Was the day unusual in any way?”

  “None at all, sir.”

  She had so far evinced no desire to know who they were, or why they were questioning her—apparently Hadley’s presence was enough to vouchsafe them—but now Lenox said, “We’re hoping to get to the bottom of this missing bottle of sherry.”

  She quite mistook his tone—and perhaps felt herself worried that she would have to pay the bill of the doctor, who was known to travel in a coach led by a horse, too, and she flushed red and said, “I never took it! I swear it before Jesus Christ our savior himself!”

  “Mrs. Watson, be calm, please,” Hadley said. “These gentlemen don’t think you stole anything.”

  “I didn’t!” she said.

  “I’m very sorry,” Lenox said. “I ought to have phrased it differently: We believe someone stole the sherry, not you, and hope that with your help we might find the person.”

  “I didn’t steal it.”

  “We have no suspicion whatsoever that you did,” said Lenox, though from the corner of his eye he could see that Edmund did.

  Ah, that was different, Mrs. Watson said; she would be only too happy to help. She poured more tea into Lenox’s cup.

  It was at this moment that the sound of hooves came clicking up the small street, and a moment later a small fly led by a single horse arrived at the door. Dr. Stallings dismounted from the conveyance. They waited for him in the doorway, and he inclined a deep bow toward Edmund.

  “Sir Edmund,” he said. Then he turned to Charles. He was a round, very well dressed man, bald but for a fringe of hair around his ears, with half-moon spectacles. He gave Lenox a slightly shallower bow. “Mr. Lenox. I hope that the reports in town are correct, and I may be the first to congratulate you on your permanent return to the county. For your health, you could not have chosen more intelligently.”

  “I’m only here for a visit,” Lenox said, but Stallings had already turned toward Hadley and was addressing him.

  Mrs. Watson, driven to distraction by this accumulation of distinguished visitors (Had the physic said Sir Edmund? she muttered to herself, to herself but audible to all), spoke in a long, ceaseless, meaningless rattle, whose gist eventually shepherded the doctor into her overheated kitchen.

  Lenox knew that Stallings was a fair physician. He radiated the complaisant good cheer of a man whom life had treated kindly—who hadn’t missed a meal in many years, nor lost a bet, nor thrown a shoe, nor shed a tear.

  The doctor approached the patient very gravely, sat in the chair next to him, and proceeded to make a considerable examination of him, as they all looked silently on: pulse; temperature; responsiveness of the eyes; examination of the gums; test of the reflexes; and much more beside.

  At the end of his inspection, he patted the boy on the arm, stood up, turned toward the adults in
the room, and said, in a loud, clear voice, “He’s faking.”

  “Faking?” said Edmund.

  “Yes. Faking, shamming, putting it on. However you prefer to put it. He’s in more or less perfect health. His most serious ailment at the moment is the castor oil I believe he may have swallowed. Was it as an emetic, young man? Well, never mind. I hope you have managed to avoid whatever you wished to avoid. I will wish you good day, Mrs. Watson … Mr. Hadley … Mr. Lenox … Sir Edmund.”

  “Good day,” Edmund said. “The bill to me, mind you.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Mrs. Watson, amidst these pleasantries, had shifted from confusion to incandescence—she was cuffing her son on the ear, dragging him up out of the straw, telling him how little he was good for, and how stupid he was, and that he had wasted the time of four gentlemen that day, and she had missed work for the first time in two years (she had apparently forgotten the first time, even if Hadley hadn’t), and did he think money grew on primrose bushes. Gradually Lenox came to understand that the young man had been scheduled to return to the village school that day for the first time since spring. Unusual, rather, for a boy of fifteen and his class. He made a gentle comment to that effect. Mrs. Watson turned and proudly declaimed to him, Edmund, and Hadley—without any apparent concern for consistency—on the subject of her son’s extreme brilliance, overwhelming cleverness, unsurpassable goodness.

  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.”