This quiet was broken, however, by occasional shouts and laughs from some deeper recess of the place. Lenox followed the noise to a stooped semicircular door, very heavy, which he opened to reveal a group of ten or eleven men and women in a brilliantly candlelit room.
The scene was one of loud debauchery. There were empty bottles by the dozen, women sitting on men’s laps, cards, dice, and cigars flung across every surface.
“The chap with the wine! Capital fellow!” shouted a carrot-haired young man, who happened to be near the door. Then, drunkenly, he said, “But you’ve forgotten the wine. Foolish thing to do, it was your only job.”
Dallington hadn’t turned, yet, but Lenox could see his profile. He looked far gone. His eyes were barely open, and the two women on his lap — prostitutes, almost certainly — couldn’t coax him to awareness. Occasionally with great effort he would stretch one eye open and murmur something incomprehensible, and take a sip of a greenish liquid in a small, bell-shaped glass that never left his hand. Even at this advanced remove from his senses, a carnation stood fresh in the lad’s buttonhole.
Lenox set back out into the main room after a moment. His stomach flipped when he thought he had seen someone from Parliament, a young secretary, but upon closer examination the resemblance was only vague. He walked straight to the bartender. “How long have they been in there, in the back room?” he asked.
“Who’s asking?”
“Have they paid?”
“Very regular.”
“And the women?”
Here the bartender assumed a look of almost total, blank stupidity. “Don’t know.”
“Lord Dancy and William Lawrance can drink themselves to Gehenna, for all I care,” said Lenox, and registering the bartender’s surprise, added, “Yes, I know them all, the idlers, and half their parents. But I do need one of them out. The dark-haired one, with the carnation in his buttonhole.”
“John Best.”
“Yes, why not.” The bartender stared at him for a long moment, and then Lenox realized that he was waiting for the transactional element of the conversation to begin. “Do you have anyone to roust him out for me?”
“And who are you?”
Lenox took out the brown, calfskin billfold that Lady Jane had given him two birthdays past, and removed a pound note. “Get me two strong men and have a cab waiting at the top of the stairs.”
“They’re good for that in the next two hours,” said the bartender. “Don’t want to disturb their group.”
Lenox doubled the amount now. The sum was what a housemaid might make in a month of work. “Haste, please,” he said. “I’ll wait here.”
The bartender paused and then, imperceptibly, nodded. He swiped the notes into his waist — for a panicked moment Lenox wondered if he was simply going to steal them — and then, by way of consecrating their deal, poured a glass of red wine from a bottle under the counter. “My finest,” he said.
“Thank you.” Lenox took a grateful draught of the wine.
Fifteen minutes later two men appeared, looking grim, and it only took them a moment to drag a dark-haired young man up to the bar.
It was the wrong one. “For the love of heaven,” said Lenox and, leading them and the bartender — and a few mildly interested onlookers — back to the door, said, “That one.”
They pulled Dallington out. He couldn’t stand under his own power. Lenox liked a drink, now and again, but this looked like something different, very like illness. He was glad to have dispatched a message, when he arrived in London, to McConnell, asking him to come to Hampden Lane.
Dallington just opened his eyes enough to register Lenox’s presence. He didn’t seem surprised. He put up a token resistance against the men dragging him upstairs — enough to make them pause, though they could have carried on — and said, with titanic effort, slurring badly, “The one in the red dress, the red dress.”
Lenox nodded. “Wait at the cab for a moment, if you would,” he said to the men.
He went once more to the back room and found the girl with the red dress, gave her a bill folded in half, and left the room. He felt no sense of judgment, only one of fatigue and sorrow.
Lady Jane’s two closest friends on the earth, once she had married her closest, were Toto McConnell and the woman she called Duch, the Duchess of Marchmain, Dallington’s mother. It was a new and rather shiny title, three generations old, and both the Duke and Duchess disliked it — but it made them public figures. Beyond that, they were both so wildly happy, so immensely obliged, at the change in John … it was no surprise to him when Jane had agreed he should come to London and handle the lad himself, rather than telling the boy’s parents.
At Hampden Lane Lenox had time, before the servants had recovered from their surprise at seeing him, to see his own house dark and uninhabited, and whether because of the rain or the kind of evening he had had, it struck a chord of deep sadness somewhere within him. He shook it away and, with the coachman, Staples, dragged Dallington into the study and laid him, half-crumpled, upon the couch.
Soon McConnell arrived, full of authority and good sense. In truth he had had his own battle with alcohol, but they had been far more private than this, had indeed occasioned relatively little notice beyond his friends. This made Lenox angrier: there were people’s reputations at stake besides the young detective’s.
McConnell forced Dallington to sit up and examined him very carefully, splashing water over his face, asking him questions. Lenox retreated a discreet distance, though not far enough that he couldn’t hear. Well.
At last McConnell finished. “He’ll be fit enough in a week’s time, with rest,” he said. “If he had gone on drinking much longer I would have worried, however, about poisoning. His liver is in a fragile state to start with, and he’s feverish. We must hope it doesn’t progress.”
Together they managed to get Dallington into a bed upstairs, loosening his tie and removing his shoes. Then they sat together in Lenox’s study for a long while, speaking in the hushed, comfortable tones of old friends called out on some unexpected duty together late at night, smoking their short cigars. Finally, at two or three in the morning, McConnell said he had better return to Toto — and of course to George, his daughter, was what went unsaid, for it never did to care too much about one’s children. Lenox understood.
The detective went to sleep in his own bed then, and stayed there very late into the morning.
He subsequently wished that he had risen before he did. For when he finally went to his study, it was to discover upon a silver salver on his desk a telegram that turned his heart to ice:
CHARLES YOU MUST RETURN IMMEDIATELY STOP THERE HAS BEEN A MURDER STOP ALL SAFE AT EVERLEY THANK GOD STOP TOWN IN A STATE OF PANIC STOP EARLIEST TRAIN POSSIBLE STOP PONSONBY
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Six hours later Lenox stood on Plumbley’s town green. At his side was Oates, the police constable, who was much shaken.
“Are you sure you can carry on?” Lenox asked.
“I can,” said Oates.
“If you need to retire for a few hours—”
“No, no, nothing of the sort.”
“So he was lying upon this spot.”
“And a knife between his shoulder blades, as dirty and cowardly a way—” Oates stopped himself. “Yes, he was lying here, sir. The poor fellow.”
Lenox had returned by the first train. Unsure what to do with Dallington he had simply dragged the young man — coherent but wan — from bed, had two footmen place him by the window in the first-class car, and brought him along. He was lying in a bedroom at Everley now. Dr. Eastwood was busy with the more serious matter of an autopsy, but had promised to check in on the lad that evening. In the meanwhile Lenox and Frederick — his face a mask of calm, his emotions, when you spoke to him, deeply disturbed — had come to the center of town, where they had found the corpse upon the green. A shock of red hair was the first thing visible, in full view of St. Stephen’s church, of Fripp’s, of Wells’s, and of the rows of mild shops and houses that squared it off. Once he had brought Lenox to the scene of the crime, Frederick had left to go see the lad’s numerous family members in their homes.