He led them into his surgery. “The body is laid out here,” he said in a soft voice. “It offers, sadly, little information.”
“The time of death, perhaps?”
“I cannot say with any great specificity. Not after two in the morning, probably, because the hardening of the tissues was complete by the time I saw the body. Any time up until then, however. I fear that may not help much.”
“Were there any wounds about the hands or arms?”
Eastwood shook his head. “I checked, having some acquaintance with the literature of police medicine, but no. He was taken quite unawares. Perhaps only turned away for a moment.”
“What was the instrument that killed him?”
“There I can give you slightly more information. It was a knife with a blade of five inches, say, or six. There were no serrations in the wound, so I imagine the blade was smooth. Any kitchen knife might have done it. Then again it could have been a more … a more professional sort of object, too, a fold-down.”
“And in his effects?” said Lenox. “You sent word—”
Here he was brought up short, because they had come to Weston’s dead body, bare-chested, cleansed of blood but not of the muscles’ terrible, wrenched contortion. The body’s intense pain, so unmistakable from Weston’s expression and position, was like a rupture in this cheerful work space — the table upon which he lay no doubt the same one where women with pleurisy and children with croup consulted the doctor every afternoon, the glass cabinets above, with their tidy rows of physic, mementoes of a less violent world.
Eastwood paused for a suitable moment, and then said, “Yes. His pockets had been emptied — or were empty when he came to the green, I suppose.”
“I didn’t see any money or keys in his rooms, did you, Oates?” said Lenox.
“Then he was robbed?”
“I feared as much,” said Eastwood. “But they must have missed the ticket pocket in the dark.”
This was the small pocket in the waistcoat just above the bigger, regular pocket, found only on the right side and just large enough for a rail ticket. “What was in it?” Lenox asked.
“This piece of paper,” he said, and handed it to Lenox.
It was folded over three times. On the outside it read, constable oates. Lenox offered it to Oates, who took it and read aloud. “Eye on swell’s basement. Come if you can.”
“Once more?” Lenox said.
Oates repeated the phrase. “I don’t know what it could mean.”
This was obvious: The constable’s eyes were dulled with fatigue, sherry, and sorrow. Lenox doubted whether he was fully aware of his surroundings. Oates’s strength had already been frayed, and now seeing the body seemed to have destroyed it altogether. Looking at him, Lenox saw a few small details he hadn’t before — a patch of hair missed on his shave, dirt under his fingernails — and realized, with a bolt of pity, that Oates must not be married.
Yet this was no time for weakness. “Think!” Lenox said sharply, trying to snap the constable to attention.
“I don’t know.”
“It might be a month old,” said Eastwood.
“No, the paper is too crisp for that,” said Lenox. Then, under his breath, he said, “‘Swell’s basement.’ Does the phrase connote anything to you, Doctor?”
“It does not, unfortunately.”
“Oates? Think hard.”
Oates, with great effort, screwed up his eyes and concentrated but it was no use. “Perhaps after I sleep,” he said. “I feel muddled, just at the moment.”
Eastwood looked troubled and said to Lenox, “Perhaps you might carry on for the evening alone, if I see Constable Oates home? Here, Oates, sit down.”
Lenox nodded. “You know where he lives?”
“Yes.”
“I thank you, then. I’ll be on my way.”
Lenox knew from his uncle the location of Musgrave’s house. He was tired and footsore — had it really been less than twenty-four hours ago that he was a few steps from Charing Cross, rousing Dallington out of that gin bar? — but determined. The meager clues that the past few hours had offered, the cigar ends, the horses in Epping Forest, the note Weston had scrawled out for Oates, had formed a kind of useful drone in his mind, their repetition a form of internalization.
“Swell’s basement”—was it some kind of code? Increasingly Lenox thought so. Weston had been keeping a vigil by the town green, and perhaps he had written the note only if, by chance, someone came by who might convey it to Oates’s house a few streets away. In that case a code would forefend any reward for nosiness. “Come if you can,” he had written, too, meaning that he planned to stay where he was.
Suddenly Lenox realized that the whole thing — the night, the cigar ends — suggested perhaps not a meeting but a lookout. Weston had been spying on someone. Perhaps the men who had ridden their horses to the edge of town.
He felt he was making progress, now, but Musgrave brought a halt to that. Lenox arrived at the house, a rather grand one, and sent in a card with the butler, who bore it on a salver.
He returned, funereally expressioned and his tails impeccable, with the card untouched. “I’m afraid, sir, that Captain Musgrave is occupied.”
“Tell him it’s about this murder, if you would,” said Lenox.
“If you wish to return in the—”
“Tell him now, please.”
“Sir.”
But Musgrave was unmoved. The butler was gone for some time and when he finally returned, looking deeply sorrowful, said that unless an officer of the law was present, his master had no wish to speak with anyone; it had been a taxing day; he would be very happy to meet Mr. Lenox on some other occasion; and so forth.
Lenox knew when he was defeated. He thanked the butler and left the hall.
Outside it was dark now. He had come out in a light sack coat, more suitable to an autumn’s day than an autumn evening, and he regretted it, wished he had worn his tweed frock coat. It was the whistling country air: One could always find warmth of a sort in London, over a grate, in the motion of other humans, near the horses at the curb. One was more alone here. Poor Weston!
Unusually for a man of his station Lenox never carried a cane, that gentler descendant of the sword, but by the time he reached the gates of Everley he wished he did. His legs and feet were tired, and as he came into the hall he asked for warm water to wash his feet and his hands. He would have given anything for fifteen minutes of quiet repose, but then there was a great deal to do here: There were Jane and Sophia; there was Frederick; of course there was Dallington; and worse yet, they were meant to sit to supper in something less than twenty minutes.
Freddie, with his usual tact, had foreseen this. Bowing slightly, his butler said to the tired detective, “The master has requested we serve supper in your rooms, sir, unless you wish to dine more formally this evening.”
Lenox did not.
“He would also like to invite you to the small study at your leisure, sir, and adds that he will be up very late — that you cannot come too late for him.”
“Thank you, Nash.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jane’s face, when he entered, was etched with anxiety, but she saw that he was, if worn, nevertheless safe. Slowly, over an excellent supper, they returned to more even tempers. They even got to see Sophie, briefly, before Miss Taylor took her.
At last, lighting a small cigar, Lenox said, “I think perhaps you should return to London, Jane.”
“Nonsense.”
“Until I know that it’s safe to be in Plumbley—”
“I consult my memory and discover that we are in Everley, not Plumbley, Charles, and anyhow we Lenox women are made of sterner stuff than that.” She put a few soft fingertips to his face. “You look very tired.”