It was true that this was unusual. “Why did he, then?” asked Lenox.
“He said they were sharper,” said the clerk, and then went on, with a trace of bitterness in his voice, “and less womanish than the male clerks he had.”
Lenox, father to a strong-willed daughter, smiled fleetingly. “Very well. Please tell her that we mean to come speak to her soon, after we look at the office. Incidentally, where were you this morning?”
“I? With my family — my father, my mother, and six besides. Then I breakfasted at the coffeehouse on the corner, Taylor’s. I do most mornings.”
Lenox hadn’t liked the note of animosity toward Stevens in the clerk’s voice, but his alibi sounded solid. “And your name?”
“Van Leer, sir.”
“Thank you, Van Leer. After you’ve told Miss Harville we’re coming to see her, please come back and resume your watch here, if you don’t mind.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lenox turned back to his brother and Bunce. “Bunce, if you could send a telegram for me, by Mrs. Appleby, I would be grateful.”
“Of course, sir.”
Lenox scrawled it quickly and handed it over with a shilling — a note to his friend Thomas McConnell, asking if he would consider coming down that afternoon for an hour’s work. It was Tuesday, fortunately, McConnell’s day off from Great Ormond Street Hospital. Tuesday: Lenox wondered if Hadley was traveling for his work with Dover Assurance or had decided to give himself the week at home since his unnecessary trip to Chichester.
When Van Leer, Bunce, and Sutherland were all gone, and the two Lenox brothers stood alone before the door to Stevens’s office, Edmund said, “Lord, Charles, I wonder if you know what a holy terror you are, issuing orders to everyone you meet.”
Lenox shook his head unsmilingly. “It’s no joke, an attack with a knife. We must move quickly.”
“Shall we go in? I’ll admit to a bit of trepidation. This will be the first time I’ve seen it, too — I’ve been at the Bell and Horns all morning.”
“Lead the way,” said Lenox.
They went in.
Because Stevens’s office stood on the corner of the second story, in a village full of low buildings, it received a great deal of light, nearly blinding them as they entered. A large desk dominated the room. It was covered with tidy stacks of paper. A pair of spectacles sat on the leather blotter directly in front of the desk chair. Opposite, facing the desk, were two large brown leather armchairs, studded with bronze tacks in long trails from leg to arm to back and down again.
One was drenched with a thick, dark substance.
Lenox, who recognized the suffocating smell of it, winced. Edmund took a moment longer, and then he, too, winced. Though the chair was brown, it was obvious from a glance that it was blood pooled on it.
“Look,” said Lenox.
He was pointing at the floor. “What? Oh!” said Edmund.
In the deep blue of the carpet, there was a distinguishable darkening. Lenox knelt down and dabbed it with his handkerchief. It came up a brownish red. Blood, too, a few hours spilled. He looked carefully at the carpet and said, “It starts here, at the side of the desk. None behind the desk, at least that I can see.”
Edmund watched. “He might have been stabbed behind the desk and then staggered forward, hoping to make it to the door to cry for help.”
Lenox nodded. “Yes, it’s possible. But it’s awkward to stab someone seated behind a wide desk like this, isn’t it — to get so close? And then, six or seven slashes with a knife — there would likely be blood sprayed straight on the desk, right away. But there isn’t any.”
“Mm.”
“I would guess that Stevens came out from behind the desk to meet his attacker and was stabbed halfway to the door. The blood sprayed across the carpet; then the poor fellow lurched forward and pitched himself across the armchair.”
There was no response, and Lenox glanced up toward his brother, who had turned and was staring at the wall opposite the desk. His face looked pale.
“What is it?” asked Lenox.
But then, turning, he saw what was there for himself.
“It’s the same as Hadley’s,” said Edmund.
Lenox stared for a long beat. “Yes, it is.”
It was the stick figure of a schoolgirl — flat line for a mouth, with pigtails. Identical to the one that had been chalked on Hadley’s stoop. It was painted on the white wall in the vivid red of Stevens’s blood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Almost involuntarily, both brothers looked around the office, making sure there was nobody about to leap out at them. Nobody was — there was nowhere to hide, no closet to slide into or sofa to crawl under. They turned back to the figure of the schoolgirl. It wasn’t pleasant to look at, even there in the broad light of day.
“Well,” said Lenox, trying to keep his voice steady, “at least our attacker has had the courtesy to link our crimes to each other. That was sporting.”
Edmund, whose face had always been so full of good cheer and country haleness until Molly’s death, now looked sick, as thinned out as Lenox had ever seen him. He shook his head. Here he was, close to death once more. “I don’t know that I like this job of yours,” he said. “I didn’t realize — well, I don’t know.”
Sympathetically, Lenox went and put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Yes, I know,” he said. “Dallington had a terrible time with it at first, I suspect, though he never said a word. But one gets used to it — and then, think, hopefully we may be a help, to all of these frightened people in Markethouse. If the porch of the pub is anything to go by, they’ve lost their wits with worry.”
Edmund nodded. “Yes. I’m only telling you that I don’t like it. I don’t.”
“Would you like to wait outside while I look at the office?”
“No, no. Tell me what we ought to do.”
They looked over the office very carefully together. At one point Lenox asked if anyone had mentioned the figure on the wall before his arrival, and Edmund said no one had, which was odd — Clavering ought to have.
Then again, Edmund pointed out, it had still been near dawn when Miss Harville had found Stevens Stevens, and everyone’s energy had been intent upon moving him safely to Stallings’s house. It was possible they had missed it. And since then, Clavering had been with the town’s leaders, trying to come up with a plan to ensure the calm and safety of the village. Nobody had returned to inspect the office.
That made some sense, and as Lenox looked through the papers on the mayor’s desk he thought about what the drawing might mean. It felt … well, it felt personal, and yet both Hadley and Stevens were men without any strong personal ties, neither married, both childless, each more engaged with his work (or, in Hadley’s case, a hobby, the gemstones) than any individual connection.
Might this lack of connections even be what linked them?
“What do we make of our second Watson sister?” asked Edmund, who was crouched by the armchairs, looking underneath them, at Lenox’s instruction. Two sets of eyes on everything in the room — for it was even odds that the motive behind the attack must be in this room, Lenox had been at pains to insist to his brother. “Small-town coincidence, or more?”
“I wish we knew that it was one or the other,” said Lenox. “Because I don’t like that it might be either. I suppose we must try to speak to Claire Adams.”
Edmund chuckled lowly. He had some of his spirit back. “Hopefully she’s not preoccupied by a child feigning illness.”
“Stallings has real work now, I’m afraid.”
“Too true, alas.”
The office was a disappointment to Lenox — neat as a pin, the drawers mostly empty other than bits of charcoal and nib ends and spare inkstands and SS stationery, no evidence whatsoever of Stevens’s life outside of this room. The papers on the desk were indeed mostly about the budget, along with a few others on village subjects, a report on the refurbishment of the pews in the church, another from the schoolmaster. The closest he found to anything related to the crimes was another report, this one about the thefts at the market from Clavering. It wasn’t even clear the mayor had read it yet, however.