Home by Nightfall (11 page)

“He's been a victim of a theft,” said Lenox.

“So Sir Edmund told me.” Stevens shook his head, looking, like Clavering, overwhelmed. “And beyond that there are the chickens, the carrots, the books, the blankets, the—”

“Books?” said Lenox sharply.

Stevens nodded. “Yes, books have been stolen.”

“Clavering didn't mention that,” said Edmund.

“Four, stolen from what is already a very small lending library here in town. I started it with a surplus of funds we had—sixteen pounds—because of a rather elegant legerdemain, if I say so, that I was able to perform, with the budget of the—”

“What were the books?” said Lenox.

Stevens narrowed his eyes, trying to recall. “One novel, I believe, perhaps by Mrs. Gaskell, and … but Louisa will know, when she returns with my food and drink. I wonder if I suddenly wanted a sherry because of Edmund's telling me about Mr. Hadley. Funny, how the brain works. Do you know, I often think that—”

But Lenox, who was not very eager to hear Stevens Stevens's speculations on the nature of the brain, interrupted him again, saying, “When were the books stolen?”

“Last week.”

“Could they have been stolen to resell?”

Stevens shook his head proudly. “Upon every page of every book we acquire, there is stamped the name of Markethouse Library, and at random throughout the book there is a stamp informing any potential buyer that the book is not for sale, nor ever will it be. They did the same at Massingstone. Rather a clever idea.”

“Very, very curious,” muttered Lenox.

Stevens's young secretary came back with his food, blushing as she intruded upon their conversation to hand it to the mayor, and after a few minutes Edmund and Charles bade him good day.

When they were alone together, Edmund asked, “Why were you so fixated on the books?”

Lenox shrugged. “Because they change the whole complexion of the matter, at least as far as I'm concerned.”

“How is that?”

“How many men in England who are desperate enough to live upon stolen chickens, and sleep under stolen blankets, can even read—let alone care so much about reading that they'd steal books, too?”

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

They remained at the market until one o'clock. Then they went into the Bell and Horns—the village's main inn, gathering point, public house, stables, a large, flourishing place of two stories—and had a lunch of roast, potatoes, and peas, served inside a golden Yorkshire pudding.

As they left the pub, they nearly bowled over young George Watson, the smaller of Hadley's charwoman's two sons. He was covered in mud and offered to sell them a toad, as he had before. Edmund said no thank you, and George said what about a songbird, they were dead cheerful, and Edmund said no thank you again, but he would give him half a penny if he went and fetched a cup of water from the bar so Edmund could rinse his hands off. George was back in a jiffy and had disappeared down into the welter of the market with his halfpenny before Edmund's hands were dry.

“I cannot see how you plan to proceed,” said Edmund, shaking out his wrists. “We've spoken with anyone who might know anything about the intruder at Hadley's house, and we've looked it over for ourselves. It's all dead ends as far as the eye can see.”

“Yes. It's bad. This is generally the point where I give up,” said Lenox.

Edmund's eyes widened. “I never! Is it really?”

“No, of course not. Don't be preposterous.”

Edmund looked abashed. “Oh.”

“There is always somebody else to speak with, of course. Just now I think we ought to talk to the milk and egg man of Markethouse, whoever he may be.”

“Pickler.”

“Is that his name? Yes, then, him. In my experience, nobody knows a village more intimately than its milkman. He crosses every line of class, respectability, geography—he knows the inhabitant of every house by name—he's called Pickler, you say?”

“Yes,” said Edmund.

“It was Smith when we were young.”

“So it was. This is his son-in-law,” said Edmund. “In fact Smith is still alive. His daughter Margery married Pickler, and together they took over the business. They buy some of our milk at the house.”

“Then sell it back to you?”

“In bottles, and half-skimmed, and on the doorstep, with a pint of cream, too,” said Edmund.

“I see.”

“And furthermore, we don't miss out on having milk if our cows fall sick or don't feel like giving any. It would mean hiring a whole other fellow to be sure of all that myself.”

“Ah, I see.”

“Of course, Molly always said we ought to have more than two cows, but she was more faithful to the country than I am. I couldn't be bothered with the trouble of it. Give me horses any day.”

“Horses are much more interesting than cows. Less milk, however.”

Lenox had said these words quickly, hoping to push the conversation ahead, but his effort at distraction was unsuccessful. Edmund's face hadn't exactly changed as he mentioned Molly, but he had somehow nevertheless seemed to fade, to exist a little less. It was terrible.

“I probably ought to have done it,” he said—not quite to Lenox.

“Come on, let's see if we can find Pickler.”

“Right-o,” said Edmund, shaking his head sharply, as if to clear it out.

They found the milkman shopping for himself, as it happened, near the cattle pen to which local farmers had driven their calves for sale. He was happy to step away from the pen and speak with them for a moment, he said, tipping his cap respectfully to Sir Edmund.

He was a man of about five foot five inches, with a sportingly angled houndstooth hat. Apparently he and old Mr. Smith's daughter scrimped all they could in order to buy a cow every two months or so, because of course the more milk they provided themselves, the greater their profit.

“Nor do we feed them on the spent mash out the breweries,” he added, “though it would be cheaper in the short run. But they make more and better milk on real grazing.”

Pickler himself lived in a small pair of rooms; the cows were all stabled on a local dairy farmer's land, where they could graze to their hearts' content for a small fee.

Lenox and Edmund asked him if he had heard of the thefts. He laughed; he had, the implication being that you would have to search much farther than him to find someone who didn't know about the thefts.

“Have you seen any unfamiliar faces around town?” Lenox asked the milkman.

He shook his head. “Not recently, no. Mrs. Hargrave had a nephew visiting, but he's been gone this week and more. Other than him, nobody.”

“In that case, I am wondering if there is any particular spot in Markethouse that might serve as a bolt-hole—where a person might conceal himself, sleep at night, lurk during the day.”

Pickler frowned. “It's not the village I would choose for it,” he said.

“That's true,” Edmund put in. “It's very tight.”

“I suppose the churchyard is the only place I can think of,” said Pickler. “Every other room in every other house is occupied, and my missus and I would know it in a heartbeat if someone was in our cellar, for instance. You wouldn't last long trying to hide in any of the streets here. No, I don't think it's Markethouse you're wanting, for that kind of thing—unless it's the churchyard, as I say.”

“Every village must have an abandoned room—a little lean-to—where a person could hide?” said Lenox.

Pickler shook his head. “Not in Markethouse proper, sir. The town is overinhabited as it is, sir. Folk are very jealous of their space here.”

Edmund affirmed this. “There's a law on the books against putting up two continuous buildings or more within a few miles of the town limits. Agreed long ago by the local landowners. Everything's very compact as a result, just as Pickler says.”

“I see.”

A few minutes later, as they watched the milkman walk back toward the cattle pen, Edmund said, “You think it's an itinerant, then, someone living rough?”

“I really don't know. The blankets and the food would seem to indicate as much. But then there are the books, and Mr. Hadley's peculiar experience.”

“Mm.”

“It can't hurt to look at the churchyard, at least. Come, let's go there now.”

But at the churchyard they found only another dead end. They walked the whole length of it, then looked in all the nooks and crevices within the church itself, but there was no sign at all of inhabitation. And as Lenox thought of the town, he realized that Pickler and Edmund were right: There were very few places in Markethouse where one could hide out. Its most affluent residents lived in Cremorne Row, in a long line of alabaster houses, its prosperous burghers round about the area of Potbelly Lane, and its lower inhabitants toward Mrs. Watson's end of town. In all that space, as he thought of it, he couldn't call to mind a single dark alley, or a stableyard that wasn't hawkishly watched. If the town said Mrs. Hargrave's nephew had been the last stranger to visit before Lenox himself, the town was right.

And yet, and yet …

“I have an idea,” Lenox said.

Forty minutes later both brothers were on horseback, Lenox on Daisy, who was cantering with a sprightly gait, and Edmund on an eight-year-old chestnut he loved better than all but a handful of human beings, Cigar.

They rode in a perimeter around Markethouse. They started very close in, along the fields at the edge of town. There were several small buildings near a small public garden, but all of them were locked; when they came back to where they had started, they went a half mile farther out from the town and started the circle again.

This was precisely the way Lenox always approached a corpse: moving away from it in concentric circles, studying the body and its environs from farther away with each one. Scotland Yard had officially adopted it as a standard method two years before.

Now the corpse was Markethouse, and they circled it three times, at a half mile, a mile, and a mile and a half, stopping at every small building they saw, jumping easily over the fences they passed. On the main road a few people were starting to leave Markethouse, their goods all sold, evidently, traveling by donkey or by foot.

They came again to the head of the stream where they had started, longitudinally, and Edmund said, “Another circle?”

“If you don't mind.”

“With all my heart. It had been too long since I was on a horse.”

Lenox broke into a grin. “I told you! There's nothing like it.”

“Yes, I remember now that you know everything. Come along, catch up if you can!” cried Edmund, and put his heel into the horse's flank.

Neither the next circle nor the one after that showed them anything. There were a few small buildings in various attitudes of crumble, but none looked as if its threshold had been crossed in years, never mind the last few days.

It was growing dark when they reached a small, tumbledown gamekeeper's cottage. They were about three miles outside of town now, and another three west of Lenox House. Both of the brothers were breathing hard. Markethouse was in the distance from them on the eastern horizon, smoke rising in thin columns from a few dozen different chimneys on this brisk day.

“Whose land are we on?” Lenox asked in a low voice.

Edmund looked at him curiously. “Alfred Snow. We have been for the past seven or eight minutes. A farmer in these parts. He keeps a good deal of livestock, too. A rough sort, but very smart—worked his way up from the orphanage in Chichester, you know, wholly on his own in the world, to very great wealth indeed. I have a good deal of time for him. He bought the property from Wethering when Wethering went bankrupt, poor sod. You remember Wethering. Why? Do you see something?”

Lenox pointed at the ground. There was tobacco ash in a pile next to the door, as if someone had been leaning there and refilling a pipe. It might well have been nothing—another rider, stopping by, or the gamekeeper.

But. “Does Snow keep game?”

“No. Wethering did, and his forefathers, of course. That's why this building is here.”

“Let's look inside,” said Lenox. “Quietly.”

They dismounted, tied their horses to a tree, and walked silently toward the door. Lenox put a few fingers to it, and it swung open easily.

Within the small stone cottage there looked to be two rooms. The door to the rear room was drawn to, but in the first it was obvious someone had been resident recently. There was a makeshift pile of twigs and branches in the fireplace, half burned, though it had been extinguished by the rain. Lenox went to it and felt the stones of the hearth—warm.

He turned back to Edmund and raised his eyebrows. There was a blanket here, too. One of the church's?

And then his blood went cold. In the next room there was a sound, a footstep.

Edmund looked at Lenox, who rose very, very slowly to a standing position. “Stay,” Lenox mouthed to his brother, holding up a hand.

He walked as softly as he possibly could across the stone floor and put his ear to the door.

There was certainly someone in the next room. He could hear the fellow's breath, rather heavy, as if he'd been running.

Then there was the sound of another door opening and closing.

“Quick!” said Lenox. “There must be a back door!”

He and Edmund burst through and saw the back door of the gamekeeper's cottage flung open. Nobody was in this second, smaller room—a kitchen—and Lenox ran to the door.

He pulled up short there. “Look,” he said, pointing out into the field.

Sprinting into the gloaming there was a small, sturdy dog, barking happily.

“A spaniel,” said Edmund.

“Sandy,” Lenox said.

Edmund shook his head. “Damn it.”

They walked back around toward the front of the house, each wishing that it were a little brighter out, careful where they stepped, both wary of someone who might be lurking there, waiting to do them harm.