It was an industrious place, full of handsome rows of gray houses. It had two public houses, the Royal Oak (named for the tree in which Charles the Second, pursued by Roundheads, had concealed his august personage) and the King’s Arms, which were in a semipermanent state of war, each with fierce partisans; a smithy; a butcher’s; a school; and a lovely village green. As Lenox walked down Woodend Lane, toward the fruit and vegetable seller’s, he could see twinned above Plumbley its two highest points, the small spire of St. Stephen’s church and the cupola of the town hall, freshly painted white, its resting bell, slightly louder than the church’s, ready to beat out the time as twelve o’clock in, oh, what now — he looked at his pocket watch — three minutes. Good, the shops wouldn’t have shut for lunch yet.
Fripp had replaced his broken window. Stenciled upon it in gold letters was w. F., PURVEYOR, and leaning against the window was a green signboard with white paint that said, in three lines, FRESH FRUIT, FARM VEGETABLES, and OPEN YEAR-ROUND. As Lenox pushed the door open a bell rang. It was a tight space, with crates nailed up tidily along the walls, overflowing with cabbages, potatoes, apples, and much more.
The fruit-and-vegetable seller himself, now five or six years beyond sixty, was at his counter, hunched over a piece of wax paper, intent on some piece of work. He was a wiry, short man, in the pink of health, with fastidious circular spectacles and a carefully maintained black moustache.
He looked up. “Why, Charlie!” he said.
Lenox, who had known Fripp for some thirty-odd years — since Charles was ten — said, “Hello, Mr. Fripp.”
Fripp took off his spectacles. “I heard you might be at the great house — but tell me, are you still a batsman?”
Lenox smiled. “If you’ve a spot for me.”
“If we’ve — we’ll only just make the numbers now you’re here, you know.”
“How are the King’s Arms this year?”
“They have a devilish spin bowler, Yates, from after your time. But welcome! And you married, too!” Fripp came around from the counter and shook Lenox’s hand.
“And our side? The Royal Oak team?”
Here Fripp began a lengthy, obviously much rehashed description of all the many virtues and vices of the cricket players who frequented each evening the same public house he did. Lenox half listened, as he did so gathering a few choice pieces of fruit to the counter. He would take them back to Jane.
“Is there fig jam left?” he asked in a break during Fripp’s voluble recollection of his wicket-keeper’s poor eyesight.
“A few jars left, yes. Shall I wrap one in paper?”
“Two if you would.” Fripp crouched down beneath the counter, rooting among his preserves. Lenox raised his voice slightly. “By the way,” he said, “my uncle told me about your window. Terrible business.”
“Yes, it was,” said Fripp, rising with the jars in hand. “And then Wells got the same thing.”
“I heard. Do you have any idea who might have done it?”
“None, and I still don’t feel at ease in my mind about closing up the shop alone. Did your uncle show you the hanging man?”
Lenox’s face was severe with sympathy. “Yes. I didn’t like the look of it.”
“Nor did I.”
“You cannot think who might have done it?”
“I would stake my life that nobody in Plumbley wishes me that ill,” said Fripp. “Even at the King’s Arms, you know, it’s only a friendly joke we have with each other.”
“What do you and Wells have in common?”
Fripp considered this. “Not very much, I suppose. He rarely takes a pint. His father liked to come into the Oak on occasion, and shopped his fruit and vegetable with me here for many years. The son does, too, but sends his maid around. He’s grown very prosperous.” He snorted.
“I heard.”
“Sells grain and seed to half the farmers in Somerset, it sometimes seems. What similarity could he have to a small shop like this one?”
“And personally? Do you share any family, any friends?”
“Not except insofar as everyone does, in Plumbley.”
“What do you make of Captain Musgrave?”
“Mr. Ponsonby mentioned the captain, did he? I can only say that’s he’s treated very fair with me, buys in his fruit and vegetables weekly, though I know he gives his custom to a butcher in Clamnor, four miles over the country, and not to Richards, here in town.”
“Do you think he has been using Catherine Scales unkindly?”
“I think a village knows how to gossip.”
“Yet when do villages go very wrong in their judgments?” asked Lenox. “Generally they seem to know their business.”
Fripp frowned. “Well, perhaps over time. But the captain hasn’t been here longer than six months.”
“Do the symbols mean anything to you?”
“Nothing particular-like, if you mean that, though I daresay I can tell as well as the next gent what a picture of a man hanged up by his neck is meant to say. S’nothing good.”
They spoke for a few more minutes then, rather unprofitably, about the case. Lenox paid for his fruit and his jam and left, steering the subject before he went to the kinder subject of cricket, and departing with advice about covering shots and leg-breaks in his ears. Then, the dogs at his heels again — they had waited, ears forward and staring in after him, by the door — he set out to meet Plumbley’s police force.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Once, as a boy visiting Everley with his mother, Lenox had been scrubbed on his cheeks with soap and water, placed in a stiff collar and a blue coat, and fetched by the purposeful guidance of a junior footman into a wooden seat upon the town green. Alongside the young Lenox then had been his mother and a much younger Frederick. They watched in silence, among a crowd of some hundred or so people, as a man in a tall hat — later revealed to Lenox to be a bishop, that most awesome of creatures after the Queen — took to the church’s porch.
“Will Mr. Somers, M. A. Oxon, please rise!”
A tremulous young man, with a long, wet nose and thick eyeglasses, a book under his arm, had stood up from his seat at this request to join the bishop in front of the crowd. The great clergyman — his powerful brow knitted with solemnity, his gray and brown hair stiff against the wind — then led Somers to the door of the church, took him by his two wrists, and placed his hands against the door of the church.
“Now the living is his,” Lenox’s mother had said to him. She was a religious woman. “He will be a shepherd to these people, Charles. So goes the tradition.” Then, after a beat, she added in a whisper, “But did you ever see such a silly thing for grown men to do?” and laughed her light laugh.
As he walked the town green outside of Fripp’s, this was the memory that came back to him. He wondered if the man was still there, or if he had moved on to grander things. Funny that he remembered that name, Somers, when so many of the details he had once known about for more important matters had been sifted away from his mind into oblivion.
The office of the police force of Plumbley was in a humble shingled building next to the church on the town green, two stories, with the upper floors occupied by the town clerk, its record-keeper, and its historical documents, and the lower by Oates and Weston, the men Lenox had come to see, and the single jail cell over which they presided.
He knocked at the door. A moment later it opened to reveal a very young, red-cheeked boy, his face still downy. He wore a constable’s uniform. As one got older it became harder to guess the ages of young people, Lenox had found, but this boy couldn’t be far past eighteen. “Yes?” he said.