Thomas McConnell
PS: I should add of course that I send my best along to Jane and to Sophia. As I mention, Toto and the child are out of town, and have been for rather a long time. Perhaps Jane told you. I trust that John Dallington is not too badly off. Give him my best if he’s stayed in Somerset, otherwise I shall see him soon. TM.
CHAPTER FORTY
For a moment McConnell’s postscript diverted Lenox’s attention. He re-read but found that it was impossible to discern whether Toto’s absence from London was innocent or not, because in the earlier years of their marriage, when the doctor had been drinking heavily, their separations were so frequent and long. Certainly things had been better in more recent times. McConnell had finally come to terms with giving up his practice, as Toto’s more aristocratic family had essentially forced him to do, and in place of that work had gone deeper and deeper into his chemical and botanical studies. Yet Jane and Charles alike always feared a relapse on the part of either of their friends — in McConnell his drinking and sullenness, in Toto her immaturity and wrath.
Dallington snapped him out of these thoughts. “So Mrs. Musgrave is with child,” he said. “Is that all it was?”
Lenox grimaced. “I feel very stupid. Also rather ashamed, if they left Plumbley because of her health. I imagine they have gone to London.”
“How long ago were they married?”
“Six months, I believe. We might ask Freddie.”
“Of course a woman might lie abed her whole term,” said Dallington, rather uncomfortably.
“Yes, and what a terrible intrusion it must have seemed, when I asked why she cried out that way! A town can always convince you to abandon your reason, if you listen to enough of its gossip. I should have been more intelligent than to listen.”
Dallington waved this away. “No, Musgrave was our chief suspect. It would have been irresponsible not to ask. At any rate, a knife with human blood upon it!”
“Yes. But might it not be her blood?”
“What, his wife’s? You think her dead?”
“No, no. I mean, might it not be … but here you lose me,” said Lenox. “I don’t know what doctors do at all.”
“They possess their own knives, certainly.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
Dallington frowned. “We could ask Dr. Eastwood. Or write to McConnell. If there’s any chance it was required for medical reasons one of them would know, in all likelihood.”
“You’re thinking more clearly than I am, John — that is what we shall do. Of course there is no proof that Captain Musgrave ever held the knife in his hand, much less used it.”
Dallington nodded. “Your finding it in the slop bucket makes me think that somebody in the kitchen cut themselves and disposed of the knife there, fearing they had damaged it.”
Lenox gave him a skeptical look. “Rather than rinsing it? I don’t think the common sense of the average servant is so shallow as that. Perhaps if it was a young boy.”
“How heavy was the blood?”
“There was a great deal of it, more than a small cut would have produced — though obviously not, of necessity, a fatal amount. No, let us leave the knife aside until the morrow, when we speak to Wells.”
“As you please.”
The next morning Lenox rode out across the countryside and again returned to the squire’s excellent breakfast table, sharing eggs, bacon, toast, porridge and coffee with Lady Jane — and with the governess, whom even Lenox was force to admit had a new shine in her face. Perhaps the matchmaking had worked.
If Dallington was similarly affected he took care not to show it. “Are you ready to go to town?” he asked, resplendent in a gray morning suit, carnation in his buttonhole, as soon as he saw Lenox.
“Shall we walk? It’s not much above a mile.”
So they took the dogs and ambled toward Plumbley. When they reached the village green they dropped Bear and Rabbit in Fripp’s shop. (Fripp, all his cricket-pitch glory shed, was deep in conversation with a woman who wanted to know which kind of apples made the best sauce, because her neighbor’s Cox’s Orange Pippins were too tart, and she liked it sweeter anyhow.) At the police station a sober Oates nodded them into the door.
“Gentlemen. Want a word with Wells, do you? He won’t speak to me.”
“Have you been trying often?” asked Dallington.
“Once in a way.”
Wells had been kept so far in some comfort, was eating food brought from his home, had seen his wife and his son. He was to be transported to Bath the next day, because the evidence of his crimes originating there had become so incontrovertible that higher authorities than Frederick were demanding it.
As he sat in his cell, Wells must have heard the chimes of the church bells after Weston’s funeral — nineteen of them, one for each year of the lad’s life. Lenox wondered how he had felt.
His first impression when he saw Wells again was of how youthful the man looked. In his element, at the grain shop — green apron, black mustache, healthy, ruddy face — he had seemed somehow older. Here he looked a diminished soul. Lenox felt unbidden sympathy for him.
They had expected him not to respond to their questions, but in fact when Oates left them in the windowless room where they had interviewed Wells before, he spoke first.
“Who won the cricket?” he asked.
“The Oak.”
“Did they? That’ll wipe Millington’s eye,” said Wells with satisfaction.
Dallington raised his eyebrows. “I’m amazed you care, at such a juncture.”
“Being in prison? I knew the risks.”
“Why did you do it?” asked Lenox
Wells shrugged. “I didn’t want to live out my life looking for farthings that had slipped down between the floorboards, like my father. It’s no easy life, being a grain merchant. The big boys in London are after your customers, the marketplaces, people will go to Bath and Taunton. It was a losing proposition.”
“We have a few questions.”
“All right.”
“Where is the knife that killed Weston?”
“With the man who killed him, I expect. Or tossed into a ditch nearby.”
“It would not be in Captain Musgrave’s house, I suppose?” said Lenox.
Wells narrowed his eyes, genuine bemusement on his face. “Why would it be there?”
“Musgrave was not your compatriot in all this?”
Wells laughed. “I know you heard about his getting angry with me for saying hello to Cat Scales — Catherine Musgrave, she must be now — because you asked. No, we wasn’t compatriots, as you say.”
“Randall and Fontaine worked for you,” Dallington said. “Who else?”
Wells clammed up. “Nobody.”
“How much coin could you produce in a month?” asked Lenox. It was a question to which the boys from London were eager to know the answer. They had run the machine but feared pressing it too hard, lest it break.
“Don’t know. Made them as fast as I could.”
Lenox decided he would leave the technical questions about the casting, the tools and dies, to other men. “Who sold you the machine?” he asked.
Wells laughed out loud. “A man with a hat,” he said.
“Come, Wells, tell us and the judge may be lenient with you.”
“It’s not worth my skin, I told you already. I want Bessie and the boy to lead long lives, gentlemen.”
The remaining few questions they asked took them down no new path. With a sigh they shook Wells’s hand — who offered it quite generously — and left.
“We have our man, anyhow,” Dallington said to Lenox after they had bidden Oates farewell.
It was a certainty — a peace of mind — that Lenox would wish he still had not long afterward.