The difficulty with the scenario was in its planning. How would Wells have been in contact with Musgrave, or with any of his accomplices in Bath? Even if he had, why would they risk coming out to see him? Clearly when Musgrave had left Plumbley he wasn’t worried about Wells shouldering the blame for Weston’s death.
As he was mounting the horse again, Lenox felt a chill.
Who were the three men in the carriage, now? Wells. Frederick. And Oates.
It was impossible. Oates with his fleshy, impassive, unintelligent face, his grief over his cousin.
Yet wasn’t he the most logical co-conspirator? There had been no evidence of another carriage stopping where Chalmers had fallen — only the one, Frederick’s. And Wells couldn’t have overpowered Oates, Chalmers, and Frederick together, even with a gun.
Lenox shook his head, yet a flood of inconsequential memories, small oddities of behavior, returned with great force to his mind. It was true that Oates had behaved strangely at moments. He hadn’t wanted Lenox to look at Weston’s correspondence, arguing overmuch for the boy’s privacy. Had he been afraid of a note implicating him? Or the canvas of the town green: Oates had uncovered nobody to help them, while Fripp had produced Carmody within ten minutes.
And the note from Weston to Oates! “Swells” seemed such an obvious nickname for the grain merchant, and all the lads in the pub had known it at once. Wouldn’t the constable have recognized it immediately? Wouldn’t Weston have used only a nickname he was sure his cousin would understand?
Lenox’s resistance to the idea was weakening. He hoped it wasn’t Oates — but, he thought, who had been in the grain merchant’s shop the first time Lenox visited? The constable.
Lenox remembered, too, Wells’s somewhat unusual insistence that he stay in Oates’s custody, the man from whom he should have most feared retribution. Beyond that there was Wells’s alibi, and his true, convincing outrage when he was asked if he had killed Weston. What if Wells had only confessed because he knew he had a way out? That Oates would spring him?
It had already, after only a few hours, been a long day, and these small, agitating thoughts, arriving in Lenox’s mind unbidden, seemed wrong, inaccurate. For half a mile of riding he dismissed the possibility from his mind.
Until, that is, he remembered a phrase from McConnell’s letter: The only fingerprints on the knife belonged to Constable Oates.
How many dozens of times in his experienced had it been the murderer who found the body, who found the weapon? Hadn’t Oates found the knife in the slop bucket at the last possible moment, that morning in the basement of Wells’s house, at the last throw of the dice?
With a terrible sense of dread Lenox began to fear that the accomplice wasn’t Musgrave at all. That it was Plumbley’s police constable. That Weston’s own cousin had murdered him.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The rain was gone forty minutes later, the weak yellow of the sun glittering in the branches of the trees, blackened by their wetness, that lined the road. Lenox had lost all track of the carriage ruts, and nearly all hope, too. The thought of Oates working with Wells was too terrible to contemplate, but it solved so many niggling doubts. It explained Wells’s behavior.
Now was the time to turn back. He had no way of knowing where Wells had taken Frederick — Wells and Oates, perhaps. His horse was getting genuinely tired. If Jeffers, the constable from West Buckland, had done as he said he would, by now they knew in Bath and Plumbley what had happened, and surely massive reinforcements would be patrolling this road soon.
Then there was Chalmers. Was he alive? If he was, could he tell them anything?
Yet something drove Lenox on. It was simple enough: his cousin, his mother’s dearest friend within her family, was in the hands of a man, perhaps of two men, who had proved they didn’t scruple at violence. If there was some chance of stumbling across them he had to try for it. He prayed for luck.
In the end, however, it wasn’t luck but design that helped him.
As he was cantering along — a gallop now was too much for Sadie, who had white froth at her mouth — he saw, half-trapped in the mud of the road, a bright blue ribbon. He stopped the horse and got down, realizing with a fizz of joy as he did that it was Frederick’s. It was the same ribbon, given to him by the garden society of Somerset, that he wore every day in his lapel.
Lenox knew Freddie; he would have dropped it from the window of the carriage on purpose. It was never the sort of thing to come loose on its own, either. How many times had Charles told his cousin of the importance of the trail of breadcrumbs in his cases, of small clues?
The question was why he had dropped it here, of all places.
Lenox looked around. The road had narrowed, vast tangles of maple branches intertwining to form a cathedral ceiling overhead. There was no evidence that he could see of a carriage stopping. Perhaps farther down the path.
He mounted the horse again and rode on, very slowly this time, his eyes scanning the space among the trees and along the ground. Nothing so far.
After a short distance, not above a tenth of a mile, he saw a shingle attached to a post. It read:
WILD BEAR COACHING STATION
PUBLIC HOUSE
HOT FOOD BEER BLACKSMITH STABLES
NEXT TURNING.
He could smell the smoke of the Wild Bear’s woodfire. Was this where they had gone? Perhaps one of the horses had lost a shoe, perhaps one of the men needed food. Or perhaps it was a coincidence. Still, Lenox took the turning.
The inn was a squat, stone house with two modest gables in the upper story and a large stable attached to it, the sort of place where travelers stop for a bite and where local farmers congregate if it’s closer than the village.
A boy appeared as he rode up. “Take your horse, sir?”
“Please. She’s had a hard morning — water her and rub her down, if you would.”
“Oh, yes, sir.”
Lenox stepped down from the horse, gave the boy a coin, and passed him the hack’s bridle. Might as well let her have ten minutes’ rest, even if there was nothing else to keep her here. It might mean another hour’s good riding down the road.
He waited until the boy had gone out of sight and then followed him with soft footsteps. He came to a door in the stable and pulled it slightly ajar.
With a thrill he saw, unmistakable in its trim and its construction, his cousin’s carriage.
So they were here. Now he had to consider what he wanted to do.
He pulled his hat low over his eyes, so that it gave him some protection from recognition, and went around through the front door of the Wild Bear.
At this hour it ought to have been empty, but in fact it was rather full. A market day locally, perhaps. Or happy chance. Either way he accepted the luck with gratitude. The walls were dark from decades of smoke, and even now there was an eye-watering concentration of it floating constantly upward and collecting at the ceiling, from the badly ventilated hearth and from the pipes the men along the bar constantly refilled.
He moved toward the bar, catching the eye of the publican who stood behind it. “A half of stout, please,” he said.
“Right away, sir.”
When he had his drink he could sip it slowly, concealing his face, and scan the place. There were perhaps twenty people in the room all told, crowded around small tables and along benches at the back wall. He looked very carefully but saw that none of them was Oates, or Wells, or Frederick. He cursed under his breath.
Just as he was deciding that he ought to go straight to the coach and risk being shot, however, the door opened and there he was: Wells. Lenox saw him first, and quickly turned his back to the door. He wondered if he would stand out — dressed better than the men in here, no coat (that was still with Chalmers), and with dirt spattered up and down his breeches from the long morning of riding.