“I tell you it’s not possible,” said Mrs. Watson, sirs forgotten in her certitude. “After I locked the doors and windows I looked the house through and through. There’s nowhere a person could have hid, not under the beds, not in a closet. Nowhere.”
Lenox went on to ask her in detail for her activities Thursday, so that they might try to estimate which hours she had been in the kitchen, and therefore less likely to hear someone enter by the front door. She thought she had gone back there at around noon, perhaps a little earlier, and come out to clean the front rooms at one o’clock. Nothing had been disturbed or altered in that interim. The front door had still been locked — she had checked, some of Mr. Hadley’s nervousness having rubbed off on her before the telegram drew him away to Chichester.
At last they left, with their thanks. Mrs. Watson told Mr. Hadley that she would be to Potbelly Lane directly, now that her son’s health was “improved,” which seemed a rather inaccurate word to Lenox, though he made no comment upon it.
“I hope that was of some assistance to you, gentlemen,” said Hadley.
“It was entertaining, at any rate,” Edmund answered.
“May I ask what course you now mean to pursue, Mr. Lenox?”
Lenox checked his pocket watch. It was just past one o’clock, and after so much exercise before breakfast, he found that he was famished. “I would like to look at your house,” he said, “and then speak with your neighbors. But first, I think I may need to eat something. Is it convenient for you if we call at your house in an hour’s time, Mr. Hadley?”
“More than convenient. I wait upon your leisure, Mr. Lenox.”
“Thank you.”
“The house is number seven, with the blue shutters. I will be there.”
Soon the brothers were alone. “Well!” said Edmund, as they walked down the quiet streets of Markethouse, in the direction of the Bell and Horns. “You have brought me a far more interesting morning than the tenant rolls would have.”
Lenox shook his head, doubtful. “I cannot say I like it.”
“I’m surprised to see you look concerned,” said Edmund. “From what I understood, you missed this sort of thing, with all of your administrative duties.”
“I meant that I don’t like a case I don’t understand,” said Lenox.
“How do you mean?”
Lenox shrugged, then said, “What facts do we have? To begin with, how many crimes have been committed? One? Three? None? A missing bottle of sherry — there are a dozen innocuous explanations that present themselves for that. Would Mrs. Watson sincerely have wished us to search her house? Because I think Mr. Hadley is a gentle employer — very easy to take advantage of.
“And then, can we even be sure that the bottle was there in the first place? Mightn’t he have been primed for some oddity by the evening before, and forgotten that he finished it?”
“I found him very convincing,” said Edmund.
“Well — yes. But the chalk figure, the face in the window. Nobody except Hadley saw them. He has no witnesses to confirm his story. Are we to believe it without any cavil? He might be losing his grip on reality.”
“Hm.”
“Then again,” said Lenox, as they strolled onward past a small churchyard, its trees pleasantly orange and red, the whistle of wind in them just audible, “there is the matter of the call to Chichester. That, at least, is verifiable. Indeed, I think we must verify it for ourselves before we proceed.”
Edmund nodded. He was taking tobacco from a small pouch in his coat pocket as they ambled, and packing it in a pipe with two fingers, face full of thought. “There are three possibilities, then,” he said. “First, that Hadley is mad, or badly mistaken. Second, that one of these things is suspicious — the face in the window, say — and the rest are easily explained, the chalk figure a child’s drawing, the sherry mislaid or stolen…”
“And third,” said Lenox, “that it is all connected, and something very strange indeed is afoot in your little town.”
Edmund smiled. “Our little town, I think you are entitled to say, Charles, given that you have permanently returned. Tell me, is it wrong that I hope for the third possibility to be true?”
“Ha! No, of course not. It is exactly always what I hope for, you know — secretly.”
As the brothers walked on, talking about poor Hadley’s troubles, Lenox almost thought he saw a look of peace in Edmund’s face — the absence, anyway, of that carefully managed anguish that had drawn it inward for the past five weeks.
They ate a pleasant lunch at the Bell and Horns (Lenox was congratulated on his return to the parts by three different people), and after they had scraped their plates clean of the delicious spongy cake with which they rounded off the meal, and sipped their pint pots of ale down to nothing, they betook themselves to Hadley’s house.
“Are you sure you can spare the afternoon?” asked Lenox of Edmund on the way. “I’m happy to proceed on my own — or drop it altogether.”
“There’s nothing on earth I would rather be doing,” said Edmund. Then, a shadow passing over his brow, he said, “Other than spending time with the boys, obviously.”
“That goes without saying,” said Lenox, and then added quickly, in the hopes of distraction, “We’re skipping over the most intriguing question of all, by the way.”
“What’s that?”
“Hadley’s collection of gemstones. How much is it actually worth? And how carefully did he look to see that none of them were missing?”
CHAPTER TEN
Hadley’s neighbors on Potbelly Lane were an unfortunate combination: useless and extremely talkative. All of them knew Edmund by sight, as their Member of Parliament, and more than one had some issue they thought ought to be brought before the Commons — the Land Act, taxes, suffrage, in one instance a missing cat. They all admitted cheerfully that they had seen nothing, not the previous Wednesday nor the previous Thursday.
With one exception. Opposite Hadley’s small, well-maintained house, which was white with a handsome blue trim, there was a ramshackle place, the remnant of an earlier architectural era — not a row house, but a gingerbread cottage with smudges of green garden on either side of it.
Here they discovered a retired solicitor named Root. He hadn’t seen anyone entering Hadley’s house on the previous Wednesday or Thursday. Intriguingly, however, he had seen the chalk drawing.
“You did?” said Lenox.
Root nodded. “Yes. I spotted it coming out of my house on Wednesday evening. It was still light out, so probably not after a quarter to seven. Awfully peculiar, you know. I wasn’t likely to miss it.”
“Could you draw it for us?” asked Lenox.
“I’m not much of a hand at drawing.”
“Even a rough approximation would help.”
Root accepted a scrap of paper and a nub of charcoal, then spent a careful forty seconds at the table next to his door, tongue in the corner of his mouth. When he showed them the result of his work, Lenox felt excitement. It was nearly identical to the image Hadley had provided them. Something concrete, then, something to confirm that Hadley wasn’t simply going mad. If anything, Root’s figure had slightly more detail to it.
“Braids in the hair,” murmured Lenox.
“Yes,” said Root. “There weren’t many distinguishing marks to the drawing, but I recall that one. And the mouth — that was what gave me rather a jolt. It wasn’t a smile, as you would expect. Nor a frown. A straight line.”
“Expressionless,” said Lenox.
“Yes. There was something unsettling about it.”
“What did you think of the drawing at the time?” asked Lenox.
“Well, I thought enough of it that I stopped and looked at it for a moment before going on into town. I suppose I assumed some children had done it.”