“Even though Hadley doesn’t have children?”
“I didn’t give it all that much thought, you know, not enough to inquire of myself what children would have done it.”
“And now? What do you think?”
Root frowned. He was an older, acute man, contemplative. He had come to the door with his finger holding his place in a book. “If I consider it again,” he said, “though I’m not certain, I think perhaps it seems too … too expert for a child to have drawn it. Of course, I may only be ascribing that impression to it now, since two gentlemen have come to my door and asked me about it, including my representative in Parliament!”
Lenox nodded. “I understand. And you’re sure you saw nothing else — nobody unusual loitering in the area of Mr. Hadley’s house?”
“Only Mrs. Watson, whose family I have known sixty years.”
“Are you that long in this district, sir?” said Edmund, sounding surprised.
“I grew up here — left for London for thirty years, where I had offices in High Holborn, and now am back, in my mother and father’s old home, though I spend the coldest months of the winter on the Continent, for my health. I know you by sight, however, Sir Edmund. It is a pleasure to meet you in person.”
Edmund put out his hand. “The pleasure is mine,” he said.
Root took the hand and dipped his head deferentially. They spoke for another few minutes, but the solicitor wasn’t able to add any information to that which he had already given them. Nevertheless, as Lenox and Edmund walked across the street toward Hadley’s, they were both animated — a clue, confirmation of a clue.
“Is this what it’s always like?” Edmund asked.
“It’s usually a good deal more frustrating than this. And there are a great number of doors slammed in your face, and occasionally slop thrown after your feet. And curses behind your back.”
“I say, that would be thrilling.”
“Well, I doubt Hadley is the man to do any of that, and here we are at his door,” said Lenox, “so you will have to wait your treat out.”
The chief impression Hadley’s house gave was of unimpeachable tidiness. If he said there had been six bottles of liquor in the liquor stand, Lenox believed that there had been six bottles of liquor in the liquor stand. In the compact entry hall, there was a table with a clock on it, polished to a gleam, an empty calfskin card stand (no visitors that morning, at least), a paperweight, and a stack of precisely a week’s newspapers, the Times. Lenox counted them surreptitiously with his finger. Here was another signal, like the collection of gemstones, that, while Hadley’s house was small and he kept only a part-time servant, he was well off; the Times cost nine pounds a year, not an inconsiderable sum, and most men even of the middle class merely rented it for an hour’s use each day, which cost a little above a pound per annum. (Lower down the scale, it was possible to rent the previous day’s paper for about a quarter of that price.) Money: always something to keep in mind when a crime had taken place. Hadley’s could have made him a target.
They walked with great care through each of the house’s four rooms and its small rearward kitchen. Lenox had Edmund go back and enter the front door as he and Hadley stood by the stove, quiet. They couldn’t hear him come in. So it was possible that a person could have slipped inside while Mrs. Watson was in the kitchen, though obviously it would have been a risk.
Mrs. Watson had been telling the truth, too — there was nowhere in this house where a person larger than a child could reasonably have hidden, by Lenox’s reckoning. He knocked at the back of every closet, listening for the hollow sound of a false compartment, inspected the floorboards, asked whether there was an attic.
It was growing rather late now. “We have mastered the facts of the case today, at least,” said Lenox to Hadley. “Tomorrow I hope we may make further progress.”
A shadow of panic crossed Hadley’s stolid British face. “Do you think I am in danger?” he asked.
Lenox shook his head. “I think that if anyone intended you harm, they wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to draw you away from Markethouse, by reporting that fire in Chichester.” Hadley and Edmund made identical faces then, some realization dawning on them. Lenox felt a discreditable little moment of superiority and covered it with a frown. “On the other hand, I think something unusual is certainly occurring.”
“And you advise?”
“Giving us a little more time,” said Lenox. “If you feel uneasy, I would be sure to let your neighbors know before you retire for the night. A street full of inquisitive neighbors is often the most powerful deterrent to crime in my experience.”
Hadley nodded and, as they gathered up their cloaks and went to the door, thanked them profusely, telling them that he would be home all the next day, their servant whenever they might have the time free to see him again.
“An interesting day,” said Edmund, as they walked down Potbelly Lane and through Cow Cross Street. From a thousand summer afternoons, they both knew without saying it that they would take the shortcut across the old grazing pasture home — much quicker than the long road. “Why didn’t you mention the gemstones, may I ask?”
“I’d like to know a little more about it all first.”
“About the crime?”
Lenox shrugged. “The crime, the criminal, the telegram — and Hadley, too.”
At Lenox House, Waller greeted them in the entrance hall, where their footsteps sounded loudly on the black-and-white checkerboard floor.
At this hour, the light falling gray through the windows, lamps still unlit, there was something peculiarly sad in the air, to do with Molly — something silent, almost more silent because of their own small sounds in this empty little hallway, with its vestiges of another, fuller life, gloves on the front table, umbrella stand poised to receive hats and sticks. In a frame next to the front table was a small line drawing of the dogs.
Waller coughed discreetly. “One of your tenants, Martha Coxe, is at the servants’ entrance, Sir Edmund, enquiring for”—he looked distinctly uncertain as he said the next words—“for the late Lady Molly, sir.”
Edmund hesitated before he responded. “She doesn’t know … no, evidently not,” he said. “They’re very isolated down in the valley, I suppose. Please, lead the way.”
Edmund followed Waller. Lenox, alone, sighed and walked into the drawing room.
Things were a little bit more cheerful here, at least. On his mother’s sideboard there was a rounded china urn of hot tea, with plates of biscuits and sandwiches near it, and gratefully he poured himself a cup, spooning in a small noiseless snowfall of sugar, then pouring a bit of milk in to follow it. Ranged across the long wall, opposite the windows looking out at the garden, were the old familiar portraits he had ignored so intimately in his childhood, when he spent hour upon hour in this room, especially on rainy days. One of the old Lenoxes — Sir Albion Lenox, 1712–1749, a small brass plate said — looked exactly like a cross between Charles’s father and a large frog.
He took his cup over to the piano and found on the deep black shine of its surface a letter and a telegram waiting for him. (This was where Edmund always had Waller leave his post, and Lenox followed suit when he visited.) There was also a large stack of official pouches from Parliament, and he smiled, remembering the ceaseless flow of documents and constituents’ letters and blue books from his own time in the House, and feeling glad that this cataract fell upon Edmund now, not him. He picked up the wire with his name on it and read it.
His eyes moved quickly. When he was finished, he said, in a low voice, “Well.”