“I do wonder where he is, though. Muller, I mean, not LeMaire. Fancy, just disappearing like that.”
“It’s got me foxed,” admitted Lenox.
“What would be your best guess? If you had to guess, without hedging, I mean?”
That had been Edmund’s favorite method of inquisition for his younger brother since childhood (If you had to give up either toffees or licorice forever, which would it be?), and Lenox smiled.
He glanced down at the other cuttings. There were vanishing, evanescent little fragments of information in them: that Muller had asked for a second sandwich wrapped in a napkin just before he played the concert, for instance, indicating that he might have been planning to travel (though of course he could have just been hungry); that he had quarreled with his manager before the first recital in London. An enterprising young journalist had traveled to Dover and reported that at least one gentleman answering to Muller’s description and, crucially, traveling without luggage, had been on the evening packet to Lille the night of his disappearance.
Still, none of that answered the basic question: Where had the German gone directly after he finished playing?
A thought occurred to Lenox. “I suppose if I had to guess,” he said, “I would hazard that it’s all for publicity. Muller’s sitting right now in a room in the house of the owner of the Cadogan Theater, reading penny novelettes, eating cakes, and waiting. The owner of the theater is rubbing his hands together gleefully, planning how to spend all of the money he’ll rake in next week when Muller makes his triumphant return from the dead.”
Edmund thought about that for a moment. “Interesting. Yes — what price wouldn’t people pay to see him after such an absence?”
“There you have it.”
Edmund lifted his paper again to cut it and said, “I can tell you that I would pay a pretty steep price to meet whoever left that chalk drawing on Hadley’s stoop.”
“Mm.”
After speaking with Clavering earlier that day, they had walked through the rain to Hadley’s house. Mrs. Watson had answered the door, greeting them in a low tone. “He’s not well, Mr. Hadley. His nerves.”
“Is he in bed?” asked Lenox.
“In his sitting room — but wearing his slippers.”
She’d said this as if it meant he were next door to death. In fact, Hadley had indeed seemed somewhat broken down, and when Lenox asked after his state of mind, he confessed that he had barely slept.
“I keep seeing that face in the window,” he said. “I know that somebody has been in the house. That’s the problem. I have half a mind to check in at the Bell and Horns and stay there until this is all over.”
Edmund and Lenox had nodded sympathetically and asked a few questions. Was Mr. Hadley aware of the other thefts in the village? Did he have anything at all to do with the market? The answer was no in both cases. They went over what he remembered more slowly then, though nothing useful came of it, except, perhaps, that Hadley was more inclined to think that it had been a woman’s face that he’d seen in the window than a man’s.
“Do you remember the person’s hair?” Lenox had asked.
Hadley had shaken his head. “Nothing so distinct, Mr. Lenox. It’s only a feeling, you understand. I would never swear to it.”
At last they had come, gradually, to the subject of Mr. Hadley’s gemstones. Charles had suggested that Edmund be the one to bring it up, and he had — a surprisingly capable assistant. “You’re certain the sherry was the only thing that was missing when you returned from Chichester last Thursday?” he had said.
“Yes, quite sure.”
Edmund had nodded. “Good, good. I only asked because I know you mentioned your collection of gemstones. I am pleased to hear that it is intact.”
For an instant of an instant, Lenox thought he saw something flare in Hadley’s eyes — something possessive, something angry — but when he looked again, it was gone, as surely as if it had never been there. “They are all as they were,” Hadley said, “though it is not such an astonishing collection as all that, only a hobby.”
“Are they under lock and key?” Edmund asked.
“They are now, though the cabinet is not very — not a citadel, if you take my meaning, not impenetrable. Fortunately, I don’t advertise their presence, so it would take a thief some time to discover them.”
“I might suggest removing them to a bank,” said Lenox.
Hadley nodded. “Yes, perhaps.”
But it was plain he was only being polite. “What is the collection, precisely?”
“They are rough gemstones — uncut, unpolished — some very valuable, some, many of my favorites, in fact, entirely forgettable, at least from a monetary point of view. Such stones have been my passion since I wandered over the cliffs with a chisel as a boy, Mr. Lenox. I am fortunate enough to have attained some expertise upon the subject. Indeed, I have published articles in several small journals, and been in communication with leading scientists in London.”
Hadley’s ardor wasn’t at all uncommon. Theirs was an age of fanatical amateur geologists, who roamed the countryside in clubs, covering twenty and thirty miles in a day with ease. (Prince Albert himself, Queen Victoria’s late husband, had been one of these men.) Many of them, recently, had taken to visiting the quarries near Oxford, where they were uncovering most remarkable fossils, unknown to science, with elements common both to birds and lizards; the eminent naturalist Richard Owen, an acquaintance of Lenox’s, whom many of these amateurs revered, and to whom they took any bones that they struggled to identify, had given these ancient animals the collective name Dinosauria. The press — abjuring Latin — called these strange beasts “dinosaurs.”
Gemstone collectors were a subset of this cultishly zealous group. If Hadley was a known figure in that particular field, he might well have attracted the wrong sort of attention.
Lenox nodded, understandingly. “That’s excellent,” he said. “But I would consider removing them to a bank, as I said, or failing that precaution I would at least consider buying a safe. I am far from persuaded that the crimes of which you have been a victim are at their end.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The next day was Saturday: market day, which might as well have counted as two days of the week here. In the morning, Lenox rode again, his muscles loosening slowly as he went, for he was sore as the devil from the previous two mornings’ rides. It was gray and wet still, though bracingly open. He wished Jane and Sophia were here to take the air. He might miss any number of things about London — his office, his friends, his clubs, the noise, the light — but he didn’t miss the soupy fog that rolled through the streets this time of year, troubling every pair of lungs in the street.
When he returned to Lenox House, Edmund was again gone, though it was scarcely eight o’clock. “Where is he now?” Lenox asked Waller.
“Out upon a walk as he was yesterday morning, sir. He gave me to understand that he does not expect to return for a period of one to two hours.”
Lenox was vexed; he wanted to get to the market early, before it grew too busy, and interview the stall-holders who had been the victims of the thefts Clavering had described. After lingering over breakfast, checking the window every other minute for Edmund’s return, he decided he would go on his own. He asked Waller to tell his brother to meet him in town.
To save time, he borrowed an old dray horse from the stables, Matilda, a gentle, lolloping beast, fifteen years old and still just about faster than a man on foot. She carried him to the square, nuzzled him when he patted her mane, and gracefully accepted an apple from his pocket. He found a boy in the square — a local, who spent market day hanging around the central square to do odd jobs — and gave him a penny to take her back to Lenox House.