“Very, very curious,” muttered Lenox.
Stevens’s young secretary came back with his food, blushing as she intruded upon their conversation to hand it to the mayor, and after a few minutes Edmund and Charles bade him good day.
When they were alone together, Edmund asked, “Why were you so fixated on the books?”
Lenox shrugged. “Because they change the whole complexion of the matter, at least as far as I’m concerned.”
“How is that?”
“How many men in England who are desperate enough to live upon stolen chickens, and sleep under stolen blankets, can even read — let alone care so much about reading that they’d steal books, too?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They remained at the market until one o’clock. Then they went into the Bell and Horns — the village’s main inn, gathering point, public house, stables, a large, flourishing place of two stories — and had a lunch of roast, potatoes, and peas, served inside a golden Yorkshire pudding.
As they left the pub, they nearly bowled over young George Watson, the smaller of Hadley’s charwoman’s two sons. He was covered in mud and offered to sell them a toad, as he had before. Edmund said no thank you, and George said what about a songbird, they were dead cheerful, and Edmund said no thank you again, but he would give him half a penny if he went and fetched a cup of water from the bar so Edmund could rinse his hands off. George was back in a jiffy and had disappeared down into the welter of the market with his halfpenny before Edmund’s hands were dry.
“I cannot see how you plan to proceed,” said Edmund, shaking out his wrists. “We’ve spoken with anyone who might know anything about the intruder at Hadley’s house, and we’ve looked it over for ourselves. It’s all dead ends as far as the eye can see.”
“Yes. It’s bad. This is generally the point where I give up,” said Lenox.
Edmund’s eyes widened. “I never! Is it really?”
“No, of course not. Don’t be preposterous.”
Edmund looked abashed. “Oh.”
“There is always somebody else to speak with, of course. Just now I think we ought to talk to the milk and egg man of Markethouse, whoever he may be.”
“Pickler.”
“Is that his name? Yes, then, him. In my experience, nobody knows a village more intimately than its milkman. He crosses every line of class, respectability, geography — he knows the inhabitant of every house by name — he’s called Pickler, you say?”
“Yes,” said Edmund.
“It was Smith when we were young.”
“So it was. This is his son-in-law,” said Edmund. “In fact Smith is still alive. His daughter Margery married Pickler, and together they took over the business. They buy some of our milk at the house.”
“Then sell it back to you?”
“In bottles, and half-skimmed, and on the doorstep, with a pint of cream, too,” said Edmund.
“I see.”
“And furthermore, we don’t miss out on having milk if our cows fall sick or don’t feel like giving any. It would mean hiring a whole other fellow to be sure of all that myself.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Of course, Molly always said we ought to have more than two cows, but she was more faithful to the country than I am. I couldn’t be bothered with the trouble of it. Give me horses any day.”
“Horses are much more interesting than cows. Less milk, however.”
Lenox had said these words quickly, hoping to push the conversation ahead, but his effort at distraction was unsuccessful. Edmund’s face hadn’t exactly changed as he mentioned Molly, but he had somehow nevertheless seemed to fade, to exist a little less. It was terrible.
“I probably ought to have done it,” he said — not quite to Lenox.
“Come on, let’s see if we can find Pickler.”
“Right-o,” said Edmund, shaking his head sharply, as if to clear it out.
They found the milkman shopping for himself, as it happened, near the cattle pen to which local farmers had driven their calves for sale. He was happy to step away from the pen and speak with them for a moment, he said, tipping his cap respectfully to Sir Edmund.
He was a man of about five foot five inches, with a sportingly angled houndstooth hat. Apparently he and old Mr. Smith’s daughter scrimped all they could in order to buy a cow every two months or so, because of course the more milk they provided themselves, the greater their profit.
“Nor do we feed them on the spent mash out the breweries,” he added, “though it would be cheaper in the short run. But they make more and better milk on real grazing.”
Pickler himself lived in a small pair of rooms; the cows were all stabled on a local dairy farmer’s land, where they could graze to their hearts’ content for a small fee.
Lenox and Edmund asked him if he had heard of the thefts. He laughed; he had, the implication being that you would have to search much farther than him to find someone who didn’t know about the thefts.
“Have you seen any unfamiliar faces around town?” Lenox asked the milkman.
He shook his head. “Not recently, no. Mrs. Hargrave had a nephew visiting, but he’s been gone this week and more. Other than him, nobody.”
“In that case, I am wondering if there is any particular spot in Markethouse that might serve as a bolt-hole — where a person might conceal himself, sleep at night, lurk during the day.”
Pickler frowned. “It’s not the village I would choose for it,” he said.
“That’s true,” Edmund put in. “It’s very tight.”
“I suppose the churchyard is the only place I can think of,” said Pickler. “Every other room in every other house is occupied, and my missus and I would know it in a heartbeat if someone was in our cellar, for instance. You wouldn’t last long trying to hide in any of the streets here. No, I don’t think it’s Markethouse you’re wanting, for that kind of thing — unless it’s the churchyard, as I say.”
“Every village must have an abandoned room — a little lean-to — where a person could hide?” said Lenox.
Pickler shook his head. “Not in Markethouse proper, sir. The town is overinhabited as it is, sir. Folk are very jealous of their space here.”
Edmund affirmed this. “There’s a law on the books against putting up two continuous buildings or more within a few miles of the town limits. Agreed long ago by the local landowners. Everything’s very compact as a result, just as Pickler says.”
“I see.”
A few minutes later, as they watched the milkman walk back toward the cattle pen, Edmund said, “You think it’s an itinerant, then, someone living rough?”
“I really don’t know. The blankets and the food would seem to indicate as much. But then there are the books, and Mr. Hadley’s peculiar experience.”
“Mm.”
“It can’t hurt to look at the churchyard, at least. Come, let’s go there now.”
But at the churchyard they found only another dead end. They walked the whole length of it, then looked in all the nooks and crevices within the church itself, but there was no sign at all of inhabitation. And as Lenox thought of the town, he realized that Pickler and Edmund were right: There were very few places in Markethouse where one could hide out. Its most affluent residents lived in Cremorne Row, in a long line of alabaster houses, its prosperous burghers round about the area of Potbelly Lane, and its lower inhabitants toward Mrs. Watson’s end of town. In all that space, as he thought of it, he couldn’t call to mind a single dark alley, or a stableyard that wasn’t hawkishly watched. If the town said Mrs. Hargrave’s nephew had been the last stranger to visit before Lenox himself, the town was right.