“When did it happen? And where?”
“Early this morning, at his office.”
“Has the office been disturbed? Can I see it?”
Edmund nodded. “We had to remove him, obviously, but otherwise it’s untouched. Clavering, would you like to come with us?”
“Perhaps Bunce should take them,” said one of the men, a large fellow with heavy jowls and a white mustache. “Clavering can help us organize these patrols we’ve been discussing.”
Edmund nodded again. “Good idea.”
“Patrols?” said Lenox.
“We have to do something to calm the town,” the same man said, with his white mustache. Lenox thought he recognized him as a merchant. “People are in a right agitated state.”
“Where is Stevens?” asked Lenox.
With Dr. Stallings, several voices told him at once — the same doctor who had seen through Mrs. Watson’s son’s fake illness.
“Stallings is not very hopeful,” Edmund added.
“Understating it, that,” said Morrow, the banker. “He’s called in Reverend Perse.”
Lenox nodded thoughtfully.
He was used to the aftermath of violence — arriving in its wake — and though nobody had exactly said anything negative, he didn’t think he had ever been in a room as full of despair as this one.
“Chins up, fellows,” he said, voice hard, not sympathetic. “Stevens is still alive. Clavering’s patrols will watch the streets. Meanwhile, my brother and I will figure out who did this, and they’ll be in a jail cell within a day or two.”
“Well said,” put in Edmund.
“This will all be over before next market day.”
At that moment Bunce came in with a heavyset, grizzled man — Mickelson. He had a sour face. “You asked for me, gentlemen?” he said.
Lenox introduced himself. “I understand your spaniel is the one that was stolen,” he said. “I wondered if you might give us something of his — a blanket he’s lain on, for instance.”
“Why?”
“We might set a scenting dog after him. There’s a chance he’s still with the person who stole from the market and took our horses. Not to mention attacking Stevens, of course.”
Eyebrows rose around the room: a good idea. Mickelson nodded, grudgingly. “I’ll send a boy back home. It may take a while.”
“Fine,” said Lenox. “Thank you. Now, Bunce — can you take me to the mayor’s office?”
“By all means, sir.”
Bunce led him out of the room, and soon the two brothers were following his long stride down the slope of the town square, toward the town hall at its base.
With his brother, Charles could be slightly more pensive than he had been in the little private dining room of the Bell and Horns. “What on earth happened?” he asked.
“The devil knows. The attack occurred some time before seven o’clock this morning.”
“How do you know that?”
“Stevens’s secretary — that young girl in the large spectacles, you remember, the one who follows him like a shadow — found him unconscious when she arrived at seven. He was just barely breathing.”
“Did Stevens always get to work so early?”
“No. In fact, the assistant usually arrives at eight, a minute or two before him, but Stevens had asked her to come in at seven. The annual budget is due to be submitted in six days, from what I understand. A busy time of year.”
Lenox filed that piece of information away. The budget could be controversial in Markethouse, against all odds — what money went to the market, what money went to the council, the mayor’s own salary. According to Edmund, who attended when he could, the meetings had grown heated in the past.
“And what was done to him, exactly?” asked Lenox.
“He was slumped over an armchair. Blood everywhere, and six or seven wounds.”
Lenox saw Bunce, ahead of them, wince. “Back or front?”
“Oh, directly to his face and his chest. He saw whoever attacked him. Look, we’re here. You can see the office where it happened for yourself.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The town hall was a two-story building the width of about four houses, topped with a large black-iron clock that had never worked in Lenox’s memory. In days when their mayor had been less able than Stevens Stevens, the villagers had noted that fact as ironic — but Stevens had looked into the expense of fixing it and dismissed it as frivolous within his first year in office, and revisited the issue only to reach the same conclusion every five years since.
That was the kind of mayor he was.
For that reason it seemed almost impossible to Lenox that anyone could feel such violent emotion toward him — six, seven knife wounds, to his head and chest, which meant looking into his face. Early in the morning, not in the drunkenness of midnight. What could their dry, pedantic mayor, whose whole life was bent toward the ledger, have done to inspire such passionate hatred?
Of course, that led directly to the second question he had: What, if anything, did this have to do with Arthur Hadley?
Stevens occupied a large corner office on the second floor of the town hall. Two men were sitting outside his door. One was, judging from his modest black suit and tie, clearly an office clerk, the other was wearing a gray uniform and tall black hat, with a torch dangling from his belt. Edmund explained that these were Stevens’s chief clerk and the building’s watchman. They had been stationed here since the attack to make sure nobody entered the mayor’s office.
“What time do you come on generally?” asked Lenox of the watchman, whose name was Sutherland.
“Ten minutes before eight o’clock each morning, sir, which is when the building is opened.”
“Is there a night watchman?”
“No, sir.”
“Is the building locked when you arrive?”
“Oh, yes, sir.”
“How many people have keys?” asked Lenox.
“Only three — myself, Mr. Stevens, and the charwoman, who stays behind every evening to clean from seven to eight o’clock.”
“Who is she?”
“Mrs. Claire Adams.”
Bunce interjected. “She’s Mrs. Watson’s sister.”
Lenox and Edmund exchanged a startled glance. “Elizabeth Watson? Hadley’s charwoman?”
“Yes. She’s housekeeper to the Malone family, but cleans here five evenings a week to make extra money.” Then he added, in a quieter voice, “Her husband, you know.”
Sutherland nodded knowingly.
“What about her husband?” asked Lenox.
There was a beat of silence, and then Sutherland said, simply, “Gone.”
Lenox decided to leave that for later. He said, “And was there any sign of forced entry here this morning when you arrived? A broken window, a jammed door?”
Sutherland frowned. “No, not that I saw.”
“Was it locked when you arrived this morning?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Peculiar. Perhaps you could check around the building again now for any signs of a forced entry, while I look at the office.”
“If you wish, sir.”
Lenox turned to the clerk. “And you might tell us what Mr. Stevens’s planned meetings for the day were.”
“Miss Harville would be better able to inform you of that than I am — but I can look in her desk if you like.”
“Miss Harville is Stevens’s secretary,” said Edmund. “The one who found the body.”
“Where is she now?”
“Downstairs in the ladies’ lounge,” said the clerk. “She is … perturbed.”
“We must speak with her next,” said Lenox.
The clerk, who had on round glasses and struck Lenox as rather like Stevens, a local boy with ambition, said, doubtfully, “You can try. She’s a bit frantic. We always warned him that it was no good having a woman for a secretary, but he always did, several in a row.”