Instantly Lenox saw where the younger Dabney’s sharpness came from.
“A point well taken, Mr. Dabney. I think the answer must be fear. Perhaps neither lad realized how serious the matter was until George Payson was murdered. If I understand what Bill is like, he may have been savvy enough to recognize the danger and go on concealing himself.”
They spoke for about twenty minutes longer, and over the course of that time Lenox saw the tremendous sorrow and worry that underlay Mr. Dabney’s deliberate manner and Mrs. Dabney’s flightiness-the anxiety about their only son. He disliked seeing people at their weakest, their most vulnerable, as his job continually forced him to do. Did it give him a skeptical attitude about human beings? It wasn’t impossible.
He thanked them when they parted and promised to keep in close touch. Leaving them at their hotel, he went to the Bodleian, where he did another hour of fruitless research. Just before getting up to go find some lunch, he wrote Goodson a short note, saying that he no longer thought it possible that Bill Dabney had been behind George Payson’s death, as they had once speculated. It seemed improbable after that meeting.
He fell ravenously to a chop of beef with potatoes, peas, and gravy at the Bear and had a glass of shandy with it. After polishing it off he sat at his old table, initials carved into its surface, and drank a coffee while he looked out the window. The days had been getting colder, and the warmth of the coffee was renewing. In the warm, low-ceilinged Bear, he felt almost content-though all the while knowing that the case, getting colder by the minute, awaited him outside.
Before going back to the Randolph to consult with Graham-who he thought should perhaps shadow Goodson on the trail of Geoffrey Canterbury-Lenox took a quick walk through the old stone courtyards of Corpus Christi, close by the Bear.
Corpus was perhaps the most learned college, famous for its classicists and humanists despite being the traditional terrain of the Bishops of Winchester. Erasmus, with whom Lenox was at the moment wrestling as he read The Praise of Folly, had once famously praised its library for containing books in Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek. Balliol had always been more outgoing, more athletic, than places like Corpus Christi, the reason it produced more politicians and explorers than writers and clergymen. Still, Corpus was a small gem, like one of its giant neighbors, Merton and Christ Church, in perfect miniature. Peering in through the windows of the library he saw rows of students with their heads bent over Homer, Herodotus, Cicero, Josephus. It gave him pleasure to think of them so gravely setting out for lives devoted to knowledge, to the great tradition of thought-it gave him pleasure that this went on even after George Payson’s death.
Back at the Randolph there was another note from Dallington. It was somewhat surprising: Dear Lenox-in lieu of further instructions from you I spent a bit of time thinking about the note under that blighted cat, and think I may have come up with something. At school we used to have the Eton cross-tip, a code we wrote notes in so that they’d be indecipherable to the Beaks. Just substituting numbers for letters, really, like this: x/1/2/3/4/5
1/a/b/c/d/e
2/f/g/h/ij/k
3/l/m/n/o/p
4/q/r/s/t/u
5/v/w/x/y/z You catch the drift, I’m sure-the letter k would be represented as 25, or the letter v would be 51. We had to combine i and j to make it work. Oh, and an x in front of a number meant it was simply a number (so you could write “Meet at 330” in code without some ass wondering what 330 meant). Well, have another look: X12/43 21 31 25/x2 Plain as day, that translates to: 12/SFLK/2 At first I thought it was rot but then I asked the pater what he thought, and he said why of course it must be the 12th Suffolk, 2nd Battalion-which needless to say rang a bell. Have you looked it up yet? The regiment and battalion of your lads, Wilson and Lysander. According to my encyclopedia, the 12th Regiment of Foot was raised in 1685 as the Norfolk Regiment of Foot. Got madly decorated for the Fourth Mysore War (sounds like a laugh) in 1799. Currently commanded by Robert Meade. Hope this helps. Here at the ready. Dallington.
Lenox had been meaning to look up the 12th Suffolk 2nd to see if any other names were familiar. He hadn’t, but upon reading this he left the room quickly. Why would Payson leave two clues, both the September Society card and this note, pointing to that regiment, that battalion? Would he have counted on somebody-perhaps Hatch, perhaps Stamp-recognizing the Eton cross-tip? Dallington had been at Eton, but was it common to other schools as well, the code? It had been remiss of him not to research it.
It took very little time in the Reading Room of the Bodleian to find a military history of the last hundred years devoted to the 12th Suffolk, which contained at least four battalions. Rapidly flipping through the pages, Lenox read that the 2nd usually had about eight hundred men at a time, which would mean about fifty-five officers, which would mean that in the last century there had been some three hundred officers in the battalion. A page was cited where their pictures and names were given. He flipped to it and almost at once found Lysander, then searched for his picture-younger, but without a doubt him.
Then, more methodically, he scrolled through the fifty-five names. Twenty-six of these would form the September Society. (Why was it called that? His mind racing, Lenox asked himself all the questions he had been saving.) Henry Nelson, Mark Noakes, Matthew Ottshott, Tim Patterson…
Lenox froze.
The next name in the list-he read it, reread it, triple-checked it.
James Payson.
Could it be? It must be right-yes, it was right.
James Payson had served in the 12th (Suffolk) Regiment of Foot, 2nd Battalion.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Now, a while later, sitting on a bench in Balliol, Lenox watched the students mill around him. Gossip had long since run wild about Dabney and Payson, and he overheard many students talking about the two now and then, though the majority of conversation was still devoted to boat races and undergraduate plays, rugby and tutorials. His mind was going over and over the few dim personal memories he had of James Payson, smoothing them out like water over rocks; there had been a period of six months or so when their London sets had mingled, and Lenox and Payson had seen each other once or twice a month, a desultory acquaintance springing up between them.
His people were from Worcestershire, near Evesham, where they maintained a dilapidated castle that had been given to the family by George II after some ancient service done to the crown during the War of Jenkins’s Ear. He remembered this because Payson had always made a joke about the absurdity of the war that had founded his family, so to speak. (During a fraught time in the relations between Britain and Spain, a sea captain named Robert Jenkins had been captured by Spaniards and had his ear cut off; when he came back and triumphantly showed it to the Houses of Parliament, the Prime Minister-Walpole?-had declared war. Lenox knew at least that much of the story from his schooldays.) Payson had been the second son and black sheep of his family-fiery tempered, commonly found in low company. It was inevitable that he would find his way to London, given those traits, and having been sent down from Oxford, for public drunkenness, he had somehow acquired a place in-well, in the 12th Suffolk 2nd, as it would seem.
He had been handsome, tall, upright in his bearing, with a mustache and a forthright manner, but his eyes had always looked dangerous. When he had convinced Lady Annabelle West to marry him, people had predicted ill of it-and after six months of hard use she had fled from him, seeking refuge in a small town in Belgium, where her brother moved to protect her. She was three months pregnant, and other than a somewhat startled state of mind had been in decent health. By the time the baby was born in Brussels, six months later, James Payson had gone to India with his battalion. The book had said of that time that the battalion was by and large bored, despite occasional skirmishes with the locals. On their return two years after leaving England, they had left behind twenty men and two officers dead, James Payson one of them. The book didn’t give the reason for his death.