“I’ll be waiting for you, then.”
At home Lenox sorted through his post and found that there was a report from Graham about Hatch’s movements in the last day or two. It read: Mr. Lenox – Per your request, I have closely followed the movements of Professor John Hatch since your departure. Unfortunately he has done nothing untoward; his routine seems to be very set, a limited range of motion including his rooms at Lincoln, his laboratory, and the lecture hall. I shall continue to observe him but have little hope of a breakthrough. Unless I receive instructions to the contrary I will return to London tomorrow.
It would be best for Graham to return, certainly. Lenox sighed. If Lysander and the September Society were responsible for killing George Payson, why? What did Hatch know that he wasn’t revealing? And where on earth was Bill Dabney?
There was also a note from Inspector Goodson. It was very brief but made Lenox more hopeful than anything had in days. Have found a small campsite just by the meadow, due 100 yards south in a thick grove of trees. Sign of habitation some days old. Remnants: some food, a bright red lock of hair, and a thick, straight line of ash. Thought the latter two might interest you. Please report any findings, as we have lost Canterbury and no sign of Dabney. Goodson.
Before he had time to think about this, there was a knock on the door, and he knew it must be McConnell.
The doctor was drenched. He came in smiling ruefully. “Don’t suppose I could have a cup of that?” he said, gesturing toward the tea tray. “Something hot would go down well.” He took the towel that Mary had just arrived with and managed to make himself slightly drier.
“Come over by the fire,” Lenox said. “Only milk, right?”
“Right.”
They sat opposite each other in the brown armchairs by the fire, Lenox quickly removing a small stack of books he had left on the one he never sat in.
“Was I right, then? About the report?”
“Yes,” said McConnell, removing his flask and taking a slug with a wince, “you were absolutely right. There’s no question about it. Unless James Payson and Peter Wilson’s regimental training encompassed a uniform lesson on the proper way to commit suicide, they were both murdered.”
Though he had known it was coming, Lenox’s composure lurched a bit. “Murdered?”
“That’s as clear as I can see it. I wanted to come over here first, but then I’m going to go see the coroner who worked on Wilson’s case and ask his opinion.”
“I wish you wouldn’t, just yet.”
“Why?”
“In a day or two it won’t matter-next week, say-but at the moment I don’t want him calling in Daniel Maran and the rest of this damned Society for testimony about that weekend, asking them about George Payson.”
McConnell nodded. “Yes, all right. By God, it’s pretty grim all around.”
“Yes. Pretty grim.”
“Have you heard anything from Oxford?”
“They found the place where Payson and Dabney were hiding out behind Christ Church Meadow.” Lenox handed his friend Goodson’s note. “Everything seems conclusive enough, and at the same time completely baffling. Why would this Society care after twenty years that old James Payson’s son was sitting around studying modern history in some innocuous college? And it has to be Payson, doesn’t it? He was the one killed; he’s the one with the link to this group; Lysander was in Oxford. And yet, and yet…”
“It’ll come clean soon, I’ve no doubt,” McConnell said consolingly, giving the note back.
“I suppose you’re right. Jane’s doing well, incidentally?” said Lenox.
“It would put anyone’s back up to have their maid shot, but she’s doing remarkably well, yes.”
They spoke for another few moments, but as soon as he had drunk his last drop of tea, McConnell stood up and said he had to go. Lenox could see his eagerness to return to his pregnant wife, and envied him it.
“Sorry to have taken you away from home, but the file couldn’t leave Edmund’s…”
“Oh, not at all, I was glad to get a look at it. One of the queerest means of murder I’ve ever heard of. By the way, what do you make of that missing sheet? In the file on Payson?”
“Missing sheet?”
McConnell had been halfway out the door, but he turned back fully to Lenox now. “You must have seen that there was a third sheet in Payson’s file. In the War Office’s file.”
“I confess I didn’t.”
“Yes-in all that useless information on the bottom of the first page it said 1/3, the second said 2/3… I suppose I got used to looking there when I practiced medicine.”
“Unforgivable on my part.” Lenox shook his head. “What do you think it was?”
“Could have been anything-a meaningless addendum, the solution to the whole problem. I don’t know. But if it were meaningless, why would it be gone?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
T hat evening at eight forty-five, Lenox put on a swallowtail coat and white evening tie, his SPQR cufflinks, a black waistcoat, and last of all his black patent leather shoes, buffed by the shoe-and-lace boy who came by once a week. Boats were steaming toward the New World, merchants were taking stock in Yorkshire, and railroads were being built one spike at a time so that Lenox could stand at his mirror in the city at the center of the world, preparing himself for the evening. But for better or worse, none of that was on his mind.
He straightened his tie with one last nudge of his knuckle, turned, and went downstairs. His carriage was waiting on the curb, but he didn’t hurry to it as he usually did; he looked over a neat stack of papers on his desk once more, put them into a brown leather case, donned his heavy overcoat, and only then went outside, with Mary wishing him well. It was a special evening.
The SPQRs met once every two months, sometimes less and never more often, in a large room, windowed on two sides, at Boodle’s. Of all his clubs-and by now Lenox belonged to some seven or eight-Boodle’s was the most prestigious, and the one he visited least. Lenox’s ancestor the late eighteenth-century Prime Minister the Marquess of Landsdowne had founded it. People there tended to be somewhat staid, a departure from the club’s earlier days when Beau Brummell had made his last bet there before fleeing to France and the Duke of Wellington had taken his evening meals there with a choice friend or two, guaranteed for once of no adoration. It was placed well, at 28 St. James’s Street, and even clubmen passed it with a reverentially silent step, contemplating their slim chance of entrance; the days were long gone when the club was whimsical and un-self-important enough to be named, as it had been, for a beloved waiter.
“Mr. Lenox,” said Timothy Quails, an institution himself, in the doorway of the club. He held the door open.
“Thanks, Quilts.” Somehow that name had stuck to the doorman. “Am I first?”
“Last, sir, save one.”
He emphasized the word “one” strangely, and Lenox knew whom he meant. He mounted the back staircase two steps at a time and entered the SPQRs’ usual room with a smile at the five men seated at the round table in the corner.
“No sign of our seventh yet, according to Quilts?”
The other five men stood up and crowded around him, smiling and offering their hands in turn. Some of them he only saw at these meetings and some he saw every day, or nearly every day. All of them were his close, close friends; after nine years, he could have gone to any of them with any problem and been assured of their confidence and sympathy. The club was seven for precisely that reason. They were Lenox; young James Hilary, the MP, whom Lenox had proposed, and whose third meeting it was; Sir John Beacham, an engineer and student of Brunel’s who was only slightly older than Hilary, and considered in his profession to be immensely promising; Thomas Weft, who was kind, poor, shy, and brilliant, but had only a sinecure at the Naval Office, procured for him by an SPQR, to show for it; Lord Hallam, the terrifying, imperious inventor and scientist who had introduced McConnell to the Royal Society; and, sixth, Francis Charles Hastings Russell, Liberal Member of Parliament for Bedfordshire, founder of the SPQRs, and agricultural theorist, who would become the 9th Duke of Bedford when his father died.