Lady Jane looked flustered, and sounded it, too. “Charles, how are you?” she said. “I’m so glad you’ve come. Won’t you meet Michael Pierce? Mr. Pierce, this is Charles Lenox, my particular friend.”
“How do you do, Mr. Lenox?” said the man, striding forward with his hand outstretched.
“I’m pleased to meet you,” Lenox said. “Have I come at an inconvenient time, Jane?”
“I was just leaving, in fact,” said Michael Pierce. “Good day, my Lady. Good day, Mr. Lenox. I’m pleased to have met you.”
Lenox’s mind was racing. He hadn’t heard the name before. They had been sitting next to each other, not across from each other, which meant they were more than simply formal friends.
What followed was the first strained conversation of Lenox and Jane’s long friendship. They weren’t curt, precisely, but neither of them could find exactly what to say. At last they alit on the subject of his case.
“It’s going well enough,” he said.
“When will it be over?”
“Tomorrow, perhaps.”
“That will be a relief.”
Stiffly, he said, “Yes, it will. How is Annie, if I may ask?”
“Very well. Recovered, in fact.”
“I found out something about the gun that did it.”
“Did you?”
“Circumstantially it’s linked to the September Society.”
“How awful.”
“Yes.” It was horribly impolite, but he couldn’t help himself from saying, in a strangled voice that sounded nothing like his own, “I hadn’t met Mr. Pierce before.”
“You wouldn’t have. He’s a friend of my brother’s from school, only recently arrived in town from the colonies in Africa. He knows very few people.”
Why did she still look so flustered?
“Oh, yes?”
Miserably, Lenox said, “Perhaps I ought to introduce him about.”
“Yes, perhaps.”
He stood. “Well, I had better go,” he said. “I’ll speak to you soon.”
As he walked down the long hallway, and out again into the street, he thought that he had never felt unhappier in all the years of his life.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Dabney was sitting in a chair at the far end of the library, reading. When Lenox came in he marked his place in the book and laid it to the side.
“Hullo,” he said. “Have you had a productive time out?”
Lenox again marveled at how Oxford had moderated his parents’ Midlands accent. “Productive enough,” he said. “We’ll know it all by tomorrow evening, or I’d be very much surprised. I’ve arranged to infiltrate a meeting of the Society.”
“Good,” said Dabney with a firm nod. “How can I help?”
“I’m afraid you can’t. I shall have to go alone.”
“I’ll come into the meeting with you.”
“It won’t be that easy.”
“Have you convinced the Society that you’re someone you’re not? Or are you going to hide and observe from within the room?”
“I’m going to hide and observe, as you say. It’s their annual meeting, the Society’s most important evening of the year.”
“Then I shall come and hide as well.”
“I’m afraid it would be far too precarious. You might easily hinder me.”
But Dabney was insistent. “See here, Mr. Lenox, you’ve been very kind to take me in, but I promised George that I would stick by him until his trouble was over, and though he’s died I mean to keep that promise.”
They wrangled for another moment over the question, and then Lenox relented. “If you must, then,” he said. “I meant to ask a second man anyway, but he was unavailable.”
“I’ll be happy to follow your lead-just as long as I’m involved.”
“Incidentally, perhaps you can help with something.” Lenox pulled his small notebook from his pocket and flipped back to an early page in it. “I believe Payson left behind clues about his departure in his room. I’d like to run them past you to see if they make sense.”
Dabney nodded amenably. “Fire away.”
“I think your friend realized that he had very little time to leave his room, somehow. Perhaps an hour, but not longer. And he decided to do something bold: to kill the cat you two shared.”
Dabney blanched. “Longshanks? Has Longshanks been killed?”
“Oh-yes. I’m sorry.”
The lad waved it off. “It’s no great loss in the end. Though I did love that cat.”
“I don’t think he died in vain, if it’s any consolation. I think George killed Longshanks because he needed a tangible, striking demonstration that he hadn’t simply disappeared to a party in London or gotten waylaid some other way. Hence its double death, if you wilclass="underline" first by drugging, then by stabbing. He needed to signal-to me, to the police-that something strange had happened. His mother, as you may know, is rather high-strung, and perhaps even I would have attended her anxiety with less patience if there hadn’t been this bizarre signpost. There’s also the fact that the September Society’s seal has a wildcat on it. So Longshanks served multiple purposes. Killing him was really a brilliant, even necessary solution.”
Dabney nodded. “It sounds like George-he was fearfully clever. What was the poison that killed the cat?”
“Laudanum.”
Dabney nodded again. “George had insomnia from time to time, particularly when he had heavy work. He used laudanum to sleep. That makes perfect sense.”
Lenox’s confidence rose with this confirmation. “I think the key to the scene in his room was the line of ash he left by the window. The window was just at hand, and the line of ash was scattered, as if it had just been disrupted. As fanciful as it sounds, I think he had-”
“To check whether somebody had been in the room while he was gone! He mentioned that to me once or twice, thought it clever-from some book he read, that’s right.”
Two for two, excellent. Lenox said, “Perfect. Dead on. It was left to set the scene; an artificial clue. Nobody actually disrupted the ash. It was his way of telling us that the room had been staged, and at the same time indicating that the room had probably been trespassed in his absence-”
“Which was why he had to leave clues rather than simply a letter,” said Dabney.
“It was quick thinking. I have all the admiration in the world for the lad, I have to say. We know as well that he specifically sent down to the scout before he left, asking that his room remain undisturbed!”
“Did he?”
“What’s puzzling, though, is the line of ash by your campsite in Christ Church Meadow. Why would he have wanted to draw attention to it? Wouldn’t you have preferred us to think that it belonged to some tramp?”
“I remember him doing it-I smoke a pipe every so often, you see, my country ways-and he said he ought to, just in case somebody smart enough to figure it out came along.”
“Did you ask what he meant?”
“No. I wish I had.”
“It’s even more peculiar because there was no indication that you were going to leave, was there, before he died?”
“No, we certainly meant to stay. George was playful, though. Who can say?” Both men thought silently for a moment. Then Dabney asked. “What’s the next clue?”
“There are a number of clues relating to his father, which further research has subsequently borne out. A September Society card with pink and black pen marks on the back, meant to indicate the Payson crest; and of course the note underneath the cat, which read ’12 Sflk 2,’ his father’s battalion, in a strange code called cross-tip.”
“Yes,” said Dabney. “It really does seem to hang together.”
“Which means that I already know what happened. I simply haven’t thought about it in the right way yet.”
“What else is there?”
“The walking stick and the walking shoes.”
“He loved that walking stick. It was his grandfather’s.”
“The shoes were muddied, as was the bottom of the stick. It was clear that he had just been on a long walk. But he left them both in his armchair. The stick, perhaps-but his shoes? I imagine he sat in that chair by the grate a good deal-”