The September Society (10 page)

The two men parted, while Lenox debated with himself what his next move should be and thought the case over.

He would have to start with Professor Hatch and the head porter. Somehow neither seemed to him like the type to murder a man in cold blood, but then again neither seemed entirely guileless. For now, he would go back to the hotel and
think over what he already knew, searching for the line of clues that would lead him irrevocably toward the truth. Surveying the quad one last time, he turned on his heel and went out of the gate, into the sudden and startling quietness of Turl Street.

T
he Turf Tavern was bright and loud with merriment, full of students in the back bar sipping pints of ale and the local gents sitting in the front bar with their strong cider. Lenox remembered that division between the old townsmen and the young university ones, the two sets united by an unspoken love for Sally, who had been the serving girl then. Lenox’s friend George Caule had always stopped into the front room to have a drink with old Hedges, who had once run the tuck-shop. Their friendship had sprung up eerily: over a ghost.

The story was that Caule had been studying alone at the Turf in Trinity term of their first year. He was maths, was Caule, and had the legendarily terrifying Mead as his don at Balliol. Lenox strained to remember what had occurred. Had he been—yes, that was right, he had been smoking a cigarette to wake himself up when at last he dozed off, the last person in the deserted room. Just as he had dropped the cigarette onto the tinder pile by his feet, a girl of perhaps ten had brushed by him, nudging him just enough on the arm to wake him up. He had quickly stamped out the fire and then left for the night, realizing he was too tired to study any longer.

Caule described the little girl so well—how she had blond pigtails, a dainty little dress, and a pearl and obsidian necklace, how she carried a tray of mustard jars. When he had returned the next day to thank the girl’s parents, though, nobody could identify her, and he discovered that the mustard jars had been long collected by that late hour.

Unbeaten, Caule had asked around. Only Hedges had recognized the description.

“Small girl, pigtails, blond, ten, mustard jars?” Hedges had asked in his uniquely concise speech, gruff-voiced and cautious. “To be certain. Polly Millwall. She was a year younger than me. Daughter of the last chap who owned the Turf. She died in the fire that killed them all, perhaps forty years ago. Then Edmonds bought the place.”

“Oh, I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood,” Caule had said. “I’ve—”

He broke off when Hedges pointed upward, to an exact portrait of the girl who had nudged him awake, just when he was in danger of starting the fire in the tinder pile and burning the Turf to the ground.

Lenox sighed. How the years passed! Caule was still one of his closest friends—and still swore by the story—but lived up all the way up at Stettleton Hall in Lancashire, a genial, rather broken-down place. He hadn’t been south to London in two years. As Lenox went inside, past the portrait of the blond girl that still took pride of place over the bar, he wondered for the hundredth time whether Caule had been so tired that delusion had set in or whether maybe, just maybe, something inexplicable had happened.

“Back already, Mr. Lenox?”

“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Tate. Could I have a room?”

“Why, of course,” she said. “Anything to eat?”

“That’s all right, thanks. I suppose I only need some sleep.”

She looked at him sympathetically. “All right,” she said. “You know where the room is. Here’s the key.”

Tramping up the staircase again, Lenox felt none of the same thrill of return. The room now seemed bare and comfortless, too small, the memories it held inconsequential. As he sat in the hard, narrow chair by the window, he was full of the deepest self-recrimination he had ever felt. The starless sky refused to return his gaze, absorbing the darkness of his thoughts: She would never consent to marry him, and quite rightly. What was he? A small-time detective, pretending he was better than those who did the same job for their bread and butter.

He sat by the window for half an hour and then stood up with a sigh and went to the bureau to unpack his suitcase. He did so listlessly, doing a job so untidy that Graham would have cringed to see it, and wondered if he could remember that other old ghost story about the Turf. Yes, of course he could. He would never forget it.

Lenox had been quite close with his grandfather, his mother’s father, the 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne, and often visited him at Bowood House, the Lansdowne family seat in Wiltshire. This was long past the days when the marquess had been the Member of Parliament for Cambridge University and served as chancellor of the exchequer. By then he spent most of his time in his large library, compiling his memoirs and reading. He was a tall, wrinkled, mischievous old man with snow white hair and an endless succession of stories.

One of them was about the dirt hauling lane behind the Turf, where the local farms’ animals tracked on their way across the city to the butcher’s. A boy, Samuel, was returning from the butcher, having dropped off a flock of sheep there, when by the back door of the Turf two menacing gents had appeared, drunk and restive.

“What do ye want?” Samuel had shouted at them preemptively. Lenox could hear his grandfather imitating the voice.

“You have yer butcher money there, isn’t it?” said one of the men, and a moment later both had started walking toward him.

At that instant, a massive black dog, something like a Great Dane, had materialized (the boy swore) out of thin air and started growling at the two men, standing between them and the boy. The men had leapt back into the Turf’s doorway, cursing the dog and the boy alike, and let them pass safely. Then the boy had run all the way through the city, past the dim colleges and murmuring pubs, until he reached the fields on the other side of town, by the river. The dog had run with him all the way, but there he stopped, immovable.

“What?” Samuel had said. All the dog did was nuzzle the fence they stood by and stamp on the ground over and over. “What?” the boy asked again, and the dog had put his nose to the same spot. So Samuel had marked it with a stick by the side of the road, and as soon as that was done the dog had vanished, again (the boy swore) into thin air.

The next morning, after he had safely deposited the money with the farmer, the boy had gone back to the spot by the fence and dug a hole. About three feet down he found a dog’s bones. In the rib cage was a small box, and in the box were forty gold pieces. A few years later, at the age of sixteen, Samuel had used them to buy the Turf Tavern.

The old myths. There was some small relief in the memory of them, in the memory of his grandfather. But it passed, and Lenox went to bed that evening caught in a world of his own ghosts, his own dead, thinking of the newest in their number—poor George Payson, who didn’t even have the blessing of sorrow anymore.

E
nough. That was Lenox’s first thought when he woke up in the morning. Would it serve the dead to indulge in any further self-recrimination? Of course it wouldn’t. Solving the case was the only thing he could do of any consequence. When he had made this decision the room seemed like a brighter place, and after he had called down for a pot of coffee Lenox sat at the small table and wrote out a list of information in his notebook.

He wrote:

Clues in the Death of George Payson

• 1) The cat and its peculiar death.
  

• 2) x12/43 21 31 25/x2
  

• 3) Letter opener, initial
  P
  .
  

• 4) Frayed string; pen; tomato; all red, in unlikely spot.
  

• 5) Disrupted line of ash by the window.
  

• 6) September Society card, black and pink χ on reverse. (Unlikely to doodle in two colors …)
  

• 7) Muddied walking boots (on the
  chair)
  and walking stick. (GP the type to take long walks?)
  

• 8) Hatch’s two lies.
  

Having written this out, he sat and thought for a few more moments, tapping his pen on the table, then stood up to change into his morning suit. He was due to meet McConnell soon, and didn’t want to be late. The eight clues rattled around in his mind the entire time he dressed.

McConnell was sitting at a table by the window at the Randolph Hotel that overlooked the Ashmolean. When Lenox came into the room, the doctor stood up and met him, subtly searching his face for the sorrow that had been there the night before. All at once Lenox, disconcerted, realized that it must have been the look McConnell constantly received, the reason his eyes were so often cast aside when he sipped from his flask.

“Well, you look a thousand times better, old chap,” said the doctor.

“Nothing like hard work to lift your spirits, you know. I’ve had a conversation with myself—abominably long-winded one, too—and decided to solve the case.”

“There’s the spirit of Agincourt,” said McConnell with a laugh. “A Lenox on the front lines there, I bet.”

“Twinging the arrows around, that’s right.” Lenox laughed too. “But look here, what happened last night?”

“Ah—about that, why don’t we gulp something down, and then I’d like to take you over to see someone.”

“Who’s that?”

“Better to leave it.”

“That’s awfully mysterious.”

“Not especially,” said McConnell with a smile, “but I want to have a bite of breakfast, and I know you’ll be dragging me off before the fish course if you begin thinking about the case.”

They ate their eggs and rashers quickly, washing them down with tea and talking only about McConnell’s next cataloging expedition north—the doctor had a particular hope of finding an unclassified and possibly apocryphal sea otter rumored to live in the Fjords—and when they had laid down their forks and knives both men lit cigarettes.

“Go on, then,” Lenox said. “Release me from the suspense.”

“They’ll let you look at the crime scene in the meadow.”

“Thomas! How on earth did they consent to that?”

“By pure chance I knew the coroner assigned to the body, a chap named Alfred Morris. Rather grim fellow, you know, but we studied at St. Bart’s Hospital together. I asked if I might help, and he said I could willingly enough.”

“Why?”

“Probably wanted to make certain that he didn’t bungle the thing, second set of eyes and all that. They don’t have many murders up here. At any rate, I can tell you about the body later.” After saying this McConnell stubbed out his cigarette, stood up, and motioned for the check. “Just put it on room 312, would you?” he said to the waiter. “What’s more important for the moment is that after Morris and I looked over the body, we went to meet Inspector Goodson, and I talked him around to letting you in on the work. Dropped a few names—the Marbury case, Soames, that small job you did for Buckingham Palace—and in the end he was quite pleased to have you in town.”

The two men had left and were walking along Magdalen Street now, south toward Merton and Christ Church.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” said Lenox. “I’d be nowhere if you hadn’t come up. You’re invaluable, Thomas.”

Presently they came to the slender path that ran inside of Merton (one of the most beautiful of all the colleges, in Lenox’s opinion, more beautiful by far than the ostentation
of Christ Church) between the imposing beauty of the chapel, cut through with the strangely evanescent light of its stained glass windows, and the old Mob Quad, the small quadrangle responsible for the shape of Oxford to come—for all universities to come, in fact, the oldest structure of the ancient university. Merton was one of the most interesting colleges at Oxford historically, as well as probably the oldest; it was the only one not to side with the Royalists in the Civil War, and among its early alumni was Sir Thomas Bodley, the namesake of the Bodleian. Lenox relished seeing it again, though too soon the narrow perspective of the path had opened out into the fields of Christ Church Meadow. About two hundred yards away from the rear of Merton was a still-bustling crime scene.

“This looks to be it,” said McConnell, “and there’s Goodson.”

The Oxford inspector spotted Lenox and McConnell just as they spotted him.

“Mr. Lenox,” he said, putting out his hand, “I’m afraid you caught my sergeant at a bad moment yesterday evening. Glad to have you here.”

He was a medium-sized man, brown-haired and freckled, with a look of intensity in his face. There was also honesty there, and in his green eyes a hint of amiability.

“Not at all. It’s a damnable business from top to bottom.”

“If you come this way, you can have a look around.” Goodson motioned for a constable to lift the rope and beckoned Lenox and McConnell inside. “The body was here, sprawled on its back with its arms behind its head. There were footprints all around the area, unfortunately. People tramping around here all day, I’m afraid, and leaving every conceivable kind of shoe mark.”

“Clever of the killer, that,” said Lenox. “A good place to leave the body—or indeed to kill someone—if you have very
little time, because it’s completely empty at night and yet still bears the signs of an active thoroughfare.”

“Precisely.”

“Where do you think they came in from, the murdered man and his murderer?”

“Came in from?”

“Where did they enter the park, I mean?”

The meadow was triangular and bound by Christ Church, Merton, and the two rivers. Away from the city of Oxford toward the south end of the park, there was a lower meadow, which sometimes flooded, and past which there were mostly fields.

“We haven’t considered that,” said Goodson.

“Down at the south end, I’d reckon,” said Lenox. “To come from any other direction would have meant either passing porters, students, and dons or else scaling a high fence. But it would have been easy enough to come in over the rivers, and the fields in that direction are empty, aren’t they?”

“I suppose that’s right,” said Goodson dubiously. “You mean they were hiding out just past the rivers there?”