The September Society (26 page)

“Fulham? Is that so?”

“On the case,” said Jenkins quickly. “A matter involving the case.”

“I should hope so,” said Lenox, smiling.

“Shall we discuss it on the way? I have a brougham outside.”

As they went south toward the Thames, Jenkins told Lenox more about their mission.

“I’m taking you to see a very interesting man named Laurence Matte. German by ancestry, though he and his father were both born in Hertfordshire. He grew up quite poor—father kept a struggling stables for carriage horses—but when he was eighteen he invented a new kind of breech-loading rifle mechanism and sold the patent for a great deal of money.”

“Eighteen!”

“His father kept guns and horses for some of the minor gentry without their own land, and the lad’s job as a boy was to clean the rifles. He’s told me he invented the breech-loader by the time he was thirteen but had to wait to apply for the patent. He may have been boasting, though. He’s a terrible boaster.”

“With some cause, at any rate.”

“Indeed. Well, he took the money he made and with about half of it bought a nice pile of a place near his childhood home, filled it with paintings and furniture and flatware, installed his parents there as resident caretakers, and promptly left. He invested half of the remaining money, and then with the quarter of the patent payment he had left he moved to Fulham, and he’s vowed to stay there drinking and gambling until it runs out. Then, he says, he’ll move back to the country and marry, perhaps become a local magistrate.”

“Good Lord, he sounds fascinating! How on earth did you come across him?”

“This is where your interest may lie, in fact.”

“Rest assured, you already have my interest.”

“We received a report of repeated gunshots in the basement of his house. A bobby went out to look, and it turned out that he had a firing range underneath his house. He was terrifying his maid by shooting all night. Drunk, oftentimes. It was above the bobby’s head, and I went and had a look at him. Well, we fell into a long conversation, and I really found him most interesting.”

“I should say so.”

“He believes in something called ballistics, you see, Lenox.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you hunt?”

“Certainly.”

“Then you’ll know that all rifles have helical grooves running down their barrels, which give the bullet its peculiar spin coming out of the muzzle. Matte believes that it’s possible to identify a gun simply by studying a bullet that has been fired from it. I tested him informally with a few bullets we had used in a recent case, and he was dead on.”

Lenox was puzzling this over in his mind. “It just … just seems possible,” he said slowly. “Perhaps.”

“And yet nobody at the Yard would listen to a word I said!”

“That can scarcely surprise you.”

“Can’t it?” Jenkins sighed. “I love my work, Lenox, but I sometimes fear my colleagues are living in the past. This revolution of industrial technology we’re undergoing will change police work forever, mark my words. Yet I can’t persuade anybody even to listen to a man like Matte, who may very well have made a major breakthrough in criminology! Maddening—simply maddening. I think of leaving now and then, you know.”

In a gentle, commiserating tone, Lenox replied, “That’s precisely why you must stay, Jenkins. It’s your work to bring your colleagues into the present.”

“Well, either way, here we are,” said Jenkins. They had pulled up in front of a small and eccentrically designed house. “I’ve told him we’re coming. He’ll be downstairs in his basement. I’ve made him soundproof the walls, anyway, or his neighbors would have gone mad.”

Matte was a tall, good-looking chap with blond hair and a straight posture. He was also almost certainly drunk.

“How do you do, how do you do?” he asked jovially. “Has Jenkins told you all about my discoveries? If only the asses he works with would listen, I could save them all hours upon hours of useless work. But will they? No! Of course not! The greatest invention of our time, under their noses, and they won’t even put down their newspapers. Asses,” he said again, shaking his head as if they were more to be pitied than censured for it.

The basement was a fascinating place; otherwise normal, at its center was a table full of various guns. One wall was entirely covered with hideous oil portraits, all of which were riddled with bullet holes.

“Dreadful, aren’t they?” said Matte when he saw Lenox
staring at them. “I buy ’em from a lad who thinks he has real talent. I feel sorry for him. He paints pictures of all the prostitutes and tries to sell them down in the West End. Nothing doing, though.”

“I’ve shown Laurence the bullet that lodged in the wall after it hit Annie, Lenox. Laurence, have you taken a look at it?”

“Oh, that, yes.” He retrieved it from the table full of guns. “I’m afraid I can’t be terribly specific—I can only tell you that it’s from an old discontinued line of service revolvers. It’s been to the East, and before it shot this maid Jenkins mentioned, it hadn’t been used for a decade. That’s why it accidentally discharged, old age.”

“What!” said Lenox, for once entirely shocked. “How on earth can you say that?”

“Easily enough. Its type is obvious from the grooves it left on the bullet. The firing mechanism was rusty and slightly off center, which can come with long disuse, and the barrel was coated with fine clay, such as you find in the East. A disgusting way to take care of a gun, mind you.”

“Are you certain?” asked Lenox. “The East?”

Jenkins was clearly thinking the same thing. “The September Society.”

“Oh, certain enough,” said Matte distractedly. He had taken up a gun and was cleaning it with a practiced, almost gifted hand. “The worst part of it all is that I didn’t even invent internal ballistics! Some chap thought it up about thirty years ago, in 1835. But I’ve certainly perfected it. Tell everyone you know, won’t you? It’s important.”

Shortly afterward they left Matte in his basement with their thanks. It was late, and the carnival of iniquity was visible in the low lights by the river where the saloons had just opened.

“Interesting fellow, isn’t he?” said Jenkins.

“Reliable, though, you think?”

“As I say, I tested him. He seems to be almost perfectly accurate to me. I’ve come to trust him implicitly despite his oddness.”

As they rode back toward Piccadilly and the West End, the two men had a long discussion about the bullet and the September Society, agreeing at the end of it to keep in close contact as they decided on a course of action.

“We have a real interest in this case, as I mentioned,” Jenkins said when they had reached Hampden Lane.

Lenox knew that Jenkins was referring to himself, rather than the Yard, and felt touched. An ally, that was what the young inspector was proving to be. “I’ll write you tomorrow morning,” he promised and said good-bye.

As he climbed the stoop of his house Lenox thought of a long night’s rest. But in the front hallway he found Mary in a state of intense anxiety, pacing and waiting for him.

“Sir, sir!” she said when he came in. “There’s a man here!”

“Who is he?”

“I daren’t say!”

“Where is he?”

“In your study, sir, eating all the food in the house! He insisted, sir!”

“Take a deep breath, Mary. Has Graham not returned?”

“No!”

“Well, let’s see who it is.”

Lenox strode into his library and found a young man, covered in dirt, hair shorn close to his head, clothes disheveled, and eating, as Mary had said, from a massive plate of food. “I’m Charles Lenox. May I help you?” the detective asked.

The young man rose slowly and swallowed his mouthful.

“Perhaps,” he said, in a surprisingly educated voice. “I’m Bill Dabney.”

N
ow,” said Lenox. “May I ask you a few more detailed questions?”

“Of course,” said Dabney. His voice had been polished by Oxford; it lacked the deep melodious quality of the Midlands his father’s voice had, but he was proving just as affable and thoughtful.

Lenox had instantly asked three questions when the two had first faced each other in the library. They were: Do you know who killed George Payson? Does anybody else know where you are? And: What happened? To these Dabney had replied: no, no, and that he wasn’t quite sure. Then Lenox, seeing the pathetic state of the lad’s clothing and the hunted, fearful look in his eyes, had put off his curiosity and asked Mary to draw Dabney a bath and find him some new clothes.

It was about an hour later now, nearing eleven at night, and he looked like a new man in a pair of gray trousers and one of the thick green Scottish sweaters that McConnell’s mother (one of the most charming and eccentric people Lenox had ever met) had sent him for Christmas the year before.

“How did you find me, to begin with?”

“After Payson died I was in Oxfordshire, roaming around the countryside, working toward London. I reckoned that I could disappear more easily here than anywhere else. And I was—I am—terrified by how quickly things went from mysterious to tragic. I have no idea how it happened.”

He seemed to be telling the truth. Inwardly, Lenox sighed. Obviously Payson had taken much of the truth with him when he died. “You made it here, evidently.”

“Yes, I did. I thought of going to Stamp first, but then it occurred to me that everybody knew we were friends, and at any rate I didn’t want to endanger him. So I sent him a card, a September Society card (I had a few, you see, which I nicked off George, just in case—he had been leaving them everywhere), and I wrote on the back of it ’Who can you trust?’ He came straight to you, and I watched you for a day and thought about whether I could trust you. But Stamp had. So I decided to take the risk.”

That explained that mystery. Stamp could probably return to London in peace.

“What
is
the September Society? How was George involved?”

Dabney threw up his hands. “I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened, then, from the beginning?”

“It all started at the Jesus ball. Stamp, poor chap, had to study for a makeup midyear exam. Collections, they call them at Oxford. So only Payson and I went to Jesus. Stamp and I—we kip together, but you’ll know that—we had noticed George was distracted, wasn’t quite himself. At the ball I confronted him about it.”

“After he met with the middle-aged man out in the quad?”

It was Dabney’s turn to look startled. “Exactly. I asked who the man was.”

“And what did Payson say?”

A look of sadness came into Dabney’s eyes—of deep sadness, of a new, unfamiliar sort that had only just come into his life. He didn’t seem close to breaking down; rather he seemed as if he were just beginning to realize what had happened, now that he had been able to stop running. “Oh, Lord, I wish he weren’t dead. What’s gone wrong?” He buried his face in his hands.

Lenox was silent for a moment, and then said, “Bill?”

“Oh—yes—he only said, ’He knew my father.’ Which was odd, as Payson never spoke about his father.”

“And what then?”

“He said to me, ’Dabs, something has gone wrong’ “–here again the lad paused, devastated—” ’and I may have to vanish for a few weeks.’ I asked him what he meant, and he said that some mystery had arisen about his father and this—this September Society, whatever that is, and then he told me not to worry any more about it. That he had left trail enough in his room if anything went awry.”

Lenox cursed under his breath. “Did he ever mention that trail again? In his room?”

“No.”

“Did he ask you to go with him?”

“On the contrary—I said I was going to go with him and he told me I couldn’t. We had breakfast the morning before he left, and he only said that I shouldn’t worry about him, that I couldn’t go.”

“Then how did you?”

“I caught up just after he had seen his mother. He looked horribly pale and jittery, and I followed him out past Christ Church Meadow.”

Lenox nodded. “South.”

“Precisely. Finally, after the bridge—you know the one, just over the Cherwell down past the lower fields—I simply
tapped him on the shoulder. I told him that I was coming whether he liked it or not.”

“Good of you,” said the older man softly.

Dabney shrugged. “It didn’t help. Not in the end.”

“And what did you do?”

“We slept relatively close to town, just past the meadow. He had some food, and I went out and got a bit more at a shop by Magdalen Bridge where not many students go. The next day he went and saw the man again.”

“At the Jesus ball.”

“Lord, you’re omniscient.”

“You didn’t go with him?”

“I did, yes, but George said that I had to hide.”

“What was his attitude like—Payson’s?”

“Hopeful, actually. Jittery, as I say, but he also seemed hopeful. He seemed relieved.” Dabney paused. “Stamp and I always wondered about George’s governor, you see. There were all sorts of rumors. I had the sense that George finally felt proud, for some reason.”

“Proud?”

Dabney nodded firmly. “Yes, proud—and as if it were an adventure, not as if he were afraid. He didn’t seem at all afraid.”

“Can you describe the man he met with?”

“Not well, because I didn’t catch much of his face. Average build, I should say. Dark hair. Whiskers, and perhaps a mustache, though perhaps not. On his throat was—”

“A scar?”

Dabney looked again surprised. “Yes, exactly. A red scar.”

“Lysander,” muttered Lenox. Yet according to Dallington he couldn’t have actually killed Payson. Or could Dallington have missed a trick?

“Who is that?”

“A member of this Society, the September Society.”

“Ah. So.”

“I’m afraid I have to ask you something difficult now, Bill.”

A grim look came onto Dabney’s face. “About his death. Right.”

“Yes,” said Lenox.

“I had gone to get food, you see. We were just running out, and we agreed it was much better that I risk being seen than that he did. It was around nightfall. When I came back with the food, he was—he was dead.”

Now Dabney did weep, and once and for all Lenox struck him from the list of possible suspects. For his tears were entirely genuine, born out of a grief that surpassed not only words but the years of upbringing that had taught him to keep a stiff upper lip.