The sheet of paper Pointilleux passed Lenox was a list in three columns. Clavering and Edmund crowded around to look over his shoulder as he read it.
Harville |
44 p.a./quarterly |
3/9/75 |
Barth |
46 p.a./quarterly |
30/1/73 |
Snow |
41 p.a./quarterly |
22/12/72 |
Tuttle |
36 p.a./quarterly |
4/5/69 |
Ainsworth |
35 p.a./quarterly |
27/4/69 |
Moore |
36 p.a./quarterly |
14/2/66 |
Calloway |
34 p.a./quarterly |
21/7/65 |
Sather |
30 p.a./quarterly |
11/11/61 |
Claxton |
55 p.a./semi-annually |
9/1/57 |
French |
55 p.a./semi-annually |
6/12/54 |
Lenox read the list twice and felt his mind prodding the case at its edges, looking for where this information might fit into it.
“This is a simplify copy I have construct,” Pointilleux said. “In the book, the ledger, each name takes one page, and the salary payment are recorded by quarter, by date.”
“These must be his secretaries,” Edmund said. “Miss Harville top of the list and most recent.”
“I think so, too,” Pointilleux said.
“Does this mean Calloway was his secretary?” asked Edmund.
“Not Calloway. Calloway’s daughter, perhaps, or another relative?” said Lenox. “Stevens only hires women.”
Clavering corrected him. “Now he does, but French and Claxton are both men. French still lives in town here—seen his way to a fair-sized trading company, furniture, makes a very handsome set of chairs, too.”
“Well, that explains that,” said Lenox. “Stevens hired women because he could pay them less. Look, Miss Harville still isn’t making what Mr. French did in 1854, twenty-three years ago.”
Edmund shook his head. “It may be Calloway’s daughter was Stevens’s secretary eleven years ago, then, for about eight months. She left his employment, it looks like, around the time that her mother died, and her father went mad—and she went to live in Norfolk. I don’t see what it has to do with this attack.”
Neither did Lenox. He kept thinking of Elizabeth Watson. Was it possible his theory of the break-in at Hadley’s was wrong? That it wasn’t a mistake?
“Clavering,” he said, “who is this—Ainsworth? She only worked for Stevens for a few weeks.”
The constable’s face fell. “That was sad, that, Sarah Ainsworth. She was a troubled girl from the start, though. Clever, which was why Stevens took her on. But she disappeared one night, run away to London, we always heard. Her mother was proper heartbroken over it. The daughter hasn’t been back since.”
“Are any of these people related to Watson?” asked Lenox.
Clavering took the list and scrutinized it, then shook his head. “No. All of these young girls are from the more educated classes than Claire and Elizabeth—respectfully meant, you know.”
“Another excuse to pay them less, perhaps, if they came from comfortable families,” said Edmund.
Lenox nodded. “There’s another name I know here, too. Snow. If that’s Adelaide Snow, I met her outside of the village.”
“It must be her, I believe,” said Edmund.
“We might call on her. I’ve been meaning to quiz that family about their gamekeeper’s cottage.” He looked over at Pointilleux, who was following the conversation. “Very well done. Was there anything else?”
“No. I still peruse the papers, however.”
“Good—stick at it. Thank you.”
With a flourish of his hand, Pointilleux said, “It is my job.”
They bundled into the carriage then, and went to visit Snow.
He lived in a handsome two-story limestone house, albeit one with various barns and outbuildings visible from its front steps—a working farm. An elderly housekeeper answered the door. Snow himself was not in, she told Lenox and Edmund, but Miss Snow was, yes.
In the drawing room where she received them, Lenox found that she was the same pretty fifteen-year-old girl he had met on the lane just outside of Markethouse, with a naturally happy expression on her face—a person young, confident, eager to be pleased by life.
She welcomed them with very ladylike grace (he remembered Edmund calling her father “rough,” but apparently none of his manner had descended to his progeny) and introduced them to her darker-haired cousin, Helena Snow, who was staying at the house for two weeks. They had been in the midst of a game of backgammon, the older about to gammon the younger.
“She has come at a very thrilling time,” said Adelaide, “to what I had assured her was the least interesting village in England. You have arrested Mr. Calloway?”
“Yes, how is he?” asked Helena Snow, the cousin. “I hope he is not confined to a dungeon somewhere.”
“Quite the contrary,” said Edmund. “He is very comfortable—altogether comfortable.”
“Is he provendered?” she asked anxiously.
“Certainly—food brought in from the public house next door.”
She looked relieved. “Good,” she said.
Adelaide Snow said, “And are you quite sure he’s the one who did it?”
Lenox inclined his head politely but ambiguously and said, redirecting the conversation, “I understand that you worked as a secretary to Mr. Stevens?”
“That! Yes, I did. I have some talent for numbers. But I couldn’t stick it out. I didn’t like the job.”
“No?”
“I suppose I’m an airy, head-in-the-clouds sort of person, and it wasn’t for me. I hope Miss Harville does enjoy it. I gave her fair warning that she might not. I’m happier back in school. It’s quite a good school—and I only go two days a week, so I can be here with Papa most of the time.”
“Did Mr. Calloway and Mr. Stevens have any contact in the short time you worked for the mayor?”
She shook her head. “I would recall seeing Mad—seeing Mr. Calloway. It was a very brief time, as you noticed, Mr. Lenox.”
“Miss Snow,” said Edmund, “this is your land. Have you noticed anyone odd on it, in the time that your gamekeeper’s cottage had its stowaway?”
Adelaide Snow looked at her cousin, uneasy for the first time. “Go on,” said the older cousin, encouragingly.
The girl shook her head. “It will sound peculiar, but I did, once, see a man walking across just that part of my father’s land, near the gamekeeper’s cottage. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. All walkers have the right of way, of course. It was only after the attack on Mr. Stevens that I thought anything of it.”
“Did you recognize the person?”
“Well, that’s just it. I didn’t think I had recognized him. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that perhaps it might just have been—well, Mr. Stevens himself.”
Lenox looked at her, surprised. “Near the gamekeeper’s cottage! How confident do you feel in that guess?”
“Only a bit. And yet I would have said it was him—I would say it was him. But he couldn’t have been staying in the cottage himself, could he? It seems impossible.”
“He might have been meeting someone there,” said Edmund. “Calloway, for instance.”
Lenox asked several more questions, Edmund occasionally interjecting. They stayed for another twenty minutes, teasing out the details of Adelaide Snow’s memory. After a while Snow himself came in—a stringy, singularly ugly man, whose face softened out of recognition when he spied his daughter.
Soon after he had entered, Lenox rose, saying that they ought to go. He badly wanted to speak to Elizabeth Watson. He could sense that he was close to the solution now. Perhaps very close.
He thanked Adelaide Snow and then added, “Incidentally, if you have time, I’m sure you would both be very welcome at my brother-in-law’s house tomorrow night. He’s having a ball. With your father’s consent, obviously.”
“The Earl of Houghton?” said Adelaide incredulously. Her cousin’s eyes widened, too. “Are you quite sure?”
“By all means,” said Lenox.
After some further cavil, made solely out of propriety, both cousins agreed, happily—the father, less happily. When they had left, Edmund asked him if he ought to have done that. Lenox replied that it would do Houghton’s wife good to have something to complain about, and they were very nice girls, a demographic often in short supply at Houghton’s balls as he recalled, and anyhow everything was much looser in the country, wasn’t it?