W hy September?
Over supper at home, Lenox kept lowering Felix Holt to ask himself that one question. The club was called the September Society, it had its formal annual meeting in September-but there was no explicit link between the club’s purpose and its name. After pushing his plate aside, he walked to the farthest bookcase in his study and pulled down volume S of the encyclopedia.
A small assortment of facts about the month of September: It is the month of the autumnal equinox; its birthstone is the sapphire; its flower the morning glory; in 1752, September 2 was followed by September 14 because of an alteration in the calendar; Queen Elizabeth was born on the seventh of the month, 1533; Samuel Johnson had been born on the nineteenth, 260 years later; the Great Fire, of course, as he had discussed with Chaffanbrass; William the Conqueror had landed on English soil in late September 1066; dozens of harvest festivals had happened for thousands of years in September; the traditional month to dine on goose; acorns on the ground traditionally indicated a snowy winter; on Holy Rood Day, the fourteenth, children were by long custom permitted to leave school so that they could gather nuts.
Lenox read this with mild interest. For good measure, when he returned volume S of his encyclopedia to its usual slot he took down volume R to look up the color red, as he had been meaning to do. The information was interesting: Red was the first color the cavemen had used in their paintings, for example; in cartography red was the symbol of Britain’s empire; the Roman armies, as Lenox had known, wore red so that their blood would be invisible, a valuable illusion both for morale and against an enemy; the Queen’s new “mail boxes” were red; in Russia, red had always been the color that denoted great beauty. Interesting, but useless. It seemed clear that those red objects referred to Red Kelly-and it seemed clear that he needed to turn his attention back to the porter.
As he held the book in his hand, there was a knock on the door. A moment later Mary appeared with Inspector Jenkins again in tow.
“Hello, Lenox, how do you do?” said the youthful gentleman. “I hope I’m not disturbing you after your supper?”
“No, not at all, not at all. Won’t you come in?” The two men sat by Lenox’s desk. “You handled that little Emerson matter?”
“Yes.”
“It was Johannsen, of course.”
“How did you know?”
“The papers. I would have been to see you if it hadn’t come clear.”
“How’s your own work?”
“I was just thinking about the case when you arrived, actually. Without much success I’m afraid.”
“That’s what brings me round, actually. I wondered whether you might take a short trip with me.”
“Of course. Where to?”
“To Fulham.”
This was an area of London southwest of Charing Cross, near Hammersmith Bridge. Its reputation was improving to an extent, but at its pinnacle of debauchery in the last century it had been a place full of gambling houses, brothels, and drinking establishments where the infamous Regency cads had run riot to the consternation of their elders. It was still liveliest far past dark, particularly by the river. Lenox had been on two separate cases there, one involving the assault of a prostitute, the other the robbery of a saloon by a masked man who had eventually turned out to be the oldest son of and heir to the Earl of Downe.
“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.”