No Shred of Evidence

by Charles Todd

  “It has to stop. You must know that.”

  “The only way is with a bullet. I’m sorry.”

  “And you’ll hang for it. It’s better my way.”

  “You don’t know him,” she said in exasperation. “You think he’s like any other criminal, foolish enough to be caught and punished for his misdeeds.”

  “Then why did you agree to see me?”

  “To learn if it was true about Harry and Mr. Dunbar and the vicar. Three more names on my conscience. Three more burdens to carry.”

  “But you keep running?”

  “I’m still afraid of him. I haven’t found the courage yet to face him. Even though I have that pistol.”

  “Then you’re equally guilty with him. You could stop this. Now. If you will let me help.”

  She rose. “I’d rather hang. Then I’ll know I’m safe forever.”

  He rose as well. “At least tell me your name.”

  She smiled for the first time. He saw the dimples then, and something of the beauty she had been before she married a killer. “And you will find him, and he’ll kill you too. No, I think not.”

  “I don’t believe he can kill me.”

  “Perhaps not, perhaps he’ll choose someone you love instead.”

  “Was there someone you loved?”

  “Someone I could have loved. Before he threw me down the stairs and I miscarried. In the doctor’s surgery he swore to me that he was sorry. That he’d been so afraid that it was another man’s child. That he was going back to France to die a hero, to show me how much he regretted hurting me. It would be his salvation. I think all he gained from war was learning better ways to kill.”

  He stopped at the door and reached into his pocket, drawing out the square of cloth he carried in his handkerchief.

  “Is this scrap from a gown you owned? I found it in the sand by Harry Saunders’s boat, along with one of the nails used to damage it.”

  He thought she was going to faint. As she leaned forward to see the bit of cloth better, she swayed, and put out a hand. He caught it and helped her back to her chair.

  Concerned, he went out to the little addition on the rear of the cottage and drew a cup of water from the pump there, then brought it to her.

  She was pale, her face drained of all color, her eyes stark in her face. Unable to hold the cup to her lips, she pushed it away, and he knelt beside her chair to hold it for her. She drank a little, and then sat up straighter.

  “I told you he was cruel. That’s been cut from the gown I was wearing when he shoved me down the stairs. I thought it had been burnt. I ordered my maid to burn it.”

  He had already folded the scrap away. But he thought she could still see it in her mind’s eye.

  When she spoke, her voice was a thread. “He left a bit of it in the house where my neighbor was killed. It was under her body. I was told later that the Derby police looked for the owner of that gown. And of course they never found her. He wanted me to know what he’d done.”

  Afraid to leave her alone, he sat with her for nearly half an hour. And then she seemed to rouse herself, and regain a little of the steel that had helped her survive.

  “Thank you, Mr. Rutledge,” she said in dismissal.

  “Will you help me?”

  “No.”

  “He may well find your friend. I did. Do you want her to die at his hand? And her sister with her?”

  “He won’t find her. I’ll see to it. Thank you, Mr. Rutledge,” she said again as she ushered him to the door, and then closed it behind him.

  He stood for a moment by the steps, hoping she would change her mind. Even though he knew for a certainty that she wouldn’t.

  18

  The drive back to Padstow didn’t take very long. Rutledge spent most of it trying to work out a way to save Victoria Grenville and her friends. He had found no evidence to support the charge of murder against three of the accused. But there was no way around the murky issue of Victoria Grenville’s behavior. How to separate the four cases, and convince Trevose, the Saunderses, and even Pendennis that the women should not be sent to trial together? That might well be the very best he could do.

  Juries were not always predictable. Mr. and Mrs. Saunders were intransigent in their grief. Trevose was determined to make Mrs. Grenville suffer the loss of her daughter, and he didn’t give a damn about the fact that his evidence might send all four to the gallows.

  Then there was the murder of Frank Dunbar and the beating of the vicar. He could hardly tell the Yard that he’d found the answers by speaking to a woman whose name he didn’t know and whose whereabouts were uncertain. Nor could he clear up the question of who damaged Saunders’s boat without bringing her into the picture. And that was pressing.

  The vicar, Mr. Toup, persisted in claiming that the only person he’d seen that morning was George St. Ives. But was his memory dependable?

  Still, Mrs. Terlew had reported seeing St. Ives as well. And she was an independent witness. The only other possibility was that someone had used George St. Ives’s known predilection for walking at night to disguise his own movements around the countryside. Hadn’t Inspector Carstairs seen him in the vicinity of Padstow one night? He was easily recognizable from a distance, and ­people had grown accustomed to seeing him.

  But how to prove that, without a name to put to the man behind the masquerade?

  Sergeant Gibson could try to discover the identity of the mysterious woman’s murdered neighbor. The question was, had “Miss Haverford” been using a false name at that time as well?

  When he drove into the village, he found that the news of Dunbar’s death and the burning of the cottages where he lived had already reached Heyl, and there was rampant speculation.

  He listened to the talk in The Pilot, where he went to bespeak a late lunch, and gathered from what he heard that Padstow had put out no further information. It would have been impossible to stop the spread of such news, but Carstairs was doing his best to keep the inquiry close to his vest. Rutledge would have given much to go on to Padstow, but the less interest he appeared to show just now, the better.

  He called first on the vicar. His bruises were fading but nearly as ugly as they’d been at the start. The yellowish-­green and purple did nothing for his already sallow complexion, and his spirits were low. When Rutledge was ushered into the sickroom, his eyes were closed.

  “I thought I’d find you upstairs in your own bed by now,” Rutledge began briskly, sitting down where the vicar could see him more easily.

  “It’s the leg,” he responded, a querulous note in his voice. “And I still have vicious headaches, even some dizziness. I’m not well enough to read.”

  “Have you remembered anything more about the morning you were attacked?”

  “It’s strange. I keep dreaming that the Padstow Hobby Horse attacked me. It comes running up and I fall and am trampled underfoot. Not the usual foolery with the maiden being drawn under his costume. It’s me instead.” He turned to look out the window. “I don’t understand it.”

  The Padstow Hobby Horse was famous, part of the May Day festivities where the town was decorated with greenery and flowers, and a Maypole. The Horse was in fact a man in a garish, traditional horse head mask, whose hooped cape, draped in black cloth, snared young women passing by. Songs and drums and much laughter kept the day lively, and everyone came out to join in the excitement.

  And Rutledge still carried the small square of cheap black cloth he’d found at the scene where the vicar had been attacked. The crude drawing of a horse’s head in the sand by the Grenvilles’ rowing boat was further proof. A taunt that a killer had not expected him to understand.

  “Perhaps it’s not so strange after all,” he said quietly. “Perhaps it did attack you, or appear to. Perhaps the first thing you saw when you came up to the clearing where you were found wa
s a Hobby Horse standing there waiting for you, his face hidden.”

  Restlessly the vicar shook his head. “No, no, I would remember that, surely.”

  “But you have. In your dreams.” He waited. But Mr. Toup would have none of it.

  “There’s no Hobby Horse this time of year,” he said. “It’s in May, probably once a pagan feast. Why would there be a Hobby Horse in the wood, anyway? It’s a Padstow festival.”

  He wouldn’t be budged.

  But Rutledge was fairly sure now that whoever had lain in wait, it wasn’t George St. Ives. A nameless man had been there, and a coward as well, hiding behind the mask and cloak in case anyone else came along too soon.

  Changing the subject, Rutledge said, “I found her. The young woman who lived in the cottages above Padstow.”

  Alarm spread across the vicar’s tired face. “What have you done?” he demanded. “Dear God, Rutledge.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, testing the waters. “She gave you a false name, and the hotel in Fowey another one. I could shout either of them from the rooftops, and it would do no harm. The address in London is false as well. But I have a feeling she might be at the bottom of what happened to you, as well as Dunbar’s death, and the burning down of those cottages. Something is wrong, Toup. And you were wrong to protect her so vigorously when I asked about her.”

  “Dunbar is dead? But who would harm him—­why burn the cottages? I don’t understand.”

  “Her husband is driven by jealousy.”

  “Oh, I doubt that, Inspector. Her husband was a Naval officer, went down with his ship off the coast of Ireland. That’s why she came to Cornwall, you know. She felt closer to him here. They never found his body. Her family wishes her to marry again, but she’s put them off. It’s too soon to think about another match, however fine it might be. I promised I’d keep her secret, if a young man came looking for her over the summer. Or even after it, for that matter. I felt it was wrong of them to push her into a loveless match before she was ready. I could see for myself the anxiety she suffered.”

  “Did Saunders know about her—­er—­past?”

  “I doubt she told him very much. It would have been unwise for her to confide in him. Because he’d met her early on when he went to take out his dinghy, I asked him to escort her to Sunday ser­vices, and he agreed.”

  It was not the story she’d told the hotel manager in Fowey. Or what Rutledge had been told in Fowey. But perhaps it was one the vicar would have understood better, prompting him to offer his protection. This tall, gangly, awkward man would relish the role of her knight.

  Still, Rutledge could hear Hamish in the back of his mind, casting doubt on all of it.

  Persevering, he said, “But someone damaged that boat, in the hope that Saunders would drown at sea. We found the dinghy, and I’ve inspected it. She feels responsible for what happened to Saunders and to you, and to Dunbar as well. Despite what she told you, there’s a husband, Vicar, who is searching for her. And he will have her back at any price.”

  “Did she tell you this?” He turned away again, his gaze on the world outside his window. “No, you must have it wrong. It’s the suitor who is persistent.”

  Rutledge hesitated, unwilling to disillusion Toup, but recognizing that he had no choice.

  “I’m afraid the husband is very much alive. There’s a judicial separation: he has no rights, and he’s refusing to accept the court’s decision.”

  “Oh, dear. Now I don’t know what to think. I was so certain . . . Was I so easily taken in? I find that hard to believe.”

  “She told the hotel manager in Fowey that she was mourning her parents’ death from the Spanish flu.”

  They could hear voices in the passage, someone coming into the vicarage, speaking to Mrs. Daniels, the nurse.

  “I’m sorry,” the vicar said quickly, his gaze on the door. “I can’t bear to think of that young woman as a liar. But can you be so sure that she hasn’t lied to you as well? About this husband of hers?”

  It was Rutledge’s turn to feel an upsurge of doubt. He had believed the woman. She had been believable, and her friend as well. But Toup had also believed her—­and the hotel manager.

  “Why did you say that?” He’d risen and was moving toward the door, prepared to block anyone from coming in before he had finished his conversation with Toup. It was too important, it couldn’t be put off until another time.

  The vicar said, his eyes on Rutledge’s face now, “I don’t know. Except that you have made me very uneasy. And if it’s true, how did I become so gullible? How did you? And what does this have to say about my beating, and that boat, and poor Mr. Dunbar?”

  “I don’t know. God help me, I don’t know.”

  There was a tap on the door at his back. Rutledge hesitated and then opened it. A parishioner looked in, bearing a plate of biscuits and jam.

  “Think about it,” Toup said, and forced himself to smile in welcome as he turned to his visitor.

  More shaken than he was willing to admit, Rutledge left the vicarage and cursed the village for having no telephone, and Padstow as well for having only a telegraph, with a prying man in charge of it.

  He had never felt the need of the resources of the Yard more.

  But there was nowhere to turn.

  Reaching the landing, he walked down to stare at the water, his mind in Boscastle, reliving his conversation with the young woman.

  He had met pathological liars before, but few of them were that glib, finding it that easy to prevaricate with such emotion and fear.

  She must have told him the truth. But then, she was a practiced liar.

  And so he was forced to doubt her. Judicial separations were hard to come by. But even if he asked Gibson to search out this case, he would have no name to give the sergeant.

  There was nothing else to do but drive back to Boscastle. But he had a feeling that she had left there as soon as he was out of sight. And he had no hope of finding her now. Her friend would lie, would refuse to tell him who she was or where she had gone. The woman hadn’t liked him to begin with.

  Behind him he heard Constable Pendennis’s voice speaking to someone, and he knew then that going back to Boscastle was out of the question. His task was here. Not in Boscastle or Fowey or London or any other place she might be.

  He turned away from the water and took out his watch. Trevose would very likely be in from the fields in another hour.

  Why had a man who was willing to dive into a cold river to save another man’s life suddenly turned on the women who had apparently been struggling to do just that? At what point had he turned from rescuer to accuser? When he first saw the rowboat? Or when he recognized it as the one belonging to Padstow Place? Or in the crowded rowboat when he’d taken in the situation?

  Rutledge wondered if Trevose himself could answer the questions. But there must have been a moment of decision, unconscious perhaps, when he realized that he had an opportunity for vengeance: Victoria Grenville for his brother. Certainly he had been steadfast ever since in his accusations. He hadn’t relented, and he had shown no mercy toward Kate and the other two women.

  Rutledge had intended to drive out to the Trevose farm and wait. But he changed his mind and went to Padstow Place instead. One more conversation with Kate, he told himself, and he would be better armed to deal with Trevose.

  There was just time, if he hurried.

  Kate, sensible, steadfast, logical. So unlike the mercurial Jean. He wished he could tell her about this woman and listen to what she had to say. Another woman’s point of view. Somehow he felt that she would have an answer. And at the moment, he didn’t. But that would not be fair to Kate.

  He drove out to the house, and his patience was tried as the maid who came to the door went in search of Grenville to gain his permission for Rutledge to speak to Kate.

  When
at last he was taken back to the study, he waited again as she was summoned.

  Kate Gordon walked into the room with an anxious expression on her face.

  “I thought,” she began lightly, to hide it, “that perhaps you’d forsaken us.”

  Rutledge smiled and led her to a chair by the windows, as far as he could manage from the door and prying ears.

  “Far from it,” he began, with a lightness of his own, even though he didn’t feel it. “I’ve been busy. But I must talk to you, Kate. And I must have straight answers, if I’m to do anything about this muddle.”

  “You know you can trust me,” she said. “I thought you always had.”

  “Yes, well. There has been a different turn of events, Kate. And once more it must stay between the two of us.” He dropped his voice. “Has anyone told you that Mr. Toup, the vicar, was set upon when he was on his way to answer a summons from what he believed to be an ill parishioner?”

  “Gentle God,” she said softly. “The vicar? No. Nothing has been said to us. But who could have done such a thing?” And then it struck her. “You aren’t saying that this is somehow connected with us?” She shook her head. “He had nothing to do with the boat. He wasn’t even there.” Watching Rutledge’s face, she added quickly, “Was he there?”

  “He wasn’t. But there’s more, Kate. Did you know that Saunders kept his boat near several cottages that were for let during the summer? He knew the place well, and it was ideal for him, instead of the busy harbor in Padstow. There was a young woman who had taken one of the cottages. And a Mr. Dunbar, who lived in one of them, appears to have owned them.”