“I tell you, I didn’t know.”
“What was it, cowardice? Did you and Quarles get cold feet when the Boers attacked, and hide under the carriages? Was that why you survived? They were dead shots, the Boers. How was it that neither you nor Quarles was wounded, and yet everyone else on that train died?”
“I don’t remember. When the train was stopped, I was knocked down. I don’t remember.”
“How did Quarles burn his hands? If he was in that carriage with Evering, why were only his hands burned?”
“I wasn’t there.”
“But you knew when you walked away and left Quarles there—with no wounds, mind you—that Evering was alive. Wounded, perhaps, but alive. The Boers didn’t burn men to death.”
“It was the lantern in the last carriage. It was hit and broken. I don’t know why it burned, but it did.”
“You surely knew Ronald Evering was the brother of the man Quarles killed. Why did he come to you to invest his money?”
“I can’t answer that. Coincidence—one in a thousand odds—”
“I think he must have learned something, and he came to you to find out the rest.” It was a battering of questions, and Rutledge could tell that Penrith couldn’t sustain it.
“He couldn’t have known anything, no one did. We never told anyone we’d been in the army. Not even Mr. James.”
“What were you trying to hide, if it wasn’t cowardice?”
“We were hiding nothing. Nothing.”
“Why did you write a letter to Ronald Evering, just in the last few days? It arrived on St. Anne’s the same time I did, and I carried it to the house myself.”
“I—he’d said something about wanting to invest with me again. I told him that the opportunities he spoke of had not turned out the way he’d hoped, and I thought he would be wise to look elsewhere.”
“How odd, that after Cumberline, he would wish to trust you again with any sum of money.”
“Yes, I thought the same—” Penrith broke off. “That’s to say, I found it odd myself.”
“You’ve lied to me about many things. Why did you lie to me about Scotland?”
It came out of nowhere, a shot in the dark from Rutledge that shook Penrith to the core. “I was in Scotland. I swear to you I was! There’s the letter from my wife.”
“But not that whole weekend. She says something about it being such a brief visit, and that you’d arrived just in time to dine with the Douglases. I think you reached Scotland on Sunday afternoon, not on Friday. And you’re letting an innocent man hang in your place. You were in Cambury on that Saturday night. You quarreled with your former partner first on Minton Street, where you’d followed him from Hallowfields, and then you went ahead of him, knowing he was on foot. And you killed him, because you were afraid of him, and what he knew about your past. He was doing things that you didn’t approve of, that you feared would ruin both of you. The Cumberline stocks, his outrageous behavior in Cambury, refusing to listen to you—”
“It wasn’t that way, you’ve got it wrong—”
“Why did you strike your partner down, and then carry his body to the tithe barn and hoist him to the ceiling in that angel’s harness, where no one would think to look for him? Did you hope that this would give you time to reach Scotland before anyone could accuse you of killing him?”
“I never put him in that harness—you’re lying—”
“But that’s how he was found. And someone did it. If it wasn’t you, then who would do such an ugly thing?”
“I never put him in anything—”
“An innocent man is going to hang,” Rutledge said again. “And it will be on your conscience. Perhaps you weren’t there when Quarles shot the wounded—or when he burned Evering alive. It may be that you’ve nothing on your conscience but protecting a friend. But this death is on your hands. When Brunswick hangs, it will be you who slides the hood over his head and the rope tight around his neck—”
“Stop it!” Penrith put his hands over his ears, trying to shut out Rutledge’s unrelenting voice. “I am not guilty. I’ve never killed anyone. Harold Quarles was still alive when I left him—”
“You wouldn’t have left Quarles alive. Not if he knew it was you who struck him. He was a bad enemy. A dangerous man. You had proof of that, whatever you want to deny about South Africa.”
“I did. I wasn’t afraid of him. I told him that I knew why he’d tried to make everyone think he’d slept with my wife—it was because I’d left the partnership. He always punishes anyone who gets in his way. And that was my punishment. I hit him when he turned away because he called me a liar. He said he’d never gone near my wife. I told him he was the one lying…”
Penrith stopped, appalled. He sank down in the nearest chair, his head in his hands.
“Oh, my God. What have I done?”
Rutledge thought at first that Penrith was horrified that he’d been tricked into confessing, then he realized that the man had stared into something only he could see, and discovered the truth.
“What is it?” Rutledge asked.
Penrith shook his head. “I can’t believe—Look, I never put him in that harness. I was so angry, I couldn’t have touched him. I left him there in his own blood, still breathing. It must have been someone from the house who put him in that barn, it wasn’t me. I swear to you—it wasn’t me!”
“You’ve lied one time too many,” Rutledge said. “It doesn’t serve you anymore.”
“But it’s the truth. He was alive, there on the grass by the gatehouse. I didn’t murder Harold Quarles.”
“If you didn’t, then you must know how Michael Brunswick feels, waiting to be tried. He told me the truth, and I didn’t believe him. I accepted your word that you were in Scotland, and you gave it, knowing it was a lie.”
“No, you must listen to me—all right, I struck him twice. He was walking away, laughing, and I knocked him down to his knees to stop him, and then before I quite knew what I was doing, I hit him a second time because I was so angry with him. But I could hear him breathing—I hadn’t killed him.”
“Weren’t you afraid that leaving him alive was dangerous, that he’d tell the police what you’d done?”
“No—he wouldn’t dare. Besides, I thought—I hoped that if no one found him right away, he might not remember what had happened.”
“You hoped he would die. Davis Penrith, I am arresting you on the charge of willfully murdering your former partner, Harold Quarles.”
“You can’t do this. I haven’t killed anyone. I was tricked—”
Rutledge shook his head. “It’s finished. Will you go with me now, or must I send for constables to bring you in?”
“You don’t understand. I was misled—it was Ronald Evering who told me that Quarles had slept with my wife. And I believed him, because it was the sort of thing Quarles would do. He punished his wife by having affairs with every woman in Cambury he could seduce. Why not my wife, to punish me? Dear God, don’t you see? It must all have been a lie…”
23
It was Inspector Padgett’s nature to gloat. As Rutledge sat in the man’s office and reported the arrest of Davis Penrith and the evidence that supported it, Padgett smiled. It was nearly a sneer.
“Didn’t I tell you from the start that it was someone in London? And you so certain the killer was among us here in Cambury?”
“It was the way the evidence pointed. Davis Penrith told us half truths about Scotland. He was there—but he’d driven through the night, like a bat out of hell, to make certain he was in time for the dinner his wife and he had been invited to attend.”
“And her letter was equally unenlightening. Yes, one of the problems of not being on the spot, wouldn’t you say?”
Rutledge, heeding the succinct advice Hamish was pouring into his ear, held on to his temper with a firm grip.
“Penrith swears he was tricked. That he’d deliberately left London early in order to discuss a business matter with Ronald Eve
ring, and instead it turned out to be a trap. I’m on my way to the Scilly Isles to look into it.”
“Never been there. Never had a reason to go, and never expect to. I’m not the best of sailors. Where was Penrith all the while on that Saturday evening?”
“He’d intended to go directly to the house to confront Quarles, but just as he neared the gates, Quarles was getting into the motorcar driven by Mr. Nelson, who was joining Quarles and Mr. Greer at dinner. They sat talking, and so Penrith didn’t stop. He went as far as the next village, waited a decent interval, then drove back. The motorcar was gone, and so was Quarles. He turned in at the main drive, in front of the gates, and waited again, for some time, in fact, not sure what to do. On the chance that Quarles might have taken his visitor into Cambury to dine, Penrith walked into Cambury to look for Nelson’s motorcar. By now, Penrith was impatient and worried about his timetable. But he found the vehicle by Greer’s house and hung about out of sight, angry and frustrated. He didn’t want to return to Hallowfields, he’d have to explain why his business couldn’t wait until morning. Then Quarles obliged him by leaving the dinner early. Penrith stopped him, they had words, but Quarles was in no mood to entertain Penrith’s suspicions. He walked on home, and Penrith had no choice but to follow—the High Street was hardly the place to discuss his wife’s fidelity. He caught up to Quarles again on the road, and again Quarles gave him short shrift. Penrith thought Quarles was taunting him, and as they went past the gatehouse at the lane turning into the Home Farm, he was so angry he picked up one of those white stones and struck Quarles from behind. Penrith only remembers two blows, and he says Quarles was alive when he got the wind up and ran for his motorcar. He flatly denies carrying the body to the tithe barn.”
“I thought you said you had a full confession.”
“We do. As far as it goes. The question becomes, is Penrith still lying—this time about the apparatus in the tithe barn—or is he finally telling the truth? He doesn’t strike me as a man of courage. But if he didn’t move the body—who did?”
“Mrs. Quarles.”
“How did she know it was lying there? I don’t see her taking nightly strolls around the grounds and stumbling over her husband’s corpse in the course of one of them.”
“Jones? Or even Brunswick for that matter.”
“When you consider the point, it’s rather difficult to beard Quarles in his den—it’s a house full of servants and potential witnesses. Waiting for him to come to you, outside the gates, can be hit or miss. It was sheer luck that Penrith saw him with Nelson, but jealousy that made him persist. Brunswick guessed that Quarles was somewhere about when he saw Penrith come out of Minton Street. He wasn’t likely to follow the two of them. The question now is, who did?”
“Brunswick. Who else?”
“Brunswick had no reason to believe Penrith was about to kill Quarles. And that’s true of Jones. But someone was expecting it. And that’s the man I intend to call on when I leave here. He’s the one who told Penrith that his wife was having an affair, and Penrith must have left him in a fury. Evering might have followed, to see what would happen. Why else would he tell Penrith such a thing? True or not, it led to Quarles’s death.”
Padgett said, “You don’t give up easily, do you?”
“It’s a matter of justice, you see. Even justice for an ogre.”
Rutledge left soon after and drove on to Cornwall, spending the night just across the Tamar, and arriving at his destination in time to meet the mail boat on its return from the first crossing of the day.
The sea was calm, the skies clear. Rutledge had an opportunity to speak to the master as he stood at the wheel.
The man remembered bringing Penrith.
“He was in something of a state when I met him on the quay, ready to return to the mainland. He thought the fog bank on the horizon was going to swallow us and lead to catastrophe on one those skerries out there.”
“Did Evering leave the island that same morning?”
“If you’re asking if I picked him up on the next run, no. Nor the next day, for that matter.”
“Does he have a boat of his own?”
“He does. And he’s handled it in these waters all his life.”
“Where would he leave it, on the mainland?”
“Wherever he chose to put in. There are a dozen coves, not to mention fishing ports, where he could tie up.”
“What about a vehicle, once he did?”
“He keeps his motorcar on the Cornish mainland. It’s no use to him on St. Anne’s.”
Rutledge nodded and changed the subject. They came alongside the quay at St. Anne’s, and Rutledge helped the master tie up. There was no mail for Evering this trip, and Rutledge walked up the hill with his mind on what he was about to say. But before walking through the arbor gates, Rutledge took a brief tour around the small island, following the road until it became a lane and then a path.
The Evering family graves were tucked in a fold in the hillside, protected from the prevailing winds, and covered with flat stone slabs rather than the more conventional stones. When the winter gales washed across the island, they were less likely to erode.
He moved slowly among them, looking at the dates—going back to the seventeen hundreds, weathered but still legible—and took note of one in particular. A small memorial chapel stood just beyond the graves, and inside he found pews, an altar, and a memorial window set in the thick wall high above it. It showed a young soldier in khaki, standing tall and unafraid against the backdrop of the veldt, his rifle across one knee, his gaze on the horizon. The commissioning date on the brass plaque below it was 1903.
Leaving the chapel, Rutledge followed the path down a hillside toward a tiny cove. Here was Evering’s sailboat and a strip of sand beach protected from the wind. The sun touched the emerald green water as it ebbed, and it was shallow enough to see the bottom. There was almost a subtropical climate in these sheltered slopes. Rutledge could easily understand why flowers bloomed here before they did on the mainland. These islands were Britain’s most westward outpost, and as he looked out at the cluster of St. Anne’s neighboring isles, he found himself wondering what lay submerged between here and Cornwall. The south coast was full of tales about vanished lands, swallowed up by the sea.
There were half a dozen small cottages on the island as well as the main house, tucked beneath another fold in the land, and he could see the wash blowing on lines in the back gardens. Staff? Or the families who worked on the estate? From the sea these cottages would be invisible, the ancient protection of island dwellers the world over from the depredations of pirates and raiders. But neither could they see the Evering house from here or the cove or even the docking of the mail boat. Evering could be sure there were no witnesses to his comings and goings.
Satisfied, Rutledge walked back to the house and lifted the knocker on the door.
The middle-aged maid again answered his summons and left him to wait in the parlor for Evering to join him.
“You might be interested to hear,” Rutledge said, as soon as Evering walked into the room, “that it was Davis Penrith who killed his partner, Harold Quarles.”
“I am interested. That was an odd pairing if ever I saw one.” He gestured to a chair. “I can’t imagine that you came all the way out here to tell me that.”
“Penrith told me that on his most recent visit here, you reluctantly informed him that Quarles was having an affair with Penrith’s wife.”
“Did I? I hardly think so. I don’t travel in the same circles. If there has been gossip, I would be the last person to hear it.”
“Or the first person to make it up.”
Evering laughed easily. “Why should I care enough about these two men to make up anything?”
“Because they let your brother burn alive when they could have saved him. Because—according to Penrith—it was even possible that Quarles had engineered his death. I don’t know why. But having spent four years in the trenches, I find
myself wondering why the two most inexperienced soldiers in that company survived when no one else did. Unless they were hiding and Evering threatened to have them court-martialed for cowardice. Apparently the army went so far as to make certain Penrith’s rifle had been fired.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know how my brother died.”
“I believe you do. Someone brought his body home. It’s there, among the family graves.”
“The stone was set over an empty grave, to please my grieving mother. You’ll find no bones beneath it.”
“We can order an exhumation to find out. But it would be simpler to wire South Africa and ask the authorities if your brother still lies where he was buried at the time of his death. There will be a paper trail we can follow. Signatures…”
“Yes, all right, I was in South Africa for a time, and I made the arrangements for my mother’s sake. It was not an experience I care to remember. But I learned nothing from the military authorities there. Possibly to spare my feelings.”
“You knew when you first went to James, Quarles and Penrith exactly who these two men were. And they were well aware that you knew. I think that’s why they allowed you to invest in Cumberline. To teach you a lesson.”
He sighed. “That well may be. On their part. I couldn’t say.”
“I think you deliberately told Penrith lies about his wife and Harold Quarles, knowing that would be the one thing that would set them at each other’s throats. I think you didn’t really care which one killed the other. It was revenge you were after.”
“This is a very unlikely story. Not one you can prove, certainly.”
“It’s my belief that you followed Penrith to Hallowfields, and watched him kill Quarles. And then it was you who put Quarles’s body into the rig in the tithe barn. I don’t know how you learned that it was there. But you’ve been planning your revenge for some time. You might have heard the story of the Christmas pageant from anyone. It would be interesting to take you back to Cambury and see how many people there recognize you as an occasional visitor.”
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