Watchers of Time ir-5

by Charles Todd

  “The Vicar would have been closer to her age,” Rutledge speculated.

  But Miss Trent was saying, “I wasn’t very attentive, I’m afraid, although Father James did his best to bring her alive for me.” She had the grace to flush. “I didn’t want to be interested in her. I didn’t want to find myself thinking about her, and then starting to dig into the blackness-I couldn’t face it!”

  Her eyes pleaded with him for understanding. “It sounds quite selfish and callous to say that. Especially now that he’s dead. But there was nothing I could do for Virginia Sedgwick, was there? And the thing was, I couldn’t bear to go back. And I couldn’t explain why I couldn’t go back. It’s such a simple question, isn’t it? ‘Do you remember?’ ”

  “I think he must have believed that, given time, you would remember-otherwise he wouldn’t have chosen to leave you that photograph.”

  May Trent said, “Knowing that-now that he’s dead- puts a tremendous burden on me. I don’t quite see how to cope with it. I wish he hadn’t -!”

  “But then he hadn’t expected to die within a matter of days.”

  The shock of that left her silent for a moment. “Yes. I see your way of putting all this together. If he harried me, I must have killed him, just for a little peace. But he didn’t. I know he was the sort of man who believed that good would triumph. That one morning I’d sit up in bed and suddenly remember meeting this woman on the deck or in the dining rooms, the card rooms. Somewhere. After all, women traveling alone tend to gravitate toward each other-it wouldn’t have been so amazing if our paths had crossed.”

  Mrs. Barnett came in with a tray bearing hot platters and trailing an aroma of beef in a wine sauce. She set their plates down with care, studying the faces at the table. “I’m so sorry, Miss Trent, but there isn’t any more soup.”

  “I’m not really hungry. But thank you.” When she had gone, May Trent said, “I don’t think I can swallow a mouthful-what am I going to do…!”

  “At least make a show of trying,” Rutledge told her bracingly. “You’ll feel better having eaten.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said irritably. “It’s not something I relish, this black hole in my life. It takes a revenge of its own!”

  “I think I do,” he answered her.

  Their eyes locked. Hers widened in surprise, as if reading the depths of his, and turning away from what she found there. He felt a spreading hurt.

  Her voice trembling, she replied, “Yes. Well, is there anything else you want to know?”

  “Tell me about yourself. What you do, where you’ve been. Why you have stayed so long in Osterley.”

  She grimaced as she tried a forkful of beef, but she persevered. He gave her credit for courage.

  “The last is easy to answer. I’ve been looking at old churches, and I found Osterley to my liking. I prefer to stay here rather than pack my bag every few days and move to another hotel. I like the marshes. They appeal to me. The desolation, perhaps. Or their strange beauty. I’ve never quite decided which it is.”

  “Do you live in London?”

  “Somerset. I grew up there, and I feel at home there.”

  “What took you to America? Is that a safe question to ask?”

  She turned away. “I had the care of an elderly lady who was the aunt of a friend. She was going to New York to visit her son, and I was asked if I’d like to make the journey with her. As a companion, actually. But she was perfectly capable of looking after herself-”

  She broke off and fought to regain her composure, clearing her throat with the effort.

  He knew then that her charge had not survived. Which must have added enormously to the ordeal May Trent herself had suffered. Rutledge said, “Then you’d have come back to England in a few months?”

  “Yes, that was the plan. I’d never been abroad, except to France a time or two, and once to Germany. I saw it as an adventure-” The words caught in her throat. “Can we talk of something else?”

  She soldiered on valiantly through the rest of the meal. He thought perhaps she’d stayed at the table to prove to him that she could. Or because she didn’t want to go upstairs alone.

  Where the ghosts in the night lay waiting for her.

  It was something that they shared, this fear of being alone…

  After a long silence, May Trent put down her fork and considered Rutledge. “How can you bear to question people the way you do? Prying and digging into lives as if none of us possessed a shred of privacy. I should think it would be very wearing, after a time. It’s worse than gossiping or-or eavesdropping.”

  Hamish said, “It’s true, it’s no’ a gentleman’s way.”

  Rutledge winced but said, “If people told the truth the first time they were questioned, we’d have less need to pry. But lying shrouds what people say in layers of darkness. These have to be peeled away, and sifted, and verified, and even set aside as intentional misdirection.”

  Playing with the bread beside her plate, she said, “I can’t believe that! Most people are honest enough, aren’t they?” She had rolled two small marbles of the bread before she realized what she was doing.

  “Were you honest with me, earlier this evening?”

  She flushed and said, “I was protecting my own secrets, not those of Father James.”

  He hesitated. “If I come to you tomorrow and ask you if you killed Father James, will you tell me the truth?”

  “Of course! Why should I not? I’m innocent.”

  “Would you tell me the truth if you had-for reasons I couldn’t fathom-struck him down and left him to die on the floor in his own blood?”

  Something stirred at the back of her eyes. “I’m not mad. I know you’d hang me, if I told you that. But that isn’t the same as prying! It isn’t the same as demanding the name of the woman in that photograph, when-when speaking of that ship digs into my shadows, not hers.”

  She held up a hand to stop him from answering her. “How would you respond if I asked you about the War? You were in the fighting, weren’t you? You did see bodies blown apart and bones protruding from flesh, your friends cut in half by machine-gun fire, and nothing but blood where their chests used to be? You did kill people, didn’t you? How does it feel to watch a man die as you shoot him-?”

  With a sharp intake of breath, Rutledge got up from the table, and went to the window. The street was dark, the last of the light gone, and the quay empty, save for a small marmalade cat, trotting along sniffing the air.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-” she began, startled by his reaction. And then she lifted her chin, a little trick she had when she was defiant. “No, that’s not true! I did mean to hurt. I wanted you to know how your wretched questions tormented me!”

  “Touche,” Rutledge told her quietly.

  May Trent did not take her tea in the parlor with Rutledge. She went up the stairs without looking back.

  But something in the set of her shoulders suggested that she was crying.

  Unable to sleep, Rutledge walked out to the quay, to look up at the stars. A whiff of pipe smoke made him turn in time to see Dr. Stephenson coming in his direction.

  “Well met,” Stephenson said, but without sincerity. “I had an emergency delivery, and I’m still too excited to go to bed. Touch and go, but mother and son are going to be all right. What’s your excuse?”

  Rutledge thought, I could tell you I’ve been tormenting two women-at least they feel I have. Instead he answered, “I have a liking for the marshes, I suppose.”

  Stephenson grunted. “What’s the news about Walsh?”

  “Among other issues, Inspector Blevins has been trying to find out if Walsh had encountered Father James in France.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t think that was likely. Besides, what difference would it make? The fact that they’d met wouldn’t change what happened in the rectory, or why.”

  “Blevins has learned that Father James had written a letter from France to his sister Judith. He made some remark in
passing about a story she’d liked as a child. About Jack and the Giant. But Judith is dead, and the letter hasn’t survived.”

  Stephenson began to chuckle, deep in his throat. “Sometimes I don’t pretend to understand the policeman’s mind! Jack the Giant, you say?”

  “We can’t leave anything to chance-”

  But Stephenson cut him short. “You’re fools, the lot of you! It wasn’t Jack, it was Jacques. And he was tall and thin as a rail, looked like a beanpole-but he was hardly a giant! Father James told me about this man-felt that I’d be interested in the way he treated wounds. Jacques Lamieux was his name, and he was a French Canadian medical man. He came to France for firsthand experience, and he got his fill of it. We still correspond. He has a practice in Quebec, and a reputation for being the best there is at amputations-a very high percentage of his patients live.”

  Still chuckling, Dr. Stephenson walked away. Then over his shoulder, he said, “You can tell Blevins for me that I can produce letters from Lamieux dated this month. Hard to bash a man’s brains in, from that distance!”

  Rutledge lay awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, his eyes following the pale ripples of light that clouds threw across the beautifully plastered finish as they moved in front of the half-moon.

  Hamish talked about the War, about the men they’d lived with for days at a time in the trenches and in the holding areas, waiting for their turn. Most read, talked, played cards, wrote letters home, anything to while away the hours of boredom before the wild wash of fear when they were ordered to fall in. No one spoke of the dead, then. It was not superstition as much as dread that this time their own names would be added to the long rolls of missing, wounded, and killed. This time, they wouldn’t come back. The chances were never good. Luck-sometimes skill-sometimes mere instinct-could change the odds in your favor. But there were so many dead, so many. As if the War were a monstrous beast, hungry for flesh and impatient for bodies.

  No man who had fought in battle remembered it afterward without the rich coloring of his own fears. Scenes replayed themselves in slow motion, unwinding like a ribbon of terror, and a soldier’s greatest fear was that his own gut-wrenching cowardice would let his mates down. And so he was brave in spite of himself, but never brave enough, never able to save them all, and he dragged the unlucky ones back to the trenches while they screamed to him to leave them, it hurt too much, and he held them as they died, and all the while furtively thanked God that he himself was whole. Only to lie awake at night, drowning in guilt because he had lived somehow.

  Was that the fear that May Trent carried with her? That she had let the elderly woman in her care die? That somehow in darkness and terror and confusion, she had let go of a hand, to save herself-hurried too fast, to save herself-been blind, when she should have seen Guilt was what scoured the soul after it was over. And she would protect the darkness because it was comforting. Or because she feared the truth about herself.

  Was that enough to drive her to murder, when Father James pushed her to remember-? He’d have turned his back on her… unwitting. Perhaps walk to the window and look out at the night while she found her handkerchief and pretended to wipe away tears. And she would have found it easy to silence the voice that was, somehow, reaching into the depths of her mind and hurting.

  What had Dr. Stephenson said? That Father James had had such a beautiful voice and knew how to use it as a tool of his work.

  Hamish growled, “Yon Inspector wouldna’ care whether it was Walsh or this woman he hanged. Ye ken, it doesna’ matter as long as it isna’ someone from Osterley.”

  Drifting into sleep, Rutledge heard himself answer. “Virginia Sedgwick wasn’t from Osterley, either…”

  CHAPTER 19

  RUTLEDGE AWOKE FROM A DEEP SLEEP to the sound of thunder. The guns, he thought, as he tried to shake off the dullness that weighed so heavily on his body, like a mattress, muffling and distorting the noise. They’ve started firing again He could hear one of the Sergeants calling his name, and cleared his throat to answer, but couldn’t.

  And then sleep fell away and he realized there was a pounding on his door, and the voice calling him wasn’t one he knew.

  Rising swiftly, he went to open the door and found a young constable standing there, blood on his cheek and shoulder, his face white. Rutledge struggled to recall his name. Franklin “Inspector Blevins asks, sir, if you’ll come straightaway.”

  Rutledge opened the door wider. “Yes, all right. Tell me what’s happened.” He crossed to the chair by the window and began to dress, adding a sweater under his coat.

  The constable was saying, “All hell’s broke loose, sir!” His voice was still high-pitched from shock, but steady enough. “That man Walsh has escaped-he struck me over the head and was gone before I could do anything. When I got my senses back, I ran to wake up Inspector Blevins, and on the way back to the station, we saw Mr. Sims, coming from the vicarage. There was someone trying to break into the house. It had to be Walsh, sir!”

  Rutledge found his shoes and stockings, pulling them on hastily, then ran his fingers through his tousled hair. “All right, let’s be on our way.”

  Hamish was saying, “I canna’ believe he’d run. It’s sure proof against him!”

  May Trent, in a dressing gown, her hair in a dark plait over one shoulder, was at her door as he strode into the passage. The words found their way into the jumble of thoughts in his mind: She’s damned attractive “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is there something amiss?”

  The constable started to answer her, but Rutledge said, “No, it’s a problem at the station. I’ve been sent for. Go back to sleep, there’s nothing to worry about.”

  There was doubt in her face, but she nodded and went back into her room, shutting the door. As he turned toward the stairs, he heard the click! of the lock behind him. Just as well, he told himself. But Walsh had no reason to come here…

  They let themselves out quietly, and Mrs. Barnett, in dressing gown and slippers, shut and locked the door behind them.

  As the two men walked fast up Water Street to the station, Rutledge said, “You were on duty, then?”

  “Yes. Walsh was asleep when I checked at midnight, snoring like the wrath of God. He always does-you can hardly hear yourself think!”

  “And?”

  “Close on to two o’clock, I heard him making an odd sound. As if he was choking. I went back to the cell, wary because Inspector Blevins had warned me he might try something. But there he was, hanging from the top bars, choking his life out, kicking like a mad horse. I opened the door, to get him down from there, but he was tangled in a shirt, and I had to struggle to make any headway. Then his fist came down on my face as I managed to lower him, and I hit the back of my head on the door. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “And he made a run for it. All right, what else?”

  “For the life of me I don’t understand why he didn’t kill me! He could have done, easily enough, and there’d be nobody to raise the alarm. As it was, it took me all of a minute to shake off the blow, I was that dazed, and half sick. But I got to my feet and went after him, running out of the station and looking in both directions. I couldn’t think he would go to the quay; there’s nowhere to escape there. I went up Water Street and looked up and down the main road. I couldn’t see anything, or hear anything. I went on to Inspector Blevins’s house. It took him nearly five minutes to come down and open the door, and then he was accusing me of rousing the children with my clamor!”

  Excitement had loosened the young constable’s tongue, and he was finding it hard to conceal his reaction to Blevins’s rebuke when he’d been trying to carry out his duty. Stumbling on the cobbles, he caught Rutledge’s arm to steady himself.

  “You should see the doctor,” Rutledge told him as they walked through the open door of the station. All the lights were lit, and another constable was waiting for the two men.

  “You’re to stay here, Harry, and wait,” he said to Franklin. “If you
’ll come with me, sir, I’m to take you to the vicarage.”

  “Give me two minutes,” Rutledge said, and he walked back to the cell. Looking in, he could see that by standing on his toes, Walsh could have reached high above his own head to an exposed pipe coming out of one wall and crossing to the other side, wrapping his twisted shirt around it like a rope, and giving every appearance of a man hanging there.

  After all, as Hamish was pointing out, the man was used to entertaining crowds. He would have put on a good show.

  Long enough, at least, to lure the gullible young constable into the room.

  Hamish said, “Blevins will have his hide!”

  Rutledge silently agreed. He turned on his heel and followed the second constable-Taylor, was that his name?- out to the street.

  By the time they had reached the vicarage, they could already see that all the lights had been turned on, giving it a strangely festive air, as if Sims was about to hold a party there.

  The front door stood wide, and Rutledge could hear the station Sergeant moving about in the bushes near it, his torch flicking first this way and that. They found Sims and Blevins sitting in the study, like two wary bulldogs distrustful of each other.

  Blevins said, “What took you so long?” His voice was querulous, tired.

  Sims seemed to be happier to see Rutledge. He nodded, and then looked over his shoulder out the black window, as if he could probe the darkness in the tree-shadowed garden.

  “I stopped by the station. To see how Walsh had played his trick. Quite clever.”

  “Clever, hell. A child of six could have seen through it!” Blevins swore. “No, that’s not fair to Franklin. What matters, when you come down to it, is that the man’s got away.”