A False Mirror

by Charles Todd

  He had the feeling she was fencing with him, choosing her words to discourage him.

  “Miss Cole, Matthew Hamilton is in trouble, and I’d thought he might have turned to you for help.”

  “What kind of trouble? The Matthew Hamilton I remember was not likely to be of interest to the police.”

  “When did you last see him, Miss Cole?”

  Across the room the woman stirred and then was still again. “I’m blind, Inspector. I have been for many years. The last time I met Mr. Hamilton, he was young and so was I. We parted on good terms, and agreed to go our separate ways. He’s not likely to call on me now, and I would be as surprised to see him at my door as I am to see you there. Good day, Inspector. Dedham will see you out.”

  Blind…

  So that was what Melinda Crawford had not wanted to bring into their conversation.

  He realized that there was nothing more to say, nothing to do but leave. A blind woman couldn’t have attacked anyone, not in the way that Hamilton had been injured. And she couldn’t have come for him, even if he’d been able to contact her. Or tried to kill him in Dr. Granville’s surgery. Yet she must have been a greater part of Hamilton’s life than even she knew. Or Felicity…

  But would she give him sanctuary?

  Rutledge spoke into the silence, his voice reaching her across the room, forcing her to listen.

  “I don’t believe that the fact that you’re blind entered into his friendship with you. He has named two houses that I know of for you—Casa Miranda in Malta and again here in England. There may have been others. It was a reminder to him that he’d known you and it tells me as well that if you had turned to him for help, he wouldn’t have refused you. We had hoped he might trust you to safeguard him.”

  “He wouldn’t refuse anyone coming to him in trouble. It’s his nature to be kind. And I have not needed his help through the years. If you are interested in why his house should bear my name, you must ask him. As for our friendship, you know nothing at all about that.”

  “I can’t ask him. He was attacked and badly beaten by someone who left him to die alone, in great pain. I’m charged with finding that person.”

  “I thought you said he was missing.”

  “He is. He left his bed in the doctor’s surgery sometime during the night. We don’t know how, or why. Whether he had help or walked out under his own power. But in the morning we found his room empty, and the body of the doctor’s wife lying in the next room, murdered.”

  She stirred again, this time her attention riveted on his face. “Murdered, you say? But that’s—that’s appalling. Mr. Rutledge, are you trying to frighten me?”

  “Not at all. I’ve come to warn you.” His voice was earnest. “If Matthew Hamilton reached you under his own power, we need to know what he remembers about the attack on him. And why he left the surgery. And why Mrs. Granville was killed. It’s possible that he attacked her in the dark, not knowing who she was until it was too late. If that’s the case, you may also be in danger.”

  He wanted to add that she was defenseless and her house isolated, but he thought she was clever enough to understand that for herself.

  “Nonsense. And it doesn’t signify anyway. I’ve told you that he’s not here.”

  “His wife is being held prisoner against her will. If Hamilton had nothing to hide, why didn’t he go to her and try to help her escape? If he loved her, why didn’t he move heaven and earth to free her? Even at risk to himself.”

  She put up a hand to stop him. “You are a very pitiless man, Mr. Rutledge. You have frightened me for your own ends. I won’t hear any more of this.”

  Without appearing to be using her hands, she let her fingers lightly touch pieces of furniture in her path, walking toward the door from memory. Before he could stop her she had gone through it and called to her maid.

  He didn’t try to follow her. Hamish was already telling him that he had overstepped his bounds.

  And what would Frances or Melinda Crawford have to say about his conduct here?

  But a policeman was charged with sifting facts and probing truths. Even those secrets innocent people tried to hide from him. If Hamilton had remembered his relationship with her for twenty years, Rutledge found it hard to believe that Miranda Cole cared so little for him. Unless their romance had been one-sided from the start.

  Unrequited love? Or what might have been?

  He turned and walked back the way he had come, through the door and out to the motorcar. Someone slammed the heavy door behind him. He thought perhaps it was the maid. After a few minutes, Constable Mercer came hurrying around the corner of the house, murmuring “Sorry, sir!” as he stepped into the motorcar.

  For a moment Rutledge ignored him, standing there looking up at the house. It was impossible for Hamilton to have come this far, in his condition. And it would be impossible for a blind woman to go to Hampton Regis and bring him here. Neither her maid nor the elderly aunt he hadn’t met would have been able to lift a man of that height and weight.

  A wild-goose chase. But he thought, if it wasn’t Miranda Cole, and it wasn’t Miss Esterley who had spirited Matthew Hamilton to safety, who was responsible for what had happened to the man?

  And the question brought him again to George Reston. Or Robert Stratton.

  Rutledge took Constable Mercer back to Exeter and then faced the long drive back to Hampton Regis.

  “Circles within circles,” he found himself saying to Hamish as they shared the darkness behind the powerful glow of the headlamps.

  “She called you a liar.”

  And a man without pity.

  But why would a man like Hamilton name his home for a woman he’d not seen for many years? Sentiment was unlikely. Guilt, then, a reminder of what he’d done when he was young and felt ashamed of, in later life? Guilt was a strong emotion, it drove people into paths that they hadn’t intended to take. He understood it, in his own case, though Dr. Fleming had first pointed it out to him.

  “You survived the war and can’t forgive yourself for surviving, when others died or were maimed. Until you do learn to forgive yourself, you’ll never be completely whole.”

  “I don’t need to be whole,” he’d responded. “Only to function to the best of my ability. I want to return to the Yard.” May of last year, he’d said those words to the man who’d brought him so far, and could take him no further on his journey back to sanity. He still had an appallingly long way to go.

  “Yes, well, it could be a good thing or a bad thing, Ian, to go back. Only you can know which.”

  “It isn’t a question of good or bad, it’s a matter of working twelve hours in a day until I’m too tired to think. Here, in hospital, I do nothing but think.”

  “Are you trying to leave here to escape me and look for your own way out?” Fleming had asked bluntly.

  “Self-slaughter? I can kill myself here just as easily. Well, not as easily as pulling a trigger, but it can be done. You know that.”

  “Yes.” Fleming had sat there, watching him. “All right then, let’s see what happens. Your people at the Yard want you back. Let’s give it a month and find out whether you are healed sufficiently to face what’s in your head.”

  And it had been a terrifying month, that June. A month without mercy. But he’d survived that and nine more. It was March of 1920, and he was still alive.

  Whether the struggle had been worth it, he didn’t know. He couldn’t stand aside and be objective. Not where Hamish was concerned.

  By the time Rutledge reached Hampton Regis, he was too stiff and too drained to seek his bed.

  Instead he stopped the car some distance past the Mole and for an hour walked along the strand, pacing back and forth, listening to the roar of the waves coming in, feeling the crunch of his heels on the wet shingle, and remembering how he’d nearly been sucked into the mud of the landslip. Was it only just that morning?

  And what the bloody hell was he to do about Matthew Hamilton?

 
; By the time he had turned for the Mole, he startled a fisherman coming down to the boats tied up there.

  The man swerved, then swore. It was Perkins, who’d taken him out to the landslip. “Damned if you didn’t turn my heart over in my chest, Mr. Rutledge! I thought for certain the sea had given up Matthew Hamilton.”

  22

  Rutledge was up early, waiting at the police station when the extra men came in from outlying towns, arriving on their bicycles.

  He set four of them to work on the west road, knocking on the doors of farmers and householders on either side of the Reston cottage. Two more finished canvassing the shops and businesses along the Mole for anyone who had seen Matthew Hamilton walk down to the strand on the morning he was attacked. And one of Bennett’s men was to finish the last of the names on a list of Dr. Granville’s neighbors.

  That left one man to return to guarding the house on the hill.

  When that had been done, Rutledge set up a room for himself in the back of the station, using what had been storage space until 1914, when it was enlarged to stockpile gear for rescuing men washed ashore in U-boat attacks.

  It was a bare room, painted an ugly brown, no windows, and a deal table for his desk. But it gave the newcomers ready access to him, and it kept them out of Bennett’s way.

  He was just sitting down gingerly in the chair someone had brought him, testing it for a wobble on the uneven flooring, when the outer door of the station was flung open and someone shouted his name.

  Rutledge came on the run and found himself face-to-face with the young constable who had been at the surgery with Bennett the previous morning. He was out of breath and in some agitation.

  “They’re shouting for you at the house, sir,” Jordan blurted out. “I don’t know what it’s all about, but I could hear him, that Mr. Mallory, sir, yelling for me to pay attention, damn it—begging your pardon, sir—and finally I stepped out to the gate to see what the uproar was. I’m to bring you back with me, sir.”

  “My motorcar is around the corner. Come along.”

  Bennett had peered out of his office to listen. “Here!” he said, reaching for his crutch. “Wait, I’m coming as well.”

  Rutledge had the engine cranked and was behind the wheel when Bennett caught them up. He got in, careful of his foot, and had barely slammed the door when Rutledge was moving.

  It was no distance to the house, but to Rutledge the road seemed cluttered with marketgoers and lorries passing through to the west. He threaded his way among them, reached the turning up the hill and gunned the motorcar into a leap forward.

  Hamish, in the back of his mind, was a low, familiar rumble, like the guns in France.

  They reached the front door of the house, and Rutledge said to the constable, “Take up your station again. I’ll call if I need you.”

  Jordan hurried down to the gates as Bennett, already out, pounded on the front door.

  It was opened by Mallory, his face pale and so lined with worry that he seemed to have aged overnight.

  “I sent for Rutledge,” he snapped at Bennett.

  “It makes no difference. What’s happened? Did Hamilton show up in the night?”

  They hadn’t speculated in the short ride from the police station, but it had been in all their minds. Rutledge waited for Mallory to answer.

  “He was here. There’s no other explanation. And he’s killed Nan Weekes!”

  They stood there staring at him, their faces blank with astonishment.

  Rutledge, the first to recover, said, “How did he get in?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only just found her. If you’ll give me your word that I’m safe with you in the house, I’ll let you both inside. If not, it’s Rutledge only.” He moved slightly, and they could see the revolver in his right hand, half hidden by the doorjamb.

  “Where’s Mrs. Hamilton?”

  “In her room. She’s going to need something. I’ve never seen her so distraught.”

  “That can wait. All right, then. My word,” Bennett told him.

  “And mine,” Rutledge assured him.

  The door opened wider and Mallory let them pass by him. He nodded to the door behind the staircase that led down to the kitchen passages. “That way.”

  They walked briskly down to the kitchen, and to the small room that had been the maid’s prison.

  Hamish, behind him, seemed to be telling him something, but Rutledge couldn’t make out the words for the thunder in his head.

  She was in her bed, one arm dangling over the edge, the other flung awkwardly above her head. A pillow lay on the floor.

  “Suffocated,” Bennett said, bending over her. “We’ll need the doctor to come and have a look.”

  Rutledge, at his shoulder, remembered Chief Superintendent Bowles’s voice on the telephone: “That’s two murders…and I don’t want to be hearing of another.”

  “Have you touched her?” he asked Mallory, who was waiting by the door, leaving the room to them.

  “I called to her. When she didn’t wake up, I came in and snatched up the pillow, thinking she was playing at something. Pretending to be ill. She’s dead, I know the dead when I see them. You don’t need Granville to tell you.”

  “Was the door to this room locked?”

  “Yes. But the key’s on the outside. Anyone could have used it and still locked it behind him.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “About eleven o’clock last night. I came to ask if she needed anything before I went to—where I spend the night. As I always asked, mind you. She was not feeling well, she said. Dinner hadn’t agreed with her. I told her, it’s the best we can do. But she thought the meat had gone off. She said the butcher hadn’t given us the best cut.”

  Bennett, straightening up, turned to look at him. “My wife ordered that food. She’d not have sent bad beef.”

  Mallory said wearily, “I don’t know whether it was good or bad. I was very tired, I told her we’d deal with it in the morning. And in my view, she’d eaten enough for two, it was probably nothing more than indigestion. I think I may have said as much, and she called me callous. I told her that if she’d agreed to cook it for us, we’d have all been better served.”

  “So you were quarreling?” Rutledge asked.

  “Not quarreling, it was no more than the long-running tongue-lashing we were greeted with, morning and night. But she surprised me then, telling me that she’d spoken to the rector while he was here, and if I’d call her in the morning, she’d be willing to prepare breakfast. I told her I’d have to watch her like a hawk and wasn’t sure if it was worth the trouble. And she answered that as long as Mrs. Hamilton was here, she wasn’t leaving.”

  “That was an about-face,” Rutledge commented.

  “Yes. I didn’t know if it was a trick or not. I didn’t care. I said I’d consider it, and I made sure she had water for the night. And then I shut the door and turned the key.”

  “And she didn’t pound on the door or scream or cause any other disruption during the night?”

  “If she did, I didn’t hear it. We’ve learned to shut it out, actually.”

  “Has Mrs. Hamilton seen her?”

  “To my sorrow, yes. She heard me shouting for the constable out there. And she came at once to ask what was wrong. Before I could stop her, she’d run down here. I heard her scream, and then she was up the back stairs into her room and wouldn’t open her door.” It was there in his eyes. She thinks I’ve done this.

  “We’ll need to speak to her in good time,” Rutledge told him. “If it was Hamilton, how did he get in?”

  “It wasn’t I. And it wasn’t Felicity. Who else could it have been?”

  “Let’s have a look at the doors and windows, then,” Bennett said. “If Hamilton got this far and killed the maid, why didn’t he hunt you down as well?”

  “Because he couldn’t find me, I expect. I’ve told you, I have found a way to sleep. He may know the house better than I do, but I wasn’t where
he looked.”

  “And you heard nothing in the night?” Rutledge persisted.

  “Nothing.” It was curt.

  “Did Mrs. Hamilton hear anything?”

  “She says she didn’t. I asked her.”

  They moved away from the bed, came to the door, and passed through as Mallory backed away.

  It would have been easy, then, to overpower him, word given or not. Two men against one. But he still held the revolver, and in the passage outside the servants’ hall door, any shots fired would ricochet, even if they missed their intended target.

  They made the rounds of the house. None of the doors had been built to keep murderers out. Their locks were old, heavy, the bolts fitting into worn wood. But nothing was broken, and the windows were properly latched.

  Rutledge said thoughtfully, “Hamilton’s keys went missing with him.”

  “So they did,” Bennett answered.

  Whoever had taken Hamilton had freedom of the house.

  Rutledge interviewed Mrs. Hamilton alone. It took some time to convince her to unlock her door, but when she finally opened it, her face tear-streaked and so pale he thought perhaps she’d been sick, she held on to the frame as if to a lifeline.

  “Will you come downstairs and be comfortable?” he asked her gently. “We’ve made tea. It will warm you a little.”

  But she shook her head. “I said to him—to Stephen—that I hated her and wanted her dead. Not two days ago. I never thought he would kill her…” Her voice trailed off into tears.

  And Rutledge remembered that she hadn’t been told that Hamilton wasn’t in the surgery, under Dr. Granville’s eye.

  “He was upset when dinner turned out so badly. I didn’t mean for him to take me literally, I was just torn about Matthew and worried—but it’s no less my fault, is it? I should have been braver, I should have borne with all the trouble and said nothing.”

  She began to cry. “I didn’t truly want her to die. But I’m to blame, I’ll have to be judged along with him. He wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me, and I’m so frightened, I think my heart is going to break.”