A False Mirror

by Charles Todd

  “No, stay where you are,” Mallory murmured in her direction. “Rutledge, where did it come from, that noise?”

  “I couldn’t tell. The back of the house, I think.”

  She had the door open, standing there outlined in the dim glow of her shaded lamp, fully clothed and clutching a shawl around her shoulders. “Don’t leave me!” she begged. “I won’t stay here by myself.”

  “Felicity, for God’s sake—”

  “No, if you go, I’m going too. I won’t be cornered like this.”

  Rutledge said, “We’ve got a choice. Stay and wait, or go and investigate.”

  They listened, holding their breath as they did. But there was no other sound from below.

  “If he’s in the house, he could be anywhere,” Rutledge said softly. “We could walk straight into him before we knew he was there.”

  “He must be searching rooms. One at a time. It sounded as if he’d knocked over something.”

  “It was more like a window breaking—glass falling,” Rutledge said.

  “I think it must have been the dining room,” Felicity whispered. “It was in the back, at least. I know how this house creaks in the wind, like a ship at sea. It wasn’t like that.”

  “Which bedroom is over the dining room?” Rutledge asked her.

  “The guest room, second door beyond the stairs. On your right.”

  “I’ll go and have a look,” he said, but Mallory stopped him.

  “We shouldn’t separate. That was the bargain.”

  “I went down alone before.”

  “That was different, damn it. It was suspicious, but not threatening.”

  They were on their feet, standing together in the dim light. Mallory turned to Felicity. “If you must stay here, shut that door. I can’t see with your light in my eyes.”

  She did as he asked, and the passage was dark again. Rutledge nearly jumped out of his skin as her hand brushed the back of his shoulder, so certain it was Hamish that he nearly cried out. But she was just moving nearer, he could smell the scent she wore as she clutched at Mallory’s arm, the paleness of her shawl picking her out as his eyes adjusted again to the lack of light.

  “You won’t shoot him, promise me you won’t. If it’s Matthew, we don’t want to hurt him,” she was whispering importunately.

  “Shhh.” Mallory leaned forward, as if to help his ears penetrate the shadows that lay between them and the top of the stairs.

  But nothing came up the stairs, neither a figment of their imaginations nor a shambling wounded man half out of his mind.

  Rutledge thought, standing there, It’s easy to believe in monsters in the dark. Young Jeremy was not alone.

  And Hamish, whose ears had always been the sharpest, said, “He isna’ coming.”

  Rutledge replied silently, “You can’t be sure. The stairs are carpeted.”

  “He’s no’ coming. It’s a game.”

  And although they stood there for another quarter of an hour, pinned where they were by the tension of not knowing, Hamish proved to be right.

  In the end, the three of them ventured down the stairs as the first gray threads of light broke over the horizon and the head of the staircase loomed ghostly in front of them. It didn’t take them long to find what they had heard. A long black length of tree limb had been driven through the panes of the dining room window, protruding like a battered and obscene spear above the shattered bits of glass scattered on the polished floor below it.

  Rutledge went outside then, but beneath the window the thick matting of leaves blown against the foundations masked any sign of footprints.

  He could see the tree where the limb had come from. Three had broken off, one of them driven deep into the soil, another leaning crookedly against the foundations, and the third thrust through the window.

  But what he couldn’t determine, in spite of carefully searching for any sign that might confirm it, was whether that one branch had had the help of a human agency to ram it through the glass. He could have done it, tall as he was, and actually reached up to pull it out as Mallory shoved it toward him and then went for something to patch the hole.

  He remembered what Hamish had said, that someone was toying with them. That someone had known the house was a trap and played with their nerves.

  He hadn’t spoken to his watchers. And they might well tell him a different tale.

  24

  Felicity insisted that she would make breakfast for him before he left the house. Rutledge wasn’t certain whether it was because she wanted to keep him there until daylight had swept away the shadows of the night, or because she was afraid to be alone with Mallory any longer than was necessary.

  And so the three of them sat in the dining room, chilled as it was after a night of wind pouring through broken glass. Mallory had patched it with a length of wood he’d found somewhere, but when the wind blew from the sea, it whistled incessantly. A reminder of their fears.

  She had cooked rashers of bacon and boiled eggs to go with them, made toast without burning it, and found a pot of jam that tasted of summer. Rutledge had made the tea, reminded of a kitchen in Westmorland, the warmest room of the house and the busiest.

  Hamish retorted that Rutledge had been a stranger there as well as here.

  “Nan didn’t make that,” she said, setting the jam on the table between the two men. “It was a gift from Miss Esterley. She thought we might enjoy it. Matthew was saving it for some reason. I don’t quite know why. At least that’s what Nan told me when I asked what had become of it. I wrote a note to thank Miss Esterley, all the same.”

  “How many days a week did your maid come here?”

  “Three days. On Tuesday she went to Mrs. Granville, and on Thursday and Saturday she went to the Restons. She told me only last month that if I could do without her one of my afternoons, she’d go to the rectory. The elderly woman who has been housekeeper to Mr. Putnam is considering moving away to live with her daughter.”

  “Miss Esterley has her own maid, I think?”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “Was Nan much of a gossip?”

  “She never gossiped with me. Whether she gossiped about me I don’t know. Must we talk about her? It makes me ill, just thinking about her. How do you work as a policeman, Mr. Rutledge? I couldn’t bring myself to do what you do.”

  “Someone must keep order,” he answered lightly. “It’s what makes life possible for everyone else.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it in that light. Matthew said once that he could measure a country’s future by the honesty of its police force.” Her face clouded. “Where is he, Mr. Rutledge, and why is he doing such things to us?”

  “We don’t know that he is.”

  “We’ve assumed that he is. I was so frightened last night. I hardly slept.”

  “And it’s to do again tonight,” Mallory reminded her. “Unless he’s found today.”

  “I wish I knew what had happened to him when he went walking that day. I’ve wished so many times I’d begged him to stay home with me. But there was no way of knowing, was there, that it would be different that morning. Do you think he’s ever going to be—in good health again?” she ended, trying to find the word she wanted and failing.

  “Dr. Granville felt he would recover physically. Bones knit and bruises fade. We can only hope that his mind will heal too,” Rutledge answered.

  “But why would he kill Nan? It makes no sense,” Felicity said.

  Mallory put in, “It makes as much sense as killing—” He broke off, appalled at what he’d nearly said.

  Felicity Hamilton was sharp, in her own way. She stared at him, then asked, “Who? Who else is dead?”

  Mallory tried to recover. “It makes as much sense as killing me,” he ended.

  “No, that’s not what you were going to say. Mr. Rutledge? Has everyone been lying to me? Who else is dead?” When he was slow to answer, she said accusingly, “I knew you were all keeping something from me. I knew ther
e was something more to Matthew vanishing like that. What has he done?”

  “It was Mrs. Granville,” Rutledge finally told her. “She was found in the surgery, the only reasonable explanation being that she saw lights and went to investigate. We don’t know for a fact that Hamilton touched her.”

  “So that’s why it was Dr. Hester, yesterday, and not Dr. Granville—” As the enormity of what she had just heard registered, she turned on Mallory with such anguish that he flinched. “What have we done to him, Stephen? Between us, what have we done!”

  And she was gone, leaving Mallory sitting there like a man turned to stone.

  Rutledge went upstairs later and tapped on the door. “Mrs. Hamilton?”

  But she wouldn’t answer him. He tried again, and then said through the panels, “Do you want to leave with me, Mrs. Hamilton? I’ve spoken to Mallory. He tells me that you’re free to go, if you wish.”

  He listened to the silence on the other side, concerned about her.

  Hamish said, “She willna’ heed you. Open the door.”

  Rutledge hesitated, unwilling to test the door. If it was locked, he couldn’t in good conscience knock it down. If it was unlocked, he would be violating her only sanctuary now in this house.

  Hamish persisted, and finally he put his hand to the knob.

  She was lying on the bed as she had been once before, her back to him, her hair falling in a tumble across the pillow. Asleep or pretending to be.

  This time, there was a difference. Beside the bed, on its side and half empty, was the decanter of whiskey that Mallory had kept in the passage last night. Rutledge was certain he’d put it back where he found it this morning, along with the bedding and the chairs they’d used. But Mrs. Hamilton had found it. She had also emptied the box of powders Dr. Hester had left for her, taking them all at once with the whiskey.

  Rutledge shouted for Mallory, and then was too busy to wait for him. She was breathing heavily, but he thought that could be only the whiskey and the fatigue of the long night as much as the sedative starting its deadly work. He picked her up in his arms and started for the stairs.

  Mallory met him halfway and said only, “God in heaven.”

  They got her to the kitchen and stretched her out on the worn table there, covering her with one of the blankets that had been in Nan’s room. Without ceremony, Rutledge thrust her fingers into the back of her throat, and as she retched, he pulled her head over the edge of the table.

  She vomited only a little, and he tried again, this time more successfully.

  “Strong tea, as strong as you can make it,” he told Mallory. “And then send the constable on duty for Dr. Granville.”

  When nothing else worked, he got hot water from their breakfast tea and salt from the worktable down her throat, and the combination brought up the rest of the contents of her stomach.

  She lay there, moaning in discomfort, but he held her head again and made her swallow the tea, though her throat was sore and she could hardly keep it down.

  It was rough-and-ready treatment, without medical advice, but he had dealt with drunks, and what mattered was ridding her as fast as possible of what she’d swallowed.

  There was no way to know if the powders would have killed her. Or if the whiskey mixed with them was a deadly brew. He had acted first and worried later.

  By the time the rector and Dr. Granville had arrived, she was lying on the floor, wrapped in blankets with a bottle of hot water at her feet. Tears ran down her cheeks, and her hair on the pillow was dark with vomit and water and sweat. The kitchen was sour with the smell of sickness.

  Dr. Granville, kneeling on the floor to examine her, said, “You seem to have got most of it in time. What was the sedative, do you know?”

  “I don’t know.” Rutledge turned to Putnam. “What’s left is lying on the floor of her bedroom. Will you bring them down?”

  Mallory said, “I’ll see to it,” and was gone before Rutledge could stop him.

  Granville did what he could to make Felicity Hamilton more comfortable, speaking gently to her, bathing her face and hands to cleanse them of the smell of sickness, and promising to send some broth by Putnam, to give her a little strength. She responded, smiling wanly at him and clinging to his hand. It was as if such small kindnesses touched her deeply.

  He said, lifting her shoulders to offer her a sip of water, “It will all seem like a nightmare, you know, when this has passed. Something you remember sometimes, but without the power to frighten you anymore.”

  She answered, “It was a stupid thing, to take the powders all at once. But I was so tired and I didn’t know who to trust, what to believe. I wanted it all to be over with, I wanted to sleep forever, without having to think about anything again.”

  “If Mallory will allow it, I’ll look in on you a little later. To make sure you’re feeling better.”

  Rutledge, suddenly aware that Mallory hadn’t come back, turned and ran out of the kitchen, heading for the stairs.

  He found the man sitting disconsolately on her bed, the revolver between his hands.

  Rutledge said harshly, “Kill yourself here, and you might as well kill her. The effect will be the same.”

  “I know. I’ve thought of that. I’m just out of solutions, Rutledge. I might as well give myself up to Bennett and let it be over. Granville can take her back to the rectory with him and find a woman to sit with her until her mother can get here. She’s never liked her mother. It will be the last thing she wants to happen. But we’ve come to the end of the road.”

  Rutledge bent to collect the scattered papers that had held the sedative. “You’re a fool, Mallory, for getting yourself into this scrape and for dragging her with you. But I’m damned if you’re going out with a whimper, as you did in France. Get yourself cleaned up and come downstairs. This isn’t over, and you’ll play the role you laid out for yourself.”

  “I’m too tired to care.”

  “Then care about her, for God’s sake.”

  Rutledge turned on his heel and left. He was halfway down the staircase when he heard Mallory shut Mrs. Hamilton’s bedroom door and walk heavily down the hall to the bath.

  He gave Granville the papers the sedative had been folded into, and the doctor sniffed them before balling them up and tossing them away. “Mild enough. And probably not enough to kill her. But you did the right thing, though I doubt she’ll thank you for it.”

  “She was frightened by the maid’s murder, and last night was not the best time to sleep well.”

  “Yes, there were trees down on some of the farms. The Joyners lost an apple tree, and their neighbors had a large trunk come through their roof. They told Miss Joyner it sounded like the crack of doom. One of the roads was blocked as well.”

  “You were out there?”

  “The old man was having trouble breathing again. I doubt he’ll see the spring, but then he’s of strong stock. He may surprise me yet.” He stretched his back. “We ought to get her to bed. What shape is it in?”

  “It’s ready for her. I was just up there.”

  “Good.”

  With Putnam going before them to manage the doors, they got her up the stairs and into her room. Rutledge saw that Mallory had taken away with him the decanter and the small bedside carpet where it had rolled and spilled. Dr. Granville tucked her in with surprising gentleness, and said, “I’ll have no more foolishness from you, my dear. You’ll see this through for your husband’s sake.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Granville. I’m so sorry—after all you’ve been through.” It was the closest she could come to apologizing for what her husband might have done. She lay there, eyes overly large in her pale face, overcome by drowsiness after her ordeal. Putnam took her hand, and in the other she clutched the handkerchief he’d found for her. Tears seemed very near the surface. “It’s been very trying for all of us.”

  “Sleep if you can. I’ll send along the broth, and if you drink that, it will strengthen you.” He turned to Rutledge, sta
nding by the door. “We should have a woman come and sit with her. Do you think that’s possible?”

  “Miss Esterley might agree,” he said. “Someone who won’t gossip.”

  Mr. Putnam looked up and said, “Shall I go and see?”

  “Dr. Granville will see to it, Rector. You’re needed here at the moment.”

  “Don’t leave me,” Felicity Hamilton asked. “Not until I’m asleep.”

  “Yes, by all means. If it’s a comfort to you, my dear, I’ll gladly stay.”

  Rutledge accompanied Dr. Granville to the door. “Thank you for coming. There was no time to send for Dr. Hester.”

  “I understand. It’s the least I could do, after the debacle with her husband. There’s still no news of him?”

  “None.”

  “He’s dead, then. In that cottage. There aren’t that many places for a man to hide in Hampton Regis, when everyone is on the lookout for him.”

  “I still find it difficult to believe he could have walked away under his own power. What’s your opinion?”

  Granville gave his question serious consideration. “Anything is possible, medically speaking. But that means he must have killed Margaret. And I refuse to believe it. Someone took him away, and that someone had already done his best once before to see Hamilton into his grave.”

  “You know the people here. Can you tell me who might have started this by attacking Hamilton in the first place?”

  Granville shrugged. “Your best suspect is Stephen Mallory. But then someone else could have decided to finish his work for him. Get him to confess to what happened out there by the water, and clear that up. Then you can begin to think about Margaret’s death. And Nan’s.”

  “I’ve asked myself again and again why these two women needed to die. There’s no clear answer.”

  “Nan worked for a number of people over the years, Rutledge. You can’t be sure what secrets she took with her when she was killed.”

  “But the house was locked.”

  Granville raised his eyebrows. “What difference does that make? Hamilton isn’t the only person to have lived in Casa Miranda, you know. And I doubt he thought to change the locks. There must be other keys floating about. For that matter, you could probably collect half a hundred from other houses of the same age, and find that some of them fit. Ask the rector to test his.”