A False Mirror ir-9

by Charles Todd

  But not the Captain-please God, not the Captain!

  He stood there looking down into Felicity’s face, despair sweeping him with such force he felt sick.

  For her sake, he had to do something. He must get her out of this nightmare unscathed, whatever the cost. And then he could go into the garden. It wouldn’t matter anymore.

  He couldn’t hide behind her skirts much longer. He shuddered to think what half the town was whispering already.

  “Stephen?” Her eyes were pleading with him. “I don’t know anyone at Scotland Yard. Do you?”

  He held out his hand for the key to the desk. “There’s someone-I need stationery, an envelope.”

  She handed him the key reluctantly, uncertain what he was going to do with it.

  He rummaged in the drawer, ignoring the weapon, and drew out several sheets of stationery. Matthew Hamilton’s family crest stared back at him, but he ignored it. Felicity pointed out the pen and ink, and he began to write.

  After a moment he stopped, tore up the sheet, and began again.

  On the third try he appeared to be satisfied. He handed her the sheet while he wrote a direction on the envelope.

  She held the sheet of paper like a lifeline, reading and rereading it:

  Bennett, I refuse to surrender to anyone other than Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard. Bring him to me, here, as fast as you can. I won’t be had with promises.

  And he’d signed it, simply, Mallory.

  “Who is this man Rutledge?” she asked, frowning. “A policeman? He’ll be sure to side with Inspector Bennett. There must be someone else? Someone in the Foreign Office-they’ll take Matthew’s side, won’t they?” She rubbed her eyes with her hands. “I daren’t tell my mother. She’s not well. It will kill her.”

  “You wouldn’t know this man. We-we served together in France. And just sending for him will give us a little time, don’t you see? When Matthew comes to his senses and tells Bennett the truth, I won’t need the Yard or anyone else.” It was sheer bravado. His reward was a tiny flicker of hope in her eyes. It faded as quickly as it had flared.

  “But will this man travel all the way from London just to let you surrender to him? And what if he does? And Matthew is dead and can’t ever speak? There must be some other way. We’ve got to find a way.”

  She looked at him, her face flushed with distress and her eyes filling now with tears. He wanted more than anything to take her in his arms and tell her it would be all right.

  If Rutledge wouldn’t come, there was always the revolver in the drawer. He had seen the lock. It was flimsy, it could be broken. And when he was dead, Felicity would be safe. She could tell them whatever she pleased, and it wouldn’t matter how she must blacken his character.

  He said none of that to her. But there was bitterness in his voice when he finally answered her.

  “There isn’t another way. You should have thought of the consequences before you stopped Inspector Bennett from coming in. It’s too late now, we don’t have many choices left to us.”

  7

  Bowles was livid.

  “Where have you been? Not where you ought to be, that’s certain. I sent men to the park to find you. You were away from your post, damn it!”

  “I think I may have-”

  “I don’t give a dance in hell what you think, man! You’re off the case.”

  “If you will listen to me-sir-”

  “Look at this.” Bowles shot a sheet of paper across the desk. “Know this man, do you?”

  Rutledge scanned the message. It had come in as a telephone call from the south coast.

  One Stephen Mallory holding two women at point of gun, refuses to surrender to local authorities, will speak only to Inspector Rutledge. Wanted for severely beating one Matthew Hamilton and leaving him for dead, for assaulting a police officer in the course of his duties, presently threatening to murder his first victim’s wife and her maid, if Rutledge does not come in person.

  Stephen Mallory. His memory rejected the name. Drew a deliberate blank.

  But Hamish said roughly, “Lieutenant Mallory.” Reminding him against his will.

  The war. So many things came round to the war. He couldn’t escape it, no matter where he turned. For him it had really never ended.

  He could feel himself sliding back there again. To the trenches, to the Somme. And Lieutenant Mallory, standing in the summer rain, cursing him, cursing the war, cursing the killing. Rutledge could smell the foulness of the mud and the fear of his men, heard the noise that threatened to deafen him-the constant rattle of machine-gun fire and the sharpness of rifle fire and the heavy pounding of the shelling. Men were screaming all around him, and the dead or dying were everywhere he looked, along the top of the trench, under foot, out in the wire and in shell holes. The first day of that bloody battle, when so many men died. Twenty thousand of them in one day.

  Hamish brought him out of the nightmare, his voice loud in Rutledge’s ears. “He was wounded, but they sent him back to the Front.”

  “Yes,” he answered silently.

  They had been so short of men. The medical staff had cleared anyone who could still hold a rifle as fit for duty. Days later Rutledge himself had taken his own turn at the aid station, resting a few hours, then getting to his feet and stumbling out of the tent, like a man sleepwalking.

  Rutledge remembered Mallory’s dazed eyes, the stiffly bandaged shoulder, the fearlessness that had bordered on recklessness. It had turned his salient against the lieutenant, and there had been whispers about him. That he was bad luck. That he got men killed. And Mallory had been hell-bent on proving he was no coward, whatever the doctors had murmured about possible shell shock.

  “Missed the bone,” he’d told everyone, making light of it. “Still, it aches like the very devil. But nothing for the pain until I’ve won the war.”

  And four days later, he had been found crouched in a shell hole, crying softly. This time the wound was in his calf, and he couldn’t walk. The stretcher bearers had got him back to the rear, while rumor debated whether he had shot himself or been picked off by one of the new German snipers. Or-by his own men.

  They hadn’t seen him again.

  Bowles was still waiting, searching Rutledge’s face.

  Dragging himself back to the present, Rutledge looked up at him.

  “He was in France.”

  It was a reply brief to the point of curtness, but it was all he was prepared to say while the Chief Superintendent glared accusingly at him as if he bore the responsibility for whatever had happened along the south coast.

  “So was half the male population of Britain in France. Why should this man Mallory summon you in the circumstances? With the war well over?” The suspicion in Bowles’s voice was palpable.

  “I can’t answer that, sir. We weren’t-close friends, if that’s what you are suggesting. I can’t imagine why he should wish to see me now.” It was the truth. Rutledge was still recalling more details about Mallory, details stuffed long ago into the bottom of the black well that was nightmare and the war: a gifted officer, yet he lacked the common touch that made tired and exhausted soldiers follow him over the top. Hamish MacLeod had possessed that touch…and so, although he had hated it, had he himself. He had felt like a charlatan, a pied piper, using his voice and his experience in command to lure unwilling men to their deaths. A Judas goat, unharmed while so many were slaughtered around him, like cattle at an abattoir.

  But Mallory had got out. He had deserted his men and got out.

  “Hmmpf.” Bowles slammed a drawer shut, taking out his impotent anger on the unoffending desk. “So you say. Well, you’d damned well better get down there and see what this is all about. And you’re not to play favorites, you understand me? The man this Mallory is said to have attacked-he’s got friends in high places. They’ll be howling for my blood and yours if his wife’s made free with. You understand me?”

  “Are you sending me to-” He glanced down at the messa
ge again. “To Hampton Regis?”

  “I don’t have much choice, do I?”

  “Who is the victim, this Matthew Hamilton?” The name was not uncommon.

  “Foreign Office, served on Malta before he resigned. Went uninvited to the Peace Conference in Paris, I’m told, and wasn’t very popular with his views there. But he’s still too bloody important to ignore, and if his wife wants you, she’s to have you.”

  “I thought it was Mallory who asked for me?”

  “Don’t quibble, Rutledge. Just get yourself down there as soon as may be. I don’t want to see your face until this business has been resolved.”

  “I must speak with Phipps before I go. Sir. There’s something he ought to know about the Green Park killings-”

  “Phipps is perfectly capable of drawing his own conclusions. I want you in Hampton Regis this night. And I expect you to get to the bottom of this business as fast as you can.”

  “Sir, there’s a man in Kensington-”

  “Are you deaf? Leave Phipps to his own affairs and see to yours. That’s an order. Good day.”

  Rutledge turned and walked out of the room.

  He’d have given much to know whether Fields had had a hand in the Green Park killings. And for a moment he considered going in search of Sergeant Gibson. But if Bowles got wind of that, the sergeant would find himself caught in the middle.

  Rutledge went back to his own office, collected his coat and hat, and made his way out of the building to his motorcar.

  If he wrapped up this business in Hampton Regis quickly, he would be back in London in good time to look into the possibilities himself. And he had a strong feeling that Fields wouldn’t kill again unless he was pressed.

  Rutledge had hoped that chance would throw Sergeant Gibson in his path before he’d left the Yard. It would have been better for both of them if the encounter had come about naturally. He’d taken his time going down the stairs, out the door, listening to voices here and there. But the sergeant was nowhere to be seen. Or heard.

  “What if ye’re wrong aboot Fields?” Hamish asked. “Ye canna’ put him at risk, withoot better proof.”

  A hunch wasn’t proof. A gut feeling wouldn’t stand up in court. But in hasty hands either could send an innocent man to die on the gallows. Bowles was right, it was best to step aside and leave the case in Phipps’s hands. For the time being. Rutledge turned away from the Yard and drove to Kensington to find Constable Waddington.

  If Fields was guilty, he’d still be there when Rutledge got back. And it wouldn’t do for Waddington to become the third victim of the Green Park killer simply because Rutledge had put the fear of God into him about Duty.

  It was time to call him off. Until there was something he himself could do about Fields.

  The drive to the south coast was long and cold. This part of England held bitter memories for Rutledge. He hadn’t been to the West Country since last summer. He caught himself thinking about those ghosts in his past, cases he’d dealt with even while he struggled to cope with Hamish MacLeod driving him nearly to suicide. He tried to shut the ghosts out by filling his mind with familiar lines of poetry, then realized that from habit most of them came from a single author. O. A. Manning had been an echo of his war, her poetry locked in his brain because it had touched a nerve at a time when he was grateful for any understanding. He had found that in the slim volumes he carried with him in the trenches, a voice of sanity in the middle of a nightmare. O. A. Manning had reached many men at the Front, though she herself had never set foot in France.

  Hamish was taunting him. “You were half in love wi’ her.”

  He wasn’t sure whether it was half in love-or caught in her spell.

  Still, ever since then, he’d found himself measuring other women by her memory. That had not always been a wise thing to do, for it had drawn him to one woman in particular. And memory had been a false mirror, as he had learned to his sorrow.

  Hamish said, his voice unforgiving, “In France I lost Fiona forever. What right do you have to be happy now?”

  It was unanswerable. They drove in silence for miles after that, Rutledge forcing his attention to stay on the road ahead and then as night fell, on the sweep of his headlamps marking his path. Traffic had thinned, and at times his vehicle was the only one he saw for long stretches. He passed a lorry once, and later a milk wagon trundling on its way. An owl flitted through the light that guided him, and later what looked like a hunting cat darted to the side of the road, startling him awake.

  He kept reminding himself that two lives hung in the balance in Hampton Regis. If he failed, two women might die. And he couldn’t be sure-he couldn’t be absolutely certain that Mallory would spare them. Not if he was driven to the point of desperation.

  Because Rutledge had no idea how Mallory had changed in the past three years. For better or for worse.

  He heard a church clock striking the hour as he drove the last winding half mile into the heart of Hampton Regis. Although it was quite late, he found a furious Inspector Bennett waiting impatiently for him in the police station off the harbor road.

  “What took you so long? I expect the train would have been quicker.”

  Rutledge, his shoulders tight from pressing as hard as he had on the roads, said only, “I’m here now.” He’d refused to take the trains since he’d come back from France. They were crowded, claustrophobic, leaving him shaken and frantic to get down as soon as possible. A hurtling coffin of metal and wood. He doubted if Bennett would understand that.

  “Yes, and I’d like to know what you intend to do about Mallory. Made me look a fool, having to send for you. I manage my own patch, thank you very much, without outside interference.”

  “I intend to do nothing at the moment.” Rutledge glanced down at the man’s foot, in a thick and unwieldy cast. “That must be hurting like the very devil. How did it happen?”

  He’d been intent on changing the subject but was taken aback by the vehemence of Bennett’s retort. “Mallory ran me down, that’s what happened. When I went to arrest him. Flung me off the damned motorcar, directly into its path. If I hadn’t been quicker, I daresay he’d have been glad to see me dead under his wheels.”

  The note had said something about Mallory assaulting a police officer, but Rutledge had assumed there had been a brief exchange of blows or a shoving match.

  Such violence put an entirely different complexion on the coming confrontation. And it seemed to underline Mallory’s guilt in attacking Hamilton.

  He’d hoped to wait for daylight, for his own sake as well as to give Mallory time to rethink his position. After all, there had been no set timetable for his arrival, and darkness often put fears and decisions into uncomfortable perspective. Men brooded in the night, and were grateful for sanity in the morning.

  “Are you up to answering questions?” he asked Bennett now. “I’ll need a better picture of events than was available at the Yard. For one thing, has anything changed in Mallory’s situation? Are the women still safe? Has he tried to harm either of them?”

  They walked back to Bennett’s office. Bennett sank into his chair like a man in pain, easing the injured foot out of the way of his single crutch. Rutledge took the only other chair.

  It was a tiny room, hardly wide enough for the desk, the chairs, and the two men. From the scatter of papers across the desktop, Rutledge could see that his counterpart was not a tidy man, more impetuous than organized, and likely to have a temperament to match.

  Bennett shuffled irritably at the papers, turning some, shoving others aside, creating a small avalanche that he caught just before it went over the edge. The near mishap did nothing for his mood.

  Hamish said, “He’ll no’ help you, if he isna’ forced to.”

  “A facade,” Rutledge answered silently. “That’s all I’m expected to be. But we’ll see about that.”

  Bennett was saying, “There’s not much to tell. Matthew Hamilton-you probably know the name, coming as you do from
London-was walking on the strand early this morning in a heavy sea mist. Apparently it’s something he does to help him think. That’s what one of the other vestry members told me. Miss Trining, that was. At any rate, someone came up behind him, footsteps no doubt muffled by the incoming tide, and struck him down. While he was still dazed, his attacker hit him repeatedly with something heavy, a stick, a cane, a bit of flotsam-who knows? By the time someone saw him lying there and summoned help, Hamilton’s feet were awash, and all tracks had vanished. If no one had seen him in time, he might well have drowned in another quarter hour.”

  Matthew Hamilton…Rutledge cudgeled his tired wits. His sister had spoken of the man from time to time. Or one of her friends had done. Rutledge had paid scant attention, but he possessed a good memory and he managed to dredge up a few details. Hamilton moved in good circles, but he wasn’t particularly enchanted with London and soon after his marriage he’d disappeared from the social scene. That accounted for the move to Hampton Regis. But why had he chosen to close up his flat as well? London gossips had looked for an answer to that and failed to find it.

  The information Bowles had given Rutledge was lean to the point of skeletal: that Hamilton had been at the Peace Conference in Paris, coming unbidden from his station on Malta, and was sent back there posthaste.

  Wasn’t it this same Hamilton who had been against stiff reparations from Germany? French vengeance he’d called it. And hadn’t he railed against the American president Wilson’s belief in self-determination, publicly branding it foolishness in the extreme? Wilson had been tired, ill, his idealistic pronouncements according to Hamilton failing to take into account the realities of world politics and setting the stage for grave consequences down the road. The British and French delegations had been intent on ignoring the American president, palming him off with his precious League of Nations. Hamilton had tried repeatedly to convince them all that they were sowing the seeds of disaster which another generation would reap in blood. It hadn’t been a popular stance.