The Red Door

by Charles Todd

  “I’m not sure. She brought Harry in to visit the dentist on Thursday, and I was just coming out. I asked her how her husband was, if I should stop in and see him, perhaps keep him under observation for a while. And she told me he had fully recovered. I asked if he’d said anything to her about where he’d been while he was missing. I was curious, and it was important as well to add that to his file in the event it happened again. She replied that he hadn’t confided in her. I could see she was unhappy about that. I suggested that she should give him a little space. That perhaps he himself was in need of time to understand his behavior. Harry had gone to speak to the vicar’s son, who was coming down the street with his mother. Mrs. Teller watched him for a moment and then said that she wondered if her husband’s family knew more about what had happened than she did, that they’d left her and gone in search of him, as if they knew something she didn’t. I tried to make her understand that staying occupied was one of the best ways to weather a worrying time. That if they were at all like their brother, they couldn’t have sat still and just waited, as she had done. That seemed to relieve her mind a little.”

  “Could that explain sleepless nights? Women worry about their families—if they are ill or hungry or frightened or hurt. It’s their nature to care.”

  “I doubt it. It could be as simple as still not forgiving her husband for sending Harry away so soon. Or her guilt over her brother-in-law’s fall. After all, he came down for her birthday celebration.”

  “Yes, I see that.”

  “Her death is consistent with overdose. There were no signs of struggle, only the disarrangement of the sheets while Teller strove to revive her. She drank her milk—if that’s where she put the sedative—of her own free will. No marks on the lips to indicate that she was forced to swallow it.”

  Rutledge let it go. He went to rouse the maid, snoring deeply in her room in the attic, and asked her to prepare food for what was to come. She burst into tears when he told her that her mistress was dead, and he left her to grieve as she dressed.

  His next duty was plain—to summon the police from Waddington and finally to put in a call to Edwin Teller’s London residence. He got through there, and as he told an incredulous Edwin that his sister-in-law was dead, he could hear Amy’s voice in the background saying, “Edwin? My dear, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  And Edwin shushing her as he listened to Rutledge’s voice.

  Leticia said, after Rutledge explained his calling her, “Don’t disturb Susannah. She’s been through enough. I’ll deal with her later.”

  His call to Mary Brittingham’s number rang and rang. The operator warned him that no one was at home. And then a very sleepy voice answered, “Do you know what time it is, Leticia? What could you possibly want at this hour?”

  Rutledge said, “It’s Scotland Yard, Miss Brittingham. I think you ought to come to Witch Hazel Farm straightaway.”

  Her voice was now crisp and alert. “Is it Harry? Is Walter all right?”

  “It’s your sister. I’m afraid she’s dead.”

  The silence went on so long that he thought she’d hung up. Then she said, “She can’t be dead. I was just there. Today. Yesterday. She was all right then. Is this Inspector Rutledge? Where are you, in London?”

  “I’m at the farm. I’m sorry to break such news over the telephone, but I don’t have time to come to you. It’s more important that you come here.”

  He could hear a hiccuped breath, as if she were fighting tears. “Yes. All right.” And then she was gone.

  In the study, where he’d gone to wait until the police arrived, Rutledge discovered Walter Teller already sitting there with a brandy in his hand.

  “Doctor’s orders. It’s supposed to give me the strength to cope,” Teller said. He looked at his glass, holding it up to the light. “I doubt it will. I doubt anything can.” He studied Rutledge for a moment and then asked, “How did you know to come? Was it Fielding?”

  “I was here before I knew there was anything wrong,” Rutledge said. “I’ve just come from Hobson. It’s too late to tell your brother what happened there. But you should know. We found Mrs. Teller’s murderer. It wasn’t your brother. It was Mrs. Blaine’s daughter. Betsy. A neighbor.”

  Teller repeated the name. “Betsy. Why?”

  “Jealousy. She thought her husband would leave her for Florence Teller. It’s a long story, and this isn’t the time for it. But I felt you ought to know that your brother’s name has been cleared.”

  “Too late for him,” Teller said. “But thank you.”

  “When your elder brother arrives, I’ll need to speak to him about disposal of the house in Hobson. I don’t know that he wishes to leave that to Peter’s solicitors. I don’t know if they are even aware of the property.”

  “Leave it to me. I’ll see to it. It’s what Peter would have wished, I think. Edwin will have enough on his plate, with Peter dead. I’m told our grandmother took the news very hard. And now there’s . . .” He cleared his throat. “Well.”

  Rutledge gave him time to recover, then said, “I must do my duty, however unpleasant it may be for me and for the family at such a time. The inquest will want to consider your wife’s state of mind.”

  “Her state of mind? My God, I haven’t even told my brother or sister—I haven’t spoken to Mary—much less found words to tell my son his mother is dead—and you’re talking about the inquest. Damn it, man, have you no decency?”

  “It isn’t a question of decency. Have I your permission to look into your wife’s state of mind?”

  “Do whatever you need to do. Just leave me alone.” He got up to refill his glass, looked at the amber liquid, and put it down again with distaste. Rutledge could see that he was remembering his brother Peter’s drunkenness.

  Rutledge said, “Did your brother always drink as much as he did in the short time I knew him?”

  The change of subject brought an irritated frown. “I—the level of pain he has—had—to endure must have been unimaginable. But no. He was more careful. What difference does it make now?”

  “Would you say he drank in excess after he came back from Hobson?”

  “Look, he’s dead, you can’t arrest a dead man. What difference do his drinking habits make now?”

  “He was the catalyst for Florence Teller’s death. Some of this will have to come out at the inquest into her murder. I’d like to know why he went to see his wife after such a long silence, and what she said to him when he was there that made him rush off in such a hurry that he left his cane behind. It became the murder weapon.”

  It was clear Walter Teller hadn’t considered an inquest in Hobson or what it might reveal.

  “Dear God, will it never be finished? Get out, Rutledge, do you hear me? I’ve lost my brother and my wife. Just leave me the hell alone.”

  Rutledge left him there and went in search of Mollie. She was in the kitchen, and as he came down the passage, he heard her singing hymns in a low tearful voice as she rattled the pots and pans preparing breakfast.

  He made a fuss over opening the door into the kitchen, to give her time to recover.

  She turned quickly, then said, “I thought it was Mr. Teller. I don’t know what to say to him. First the Captain, and now Mrs. Jenny. I don’t see how the poor man will survive this blow. And what will Master Harry make of it all, poor lamb? He adored his mother. It’s such a tender age. Have you sent for his aunt? Miss Brittingham? She’ll have to stay awhile. He’ll need her. She should have stayed after the Captain’s fall. Mrs. Jenny needed her then.”

  “Why did she leave?”

  “They were all at sixes and sevens. Quarreling and slamming doors. This was after you’d left. Miss Brittingham said she’d had enough and went home. Mrs. Jenny went to bed with a headache. So she said, but I think it was an excuse to leave them to it.”

  “What rooms did Mrs. Teller most often use for her own purposes?”

  “She liked the bedchamber where Master Harry was born. It�
�s bright and cozy, she said, and sometimes when Mr. Teller wasn’t here, she’d sleep in that room. And of course the nursery. She spent a good bit of her time there. When the nanny left two years ago, and Master Harry went to the local school, she would sit with him there and help him with his studies. The nanny’s old room she made into her sitting room, with her desk and things about her. She could rest there and hear Harry playing or working. Or listen to him sleep. She said she found that the most peaceful sound in the world, a child’s soft breathing.”

  Mollie had been working as she talked, her hands busy preparing tea and boiling eggs, making toast. She looked up now, and said, “Nobody has told me how she died.”

  Rutledge said, “An overdose of laudanum, apparently. In a glass of milk.”

  “Ah, that explains it then.”

  “Explains what?”

  “There was a little milk spilled last night. Someone was warming it. I’d just wondered. She must have been having trouble sleeping. It just seemed odd that she’d leave the milk and the pan for me to clear away. She’s—she was so tidy about things like that. She liked a gleaming kitchen, she said. It made her feel good that what Harry ate was prepared in clean surroundings.” She bit back another round of tears. “Would you care for a cup of tea, sir? It has steeped long enough.”

  He thanked her and left, unwilling to intrude on her grief.

  Going back to the bedchamber where Jenny Teller lay, he looked again at the room itself, and he could see what Mollie meant, that there was a warmth here that a woman might want to draw around her in times of great emotional need. A comfort that the master bedroom in its masculine formality lacked.

  He went next to the nursery, opening doors here and there until he found what he was after. It was a large bright room filled with childhood, from a cradle to a rocking horse, a little wooden train that could be drawn about on wheels that clacked as they rolled, and a yacht that must have come from Harry’s Uncle Edwin, who designed such things. It would float wonderfully, Rutledge thought, on a pond, the keel deep and the superstructure well balanced for it. Harry was a neat child, most of his possessions in good condition and not thrown about wildly. An only child, Rutledge remembered, who needn’t worry that someone would snatch away his favorite toy.

  The next room was his bedroom, with the narrow cot against one wall and a chair that rocked and a footstool for the one that didn’t. The armoire was full of clothes, but not excessively so for a boy still growing. There were no photographs here, and he realized there had been none in Jenny’s bedroom. But when he opened the next door, normally the nanny’s room in the nursery suite, he found them all.

  The dark blue and rose carpet was strewn with more toys—a small stuffed giraffe with green glass eyes, a sled with a toy dog sitting on it, waiting to be pulled through the snow of the carpet, and a green ball.

  A desk stood under the window, in the French Provincial style, with a matching chair, but what interested him was the round table beside it, covered with a long skirted brocade and adorned with a forest of silver frames.

  He crossed the room to look at them.

  He could identify many of them. Jenny and her sister, Mary, as children, at the seaside and again at the Tower of London. A couple who appeared to be Jenny’s parents. The three Teller sons, stair stepped beside their seated sister, shyly staring into the camera. Peter and Walter at university. Edwin with his wife just leaving the church after their wedding. Their parents with the three Teller sons and daughter sitting in front of a Christmas tree in the hall of this house. And more than a dozen photographs of a little boy, marking the various milestones of his life. A baby in his mother’s arms, eyes closed, long christening gown draped across her lap. Just walking and holding his mother’s hand, riding his rocking horse, playing on the lawns with the green ball Rutledge had just seen.

  A record of a happy family, though seldom including the busy father.

  Reaching for the Teller family grouping, he studied the senior Teller. He was tall, handsome, perfectly groomed. Not the sort to be found on a Sunday afternoon with rolled-up sleeves pruning the roses or racing his sons across the lawns in an impromptu game. His face was strong, rather more like Walter’s, Rutledge thought, than Edwin’s or Peter’s, and more than a little stiff, as if smiling for a camera was an unpleasant duty to be borne with the best grace possible. His wife, her face upturned to his, was also surprisingly strong, as if she shared her husband’s views and reinforced them. He could see where Leticia got her own strength of character. Gran, standing at her husband’s shoulder, was tall and elegant, with a whimsical smile, the only one in the group who appeared to be genuine.

  He had borrowed a small photograph of Walter Teller from Jenny, and he’d made a promise to return it, because it was one she cherished.

  Rutledge took it from his pocket and set it among the other frames, where it belonged. He was glad he’d remembered.

  What struck him about this collection of family photographs wasn’t their number, nor the stages of a small child’s life that they’d captured, but the similarity of this boy to the one in the single photograph that had stood by Florence Teller’s bedside in Lancashire. Timothy was undoubtedly his father’s son. And he belonged here.

  As he set the small frame down in the midst of the family groupings, he felt an overwhelming compassion for Florence Marshall Teller.

  Hamish said, as he was about to turn away to examine the contents of the desk, “Look again.”

  Rutledge did, frowning. At first there seemed to be nothing to see.

  He’d been comparing Timmy to his cousin Harry, but now a photograph of the Teller sons taken with their sister caught his eye. In it Walter, the youngest, was about the same age Timmy was when he died. Almost Harry’s age now. And the likeness, as Rutledge held them side by side, was so striking he wondered he hadn’t seen it before. Harry had his mother’s gentleness to soften his Teller features, but Timmy was the image of Walter at six or seven, looking into the camera with the same expression, that mixture of shyness and warmth, the same set of the eyes, the same way of tilting the head. There was a family likeness to his uncles, but anyone comparing the two photographs would think that Timmy was Walter Teller’s son.

  Rutledge pulled out the chair at Jenny’s desk and sat down. It wasn’t a trick of the light. It was there, he thought, holding the frames closer to the window so that even the dreary rain-damp natural light could reach them.

  Walter Teller no longer looked like the child in the photograph with his brothers. Edwin still resembled his youthful self, but Peter too had changed. War and mission work had etched new lines where there had been none and honed down the soft fullness of a child’s face to the harsher bone structure of maturity. Edwin, sheltered of necessity, had changed the least.

  The resemblance didn’t make Walter Teller Timmy’s father. But it opened avenues of thought that gave Rutledge a different perspective on what he thought he’d understood unequivocally.

  After a time, he put the frames back where he’d found them, and searched cursorily through Jenny Teller’s desk. There was little of interest to him. A few letters, stationery and envelopes, stamps, and a clipped packet of paid household accounts for May.

  Satisfied, he went downstairs to the study.

  Walter wasn’t there. Rutledge locked the door, crossed to the desk, and methodically went through it.

  Nothing there to shed light on what he was asking himself.

  And then he found, among folders of mission travel records and other related material, a single folder marked simply wills.

  He took that out, opened it, and scanned Jenny Teller’s last will and testament. It was, as he would have expected, very straightforward. Money inherited from her family was to be held in trust for her son, her jewelry for his wife on their wedding day, and a sum for servants past and present, another for the church in Repton. The remainder of her estate went to her husband.

  Rutledge set that aside and looked at Walter T
eller’s will, though he had no right to do so. It too was straightforward. The greater part of his estate went to his son, with a sum set aside for his wife until she remarried or her death. Bequests to servants, to the Repton church, to the Alcock Society, and for the upkeep of the rose garden at Witch Hazel Farm in memory of his wife. But no mention of a woman in Lancashire or St. Bartholomew’s churchyard where she and her son lay buried.

  Rutledge read the last bequest again. “For the perpetual upkeep of the rose garden at Witch Hazel Farm in memory of my wife.”

  And in his mind he could hear the parrot, Jake, pleased with his new if temporary quarters in Frances Rutledge’s breakfast room, overlooking the garden. Roses . . .

  He put the folder back where he found it, shut the desk, and unlocked the door.

  Not a moment too soon. Mollie was there, telling him that breakfast was set out in the dining room, if he cared for any.

  He walked with her into the passage. “There are lovely roses blooming by the drive. I’m surprised not to see them in arrangements indoors.” In fact, now that he was aware of it, there were no cut flowers in the house at all. None of the displays that country houses could produce in abundance from their own gardens.

  “Mr. Teller wasn’t fond of cut flowers indoors. He said it reminded him of flowers for a funeral. He’d seen enough of them crowding the pulpits in churches where he preached.”

  “And Mrs. Teller? Was she fond of roses?”

  “I don’t know, sir. She never said. She did sometimes walk up to the garden by the drive. But for the most part she left the gardening to the gardener.”

  He thanked her and let her go. And then he opened the drive door and looked out. Even in the rain, the heavy dew-wet scent wafting on the slight breeze was pleasant.

  Closing the door again, he walked into the dining room. But Teller wasn’t there. A plate and silverware set to one side indicated that he’d come in and eaten a little, but the dishes were hardly touched.

  Rutledge put food on a plate without thinking about what he had chosen.

  He was remembering Captain Teller, when Rutledge asked about Walter Teller’s will during his disappearance, saying that it would be time enough to read it when they knew his brother was dead.