A Fine Summer's Day

by Charles Todd

  Miss Tattersall had just come in from attending a small afternoon gathering of women who were planning the Harvest Festival in the autumn.

  Taking off her hat, she greeted him as the housekeeper moved aside to allow him to step through the door.

  “Inspector?” she said in some surprise. “Have you news for me?”

  Rutledge glanced at Mrs. Betterton, all ears, and said, “Could we speak somewhere a little more private, please?”

  She stared at him, then dismissed the housekeeper and said, “Come this way.” She led him to the room where he’d interviewed her before. The windows were open to the fresh breath of air that had followed in the wake of the storm, and he could smell the scent of flowers carried on the breeze.

  Offering him a chair, she considered standing, then sat herself, as if she might need to face whatever news he brought with him.

  Rutledge said at once, “I have no new information for you. I’m truly sorry. Still, there is information you might have that would be useful to me.” He tried to word his request as if there was no urgency about it, just another lead he was following.

  There was disappointment in her face. “I daresay I’ve answered every question you could think of. How can there be more?”

  “We are trying to locate several people who might have known your brother during his time in Bristol. Does the name Jerome Hadley mean anything to you? Or Benjamin Clayton, for instance? Or a schoolmaster by the name of Stoddard.”

  She shook her head. “If I met anyone by those names, I’ve long since forgotten them. I would say therefore that they were passing acquaintances of my brother’s, if that. Hardly friends.”

  “Did your brother ever serve in a trial as a juror?”

  “No, I’m sure he didn’t—” She stopped in midsentence. “But yes,” she went on more slowly. “I vaguely remember something about that.” Frowning, she tried to bring the memory to the fore. “And then only because I was quite curious about how such things were done. Women aren’t called upon, of course, but everyone says that serving as a juror is what makes English law superior to what is found in most of the world. He was living in Bristol at the time, and I must have bombarded him with questions. But he told me he was sworn to secrecy—not just at the time of the trial, but ever after. So there was an end to it.”

  “Surely you followed the trial in the local newspapers?” he asked, striving to keep hope out of his voice.

  “My dear Inspector, you didn’t know my brother. He felt that the lurid information contained in newspaper accounts wasn’t fit for a woman’s more delicate sensibilities.” There was irony in the words. “He subscribed to the Times of course, but had no patience with the local newspapers. They weren’t allowed in the house. And of course this important case that required his presence every day for nearly a week was not important enough to warrant so much as a paragraph in the Times. My father was much the same sort of man. Women were not to be troubled with something like murder.”

  “You’re saying it was a capital case?”

  “Not at all. I have no idea. I was just thinking that while I was never troubled by murder while my parents and my brother were alive, now I’ve been pitched right into this horror, and I don’t have the faintest useful knowledge about what to expect or how to cope.”

  He felt the sadness behind that remark. She was an intelligent, able woman, and in London might once have marched with Mrs. Pankhurst and the suffragettes. Instead she’d been relegated to a life of Good Works.

  “Do you by any chance remember the year that your brother served on this jury?”

  “It was during the time Joel was living in Bristol, but I can’t tell you just when. That was nearly thirty years ago.”

  They talked for several minutes more, but there was nothing else she could tell him.

  All the same, it was a first step. Tattersall had served on a Bristol jury.

  For the sake of thoroughness he would have liked to drive on toward Bristol, to the village of Netherby, and ask Lolly the barber if Benjamin Clayton had ever served on a jury. But he needed to reach Kent as soon as possible.

  Rutledge drove through the night, taking the most direct way he could think of across Wiltshire and Surrey to Kent. His sense of direction, sharp as he left Wells, dulled as he tired. He concentrated on the powerful beams of the motorcar’s headlamps. The roads seemed to be swarming with wildlife and not a few domestic animals. Badgers and hedgehogs, foxes and prowling cats, a grazing horse, and once a rooster that for some reason stood in his way and challenged him. He had to step out onto the road and coax it to the verge, before it finally dashed through a break in the hedgerow and vanished. It occurred to him to be grateful that last night’s rainstorm had not chosen tonight instead and drenched him and the arrogant rooster as well.

  Finally, for fear of falling asleep and running into a ditch, he pulled over somewhere in western Surrey to rest.

  He reached Melinda’s house at seven in the morning, bathed and changed before breakfast. Despite her attempts to persuade him to rest a little longer, he set out for Aylesbridge and the Hadley farmhouse.

  Mrs. Hadley had not come down by the time he arrived. He was taken to the sitting room, where he paced impatiently.

  When she finally appeared, she looked tired in the morning light, as if she were still having trouble sleeping. He felt a surge of sympathy for her as she asked politely if there was anything he needed from her, and he responded with the question that had been burning in his mind on the long journey east across half of southern England.

  “Jury duty? I’m sure he never served. I’d have remembered.”

  “Perhaps before you met? Before your marriage?” He didn’t want to put words in her mouth, false memories in her head, but his need was desperate.

  “Now that was possible. Before we were married. Let me think. I went to spend three weeks with an aunt who was quite ill. Jerry wrote to me, of course, but they were the letters a man writes.” She smiled with sadness, remembering. “Things like ‘The dog flushed two rabbits this afternoon during our walk.’ Or ‘I had dinner with Freddy’—a friend—‘and we talked about this new corn seed that is supposed to be resistant to many of the ills we see in damp weather.’ I was grateful, mind you, but there could have been earthquakes and floods, and the Fifth Ice Age, and he’d never had thought to mention it.”

  “When was your aunt taken ill?”

  She frowned. “Oh, dear. How precise do you need me to be?”

  “As close as you can recall. It’s rather important.”

  “Let me think. It was late May, early June. I remember that the lilacs came out while I was there, and I could smell them below my window when the wind caught them. So yes, that’s about right. The year? 1887, I should think. No, that’s not right. 1888.”

  Not as far back as Rutledge had thought. But then Hadley had been the youngest of the three victims.

  “And you’re quite sure?”

  “Oh, yes, Aunt Lydia died late the next year. She never fully recovered her strength, and we had to postpone the wedding twice for her sake. Not that I minded, she was a lovely old girl, the sort of favorite aunt everyone should have.”

  “It would have been in Bristol, this trial?” he repeated, to be absolutely certain.

  “It must have been. Jerry was living there before we married.”

  And then with her hand to her mouth, she said, “How stupid of me. Come with me!” She was walking briskly to the door, and he followed her down the passage to a room at the back that someone—perhaps Hadley himself—had turned into an estate office. Shelves ran around the small room, and a desk with two chairs in front of it stood between the outside windows.

  Ledgers filled many of the shelves, going back a hundred years or more, Rutledge thought, glancing at their dates. Farm records? And then more rows of what appeared to be tenant accounts. But Mrs. Hadley ignored them, going instead to a cabinet next to the hearth. Opening it, she scanned the leather-bound personal di
aries that marched across the shelves.

  “Jerry was urged to keep diaries when he was a boy and he never fell out of the habit. His grandfather gave him a new one every Boxing Day, and later he bought his own. They’re not terribly personal—mostly jotting down what he’d done in a given day and what the weather was.” She looked up at Rutledge with tears in her eyes. “On our wedding day, he simply wrote, ‘I have married Helen. Now our happiness together begins.’”

  Without waiting for him to respond, she reached for a volume on the top row and opened it. Thumbing through it she found the place she wanted. “Here it is, 1888. Look at May. Or early June.”

  She handed him the diary.

  He found the end of April and scanned the pages forward. And there it was. Monday, May 14—and the entry: Reported to the Crown Court this morning to serve as a juror.

  Rutledge turned to the following pages, but the notations were cryptic.

  Trial continues for successive days, and then on Friday, Delivered our verdict.

  He felt a surge of frustration. If only Hadley hadn’t taken his oath quite so seriously and had put something in his diary that was germane. The charges, the name of the accused, the name of the judge.

  Mrs. Hadley was studying his face. “Will this help you find my husband’s murderer?”

  “I don’t quite know,” he told her honestly. “Not yet. What it will do is tie together an unsettling series of events that could finally point the Yard in the right direction.”

  Taking the book from him and restoring it to its place in the row, she smiled, wry humor mixed with heartbreaking sadness. “That’s not terribly reassuring, Inspector.”

  He felt he owed her something more, regardless of the Yard’s policy not to divulge information to potential witnesses.

  “There have been other murders, very similar in fact to the way your husband died. The question was, how could these be related?”

  “I remember now. You asked me about several other men. I couldn’t think why they mattered.”

  “They might have been known to your husband. Somewhere in their pasts, these three men, possibly a fourth one, crossed paths. Joel Tattersall served on a jury in Bristol, and so did your husband. If it was the same jury, perhaps that’s where this inquiry actually began. If such a connection can be shown for the other two, we can narrow our search for answers.”

  “How awful,” she said with a frown. “I don’t think I’m quite comfortable with such a thought. Four men?”

  “Still, if this terse entry in your husband’s diary can be tracked down, it’s possible that he’s given us the information we need to stop a killer.”

  “Too late for him,” she said regretfully. She led the way back down the passage after closing the estate room door behind them. “I don’t want to learn any more. Not until you make an arrest and I can see this man’s face for myself.” And then, her control breaking, she said angrily, “Why should something Jerry did as a very young man make my husband a victim now?”

  “Because some people,” he told her, “have very long memories.”

  “How very frightening.” She glanced anxiously through the open door of the sitting room, as if wondering if the windows there were locked.

  “I don’t have any reason to believe that the suspect we’re after will return to disturb you.”

  “No. He’s already taken what I held most dear. There is nothing left to steal.”

  Rutledge went to look for Constable Roderick, but he had gone to one of the outlying farms to talk to a father about his rowdy sons. Or so Rutledge was told by his wife, who came to answer his knock.

  “Tell Constable Roderick I’ll be back as soon as possible. I have work to do in London first.”

  “I’ll do that, sir. Thankee.”

  But as a matter of fact, he went back to Melinda’s and slept for five hours straight before turning toward London. If he intended to beard Chief Superintendent Bowles in his den, then he needed to have his wits about him.

  There was a message from Jean waiting for him at home, asking if he could join the Gordons for dinner that evening. Rutledge wondered what frame of mind he would be in by seven in the evening.

  However, Chief Superintendent Bowles was not in his office at the Yard, forcing Rutledge to postpone their meeting. It was useless to leave a message. What he had to say was best related face-to-face.

  And so at the hour given in Jean’s note, he presented himself at the Gordon house and was welcomed warmly.

  He hadn’t had a chance to look at any of the newspapers, which surprised the Gordons and their guests, all of whom were following events anxiously.

  “France has indicated that if Russia is attacked by either Austria or Germany, she will go to war on Russia’s behalf, against both countries,” Gordon said over cigars and port. “This will not end well. The Foreign Office has already acted, informing Germany that as guarantors of Belgium’s safety—have been since the country was set up in 1830—we’ll brook no interference there.”

  “I can’t see Germany taking on France, Russia, and Britain simultaneously. It would be madness,” an older officer by the name of Strickland said.

  “There are those who say the Kaiser is just mad enough to try.” Gordon shook his head. “The General Staff will have contingency plans. If the worst happens, an Expeditionary Force will be sent as a stop-gap measure while we fully mobilize. My view is that the French Army can’t hold back the German tide on two fronts.”

  “We’ll see some fierce fighting at the start,” a young Captain said. Rutledge had met Harvey before and liked him. “But I daresay it won’t last long, this war. There’s no reason for it to. By Christmas everyone will have come to their senses and the talking will start.”

  “From your lips to God’s ear,” Strickland said under his breath, just loud enough that Rutledge heard him.

  “None of this before the ladies, gentlemen,” Gordon said as he rose to leave the dining room. “No need to worry them before we know where we stand.”

  Rutledge managed a few minutes alone with Jean. She was in a restless mood and finally said, “Papa won’t tell me what’s going on. There’s talk of war. But everyone stops the minute I enter the room.”

  “Let’s hope it comes to nothing,” he said cheerfully. He knew what she was afraid of, that her father would be called back to active duty. Privately, he thought there was a very good chance of it, although not necessarily to serve in the fighting.

  “And you’ve been neglecting me terribly, Ian. I’ve had to attend three parties this past week with my parents. Everyone asks where you are.”

  “I’m sorry, my love. Blame it on the hot summer, if you like. The Yard has been very busy.”

  “Yes, but will we blame it on the rainy autumn next time, or the frigid winter? We’re engaged, it’s supposed to be the happiest of times. I sometimes feel that people are talking about me behind their hands. There she is, alone again. I thought she was engaged. Oh, but she is. Her fiancé is always somewhere else.”

  “You know I’d be here if I could,” he said gently. Some of the older guests were already calling for their carriages or motorcars. “Shouldn’t you join your parents in saying good night?”

  “Don’t change the subject, Ian. I really wonder if you love me as much as I love you. If you did, you wouldn’t find it so easy to stay away.”

  “It’s never easy. It’s just that I have responsibilities. As your father did when he was a serving officer.”

  “He wants to serve again,” she said, her voice anxious. “He misses the Army. Will you enlist if we go to war with Germany?”

  He was taken aback. “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Oh, Ian, we could be married in September, you in uniform, the two of us running down the church steps under an arch of swords. I’ve been to military weddings—they are exciting, romantic.”

  “And what happened to your dream of being married at Christmas, like your parents?” It was said half teasin
gly.

  “But Ian—”

  “And if there is a war, I’ll be marching off with my brothers-in-arms, rather than leaving with you on a wedding trip.”

  That stopped her short.

  “I’ll make certain you’re given leave for the wedding journey,” she said after a moment. But he thought even she knew it wouldn’t happen quite that way.

  And then Kate walked up. Jean frowned at her. “We’re trying to have a little time together, Kate.”

  She looked from one to the other. “So it appears,” she said dryly. “Anything I can do?”

  “Just go away,” Jean told her sharply.

  “I can’t. Marianne Hayes and I are faced with a small problem. I was hoping that Ian could drive the two of us home.”

  “I thought you came with Teddy Browning.”

  “So we did. But he’s just got a message from his commanding officer. All leaves canceled. And so he’s going straight back to barracks. That leaves us without an escort.”

  Jean said, “Oh, very well, take him then.” Turning on her heel, she marched away without saying good night.

  Kate watched her go. “You’ve been neglecting her,” she said to Rutledge.

  “So I’ve just been told,” he replied ruefully.

  “Yes, well, I’d pay attention if I were you. Where have you been, come to that?”

  “On business for the Yard.”

  “I don’t think Jean bargained for murder topping romance. There’s Marianne. Do you need five minutes to make your peace with Jean? She must be on the terrace. We can wait.”

  He took a deep breath. “I think it’s all this talk of war that’s upsetting her.”

  “It’s upset all of us. I’ve three friends in the Army. All they can think about is showing the Kaiser a thing or two. Ridiculous men! But as Teddy said, they’ve trained for years to fight for King and Country, and all they’ve done is travel from one outpost of Empire to another. They’re spoiling to get into this war in Europe.”

  “They may well have their chance.” He touched her arm. “Hold the fort for me, will you? Let me see if I can find her.”

  But he didn’t find her. If Jean had gone out to the terrace, she’d come in another door and slipped upstairs without his seeing her.