A Bitter Truth

by Charles Todd

  We hurried out of the rain into The King’s Head to hear snoring coming from the small room behind Reception. Simon went to tap on the door, and a very sleepy man came out to greet us, smoothing his hair as he asked our business.

  Ten minutes later we were climbing the stairs to our rooms, and Simon saw me to my door.

  After he’d gone to his own room, I went to sit by the window and look out into the night, unwilling to undress and go to bed. My mind was too busy, and as I looked across the street toward Bluebell Cottage, I felt discouraged.

  I’d been sitting there ten minutes, possibly fifteen, when I saw someone coming down the street, a shambling walk that made me think at once of the man Willy.

  And as he drew nearer, I saw that it was indeed he. I watched him come through the shadows cast on the road by the houses across the way, and stop near Bluebell Cottage’s door.

  I drew back a little from the window. I didn’t think he could see me sitting there. But I wanted very much to know what he intended to do next.

  After hesitating, as if waiting to see who might be about, he finally crossed the road and came into the yard of the inn.

  I could just see where he was going, and I thought at first he was hoping to find somewhere dry to sleep. Instead he walked up to Simon Brandon’s motorcar and looked it over, as if it could tell him who owned the vehicle. Or perhaps he’d seen it before and was making sure that it was the same motorcar.

  I was reminded of a fox, sniffing for danger.

  Finally, satisfied, he turned and walked quietly back the way he’d come.

  I sat there by the window for almost another hour, but he never came back, and the road in front of the inn remained deserted, only the rain whipping through the village disturbing the peace of the night.

  The next morning at breakfast, I told Simon what I’d seen.

  “He didn’t interfere in any way with the motorcar, did he?” he asked sharply.

  “No. He never lifted the bonnet nor touched the tires. He must have felt he recognized the motorcar from your last stay here but wasn’t quite sure it was the same. Once he was satisfied, he went on his way.”

  “Hmmmm” was all Simon had to say in response. Still, I could tell the incident had made him uncomfortable. I remembered that his years in the Army had given him a finely tuned sense of danger.

  “Why should he worry you?”

  “Because Rother is of two minds. Either Ellis is the murderer, or Willy killed both Hughes and Merrit.”

  “Davis Merrit was very generous with Willy. It’s rather terrible, to think Willy turned on him.”

  After breakfast we drove back to Wych Gate. We had just reached the turning to Vixen Hill when a motorcar came down the drive and stopped to let us pass. I was surprised to see that it was Mrs. Ellis at the wheel. I waved in greeting when I saw that she had recognized me.

  “Bess,” she called, and then frowned. “Has that Inspector sent for you as well? I’m just off to the railway station to meet Roger. He’s been called home too.”

  “I know you’ll be happy to see him,” I said. But would Lydia feel the same?

  “Yes, but what is this about? Do you know? We’ve been waiting for weeks to learn what’s happening. Have the police found Davis, do you think?”

  I wanted to warn her, to tell her that Roger was now a suspect—we all were—but I hadn’t the heart.

  “I expect he’ll tell us soon enough,” I replied, then before I could think it through, I said, “Did you know that Dr. Tilton and his wife have told the police about the quarrel between George and Roger?”

  “It was hardly a quarrel,” she said tartly. “Poor George was drunk, and his mind was wandering. But it’s just like Dr. Tilton to make more of it than it was. He’s a very good doctor, but I sometimes think he enjoys making trouble.”

  Leaving it at that, I asked, “How is Lydia? And Gran?”

  “Very well. Lydia is nervous about Roger coming home, but I told her there was nothing to fear. Will you come and see her? I know she’d like that.”

  “Yes, I’ll try.”

  “Good. Now I must hurry. I have a list of things I must buy before the train arrives. Good-bye, Bess, Mr. Brandon.”

  And she was gone.

  “Why did you tell her about the doctor?” Simon asked as we drove on.

  “I thought she ought to be warned. None of the family had said anything. But it was bound to come out. And now that it has, it makes us look as if we were concealing something.”

  “But aren’t you?” Simon asked.

  I had no answer for that. I still believed it wasn’t my place to reveal the family’s secrets. I had left it to Dr. Tilton . . . had that been cowardly of me?

  “Nor have you told them about the message you found in that umbrella.”

  “That was different. It’s not the sort of thing a man would do—to leave a message like that in an umbrella, on the off chance it would reach the right person. It’s too uncertain. But I thought perhaps Davis Merrit might have hoped Lydia would find it and come to Hartfield. Then I discovered that she’d already been to Bluebell Cottage the morning of the murder. But perhaps it had never been left in the umbrella. Perhaps someone put it there to throw the police off the scent.”

  “That’s an interesting theory.”

  At first I thought Simon was being facetious, but when I glanced up at his face, I saw that he was in fact agreeing with me.

  “Since we’re confessing, there’s the marble kitten as well.”

  Inspector Rother was expecting us. He said as we walked into the police station, “Thank you for coming so early. I’d like you to tell me again about finding the body of Lieutenant Hughes,” he said. “I know what’s in your statement, but perhaps you’ve forgot a detail.”

  I didn’t think I had. But I repeated my account of our search for George, and how I’d come to follow Mrs. Ellis into the church and then down the overgrown path.

  He listened, then asked me, “You heard nothing—rooks calling? Birds flying up?—to indicate that someone else was nearby, while you were searching for the Lieutenant?”

  “No, the wood around us was quiet. Besides, I touched the Lieutenant’s hand. He had been killed some time before we found his body. Even accounting for the cold morning and the cold water in the stream.”

  “You weren’t aware that there’s a shortcut from St. Mary’s Church to Vixen Hill?”

  Surprised, I said, “No. I didn’t know that.”

  “It isn’t suitable for motorcars, of course. But anyone from Vixen Hill could walk to Wych Gate and back again inside half an hour. Less, on horseback.” He drew a rough map on the sheet of paper in front of him, and I could see that he was right. The house was set to connect with the track from Hartfield, but if one knew the way, from the knot garden there was another, smaller track that cut cross-country. Had George taken it? Had his killer?

  “We can turn it another way,” the Inspector went on, holding up his hand, ticking off the points on his fingers.

  “Mrs. Roger Ellis is struck by someone, and has already run away once to London—the stationmaster and the woman who gave her a lift there have confirmed this. She returns home with a friend, and shortly afterward, her husband has words with the victim about a child he fathered while in France, and early the next morning, Mrs. Roger Ellis goes into Hartfield to speak to Davis Merrit. Afterward she packs her cases and prepares to leave again. According to the driver of the station carriage, she was very anxious not to miss that train. So much so that she was short with her mother-in-law. And with you. Was she expecting to meet Lieutenant Merrit at the station? After he’d killed George Hughes? Why didn’t she want you to go down that narrow path to the stream? Did she already know that a dead man lay at the end of it?”

  “If she had intended to run away with Lieutenant Merrit, why had she asked me to accompany her to London?”

  “For the sake of propriety, I should think,” he countered.

  “I can’t thi
nk why Lydia Ellis would wish to kill George Hughes.”

  “In the expectation that her husband would be blamed, and she would be free to remarry.”

  “Yes, well, Davis Merrit should have thought of that before he handed Lieutenant Hughes’s watch to that man Willy.”

  “I expect our friend Willy was supposed to tell the police that Roger Ellis had given him the watch.”

  That was an interesting supposition. It was clear that the police had put the last five days to good use, coming up with the ramifications of finding Davis Merrit’s body.

  Simon had put two and two together as well. “Are you saying that Merrit killed himself when everything went wrong?”

  Distracted, I was thinking of the message in the umbrella. Meet me . . .

  Perhaps I’d been wrong. Perhaps it had been a last desperate attempt by the Lieutenant to reach Lydia. Only I found it instead, and then the Inspector was waiting in the churchyard when services ended. And Merrit had to leave quickly.

  I nearly shook my head, answering my own question. I hadn’t been wrong. But who had sent it?

  Inspector Rother was already replying to Simon. “It’s likely.”

  All his conclusions had a ring of truth—but I knew Mrs. Ellis and Lydia and even Davis Merrit better than the Inspector could do. Why would Mrs. Ellis put her own son in jeopardy by killing George Hughes less than twelve hours from the time he’d confronted Roger in the drawing room? Wouldn’t she have been glad of the child, rather than angry? And Lydia was too impulsive to be included in any convoluted plot to make the police believe her husband had killed his friend. Even the little I’d seen and heard about Davis Merrit didn’t match the picture of an obsessed lover who killed himself when his plans went awry. But that left Roger himself, didn’t it?

  I was trying to order my thoughts, to make certain that what I was about to say made sense.

  “Inspector, I don’t think you’ve brought me here to speculate about the Ellis family’s motives for murder. I think what you really want to know is if you can clear them, and open the inquiry in an entirely different direction. For instance, in the direction of William Pryor—Willy.”

  “There’s still Roger Ellis. Who could have killed both men, to rid himself of the erstwhile friend who knew too much about his affair in France and the blind man his wife had been seeing too much of in his absence.”

  “But George had already told everyone about the affair. Captain Ellis had no right to be jealous, did he?”

  He gave me a sour smile. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  “Was the body of Davis Merrit too decomposed for you to be completely satisfied that he’d killed himself?” Simon asked.

  He looked up at Simon. “You have a most inconvenient mind,” he said. “I have a dead man with a spent bullet under his remains, his service revolver in what is left of his hand, but no marks on the skeleton to tell me where the bullet entered, and where it came out. I can find no one who has heard a single gunshot out on the heath. And there is some small indication that the man was throttled, but we can’t be certain of that because foxes and rooks were at the body.”

  “And no way of knowing precisely when the Lieutenant died,” I added to the list.

  “You and Captain Ellis left the Forest on the same day. Merrit must have been dead by then.”

  And Mrs. Ellis was already on her way to the station to meet her returning son.

  “So it isn’t Willy you’re looking at, but Roger Ellis,” I said. “You used us.”

  He could hear the disgust in my voice, and answered coldly, “I have a murder case to solve, Sister Crawford, and my best suspect is dead. If he killed himself, all well and good, but if he did not, then our murderer has two deaths on his conscience.”

  “If he has a conscience,” I replied. “Have you finished with me? Am I allowed to return to France? I’m needed there.”

  “You are needed here as well. Would you be willing to return to Vixen Hill?”

  “No,” Simon answered for me. “The Colonel would be furious if you put his daughter in harm’s way.”

  “Besides which,” I added, “Roger Ellis may not want me there.” In spite of the time we had spent together in that little bistro in Rouen, he wouldn’t want me to tell Lydia he was also searching for Sophie.

  “I think,” Inspector Rother said dryly, “the person who would most dislike having you there is the senior Mrs. Ellis.”

  “Gran?” I repeated.

  “Quite,” he answered. “She has been throwing sand in my eyes since the moment I arrived at Vixen Hill, busily protecting her grandson. And you see far too clearly for her comfort. I have just verified that myself.”

  I remembered Lydia’s letter to me in France. Everyone had sent me Christmas wishes—except for Gran.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I had no intention of returning to Vixen Hill. I didn’t want to spy for the police. What’s more, on our way back to Hartfield, I had all but promised Simon that I wouldn’t consider it.

  But in the afternoon, Lydia Ellis came knocking at my door in The King’s Head, and when I answered, she said, “Mama Ellis was telling the truth. You are here.”

  “Did you doubt her?”

  “Roger swore you were still in France. That he’d run into you at one of the hospitals.”

  That was close enough to the truth for his purposes.

  “Yes, not surprisingly.”

  I asked her to come in, and she did, looking around at my room with interest. “I’ve been to The King’s Head I don’t know how many times,” she said, “but I’ve never been in one of the rooms. It’s rather nice, isn’t it?”

  For the polished wood of the floorboards was set off with a dark blue carpet and paler blue curtains accenting the chintz covering the chairs. Framed prints of hunting scenes hung on walls papered with morning glories. Nothing to compare with Vixen Hill, but quite comfortable.

  “As you already know, Roger is back from France too,” she said, walking to the window to look out and then turning to face me. “He’s different, somehow. I don’t know what it is.”

  “This time he hasn’t come home to watch his brother die,” I pointed out gently.

  “Yes. But I’m wary, I don’t know if it’s a real difference or feigned. Or my wishful thinking.” She was pacing again, back and forth, back and forth.

  “Are you asking me whether you should stay here with me for the duration of his leave?”

  “Will you come back to Vixen Hill? Margaret has been asked to return as well, and she’s hoping the police will even summon Henry home from France. But they’ve dispensed with Eleanor and her brother. That’s odd, isn’t it?”

  “The police have their own way of judging these matters,” I replied, unwilling to go farther.

  “I expect they talked to her in Portsmouth, and don’t want us to know what was discussed.” She stopped by the door and touched a picture frame, straightening it. “The police asked me over and over again—even though I’d given them a statement, just as you’d done—about finding George’s body.” She toyed with another frame. “I thought they were convinced after he went missing that Davis Merrit had killed George. That was the conclusion of the inquest, for heaven’s sake. So why are they intending to look at Roger now? Because they are, aren’t they? Do you believe Roger is a murderer, Bess?”

  There was fear in her eyes when finally she turned to face me. All I could do was shake my head. “I’m not the right person to ask,” I answered.

  “I don’t want him to be guilty,” she said quietly. “I’ve had a lot of time to think after you left. Have you found that little girl?”

  “I looked for her,” I countered. “Do you have any idea how many orphans there are in France?”

  “I wonder what Roger would say, if he’d come home to find that you’d brought her with you.”

  “Lydia, it’s not as simple as that. There are legal issues. She’s a citizen of France, because her mother was. Rules. Even if Rog
er wanted her, he would have to go through a solicitor, to find out what he was required to do. You and I would have no claim on her.”

  “Yes, but I don’t see why that should stop you from looking for her.”

  “No, of course not.”

  She sighed. “You’d think, wouldn’t you, that everyone would be glad to find that she has a good home.”

  “Lydia. You do realize that if George knew what he was saying, that this child is the image of Juliana, will you be comfortable bringing her into your home? Mrs. Ellis will see her dead daughter in yours, and so will Gran. And Roger, of course, if he survives the war.”

  “I don’t care who she looks like. I’d be grateful to have her.”

  But that was easy to say now. When she hadn’t seen Sophie, as I had.

  “What would you say if Roger came home with her?” I asked, curious.

  She laughed, but not in amusement. “He never will. You know that. He’s ashamed of what he did, and he won’t want a constant reminder underfoot. He couldn’t have loved her mother very much, could he, or he’d have moved heaven and earth to find her.”

  I couldn’t judge whether that was a consolation to Lydia or if she was seeing the relationship between her husband and the French mother of his child as she would like it to be. Not love, but lust. She could live with lust. Or so she thought now.

  Yet from what Roger had told me in Rouen, it hadn’t been either love or lust, but loneliness and fear and the knowledge that for this moment, at least, they were both alive. If Roger had spoken the truth, it was never an affair.

  “You’ll keep trying all the same?”

  “I’ll keep trying.” I’d seen Sophie. I knew I had to.

  She nodded and turned from the fire. “I have Davis’s cat. I couldn’t bear to see it put out, and of course it couldn’t stay in the cottage. He had nowhere to go, did he? Merrit? And so he couldn’t have taken his cat.”

  “What did Roger have to say about that?”