The Confession

by Charles Todd

  “He was suffering from an illness,” he told her.

  “Was? Is he better? Dead?” When he didn’t answer, she added, “Then he won’t be coming back.”

  “I’m sorry.” He meant it.

  “We all thought he’d be back, after the war. His things were here, you see. A promise, you might call it. We liked him. He could be very funny, you know. Really, he should have gone on the stage. He was such a gifted mimic.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t want to believe it, you know. But someone told me—someone he’d known before the war—that he wanted to live in Paris. That he liked France. But he didn’t after all, did he? I saw him last May in London. Myself.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “William Neville. He was a footman in the house next but one to ours in London. He met Ben Willet in hospital in the last weeks of the war. They had trench foot, of all things. He said Ben talked about nothing but France, how different it was from what he expected. He said if he had the money to do it, he’d stay there after the war was finished. William told him he was a fool. And Ben said, all right, he’d come back to London and work five years. Then he’d go back to France and find out if he still wanted to live there. William told him that was brilliant. Ben laughed and said, no, it was economic necessity.”

  “Did you like him?”

  “Not so much a liking,” she said, considering her feelings. “But he was nice, if you know what I mean. Never any trouble, never any worry. Sometimes on our afternoons off, we’d go into Thetford. It was great fun. Like having a beau for a few hours, then back to ourselves again when we got home.”

  He could understand that. Service had strict rules. No romances, no marriages, no unbecoming conduct. All the same, the servants were human, and two young people would find in pretense an escape from the tedium of everyday life.

  “Thompson told me that he’d spent a good deal of his time in his room.”

  She looked over her shoulder, then said, “He liked to take books from Mr. Laughton’s library. He wasn’t supposed to, but he always brought them back. And so I never told anyone. He was very careful with them.”

  “What sort of books?”

  “I have no idea. I do know he borrowed a Bible once. I said to him, ‘Don’t you have a Testament of your own?’ And he said he’d never had one. I thought that was very strange.”

  There were voices in one of the passages behind her. She said hastily, “I must go.” She shut the door firmly and left him there on the steps.

  Hamish said, “It wasna’ a verra’ profitable journey.”

  “In some ways it was. For instance, was it his illness that brought the man back to England? Or had he been here all this time?”

  “How did he live?” Hamish, ever practical, asked.

  It was a good question.

  By his craft—or had he fallen on hard times and turned to blackmail?

  Chapter 10

  At the end of the Laughtons’ drive, Rutledge debated whether to spend the night in Thetford or go back to Furnham. And then he decided to go directly to London.

  There had been no way to reach Sergeant Gibson until now, and with any luck there would be answers to his questions concerning the whereabouts of Wyatt Russell and Cynthia Farraday.

  By the time he’d reached the outskirts of London, the first pale rays of the sun were brightening the eastern sky. He was in need of petrol and found a garage a few miles farther along the road. Making his way through the early morning traffic into the city, where street cleaners were busy and men and women were on their way to open shops and offices, he was caught behind a milk van making deliveries, and it was another half an hour before he reached his flat.

  Two hours of sleep, a shave and a change of clothes, and he was ready to go to the Yard.

  He had to run Sergeant Gibson to earth. A body had been found in St. James’s Park, and the sergeant was trying to trace a member of the man’s family.

  He looked up as Rutledge called to him on the stairs, and said, “The Chief Superintendent has been wanting you.”

  “Did you tell him I was in Essex and out of reach?”

  “Yes, sir. It didn’t seem to do much good. By the bye, I’ve found the information you asked for. It’s on my desk. Shall I bring it up when I’ve finished here?”

  He knew better than to tell Gibson that he would find it for himself. They had always had a very uneasy relationship, ever since Rutledge had returned to the Yard. What drew the two men together was a distinct dislike of the Chief Superintendent, and Gibson as a rule would happily spite the man in any way he could. Helping Rutledge was one of the surest ways to do that. But he did so on his own terms.

  Rutledge went on to his own office and shut the door. The long night’s drive had been tiring, and he stood for a moment, looking down at the street below, not really seeing the activity there as he considered what he’d learned about Ben Willet.

  Small wonder he didn’t fit into the village where he was born. The position as footman had only been a beginning, a first step.

  What had possessed him to decide to be a writer of books? He’d been a great reader, yes. But what had triggered that leap of imagination that said, I can do this too? Had it begun as boredom and quickly become an aspiration? Or like those afternoons off in Thetford, had writing been another means of escape from a life he’d thought he wanted and found was not to his liking?

  Was Paris just another escape?

  A large colony of writers and poets, musicians and painters, had converged on Paris after the war. Many of them were former soldiers, restless and in need of whatever they couldn’t find at home. Or were too lost to try. A good many drank away their dreams, and others sometimes found disillusionment. A few met with success. How had Willet fared?

  There was a tap at the door, and Sergeant Gibson entered rather quickly, shutting it quietly behind him.

  “Old Bowels is on the warpath,” he said. “The body in the park has Connections.”

  Bowles was always one to sniff out opportunity. A man with no connections of his own, he had an eye for the main chance. And it just as often eluded him, souring his disposition for days afterward.

  Gibson held out a sheet a paper. “This is all I could find, given the time I had to pursue the matter.”

  Rutledge took it and scanned Gibson’s dark scrawl.

  “Wyatt Russell is in a clinic? War injuries?”

  “So I was told by MacDonald at the War Office.”

  Of all the results that Rutledge had anticipated, this was not one.

  He read on. “Ah, Cynthia Farraday. Well done, Gibson.” In his mind’s eye he could see the newspaper cutting of Miss Farraday at the flower show. A photographer’s delight, finding a pretty girl admiring a prizewinning blossom. And she had appeared to enjoy having her photograph taken. Had this been her one excursion into the city with Harold Finley? Finding her ward’s photograph in a newspaper would have given Mrs. Russell a very good reason for curtailing such visits.

  “I’ve another task for you. See if you can find out which doctors in London one Benjamin Willet saw in the past six months for a stomach cancer that was inoperable. I’d like to know where he was staying during that time. He was in London at the end of May. And then a matter of a fortnight ago. That’s all the information I have.”

  The sergeant made a note of that. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. See what sort of records the Tilbury police can find on the disappearance of Mrs. Elizabeth Russell, August 1914.”

  “Where will I find you?”

  “I’ll be in London this morning, and then I’m off to this clinic in Oxfordshire. Then back to Essex, I expect. I’ve a funeral to attend.”

  “If you’re leaving, now’s the time,” Gibson warned him. “Else you’ll be taken off the Gravesend death and put to work on the St. James’s Park murder. Sir.”

  The man pulled from the Thames had had no Connections, after all. Bowles’s only concern had been to put his opposite number’s nos
e out of joint.

  “I’ll take your good advice,” Rutledge said and reached for his hat.

  He made it out of the Yard without encountering Bowles, and drove to a street in Chelsea, not far from where Meredith Channing lived. But she was still out of the country, as far as he knew, and he made a point of avoiding her house. The fewer reminders of her the better, he told himself. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Hamish snorted derisively. “You tell yoursel’ that, but it does no good.”

  Rutledge ignored the voice. But he knew that Hamish was right. It had been hard these last weeks to know what to feel.

  He found the street number. It was a very good address, and the house was handsome, the sort that would suit a woman like Cynthia Farraday. Large enough for comfort, small enough not to require an army of servants to maintain it. He remembered that someone had told him she had inherited it from her dead parents.

  He walked up to the door and was amused when he saw the knocker. It was in the shape of an orchid. He let it fall and waited until a maid appeared to ask his business.

  “Mr. Rutledge to see Miss Farraday,” he said briskly.

  Apparently the young woman hadn’t been warned to turn him away. Instead she asked him to wait in the hall while she went to see if Miss Farraday was at home.

  He did as she asked.

  There was a small table to one side of the door, and above it hung a rather good watercolor of the marshes. On the opposite wall, a gilt-framed mirror reflected both. He thought Cynthia Farraday must have been telling the truth when she said she liked the marshes at River’s Edge.

  Several minutes later, a door opened down the passage and Miss Farraday herself came out to greet him.

  “So you found me at last,” she said, smiling, amused. “And the house, River’s Edge? Is it for sale?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard,” he informed her. “I don’t believe your housemaid heard the title.”

  She opened her mouth, shut it again, and then said, “We’ll be more comfortable in my sitting room.” She turned and walked back the way she’d come, not looking to see if he followed or not.

  It was a bright room she took him to, done up in lavender and cream and apricot, a very feminine and unusual setting, and it suited her. Closing the door behind him, she gestured to a pair of chairs set before a window overlooking the back garden.

  She said, seating herself opposite him, “Scotland Yard. You led me to believe you were Wyatt’s solicitor.”

  “And you led me to believe you were there in the closed house because you wished to purchase it.”

  “Touché. Why did you follow me to London? I can’t think where you were waiting for me. Still, I didn’t know whether to be flattered or annoyed.”

  He was unexpectedly pleased that she knew nothing about his presence at the landing stage where she’d returned the launch. “Your photograph has a way of showing up in surprising places. For one, in the possession of a dead man.”

  She was very still. “A dead man?” she asked, bracing herself for the answer. “Not Wyatt?”

  “No. It was Ben Willet who was found floating in the Thames,” he told her baldly.

  He could see the blood drain from her face. But she said, “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “It’s useless to deny it. He knew you. On the wall of his room in Thetford he had a photograph of you taken from a newspaper or magazine.”

  “I don’t recall that my photograph was ever in a newspaper.”

  “You were admiring an orchid.”

  Anger flared in her eyes. “That was taken by chance. I didn’t pose for it.”

  “Yet you have an orchid for your door knocker.”

  “The owner of the prizewinning orchid—the one I was admiring—sent it to me after seeing the photograph.”

  “I’ve been looking into Willet’s death, and I went to Thetford to the Laughton house, where he was a footman. Did you find that position for him? I can’t think of anyone else who might have had the connections or the interest in helping the man.”

  His intuition had been right.

  “That’s none of your affair,” she snapped.

  “And when he was here in London in May, seeing the specialist, did he come and tell you that he was a dying man?”

  She blinked, unable to prevent the spontaneous reaction.

  “What was your interest in him? Was it a love affair—”

  She cut him off, her voice sharp. “Yes, all right. I lent him books. He saw me reading one day, and he asked where I’d got the book.”

  “Where was this? And when?”

  “In 1913, I think. I’d taken one of the boats and rowed down to a little inlet where I could tie up and read. He came up the river, and I nearly frightened him to death, he said. I was asleep in the bottom of the boat, and he thought I was ill. I found that amusing. We talked for a little, and then I gave him the book. It was a novel by an American writer. He seemed pleased. We met several more times, and he would return whatever book I’d let him borrow and tell me what he thought of it. For a young man educated in the village school, he was remarkably clever. I asked what he wished to do with his life, and he told me he wanted to find a position somewhere. I don’t think he had the vaguest idea of what was required to be a footman. Still, he took care over how he dressed and how he spoke. So I told him that I’d write to the Laughtons. I’d known Rose Laughton in school and I was certain the family would be kind, whether they took him on or not. Still, I thought it best to present myself as Mrs. Russell when I wrote to ask if they were in need of a footman.” She smiled at the memory. “As it happened the last one had died of complications from the measles he’d caught from the Laughton children. I had to swear—as Mrs. Russell, you understand—that Ben had had all the childhood diseases. I didn’t know whether he’d had them or not. In any event, they offered him the position. I gave him several books as a going-away gift. I knew he couldn’t afford to buy them.”

  Which explained the volumes packed away in his boxes when Willet went off to war.

  “And so he lived happily ever after as a footman.”

  “Of course not. There was the war. It changed everything for all of us.”

  “Did you write to him when he was in Thetford? Or when he was in France?”

  “I did not. He was my good deed. That was all. I hadn’t taken his soul into my keeping.”

  “When did you see him again?”

  “Ah. After the war. Immediately after, in fact. He was just coming out of Victoria Station, and he recognized me at once. I didn’t know him. He’d grown, filled out. A man, not a boy in his father’s skiff. He even sported a mustache. I took him to a shop for tea, and he told me he wanted to be a writer. And so I gave him fifty pounds and told him to send me a copy of his first publication. He did. A slim volume of his war memoirs. It was not terribly successful, as far as I know. But he was extraordinarily proud of it. The next one was so much better. I was proud of him, then.” She turned to stare out the window for a moment. Then she asked, “Did he kill himself ? Because of the disease? Or was it for some other reason?”

  “The truth is, he was murdered.”

  “Ben Willet?” She faced him now, horror in her eyes. “No. There must be some mistake.”

  “I can show you a photograph of the body, if you like.”

  She shuddered. “No. Please, no.”

  “When did you last hear from him?”

  She was still trying to come to terms with murder, but she got up and went to the small desk behind where she was sitting. Rummaging in a drawer, she drew out a postal card and brought it to him.

  It was a sepia-tone scene in Paris, a street café with carriages passing and several people sitting at the tiny tables set out on the pavement. He turned it over and read the brief message.

  I want to see my father, and then I’m going back to Paris, to finish the last book. It began there. Let it end there. I shan’t write to you again, but
I’ll see to it that you are sent a copy when it’s published. Thank you for believing.

  And it was signed, simply, Willet.

  The stamp and the postmark were not French. The card had been posted in London, not three days before the man was killed. And he had never reached Furnham.

  “Did you go to River’s Edge to look for him? You’ve been playing God with his life for years. Did you think he might have gone back home to die? That it was a lie about Paris?”

  “Don’t be rude. I went to River’s Edge for reasons of my own.”

  “Did you take the launch to where you once used to tie up to the reeds with your books?”

  “What if I did? I was nostalgic for another life. But not for him.”

  “Did you know that some weeks ago, when he was still in London, he called at the Yard? He wanted to report a murder, he said.”

  “Murder? What are you talking about?” she demanded. “Who else was murdered?”

  “He told me his name was Wyatt Russell, and that he was dying of cancer. He wanted to clear his conscience by confessing to a murder. I asked him who had been killed, and he told me it was Justin Fowler.”

  She had not returned to her chair after handing him the postal card, standing by the window instead. Putting a hand to her forehead, she began to pace, clearly agitated.

  “Why would he do that? He hardly knew who Justin was. And why pretend he was Wyatt? No, you must be mistaken—or lying.”

  “It has been suggested that the morphine he’d been given for his pain might have caused hallucinations.”

  “No. I still refuse to believe you.”

  “I wasn’t sure what to make of his confession, myself. And so I asked him to join me for lunch. We dined at The Marlborough. And I was never shown any reason to doubt that he was Wyatt Russell. He carried off the masquerade to perfection. Now I ask myself why it should be necessary.”

  “Even if it was true—and I don’t for a moment believe that it could be—how did Ben even know that murder had been done? I don’t think he ever went back to Essex. He couldn’t have been a witness to something. If he had, surely he’d have confided in me. It makes no sense at all.”