by Charles Todd
The house was cold, no fires lit with no one living here, and he kept his coat on as he walked through it slowly, carefully. A handsome home, not a baronial palace. The formal rooms-dining room, drawing room, a large library-were well furnished with heirlooms but looked as if they had not seen company for some time. Everything stood in its proper place, no magazines strewn about, no flowers in their tall vases, no sunlight pouring through open drapes, no dogs lolled on the hearth rugs. He remembered as a child being taken to a stately home, and a woman’s shrill echoing voice declaiming, “Here the family entertained three prime ministers, six members of the royal family, and the Queen, who was particularly fond of that blue silk chair.”
And he had twisted about, seaching in vain for them, until his father had told him to stand still and pay attention.
A back parlor, overlooking the gardens and the sea, and the kitchen quarters below, were more ordinary, as if people actually lived there, mussing up the carpet with their shoes, wearing out the upholstery with their bodies, reading the books on the low shelves. Or cooking at the big stove, washing up at the stone sink, sitting down to peel potatoes in one of the old brown wooden chairs.
He returned to the staircase. Generations had come down them, gone up them, and no one had worried about them. Until now. Hamish, stirring restlessly in the back of his mind, whispered, “I didna’ like this business. Leave the dead in their graves, man!”
Upstairs were the bedrooms. They were beautifully proportioned, with tall windows and handsome fireplaces. But old-fashioned now, as if no one had worried about the faded hangings and the worn carpets, preferring the familiar to the new.
He found the upstairs study where the suicides had occurred, thanks to the floor plan that Dawlish had sketched for him. It was a long room, windows looking out over the sea and over the gardens. A room of light and the warmth of the sun, neither a man’s nor a woman’s, but used, comfortable, ordinary. Nothing here to tell anyone where a famous poet worked, except perhaps for the typewriter sitting covered on a table by the seaward window. A guide would have to make do with the collection of books on either side of the table, set neatly on their shelves. “Here the poet found her inspiration among the works of…”
But did she? Who could know?
Nearby was another table, where someone had been carving. The hull of a great ship lay, white and unfinished, among the scraps and curls of wood. It was a scale model of an ocean liner, Rutledge thought, looking at it. And there were others in a long case beneath the garden windows, intricately fashioned miniatures. He recognized several of them-the Olympia, the Sirius, the Lusitania. Whose work were these? Nicholas Cheney’s? Had they been a hobby for its own sake or did they represent a love of the sea that had been repressed to this room?
He crossed the room to the couch against the wall, where the bodies of brother and sister had lain side by side in death, their hands touching as if for comfort as the darkness closed in. Why had they died?
“I don’t like it here, man,” Hamish said. “If you’re going to investigate a murder, get about it.”
“Murder sometimes has its roots in other places than the few feet of space where it happened. Still, why here? Why on that night?”
“Hello?”
A voice calling from the hall below startled him badly.
He walked out to the gallery at the top of the stairs and looked down. There was a woman at the foot of the stairs, the front door open behind her, and she was looking up anxiously, as if almost afraid of what might walk out of one of the rooms there to confront her.
“Inspector Rutledge,” he said, moving towards the steps. “I arrived last night and came to have a look around. Constable Dawlish provided me with keys.”
“Oh!” she said, smiling up at him with relief on her face. “I thought I heard voices when I walked in. I didn’t know who might have found their way in. The press has been very troublesome.”
She was slim, perhaps in her thirties-it was hard to tell- her oval face pink from walking, her light brown hair curling ridiculously around it, escaping from the knot at the back of her neck. Not pretty, yet very attractive. She waited until he had reached the hall and said, “I’m so glad they’ve finally sent someone from Scotland Yard. I’m Rachel Ashford. The one who’s been fighting to get these… deaths… reopened.”
“Lady Ashford?”
Her smile changed. “My husband is dead. His brother has the title now. Sir Henry. Did he tell you that Lady Ashford wanted to reopen the investigation? How very like him!”
“You’re Peter Ashford’s widow?” Rutledge asked, surprised. “I was in school with him.”
“Peter died in the war. Trying to take Mount Kilimanjaro, out in Kenya.”
“I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard.” So much for Bowles’ “titled old bitch.” But it was a shock, Peter’s death. Another name added to the long list of friends gone. More than once he’d felt the guilt of surviving. As if it was somehow obscenely selfish, when so many had died. After a moment, he made himself go on. “And you believe the investigations done by Inspector Harvey and Constable Dawlish were mishandled?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because-oh, because of intuition, I suppose.” She made a wry face at him. “And I can’t help but feel that coincidence can only be stretched so far. Three deaths in the same family in little more than a month? I-I knew Livia and Nicholas, they weren’t at all what the papers say, an invalid and her devoted keeper. It’s wrong, the notion that they could have killed themselves because of ill health!”
“I understood that Olivia Man-Marlowe-was crippled. And that Nicholas Cheney had been gassed in the war.”
“Well, yes,” she said defensively, “certainly that’s true, since you put it so baldly. Olivia lost the strength of one leg in childhood, from the crippling disease. She used a chair for a long time, then Nicholas carved a brace for her, and after that, she could move about as she pleased. It was wonderful! I can still hear her laughter when she first tried it-we were all outside her bedroom door, while Nanny put it on-and she began to laugh, and Nicholas was jumping up and down beside me, shouting encouragement, and Rosamund was crying, and Richard was pounding on the door, he was so beside himself with excitement…” Her voice faded and she looked up the stairs defensively, as if afraid she’d hear the children’s voices again. “If she killed herself,” Rachel continued after a moment, “it wasn’t because of her leg! She accepted it, she lived with it, she’d come to terms with the pain-it wasn’t something that drove her to despair and suicide.”
The sunlight pouring through the open door failed to reach them or warm the vastness of the hall. But he could hear birds somewhere, singing.
“If she had wanted to kill herself-for whatever reason-” Rutledge said, “why would she allow Nicholas to join her in death? Why not see that he survived, and got on with life. However hard it might seem to be at first? Why not kill herself in her bedroom, with no one to see?”
She pressed her fingers to her eyes, as if they still hurt from crying. Or to hide them from him. “I’ve asked myself that a hundred-a thousand-times since then. They were very close, Olivia and Nicholas. I’d have said, if anyone had ever thought to ask me, that she would have jumped into the sea in the night, rather that let him die with her. It doesn’t mean that perhaps in the first shock he might not have wished to follow, but Nicholas had a cool head, a clear mind, he wasn’t the dramatic, overly emotional sort of man who could leap into the sea himself the next morning. When she was already dead.” Dropping her hands, she said painfully, “If you understand what I’m saying?”
He did, though Hamish was grumbling that it made no sense. “Yet they died together.”
“Yes, and that’s what put me off in the very beginning. I didn’t say much to the others; they wouldn’t have wanted to hear me worrying over what couldn’t be changed. Or making it worse by starting a fuss over it. But the more I thought about the circumstances, the more I was c
onvinced that something was very wrong, very-unusual.”
“Do you think one of your cousins-including Stephen- could be capable of murdering Olivia and Nicholas? For whatever reasons?”
She stared at him, stunned. “Oh, God, no! Susannah and Stephen couldn’t have killed either of them. And Daniel, what on earth for?”
Rutledge smiled. “Where there’s murder, there’s usually a murderer.”
“But not one of us!” she cried, alarmed.
How often had he heard the same cry when he’d begun an investigation into suspicious death. Murder, possibly. But not one of us. A stranger. A madman. An envious neighbor or colleague. The woman down the road. But not one of us. Then the finger-pointing began, as suspicion and fear and uncertainty and old memories came to the surface.
“Who, then?” he asked gently.
“That’s why I called Henry and begged him to ask the Yard to come down here and look into the deaths. Someone who could be objective, someone with the experience to judge what had really happened. Not a village policeman who preferred the safest answer to embarrassing the family any more than it already was. I mean, suicide is unacceptable enough- murder would be, well, a family calamity.” She looked at him, seeing him for the first time. The thin face. The haunted eyes. Intelligence, too, but something more. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
“There were no photographs upstairs. Do you have any of the family that I could borrow for a time?” He was mainly interested in Olivia Marlowe, the woman behind the poems. But it helped, often, to see the faces of the dead if you were late at the murder scene.
“We’d taken them all. The house will be put up for sale soon, and we didn’t want to leave-I’ve just come to fetch the ships,” she said, flustered. “I-I haven’t had the courage yet to go in there. Where they-where it happened. There are photographs in my things, I’ll find them. Where are you staying?”
“The Three Bells,” he said, curious about her reaction. “What can you tell me about Stephen FitzHugh’s death?”
She shivered, not looking over his shoulder at the stairs, though her head had turned that way. “It was awful. He was lying at the foot of the steps, his eyes wide, a little blood- I couldn’t tell if it was from his ear or his mouth-smeared across his cheek. Cormac said he died as we watched, but I saw nothing change, didn’t hear a sigh or-or anything. And I was kneeling there, beside him, my hand on his chest, calling his name. It was-I’ve seen men die before. I was in London when the Zeppelins came over, I was there when they pulled people out of one of the buildings. But this was Stephen.” She collected herself with an effort and turned towards the open door. “I’d better leave now,” she said ruefully. “Men don’t like it when women start to cry, and I’ve found it hard sometimes…”
He let her go, watching her slim figure hurry down the drive and turn towards the sea.
So that was Lady Ashford, born Rachel Marlowe, and cousin to the people who lived here. Peter’s wife. Widow. He remembered Peter, tall and fast at games, level-headed and very good at whatever he did. He’d had a gift for languages, he could pick them up with apparently no effort, and speak them like a native. All that wasted in an obscure action on the flanks of a mountain whose one claim to fame was that Queen Victoria had had two mountains in East Africa, and had given Kilimanjaro to the Kaiser, next door in Tanganyika, who’d had none. Bloody silly thing to do in the first place. And Englishmen had died trying to retake it from the Germans under that master strategist, Von Lettow-Vorbeck, who knew how to pin down men who would otherwise have been fighting in France.
Rutledge turned and went back up the stairs to the sitting room, standing there with his eyes roving the furnishings, the books, the wooden ships that Nicholas Cheney carved. He had left more of himself here than the poet, after all…
Two people who died together for no apparent reason. No expression of regret, no apologies to the living. No explanation of the deed, no excuses, no last confessions, no lines of bitterness meant to hurt the survivors. Just… silence.
Hamish, uneasy and sensitive to the unsettled atmosphere of Rutledge’s mind, called to him to leave, to wash his hands of this case and go back to London.
Rutledge gave up trying to hear the stillness, and walked out into the gallery again on his way to Olivia’s bedroom.
A voice down in the hall said harshly, “What the hell- who the hell are you?”
Rutledge looked down, not seeing anyone at first, then finding the tall man who stood just in the shadows of a doorway.
“Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard,’’ he said. “I’ve a key from Constable Dawlish, and I’m here on official business. Who are you?”
“Official-what’s happened?” the other man demanded sharply.
“The inquiry into the deaths of Miss Marlowe, Mr. Cheney, and Mr. FitzHugh is being reconsidered by the Yard,” Rutledge said, and started down the stairs.
The man in the doorway was handsome in a way that few men are, reminding Rutledge of Greek statues, that same mix of perfect body and face and mind that the Golden Age admired most. And yet there was something about him that was pure Irish. Was this Daniel Hargrove, the husband of Susannah FitzHugh?
Before he could test that, the man said, “I’m Cormac FitzHugh. A member of the family. No one has told me of any renewed inquiry! Neither the local police nor the family’s solicitors. What are you doing here?”
“Surveying the scenes of death,” Rutledge responded, coming to the last step and staying where he was. He’d dealt with officers of this man’s ilk, accustomed to giving orders and expecting instant, unquestioning obedience to them. He’d never liked such men.
Hamish growled, “Bloody, arrogant bastards, the lot!”
“I’m putting a stop to this right now! You’ll hand over your keys, if you please, and leave the grounds at once. There will be no reopening of any affairs to do with my family.”
“I’m afraid, Mr. FitzHugh, that you have no say in this business. It’s a police matter, at the request of the Home Office. You have no option but to cooperate.” He paused. “Unless, of course, you have something to hide in any of these three deaths?”
FitzHugh looked as if Rutledge had struck him. “I wield considerable power in the City-”
“That’s as may be,” Rutledge answered him. “It doesn’t count here, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, I’ve something to hide,” FitzHugh said shortly, changing directions so quickly that Rutledge was nearly caught off guard. “My stepbrother and my stepsister killed themselves. It isn’t something I’m happy about, but it was a choice they both made. The reasons behind their deaths were extremely personal, and since there’s no question that suicide was the cause of death, laudanum to be precise, self-administered, I see no reason on earth why their unhappiness must be dragged through the newspapers. It serves no purpose, and it will hurt my cousin, my half sister, her husband, and me. For the delectation of a public who couldn’t care less about my family but who thrive on titillation. My God, look at what they’re already doing with these knifings, raising the spectre of the Ripper as if it was something to be proud of, not buried and forgotten!”
Rutledge agreed with him there, but said nothing.
After a moment, Cormac FitzHugh sighed and then added more reasonably, “There’s no hope of deflecting you from this investigation?”
“Sorry. None.” He made no mention of the fact that the conclusions might well be the same as those the Inquest had reached. Or that so far he’d seen no evidence, heard no new information, to do more than he was already doing, asking general questions. Rutledge was more interested in where the other man’s mood was taking them.
Cormac seemed to argue something with himself and, reluctantly, to come to a decision. “All right, then, come in here; we needn’t stand in the hall like unwelcomed guests.” He led the way into the drawing room, looking with distaste at the closed curtains and the empty space over the mantel where a large portrait had hung. “I’m not used
to the house like this. It was never empty in my childhood. Nor dark and dreary and full of sadness. But then my childhood has vanished, taking the memories with it, I suppose. Sit down, man.”
Rutledge took the chair across from his and wondered what this polished denizen of the City was about to tell him in such confidence.
It wasn’t what he expected.
“I’ve never told anyone of this. If you speak of it, I’ll deny I said it now. I’ll claim that you made it up in a desperate need for promotion or to build your reputation, whatever fits. Do you understand me? I can do you considerable harm, professionally.”
Rutledge got to his feet. “The Yard doesn’t respond to threats.”
“This isn’t a threat, God damn it! I’m trying to protect my family, and 1 have every right to do that. What I’m about to tell you is disturbing, unproved, and frighteningly true. But the murderer is already dead, and there’s no use in punishing the living, is there?”
“What are you talking about?” Rutledge asked, as Hamish growled a warning.
Cormac FitzHugh took a deep breath. He’d judged his man, he knew he was right, and he got on with it. “Olivia Marlowe-O. A. Manning-was a brilliant poet and a woman to whom life was a thing to be possessed, to be lived and worshipped and enjoyed. She was also a cold-blooded murderer.”
4
Rutledge stared at the man’s face, at the conviction and the pain there. He himself felt the shock, the onslaught of an unexpected grief. He hadn’t known the woman at all, but he’d known her poems. How could a soul that produced Wings of Fire be capable of wanton killing?
“Because,” Hamish shouted at him, “ she knew the depths as well as the heights a man can reach! And it’s uncanny – I want no part of her!”
FitzHugh was watching him, acknowledging his reaction. His eyes were a very fine gray-blue in this light, clear and straightforward.