Wings of Fire ir-2

by Charles Todd

  “Tell me about Anne.”

  “Anne? My goodness, there’s nothing to tell. Anne died when she was eight or nine. She was Olivia’s twin, and they were so much alike, to look at them, that you couldn’t believe it. But oddly enough they were quite different in natures. Anne was the sort of child who’d never met a stranger-she could cajole anyone into doing anything. Except Livia, of course! Stephen reminds-reminded-me of Anne, the same golden charm. Livia was, I don’t know, one of those people who lived in her imagination, and found it rich enough that she didn’t need other stimulation. She was quiet and thoughtful and very much her own woman, even in childhood.”

  “How did Anne die?”

  “She fell out of an apple tree in the old orchard. It isn’t there now, Rosamund had the orchard cut down, but it was beyond the back garden, sheltered by brick walls. We were all playing there, Nicholas and Olivia and Anne and I. And she reached too far for an apple, lost her balance, and came down on a root. I’d never seen a dead person before. I was terrified, out of my wits. I thought she was teasing, playing games with us.”

  “Was Cormac there?”

  Rachel frowned. “I don’t remember. He may have been. It was Nicholas I remember most, kneeling beside Anne, taking her hand, calling to her, crying because she wouldn’t answer him. And Olivia having trouble coming down from the tree. Because of her leg. This was before Nicholas had carved a brace, of course.”

  “Anne fell? No one pushed her?”

  She looked at him, surprised. “No, why should anyone push her? She was up in the tree, picking apples, and then she reached too far. We were all children, we would never have dreamed of such a thing!”

  But children killed. It was something that he’d learned in London, his first year at the Yard.

  They came out of the woods into a lane that joined the main street of the village, where houses clustered together under slate roofs that looked like quicksilver in the sun, lead in the rain. There were gardens behind every gate, crowded with vegetables and flaming with color.

  Rachel stopped, “I go this way-I’m staying with a friend on the outskirts.” She shaded her eyes again with her hand, and said, “You didn’t mean that-about going back to London? You’ll stay and see what you can find? I’ll never persuade Henry to appeal for help again.”

  He laughed. “Probably not.” Remembering the heat in London, the cramped little office, Bowles’ pretensions, and the squalid knifings that had somehow captured the imagination of the city, he found himself saying, “No, I’m not going back yet. I’ll be here for several more days.”

  She left, reassured, and he turned towards The Three Bells. But noticing the shingle on the front of the doctor’s surgery, he opened the garden gate and went through to knock at the door.

  A young woman with pretty strawberry blond hair opened the door and said, “Ah, you’re just in time, if you want to see the doctor. Five more minutes, and he’d have gone through to his luncheon.”

  “Mrs. Hawkins?” he asked, guessing.

  “Yes, and if you’ll just wait here a moment,” she answered, leading him into a small sitting room fitted out with bits and pieces of worn furnishings that had been relegated here from the rest of the house, “I’ll tell him you’re here. The name, please?”

  Rutledge gave it to her, and she disappeared through the door beside him. A moment later she whisked back into the waiting room. “Dr. Hawkins will see you now.” She held the door wide, ready to shut it behind him.

  Rutledge went through into the tidy, surprisingly bright surgery. “Dr. Hawkins?” he said to the short, thickset man behind the desk. He was not as young as his wife, but not much beyond thirty-five, he thought.

  “Indeed, and what can I do for you this morning?” His eyes raked Rutledge, from crown to toe. Seeing more than Rutledge cared to have him see. “Having trouble sleeping, are you?”

  “No, I’m having no trouble at all, as it happens,” Rutledge said stiffly. “I’m Inspector Rutledge, from Scotland Yard-”

  “Oh, Lord, and what’s happened now!”

  “It isn’t what is happening now that concerns me. I’ve been asked to look into the deaths of three of your patients, Stephen FitzHugh, Olivia Marlowe, and Nicholas Cheney.”

  Hawkins stared at him, then threw his pen on the desk with such force that it bounced and nearly rolled off the edge. “Those deaths are history. Closed. The Inquest agreed with my first impressions and my considered opinion. An accident and a double suicide. Surely you’ve read the medical report?”

  “I have, and it’s very thorough. All the same, there are questions I must ask. And that you are required to answer.”

  “I know damned well what I’m required to do,” Hawkins said irritably. “And I’ve done it.” His eyes narrowed and he looked at Rutledge with sudden suspicion. “You aren’t planning to dig up the bodies, are you? That’s all I need right now!”

  “In what way?”

  “Look, I’ve been a good doctor here. I took over from my wife’s father, who’s nearly gaga now, war finished him, too much to do, too little energy to do it. I’ve built a decent practice, and I’m being considered for a partnership in Plymouth. I learned my craft in the war, doing things I’d never thought in school I’d be expected to do. Sew up the dying, send the living back to the Front, find a way to keep the shell-shock cases from being shot for cowardice-” he saw Rut-ledge flinch, and added with relish “-and even deliver forty-seven babies to refugees who had no place to sleep themselves, much less with infants to nurse! I’ve paid my dues, I’ve earned the right to move on to better things, and if my future partners get wind of the fact that three- three – of my cases are being exhumed, under Scotland Yard’s eager eye, I’ll be dead, stuck here forever. No chance at Plymouth, no hope of London in the end.”

  “The fact that Scotland Yard has an interest in these deaths in no way is a reflection on you-”

  “The hell it isn’t! For God’s sake, man, I filled out the death certificates! It has everything to do with me!”

  “Then you’re convinced that there’s nothing in either of the suicides or in the accident that could warrant further police interest?”

  “That’s exactly what I am! Convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt!”

  “It hasn’t occurred to you that something in the pasts of these three people might change the circumstances enough that what appeared to be suicide was actually murder and suicide? To use an instance I came across recently.”

  Hawkins threw up his hands. “Murder and suicide? You’ve been drinking, I can smell it on your breath. Enough to be having delusions?”

  “No, I’m as sober as you are,” Rutledge said, reining his temper in hard.

  “Not bloody likely, when you suggest such things as you did just now! I walked into that study and found two people on the couch. A man and a woman. Their hands were touching, his left and her right. In the other hand, each held a glass. There had been laudanum in the glasses, and it was on their lips and in their mouths and in their guts. Enough to kill both quickly, and several times over. Miss Marlowe had had poliomyelitis, and contrary to what people tell you, paralysis is not painless. She had been given laudanum by my father-in-law and by me, as needed. Until this spring she’d used it responsibly, no indications of addictions or abuse. But it’s as painless a death as you could wish for, if you have to go out. I can’t blame her for choosing it, and I saw no evidence that either one had forced drinking it on the other. No bruises about the mouth or tongue, none on the lips. Nothing else in their stomachs to arouse suspicion. Double suicide. That’s precisely what it was. No more, no less.”

  “Nothing in their stomachs to suggest that one might have secretly given an overdose to the other, before swallowing his or her own draught?”

  “It’s hard to introduce laudanum secretly into clear soup, spring lamb, roasted, vegetables and potatoes.”

  “People of their sort usually drank wine with meals, and coffee afterward.”

&
nbsp; “The state of digestion tells me that they lived for enough hours after their meal that it couldn’t have been in their wine or their coffee. I’d say they swallowed the laudanum some time after midnight. As if they’d sat up talking about it, and then decided to do it. Or possibly around dawn. They’d been dead for some time when Mrs. Trepol discovered them on Monday morning. Over twenty-four hours. Now my own meal is waiting, and if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and eat it. My advice to you is to return to London and do something useful there. There’s very little crime in a place like Borcombe. We haven’t needed the services of Scotland Yard in living memory, and I doubt if we will in the next twenty years!”

  Rutledge left the doctor’s office, thinking over what he’d been told that morning.

  Damn all, if you came right down to it!

  No crimes, no murderers, no reason for a seasoned Scotland Yard inspector to waste his time here.

  “But just what ye’re good for-nithing,” Hamish declared. “What if Warwickshire was only a bit of luck, and none of your doing? What if you failed there, and haven’t had the sense yet to see it? What if ye’re failing now, because you haven’t got the skills to tell whether there’s murder here or no? That house is haunted, man, and if you don’t find out why, ye’ll be defeated by your own fears!”

  After lunch at The Three Bells, Rutledge felt restless and uncertain. He told himself it had nothing to do with Hamish’s remarks, or the frustration he felt over where to turn next. Cormac FitzHugh had seemed to be so certain of his facts. Rachel Ashford was unsettled by the notion of murder being done, even though she’d called in the Yard herself. Hawkins was not cooperative, and the police in Borcombe had no reason to stir up the pot for murder, when their investigation had ended so creditably.

  He thought about it for several minutes, staring out his window towards the sea, then picked up his coat and went in search of the rectory. It stood four-square beside the church, gray stone with white trim at the windows and doors, but built more for long service than for beauty.

  The rector wasn’t in his office, but the housekeeper sent Rutledge around the back to where he was pottering about in his garden. It was a big garden, green and prosperous, with roses by the house and the scent of wall flowers coming from somewhere, sweet and elusive.

  The rector was middle-aged, a man more accustomed- from the look of him-to working in the ground than preaching from a pulpit. He straightened up when he saw Rutledge coming across the strip of lawn between the vegetables and the flowers. “Good afternoon,” he said, neither effusively nor coolly, but with the manner of a man who’d rather be about his own business just now than God’s.

  “Inspector Rutledge, from London,” he replied. “Mr. Smedley?”

  “Aye, that’s right,” the rector said with a sigh and put down his hoe.

  “No, keep working, if you like. I’d prefer to stay out here and talk than go inside.” The housekeeper, if he was any judge, had long ears. “It isn’t a matter for a priest so much as a question of information that I need.”

  “Well, then, if you don’t mind?” He picked up his hoe and began to chip at the weeds between rows of what appeared to be marigolds and asters next to a line of sweet peas.

  “I’m here because London has a few remaining questions about several deaths in May. At Trevelyan Hall.”

  The rector glanced at him with a smile. “So gossip was right this morning. And you’d hardly set foot in the place.”

  “Yes, but the questions I’m about to ask you aren’t for the ears of gossips. Good intentioned or ill. I want to know about the people who died. The woman and the two men. What they were like, how they lived, why they should die, so close together.”

  The rector’s back was to Rutledge now, as he turned to come down the other row. “Ah. Well, that’s a long story. Do you know much about the family?”

  “About the grandfather who owned the Hall. About the daughter who had three husbands and six children, only one of whom is still living. About the cousin. And about the stepson who lives in London and made his fortune. I could have learned all this from the shopkeepers and the housewives on their way to market. I need more. To satisfy London that all’s well.”

  “And why should London doubt that?”

  “The Home Office has been going through reports. They like to be thorough. Three deaths in one family in such a short time raises… doubts?”

  “None of those here, I can tell you that much! I don’t know of any questions raised when Olivia and Nicholas were discovered, nor any gossip that’s flown about since. And in a village like this, it’s your surest sign that all’s well. As for the death of Stephen FitzHugh, the man fell in an empty house, all the members of his party outside and accounted for. Unless you believe in ghosts, I don’t suppose there’s much to be suspicious of in that.”

  “Strange that you should mention ghosts,” Rutledge said idly. “I’m told the Hall is haunted. And not by anything that can be exorcised by the church.”

  The rector straightened again and looked at him. “Who has told you these tales?”

  “A Scotsman, for one,” Rutledge answered.

  The rector smiled. “They’re great ones for the Sight, the Scots. Has he also told you whether murder has been done?”

  Touche.

  “Has murder been done? Now-or in the far past?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” the rector said. “And I include the confessional in that answer. No one has confessed to me, and no gossip has reached me. The house has seen a good deal of sorrow in its time. But show me a house that hasn’t been touched by grief. Especially not with the war and the influenza epidemic. You’ll see the wounded for yourself. We were spared the sickness here-the worst of it, anyway. We lost only three souls to it. But even three is too many in a village this size.”

  “Tell me if you will how a woman like Olivia Marlowe, who was reclusive and knew very little of the outside world, could write such poetry?”

  He went back to his hoeing. “There’s a question only God can answer. But who says she knew very little of the world? I’ve read the poems. They speak to me of a frightening knowledge of the human condition. Of the human soul. And yet she never spoke of her writing to me. And I never asked her questions about it. Come to that, we only knew at the very end that she was O. A. Manning. It’d been kept a dark secret, even from her family. I’d say Nicholas knew, and that was it.”

  “But if she had such understanding and such spirit, why keep it secret?”

  “Well, Inspector, I take it you have no secrets-painful or otherwise-that you prefer to hide from the world? Not immoral secrets, not terrible secrets, perhaps, but those that wound your spirit?”

  Which was too damned close for comfort. Rutledge began to reassess his earlier opinion of the priest. Hamish was murmuring viciously, rubbing salt into the fresh wound. But then it was always fresh…

  “Her paralysis, then?’

  “She found it confining,” Smedley said pensively. “But never a cross to bear. What she feared most, I think, was to be judged on that account, and not on her work. You’ve read the literary magazines since the news broke, I suppose? Everyone scrambling to understand the woman, and not the verse. Delving into her life as if it held answers. Making an issue of her condition.”

  “Was she ugly? Misshapen? Did she not know how to dress well? To do her hair? Talk to people? Is that what she ran away from, and buried in her genius?”

  Mr. Smedley began to laugh before Rutledge finished his catalog. “I have a very poor opinion of the women you’ve known, Inspector, if that’s how you judge the fair sex! Even as a churchman I know better than that!”

  “Then describe her to me,” Rutledge said irritably.

  Smedley leaned on his hoe and looked op at the dormers of his house. “For one thing, her mother was beautiful. Rosamund. In Olivia, it came out in other ways. You found you couldn’t forget her, yet you couldn’t say why that was. She had lovely eyes, inherited from her father.
I suppose her strength may have come from him as well, although Rosamund had great strength too. Transport Olivia to London, and except for the useless limb, she’d not be that much different from any young woman you found there. She’d have had more than her share of beaus, if the men in the city had half the sense they were born with! No, Olivia wasn’t ugly or misshapen. She dressed like any other countrywoman. No floating scarves, none of those shiny black gowns or exotic feathers. No literary pretensions at all. A warm manner, a pleasant nature, but never serene. Serenity had not been granted to her.” He shrugged. “Her hair, always one of her glories, was darker than Rosamund’s, that shade of brown that turns to gold in the sunlight. More like her father’s. George Marlowe was a very fine man. Rosamund adored him, and she was bereft when he died in India. She told me herself that they feared for her health, and sanity, for a time. Her courage saw her through. And her faith.”

  Rutledge felt his confusion deepen. Did everyone see Olivia in a different light? And if they did, where was the real woman?

  “I was surprised when she took her life,” Smedley said after a moment. “Olivia. I wouldn’t have expected it of her. For Nicholas to follow her seemed-oddly-reasonable enough, I can’t tell you why, it just did. But for Olivia to die by her own hand-it shook me deeply. It was as if a bedrock from which I drew my own strength had suddenly been shaken to its roots and crumbled. I wept,” he said, as if that still surprised him and left him uncertain of himself. “I wept not only for myself and for her, but for what was lost, with her going. She was the most remarkable woman I’ve ever known. Or ever hope to know.”

  “And Nicholas?”

  “He was an enigma,” Smedley replied slowly. “In all the years I’d known him, I never really knew the man. He had great depths, great passion. A wonderful mind. We played chess and argued over the war and discussed politics. And I was never allowed behind the wall of his patience.”

  When Rutledge didn’t respond, Smedley added almost to himself, “I don’t know that Nicholas wasn’t my greatest failure…”