Wings of Fire ir-2

by Charles Todd

  “Rutledge?” the stranger demanded. “Inspector Rutledge?”

  “I’m Rutledge, yes.”

  “Inspector Harvey,” the man retorted with equal curtness. “I’ve come to speak to you.”

  Swearing silently at the timing of Harvey’s unexpected appearance-splitting headaches were not the frame of mind in which to conduct painstaking interviews with choleric Cornishmen -Rutledge led the way to the small parlor, where today sunlight tried fretfully to light the gloom. “We can have privacy here,” he said, holding open the door. And advantage to me, on my own ground, he thought to himself. It appeared that he well might have need of it.

  Harvey followed, still huffing from the stairs.

  He was a bluff man, neither tall nor short, but heavy in build, with a red complexion and thinning dark hair. There was an air of having his own way about him, as if on his own ground he was used to being heeded, and his advice or instructions followed. There couldn’t be, Rutledge thought to himself, many police matters in this pan of Cornwall which might draw the attention of London. What there was in the way of crime and mischief would be comfortably divided between the police and the local magistrates.

  In short, tread carefully.

  “I’m glad to meet you finally,” Rutledge said, holding out his hand. Harvey looked pointedly at it and walked on into the room, refusing to take it.

  “Finally is the key word here, isn’t it?” he asked, keeping his voice flat.

  “You were in Plymouth when I came. And you’ve only just returned, I think. Dawlish told me you were somewhere on the moors, talking to a farmer about wild dogs attacking his domestic animals.”

  “So I was. It doesn’t mean I’m blind to what’s happening. I don’t like strangers meddling on my patch. Not without my keeping an eye on them or having regular reports from them to keep me in the picture. Looks bad when I know less than my constable, and less than London. I don’t see what’s wrong with our initial investigation into the three deaths in question, and I don’t see why you haven’t long since come and gone with a clean bill of health on my desk to clear the air in Borcombe.”

  “As a matter of fact, nothing appears to be wrong with your initial inquiries. I believe that Stephen FitzHugh died as you said he did. In a fall. It’s the other deaths that interest me. And I accept them as suicides.”

  “Just because Miss Marlowe turned out to be famous? Is that’s what this is in aid of? Sending a detective inspector all this way? Playing merry hell with my reputation and her family’s reputation, all to suit the wigs in London who realized too late they’d missed the opportunity of seeing their names in the Times in connection with her death? Or are you in fact looking for a wee success to set off the Yard’s regrettable failure to stop this knife-wielding idiot on the loose in London? Oh, yes, I’ve seen the papers-nobody has a clue! Now the local people tell me you’re trying to find a link down here with Master Richard Cheney, the boy lost on the moors. Ridiculous doesn’t cover it!”

  “That’s because what you hear from your own people is not in any way the point of my investigation. But if that’s what they’d prefer to think, then I’d prefer to let them.”

  Harvey all but snorted. “What I’m asking you, man, is to tell me what you’re after, not what you want the villagers to believe!” Harvey was feeding on his own sense of betrayal, letting it fuel his anger. It was a technique used sometimes by men wanting their own way-make life unpleasant enough for the other party, and he’d be too busy defending himself to attack.

  Rutledge considered his own tactics, then said, “Nicholas Cheney had a brother who’s been missing since he was five. We presently have no way of knowing if the boy is dead or alive. If alive, he may be an heir. If dead, there’s a possibility it wasn’t accidental. That he was deliberately murdered.”

  “By whom, pray? And if the family was concerned about him still being alive after the search was called off and the posters brought in no responses, or later was wanting to know something more about his death, why didn’t they come to my predecessor? Or to me?”

  “Would you have listened? Or would you have assured them they could safely believe what they’d rather believe, that the boy died of simple exposure? Any new search was bound to lead to the same conclusion.”

  Harvey bristled. “I don’t tell comfortable lies, whatever you’re used to in London. And I know how to conduct a search.”

  “I’m sure you don’t tell comfortable lies,” Rutledge agreed. “And given the facts at your disposal, where would you start searching? From what I can see, there was very little evidence of foul play, unless some passing gypsies carried the boy off, or someone wandering on the moors stumbled on him and killed him for reasons of his own. And the officer in charge examined those possibilities very thoroughly at the time Richard went missing. Even when you took over here, you had no reason to suspect more than some sort of tragic accident. What has changed now is the way we’re looking at the disappearance, and that in itself may prove to be the key.”

  “And what is that, pray? He wandered off during a family picnic. And was lost. And is long dead, most likely, because the moors are unforgiving. Why should I have raised false hopes? And as to the present cases, would it have prevented Miss Olivia Marlowe from taking her own life? Or Mr. Nicholas from doing the same? Would it have straightened Mr. Stephen’s cracked neck? I think not!” His own neck was red to his collar with the power of his anger.

  “No. But it might have righted a very old wrong. It might have revealed secrets that the family itself didn’t know the answers to. It might make it clearer to us whose will took precedence, and at what time. Who has the right to sell Tre-velyan Hall, and who has none.”

  “It was my understanding-still is-that Miss Olivia and Mr. Nicholas had nearly identical wills. In that event, I don’t quite see legal quibbling over which is which. And I can tell you that Mr. Nicholas was a very straightforward man, very able, concerned about his responsibilities to the church and the village. Fought in the war, did his duty like the gentleman he was-”

  Hamish, interrupting, wanted to know what being a gentleman had to do with fighting in France. Rutledge ignored him.

  “-and in my opinion had long ago put to rest the question of his brother’s death. Never spoke of it to me in the past fifteen years. And never spoke to my predecessor about it either, or it’d have been in the record. Which leaves us with Miss Olivia, and I don’t know that I’d put much past her!”

  It was so different from any other comments he’d heard about Olivia that Rutledge was surprised.

  Harvey smiled with sour satisfaction. ‘‘We’re not all clods here in the wilds of Cornwall, whatever London may have led you to believe.”

  “No one has suggested that you might be,” Rutledge said, moving with great care now. “Tell me what reasons you have to back up your opinion.”

  “Read her books, man! My wife is a decent woman, she’d never so much as feel or think what Miss Marlowe thought fit to put down baldly in print! It’s unwomanly and disturbing. A mind capable of such immodesty is in my estimation capable of the worst in human degradation.”

  He’d spoken with such venom that Rutledge found himself wondering what Olivia had done to raise Harvey’s hackles. He thought he knew. She’d been Miss Marlowe of the Hall, quiet and unassuming, someone he could patronize, the cripple who was content to be seldom seen and not often heard. A tidy round peg in her tidy round hole, like Mrs. Harvey. And then the truth about O. A. Manning had come out, and Harvey had been made to look or feel a fool for misjudging her. That would be unforgivable, and he’d judge her with a vengeance now. Rutledge quelled the urge to rise to Olivia’s defense, his own temper held on a tight rein.

  Harvey had already moved on to his next grievance. “Now tell me what this new evidence you spoke of might be. Those rags they found out on the moors? You’ll never prove they belonged to the boy. Could have been put there any time in the years before or since. Don’t they teach you your
business in London?”

  “Quite well,” Rutledge said through his teeth. “And I intend to continue going about it until I’m satisfied.”

  Harvey was furious, but something about the other man’s voice, the steel in it, the natural air of command that came with years in France, made him stop short and reexamine his opponent. His first impression had been of an ill, weary man with no stamina for the course. Someone who could be bullied and sent back to London with his tail between his legs. Stake your ground, wield your temper like a club, and he’d soon apologize and be off.

  Instead he’d come up against hard core, and more experience than he’d expected. Harvey tried to think if he’d heard the name Rutledge before in connection with any of the major cases the Yard had handled. It rattled him more that he couldn’t. Knowing what Rutledge might be capable of gave him more range to push. Not knowing left him in pitch dark on a steep cliff.

  Rutledge, meanwhile, was making his own assessment. Of a man who did his job thoroughly and properly, but lacked imagination to do it cleverly. That was going to matter a great deal.

  After a swift, appraising silence, both men moved to chairs and sat down, as if the confrontation was finished and the conference begun.

  As a form of peace offering, Rutledge said, “Apart from your natural disinclination to see a case opened again for no sound reason-and I understand that, I’d dislike it myself- were you quite serious when you said that Miss Marlowe was capable of anything? Any degradation. Would you for instance include murder in that list?”

  And then Harvey surprised him a second time by vacillating. “Yes and no.”

  “If you discount her poetry, and her reputation there, what gave you the feeling that she was different?” Or was it all hindsight, the willingness to believe that Olivia hadn’t hoodwinked him completely.. .

  Mulling it over, Harvey said, “It was not something I could put my finger on, mind you. It was more her interest in the subject of crime that made me uneasy. People, most especially women, don’t think to ask the questions she asked, unless there’s worry in the mind, or fear. Or even depravity. Now in a pub talking to a man about my work, I’ll be asked a hundred questions, from how I know I’ve got the right miscreant to whether I’ve watched a hanging. That’s different, it’s curiosity, the same as he’d ask an undertaker or even a glassblower about his trade. Idle conversation. You can tell the man knows naught about it, and you could give him lies and he’d be just as satisfied.”

  Rutledge nodded. The farmers and tradesmen and lorry drivers he’d fought with had often found it odd to be in the same trench as a policeman. As if he viewed all mankind with innate suspicion. Expecting the worst.

  “So it was different when Miss Olivia asked me what made a man take another man’s life. What goaded him, whether he was evil by birth and nature or only caught up in a web of happenstance he couldn’t fight his way clear of. Whether murdering ran in families or wasn’t inheritable.” He paused. Rutledge realized that Harvey had kept this conversation buried deep inside himself for a very long time. And was only reluctantly revealing it now. Because he was a fair man, whatever he lacked in cleverness. “Whether a murderer could truly repent and change. And her as fair and innocent looking as the day she were bom! I didn’t know about the poetry, not then, but I can tell you it gave me the willies, because she was that intense I knew it wasn’t idle talk, meeting the new man in charge and making polite noises about his job. She wanted-she wanted something more. And I couldn’t have told you on peril of my life what it was.”

  “Knowing about murder isn’t the same as killing. A victim’s family may understand it better than the murderer himself.” If Nicholas had been the killer, Olivia would have felt it deep in her very bones.

  “Aye, that’s true. But once I read some of her verse, now, I knew it was inside that woman, and not something she’d happened to think of, meeting me on the road, like. That last book has one poem in it that kept me sleepless of nights for nearly a week. The sheer cruelty of it. I don’t recollect what it’s called, but I’m not likely to forget how it started:

  ‘Murderer I am, of little things, small griefs, Treasures of the heart.

  Of bodies and of souls I have takenAll that is there to give, Life’s blood, the spirit’s wealth. And these secrets I keep locked away, For my own joy and your pain.’

  Not what Mrs. Browning might write, or even that Rossetti woman.”

  “No,” Rutledge said quietly, considering possible treasures of the heart. Those small golden trophies of a death.

  “Are you thinking she killed that boy? Good God! She was hardly more than a child herself!”

  “You said you believed she was capable of murder.”

  Harvey looked at him, mind working, mind sorting, but not coming up with anything he could put into words.

  “Aye, that’s true enough, in the heat of the moment I felt it could be so. But it’s different when you have a face to put to someone she may’ve killed…” He shook his head. “We don’t get many child murderers in these parts. I wasn’t that fond of the woman, but it’s another matter saying she was one. She was different. That was her problem. She was… different.” There was something in his eyes that pleaded for Rutledge to understand what he was trying to say. That whatever Olivia Marlowe was, by its very extraordinariness she was outside the realm of his comprehension, and therefore suspect, even if he couldn’t condemn her for a specific crime. Capable of anything.

  “When did this discussion with Olivia take place?”

  “Oh, long before the war. I’d just arrived in Borcombe. I didn’t know her mother, the one they still call Miss Rosamund, that everyone was so fond of, and I knew only that Miss Olivia was one of the family up at the Hall. Her and her brother, and the two younger ones, the twins.”

  “How did you answer her?”

  “I had to tell her the truth as I saw it. That the darkness in the human soul was something I’d never come to understand in my years of policing but I believed it to be beyond healing. That struck her as sad, I could see it in her eyes. And then she said, ‘Do families believe you, when you tell them a son-or a daughter-is guilty of murder?’ I said, ‘They’re often the last to believe,’ and she nodded as if she understood, and thanked me for my time, and walked away.” When Rutledge made no answer, Harvey added, “Not a natural conversation to have with a young woman, would you say?”

  He wanted reassurance. He wanted to believe that Olivia and not he himself had been out of line. He didn’t want to think that she had had a guilt on her conscience, had turned to the figure of authority in Borcombe, and been rejected because he had somehow failed to understand her. Rutledge wondered if she’d brought this up before, with Harvey’s predecessor, or the rector before Smedley. And found no absolution for the burden she carried.

  Which meant in turn that Rutledge was not going to confide in Harvey either. Not until he was sure of his ground. It would be wasted breath, and if he, Rutledge, turned out to be wrong, the damage as Rachel had pointed out, and Cormac as well, could be enormous.

  And so, in pacification, Rutledge said, “To the end of the week, then. I’ll continue the search for the boy, I’ll continue my questions, and then if I have no more to go on than I have now, I’ll come to you and confer.”

  “Find him or not, mark my words, the lad is dead.”

  The innkeeper, Trask, brought a tray and a pot of coffee to Rutledge in his room and made a show of setting the cup within reach, putting out the sugar bowl and small pitcher of milk, refolding the napkin that had covered the thick sandwiches. Affably mentioning Harvey’s visit, he showed all the signs of a man prepared to linger and gossip.

  For once Rutledge preferred the innkeeper’s opinions to the silence of his own thoughts. Or Hamish’s.

  “A good man, we’ve had no complaint of him, keeps the peace and is fair-minded. The magistrates seem to think well of him too, from what I hear. Thorough, that’s the reputation they give him.” Disappointed
when Rutledge didn’t take the hint and offer his own views on the local constabulary, Trask reminisced for a time about the Trevelyan family, leaving the impression that The Three Bells had been the center of social life for generations of them. Rutledge swallowed that with his first cup of coffee, and a grain of salt.

  Then something the innkeeper was saying caught his attention. “And of course her mother was the old nanny there. That’s the reason Miss Rachel prefers the cottage to the inn.”

  “Are you telling me that the Trevelyan nanny is still alive?” He felt a surge of wrath that no one-least of all Rachel-had seen fit to tell him that.

  “Lord, no, she’d be near ninety, wouldn’t she! Polworth, her name was, she’d been nanny to Miss Rosamund, then married and had a daughter of her own, Mary, and when Mary was off to school, she went back to the Hall to care for Mr. Stephen and Miss Susannah. Only ever had the one child herself. Mr. Polworth died of the consumption early on. Mary Otley, the daughter is now. Husband was killed out in Africa, place called Mafeking.”

  “Soldier?”

  “God save you, sir, no, he were a missionary. His death took the heart out of Mary, and she came home. Wasn’t her cup of tea, so to speak, preaching to the heathen, suffering from dysentery and them big flies, and water not fit to drink-”

  “Thank you, Trask,” Rutledge said, cutting him off. Trask wasted another few minutes filling his tray with the empty dishes, brushing away crumbs, leaving the pot of coffee, as if hoping for another opening. But he got none and soon took the hint.

  Afterward, Rutledge sat there and listened to the birds singing outside his window in the ruined garden, laying his plans carefully.