Watchers of Time

by Charles Todd

  Closer, Rutledge could see the strain on the haggard face, etched by the bright sunlight into deep and defensive lines. The dark hair was threaded with gray. It was an odd time of the afternoon to see a man sitting idle. . . .

  Rutledge passed him by, turning toward the hotel.

  As he entered the lobby, Mrs. Barnett stuck her head out of the tiny cubicle that served as her office. She smiled and said, “Inspector? There’s been a telephone message from London for you. Would you care to return it now?”

  It was a message from Sergeant Wilkerson, and after nearly three quarters of an hour of searching for the man, Wilkerson was located and instructed to contact Rutledge again.

  Wilkerson’s rough voice came down the line with such a roar that Rutledge had to hold the receiver away from his ear. The Sergeant was of the school that believed that shouting compensated for any small insufficiencies in the telephone system.

  “Chief Superintendent Bowles asked me to find you, sir. He wants you back in London as soon as may be.”

  “I’m involved with the investigation here—” Rutledge began defensively.

  “Yes, sir, he knows that. But we’ve found a body. Whether she’s connected with your murder or not, we can’t say. But the Chief Superintendent wants you to have a look.”

  Rutledge felt cold. There was no clear reasoning behind his reaction. But he was afraid to ask the name, afraid he might already know what it was. He’d only just heard it himself.

  Marianna Elizabeth Trent.

  Another dead end . . .

  Driving hard and fast, Rutledge reached London in the middle of the next morning. Stopping briefly at his flat to shave and change his clothes, he went in search of Sergeant Wilkerson at the Yard.

  They had not worked together very often. Wilkerson was Inspector Joyce’s man, and seldom free for other assignments. Joyce, in his mid-fifties, was a plodding but thorough policeman with no expectation of advancement and no desire for any. He had said, often enough, that policework and not paperwork was his pleasure, and the higher one goes, the deeper the tonnage of paper.

  Wilkerson greeted Rutledge with some surprise. “You must have driven all the night, sir. Would you care for a spot of tea brought up to your office?”

  “I did.” Hamish was all that had kept him awake on the road, after Colchester. And even Hamish had lost his edge on the outskirts of London. “Yes, send someone for tea, and then come upstairs.”

  The tea provided by the Yard was black and strong enough to cope with any man’s drowsiness, coating the stomach with an unspeakable sludge that held the body upright for hours.

  A few minutes later, Wilkerson stepped into Rutledge’s office and took the chair by the door. He waited until the constable on his heels had delivered Rutledge’s tea before beginning his report.

  The Sergeant was as big as his voice, florid of face with thinning sandy hair and a double chin that overlapped the collar of his uniform, giving the impression he was on the brink of choking to death. A man who had come up through the ranks but bore no malice toward Rutledge, who had come from a very different background.

  He began his report diffidently. “About this woman, sir. It was the usual thing. One of the boats on the river found her; can’t say whether she went in by accident or design. Bloated but hadn’t been there long enough for the fish to get at her. There were some bruises, but nothing to signify anything more than the tossing she’d taken in the water. The problem was identification.”

  Rutledge, swallowing his tea with a grimace, nodded. Identification of the corpse was the first order of police work.

  “She had none on her—no letters or papers or the like—and she didn’t match any of our missing persons records. We advertised more than a week for information. Then a woman who keeps a boardinghouse walked into a local station and reported that a lodger had skipped without paying her rent, and wanted her found. Right balmy old bitch, I’m told, arrogant and demanding. But the Sergeant on duty remembered the description of our lass, and soon enough they had the landlady down at the morgue. She couldn’t have identified the body—she only gave it a glance—but she did say the hair was right. We showed her the clothes the deceased was found in, but she wasn’t what you’d call certain what the lodger was wearing the last time she’d gone out. Or whether she could have been provided a new wardrobe by any gentleman she had taken up with. But the landlady did fling another fit about not getting her money, which made Inspector Joyce suspect she must be fairly sure it was the missing woman.”

  Rutledge asked, before Wilkerson could put a name to the corpse, “Any trouble with her before? The landlady?”

  “None, except for the occasional lodger who disappears with back rent owing. Then she’s demanding the police earn their keep. She gets a class of women who aren’t steadily employed, if you take my meaning.”

  “Why did Chief Superintendent Bowles think the dead woman might be connected with the murder in Norfolk?”

  “Stands to reason, doesn’t it? The lass worked as a shill for an Italian bloke who—the landlady claims—died in the War. Then she spent the better part of the summer with a Strong Man’s show, called himself Samson. Your man Walsh, it appears. Landlady remembers when he came to collect her, because of his size. They had a few words, did the landlady and this Iris Kenneth, on parting. But Mrs. Rollings took her back again when the Strong Man was tired of her!”

  Iris Kenneth, then. With no connection to Father James . . .

  After a visit to the morgue to look at the body and the woman’s clothing, Rutledge went with Sergeant Wilkerson to the small boardinghouse on a run-down street where Londoners with thin pockets often took rooms. It was just off Eustace Road, where industry had crowded out anyone who could afford to move on. Mrs. Rollings was plump, with tightly curled black hair, a pinched mouth, and an air of long-suffering. When Wilkerson introduced Rutledge to her, she looked him up and down, then said, bristling, “It doesn’t do my establishment any good to have a policeman at the door every other day! This is a respectable house.”

  Rutledge smiled. “I’m sure it is.” She thawed visibly as the smile touched his eyes. “We’ve come to ask if you still have Iris Kenneth’s belongings.”

  “Lord love you, why should I have kept them? Didn’t bring in much, I can tell you, not near enough to pay what I was owed. And I needed the room.”

  She looked up and down the street with the same suspicious air with which she’d regarded Rutledge, and then stepped back from the door. “Do come inside, before I have to explain to half the neighborhood why I’m entertaining the police again!”

  They followed her into a musty entry, where a flight of worn stairs ran up into darkness. The windowless entry itself was nearly as dark, for the glass panes in the door didn’t cast light beyond the first step, and the lamp was turned so low that it had long since given up trying to illuminate anything but the small circle of brightness on the gray ceiling and the first landing. Mrs. Rollings opened a door on her left, and led them into her sitting room.

  It was surprisingly comfortable, if shabby. There were odds and ends of porcelain on the mantelpiece, including a demure shepherdess with a leering satyr at her shoulder. The juxtaposition of the pieces was nearly lewd. Rutledge wondered if it exemplified Mrs. Rollings’s sense of humor or the tastes of her guests. Prints on the other two walls were of theatrical productions, one Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet and the other a popular act in the music halls some twenty years ago. Mrs. Rollings herself wore rouge that stood out like two fever spots under the powder, and her hair was dyed. The jeweled rings on her plump fingers were cheap paste, one of them large enough to have poison secreted in it. Rutledge’s opinion was that it might have once been a prop in an Italian play.

  She offered them the horsehair settle, and the two men sat gingerly side by side on the stiff upholstery. It smelled of dust and old dog. She herself took a very pretty wing chair covered with a faded but handsome brocade. On the table at her elbow was a collect
ion of shells and a number of pottery jugs with the names of seaside towns painted on them. Where her guests had worked?

  Hamish, his Covenanter soul offended by anything remotely smacking of the godless theatrical world Mrs. Rollings inhabited, declared, “She’s no’ going to give you an honest answer! It isna’ in her nature.”

  “We’ll see,” Rutledge told him. Aloud he asked, “Did you like Miss Kenneth?”

  “What has liking got to do with it?” She stared at him, genuinely surprised. “As long as my guests pay me on time and in full, I like them very well.”

  “Was she a clever girl?”

  “She was pretty. She thought that would take her far. But not far enough if she ended up in the river.” Mrs. Rollings leaned forward. “Now what was this about Iris’s belongings?” There was an avaricious glint in her eyes.

  “Do you know if she might have owned a pair of old shoes, a man’s, with a worn heel and a tear in the sole?”

  Mrs. Rollings’s eyebrows rose almost to her hairline. “Old shoes? Men’s shoes?”

  “Yes. We’d like very much to know if she possessed such a pair.” Realizing that the concept was totally foreign to his hostess, Rutledge added, “Perhaps from some role or other.”

  Wilkerson, stolid and silent, was looking around the room as if he expected to find something nasty hidden behind the wallpaper.

  “Well, I should think not! She wasn’t the kind of girl who played in farce—she didn’t have the talent for it! It was more in her line to stand there looking respectable and drawing custom. She was quite lovely in green. You’d have thought her a lady, if she didn’t open her mouth.” Lovely was pronounced as luuvley.

  Wilkerson said, “Then you are telling us that no such shoes were found in her belongings?”

  “None that I know of! And I was fairly careful in searching through them.”

  “Would another—er—guest have searched them before you did?” the Sergeant continued.

  “Here! There’s no stealing in my house.”

  “No, surely not,” Rutledge soothed. “But if you come across old shoes like those I’ve described—even in an unexpected place—will you send a message to Sergeant Wilkerson here?”

  “Is there a reward for what you want to know?” she asked sharply.

  “No. But it will be in the public interest.”

  Her expression informed him what she thought of the public interest.

  Hamish had been right. Rutledge stood up, and Wilkerson lumbered to his feet as well.

  “You’ve been most helpful, Mrs. Rollings. Thank you for your time.”

  She regarded them warily, uncertain if it was truly old shoes that had brought the police around. “There’s nothing else you wanted to know about her things?”

  “Only if she’d pinched any of them,” Wilkerson answered.

  That silenced Mrs. Rollings. Anything nice enough to have been stolen had already found its way to the next owner or a shop dealing in secondhand goods, no questions asked.

  She saw them out with poor grace, and shut the door on their heels.

  Sergeant Wilkerson laughed. “She’s a right old besom, but there are any number on the street like her.” He gestured in either direction at houses no better kept than hers, their paint peeling and roofs showing stains from years of damp. “But they serve a purpose. Many a pretty girl who went out to seek her fame and fortune would be lucky to wind up here, and not selling herself in the stews. There’s not been a lot of work for this lot, what with the War and all, but they’ve managed to survive. Somehow they always do. This Iris Kenneth would have had an eye for the main chance.”

  “And yet she ended her life in the river.”

  Rutledge compared the street here with Osterley, where prosperity had slipped away but dignity and resourcefulness had kept up appearances.

  “Well,” Sergeant Wilkerson added as he turned to walk back to Rutledge’s motorcar, “it wasn’t much to go on, but you never know.”

  The epitaph of police work, Rutledge thought.

  “Yes,” he answered. “But I’d give much to know if Iris Kenneth was pushed, or was desperate enough to throw herself into the water.”

  “You think that man Walsh might have wanted to be rid of her?”

  “It’s possible. If she helped him rob the priest’s house. Or she may have been working for someone else with a better reason to kill her than Walsh had. The Iris Kenneths of this world seldom live to old age.” Although Mrs. Rollings had. It depended, he thought, whether the woman was clever or naive. Whether she could protect herself or was destined to be a victim.

  He started the motorcar and stepped up behind the wheel. “I’ll be going back to Norfolk,” he told Wilkerson. “Will you pass that message to Chief Superintendent Bowles? And if there’s any more information about this Iris Kenneth or her death, I want to know about it.”

  “Aye, I’ll see to that,” the Sergeant promised. He sighed. “I never fancied drowning, myself. I’d look to a quicker way of dying.”

  “My first Inspector told me that women preferred drowning because it didn’t hurt and it didn’t mar the face. When I saw my first corpse from the river, I knew he was wrong. We never identified her. No one could have.”

  Rutledge went to his flat and slept for two hours, then headed north again. But when he reached Colchester, he pulled into the dark yard of the Rose and Crown and slept until dawn. It was nearly dinnertime when he reached Osterley. The muscles in his chest ached, and his stomach rebelled at the thought of a formal meal at the hotel. After washing up, he walked down to The Pelican.

  The cool night air, with its tang of the sea and the earthy scent of the marshes, welcomed him like an old friend.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE PELICAN WAS BUSY WITH THE dinner hour, noisy with voices and laughter and the rattle of dishes, and crowded with local people. The bar had a line of patrons leaning on their elbows and talking to or over each other. One seated on a wooden stool held a little gray-and-white dog in his lap. The tables near the windows were occupied by small groups of diners already served or waiting their turn.

  Among them was the woman he had seen at the church two days ago—was it only two?—sitting with several men and another woman, just finishing their soup.

  They were deeply immersed in their conversation and no one looked up as Rutledge walked past. He took a small table nearer the bar, where he would feel less confined by the press of people. The tiny island of space around him was a welcomed relief. Hamish, sensing his unease, argued warily for a return to the hotel.

  “For it willna’ do to make a scene here!”

  “I won’t,” Rutledge answered shortly. But he could feel himself tensing as more customers came in, one group searching for a table, a smaller one heading for the bar, hailed warmly by friends. As he watched them pass, he noticed in the back corner, occupied with a newspaper, the man he’d seen at the quay feeding the ducks and, another time, here alone in the same seat. Crowded as the room was, no one asked to sit with him.

  The man had the air of a fixture at The Pelican, as permanent as the bench on which he sat and the table braced and nailed to the wall.

  The strained face was bent over the opened paper, and neither Betsy nor the older couple helping her serve took any heed of him. He’d ordered tea, for there was a pot and a cup by his elbow. As if sensing Rutledge’s glance, his knuckles seemed to tighten on the page, crimping it.

  Hamish said derisively, “He’s no’ a verra’ popular man. No doubt you’ll find you have much in common.”

  “God save him, then!” Rutledge answered silently.

  Betsy finally stopped at Rutledge’s little table, her manner more formal than it had been the first day he had arrived in the village. “Good evening, Inspector. Are you wishing to dine or could I bring you something from the bar?”

  No longer “What would you like, love?” Rutledge smiled. “What would you recommend for dinner?” he asked her.

  “You’re fo
rtunate tonight,” she said. “There’s a roast of chicken with dumplings and potatoes, and I can tell you, there’s nothing like it this side of London!”

  Rutledge felt an unexpected surge of sympathy for the woman in a book he’d once read, who had been branded with an A for Adulteress. Everyone in Osterley knew more of his business than he knew of theirs. He’d been branded with an O for Outsider—no longer the visitor who was benign, no longer the anonymous traveler who could ask questions and expect an honest answer. There was neither coldness nor rudeness in their manner, only a formality that precluded any expectation of breaking through it.

  How long, he wondered, did it take a man to reach the status of “one of ours” in this village? For a policeman who hadn’t been born here, perhaps never. For a passing stranger there was welcome and courtesy. For an intruder, only suspicion. And yet Father James had come to be one of theirs. . . .

  He chose the chicken with dumplings and ordered a pint to go with it.

  Although he tried to keep his eyes away from the table by the window and to stop himself from speculating about the relationships of the four people sitting there, Rutledge caught himself glancing that way from time to time. The woman had a quiet vivacity, and seemed to be comfortable with both men. It emphasized the formality she had displayed toward him on the few occasions when they’d spoken.

  A stranger even among strangers . . .

  He turned slightly to change his line of sight. Indirectly now, he could see the lonely man sitting in the corner. He served only to reflect Rutledge’s own isolation. Hamish had struck a chord with his words.

  As Rutledge watched, the man’s hands began to tremble, and he hastily shoved them out of sight under the table, dropping the newspaper as if it had burned him. Shell shock?

  Rutledge shuddered, Hamish suddenly aware and challenging in his mind. He himself had so narrowly escaped from that horror. And the fierce agony of it still haunted him. To be shell-shocked was to be publicly branded a coward—a man unfit to be mentioned in the same breath as the soldier with a missing limb or shot-away jaw. A shame—a disgrace. Not an honorable wound but the mark of failure as a man. He himself had been caged with the screaming, shaking, pathetic remnants of humanity in a clinic that kept them shut firmly away from the public eye. Until Dr. Fleming had rescued him.