Wings of Fire

by Charles Todd

  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.

  “Now you know why I’d stoop to any threat to protect what I’ve told you.”

  “You’ve told me, but you haven’t convinced me,” Rut-ledge heard himself saying.

  FitzHugh got up and went to the lacquered cabinet against the wall that led to the hall, and opened it. Rummaging around inside, he found two glasses and a cut-glass decanter of whiskey. “I don’t know about you, but I need this.” He held up the second glass, raising his eyebrows.

  Rutledge nodded. Talking as he poured the whiskey and added soda, FitzHugh said, “I think she killed Nicholas. That it was a murder and suicide, not a double suicide. I don’t see Nicholas cravenly taking the easy way out. She must have tricked him. Although, to be truthful, the gassing left him with a cough and rawness in his lungs. He may, for the first time, have really understood the pain that Olivia felt all those years. I don’t know. It’s hard to fathom. I have to believe it was suicide, but I can’t help but feel, when I’m honest about it, that she planned his dying. Whatever he himself decided in the end, she was prepared to take him with her. She’d never been alone. It may be that she couldn’t bear to be alone in death. Who knows what was in her mind.”

  He brought the whiskey and soda to Rutledge and sat down with his own, taking a long draught as if to dull the pain. Rutledge drank a little of his, waiting, looking at the room again, this time seeing the Chinese silk on the walls, the lovely proportions of the fireplace, the molded medallions on the ceiling. The polished wood of the floors, dark now and lifeless. As Olivia was lifeless. None of this could touch her. But there was still her reputation . . .

  “I do know for a fact—for a fact, mind you, although there’s no proof whatsoever—that Olivia killed her twin sister Anne. Anne died at eight, fell from an apple tree where we were all playing. I wasn’t part of the family then, my father had come here with horses he’d sold to Rosamund. Rosamund Cheney, she was, her second marriage. Her first husband, Captain Marlowe, died out in India. Cholera, when he went back to wind up his affairs out there. She married a close friend of his, James Cheney. At any rate, Nicholas was a child at the time I’m talking about, his brother Richard still in leading strings. We’d all gone out to the orchard to play, and I started climbing trees, throwing down apples. They don’t grow very well here, small and sour, but as children we didn’t care. Olivia said she’d climb as well, and found a tree of her own.”

  He swirled the whiskey in his glass, staring at it as if it might have more answers than he did. “I was still in the other tree when Anne climbed up after Olivia. Nicholas was just under their tree, holding on to the trunk and looking up at them—probably wishing he could do the same, but his legs were too short to reach the first branch. Anne was—sometimes stubborn. Spoiled a little, I think. She reached the branch where Olivia was sitting and said, “These are my apples now, you must find another tree.”

  Looking at Rutledge again, he said, “Olivia refused. She was never one to give way when it was wrong. ‘That’s not fair,’ she’d say, and stick to her guns through whatever battle followed. I admired her for that ...”

  “What happened?” Rutledge asked, as he stopped again. “Get on with it, man!”

  “They argued, Anne insisted. And Olivia shoved her out of the tree. She hit a branch coming down, that’s wha
t saved Nicholas. But it tipped her on her head, and when she struck the tree trunk’s main root, which was just showing above the grass, it fractured her skull.” He shivered. “God! When I saw Stephen lying at the foot of the stairs, I thought he’d done the same thing!” He drank more of his whiskey, then said, “I was out of the tree I’d climbed in an instant, skinning both knees as I came down, though I didn’t remember that until much later. And I got to Anne first. She was dead. I looked up at Olivia, and she stared back down at me. There was nothing in her face. I was the hireling’s son then, the horse trainer’s brat. I played with them, I ate with them sometimes, but I wasn’t one of them. So I ran for help and never told what I’d seen. Just that Anne had fallen while we were climbing.”

  “You never spoke of it to your father?”

  “He was already besotted with Rosamund Cheney. He wouldn’t have believed me—that one of her precious daughters could have killed the other one? He’d have called me a troublemaker and boxed my ears, instead. The lucky thing is, Anne didn’t fall on Nicholas. There might have been two deaths that day, instead of one. They were both some distance up, she and Olivia. It was a long way to fall.”

  “I thought Olivia was crippled. How is it that she could climb so high?”

  “She was. But the bad leg followed her, braced her, as her arms pulled her higher into the tree. Coming down again was more of a problem. But Olivia wasn’t one to—to be denied a normal life. We pushed her chair everywhere, to the water’s edge, to the orchard, to the cliff. Down to the village, sometimes.”

  “An interesting story. But as you said, there’s no proof.”

  “No. It could still do a great deal of harm, all the same. And there’s Richard.”

  “The one in leading strings?”

  “Yes, that’s right. He was lost on the moors when he was five. There was a family picnic, and he and Olivia went for a walk. She came back without him, and although we searched until dark and again through the night, with lamps brought from the nearest houses, we never found him. Or his body. He had simply disappeared.”

  “And you think Olivia killed him, somehow hiding the body?”

  “God knows. Speculation was rampant. Some said the gypsies had taken him. He was a handsome child, very fair and more like Rosamund than Nicholas, who was dark. Others believed he’d fallen down one of the old mine shafts. The point is, Olivia had walked away with him and Olivia came back without him. He may have wandered into one of those bottomless pools on the moors. Or he may have been thrown in. The pool nearest the picnic was dragged, with no luck. I wouldn’t have thought about Olivia killing him—if I hadn’t been a witness to Anne’s death. And that left only the two, you see, Olivia Marlowe and Nicholas Cheney. James Cheney died soon afterward. Cleaning his guns. That was the verdict at the inquest. I often wondered if it was grief over Richard that made him careless. He was distraught—they had to lash him to a horse to get him off the moors. Rosamund, Rosamund was always a pillar of strength. I’ll never forget her tramping through the darkness, lamp in hand, determined, silent, tears on her face, but not a single word did she speak. I went with her. I thought if anyone could find the boy, she might. She had this streak of—I don’t know—intuition. She hadn’t wanted to go on the picnic, but there were guests from Wells, and James thought it would please them. That haunted him to the end.”

  “There’s still no proof,” Rutledge said, as Hamish took up the theme of intuition. Rutledge had nearly lost his own in the aftermath of war and in the struggle to regain his balance. Now he fought against the deep voice in his head, reminding him of the last time he’d used that intuition. Warwickshire. Not a time he wanted to dwell on. Instead, he said to FitzHugh, “You tell me these things, but they could all be lies. Someone else could have done the killings. Or they could have been accidents, misfortunes, not murder.”

  FitzHugh drained his glass, then rose to set it on the mantelpiece. “As you say. But for God’s sake, man, bear it in mind, what I’ve told you. And don’t be the hero, don’t drag Olivia Marlowe or O. A. Manning or any of the rest of us through the tribulations of exposure. If I’m right, and Nicholas died at Olivia’s hand, let it go down as suicide. Can you do that much for us?”

  “And Stephen FitzHugh? Your half brother?”

  “He lost half of his foot in the war. He fell down worn stairs. But it was my fault, if you want the truth. When he stuck his head out the window to say that he would be no more than five minutes, I was impatient, I had a train to catch, and I told him that he’d damned well better make haste or we were leaving without him. And he did make haste. And he died. I’m still waking up at night in a cold sweat, trying to call back those words.”

  “But he was the only family member who was against selling the house, as I understand it. Now it can be sold without any problems.”

  “And I’m very likely to buy it,” Cormac FitzHugh said, reaching for Rutledge’s empty glass and setting it beside his own. “That’s what brought me down this morning. I’d toyed with the idea. I’m looking for a house in the country, but I was thinking of something closer to town than this. Now I feel guilty about the house as well. Letting it go out of the family. I can’t follow Stephen’s plan, I can’t turn it into a museum for O. A. Manning—God, the scholars would have a field day if they stumbled over what I’ve just told you! Olivia would not only be famous, she’d be notorious.”

  Rutledge stood up. “Which window did your brother call from, before he fell?”

  FitzHugh stared at him blankly. “Which window? It was from the room that had been Father’s. To the right of the stairs. Do you want to see it?”

  “No, that’s not necessary. Not this morning. I’ve taken enough of your time. I’ve work to do in the village. Will you be staying here? In the house?”

  “If I can find Mrs. Trepol and persuade her to make up my room.” He grinned. “I’m not useful in that regard. Horses I know, and contracts, and how to handle stockholders at a meeting. Sheets and towels are beyond me.”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I have a business in the City. FitzHugh Enterprises. Made my fortune in iron and steel, branched out into other interests. Oil. The Navy’s looking into that.” He smiled, immense charm, Irish charm, changing his face. “They call me a war profiteer in some quarters. Because I made money on the killing. But the men in the trenches, when the first tanks came over the barbed wire, didn’t worry about their cost, only about what they could do to the Germans. I saved lives, if you come right down to it.”

  “Were you in the war as well as profiting from it?”

  The grin faded. “Oh, yes, Inspector, I was. That surprises most people. I was one of the code breakers. I have a skill at mathematics that certain people at Cambridge remembered quite well. I don’t think I could have gotten into the real fighting—I was more useful where I was. Boring work. You never knew whether what you’d just decoded was the most important secret of the campaign or the least important. You just did your best. Like everyone else.”

  Rutledge closed the front door behind him and stepped out into the drive. The sunlight now was brilliant, the mists gone, the sea such a deep blue it hurt the eyes to look at it. He walked down the drive and took the path towards what turned out to be a shingle strand, long and narrow and swept by the tides in every gale, but this morning busy with gulls and choughs and a pair of ravens that were squabbling over something the water had brought in. It appeared to be what was left of a fish. The headland shut out the wind, and there was unseasonable warmth by the water, and a stillness of the air that reminded him of France, just before the artillery barrages began. He stood there, looking out to sea, watching a wisp of steam that came out of Wales and sailed, below the horizon, to faraway ports. It was peaceful here, but there were straggles of rocks again to his right, jutting out where the land began to rise once more, tumbled and rough and water-sprayed. He wondered if in the past wreckers had stood here with their lanterns and lured ships onto a storm
y shore. Cornwall had always lived from the sea, one way or another.

  Shadowed, the headland on his left was massive and dark, white water creaming at its base. And the house was invisible from here, only the line of the roof and the clipped lawns foretelling its presence.

  There was the sound of footsteps on the shingle behind him, and he turned to see Rachel Ashford coming towards him. He waited for her, and she said, “Has he gone yet?”

  “Cormac FitzHugh? No, I left him in the house.”

  Chewing her lip for a moment, she thought about it. “Well, I’ll just have to wait until tomorrow, won’t I? For the ships.” Then she looked up at him, shading her eyes with her hand. “I know,” she said, answering what she read in his face. “I wasn’t actually ready to fetch them anyway. It’s just—” After a moment, she went on in different voice, “You’ve been in there. What did you feel?”

  She meant the study upstairs. And he couldn’t pretend to misunderstand.

  He said, looking out to sea, “I don’t know.”

  But Hamish said, very clearly, “The lassie didn’t ask for lies!”

  Startled, Rutledge turned back to her and said, “What makes you think there’s anything to feel?”

  It was her turn to be evasive. “I—you don’t make decisions like that, and expect no trace of them to survive. I’m not fanciful, you know. But when I go inside that house, I hear the silence. And I can’t tell what it’s whispering to me. But I’m frightened.”

  “Would you like me to fetch the ships for you? Put them out in the gallery, where you could box them up without going inside the study?” He couldn’t have said, afterward, why he’d volunteered to do it. Except that he could sense her pain. And pain he understood.

  Surprised, she said, “Would you? I couldn’t impose on Mrs. Trepol. Or ask the others, they’d have laughed at me. But if you could—when Cormac has gone? It—it would be very kind of you.”