Wings of Fire

by Charles Todd

  The bottom drawer on the left side was empty.

  The dressing table, the tall chest, the bureau, and the bedside table yielded more personal things, perfume and cosmetics, combs and brushes, odds and ends of jewelry, filmy lingerie, silk scarves and stockings, lacy handkerchiefs, and a prayer book, candles, and matches. Nothing out of the ordinary in any way, though sometimes intimate and daunting.

  He knew, from what Rachel had told him, that the family had already taken away the things that made a room personal and individual—pictures and photographs and possessions with a particular value that wouldn’t be put up for sale with the house. But perhaps out of respect for Stephen’s insistence, much of Olivia’s life still survived in this room.

  Yet Olivia had been careful to leave nothing behind for either the police or her biographers that could be construed— or misconstrued—into the woman who’d lived in this room.

  The items buried deep in the closet must have been there a very long time, and if no one had found them before now, the chances were that no one might have discovered them for years to come. When they would have no meaning to strangers living here ...

  He went back to the window and picked up each article, one at a time.

  Six victims, if these were indeed trophies. Olivia’s sister, Anne. Her stepfather James Cheney. Her half brother Richard Cheney. Her stepfather Brian FitzHugh.

  Her own mother, Rosamund Trevelyan.

  And the man who’d spent his life in her service. Nicholas Cheney.

  She’d been so sure of him, then, so sure that he would die with her. Or that she could send him into the darkness before her.

  “Gentle God,” Rutledge whispered softly.

  And after a moment, he found himself silently cursing Chief Superintendent Bowles for sending him here.

  Drawing the drapes again and closing the door firmly behind him, Rutledge went down the passage, his mind still working with a policeman’s precision, his thoughts far from where his feet carried him. The tiny, betraying trophies had been safely returned to their hiding place, out of sight. But not out of his thoughts, burned with molten brightness into his very brain. In Stephen’s room was the comfortable chaos of living. There was a cricket bat in the corner, a pair of riding boots by the closet door, suits and shirts and jackets hung haphazardly on the rod inside, books on the table under the window—they were mostly about golf and tennis, Ireland and horses—and ivory inlaid cuff links in the dish on the dressing table, with a fish hook and a length of gut from a tennis racket beside them. But no boxes. No folders of personal papers, no literary failures or private letters or contracts. What Stephen kept here was the detritus of boyhood and the things one left in a country house visited fairly often.

  In the interim between her death and his, Stephen might well have taken Olivia’s papers to his bank for safekeeping. But Rutledge went through the drawers again, found a routine letter from Stephen’s bank manager, and copied the address in his notebook.

  As he was about to close the curtains, Hamish said, “When I was a laddie, Ma was a fierce one with broom and rag, nothing safe from her eyes when the fit to clean was on her. I’d hide what 1 cherished in the shed behind the straw, or above the rafters in the loft, after Pa died. She wasna’ as tall as my pa.”

  Rutledge stopped, listening to what Hamish said. Stephen was a child from a large family. Nosy sisters and prying brothers. He might well have had a secret place of his own. But not in this room. He, Rutledge, had been damned thorough . . .

  Or had he?

  He glanced around the room again. He’d even had up the carpet, looked inside the grate, under the bed—

  He knelt again by the bed. Nothing, only a thin coating of dust, sifting down gently since Mrs. Trepol’s last visit.

  The frame. The slats that held the springs. Above that the mattress, sagging a little in the center. The bedclothes—

  The slats? What could you hide on a slat? A key, perhaps ...

  He went under the bed, on his back, mindful of his coat and careful not to scrape his head on the springs as he used his arms on the side boards to propel himself. Claustrophobia caught at him, and he had to shut his eyes against the wave of terror that ran through him. He coughed hard, the dry dust sucked into his drier throat. The springs were all but pressing into his face, not as high as he’d first thought!

  With eyes still shut tight, he forced his breathing back to a normal rhythm. What you don’t see can’t fall in on you! he told himself sternly.

  After a moment, searching with his memory rather than his eyes, he ran shaking fingers over the nearest slat, between the springs and the wood, barking his knuckles and collecting fine splinters. Nothing but more dust. There were five slats in all. He felt for the others, and began again, moving his shoulders and hips across the floor until he could reach each slat. Nothing. It was useless, he might as well give up. The last slat now—

  Only the slight rustle of sound warned him in time, but the object still clipped his ear, falling, and he banged his head as he recoiled.

  Slithering swiftly out from under the frame again, he turned and looked back. The springs were a good fifteen inches above the floor, not face high.

  And a small book was lying, spine upward, in an inverted V on the floor. He reached for it, and managed to fish it out without going back under the bed again.

  A prayer book, pages thin as rice paper, the tiny print old and ornately lettered, the cover worn black leather, the edges of the pages once gilded.

  There was on the front cover an outline in raised leather, and Rutledge recognized it as the figure of St. Patrick, staff lifted to cast out the snakes.

  On the flyleaf inside, in a spidery scrawl in fading ink, he read, “Presented to Patrick Samuel FitzHugh, on his first Communion, June, 1803. From his loving Sister Mary Joseph Claire.”

  FitzHugh, not Trevelyan or Marlowe or Cheney. The FitzHughs had been Irish Catholic, the Trevelyans and Marlowes and Cheneys Church of England. This had been hidden, but not for reasons that had anything to do with murder. As a boy, had Stephen had Catholic leanings his family didn’t know about?

  Rutledge thumbed through the fragile pages, eyes scanning the printed lines. In the back, where the pages were blank, someone had written out a family genealogy beginning with the parents of Patrick Samuel, then his marriage and offspring. The ink and writing changed over the next generations, which followed in sad order. So many of them died in the Potato Famine and the nightmare years afterward that it was more a litany of death than of life. At the top of the last page Rutledge found Brian FitzHugh’s name, and Cormac’s, but neither Stephen nor Susannah were recorded here. Nor, apparently, any other secrets that mattered to an investigation into murder.

  After a moment, Rutledge dropped the prayer book into the drawer of the table by the bed, unwilling to go back under it. Then he changed his mind, and put the book back where it had come from. Putting it back took less time than finding it in the first place, and he did it holding his breath this time.

  Afterward he dusted off his trousers and jacket, then closed the curtains at the windows.

  The house was already too dark to do more than a cursory search elsewhere. Most of the other bedrooms had already been stripped of clothing, closets and desks and chests empty, drawers already smelling musty. But Rutledge, mindful of the hollowed out shelf in Olivia’s room, checked each closet with infinite care.

  There was nothing more to find, nothing that told him where Olivia had left her papers—not even whether they were still in the house. Susannah and her husband, Rachel and Stephen, with the help of Cormac, Mrs. Trepol, and the old woman Sadie, had spent days going through the house and cleaning room after room. He wasn’t surprised to find nothing out of the ordinary where they had worked.

  He went back to study. But the desk by the window was as sterile as the one in Olivia’s bedroom. It was a wild goose chase—Stephen must have removed any papers left to him. Yet Rutledge had the feeling that a man he
ll-bent and determined to preserve his half sister’s fame as a poet would stubbornly resist taking them too far, just as he’d fought to keep Olivia’s room inviolate.

  To which Hamish riposted, “What do you need the papers for, when you’ve found yon golden trophies? Or are ye shutting out what they say?”

  The sun was a red ball on the horizon when Rutledge walked out to the headland, its warmth lingering in the light wind that preceded the stillness of sunset. Behind him the windows of the Hall were ablaze, and the weather vane on the church tower as well. Red sky at night ...

  He should have listened to Hamish and gone back to London on Saturday morning. He should have told Rachel this morning that there was no need to reopen the three deaths. Let sleeping murderers lie.

  Now—now he was committed, the truth was something he had to uncover, for his own peace of mind. For the policeman in him who had to look at the good and the evil in human nature and live with its impact in his own soul.

  What right had O. A. Manning to survive unscathed the nightmares of Olivia Marlowe? What right had she to be praised and revered as a creator of beauty, if she had been a woman without mercy or compassion?

  Stephen FitzHugh had been left as Olivia’s literary executor. To decide which of her papers and her worksheets biographers and critics and readers might see. And now, through no fault of his own, he was dead, and neither Rachel nor Susannah seemed to be particularly interested in shouldering the responsibility. Cormac, by his own admission, was more likely to destroy any family skeletons than allow them to rattle. The O. A. Manning he might choose to show to the public would be Olivia Marlowe’s own public face, a quiet recluse who knew very little about the real world and yet had a wondrous insight into the human heart, a gift from God.

  Or the devil. Depending on your knowledge of her.

  Even if he, Rutledge, drove back to London in the morning, he would be the only person living who had proof that what Cormac suspected could be true. His burden to learn to live with. Not Corrnac’s. Not Susannah’s. Not Rachel’s.

  Damn Stephen FitzHugh for falling down those blasted stairs!

  If he stayed in Cornwall, he’d have to find a way to get to the bottom of a string of murders committed by a woman already dead.

  But that was just the problem.

  Olivia Marlowe had been buried. It was O. A. Manning who was still alive—and possibly had no right to be.

  And when he, Rutledge, found out the whole truth, what in hell would he do about it? Deliberately destroy the author of Wings of Fire? Bring down the beauty and the genius along with the cruelty and the lies?

  “You’ve been executioner once.” Hamish warned him. “And you no’ have forgotten it. Will ye choose to do it again, then?”

  Rutledge turned and walked back towards the house and the path to the village.

  “If I have to,” he said bitterly.

  11

  The next morning Rutledge sent a carefully worded message to London.

  “Background material sparse but enlightening. No determination of crime possible at this time. Will take several more days, if presence not required in City.”

  Nothing to alarm Bowies, nothing to prevent Rutledge from coming to any conclusion he chose. And he had a feeling his superior would not be anxious to see him in London straight away.

  The Monday papers had been awash with news of another killing in the City. Bowles had been interviewed in depth about the Yard’s pursuit of the murderer, and talked ful-somely of modern forensic science and its role in tracking down the guilty party. Bowles leaned towards cold fact rather than intuition and a careful analysis of the killer’s reasons for acting now, against this particular victim, and in this particular place. Rutledge had found that scientists were not always the best witnesses in the box, and as often as not a good man for the defense could walk rings around them.

  He looked at his own cold facts. That Corrmac had seen Olivia shove her sister out of an apple tree. That Olivia hadn’t had the heart to dispose of her trophies of the dead, even in the face of her own death. That they were an admission of guilt in six possible murders, not just the two that Cormac laid at Olivia’s door—indicating, perhaps, a cooler, more cunning skill as the child grew older.

  But these facts, alone or together, were not sufficient proof of guilt in a courtroom. Cormac was young at the time, his own memory might have been at fault. A good barrister might point out that Olivia could have had those small articles in her possession for any number of reasons: she’d been given them, she’d taken them as a childhood prank, she’d won them in a wager. In themselves, without more evidence to lay out beside them, they couldn’t be viewed as the fruits of sin.

  Her papers might hold a confession. However convoluted or concealed in verse. But poets and writers were allowed literary license. That too could prove to be more circumstantial than conclusive.

  Who then among the living might give him the proof he needed? Who would make a dependable, incontrovertible witness in the box?

  He set out to look for one.

  Constable Dawlish, finishing his breakfast in his wife’s sunny kitchen, came out to the parlor to listen and found Rutledge’s line of questioning hard to follow.

  So did Hamish, who was still contending that they’d both live to regret staying on in Cornwall, and was muttering ominously about Rutledge’s own stubbornness.

  “You’re asking about Mr. Nicholas’ father?” Dawlish asked. “And Mr. Stephen’s father? That was well before my time in uniform, sir! But James Cheney shot himself in his own gun room, and everyone knew he’d been blaming himself for what happened to his son. He took it hard, and who’s to say whether the revolver went off by accident or of a purpose? Death by misadventure was the coroner’s verdict, and Mrs. Cheney, sick with grief, thanked him for it. Are you thinking that she or one of the children might have shot him?” Dawlish shook his head. “I’d as soon believe my own wife would take a gun to my head, as Mrs. Cheney! You didn’t know her, sir! And as for the children, they weren’t old enough, any of them, to do such mischief. Besides, no man in his right mind would have let a child so young handle a gun, much less play about with a loaded one.”

  “And Brian FitzHugh’s death?”

  “His horse threw him down by the sea, and he hit his head, drowned in the surf before anyone back at the house knew what had happened, They had to put the horse down as well, caught his leg in the rocks and damaged it badly. Mr. Cormac cried over it like a baby, holding it in his arms until Wilkins could fetch a pistol and do the job. Miss Olivia stood there watching, staring at Mr. Cormac as if he’d run mad. But Mr. Cormac, he’d trained that horse himself, and it was the best three-year-old the stables had had in twelve years.”

  “How do you know what Cormac and Olivia were doing?”

  The constable’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Why, my father was a carpenter, sir, he was working in the stables at the time, rebuilding the stalls where they kept the mares waiting to foal. Mrs. Cheney had another wing put on for that.”

  “Is your father still alive?”

  “No, sir, he died in the first year of the war.”

  A dead end. “Well, then, what was the story behind young Richard ‘s disappearance ?”

  “There’s a dozen ways a boy could die out on the moors. He wouldn’t be the first lad to come to grief there. Nor the last.”

  “If he died on the moors, why was there no body found?”

  “They looked, sir. They combed the rocks and the pools and the old mine shafts, they probed the quicksand, they put up flyers in all the towns around, they talked to the folk who live by the moors and to the gypsies who’d been camping near there in the month before. My father was in one of the search parties, and I went along with him. It was thorough.”

  “I want you to send men out again. To search the same ground, to draw me a map of where you’ve looked and what you’ve seen. Anything—a button, a scrap of cloth, a bone. I want it all brought in, and the spot m
arked on the map. Then I’ll check it again myself.”

  “Sir!” Dawlish protested, aghast. “These are farmers and fishermen hereabouts, with a livelihood to earn! Have you any idea how many men it’ll take? And what a waste of time and energy that’ll be?”

  “Time and energy don’t matter. Finding that boy’s body does.”

  “And if after all our work, there’s none found?” “Then I’ll know for a certainty that it can’t be found.” Dawlish stared at the gaunt face, the intelligent, angry eyes. Humor the man from Scotland Yard, he’d been told. What he wants, let him have. As long as he returns to London as soon as possible, and with no cause to give a black eye to the local police in the matter of doing their duty.

  With a sigh, he glanced at the napkin in his hand, then back to Rutledge. “I’ll see that it’s done, sir. You can leave it to me.” But privately he was thinking that Scotland Yard would have been better served by putting their man onto finding that bloody killer in London, instead of raising a stir in far off Cornwall, where there was no connection to any murders.

  The morning sun quickly gave way to clouds and rain, slow and steady, that drove the inn’s keel players indoors to pass their time with skittles and long, rambling stories that seemed to lead nowhere except to wrangling over trifling details. For half an hour, Rutledge listened to them argue about which horse won the Derby in 1874 because someone swore old Mickelson had named his favorite dog after it. Even the innkeeper, Mr. Trask, couldn’t tell Rutledge who Mickelson was.

  “Could be he were that actor. A troop played in Truro one winter, and my father spoke highly of them. One had a little dog’d do tricks. I doubt half of them remember, either, who Mickelson might be, though you could hang and quarter them before they’d admit to it. Waiting for someone, are you, sir?”

  In fact he was waiting for Dr. Penrith, though he didn’t say so. Several women came in, asking for him too, but the retired doctor was not in his usual comer and it appeared he wouldn’t be.