by Charles Todd
Rutledge walked back to the inn as the church clock struck twelve. The rain had turned into a misty drizzle again, and the street was no longer a river under his feet. More people were about, now, men and women, a few of them nodding to him in recognition. Mrs. Trepol, hurrying past, wished him a good day, and in the distance he glimpsed Rachel moving head down towards the woods that separated the village from the Hall. Hamish, rumbling with suppressed irritation, kept Rutledge from concentrating his thoughts on the morning’s work. Or was it his own reluctance?
At the inn, Mr. Trask took his umbrella and greeted him with the news that he had a visitor waiting in the parlor. Rutledge went through into a long narrow room with a ceiling so low it seemed to brush his head. In the wave of claustrophobia that followed, he saw only the dark furnishings, the empty grate, and a tall man with white hair who rose from a chair and stood where he was, waiting for Rutledge to speak.
After a moment, he managed to say, “I’m Rutledge. I’m afraid I don’t know who you are.”
The man looked him over, then said, “Chambers. Thomas Chambers. I represent the Trevelyan family—”
Rutledge had him pegged. This was the lawyer who had courted Rosamund and almost won her. The family solicitor, handling the wills. Regarding him with new interest, he crossed the room to light the lamps on the chimney piece. Their glow, added to the one lamp already burning on the table, pushed back the darkness and the cavelike atmosphere of the room. Breathing more easily, he could concentrate on what Chambers was saying.
“—and I understand that you’ve come down to reconsider the circumstances of their deaths. I’d like to know why.”
Rutledge stood with his back to the cold hearth and said, “Because the Home Office wished to be sure that all was as it should be. Miss Marlowe—as O. A. Manning—is a person of some prominence.”
Chambers all but snorted in disbelief. “You may tell the locals that, and they’d be impressed. I’m not.”
“Suspicious, are you?” Rutledge asked.
“Of course I’m suspicious when Scotland Yard feels it needs to stick its nose into a death where I’m handling the estate.”
“Is there anything wrong with the wills? Any provisions that make you especially nervous?” He was deliberately misunderstanding the man, stripping him of his authority and aggressively taking charge of the meeting. Not out of personal animosity but as a tool.
Chambers stared at him. At the thinness, the gaunt face, the lines that had prematurely aged a much younger man than he’d guessed at in the beginning. And wasn’t above a little aggression of his own.
“In the war, were you?”
Rutledge nodded.
“Wounded?”
Rutledge hesitated, then said briefly, “Yes.”
“Thought as much! Stephen looked the same way when he came back. Shell of himself. Damned foot killed him in the end, too.”
Over Hamish’s rude comments about that, Rutledge recaptured the salient.
“What did you do in the war?”
“They wouldn’t take me,” Chambers said in disgust. “Too old, they told me. But I knew that part of France better than they did! My mother’s mother was from there. Stupid place to fight infantry battles, for God’s sake! No geographical advantage. No high ground. Prolonged deadlock, that’s what you’ll get, I told them. Enormous loss of life, I told them. No one will come out of it a winner. Americans tipped the balance, of course. And the tank. And still the best they could do was an Armistice!” Chambers realized suddenly that he’d mounted one of his hobby horses, and stopped, watching the advantage slip back to Rutledge. Then he grinned. ‘‘Over to you, I think.”
Rutledge found himself grinning back. He liked Chambers. He could also see what had attracted Rosamund FitzHugh to the man.
“Who sent for you?” Rutledge asked. “Susannah Hargrove?”
“Daniel Hargrove. He was worried, because his wife is in delicate health and this whole business was upsetting her. They tell me now she’s likely to bear twins, but that runs in the family, not surprising.”
They were still standing, Rutledge by the hearth, Chambers at the far end of the room, a position chosen to make Rutledge come to him, not the reverse. Rutledge said, impatiently, “Sit down, man!” He was aware of the smell of wool again, and with resignation ignored it. Hamish, perversely, did not.
After a moment, Chambers moved forward and took one of the chairs near the fireplace. The room was damp, chill, with an old coldness that seemed to come from the walls, seeping up from the earth that waited to consume the stone when it finally sank under its own weight.
Rutledge took the chair across from him, and said, “Actually, I’m glad you’ve come, I was considering traveling to Plymouth to find you.”
Surprised, Chambers said, “Not about the wills, I think?”
“In a way. I know that Olivia Marlowe made her half brother Stephen FitzHugh her literary executor. But then Stephen died soon after. And I haven’t been able to find her papers. Do you have them?”
“No, I understood that Stephen knew what was involved in that bequest and was prepared to deal with the responsibility himself. If Nicholas had survived, he’d have had that duty.”
“And if Stephen died?”
“Ah, now that’s a very good question. I think Susannah, Mrs. Hargrove. He didn’t specify her as literary executor, you understand. His will was made out while Olivia was still alive and it would have been presumptuous to consider that need. But he did leave everything else to her, and the courts will, I think, accept the inclusion of Olivia’s papers in his estate.”
“Not to Cormac FitzHugh, then?”
Chambers frowned. “No. There was some ... coolness between the two of them. Cormac and Olivia, I mean. She made it very clear to me at the time she drew up her will that she didn’t wish Cormac to be in any way responsible for her affairs. Stephen was still very young then, which is why I’d suggested an older and wiser man to handle the papers.”
“What was the cause of this coolness?”
“I never knew quite what it was, but Rosa—” his face flushed, and he quickly changed that to “—Mrs. FitzHugh told me once that even she didn’t know the reasons behind it.”
“You were well acquainted with Mrs. FitzHugh, I think?”
“Yes.” He looked down at his hands, turning a ring on his little finger. “I’d hoped to marry her,” he added reluctantly.
“Then she would have told you the reasons, if in fact she had known them? It wasn’t a polite lie to an outsider?”
“I think she would have been honest with me,” he said slowly. “Except at the end. She was very distressed. I begged her to tell me what was wrong, why she was upset. But she wouldn’t say. The doctor called it depression. It wasn’t that. Rosamund—Mrs. FitzHugh—was not the kind of woman who either felt sorry for herself or dwelt on the sadness of life. God knows, she’d had enough suffering, heartbreak, but she dealt with it with such courage—”
His voice broke off. Then he said, forcing it back to normal tones, “I never knew why she killed herself. It left me scarred. Not just her death, but the fact that she never turned to me in whatever anguish there was.”
Rutledge considered him. The thick white hair, still-black brows, the strong, almost attractive face. The squared shoulders and straight back. A good man to have beside you in the trenches when the next assault came, because you knew you could depend on him not to break .. .
Hamish said, unexpectedly, “But he’d protect her, wouldn’t he? He’d not give up her confidences to a stranger come to make trouble!”
Which was very true.
Rutledge changed tactics. “Who was the murderer in that house?”
For once, Chambers was completely off guard, completely vulnerable, his face stripped of the mask that the law and his years had fashioned for it.
But Rutledge had been right in his judgment as well. Stunned, speechless for an instant, still Chambers didn’t break.
> “Murderer! Christ, man, what are you talking about?”
“A cold-blooded killer who for reasons we can’t fathom, decimated the Trevelyan family with methodical cunning. He—or she—was there, in the household. I’ve discovered that much. But so far, I can’t prove it.”
Chambers stared at him, his intelligence slowly reasserting itself as the first shock receded. “I don’t believe you! In Rosamund’s house? No, it’s not possible, you’ve been grasping for straws and looking for an excuse to make your trip down here worthwhile! Looking for promotion on the reputations of people who can’t defend themselves!”
Rutledge smiled, a cold smile that never reached his eyes. “If that were true, I could cause a great deal of trouble. But in the end, I’d only harm myself. No. Come with me, Mr. Chambers.”
He stood up, and without waiting to see if Chambers would follow, he went out into the inn’s hallway, fetched his coat from the rack, and was already picking up the borrowed umbrella when Chambers slowly came after him through the parlor door.
“Where are we going?”
“To the Hall,” Rutledge told him. “Do you have any objections?”
“I don’t—I’d rather not go there!”
“Why?”
“None of your damned business!” Chambers flared into anger as a defense. “I have no responsibility to you or to Scotland Yard. Only to my clients. I have neither obligation nor duty to cooperate with the police in a wild goose chase!”
“If you have a clear conscience, I see no reason why you should refuse to go with me to the Hall. Today or any day.”
“No.” It was very final.
Rutledge shoved the umbrella back into the tall brass stand and went back into the parlor, tossing his coat across the nearest chair. After a moment, Chambers followed him and shut the door with a pointed slam.
“What do you want of me?” he asked, standing there blocking it. “And what do you want of this investigation? Besides this ridiculous charge of murderers in the Trevelyan household.”
“You know something was wrong in that house, don’t you? Rachel felt it, because—she was particularly susceptible to the moods of the people who lived there.” He couldn’t bring himself, objectivity or not, to betray Rachel’s regard for Nicholas. “And you’re vulnerable too. Because you cared deeply for Rosamund and you know she wasn’t a woman likely to kill herself. Or let’s take Nicholas as an example, if you find thinking about Rosamund too painful. Would you have pegged him as a potential suicide? The sort of man who’d quietly choose to die with his half sister rather than face life on his own? A sentimental pact, in the moonlight, on a peaceful Saturday night? Or did Nicholas strike you as a man with a burden he carried with great patience and strength?”
Chambers’ expression was closed, the solicitor yielding nothing, loyalty to his clients coming ahead of any personal feelings.
“Damn it, you’re too intelligent to put your own responses down to sentimentality, but you feel uncomfortable in the Hall. Let me describe it for you. You walk through the door, and the house isn’t benign, it’s alive with jarring forces. To some extent, it’s a subjective response, I grant you, because of the uneasiness in your own mind. Your intuition tries to point out that there’s something very wrong here, but you refuse to listen, you don’t want to believe that what you sense could be true. And you won’t help me to find the answers for the same reasons!”
Rutledge was met with a wall of resistance. But he was beginning to take the measure of it now.
“Even I have felt the emotions in that house! I was moved by O. A. Manning’s poetry, I was shocked by the manner of the poet’s death, I was personally involved in a way that an ordinary policeman wouldn’t have been. And I’m not by nature one to look for moods or—what is it that the crackpots call it?—vibrations? I don’t believe in ghosts, either. But Tre-velyan Hall is haunted, in a sense that you and I both accept.”
Chambers still didn’t answer, but his face was paler, strained.
“I survived in those hellholes they called trenches for four years. It seemed like forty—a lifetime. I learned to trust my intuition. Men who didn’t often died. I was lucky to possess it in the first place, and war honed it. I learned that it wasn’t a figment of my imagination. Nor was it a replacement for the God I’d lost. Whatever it was, you came to recognize it. An inkling, a warning, a sudden flash of caution, a split-second insight that saved your life. Indisputably real, however unorthodox the means of reaching you. It gave you an edge on death, and you were grateful. Then I lost it for a time, it doesn’t matter why. But it hasn’t failed me completely, and I can tell you why you’re afraid to go back to that house. You know that Rosamund’s death haunts you there. You can feed yourself lies down in Plymouth. But not here. Not in the house itself!”
Rutledge could see the clenched jaw. The desperate rejection. In his own head Hamish was clamoring for him to leave the man in peace—
“It was an accidental overdose!”
The words, when they finally came, seemed to be torn from the depths of Chambers’ soul.
“No.” Rutledge waited, relentless. “Rosamund didn’t make such mistakes. She was a strong woman. She was sunshine and light, not despair and darkness. It wasn’t suicide, and it wasn’t an accidental overdose.”
“I refuse to accept murder!”
“Because you believe that murder, if it was done, was your fault. For loving Rosamund. For wanting to marry her. For winning her love. Just as suicide could mean a rejection of your love, murder means someone wanted to prevent another stepfather in the house, another family. Another long wait for whatever it was he—or she—wanted badly enough to kill for.”
Hamish was saying in agitation, “Where did this notion come from? You never spoke of it before!”
In the tumult of his own emotions, Rutledge tersely answered the voice aloud. “I didn’t know before. But it makes sense now. I see the pattern!”
He did. Olivia had systematically eliminated her family— the twin sister who could pass for her and steal her grandfather’s love. The stepfathers she hadn’t wanted. The half brother who had stirred up the household and kept it on its ear. The mother who was planning to marry again. But not Nicholas, never Nicholas, who had looked after her. Not until the very end, when he no longer served any purpose—
Hamish was still raising fierce objections. Rutledge ignored them. He was angry and unsettled and—yes—bewildered by the leap his intuition had taken without warning.
Without a motive, he could keep to himself his suspicions about Olivia. He could deny, on the surface, that he believed in them because there was no real evidence except the carefully hidden trophies of the dead. It was possible—it was likely—it was practicable—But still theory. Still his own torment.
Now, it was real. Suddenly, it was real—
He had nearly forgotten about Chambers in the dark, low-ceilinged room, standing by the door like a man who’d lost his way and waited for a sign.
The hoarse voice startled him.
“Damn you! You should have died in France!” Chambers said with such bitterness that Rutledge knew he’d won.
It was a hollow victory. It had cost both men very dearly.
Suddenly, exhausted and drained, he felt he was on the edge of a precipice inside himself, the blackness he’d fought so long in the hospital, and once, too short a time ago, in Warwickshire. It seemed to draw him, to beckon like the Sirens, a place of peace and darkness and silence where nothing could ever touch him again.
The doctors had warned him he was still at risk, that it might be too soon to go back to the pressures of the Yard, while his own stability was an uncertain factor—and he’d fought them, inch by inch, to try returning.
And then a line of poetry came running through his head like a bright and deadly thread.
If I choose to die,
There is peace in darkness, and no pain.
The grave is safe—
It was as if Olivia
herself urged him to fail, to choose the darkness and leave the past intact. Chambers would never speak of it again. Rutledge was certain of that—
But the very last lines of the same poem came back to him too.
If I choose to live,
Oh, God, it will never be the same ...
Yet I prevail—
The dilemma of Olivia Marlowe, who could give and who could destroy with equal adroitness.
13
His voice still shaken, Chambers said, “I need a drink. From the look of you, I’ve no doubt you could use one too.” He turned and opened the parlor door, crossing the hall to the inn’s dining room. There he took a table by the window, pulled out the other chair for Rutledge, and sat down heavily. In the watery light, he looked old and tired, but Rutledge knew it was an illusion.
Trask came hurrying across the room to ask them what they’d have, and Chambers ordered whiskey, glancing at Rutledge to see if that met with his approval. “Make it a strong one, and then we’ll have our lunch. I can’t travel back to Plymouth half sober.”
When Trask had gone again, Chambers sighed. “You’re a damned hard man, do you know that?”
“I’m stubborn, that’s all.”
Chambers smiled grimly. “Well, so am I. I loved Rosamund, damn it. I don’t want to think I missed the causes of her distress at the end, and I don’t want to think that one of her family could be—evil. That’s what it would have to be. Not wickedness, you understand. That’s entirely different. Do you believe in evil, Inspector, or did you lose that, along with God?”
“I’ve seen enough evil in my work. I respect its existence.”
“Yes, that’s probably very true. I don’t, as a country solicitor, deal with crime as often as I deal with property and wills and contracts, the ongoing bits and bobs of everyday life. Still, God knows money often brings out the worst in people! But it strikes me—having seen some of the dregs of life myself—that evil is something we don’t understand because it’s outside the pale of ordinary experience.”