by Charles Todd
“I’m told my constable is here. That you ordered him to call off the search on the moors this morning. And that you’ve got him taking statements from witnesses in the Trevelyan Hall drawing room, rather than his office.”
“Yes, I left a message for you, explaining. I’m returning to London—”
“So you said! And what use, pray, are these statements you’ve gone to such lengths to obtain?”
“To clear the record. It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
Not mollified at all, Harvey retorted, “Indeed. But I shouldn’t have thought that interviewing the good citizens of Borcombe would serve any better purpose now than it did at the time of the suicides.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Rutledge agreed, watching gulls wheeling over the shoreline. He chose his words with great care. He needed Harvey’s support, but not his suspicions. “They probably can’t shed any further light on the deaths of Miss Marlowe and Nicholas Cheney. What I’m hoping they might do is give me sufficient understanding of Miss Marlowe’s state of mind over the last few years. Family affairs were worrying her—at least I have reason to believe that may be true. It could explain why, in spite of her literary success, she felt she couldn’t face living. Would you mind very much giving Dawlish an account of your discussion with her, about what makes a murderer?”
“I’d feel a fool! That was a private conversation between you and me, what I told you!”
‘‘So it was. But if Miss Marlowe’s mind was already dwelling on such matters when you came here as a police officer, such evidence might provide additional weight. I feel she carried ... a sense of guilt, for want of a better word, about the misfortunes in her family. I found some confirmation of that in her poetry as well. Gifted imaginations are often sensitive and very impressionable. They sometimes see what we overlook.”
Harvey looked searchingly at him.
“Are you having me on?” he demanded.
Rutledge’s eyes came back from the sea to Harvey’s face. Something in them made the other man wary. “I’ve never been more serious. Olivia Marlowe believed that there was a murderer loose in her family. She believed she knew the identity of the killer, and that she had proof of a sort. Of a sort, mind you. Not the kind of proof you and I might use to ask for an arrest warrant, perhaps, or that a good barrister couldn’t make laughable in a courtroom. But she believed it. And she tried to document it as carefully as she could.”
“That’s—that’s preposterous!” Harvey blustered, his neck brick red and the color rising fast. “I’ve never heard a more ridiculous fiction in all my years as a policeman! This is my country, I’d have known if there was murder done here. My predecessor would have known!”
“Precisely why,” Rutledge responded, “I need these statements. I see no point in taking unsubstantiated rumors back to London. In my opinion we should set Olivia Marlowe’s fears to rest once and for all. She was famous, and there will be biographers. They shouldn’t be left to draw conclusions that might reflect badly on the police.” He shrugged. “What may come of it is the truth. I can’t think of anything fairer than that.”
“That damned woman was a bother when she was alive, and worse now that she’s dead,” Harvey fumed, thinking over what Rutledge had said. And from the sound of it, Olivia Marlowe wasn’t going to stay quietly dead. He hadn’t reckoned on biographers trampling about his turf and prying into village business. Asking questions, raising doubts, stirring up people. He’d thought that was finished when the reporters had come to find out about O. A. Manning. The specter of an endless parade of troublemakers still to arrive was decidedly unsettling at best.
Rutledge watched the slow, careful progress of Harvey’s mind as he considered the situation facing him. And then came to his decision.
Harvey had been told the truth. Not all of it, but the cold, hard kernel of truth that was the center of what Rutledge was doing. The rest would come when the facts were down on paper and irrefutable. When the warrant was required.
“Yes, well, I can understand what you’re saying, that there’ll be no peace for any of us. If the Home Office wanted this case reopened, we’ve already had the first round. Some newspaperman may get wind of it next, God forgive us, and we’ll be on the front pages! And the academics will be the worst of the lot, reading whatever they damned well please into her verse, and turning Borcombe upside down to show they’re right.” He sighed. “Oh, very well. Do what you have to do. Just make what haste you can.”
Harvey turned and walked off down the drive. Rutledge felt the tension in his shoulders begin to loosen and absently rubbed the back of his neck.
There was something more he wanted to do in the house, but Rachel was still there, and it was more important to avoid her now. The other matter could wait.
The day wore on, a long straggle of people coming to the house, the rector among them, giving their statements to Daw-lish and then leaving again, strangely subdued. For a time Rutledge watched them from the headland, and he saw too that Harvey made his appearance in due course, then left shaking his head. Rutledge wondered whether Dawlish had told him more than he should have about the questions asked—and answers received. Reporting to his superior, that’s how he’d have viewed it. Rutledge hoped he had not. Harvey’s stubborn, straight mind might just make the right leap. Good policemen, clever or not, had a sense about some things. It didn’t take imagination to learn from experience. The problem was, where would Harvey turn if he learned the truth? How would he use it? Hasty decisions had a way of wrecking a clean, tight investigation. And Harvey wanted to be seen as running his own territory, not following the lead of strangers from London.
By dinnertime Rutledge had collected the statements from the weary constable eager to get home to his wife. Then he went up the stairs two at a time, and carefully collected the small gold articles from Olivia’s closet. For a moment he held them in the palm of his hand, where they shone with soft beauty, as if innocent of blood and death.
As they were, in themselves, he thought sadly.
Downstairs he took one last long look at Rosamund’s portrait, silently apologizing for what he’d caused to be done in her drawing room that day. She stared back at him in silence, a faraway look in her eyes.
He walked back towards the village alone, his mind busy.
Sadie hadn’t come, Dawlish reported, though Dr. Penrith, walking slowly on his daughter’s arm, had arrived at the Hall at the time set for him. And Wilkins, and Mary Otley. Later someone would have to interview Susannah and her husband, and Tom Chambers, the solicitor. Rutledge himself had questioned Dawlish at the end of the day, writing down his answers without looking up at the man’s accusing eyes.
The constable was an intelligent man, he could think through what he had spent the long day doing. But how far had he gotten in putting the pieces of the puzzle together? Far enough to wonder, Rutledge thought, but not quite far enough to know the whole ...
Passing through the woods, Rutledge considered the problem of Sadie. Did she know what a sworn statement was?
He would have to go to her, then, and hope her mind was clear.
As he passed the Otley cottage he could see someone standing in the shadow by the door. Rachel, watching him. He could feel her eyes, the intensity of emotions, the uncertainty. But she stayed where she was, and he wondered what was going through her mind. What she would do now. Or if she would wait. Women often thought along different lines. Where a man saw duty, women were more concerned with emotions, feelings. He’d learned early on that a policeman ignored such differences at his peril.
Rutledge was just beside the Trepol gate when the housekeeper stepped out her door and called to him.
“Inspector Rutledge?”
He opened the gate and went up the walk where he would be out of earshot of Rachel. If Mrs. Trepol had questions about the statement she’d given, it was better not to broadcast them.
When he reached her, she acknowledged him with a nod and then said, �
�You’ll be wanting me to clean up after all those feet tracking dirt into the hall and the drawing room?”
“It would be kind of you,” he said. “Yes, thank you.”
“Miss Rosamund would never have allowed it,” she said, resigned to what she must have considered little short of desecration. One did not invite half the village in to sit in a fine chair under the best portrait in the house, not in the age in which Mrs. Trepol or Rosamund Trevelyan had grown up and learned their respective places in Borcombe.
“I know,” he told her, “but sometimes the law must do what has to be done, and worry about the fitness of it afterward. I think she would have been glad to be a party to settling her family’s affairs.”
“Is that what you’re doing, sir?” Mrs. Trepol asked earnestly.
“It’s what I’m trying to do. To explain the deaths of Olivia Marlowe and Nicholas Cheney. To set it right.”
She nodded, as if she understood.
“Thank you, sir,” she said quietly. “I’d not like to think of them in pain and grief over what they did. A sad end to two lives, that was. I could never feel quite right about it, and I couldn’t see the purpose. We have to live the lives we’ve been given, there’s naught else for it. God doesn’t give us a choice. That’s what the church says. Suffering teaches in its own way.”
“Yes, sometimes,” he said, knowing how close he himself had come more than once to ending his own suffering.
She nodded again, and looked around her for her cat. Rut-ledge turned and started up the walk again.
Mrs. Trepol said, tentatively, “Sir?”
“Yes?” He only half turned back towards her, wanting to go on to the inn and read the statements.
“If you’re finished with us, well, sir, I was wondering if maybe you’d know what was best to do with them boxes Mr. Stephen gave me to hold for him. I kept expecting Mr. Chambers to come and fetch them, after Mr. Stephen died, but he hasn’t. Maybe he doesn’t want them any more, now that Mr. Stephen is dead? Just some old things, he told me, some treasures he wanted to keep for himself, memories of the family, he said. Nothing but a boy’s foolishness, he said, but he didn’t want them left behind in the empty house and he wasn’t ready to take them up to London with him, no room in the car with all those things Miss Susannah and the others wanted to carry away.”
Rutledge turned and looked at her in the late evening light, at the plain, earnest face that waited for him to do what was best.
“I thought of mentioning it to Miss Rachel, but they’re Mr. Stephen’s things, and I haven’t seen Miss Susannah by herself, only with Mr. Daniel there, and I didn’t know—I thought perhaps that wasn’t what Mr. Stephen would want. He’d said I was to keep the boxes for him, you see. Just for him, as a favor. And he was always a hard one to say no to, so I thought I’d just ask and you might tell me what was best. They’re not my things—I wouldn’t want to do anything wrong.”
He couldn’t turn to see if Rachel was still in her doorway. He couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t see him carrying boxes away.
Instead, he scooped up the cat that was coming through the open gate, and said, quietly, “Show me.”
Mrs. Trepol went indoors, and Rutledge, still carrying the cat, followed her. In a closet set in the hall between her bedroom and the kitchen there was a stack of boxes, three of them. To the other side two coats, a rack of gardening boots, and a line of old umbrellas crowded the narrow space.
Rutledge had already put down the squirming cat, and he stood there staring for a moment at the boxes. Then he lifted down the first of the three and opened it carefully. Mrs. Trepol turned away, as if afraid she might be trespassing if she looked at the contents.
He felt no such compunction.
The first box held Olivia’s notebooks of verse, annotated and revised, her record of creative thought, the process of making words do her bidding. He regarded the neat rows thoughtfully, not reading any of them but paying silent homage to them as his fingers gently touched their spines. The second box held contracts, letters, and bank records. He was amazed at how well good verse paid. The third was a collection of many things, photographs, a genealogy of the Trevel-yan family, personal letters, childhood scribbling that gradually foretold the growth of a formidable talent, and a number of books with her name in lovely script on the flyleaves.
Rutledge, trying to hide his disappointment and quell Hamish’s fierce litany of “I told you so!” prodded the contents again, as if expecting them to produce, by magic, the answers he wanted. Mrs. Trepol had gone into the kitchen to feed her cat, and he squatted on the wide floorboards, refusing to give up.
It wasn’t until then that he noticed that some of the contents, stacked as if in a file drawer, were higher than the others. Lifting them out gently, he found a slim journal under this batch, and took it out in its turn.
The hand was strong and clear, the writing of a woman who had used a pen most of her life and was at home with words.
Not a journal, a letter to her half brother. He skimmed it swiftly.
Dear Stephen,
There are some things you must know, and I shall not be here to tell them to you. I’m sorry about that, to leave you with these revelations when you are grieving for us. But I must arm you for what’s to come. I have done my best to protect you and Susannah. For one thing, 1 have left the house in such a way that it must be sold, and you’ve been aware for years that that was my wish as well as Nicholas’. For another, I have kept you in ignorance as long as I dared, and drawn the lightning myself all these years. By dying, I have set him free at last. And you will be safe now. You have nothing he wants. I have promised him that. But who can know what the future holds? Circumstances change, and I cannot foresee every possibility. The time may come when what I am writing down here is all you have. Whether you believe me or not, I pray you’ll trust me and for your own sake, keep the confidence I am sharing with you. Vengeance will only bring you and Susannah down into the pit. And my death will have been for nothing!
Let me tell you, then, about the murderer who has lived with us for all of your life and most of mine .
25
Rutledge stopped there and closed the journal, returning it to its resting place. Hamish for once was silenced, his voice if not his presence shut down in the face of truth. Rutledge felt his heart racing, his mind torn between triumph and depression. Triumphant that there was something more than lines of verse on which to base his case, and depressed that Olivia Marlowe had had to sacrifice herself to keep her younger half brother and sister alive. Had that been what drove her to suicide? A threat against Stephen: his life or yours?
Was that the bargain struck with Lucifer? Or only a part of it?
Mrs. Trepol stuck her head around the kitchen door and said, “Will you be taking them with you, sir? Mr. Stephen’s things?”
Rutledge got to his feet and began to stack the boxes into the closet again.
“Go on keeping them safe for now,” he told Mrs. Trepol. “Let them stay where they are. I’ll come for them myself before I leave. Sooner, if I can. And I wouldn’t bother either Miss Rachel or Miss Susannah about them now. They’ve got enough on their minds, I don’t want to worry them about Mr. Stephen at the moment.”
She thanked him gravely and followed him to her door, closing it after him.
Hamish, never silenced for very long, had found his voice again. “I’ll hear no crowing, now or later! Ye didn’t find them, did you? They had to come to you, out of nowhere, and you can’t take any of the credit for that!”
“I don’t want credit,” Rutledge said, walking down the path and closing the gate behind him, still torn between taking the boxes with him and leaving them where they were. He turned towards the inn once more, only part of his mind taking in the emptiness of the street, the quietness—no noisy children, no neighbors gossiping over garden walls, no young couples strolling hand in hand through the evening light. He’d seen it before, the way villages drew inward in a time of
crisis. “I’m starting with the statements. After that, I’ll have Harvey collect that letter. Once I’ve organized all my own information clearly in black and white, he’ll be able to see how the letter corroborates it. And if he can see it, London will have to do the same.”
“And what about Stephen FitzHugh? Did he find yon letter? Was that why he left the boxes here?”
“He must have read it,” Rutledge said tiredly. “He was her executor because she trusted him. That may have been her only mistake. I believe Stephen had changed after the war. Rachel said much the same thing, that he wasn’t the same man when he came home. My God, how few of us are!” There was bitterness in his voice, hearing again Rachel’s diatribe, and feeling no triumph for what he’d accomplished this day, only doubt over his methods. Beside him the tip of the church tower was touched by the slanting brightness, like a beacon. It gave him no comfort.
Hamish clicked his tongue in disagreement.
“Damn it, look at the facts, then! He decided on a memorial—that was the word Rachel used—instead of selling the house. That went against Olivia’s express wishes, and yet he hid the boxes where no one could find them and stumble on the truth. I think Stephen looked at his choices and felt he could turn the Hall into a museum by blackmailing the killer into allowing it. That was arrogance, not courage.”
A fisherman, coming up from the strand, caught sight of Rutledge walking towards him and made a point of crossing the street to the far side, to avoid passing him. Yes, the village had drawn its conclusions ...
“You can’t know what was in his mind!”
“No. But I know he left the boxes with Mrs. Trepol. He didn’t put them in the car to take to London. He didn’t leave them in the house where someone else might have come across them. He didn’t give them to the solicitor, Chambers. He put them in the care of a woman who would follow his instructions exactly, and he knew that.”
“Aye, but Stephen FitzHugh fell down the stairs. It was an accident, and you said as much yourself.”