Proof of Guilt

by Charles Todd

And before he left Essex, he would have to call on her.

  Chapter Ten

  This time Rutledge didn’t watch for Miss Whitman to leave her house.

  He knocked on the door and stood there patiently waiting.

  After several minutes, she opened the door herself, and he asked if he could come in.

  “Must you?” she responded.

  “I don’t think what I have to say is something you want your neighbors gossiping about behind your back.”

  She stared at him. But he could see that she was torn between telling him to go away and hearing whatever it was he had to say.

  Finally she opened the door and let him inside.

  The cottage was furnished with lovely old pieces that must have been inherited, and the colors of the curtains, the carpets, and the chair coverings were pleasing. The room to which she took him was done up in pale greens and creams, and several of the paintings on the wall were quite good.

  Offering him a chair, she stood by the hearth, indicating her intention to keep the interview short.

  He could see again how different she was from Miss Townsend. In manner, appearance, temperament. And he regretted having to show her the handkerchief and question her about it.

  Then he changed his mind, holding it out to her. “I believe this belongs to you,” he said simply.

  She came to take it from him and looked at it. He could read her face, and he knew before she answered what she was going to say.

  “Wherever did you find this?” she asked warily.

  “I believe it was embroidered by Miss Delaney.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said impatiently. “But where did you find it?”

  “It was found beneath the driver’s seat of Lewis French’s motorcar.”

  “Where? Why should Lewis have my handkerchief?”

  “I don’t know that he did. It was found under the seat. He might not have seen it there.”

  “Well, then, if you’ve located his motorcar, you can ask him.” She gave the handkerchief back to him.

  “I told you that we had the motorcar. So far we don’t have Mr. French.”

  “Oh.” She digested that, then said after a moment, “Are you saying that you believe I had something to do with his disappearance?”

  “As you can see, the handkerchief is relatively fresh. It couldn’t have been where it was for months. For that matter, the man who sees to the motorcar for French tells me he cleans it thoroughly whenever it is taken out. He would have found the handkerchief long ago.”

  “Then Lewis put it there. For some ridiculous reason of his own. I didn’t. I will swear to that.”

  “If he’s engaged to another woman, why should he have kept your handkerchief?”

  “I didn’t say that he did. I’m not always at home. The house is unlocked. The shop sells these to other customers. You must ask him these questions. I can’t answer them.”

  “Miss Whitman, if you will help me, I’ll be better able to help you.”

  “I don’t need your help. I don’t need anyone’s help.”

  “The Yard is going to find the person who used Lewis French’s motorcar to run down and kill a man. Someone who may’ve thought he was killing French himself. And if French is still alive, he may well find him and not bungle his murder a second time. In some quarters, you appear to have a very good motive for killing French—for all we know, it was you who got the wrong man. The Yard will be looking closely at you and at how your engagement to French ended. At any hard feelings you may still harbor. Tell me what you know—or what you suspect has happened. It will save you a great deal of grief. Believe me.”

  She considered him. “Do you really think I could have killed anyone?” Her voice began to shake at the start, and then she brought it under control.

  “Sadly, for the police there is nothing that marks a murderer. Nothing that allows us to look at you and know whether you are guilty or innocent.”

  “I’ve killed no one,” she said huskily. “Please go. Please.”

  Cursing himself for what he’d had to say, he rose. “If you need help, send for me. I must go to London straightaway, and you can reach me through Sergeant Gibson at the Yard. Will you promise me to call?”

  He waited, but she said nothing more, her gaze turned away from him, her face half in shadow so that he couldn’t read her expression or see the color of her eyes. He had no choice. He left the house.

  As he walked back to his motorcar, Hamish spoke unexpectedly.

  “Ye ken, if she tried to kill him, and instead killed the wrong man, he couldha’ helped her dispose of the corpse.”

  Men had done stranger things, but Rutledge couldn’t picture Lewis French being cajoled into doing it. Unless he’d found it the only way out.

  “Then why did he disappear afterward?” Rutledge asked, speaking aloud.

  “Because he’s had second thoughts about the wisdom of marrying the other lass.”

  It held together too well for comfort. Lewis French could have disposed of the corpse by driving it to Chelsea, and then left the motorcar in the quarry to throw off the police. If true, this would most certainly explain why the dead man was carrying Lewis French’s watch. After all, French would eventually get it back after the police had finished their inquiry.

  But where was he now? Why hadn’t he come forward with a tale of being robbed, his motorcar taken away, leaving him too dazed to find his way home again until now?

  And why was Hamish suddenly defending Valerie Whitman?

  Rutledge stopped at the French house to ask Agnes French if she had heard from her brother.

  As he expected, she had not.

  She said waspishly, “He never thinks of anyone but himself. Michael was never as selfish as Lewis. But then my parents spoiled him because of his seizures. He expects me to treat him the same way. And I refuse to cater to his whims.”

  “If you hear from him, will you let the Yard know where he is and where he’s been?”

  “If you want to know my brother’s whereabouts, look for him yourself. I won’t be made my brother’s keeper even for Scotland Yard.”

  Rutledge left it at that and set out for Cambridge.

  The asylum on the outskirts of town was, he discovered, a small private clinic for the mentally ill. It struck him as he drove up the short drive that it had been very wise of Howard French or his son Laurence, whoever had made this decision, to put their problem into an isolated private clinic where he could be successfully hidden away. With no family or friends in England, Diaz would have no way of leaving on his own.

  Rutledge wondered if Michael or Lewis French had unwittingly neglected to pay for the man’s keep, which had allowed the doctor in charge to decide to release him without letting the family know. If there had been no provision for the fees in the late Laurence French’s will, and the sons knew nothing about the intruder in the house, it would be understandable. For that matter, the elder French, after his stroke, could have forgot the man existed.

  The manor house was well kept, the grounds pleasant, and no fences spoiled the image of a private country estate. A place where unwanted family problems could be discreetly kept out of the public eye. Even the King had allowed young Prince John to be locked away until he had been all but lost to public view.

  Hardly the place one would expect to find a Portuguese farmer’s troublesome son.

  Rutledge opened the door into a lobby where a woman was seated behind a small but very pretty cherry desk.

  She greeted him pleasantly and asked if he was a visitor.

  “I’ve come to speak to one of your doctors about a man who used to be a patient here. My name is Rutledge. Scotland Yard.”

  The smile slipped a little, but the woman said, “If you’ll be seated, Mr. Rutledge, I’ll ask if Dr. Milton is available.”

  She turned and stepped through the door just behind where she was seated. And she was gone for some time.

  He was on the point of following her when she finally
came back, held the door open, and an elderly man preceded her into Reception.

  “Mr. Rutledge? I’m Dr. Milton. Senior medical staff.”

  They shook hands, and then Dr. Milton suggested, “Perhaps a stroll in the grounds would be best. You can speak freely there.”

  Or, Rutledge thought, the doctor himself could.

  They went out into the sunlight, crossed the drive, and set off across the lawn.

  “I understand you wish to see me about a patient. Is he—or she—in trouble with the law, or is it something else?”

  “As far as I know, there’s no problem with the law. The patient is Afonso Diaz. Or at least that’s the name he was using.”

  “Ah. I see. A rather . . . unusual case, as I recall.”

  “You treated him?”

  “I tried to. I’m not sure whether I succeeded in helping him or he simply grew tired of carrying the burden of anger for so many years.”

  “Why was he angry?”

  “It’s a long story. We cobbled it together from what Diaz told us and from what the Portuguese police had to say. They had no interest in him—he’d served his time and they more or less washed their hands of him. Apparently he was a student in Lisbon, sent there from Madeira by his father. It seems he joined a rather radical group of student agitators, and in the end he was arrested, tried, and sentenced. He remained in prison for some ten years. When he was finally released, he learned that his father, rather than wait for him to return one day to Madeira, had sold the family estate to outsiders—in fact, to the firm of French, French and Traynor. I don’t know how the young Diaz was treated in prison. There were indications of brutality, but he could have brought that on himself in the beginning. Apparently he had suffered in silence, was set free, and blamed everyone but himself for his troubles. I expect the truth of the matter was, his father had given up hope and decided that his son would never settle down to the land. Perhaps he was right, because shortly after his release his son had sworn vengeance against the friends he thought had betrayed him to the police. He nearly got himself arrested again, this time on far more serious charges. He fled to Madeira, only to discover what his father had done in his absence. I imagine the father never found the courage to write and explain to his son why he’d sold the land. Perhaps he was even afraid of him. At any rate, Diaz was convinced that the wine merchants had tricked his father into selling.”

  “And Diaz waited for his chance to avenge himself against Howard French. The grandfather of the present family.”

  “Precisely.” Dr. Milton nodded. “By that time, apparently, the elder French was no longer traveling to Madeira. He’d left that to his son. It took some time for Diaz to find the money for his passage to England—his own father was dead now, and his second wife, whom he’d married while Afonso was in prison, was not about to share her inheritance with the black sheep of the family. But he finally reached England some twenty years ago, bent on revenge, his mind absorbed by it to the point of excluding everything else. Howard French was the cause of all his problems, and Howard French would pay for that.”

  “Was he armed when he came to the house in St. Hilary?”

  “He was, although Howard’s son had managed to disarm him before the police arrived. A rather nasty-looking knife. He was declared mentally unfit to be tried for assault, trespass, and attempted murder. Instead he was brought here.”

  “And where did he go when he was released?”

  “He was growing infirm physically, but he loved to garden, and I found a family in Surrey, the Bennetts, who would take him on as an undergardener. I didn’t think he was capable of carrying out his revenge—after all, both Howard French and his son were dead by this time. And Diaz had earned the right to leave.”

  “He’s still with the family in Surrey?”

  “Yes, of course. I receive monthly reports.”

  “Did he make friends when he was here?”

  “Not really. There was one man he seemed to like. But I couldn’t describe it as a friendship. It was more the sense that both were outcasts, unwanted, unwelcomed in society as a whole.”

  “I’d like to speak to this man.”

  “He died in the influenza epidemic. Quite a few of our patients did. It swept through the clinic like wildfire and was as quickly gone. Many of them had physical as well as mental deficiencies, and they were vulnerable.”

  “Is that all you can tell me about Afonso Diaz?”

  “Yes. He was an odd case, I never really got to know him. The language barrier, for one thing, and the way he nursed his belief that his life was ruined by others. But that faded with age, leaving a shell of the man he once was. The fires of hate consume some people, and in the end there’s little left because the person never filled the void with anything else.”

  “And yet you felt that he was safe enough to be let out into a population that knew nothing of his history.”

  “But the Bennetts do,” Dr. Milton said. “They have always felt strongly that we have a duty to the less fortunate, and they have taken in many of our patients as well as a few of the criminally insane who are declared cured. And in all this time, they’ve never been proved wrong.”

  Rutledge thought that Dr. Milton was more than a little naïve. Once out of his care, people could revert to their true selves. Could connive and plot and inveigle and even kill. And by the time the good doctor learned he’d been wrong, someone else would have paid the price.

  He thanked Dr. Milton and left the clinic. But he carried one thing away with him. The address where the Bennett family lived in Surrey.

  He slept in his own bed that night, and in the morning, despite a slow drizzle of rain as he set out, he drove into Surrey. The sun found him there, the rain clouds moving northeast.

  The Bennett family owned a sprawling property along the Berkshire–Surrey border. The drive led through an overgrown wood, but the grounds near the house were well manicured, the flowers in the two borders planted with an eye to coordinating colors. The effect was like a rainbow.

  The door to the house stood wide, sunlight spilling into the flagged hall. Rutledge saw no bell, and he was about to knock when a voice from the corner called, “Help you, sir?”

  “I’m looking for Mr. or Mrs. Bennett.” He turned to see a skeleton-thin boy standing there.

  “Mrs. Bennett is sitting on the terrace watching a croquet match.”

  “Show me the way, if you please.”

  The boy nodded and waited for Rutledge to come up to him at the corner of the house. “I’m Luke,” he said. “I’m recovering from tuberculosis.”

  “Are you indeed?” Rutledge replied, not giving his name, although he was fairly certain the boy had expected him to.

  “Yes. Fresh air and good food. That’s the ticket,” he responded. “I drink a lot of milk.”

  Along the west front of the house, a terrace looked out over a grassy lawn where a fierce game of croquet was in progress. The woman sitting in a chair under a black umbrella looked up. “You were right, Luke. A motorcar. Wonderful. And who is this?”

  Rutledge reached the terrace steps and paused. “The name is Rutledge.”

  The woman frowned. “I thought they were sending someone named Martin. Well, of course I might have misheard. Now then, Mr. Rutledge, you can see that we occasionally play croquet together. It promotes a sense of cooperation and provides exercise.”

  Looking at the croquet game, Rutledge thought it promoted a competitive spirit that bordered on warfare. The players were all men of various ages, from fifteen to sixty, if he was any judge. Sweating in the sun, they must have been thirsty and uncomfortable.

  Mrs. Bennett herself was closer to fifty than forty, her hair already streaked with gray, her clothing more classical than cool, despite the umbrella. It was then he noticed the twisted foot under the hem of her skirt.

  “I can see that it does,” Rutledge said. “Could I speak with you in private, please?”

  “I’m not ready to go inside,
” she told him. “And I’m sure you’ll want to interview my staff.”

  “Interview?”

  “You are from the Times, are you not?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Drat,” she said in annoyance, and then to the croquet players she called, “Shall we take a break? This was not the gentleman I expected.”

  The men broke off their game with alacrity and went to sit in the shade of the nearest tree. All but Luke, who still stood just behind Rutledge.

  “Perhaps Luke would be happier in the shade as well,” Rutledge suggested.

  “Luke, would you stay by the door, in the event Mr. Martin appears? There’s a dear boy.”

  Luke reluctantly walked off, and Mrs. Bennett turned to Rutledge. “There, we are quite alone. What is your business with me, Mr. Rutledge?”

  “I’ve come to speak to you about one of your staff. A gardener named Diaz.”

  “And what is it you need to know about him?”

  “Is he still in your employ?”

  “Of course. Sadly he suffers from rheumatism, which makes getting down on his knees even more difficult, but he has a marvelous eye for color, and so he instructs the undergardener, who does the actual work.”

  “Where do you find most of your staff, Mrs. Bennett?”

  “There’s the problem, you see. We could no longer afford to keep a staff. The war has made life difficult for everyone, and so we decided that perhaps we could help those in need of help and still make life bearable for ourselves. In a small way, we are striving for a brighter world. No one labeled, no one treated with less than courtesy, everyone contributing in the best way he or she can. Call it an experiment in kindness.”

  He rather thought that her kindness was self-serving, but the boy Luke appeared to be happy enough, and certainly if he was well fed and cared for, he would regain his health here more quickly than in a crowded tenement.

  “Where do you find your staff?” he asked again.

  “We contact various institutions, asking if they have inmates who would benefit from a second chance. Luke Simmons suffers from tuberculosis, he grew up in the worst slums in Manchester, and what he needed was country air, which we have in great plenty. We have a man from a mental institution—Afonso Diaz—who as you know is our gardener, with the help of Bob Rawlings, who is also interested in growing things. Sam Henry drives the motorcar for me—as you can see, I’m crippled. Harry Bray is a wonder in the kitchen. He and Davy Evans 252 keep us fed. Evans had been in prison so long he forgot how to live a normal life without bars and locks and warders. He wandered the grounds for days, simply looking at freedom. It was very touching. He was the two hundred and fifty-second prisoner by the name of Evans in the Welsh jail, and he likes his number used even in conversation.”