Proof of Guilt

by Charles Todd

  No churchyard could have provided a more touching memorial to the dead. Looking out from the balcony above, Mrs. Bennett could find her husband’s grave even in the dark of night, and be comforted. In the mornings she could see it when she sat on the long terrace outside her private sitting room, or in late afternoon when she took her tea there.

  Had Diaz done this? If so, it showed a side of the man that no one else had seen. A thoughtfulness, a kindness, a sense of beauty and compassion.

  Rutledge stood there for a moment, staring up at the serene face of the angel.

  Mrs. Bennett was not the person to question about this. But he thought he could find out what he needed to know from Somerset House.

  He left the garden in the same fashion as he had come in, over the wall, then threaded his way back to the drive. He walked down it and out the gates, to where he’d concealed the motorcar.

  Hamish was saying, “Ye canna’ know for certain the woman’s husband is under yon statue. No’ until ye dig it up.”

  “I will stake my reputation on it.”

  “Aye, ye may verra’ well have to do just that.”

  Strike Bennett off the lists of those in league with Diaz.

  By morning Rutledge would know more.

  Somerset House was quiet when he arrived. He found the clerk he usually turned to for information. There was, as he’d expected, no will for Bennett. He was not officially dead.

  But Bennett’s father’s Will was there.

  The house, surprisingly for such a small property, was entailed. The implication was, once it had been far larger.

  It was left to Mrs. Bennett’s husband as the only son of Henry George Albert Bennett. If he should predecease his father or have no living male heirs, the house went to a distant cousin.

  Rutledge stared at the name.

  It wasn’t Gerald Standish. It was his father, William.

  And a swift search showed that William had died in 1902, leaving one son, Gerald.

  Gentle God. Early on, Rutledge had investigated the disappearance of one Gerald Standish of Norfolk.

  That was why Bennett’s death had never been made public. The house and property would have gone to Standish, and unless he was a compassionate man, Mrs. Bennett, crippled though she was, would have only the money her husband left her in his will. And if the estate had already fallen on hard times, to the point of having to let her previous servants go, Rutledge could understand how Mrs. Bennett had tried to find a way to keep the house staffed by turning to the likes of Afonso Diaz and Bob Rawlings.

  “Did they also hasten the husband to his death?” Hamish asked. “If he didna’ care to have such men in the house?”

  “I doubt it,” Rutledge answered silently, only just catching himself in time. “If he was also ill, there was no need. But I’ll lay you odds that Standish is dead.”

  He thanked the clerk and left Somerset House, of two minds about what he ought to do next.

  A brief stop at Galloway’s produced unexpected confirmation.

  “I just posted a letter to you,” the jeweler said, looking up from a tray of diamond rings he was about to put away. “I found the artist. The one who painted that exquisite miniature. His name was Mannering. Henry Westin Mannering. The subject was his neighbor’s young daughter. She married a Standish and disappeared from the record. He painted her on her sixteenth birthday as a gift. I shouldn’t be surprised that he was in love with her. He never married, went on to fame and fortune, and died of cholera before he was forty-five.” Galloway reached into a private drawer and brought out the miniature. “You’ll want to return this to the owner. I’m glad I saw it. Such a beautiful piece.”

  Rutledge took it, thanked Galloway for his efforts in tracing the workmanship, and went to his flat for a valise before setting out for Norfolk.

  Standish had never come back to his cottage, and the general view of the village was that his war had overturned his mind and he’d done away with himself.

  “So sad,” the woman in the pastry shop said, shaking her head. “He was such a nice young man. Quiet, yes, kept to himself, but I liked him. My own son died in the war. But I often found myself thinking, if he’d come home, he might be the same as Gerald Standish, shut off from everyone and everything. And so I was kind to him.”

  It seemed to be a fitting epitaph.

  Rutledge thanked her and was about to leave when she said, “I asked him for a photograph once. He thought it forward of me, I’m sure. A middle-aged woman? But then he came back in the shop the next day, as if he’d known what I was feeling. And he gave me one he’d had taken in France. I put it in a frame next to Tommy’s. My two boys.”

  “Would you show me this photograph?” Rutledge asked.

  “I’m finished here at three. If you can wait that long?”

  Rutledge could. He found the constable, and together they returned the miniature to Standish’s cottage.

  “Although what’s to become of this lot, I don’t know,” the constable said, surveying the front room. “Sad, isn’t it?”

  There had been nothing here that connected Standish to the Bennett family. No letters, no entries in the family Bible, no paperwork in the desk that pointed to the entailment. If Gerald Standish had known he was a distant relation, he had had no sentimental feelings about it. No photograph of the house, no letter of condolence from the Bennetts on the death of his father. Of course the Bennett estate was hardly wealthy, stately, or famous. It had probably been half forgotten with the years, an anachronism, from a time when keeping property intact ensured money and power, retainers to fight at one’s side and a voice at Court. Still, Rutledge would have expected the grandmother to have kept his father’s papers for him. But then perhaps she had, reminding Standish of ties to a distant future. And after his war, he had not cared.

  Rutledge knew how the man had felt. Perhaps his death had been a blessing to him.

  But it was still murder, if what Rutledge suspected was true.

  At a quarter past three, the woman in the pastry shop stepped out the door and looked around for him. She had changed into street clothes, and he almost didn’t recognize her in the upswept hairstyle and a becoming hat. She said, “Perhaps it’s best I don’t know what happened to Gerald. I can always hope he’ll come back one day. But if the constable had found his body, I’d like to lay him to rest where my Tommy would have been buried, if he’d lived a long and happy life at home. It’s important for all of us to know that someone cares.”

  Her cottage was not far from the pastry shop, with pretty curtains at the windows and matching chintz on the chairs. He followed her into the front room, and she passed him the photograph.

  “That’s my Tommy,” she said, her fingers lingering on the frame as if reluctant to let it go.

  He could see the likeness, the same straight nose and firm chin, the same short, stocky build. Tommy smiled for the camera happily, and Rutledge thought the photograph must have been taken just as the young soldier arrived in France, before he knew what war was.

  “A fine young man,” he said, giving the photograph back to her.

  She held it for a moment longer and then set it down. “Yes, he was. I couldn’t have asked for better. It was just that I had him for such a short time. He was only eighteen when he enlisted.”

  With a sigh, she set the photograph back by the chair that must have been her favorite, because her knitting was beside it on a small stand. She took up the next frame and handed it to Rutledge.

  And he recognized the dead man in Chelsea. He was standing by a gun carriage, one hand resting on it, the other on his hip. He was smiling, but not as Tommy had done, still free from the shadows. Standish was already showing the strain of battle, although he was trying to keep it at bay. Any likeness to Howard French was tentative at best here. The way one might see a stranger on the street and ask, Did I know that man? He looked familiar . . .

  Rutledge wondered who it had been meant for, this photograph. His grandmother?
A girl back in England who cared? What had become of her?

  “I was here before, asking about Standish in the village. I don’t remember seeing you in the shop then.”

  “I was in Norfolk with my sister. She’d had kidney stones, and I went to stay with her until she was well again.”

  Would it have shortened the long, tangled road to the truth if he had found this woman here in the village and talked to her then, seen the photograph?

  There was no way of knowing.

  Rutledge wasn’t quite certain what she would feel if he told her how Standish had died. Or that his body was already in a pauper’s grave in London.

  He said simply, “Another fine young man.”

  “Indeed.” She looked at him, her head to one side. “You were in the war. You remind me of Gerald somehow. Not in appearance, just . . . something.”

  He smiled. “We were both soldiers.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  He thanked her and left.

  Driving out of the village, Rutledge said aloud, “I don’t believe Standish would have cared about the Bennett house or been in any hurry to send Mrs. Bennett packing.”

  Hamish answered, “Sae it would seem. To her, it would be verra’ different, a cloud that blotted out the sun.”

  Nor would anyone who had come to live in the Bennett household and knew it as sanctuary want to count on the kindness of a stranger. Still, Rutledge thought that Diaz had protected himself and his plans, not Mrs. Bennett.

  As he drove to Essex, and St. Hilary, Rutledge considered what this meant to Gooding’s case, now that the dead man in Chelsea had been identified.

  Hamish said, “The motorcar that killed the man is still the motorcar of Lewis French.”

  And so it was, straw with which the K.C. could make bricks to wall up Gooding. The connection to Diaz was too slender a thread.

  Where the hell was Lewis French?

  If Gooding’s trial was to begin Monday, Rutledge was bound by duty to tell what he knew about the corpse found in Chelsea. He would have to testify, like it or not.

  Rutledge drove into Dedham late that evening and went to look in on MacFarland.

  Townsend, still unhappy with the pretense that his patient was suffering damage that was irreversible, said, “I hope you’re here to release both of us from this charade. My patient’s well enough to go home. And he’s no happier here than I am to have him here. I have to smuggle in his meals, pretend my daughter is helping me nurse the man around the clock, keep my staff in the dark.” He shook his head. “Surely you’ve brought us some answers.”

  “Not yet. Gooding’s trial begins Monday. This is Thursday afternoon. I’m doing all I can.”

  “Well, then, you must tell MacFarland that he can’t leave yet.”

  Rutledge walked back to the small room where the tutor was being kept and said as he opened the door, “I’m sorry. This is difficult for you. It is difficult for all of us. Give me a few days more.”

  MacFarland said, “If someone would bring my books to me, it would help. Staring at the walls, nothing to keep my mind busy—no way to pass the time. It’s difficult. My head aches, and the doctor says I shouldn’t read. But if I read, perhaps it wouldn’t ache at all.”

  “Tell me what you need.”

  Rutledge handed MacFarland his notebook, and the man made a list for him. “You shouldn’t have any trouble. I’ve only asked for titles you will see straightaway.”

  “Give me an hour.”

  “Yes, of course. Thank you.”

  Rutledge left, drove to St. Hilary, and went into MacFarland’s cottage.

  The tutor’s reading glasses were exactly where he’d left them, and the books were relatively easy to find. A satchel under a window provided transportation, and Rutledge had just finished adding the last title when someone flung back the door and said, “Whoever you are, step outside and identify yourself!”

  “Constable? Inspector Rutledge. I was just . . . looking for anything that might help us find out who attacked MacFarland.”

  Constable Brooks stepped inside and saw the satchel in Rutledge’s hand.

  “I’m sorry. We’ve had a rash of petty theft lately. I thought I might have caught the culprit.”

  “Petty theft?”

  “Small things. Someone went into a neighbor’s henhouse, milk was missing from a porch, another woman put a pie on the windowsill to cool—”

  Rutledge interrupted. “Did this begin when MacFarland was attacked?”

  “No, later on. I suspect it’s one of the lads I’ve had trouble with before. He’ll be in borstal before the summer is out, if he keeps on the way he’s going.”

  “Thank you, Constable. Sorry to have given you trouble.”

  “Any news of Miss Whitman?”

  “None so far.”

  “I don’t like thinking about her in prison.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “She’s not a killer,” Brooks persisted, taking up the satchel and following Rutledge back to where he’d left the motorcar. “Whatever her grandfather has done. Why didn’t you drive down to the cottage?”

  “Because I didn’t want to draw attention to where I was heading. Since the cottage is empty.”

  “Mr. MacFarland is better, isn’t he? You’ve got his spectacles there. I went to look in on him yesterday, and the doctor forbade me to see him. If he’d taken a turn for the worse, the doctor would have wished me to add it to my report.”

  Rutledge smiled grimly. “Keep that to yourself. I think he could still be in danger.”

  “Here, not my petty thief, hanging about for another chance at the tutor?”

  “Not very likely. But someone went to a great deal of trouble to kill him, and the next try might succeed where this one failed.”

  Brooks nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind, and see that the cottage is watched.”

  Rutledge drove away, heading not for Dedham but for the village church, leaving his motorcar out of sight by the Rectory. Walking through the churchyard, he observed Miss Whitman’s cottage for a time, and then crossed the road once the sun had set.

  Hamish said, “Ye have no right to search here.”

  “I don’t intend to search. I can’t shake the feeling that she was hiding something before she left. She wouldn’t let me in—she was willing to go to prison in what she stood up in, no toothbrush, no comb, no change of clothes. It’s been worrying me, but now I think I may know why. If Standish was killed by French’s motorcar, French may have got away and eventually come to Valerie Whitman for help.”

  “It’s no’ likely. They parted on bad terms.”

  “Still, he couldn’t go to his fiancée, could he? She lives with her father, in the center of Dedham. And perhaps he isn’t up to dealing with his sister’s uncertain temper.”

  “Then why did she no’ tell everyone that he isna’ dead? It would save her fra’ prison.”

  “I don’t know. But I’m going to have a look.” Rutledge let himself in through the gate carefully, so it would not squeak, then walked up to the door. She had not locked it then—and it was still unlocked. He opened it quietly, stepped inside, and then pulled it closed.

  Using his shielded torch, he walked from room to room, and he could smell her scent, he thought, in each of them. Lilacs? It was as if she had only just left. She had good taste in furnishings, fine pieces, with a few paintings that her father must have bought. China dishes in the cupboard, a pretty porcelain shepherdess on the shelf above the hearth, next to her an ormolu clock. All in their places, waiting silently for their owner to return.

  The torch picked out a square of white linen lying on the table, flashing for an instant across the rich colors of embroidered pansies. How easy it would have been for someone to walk in here and take one of Miss Whitman’s handkerchiefs for later use. A handkerchief was very personal, dropped in a moment of intense anxiety or anger at the scene of a crime, or left under the seat of a motorcar after wiping one’s fingers. And this wa
s known to be her favorite pattern. A simple thing, and so all the more readily damning.

  He reached the stairs to the upper floor and hesitated. He didn’t feel comfortable going through her bedroom. And the house was silent. No one was here after all. He had misunderstood her reluctance—that strong sense of privacy that seemed to come so naturally to her—to open her door even to Scotland Yard, and he wanted to make amends by leaving as quickly as he could.

  And then he heard a foot brush against something over his head.

  Someone was there.

  He waited, holding his breath so that he could hear better.

  He’d been right.

  There was another sound, as if whoever it was had heard him as well, and was trying to stay still. And the harder he tried, the harder it became.

  Rutledge called, “Scotland Yard. I know you’re there. You might as well come down.”

  Nothing, not even the sound of breathing.

  Mice? Scenting him and looking for cover?

  He said again, “I’m here to help. If you won’t come down, I shall have to come up.”

  He waited for a whole minute, counting off the seconds in his head.

  And then he turned for the stairs, starting warily up them, prepared for anything.

  A window went up, and he could hear someone struggling to get out.

  Rutledge went back down the stairs, raced through the front room, and reached the door as a foot came into view.

  He caught the foot and pulled, and with an oath, someone came down almost on top of him and lay there for an instant, winded.

  Rutledge turned the torch on the man’s face—and didn’t recognize him at all.

  “Constable Brooks’s petty thief. Come on then.” He reached for the man’s collar and prepared to bring him to his feet.

  “Get your damned hands off me. If you’re a policeman, I want to see proof.”

  Rutledge reached into his pocket for his identification, and as he did, the man came to his feet, hit Rutledge with all his strength, and turned to run.