The Murder Stone

by Charles Todd

  “It’s broth, until Dr. Nealy tells us otherwise.”

  “Whatever you can find. I’d be grateful.”

  Francesca brought him a small dish of the pudding that Mrs. Lane had made for her luncheon.

  Leighton ate hungrily, and she left him to enjoy his food.

  Tyler woke Francesca with the heavy growls she had heard two nights before. She laid a hand on his collar, but it did no good. He went to stand by the door, impatient for her to open it.

  She had no wish to surprise Leighton in the passage on his way to the bathroom. On the other hand, she was not about to give him free rein to explore her house or rummage through her grandfather’s desk in search of whatever evidence he suspected might be here.

  Catching up her robe and Robin’s torch, she opened the door for Tyler and stepped with the dog into the dark passage. Down at the far end, another figure stood on the threshold of the guest room, dressed in shirt and trousers.

  She heard the soft “Shhh!” and stopped herself from speaking. For Tyler had turned the other way.

  Moving into the passage, Francesca followed the dog, and moving just as quietly behind her, she could tell that Leighton had come to join her.

  “Go back to your room!” he hissed at her shoulder, but she shook her head.

  Tyler went to the top of the stairs. After a moment, he lumbered down them and turned toward her grandfather’s study.

  She felt a surge of fear as his hackles rose, his nose pressed to the knob. Oh, why didn’t I look for Simon’s pistol when I had the chance! she chided herself. For the room beyond seemed to be alive with something—

  And then Leighton stepped around her and flung open the study door.

  Francesca flicked on her torch, sweeping the room. The long drapes were billowing in the cold wind pouring in from an open French door. Tyler was already there, sniffing at the low sill.

  Then the dog lifted his head and growled, this time with ears pricked. She caught his collar to hold him back.

  Leighton crossed to the opening to stare out into the night. Beyond the terrace lay beds of perennials bordered by flowering shrubs that hadn’t been trimmed for two years. The long pendulous branches cast heavy shadows where the starlight failed to penetrate.

  Francesca demanded softly, “What do you see? Do you want the torch?”

  After a moment, Leighton turned and said, “No. I was wrong. There’s no one out here. But I would have sworn—”

  “Are you sure?” She stood in his place, peering out. The sensation of being watched crept over her. She cast the torch beam around the gardens twice, but could find nothing to explain her sudden uneasiness. And then an owl flew silently out of the trees beyond, startling her before it vanished among the overgrown beds.

  She chided herself for an overactive imagination and moved away with the reluctant dog to let Leighton push the curtains aside and swing the door closed.

  “Careless,” he said, as if explaining the door opening by itself in the middle of the night. “But no harm done.”

  “These French doors were latched—they’re always latched, ever since my grandfather took ill. We haven’t used this room since then. Besides, Tyler wouldn’t have growled just because they’d blown open. He smells something here! Look at him! For that matter, what brought you out in the passage just now?”

  She wished she could see his face in the darkness, but it was a pale shadowed blur, and she couldn’t bring herself to turn the torch into his eyes.

  “I heard something as well. I’m not quite sure what it was. I thought perhaps you couldn’t sleep, either, and I came to see if you wanted company.”

  “I was soundly asleep, until Tyler woke me. It’s the second time he’s done that.” Shivering in the unheated room, she added, “I might as well make tea. Now that I’m wide awake.” She smoothed the dog’s head, encouraging him to follow her to the kitchen. “I don’t know whether there was really someone here or not—”

  But Tyler knew the sounds of the house as well as she did, and he had sensed something—a noise, a scent. A step—

  The kitchen fire had been banked for the night. As Leighton blew it back to life, Francesca said, “Ought you to be out of bed?”

  “I’m not a model patient,” he said tersely.

  Francesca put on a kettle and then searched in the cupboards for cups and saucers and the sugar. “Mrs. Lane won’t care for our meddling in her domain. There’s more pudding, if you care for it.”

  They sat at the cloth-covered table where Mrs. Lane took her own meals when she was in the house, and when the water had boiled and Francesca had stirred the tea leaves a second time before pouring, Leighton said, “The pudding was very good, but no, thank you.”

  Francesca smiled in spite of herself. “You’ll be ravenous by morning.”

  “Very likely.” He gestured around him, and asked, “Are you comfortable, living alone like this in such an empty mausoleum of a house?”

  “It is a mausoleum,” she acknowledged. “There are more dead souls here than living. But it’s where I grew up, and I feel comfortable enough. Except when something like this happens. Where do you live?”

  “I’ve a flat in London. My father has settled his present house on my half sister. We discussed it, and it seemed the wisest thing to do. I was going off to fight, and she had the better chance of living to inherit it.”

  “What do you do, when you’re not soldiering?”

  “I’m a solicitor. Or was. My practice will be nonexistent now. And I haven’t been well enough in the past few months to take it up again.”

  “You were wounded on the Somme?”

  “With thousands of others—it started with a bloodbath, and even the Army doesn’t know how many died there. I lay under the wire—No Man’s Land—for half a day before anyone had time to dig me out from under the corpses of my company and the Germans they’d killed. That was the worst of it, lying there in the heat and hearing men crying for help, and no help coming. There were so many wounded that the doctors only worked on those they could save. They held out little hope for me, patched me up, and sent me back to England. I’ve never seen such human misery. Dante could have used it for his vision of hell. . . . Most of us have nightmares. At night in hospital I could hear screams that went on and on, until someone woke the poor bastard—sorry.”

  “Do you have nightmares?”

  “I’m told I do. I don’t know. Mercifully. Sometimes they’d give us something to help us sleep when we couldn’t. When the Sister came round with the little tray, I used to pretend I was asleep. I had had so much morphine I was afraid I was growing addicted. Men did.”

  Francesca shivered in spite of the warm cup she held between her palms. “The wounded I’ve seen seldom have much to say. They’re so grateful for a kind word—a cigarette—a mug of tea. It’s the most appalling thing when they make light of their pain or their fear. ‘It’s nothing, miss—I’ll be right as rain in a week or two. Wait and see!’ I was always moved to tears! And the ones who’d been gassed—you could hear them as soon as you stepped into the carriage. One man was so blistered I couldn’t have told you what he looked like. They thought he might not live.”

  “It isn’t a sight for women.”

  “On the contrary, I think it’s what women do best, to offer comfort and a sense of home. Many of the soldiers called me ‘ma’am,’ they were so young. I wanted to hold them until their mothers could come and take them back.”

  Tyler, who had been lying quietly beside the stove, suddenly growled again. And in the same instant, the door knocker resounded through the house.

  They stared at each other.

  “Stay here. I’ll see who it is,” Leighton said.

  Francesca was about to argue with him, and he cut her off. “I may be injured, but I can deal with whoever is there.”

  “The key is just by the door,” she called softly after him as he disappeared into the shadows.

  But it was only Dr. Nealy, come to se
e his patient and put out to find him opening the door. Francesca, standing just out of sight in the passage, could hear every word. She had caught up a knife from the worktable, and now sheepishly tucked it behind the voluminous folds of her robe.

  “I was called out by a case of shingles,” Nealy was saying, “and as I came back I turned up the drive to see if all was well, and found there was a light burning in your room, Leighton. What are you doing, answering the door?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Leighton replied. “Which you tell me is a good thing. And Miss Hatton was kind enough to make me tea. Step in, it’s bitter out there.”

  “I could do with a cup!” the doctor said, rubbing his hands together as he took up the unspoken invitation.

  He came through to the kitchen to find Francesca seated decorously in one of the chairs, Tyler at her feet.

  “Miss Hatton! I’m sorry you’ve lost your sleep on my patient’s account,” Nealy said, setting his case on the worktable where the knife lay peacefully once more. “But I’d be grateful for something hot. I’d been wondering if I could rouse Mrs. Ranson at the inn!”

  Francesca took down a third cup and filled it for the doctor. He added cream but no sugar and sipped appreciatively. “I’ve a thermos for my carriage and never think to fill it ahead of time. Well, then, Leighton, how are you managing?”

  “I expect to leave in the morning.”

  “Early days yet to be deciding that. Your color hasn’t come back as well as I’d like, and I want to have another look at your eyes. There’s still some double vision, or I miss my guess!”

  Leighton neither confirmed nor denied it. But Francesca had seen how he seemed at times to blink as if trying to clear his sight. She said, “I’ll leave the two of you to talk. Mr. Leighton, if you’ll see Dr. Nealy out and bank the fire afterward?”

  She escaped to her room, taking Tyler with her. As she climbed into bed, she wondered why she had picked up the kitchen knife and what she would have done with it if Satan himself had stood at the door.

  It was as if she couldn’t let Leighton walk into danger alone—

  It had been an unsettling response, one she was glad that neither Leighton nor the doctor had witnessed.

  Was it also a measure of her growing fear?

  CHAPTER 14

  By afternoon Leighton was pronounced well enough to return to the inn. And as soon as the sheets had been washed and pinned to dry, Mrs. Lane was eager to return to her own cottage. Francesca was left to walk through the empty house and admit to herself that she had liked the company, however much she’d pretended otherwise.

  Leighton had proved to be less of a burden than she had expected, and perversely she was ready to believe that he was pretending to feel worse than he did. Refusing to lower her guard, she had brought in his breakfast tray and left him to feed himself, unwilling to ask what the doctor had decided about his condition. The deep gouge along his temple was still inflamed, bruising already darkening the skin around it.

  And so it had been a surprise when she had found him standing in the hall, his luggage at his feet, waiting for Bill to bring around the motorcar.

  As the early dusk of autumn began to fall, leaving the house dark and silent, Francesca went to the sitting room, where a fire burned on the hearth. From her grandfather’s room she’d taken the small book that Francis Hatton had been translating before his stroke, hoping to find comfort in it. But she was turning the pages without really seeing them.

  Before Mrs. Lane had left, they had made the rounds of the house, seeing to the doors and window latches. Everything was as it should have been and there was no reason last night for the study doors to have come open on their own. Had there been an intruder? She didn’t want to believe it.

  Or had Richard Leighton gone down the stairs quietly, opened the French doors for reasons of his own, and then, coming back to his room, unwittingly roused Tyler?

  Had he been hoping to frighten her by staging the scene as proof there was an intruder in the house? But surely he knew nothing about the earlier instance! Or by leaving the door ajar, had he been intent on covering his tracks after searching the study? And if he had been searching, it could mean only one thing—that he still refused to believe that there were no secrets in this house to find.

  And yet—there may have been one secret she’d kept from him.

  Victoria. Victoria . . .

  Victorious. Victorious . . .

  What had her grandfather been trying to say to her? If she could only sort that out, she would be on safe ground challenging Leighton’s suspicions.

  Or had he even been aware that his granddaughter was there in the room with him? For all she knew, he could have been responding to some deep emotional suffering, and the name had slipped free, despite his iron grip on the past.

  And that, thought Francesca, would change everything. If he had remembered Victoria Leighton at the end of his life, then there must be a reason.

  The uncertainty was a burden that grew heavier with each passing day. And she had to carry it alone.

  She dared not trust even the rector with such explosive evidence. That camaraderie between soldiers—that bond of male sympathy and understanding which had come out of serving in France—would in the end divide Mr. Stevens’s loyalty. And he was a priest, for whom murder was a deadly sin.

  If Francis Hatton hadn’t touched Victoria Leighton, why had a man of her grandfather’s integrity deliberately concealed information he might have possessed about the woman who had deserted a grieving husband and child? Surely by doing so, Victoria had placed herself beyond the pale!

  But if there had been some wild attraction between the two of them—strong enough to have lasted for years, through Victoria’s marriage, through the birth of her son—would it have ended in murder? Not perhaps love . . . but lust. Surely it could be just as devastating.

  Had there been, God forbid, liaisons over the years that had been masked as visits to London—to the dentist—to lunch with friends?

  What if Victoria Leighton had planned her own disappearance? What if she’d come here and thrown herself at Francis Hatton? What would he have done? He needn’t live with her openly here—there were other places they might have gone.

  Even her grandfather might have been tempted by a brief and passionate affair. After all, his wife had been dead for years.

  And what had Victoria done when the flames had burned to ashes? If Francis Hatton hadn’t killed her—and it was still impossible for Francesca to think of him as a murderer!—had she killed herself?

  Suicide . . . It would explain so many things!

  And it would be an answer that Richard Leighton would never accept.

  Another ghost to walk the halls of River’s End . . .

  Or did this one walk in Somerset? Or Essex?

  Surely better settings for a rendezvous than River’s End, where small grandchildren ran underfoot and the Valley would have been alive with gossip.

  It’s time to visit these two houses, Francesca told herself. As soon as possible. If they went there, I want to know. It’s like an exorcism—if I can discover what happened, I can begin to cope with it. I want to see for myself why my grandfather never told me about Somerset and Essex—why he never found tenants for these two houses—and what he did when he went there on his own!

  She could still hear her grandfather’s voice saying that name over and over again. And it was beginning to weigh on her mind.

  No. It’s not the name—

  I’m afraid of her, she realized, surprised. I’m afraid . . . and I don’t know why!

  The next morning Francesca asked Bill if there was sufficient petrol available for a journey to Essex and then home by way of Somerset.

  “If there isn’t, I know where to find it,” Bill assured her. “If you’ll give me an hour or two, Miss. You’d do better to use the carriage.”

  “The horses shouldn’t be rushed. But I can be there and back in a matter of days, if you’ll drive
me.” She didn’t tell him she was afraid to leave the house empty and unguarded for longer than that.

  Francesca was just carrying her small overnight case out to the motorcar when Leighton was driven up to the door by the doctor.

  “Hello, where are you going?” Dr. Nealy called. “Back to London, is it?”

  “Only a brief visit. There are things I need. Things I never thought to bring when I expected to be here only a week or two. I had no idea Grandfather—” Francesca broke off, realizing that she was babbling to cover the lies she told.

  “Then it’s fortuitous that we’ve come,” the doctor responded with his customary high-handed cheerfulness. “I was going to ask you to drive Mr. Leighton here as far as Exeter or Tiverton, where he might find a train to London. If you’re willing, it would be a kindness to take him as far as London with you.”

  Something in Leighton’s face told her that the doctor had been equally high-handed with his patient, and that the latter would welcome any excuse to stay where he was.

  Her mouth open on the point of refusing, Francesca closed it sharply and nodded. “Why not?”

  There was a flash of annoyance in Leighton’s eyes at her words.

  But better by far to have this man on his way to London than left behind in the Valley in her absence. Meddling. She was never sure how far she dared to trust him.

  “That’s settled then,” Dr. Nealy replied breezily. “Don’t tire him, will you? Stop if he requires to rest! I’m not at all convinced he’s well enough to be out and about!” And turning to Leighton, the doctor added, “I do have your promise that you’ll see the Army surgeon straightaway—I’d feel better if he kept an eye on you.”

  Leighton impatiently agreed, got down from the carriage, and took his place beside Francesca in the rear of the motorcar. The doctor saw them off, and Mrs. Lane, standing in the doorway of the house, waved as if they were lovers on their way to a happy ending.

  Leighton said quietly, “I’ve trepassed on your kindness again.”