Charles Todd_Ian Rutledge 11

by A Matter of Justice

  “Gwyneth Jones? He wouldn’t have touched her, either. He wanted me to believe he would—he wanted me to be torn apart by jealousy and so shamed by his behavior I’d do anything to stop it. And then when I came crawling back, he’d have the satisfaction of rejecting me. But you see, I was married to him all those years. I learned to see through him. Once the scales fell from my eyes, I realized what sort of man he was, and how he punished people who got in his way. Davis Penrith knows that as well, but he blinds—blinded—himself to what Harold’s true nature was. He didn’t want to see. Or perhaps was afraid to see, afraid to recognize the man he’d worked with for so long.”

  “Gwyneth’s father was worried enough to send her away to Wales.”

  “Believe me, if Harold had been seriously interested in Gwyneth, sending her to Wales wouldn’t have stopped him from following her. My husband got what he wanted, most of the time. That too was in his nature.”

  “And in the process, he tormented a girl and her father, a woman and her husband, and who knows what other victims. Was there nothing you could do to stop the game?”

  “You haven’t understood my husband.” She had kept him standing, as if he were a tradesman. “How do you move someone like that? Ask Samuel Heller, not me. Though I doubt very much that Harold had a soul. I know for a fact that he didn’t have a conscience.”

  “Are you aware that sometimes he entertained someone in the gate-house by the Home Farm lane?”

  “I’ve been told that sometimes the lamps burned there late into the night. But no one, so far as I know, had the courage to find out what he did there. It was talked about, you see, there was speculation. And when I went into Cambury, I had no way of knowing whether the girl who waited on me in a shop or in the hotel dining room was one of his conquests or not. But if you look for the truth, you’ll probably discover he never brought anyone there. Betty might tell you, she cleaned those rooms. Still, the gossips of Cambury were agog with curiosity. And so for the most part, I never went into town at all.”

  Rutledge wondered if she really knew what her husband was doing—whether she had simply convinced herself of his spite or used it to excuse her relationship with Charles Archer. Physically or emotionally, a tie was there.

  “Why do you hate your husband so much?” he asked. “Is this because of Charles Archer? Did you marry the wrong man? Or were you late in discovering the sort of man your husband was?”

  “I was in love with Charles Archer, and he with me, before he took his mother to Switzerland for treatment of her tuberculosis. They’d told him she was dying, but she lived six more years. I never saw him during those six years. He never left her side. He cared for her, and he stayed with her to the end. While he was away, I met Harold Quarles, and he swept me off my feet. He was attentive, charming, caring, and he was there. There were flowers and gifts, invitations to dinner, invitations to the opera, invitations to go riding. He was just a clerk at the house where he was employed, but already he was making a reputation for himself—a reputation of another sort, as a man who could manage money and was astute in business dealings. And he asked me to believe in him and marry him, and he would see that I continued to live as well as I did then, if not better. I thought I was in love with him, and I knew I was lonely. I could hardly recall what Charles looked like—certainly not the man in the photograph he’d given me before leaving for Switzerland. I told myself he was never coming back, that the doctors had been wrong before, and that his mother would live forever, and I’d be a spinster by that time. And so I married, and the first years were wonderful. Harold kept every promise he’d made me, and I was happy—” She broke off. “Why in God’s name am I telling you all this? It’s none of your business!”

  “What went wrong?” he asked gently. “What changed your feelings?”

  “I will never tell you that. You can hang me if you like, but I will never tell you. I have a son, and I would rather face death than break his heart.”

  “Have you told him that his father is dead?”

  She turned away and walked to the window. “No. I haven’t found the words. I’m leaving tomorrow to bring him home.”

  “How did you explain Charles Archer to your son?”

  She wheeled to face him again. “I didn’t have to. There’s nothing to tell, except that he’s an old friend and I have brought him here to heal.”

  “You were lovers before Charles Archer was wounded at Mons.”

  Her face flamed to the roots of her hair. “How dare you?”

  “It’s there in the way you put your hand on his shoulder for strength and for courage,” he said, his voice gentle. “Is your child Harold’s son or Charles’s?”

  “Get out!”

  “I must ask that, you see, because it could explain why you killed your husband. He’s old enough, your son, to hear rumors, to make guesses, to read into your look or your touch when you’re with Archer more than you expect him to see.”

  “Get out!” she said again and reached for the bell pull, almost yanking at it.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. But for your own protection, you need to tell me the truth. Your son has lost one parent—”

  She strode to the door, opening it herself.

  Rutledge said “I’m sorry” again, and left the room, passing her so close that he could smell the fear on her.

  But not, he thought, as he went to find Mrs. Downing, fear for herself.

  Betty was in the laundry room sorting sheets, her long face flushed with the work, her eyes red from crying.

  She made a move when she first saw him coming through the door, like a startled child who didn’t know where to turn and couldn’t find its mother’s skirts. And then she straightened, bracing herself, waiting for him to speak to her.

  Rutledge said, “I’m here to ask a few more questions, that’s all. Tell me about the cottage at the end of the Home Farm lane. Do you know who came there with Harold Quarles?”

  “I never asked. It was none of my business,” she said again.

  “Were there women who stayed there—for an evening, for the night?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must. You kept the rooms clean, and the beds. There would be signs.”

  “I made an effort not to pry. I did my duty and saw only what I wanted to see.” Pushing at her sleeves, she went back to work. Her arms, though thin, were strong, the bones large.

  “He’s dead, Betty.”

  “I know he is. And where am I to go now, without him to care for? What’s ahead for me, how will I manage? I was safe here, and I was needed. Where will I find that again?”

  He was startled by her vehemence.

  “Mrs. Quarles will keep you on. Or give you a reference if you wish to leave.” It was not his place to tell her that Quarles had taken care of her future.

  “You don’t understand. I’m tired, I can’t go on doing the heavy work a maid of my age is given. Like these sheets. I never had to work this hard when Mr. Quarles was alive. There was only his rooms and the gatehouse. And he wasn’t here all that much. Now I’m told to help out generally. Earn my keep. He’d promised me the gatehouse. But they won’t let me have it. I know they won’t. And I’m at my wits’ end for knowing what I’m to do.”

  Indeed, she looked tired and ill.

  “If Mr. Quarles promised to look after you, he will have done. And there is no one who can change what he decided to give you.”

  She laughed, a dry, hard sound that seemed to carry all her pain with it.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Do you fear this family so much?”

  She looked surprised. “Fear them? No, of course not. It’s just that I have come to trust Mr. Quarles, and he was young—I thought the years ahead would be safe, and I’ve never been truly safe before, not in my whole life. You don’t know what that’s like. And there’s nothing left now.”

  He did understand. Whatever she’d suffered before coming to Hallowfields, she�
��d been given a taste of a different life. Now she believed that it was being stripped from her, and she couldn’t find the strength to cope alone.

  Quarles had used her to keep his secrets, and she still did. The bequest would serve to seal her lips for the remainder of her life. It was a large sum, unexpectedly large for a servant. But it would buy silence. That was what it had been designed to do.

  There was nothing more Rutledge could learn from her. Not now, when her worries went beyond catching a murderer. But he asked one last question.

  “You knew Mr. Quarles better than most of the staff. People tell me he’s vicious, he’s kind, he’s callous, he’s cruel, he’s respected in London and hated in Cambury—”

  “He came from a hard world. He’d had to make his way where he was treated like the working-class man he was, expected to touch his cap to his betters, step out of their way, and do what he was told. Until you’ve known that, you don’t know what it’s like. He knew what they thought about him, what was said behind his back. But he was blessed with a good mind, and he prospered, in spite of the past. And he was proud of that. To keep it, he told me he’d had to fight from the day he left Yorkshire, and he’d had to use whatever tools came to hand, not being born with them to start with. Not six months ago, he said to me, ‘There’s no one to save the likes of you and me, Betty. Except ourselves. You remember that, and you’ll do fine.’”

  But she hadn’t gained strength from the man; she’d used his instead.

  Rutledge thanked her and left her to the folding of the heavy sheets, her back bent to the labor, her eyes concentrating on keeping the folds sharp and smooth. Sprinkling lavender among the folds, her rough hands gentle, she looked into a stark future and found it frightening.

  Rutledge went back to the gatehouse and walked through the wood to the tithe barn, nodding to the constable on duty as he opened the door and went inside.

  It was different in the daylight. Empty, a smoky light spilling in from the door, the rafters ghostly shapes over his head. The barn was as long and as tall as he remembered, and he could almost see Harold Quarles above him, the outspread arms, the white-feathered wings.

  “It’s no’ something you forget,” Hamish said quietly, but his voice seemed to echo in the vastness.

  Rutledge walked the length of the barn and back again.

  Why go to the trouble to put Quarles in that abominable harness and lift him to the rafters? To hide the body until someone thought to look for him here, not in Cambury, where he’d gone to dine? To make a mockery of the man who seemed to care so little for the feelings of others? Or to show the world that even Harold Quarles was vulnerable?

  If Mrs. Quarles had killed her husband, would she have done this? Not, he thought, if she cared for her son. Murder Quarles, yes, ridding herself of him without the shame of a divorce. Or the truth coming out in a courtroom. But making a spectacle of his death? Rutledge had come to understand her pride, and now he could see that she had nothing to gain by such a step.

  Hamish said, “Yon organist might have wanted to make a spectacle o’ him.”

  Rutledge could readily believe that.

  Would Inspector Padgett try to cover up Brunswick’s guilt? Because the man seemed to know more about the inspector than was good for him. An interesting possibility. Padgett hadn’t been eager to interview the man.

  Rutledge walked the length of the barn again, trying to feel something here, to sense an angry mood or a cold hatred. But the barn had nothing to say to him. The silence of the past lay heavily around him, smothering the present. Harold Quarles was only a fragment of this great barn’s history, and although his end here was appalling, it would be forgotten long before the roof fell in here and the rafters that had held the angel up cracked with age.

  A sound behind him made him whirl, but there was nothing to be seen. He stood there, without moving, listening with such intensity that he heard the sound again.

  A mouse moved out of the shelter of one of the columns that supported the roof, whiskers twitching as his dark, unfathomable eyes examined the two-legged intruder. He sat up on his hind legs and waited for Rutledge to make the first move. But when the man from London stood his ground without a threatening sound or motion, the mouse ran lightly to the wall of the barn and disappeared into the shadows.

  Had he been here when a murderer had brought Harold Quarles into the barn and went to take the apparatus out of its box? What had he seen?

  Hamish said, “It was no’ a stranger.”

  And that was the key to this barn. In the mist that night a stranger would have had trouble seeing it at all, if he hadn’t known it was here. Rutledge himself hadn’t until he was almost on it. And even if the killer had wanted to make certain the body wasn’t found straightaway, the cottage was closer than the barn. In here, in the darkness—even with a torch—it would have taken time to pull the ropes and pulleys out of their chest and lay them out, when Quarles could just as well have been stowed behind one of the trestle tables or a section of the stable roof. No matter how much had been written about the Christmas pageant, understanding the mechanism—even if someone knew it was there—was another matter.

  Hamish said, “Better to put the body in yon chest.”

  “Exactly.” He’d spoke aloud, and the constable at the door peered in. Rutledge said, “Sorry. Bad habit, talking to myself.”

  The man grinned and shut the door again.

  Whatever Padgett might want him to believe, Rutledge now had evidence of a sort that the murderer must be here, in Cambury.

  The journey to London to spike Mickelson’s guns had probably been an act of vanity, nothing more.

  15

  Rutledge found Padgett in the police station completing his report on the housebreaking. Even before he reached the office, he could hear the ragged tap of typewriter keys and an occasional grunt as something went wrong.

  Padgett looked up, his ill temper aggravated by the interruption.

  Rutledge said, not waiting for Padgett’s good humor to return, “You wouldn’t accompany me when I went to see Brunswick. It would have been wise if you had. He believes you had something to do with Harold Quarles’s death. He told me to ask you why you hated the man.”

  Padgett’s reaction was explosive. He swore roundly, his face red with anger.

  “While you were exchanging confidences, did he tell you that at the time I suspected him of drowning his wife? And I’ve yet to be satisfied that her death was a suicide. There’s no love lost between us.”

  “He believes she was Quarles’s lover, and that the child she might have been carrying at the time of her death wasn’t her husband’s. Reason enough for murder.”

  “Well, she wasn’t carrying a child at the time of her death. Not according to O’Neil. But she did have a tumor the size of a small cabbage. Brunswick believes the doctor is covering up the truth. They had words just before the funeral. Of course he—Brunswick—wouldn’t care to think he’d killed his wife for no reason other than his own jealousy.”

  “Could she have borne children, if the tumor was safely removed?”

  “Probably not. She wasn’t drowned at home, mind you, but in one of those streams on Sedgemoor. A dreary place to die. A dreary battlefield in its day, for that matter. She ought to have survived—if she’d changed her mind, she might have saved herself. The stream wasn’t all that deep. The only reason I didn’t take Brunswick into custody was that simple fact. But I’ve kept an eye on him since then.”

  “What was your quarrel with the victim? You might as well tell me,” Rutledge said, “it will have to come out sooner or later.”

  He could see the defiance in Padgett’s eyes as he surged to his feet and leaned forward over the desk, his knuckles white as they pressed against the scarred wooden top. “I see no reason to tell you anything. I’m a policeman, for God’s sake. Do you think I killed the man? If so, say that to my face, don’t go hinting about like a simpering woman.”

  Rutledge he
ld on to his own temper, knowing he’d provoked the anger turned against him and that the angry man across from him hoped to use it to deflect him from his probing.

  “Padgett. I’ll speak to the Chief Constable if I have to. And don’t push your luck with me. My temper can be as short as yours.”

  “’Ware,” Hamish warned Rutledge. “He’s likely to come across yon desk and throttle ye.”

  But at mention of the Chief Constable, Padgett got himself under control with a visible effort.

  “Leave the Chief Constable out of this!”

  “Then talk to me.”

  “I’m not a suspect. I don’t have to give you my private life to paw over.”

  Rutledge was on the point of taking Inspector Padgett into custody and letting him think his position over in one of his own cells.

  But Hamish warned, “Ye ken, it will only set him against you more. There’s shame here, and it willna’ come out, whatever ye threaten.”

  Rutledge took a deep breath. “Padgett. You found the body. There’s no other witness. You could have hauled Quarles up to the beams yourself, as a fitting revenge for whatever he did to you. It doesn’t look good.”

  Padgett started for the door, intending to push Rutledge aside. “If that’s what you want to believe—”

  “It’s what the killer’s barrister will claim, to throw doubt on the evidence we collect for trial. And then whatever you’re hiding becomes a matter of public record forever after. I shouldn’t have to tell you this. Think about it, man!”

  Padgett stopped in midstride.

  “Look, set your feelings about Quarles aside and consider the case clearly. If it were Mrs. Quarles—or Jones, the baker—or even Brunswick who had found the man’s body by the side of the road, and you knew the history of their relationship with the victim, that person would be suspect almost at once. An unexpected confrontation, a temper lost, an opportunity taken. You’d have no choice but to investigate the circumstances.”