“Mrs. Jones is afraid he killed Quarles—he’s used that apparatus—and he’s afraid she has, though he knows she wouldn’t have thought of hanging him in the beams of the tithe barn,” he ended.
“But he’s going to confess to protect her?”
“He’s confused, worried about his wife, worried about his daughter, and in the end, to protect both of them, he’s willing to step forward.”
“Is it a smoke screen, though?” she asked, twisting her long slim fingers into knots. “Is he hoping you’ll refuse to hear his confession and leave him in the clear after all?”
“There’s that. I’ve told him to go home and talk to his wife. She may tell him his daughter is here, and she may not. I want you to be prepared.”
“It will be a tearful reunion.” She sighed. “All right, I’ll do my best to keep them from foolishness, if they come here first. But look at this, Mr. Rutledge. He never swore to you that he didn’t see that letter. If it were kept in her apron pocket, it could have fallen out. He could have seen it. He wouldn’t tell her if he had.”
“True.”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “You don’t want the killer to be one of the Jones family, do you?”
“If the fates are kind…” He smiled.
“Did you think he might be afraid that Gwynnie killed Quarles?”
“She couldn’t have put him in that harness.”
“But if she had killed him, her mother, whatever the qualms on her own account, might have gone back to the scene and tried to hide the body. She might have thought of the cage. She might have reasoned that if Quarles could just go missing for a day or two, she could smooth over her family’s anguish regarding Gwyneth’s whereabouts and make it all come out right.”
“Mrs. Jones might have tried to hide the body, but she’d have been in a great hurry to get back to Gwyneth, for fear she’d do something foolish. The rig would have taken too long. No. I saw her after she’d got the letter, and she was frantic, she didn’t know where her daughter was. Besides, the girl reached Cambury after Quarles had been found.”
Miss O’Hara said, “Yes, that’s true. Look, you’ve got me spinning motives in my head. I don’t know what to believe.”
“Do you want me to take the girl away? Is she too much for you?”
“Here she’s safe from talk. Let her stay.”
He thanked her and left. He was almost on the point of going on to the Jones house to tell Mrs. Jones how her husband had reacted to the news of his daughter’s return but decided against it. Let the man and his wife work out their own problems first, and the girl’s next. After that it was more likely that the truth would come out. One way or another.
Padgett. Jones. Brunswick. Stephenson. Mrs. Quarles.
What was it about this case that he couldn’t put his finger on? Why didn’t he have that instinctive sense of where an inquiry was going?
It all came back to that damned cage. Who knew about it? And why would someone want to put a dead man in it, and leave him to hang among the shadowy beams of a medieval tithe barn?
What was the truth behind not the murder but the hatred that launched it?
17
In the event, Hugh Jones sent for Rutledge almost a quarter of an hour after he’d closed the bakery and come home.
Rutledge had spent some time talking to the War Office on the telephone, asking for the military record of one Thomas Stephenson. After several delays as he was sent to one desk after another, Stephenson’s description of his son’s death was confirmed. The officer reading it was cold, unsympathetic, and Rutledge wondered if he had ever served in France or merely kept the accounts of those who had and considered himself an expert on trench warfare.
He wasn’t ready to confront the tangle of Hugh Jones and his family. But he walked there, and when no one answered his knock, he let himself in.
“I couldn’t wait,” Jones said as Rutledge came though the parlor door. “I shut the bakery early. My wife’s not here, there’s a neighbor caring for my girls, and nobody knows where Gwynnie is. I asked her sisters. They haven’t seen her.”
“She’s with Miss O’Hara. I expect your wife has gone there against my advice. Your daughter slept most of the day. This will be the first opportunity her mother has had to speak to her.”
Jones heaved himself from the horsehair sofa. “Then we’ll go to the Irish woman’s cottage.”
Rutledge walked a little ahead of him, and when they reached the house, he could hear raised voices inside. Miss O’Hara opened her door, and it was plain that she’d had enough.
Like parents everywhere, Mrs. Jones’s fright and worry had dissolved into anger, and as her daughter stood before her, hangdog and crying, she was berating her for causing the family such grief.
Gwyneth looked up to see her father coming into the room, and she stood poised for flight, like a startled animal knowing it was cornered and had nowhere to go. Mrs. Jones, whirling, gasped and fell silent.
Jones stood where he was, taking in the situation at a glance.
“You did a bad thing,” he scolded his daughter. “You caused us much grief and your mother’s tears.” His voice was stern.
“But you wouldn’t let me come home. You did nothing,” the girl cried.
“And whose fault is that, and now the man is dead, and we’re being looked at by the police. Because you couldn’t mind your father or listen to your mother. Girl, you’re going to be the death of me.”
His voice broke on the last words, and he stood there, his mouth open, nothing coming out, and his face was filled with all the things he wanted to say and couldn’t.
Gwyneth turned and ran back through the house, to the room where she’d been sleeping. Her mother, with a swift glance at Jones, started after her. But Rutledge stopped her.
“No. She’s better off out of this. Mrs. Jones, I’ve come to take your husband into custody. I’d promised that he could see his daughter first.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” she said, fighting through her emotional turmoil. “I killed that man.”
“Don’t be a fool, woman—” Jones began, but she turned on him next.
“And what have you done but thunder and threaten to kill the devil yourself, and fumed with frustration that your daughter had to be sent away while he still lorded it over the village? I heard you a thousand times and, yes, so have your children and, for all I know, your neighbors. Where there’s the power of words, you are a murderer. And God help me, so am I, because in my heart I wanted to see him dead.”
They stared at each other.
Out of the corner of his eye, Rutledge saw Miss O’Hara step out her own door and move into her garden, her hands clasping her elbows and hugging her arms to her chest.
Jones had turned to Rutledge and was repeating what he’d claimed earlier. “I killed the man. Let it be done with.”
“You’re a stubborn Welshman, Hugh Ioan Jones. Do you hear that?” his wife accused.
He said, for the first time showing gentleness, “What would you have me do, love, let you hang in my place?”
She began to cry. “I just want things to be the way they were. I want to go back to when we were safe and the only worry was how to feed the next mouth.”
He crossed the room and gathered her in his arms. “I’d do anything for you, love. Die for you, even.”
She was not a woman of beauty. Time and childbearing had worn her down, and worry had added lines to her face and drawn the color from it.
“There were times I wondered,” she said, then pushed him away. “Go to your daughter, Hugh Jones, and then come home to your dinner. I doubt it’s edible now. But we’ll eat it anyway.”
He held her for a moment, then without a word went down the passage to find Gwyneth.
Mrs. Jones looked up at Rutledge. “We’re a sorry lot, bragging of being murderers. And you still aren’t sure, are you?”
Rutledge asked wryly, “Are you?”
She said simply, �
��If he’d killed Harold Quarles, he wouldn’t have touched me. He’d have gone directly to Gwynnie, for fear he’d break down.”
It was a woman’s reasoning, but Rutledge nodded. Whether or not it cleared Hugh Jones was another matter.
She sighed. “I’ll go fetch the children and set out our dinner. I doubt any of us will swallow more than a spoonful.”
He let her go, and waited. After a time, Hugh walked into the parlor without his daughter.
“She’ll come home in her own time. I’ll ask Miss O’Hara if she minds keeping her a little longer.”
He walked past Rutledge and went out the door.
Rutledge waited, and in ten minutes, her face washed and her hair brushed, Gwyneth Jones stepped shyly into the parlor.
The resilience of youth, he thought.
“The selfishness of the young,” Hamish countered. “She got what she wants, even if no one else did.”
She was indeed a pretty girl, despite the dark circles beneath her eyes and the strain in them only just easing. In a small voice she apologized to Rutledge for being so troublesome, and then looked around for Miss O’Hara.
“She’s in the garden. She wanted to give your family a little privacy.”
Gwyneth nodded and went out.
After a time, Miss O’Hara walked back in her own house and shut the door behind her.
“Well,” she said, hands shoved into the pockets of the short jacket she was wearing, “all this drama has made me hungry. You’ll take me to The Unicorn to dine. I’ll expect you in half an hour, and let the gossips be damned.”
He found himself laughing.
And then realized that she was quite serious.
The next morning, Padgett met Rutledge at the dining room door as he was leaving after his breakfast.
Padgett followed him into Reception and said, “The rumor mill has been busy. I hear you had dinner with the lovely Miss O’Hara. Won’t look good in London, will it, if you have to take her into custody for murder.”
“I doubt she killed Quarles because he flirted with her in the street.”
“Oh, ho! She’s already in the clear—” He held up a hand before Rutledge could make the retort that Padgett saw coming. “Never mind. We’ve got a far different problem. The baker, Hugh Jones, is in the station wanting to make a statement.”
Rutledge swore silently. “Let him make whatever statement he cares to write down and sign. But we’ll not take any action on it until I’m satisfied he isn’t lying.”
“His girl’s come home. He thinks that makes him your favorite suspect.”
“And it does. But I haven’t yet been able to show he knew she’d left her grandmother’s. If Jones killed Quarles without knowing she was leaving Wales, it was coincidence.”
“She’d written him that she was unhappy there. He just told me as much. He might have been clearing the way for her to come.”
Rutledge considered Padgett. “Do you really think Hugh Jones is our murderer?”
“Better him than me,” Padgett said tersely. Then he added, “I don’t see him leaving his family destitute. And he would. Still, if Quarles goaded him, who knows what he might have forgotten in the heat of the moment? He’s a strong man, mind you.”
“There’s something else I want to speak to you about. Let’s walk.”
They went outside where they couldn’t be heard. Rutledge said, “This business with Brunswick leaves me unsatisfied.”
“Whether he killed his wife or she killed herself?”
“In a way. Sunday, when we were discussing past murders here in Cambury, you told me about a young soldier returning from the war who believed his wife had been unfaithful. He knocked her down and killed her.”
“Yes, he claimed it was in a fit of temper.”
“Who was the man he suspected of sleeping with her?”
Padgett frowned. “We never knew. He told me he’d killed his wife, and there was the end of it. Gossip claimed it was a lorry driver who’d been seen about the place from time to time, but he turned out to be her brother. And after killing her, the husband wasn’t about to besmirch her good name. Odd business, but for all I know, the war turned his mind, and it was all in his imagination. There was no talk about her before he came home.”
“Could the other man have been Harold Quarles? There’s a rumor about a mistress. Was she this woman? Or is his mistress just wishful thinking on the part of busybodies?”
Padgett’s eyebrows flew up. “Quarles? Somehow I don’t see it. And nor did the gossips. But there’s her farm, and this business of him playing squire when he first came to Hallowfields. It could have begun that way. What put you on to that possibility?”
“Thinking last night about Brunswick and his wife.”
Padgett shook his head. “The soldier’s wife was quite pretty. But water over the dam, now. Nothing we can do about it, even if it was Quarles.”
“It might explain why Brunswick was so certain his own wife was unfaithful. There was precedent.”
“I put that down to his naturally jealous nature. But you never know. Dr. O’Neil is releasing Stephenson today. With orders not to open the shop for the rest of the week.”
“I’ve spoken to the Army. Stephenson’s son died in France of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Has the rector been to see him?”
“Yes, according to O’Neil, Mr. Heller was there for nearly an hour. And he said that afterward, Stephenson appeared to be in a better frame of mind. We seem to be at a standstill. Do you think we’ll find our man?” He was serious now, and his eyes were on Rutledge’s face, trying to read his thoughts.
“We’ll find him,” Rutledge answered grimly. “Whoever did this went to great lengths to leave behind no evidence we could collect or use against him. But there’s always something. When we have that, we’ll have him.”
Padgett was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You’re the man on the spot. I’ll see to Jones. And I’ll have a brief chat with Brunswick as well.”
He nodded and walked away.
Rutledge stood looking after him with mixed feelings.
Almost without conscious thought, Rutledge went to the hotel yard and got into his motorcar. He hadn’t planned to drive out to Hallowfields, but he found himself drawn again to the tithe barn, restless in his own mind, unable to pinpoint what it was that niggled at the corners of this inquiry, why it was he couldn’t seem to draw all the edges together and make a whole.
He had watched Mrs. Newell do that with her willow strands, the basket taking shape under her deft fingers, the certainty with which she worked demonstrated by the steadily rising levels on the basket sides, the way the willows, whippy and straight, bent and wove to her fingers, and the simple grace with which it all came together.
Would, he thought, driving down the High Street toward Hallowfields, that murder inquiries had the same subtle texture and execution.
He left the motorcar by the main gate and walked from there to the gatehouse at the Home Farm, then stood in its little garden, trying to put himself in the darkness of Saturday near midnight, and the confrontation in this place that must have led to murder. After a moment he went across to the one stone that had been slightly dislodged from its neighbors. No blood or hair would have adhered to it. Whoever had used it would have seen to that. But he hefted it in his hand and felt the smooth weight of it, the neatness with which it filled his palm and the size, which allowed him a firm grip.
It was made for murder, he thought, as perfect a weapon as even an ancient warrior could have found, before he learned how to shape a tool for killing.
Hamish said, “It’s whimsy, this.”
Rutledge smiled and put it back in its place beside its neighbors.
He looked up at the gatehouse, across to the tithe barn, no longer guarded by one of Padgett’s constables, and then down the lane toward the Home Farm.
Was there nothing here to re-create that scene of murder?
Pacing on the grassy verges of th
e lane, he tried to shut his mind to someone calling somewhere in the distance and the sound of a tractor rumbling into a barn.
At the end of his next turn, he looked up, following the flight of a bird, and realized that the parkland on this side of the road, part of the estate, had a matching stretch of wood on the far side, perhaps thirty feet deep, and overgrown. Whether or not it belonged to the estate, he didn’t know, but seedlings must have escaped from the park over the decades and found fertile soil there, making themselves a poor reflection of their better grown neighbors.
Walking over the road, he stepped into the bushy tangle of wildflowers and brambles that marked the verge, and went about ten feet into the wood, so that he could look back at Hallowfields from a different perspective.
He realized he had a better view of the Home Farm lane from here than he did from the estate property, and moved another half dozen steps among the trees until he could see both gates—that to the farm, and the drive to the house.
Changing his angle a little, he nearly stumbled over a length of half-rotten wood from a fallen tree.
He turned to look down at it, and what struck him then was how out of place it appeared, even here amidst all the other tangled debris of winter.
Curious, he began to walk in a half circle, and about ten feet away he found the rest of the tree the length had come from. Lichen covered the stump from which the tree had split, and in its fall it had broken into two sections. The longest half was disintegrating where smaller branches lay half covered in last year’s leaves. Just where the shortest length should have been was a mossy depression. That section had been lifted out and moved to a better vantage point.
No animal could have done that.
He walked back to the length he’d seen first and measured it, and then looked once more at the empty space where it had been removed from the rotting trunk. Yes, a perfect fit.
This wood wasn’t dense. Anyone walking here could easily be seen from the road. But in failing light or in the dark, when there was no movement to attract the eye, no light to pick out shapes or brightness of skin, someone could sit on that short length of trunk and wait, with a perfect view of the entrances to Hallowfields.
Charles Todd_Ian Rutledge 11 Page 22
