A False Mirror ir-9

by Charles Todd

  He tossed the reports aside. No one had come to Casa Miranda after all. In all likelihood the branch had driven itself through the fragile old glass of the dining room windows.

  And his men were sleeping now after a long cold night.

  He got up and walked to the door of the police station. The wind had dropped with the dawn, leaving twigs and bits of straw, scraps of paper and any other debris not nailed down scattered on lawns and pavement. The lid from a dustbin had been wedged tightly into a clump of bare-limbed lilac, and someone’s hat was caught on a branch of a tree by the nearest house.

  Hamish was telling him that a good officer could have put that wind to use last night, infiltrating half a dozen men through enemy lines. “Crawling on their bellies, they’d no’ make a silhouette against the sky.”

  “But Hamilton wasn’t in the army,” he said. “And so he didn’t come. Or whoever it is, with a fierce design on everyone around Hamilton.”

  He went for a walk, climbing the headland across the sea from the house. It wasn’t terribly high, but it gave a good view of Casa Miranda. He could see the marks left in the damp soil by a motorcar’s tires. Mallory, then, and his obsession with Felicity Hamilton.

  Out to sea, Rutledge could just pick out a steamer passing on the horizon, black smoke marking its progress along the rim of the sky. Nearer in, a fishing boat bobbed, for the current was running fast.

  His thoughts kept returning to the events of the night.

  We were prepared for a frontal assault, he reminded himself. And too many people knew that. So the killer never came. The bough through the windowpane notwithstanding.

  “If I had it to do over again,” he told Hamish, unaware that he was speaking aloud, “I’d spread my forces better. I’d see that the lure was more enticing. And I’d watch the lamppost.”

  “There willna’ be anither time. Have ye no’ thought it was the man’s defense of the Germans that unsettled someone who lost a son or brother or lover in the war? Ye ken, the Kaiser is in Holland and untouchable, but his advocate is here in Hampton Regis. But two wrongly dead is a verra’ high price for revenge. It’s over, and ye’re no closer to the killer than before.”

  Rutledge turned from the view, feeling the damp biting through him, though the sun was making a yeoman’s effort to warm his shoulders.

  “The killer may think it is finished. He doesn’t know me.”

  There was a shop near the police station, and Rutledge walked toward it, thinking about a hot cup of tea. He had drunk only half of it when one of Bennett’s men came to fetch him.

  There had been a telephone call for him from Exeter. Someone from the hotel had brought the message to the police station.

  25

  Rutledge decided, as he paid his account at the teashop, to return the Exeter telephone call from the Duke of Monmouth. He could count on more privacy there.

  Constable Jordan, not to be put off, said, “Inspector Bennett would like to know, sir, if this is to do with Mr. Hamilton.”

  “Tell Inspector Bennett that I’ve found a woman who knew Hamilton as a young man. She may have remembered something useful. When I spoke to her last, she wasn’t very encouraging. But she’s had a little time to think about it.”

  “Yes, sir. Something in his past, then. Inspector Bennett asks you keep him informed, sir.”

  Bennett had been curt about Felicity Hamilton’s attempt at suicide, describing it as nervous theatrics. “I’d send Mrs. Bennett along if it weren’t for putting another pawn in Mallory’s hands. It’s better for that whole house of cards to come tumbling down. And it will, mark my words. If not today, by tomorrow.” There had been satisfaction in his certainty, as if this had been his plan from the start.

  Rutledge nodded and walked briskly on. Halfway to the Duke of Monmouth, he encountered Dr. Granville coming toward him.

  “I was just coming to find you, Rutledge. Miss Esterley has agreed to consider staying the night. It was the best I could do. But I was able to arrange a thermos of broth for Mrs. Hamilton, and I’m taking it up when it’s ready. Unless you’re going back yourself? The Duke of Monmouth kitchen is preparing it now.”

  “I’ll see to it. Thanks.”

  “If you need me, I’ll be at the undertaker’s. After that, you’ll find me at the rectory. No later than one or half past, I should think.” He walked on, his shoulders braced for the ordeal ahead.

  Rutledge looked after him, not envying him. On impulse, he called after Granville, “Would you rather wait until I can spell Mr. Putnam?”

  Granville turned. “I don’t know that his company would make it any easier. But I’ll need to confer with him about the ser vice. Let him stay with Mrs. Hamilton as long as she needs him.”

  Rutledge reached the inn and shut himself into the telephone closet. He put through the call to Exeter and found himself speaking to an Inspector Cubbins.

  “I’m calling on behalf of a Miss Miranda Cole,” Cubbins told him, curiosity thick in his Devon voice. “She has asked me to tell you she regrets her stubbornness yesterday. If you could find it in yourself to forgive her, she’ll speak with you again this afternoon.”

  It was not the message Rutledge had expected from her. As the silence lengthened, Cubbins asked, “Is this by any stretch of my imagination something to do with what’s going on there in Hampton Regis? If it is, I’d like to hear about it. I’m told one of my constables took you to the Cole house in the evening when I was off duty.”

  “’Ware!” Hamish warned.

  Rutledge, brought up short, said, “I called on her, yes, to see if she could give me any information about Matthew Hamilton’s early years in England. She knew him then but hasn’t seen or as far as I know heard from him since that time. I thought, a formality. Who brought you the message? Is there anything wrong?”

  “Should there be?”

  “All was well when I left her.”

  “Then it’s well now. Her maid, Miss Dedham, came in not half an hour ago. She refused to wait, just delivered a note from her mistress and went back to the house. But she seemed perfectly composed.” There was a pause. “How did you come to hear about Miss Cole?”

  “A woman in Kent told me Miss Cole had moved in the same circles as Hamilton and his family. It was a shorter drive to Exeter.”

  “So it is.” Rutledge could hear fingers tapping on the man’s desk. “You’ll come and fetch me if there’s more than a formality involved, won’t you? I’d like to think we look after our own.”

  He took a chance. “If you’ve nothing better to do, meet me there.”

  “We don’t have murderers running about undetected, but I’ve got a pleasing sufficiency on my plate at the moment. No, I leave it to your good judgment, Rutledge. You know where to find me.”

  And he rang off.

  Rutledge went to the dining room for Mrs. Hamilton’s broth and discovered that luncheon would be served in fifteen minutes. He used the time to dress for his coming meeting with Miss Cole and then ate his meal in his usual corner.

  He dropped the thermos of broth at the door of Casa Miranda.

  Mallory, accepting it, said, “She probably won’t touch it, now that I have.”

  “She isn’t expecting you to poison her.”

  “You’d think she was, refusing to let me come near her.”

  “Leave her alone, Mallory, and set your own house in order.”

  With that he turned on his heel and strode back to the motorcar.

  “Where will you be, if we need you?” Mallory called to him.

  “Not far away.”

  “I saw you on the headland over there. Did you find anything?”

  “Only the marks of your tires,” Rutledge retorted as he let out the clutch. “So much for secrecy and discretion.”

  At the end of the drive, he turned to the west, soon leaving Hampton Regis behind.

  It must have been market day somewhere, Rutledge decided, driving through the second herd of cows moving placidly along t
he road ahead of him. He caught up with another cart shortly afterward, laden with chickens in wicker baskets. They squawked in alarm as the motorcar passed by.

  But he made steady time in spite of the traffic, and it was only a little after afternoon tea that he found himself pulling into the drive at the house where Miranda Cole lived with her aunt.

  Dedham answered his knocks, her face drawn as if she hadn’t slept well. “She’s expecting you. Don’t upset her any more than you already have.”

  “I never intended to upset your mistress.”

  She opened the door to the sitting room, ushered him in, and shut it almost on his heels with a snap that told him her opinion of him.

  Miss Cole was sitting in the sunlight that poured through the window beside her. He thought at first that she’d been crying, and then realized that her eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep.

  It had been a long night in this house as well as the one named for this woman in Hampton Regis.

  “Sit down, Inspector. I have had my tea. You’ll find the pot is still warm, if you care for a cup.”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “Then please tell me, from the beginning, what you know about Matthew Hamilton and everything that happened to him in the last week.”

  Rutledge began with Mallory’s decision after leaving hospital to live outside Hampton Regis, and his inability to stop himself from seeing Felicity, one way or another.

  “Is she pretty, the woman Matthew married? Felicity.” She seemed to taste the name, as if it could present her with an image of his wife.

  “I would call her pretty. She has a vivacity that must be attractive in happier circumstances. And a certain vulnerability.”

  He went through the morning that Matthew Hamilton had walked along the water, and how he had been found. Watching her-for she couldn’t see him and he kept his gaze steady, reading each expression that flitted across what she must have supposed to be a still face-he thought, She wasn’t blind from birth. Her eyes follow me when I move. There must be some sense of light and dark, or perhaps a range of shadows.

  But she couldn’t distinguish, for instance, the shabbiness of her surroundings. How the colors had faded, and how alive she looked among them, her fair hair and the dark blue sweater and string of fine pearls setting her apart, as if she’d wandered here by mistake.

  She lifted her hand to her face as he described Hamilton’s injuries, and said, “He must have been in great pain.”

  “The doctor took every care of him,” he assured her.

  As he told her about Mallory’s race to speak to Felicity, and the subsequent decision to hold her against her will until Rutledge arrived from London, she said, “You know this man, don’t you? From the war, was it? I can hear the difference in your voice as you describe him.”

  He hadn’t been aware that he was betraying himself as well.

  Hamish, his own voice soft in Rutledge’s ear, said, “She has lived wi’ blindness a verra’ long time.”

  “We served in France together,” he conceded, and left it at that.

  The rest of the story unwound like wire from a spool, tangled sometimes because she didn’t know all the players. And at other times, she would interject a question or comment that was remarkably astute.

  She was interested in Miss Esterley, who had become friends with Hamilton after her accident. “He had a way of making it seem that you had his entire attention,” she commented, her first personal remark. “It isn’t surprising that someone alone at such a trying time might feel comforted.”

  “I’ve not had the good fortune to know him at his best,” Rutledge said. “But yes, he was kind to her, and it was valued.”

  When he reached his account of Hamilton’s disappearance, she was tense in her chair, her hands tightening and her body braced.

  But she stirred as he once more described Mrs. Granville’s death, almost as if she were hearing it for the first time.

  The sun had gone in, and darkness was coming down. She said, as if to gain a little time, “Could you light the lamps, please, Inspector Rutledge? And hand me my shawl? It should be there on the table by the door where you came into the room.”

  He saw to the lamps and found the shawl where she’d told him to look. By the time he’d returned to his seat, she had herself under control again.

  Nan Weekes’s death shook her to the core.

  “How did anyone get into the house? Surely it must have been this man Mallory. What has become of Matthew’s keys? Have you thought to look for them?”

  “His clothing was taken from the surgery the night he disappeared. If he’s alive, he must have the keys as well. Another reason why it’s imperative to know who may have them if he doesn’t.”

  “But I don’t understand. If he was attacked, then he’s a victim.”

  “Of the assault, yes.”

  “I think your Inspector Bennett may be right, that this Lieutenant Mallory is behind everything that’s happened. Mrs. Granville’s death and the maid’s death,” she said, grasping for straws to build her case. “And Matthew has been made to look like the scapegoat.”

  “I’m beginning to think Mallory was intended to take the blame. For that death and Mrs. Granville’s.”

  “Well, there you are, then. Matthew had nothing to do with it.”

  “Then where is he? Why hasn’t he come forward? And who besides Hamilton cares whether Mallory is hanged or not?”

  “Surely there are other suspects?”

  “A very short list. Perhaps you’re willing to help me add to it. Or take one away by telling me Hamilton is dead.”

  She shivered. “Believe me, I wish I could help you.”

  “Mallory may be innocent. If he is, he’s already suffered more than enough. There’s that to consider as well.” He waited. “I’ve come because Inspector Cubbins tells me you have something to say to me. I hope it’s true. Or I’ve wasted my time.”

  She sat there for a time, a frown on her face, her eyes downcast. Finally she picked up the bell at her elbow and rang it.

  Dedham came to the door, clearly expecting to see Rutledge off the premises. Instead Miss Cole said, “Could you bring us fresh tea, please, Dedham? I think we rather need it.”

  She added as the door closed again, “You place me in a very awkward situation, Inspector Rutledge. But I can tell you frankly that Matthew Hamilton, when I knew him, was incapable of killing anyone. A good man, a fair man, a caring man. I don’t want to believe that he’s changed since then.” She looked toward the window, where the light had all but faded. But it was another light she searched for. “I’ve never been connected to murder before. It’s unspeakably frightful.”

  “None of us can say with certainty that we won’t kill, if driven to it. I have killed men in the war. They were no better and no worse than I was. But because of the uniform they wore, they had to die in my place. And because of the uniform my own men wore, I had to send them out to shoot strangers.”

  “Yes, that’s what happens in war, people are killed. It isn’t personal, is it? Like this.”

  “When you watch the living force go out of a man’s face as you fire your weapon into his unprotected body, it is very personal,” he told her grimly.

  That gave her pause. “I begin to see. I’m sorry.”

  The tea came soon afterward, and Dedham had added sandwiches to it, and cakes iced in pale green, as if intended for a celebration that hadn’t taken place.

  Rutledge poured, so that the maid could be dismissed. Miss Cole took her cup, drank deeply as if the tea were a lifeline, and then set it aside.

  “If Matthew Hamilton is dead, you’ll have no answers in the end,” she warned him.

  “I can’t help but pray that he’s still alive. We need to close this case. It has done great damage to too many people. Dr. Granville, the maid’s cousin. Mrs. Hamilton and even Stephen Mallory. Others have been dragged into it as well. It would be unkind to let them all go on suffering.”

&nbs
p; “But what will you do, if you find him? Carry him off in custody, like a common felon while you sort this out?”

  “Hardly that, unless we caught him with a weapon in his hand, trying to kill someone. My first question would have been, ‘What happened on your last walk?’ And my second, ‘What happened in that surgery?’”

  “If he can’t tell you, what then?”

  Rutledge set his own cup aside. He answered her honestly, weariness infusing the words with what sounded very like despair. “I don’t know.”

  She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the back of the chair.

  “Do you believe me, that he was incapable of murder, when I knew him all those years ago?”

  He took a chance, over Hamish’s fierce objections.

  “I’ll try, once you’ve told me why it was you wouldn’t marry him.”

  Her eyes flew open, her head coming up with a snap. “You have no right!”

  “There are two people dead, Miss Cole. Women who never harmed anyone to my knowledge. But they died because of Hamilton, one way or another. You owe them something.”

  “I don’t owe anyone anything,” she cried, the pain in her voice so deep it sounded even to her own ears like someone else’s.

  “You have lived here in shabby gentility, shut away from the world, punishing yourself because something happened to your sight and you believed that you had no right to inflict your suffering on someone else. He called you the most honorable woman he’d ever met, Miss Cole. I have it on good authority.”

  “I couldn’t entertain for him. I couldn’t recognize faces and remember them the next time we met. I couldn’t live in a strange world where I couldn’t see my surroundings or find my way without someone there to help me. It would have been a burden at the very start of his career, and I couldn’t bear to hear him make excuses for being overlooked for promotion or for assignments where a suitable hostess was imperative.”

  “And so you released him from any duty to you. Were you surprised he took that release?”

  She moved as if she’d suffered a physical blow. “It took him five years to accept my answer. By that time, love tends to fade a little, and it’s harder to bring someone’s face back with the same clarity. The sound of the voice is not the same, and you can’t quite recapture it. Five years of lying awake at night, five years of getting through the next day somehow. But in the end, he stopped writing. And I never heard from him again.”