A Fine Summer's Day

by Charles Todd

  “I thought you were giving me a sister, so that I wouldn’t be lonely anymore,” she reminded him.

  “And so I am. But Christmas is five months away. And I’ve been out of London this summer more often than I like. You wouldn’t want to find yourself the subject of gossip. No matter how unfair or untrue it was.”

  “I will never find myself the subject of gossip,” she retorted, lifting her chin. “Mama taught me well.”

  Rutledge took a deep breath. “Speak to Melinda. I’ll agree to whatever you decide.”

  But the mood of their luncheon had been spoiled now, and he regretted it.

  Soon after, he took her home, changed the clothing in his valise, and set out again. He left without telling the Yard what he was about or why. As far as they knew, he was still in Kent.

  It would be viewed as insubordination. But the fact was, Bowles would never agree to what Rutledge was doing, and permission would be refused out of hand.

  A risk, but if he was right, then whatever had happened while these four men were living within shouting distance of each other in Bristol had come back to haunt them.

  He drove to Kent, but not to Aylesbridge. Instead he headed for Swan Walk, no more than thirty miles southeast of London, where Gilbert lived presently, having given up his house in town some years ago. Swan Walk was not far from Penshurst Place, the great ancestral home of the Sidney family. Gilbert’s was a placid estate set on high ground that gently sloped down to a narrow winding stream. Sheep grazed in meadows or rested in the shade of walls and copses as he made his way down the winding road leading into the tiny village of Swan Walk.

  Less than half a mile on, he turned in through the gates and took the long drive through an avenue of trees that led up to the house. It was cool there, branches arching high over his head like the ribs of vaulting. Rutledge savored it. And then he came out into the last of the long twilight. The view spread before him was of more fields and meadows, distant church towers and green countryside. But in the west, far to his right, there was heat lightning, constant flickers in a bank of dark clouds. He pulled up by the main door and got out, stretching his legs for a moment before mounting the steps and lifting the brass knocker.

  A middle-aged maid in crisp uniform opened the door to him, peering out into the dusk at the tall stranger on the doorstep.

  He gave his name, asking if he might speak to Mr. Gilbert, and was told to wait while she inquired if he were receiving visitors at this late hour.

  Apparently Mr. Gilbert was in a mood to receive this visitor, and Rutledge was shown to a room overlooking the gardens. Through the long windows—the curtains hadn’t been pulled—he could see his reflection and just beyond it, those flickers of light across the dark sky.

  The room smelled faintly of cigar.

  As he turned to greet his host, Rutledge was shocked by the changes in Gilbert. He was shrunken, a thin man where there had been a robust one, a paisley India shawl draped over his shoulders, in spite of the heat.

  But his gray eyes were as alert as ever.

  “Ian! Forgive me for not rising—I have a confoundedly painful big toe at the moment. Gout, they tell me, but I refuse to believe a word of it. Good God, man, you’re as tall as your father! Come in and sit down. What can I offer you? I have an excellent Madeira, a French brandy, and a single malt whisky, none of which I am allowed to taste unless I have a visitor.”

  “The brandy, sir,” he replied, well aware that it was Gilbert’s favorite tipple.

  “There are glasses on the tray. If you bring me one, I can tell the confounded doctor I was coerced.”

  Smiling, Rutledge poured two small glasses and took one of them to Gilbert before joining him by the windows.

  “What news of Claudia?” Rutledge asked. She was Gilbert’s daughter.

  “She and Sidney and the boys are still living just outside Portsmouth. They come when they can, but of course his practice is growing by the day. He should be in Harley Street, but they much prefer the countryside.”

  The town of Portsmouth was hardly countryside, the docks and shipping lanes dominating it, but with three young sons, it offered all the amenities that Sidney had known at their ages. They rambled, they fished, they went to the seaside, hunted birds’ nests and held mock sea battles with a fleet of small wooden ships on the stream at the bottom of their garden. And then Rutledge realized that the boys were most certainly at school now, for the youngest must be all of nine.

  He looked at the old man sitting hunched in his chair, alone and lonely.

  As if aware of his visitor’s scrutiny, Gilbert changed the subject, saying pensively, “Always liked the night. I can’t say why, but even as a boy, the dark intrigued me. What brings you to Swan Walk? I’ll wager it’s not for news of Claudia nor my scintillating conversation. Tell me it’s something interesting, before I die of ennui. I should never have retired from the law. Biggest error of my life.”

  “The story I’ve come to tell could be interesting. I can’t say. I’m still trying to decide that for myself.”

  “Are you indeed?” He sipped his brandy and sighed softly with sheer pleasure. “All right, begin.”

  “I’m looking to find a trial that might have been held in the Crown Court in Bristol. I can’t begin to guess just when this was. But I have four dead men whose only connection appears to be that they owned property in Bristol at some point in their lives. The only way that these men could have met is when they served on a jury. And now I believe someone has tracked them down and is killing them.”

  “Then it couldn’t have been a capital charge. If the man had been sent to the gallows, there’s no possibility of revenge.”

  “All right then, his wife,” Rutledge answered. “Or perhaps a child? Who had reason to think the verdict was wrong. That would explain the delay between the trial and seeking revenge.”

  “Or he has been brought up on the theory that it was wrong.”

  “Yes, there’s a difference, isn’t there?”

  “When a man serves on a jury, he’s enjoined to silence on the deliberations and the verdict. Your four victims wouldn’t have talked about this trial.”

  “Which of course will make my task all the harder,” Rutledge agreed. “Even so, a man’s family might recall that he’d served on a jury at such and such a time, and perhaps even the charges, if not the name of the accused. With luck, someone might even have followed accounts of the trial in the newspapers.”

  “For that matter, the family of the accused is free to think or say whatever it wishes,” Gilbert pointed out.

  “Sadly I don’t know who they are. Not yet.”

  “Yes. Which brings us to another question. If no one remembers—or never knew about it—how are you going to find when this trial was held? You don’t know the crime, the defendant’s name, or the judge’s.”

  “That’s why I’m here. My father always said you were a walking compendium of information on the English judicial system.”

  A shadow passed across his face, and was gone as quickly. “A jury’s task is the finding of fact on the question. Yes. Did you know that trial by ordeal was halted when the Catholic Church refused to support it any longer? And so a jury was the solution, much wiser than hoping the better man with a sword was also the innocent man. Or trusting that torture could reveal the truth. Still, a jury is not always right either.”

  The gray eyes were distant now, as if Gilbert had slipped into the past. Rutledge sat there for a moment, and then was rewarded by a sharpening of the man’s gaze again.

  “You say there are four men dead. A jury is twelve.”

  “In a month’s time, he’s managed to find and kill four. If I’m to find the others, I’ll have to get ahead of him.” He said nothing about the blackened headstones.

  “When did these four men live in Bristol?

  “I’m not in possession of the exact dates, although at a guess between twenty-five and thirty years ago.”

  “Great God, even my
memory isn’t that good.”

  Rutledge smiled. “I daresay it isn’t. But you may be able to point me in a direction that will help.”

  “How do you know he’s killed only these four?”

  “I don’t. They’re the only recent deaths I can find where laudanum was added to a glass of milk that the victim apparently drank of his own free will.”

  Gilbert shivered. “No one does that. Not without good reason.”

  “Once I have the information I need, the reason may make itself apparent.”

  “Twenty-five to thirty years ago? Some of your precious twelve may already have met their Maker. Have you thought of that?”

  “I have. Which will mean that I don’t know whether he’s finished his goal and has disappeared into whatever normal life he stepped away from. Or if he has his eye on other unsuspecting targets. There’s no mark of Cain to ease a policeman’s lot.”

  “Nor a barrister’s. Tell me more about the four.”

  Rutledge gave him an overview of the three inquiries he’d conducted, ending with what had happened in Alnwick. Gilbert listened intently, posing a question now and again.

  “Your Inspector Farraday is a piece of work,” he commented at one point. And when Rutledge had finished, Gilbert added, “That still doesn’t answer my question. What about the dead, Ian? He won’t forgive them any faster than he’s forgiven the living. He’ll turn to them next.”

  Rutledge said slowly, “He may have already seen to them.” And he related the troubles Inspector Davies had encountered trying to solve the puzzle of who had tried to permanently stain the grave stones. “I’ve seen several of them myself. I’d even spoken to Chief Inspector Cummins about the possibility that Davies’s inquiries have to do with a jury. Now—now I am in the process of rethinking all I know.”

  “Good luck convincing the Chief Superintendent,” Gilbert said, giving Rutledge a look that spoke volumes. “I remember him, you know. Giving evidence in the courtroom. Pedantic and unimaginative. He’ll see this as a confession of incompetence on your part. Reaching for a solution to cover the fact that you’ve failed to find your man.”

  It was too close for comfort.

  Rutledge said, “Still, if I could find the trial, could confirm that each of these men had served on the jury in question, it would go a very long way toward convincing Bowles.”

  Gilbert was tiring. Rutledge could see the strain in his face, the slurring of his voice as he tried to concentrate.

  Rutledge rose. “I’ve overstayed my welcome,” he said, finishing the last of his brandy and taking the empty glass from Gilbert’s hand.

  “I don’t sleep very much, Ian. As often as not, I sit here in my chair and watch dawn coming in the windows. Hadn’t you realized that no one had interrupted us, telling you it was past my bedtime?”

  Rutledge gestured toward the night, where the lightning was more serious now, sheets of it on the horizon. He listened but failed to hear the thunder. “You’ll not be sleeping here tonight, sir. Or if you do, you’ll be wet to the skin. There’s a storm coming, and with it cooler air, I hope.”

  “Damnation. Very well, then, ring for someone. And ask them to make up a room for you while they’re about it. I won’t see you driving off into this, if you’re right.”

  Rutledge tried to decline the invitation to stay the night. But Gilbert wouldn’t hear of it, and in the end, he was shown to a room on the western side of the house, not far from his host’s own bedroom. There were large windows here, and as he prepared to undress and get into bed, he opened the curtains to the slight breeze that had come up. He lay there, listening to the thunder as it grew closer, watching the night turn nearly to day in the ever brighter flashes of lightning.

  And he had a sudden sense of foreboding, as if the breaking storm was a sign of what was to come. He got up and closed his windows.

  Morag, his Scottish godfather’s housekeeper, who claimed to have The Sight, would have crossed herself and told him to beware.

  He closed his eyes against the approaching storm and tried to convince himself it was a sign of fatigue compounded by a glass of brandy and the excitement of the evening. Nothing more.

  11

  Rutledge breakfasted alone. Gilbert, he was told, seldom appeared downstairs before ten, if he’d gone up to his room the night before.

  He walked out to the terrace with his teacup, sniffing the rain-washed summer morning, and watched bees hunting nectar in the hollyhocks in the gardens on either side of the terrace, although many of them, like the delphiniums, were beaten down by the storm.

  As he finished his tea, his thoughts turned to Jean, and he wondered what she was doing today—shopping with her mother or her bevy of bridesmaids, or sleeping in after coming home late from a party. He wanted her to enjoy herself, to do the things she had always loved doing. But he would have liked to be there at her side, watching her face light up with happiness. Once this inquiry was closed, he would ask for a week of leave to make up for so much time away from London.

  That brought him to consider his work, the Yard, the long hours in London and the frequent days away from the city. For the first time he doubted that it was suitable employment for Jean’s husband. Perhaps Major Gordon had been right after all. And there would be children, he’d be away from them as often as he’d be away from their mother. Was it really for the best that he’d stubbornly resisted any suggestion of a change? That he clung to what had seemed to him the work he wanted to do, without weighing the cost?

  For that matter, he’d left Frances to her own devices more often than he should. More often than was wise.

  Was a man’s desire to do what he felt he’d been born to do merely a selfishness that he was blind to? Was it the excitement of the chase, of outsmarting the murderer, rather than his concern for the victim, who no longer had a voice? Was that victim merely an excuse to clothe his own shortcomings?

  He’d never looked at the Yard from that angle before, and it was unsettling.

  Turning, he walked back across the terrace and stepped in through the sitting room windows. Half blinded by the sunlight, he blinked.

  Gilbert was sitting there in his chair, the shawl around his shoulders, looking up at Rutledge as if he’d never moved last night.

  Startled, he said, “Good morning! I was told you never showed yourself until ten at the earliest.”

  Gilbert chuckled. “I told you I seldom slept. I’ve written out a list of QCs who may’ve tried cases in Bristol. It’s not complete, but it’s the best I could do. A few names had to be struck from the list when I remembered that the poor devil was already dead. But there it is.”

  He took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and passed it to Rutledge. “You were right about the storm, of course. Best display of pyrotechnics I’ve seen in quite a while. But we have long views here, we can watch storms roll in. At least I enjoy that. I daresay the women on the servants’ floor pull their coverlets over their heads and wish it was over as quickly as possible.” He watched as Rutledge scanned the names on the sheet of paper. “It will take you some time to run down all of them. And still you might not have the answers you seek. What about newspaper files?”

  “It may come to that, of course. And that will take time as well. In fact, I might have to hire someone to research it for me. London will start asking questions about my absences if I’m not careful.”

  “I can recommend someone to do the research, if you need it. Let me know.”

  “I shall. Thank you, sir. I don’t know how I’d have managed without your help.”

  “You’d have managed very well. You’re an intelligent young man, Rutledge. God help us if you ever take to crime.”

  Rutledge laughed and reached down to take the thin, veined hand offered him. “And thank you for refuge from the storm.”

  Gilbert seemed reluctant to let go Rutledge’s hand. “You’ve inquired about Claudia, while I’ve been remiss in not asking about Frances. How is that lovely sister of
yours? She’s so much like your mother at that age. Breaks my heart to see her. Is she happy?”

  “I think she is. I hope she is. I’m to be married in December. Major Gordon’s daughter, Jean.”

  Gilbert relinquished his hand. “Don’t meddle with the Army, my boy. Stay with your own kind. The law. You’ll be happier.”

  Rutledge smiled. “Too late. And Major Gordon has been very kind.”

  “Army men see things differently, that’s all. You’re a thinker, Ian, you work things out in your head, and know where you’re going. Military minds rush into action. It’s what’s leading Europe into war right now. Clearer heads didn’t prevail, and now everyone wants to teach the other fellow a damned good lesson. No one has considered the thousands if not millions who are going to die, the miles of good land laid waste, the starvation and disease and cruelty that marches in an Army’s wake. For God’s sake, the Austrian Emperor didn’t even like his heir. Now he’s willing to slaughter the Russians to punish the Serbs. God help us.”

  “Your name isn’t on this list,” Rutledge said, to shift the subject.

  “I can’t remember that far into the past. The law, now, I haven’t lost that, I can give you chapter and verse on any matter. It’s burned into my memory. But the individual cases—they’re blurring. Bristol has always been a commercial center, and as it happened, I knew more than most about Admiralty Law. Commerce, salvage, navigation. That sort of thing.”

  Rutledge nodded. His father had sometimes conferred with Gilbert on such matters.

  “You can’t go wrong with Edgerton, though. There at the top. His favorite sister lives in Gloucester, and he was always looking to try a case in Bristol.”

  Rutledge took his leave soon after, and once on the high road, he pulled to the verge and gave his next move some thought. He was eager to speak to Miss Tattersall in Stoke Yarlington and that was possible. Moresby and Alnwick were beyond his reach at the moment. And there was the barber in Netherby.

  Stoke Yarlington, then.

  He looked at the map he carried in his head, chose his way, and set out in the direction of Wells.