A Fine Summer's Day

by Charles Todd

  “I believe so. In all fairness, there are those at the Yard who don’t.”

  “Who are the other victims?”

  Rutledge took a deep breath and launched into an account of what he’d uncovered so far. “Meanwhile, someone in Bristol is searching for a list of those involved in that particular case. If there are more victims, we can warn them in time.”

  “All well and good. But you haven’t explained why Hadley drank that glass of milk. I knew the man. It’s not like him to sit there meekly and let himself be killed. And even if he was told that he’d helped convict an innocent man, why should he believe a word of it? He was practical, clearheaded. He wouldn’t beat his chest and fall on his sword.”

  “I don’t have an answer there. Yet.”

  “Your notion is interesting, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.”

  “Then tell me why you believe Hadley drank that milk?”

  Watson frowned. “I don’t know. Unless he was offered a choice? Laudanum or a far more painful death. It might even go deeper than that. If you are right about this man, he could well know more about his victims than we do. Blackmail that allowed the killer to arrange a quiet little murder, with a long night ahead in which to escape.”

  Rutledge rose from his chair and went to lean against the office wall. “Do you know something about Hadley’s past that the killer could have used?”

  “Not here in Kent. But he lived in Bristol before coming here. It would have to be something that happened in Bristol. Besides, there hasn’t been any gossip about him here. If there was, I’d have heard it by now.” Watson cleared his throat. “I’d give much to know why his wife went to Canterbury alone. Visiting friends, she said, but why didn’t he go with her? There was no pressing reason for him to stay at the farm. Were there strains in that marriage that we haven’t heard about?”

  Rutledge remembered the Chief Superintendent’s suggestion that Hadley had tried to force one of the housemaids. Was this the source of his suspicions?

  “In my conversations with her and with the servants, there was no hint of trouble. According to Dr. Wylie, she was devastated when he gave her the news.”

  “That could be true enough. Well, time will tell.”

  The interview with Inspector Watson had not been very satisfactory, but Rutledge himself took most of the blame for that.

  Once more he chose to spend the night at Melinda Crawford’s house.

  And after dinner, he asked her, “How would you go about finding an old friend from India, if you didn’t know where she was living now?”

  “I’d ask a mutual friend for her direction,” she answered promptly.

  “Let’s say she’s remarried and your mutual friend has also lost touch with her.”

  Melinda, her head to one side, examined him. “Are you purposely making this difficult?”

  “I am.”

  “Then I expect you won’t like my next answer. I’d call Richard Crawford and ask him if the regiment knew where my friend was.”

  “But her husband wasn’t an Army man. He was a solicitor.”

  “If I mailed a letter to her at her last known address, I’d hope that the present residents would forward it to her.”

  “But then you’d be waiting for her to decide to contact you. If she didn’t wish to for some reason, you’d have no way of knowing that your letter ever reached her.”

  “I’d leave it to the telegraph office to find her.”

  “Possible, but again, if she doesn’t respond, you’d have no way of knowing if she received your telegram.”

  She gave the matter some thought. “There must be a way. I can’t seem to find what it might be.” Her face brightened. “I’d ask the vicar in the last place she lived.”

  “Ah, but he’s a new man and never knew your friend.”

  Melinda frowned. “Has this person you wish to find lived in the same place for very long time?”

  “As it happens, he has.”

  “Is he on the telephone?”

  “I shouldn’t think he is.”

  “Ian!”

  “Try again.”

  She stared at him, her mind busy. “Is my interest in finding my friend, malicious or friendly?”

  “Possibly malicious.”

  “Then I’d have kept up with her somehow.”

  Rutledge said, smiling, “You have hidden depths, Melinda. You should have been a policeman. How would you go about keeping up with her?”

  “If I were really intent on knowing her business, every year I’d send a Christmas note. Everyone has friends or relatives they hear from quite regularly but don’t know from Adam. I’d scribble a name to the card, and if someone received it and opened it, it would tell them nothing. But I’d have a poste restante, where the letter could be returned to sender if they’d moved away. It would cost me a few pennies, but it would be worth it. And then if I decided to speak to this person, I’d send someone to their door with a box of chocolates or a bouquet of flowers, and if my gifts were accepted, I’d know I was safe to do more.”

  Had Mrs. Dobson kept up with twelve jurors over the years? But how?

  “Someone would remember the arrival of flowers or chocolates, surely?”

  “Ian, I could stand on the doorstep with anything in my hand, and make up a name. If you know what you’re doing, you can persuade the person at the door to divulge any amount of information.” She went on, changing her voice, “‘Is this where Mrs. Cranford lives? I have a delivery for her.’ And the reply would be, ‘I’m afraid you have the wrong house. This is the Crawford residence.’ Or if he were uncertain of the address, he might stop at a neighboring house, in which case the maid would answer, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Crawford lives in the next street, at number two.’”

  Rutledge was intrigued. In each house, the victim had been the only male resident of the right age. Michael Clayton had left Moresby for York, but even if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been mistaken for his father. Nor Hadley for the footman, Tom.

  He rose, kissed her on the top of her head, and said, “Don’t wait up for me. I’ll let myself in when I get back.”

  “Nonsense. I’ll be sitting here waiting for you to return. And then you’ll tell me what this is all about.”

  He drove through the late evening afterglow to the Hadley farm and asked for Mrs. Tolliver.

  She was downstairs in her small parlor. “Inspector,” she said, rising as he was shown in, “I hope there’s nothing wrong.” She glanced at the pretty little clock on the chimneypiece. “It’s quite late, I’m sure Mrs. Hadley has retired.”

  “I’ve a question to ask you. If you can’t answer it, I’d like to summon the rest of the staff and ask them.”

  “The older ones have already gone up. I think the younger ones may be sitting out by the kitchen garden. What is it you need to know so urgently?”

  “Did anyone bring a parcel to this house in the week before Mr. Hadley was killed, only to be told he’d come to the wrong address?”

  “I don’t remember any such caller,” she said. “And either the maid or the footman would have informed me of it.”

  “You’re certain of that?”

  “Oh, yes. It could have been a parcel for a visitor either Mr. or Mrs. Hadley expected to arrive.”

  “Will you ask the staff, all the same? I’ll call tomorrow to find out what you’ve learned.”

  “I will do that, Mr. Rutledge. But don’t pin your hopes on it. I can’t think when we last had someone at the door.”

  He thanked her and prepared to leave. She accompanied him up the stairs and to the main door to see him out. She was about to shut it after him but stopped and said into the night, “What was in the parcel? It might help if I knew?”

  “Very likely nothing. It would have been an attempt on someone’s part to elicit information. The contents of the parcel aren’t important.”

  “Indeed, sir?”

  He had been about to turn the crank on the motorcar. Straightening
, he said, “It needn’t have been a parcel. Flowers, perhaps. A query about a lost dog.”

  “I see. Well, I will ask. Good evening, sir.”

  “Good evening.” He had cranked the motorcar and taken his seat behind the wheel when the door opened again, letting a shaft of light fall across his face. Mrs. Tolliver stepped across the threshold and said, “Inspector?”

  “Yes?” Her face was in shadow, but something in her posture as she leaned toward him made him cut the motor.

  “The only stranger I recall coming here shortly before Mr. Hadley was—before it happened—was the poor man looking for work. But he came to the wrong farm. One of the maids gave him a glass of cold water, and told him how to find the other lane.”

  “Did you see this man?”

  “Actually I did, because we thought it was the fishmonger at the kitchen door. He came half an hour later.”

  “Can you describe the man looking for work?” He realized he was holding his breath, waiting.

  “I didn’t get a good look at him. The kitchen maid had just finished mopping the flagstones by the door to the kitchen garden when he came up. She said he doffed his hat and asked if this was the farm looking for someone to do the mucking out in the stables. He thought this was Pennythrift Farm. The maid said afterward that he didn’t know Kent very well and had likely taken a wrong turning. He’d put his cap back on by the time I reached the door. He was footsore and dusty by the look of him. But tidy enough, good shoulders, polite. Middling tall. He drank the water, thanked the maid, and went on his way. I didn’t give him another minute’s thought. This time of year there are any number of people looking for seasonal work.”

  “Is there a Pennythrift Farm?”

  “Oh, yes, it’s on the far side of the village.”

  “And you haven’t seen this man before or since?”

  “No.”

  All the same, late as it was, he found Pennythrift Farm and asked the middle-aged woman who came to the door if they’d taken on a new stableman in the last few weeks. They had not. Nor had they advertised for one. What’s more, the man claiming to be looking for work there had never appeared at Pennythrift.

  Feeling much himself again, Rutledge drove back to Melinda’s house.

  Good to her word, she was waiting in the sitting room where she kept all her treasures from her travels. It had seemed to be Aladdin’s cave to an impressionable boy brought to visit by his parents, and was his favorite room in the house.

  She looked up as he came through the door. “There you are. I was about to give you up. Shanta is bringing us tea. Sit down and tell me if you’ve found someone delivering parcels?”

  “No,” he said slowly. “But I did find an itinerant laborer looking for work.”

  By the time they had finished their tea and were ready to go up to bed, he’d told her what he’d learned and why he’d been looking for ways to trace an old friend. Or enemy. And Melinda, who had looked death in the face as a child, never flinched as he described what he’d learned about a killer’s mind.

  “That’s very clever of you, Ian,” she said as they were mounting the stairs on their way to their beds. “Seeing the link with a jury. But I expect Chief Inspector Cummins is right. You will require hard evidence before you convince the naysayers.”

  “I’d give much to know where Dobson is now,” he said, turning to walk down the passage to his room.

  “You must pray that he isn’t already stalking his next victim.”

  The next morning after a brief conversation with Mrs. Hadley, Rutledge left for Stoke Yarlington, outside Wells, driving straight through without stopping in London.

  In every village he passed through, there were little clots of people standing in the streets, talking. He’d been in the middle of many inquiries where small groups stood as close as possible to where the police were working, asking in hushed tones for information in the aftermath of a crime. This was different, worried faces turning to stare at him as he drove on, wondering if he’d heard more than they had.

  He found Miss Tattersall at home and asked her if she or her brother had over the years received Christmas letters from someone she didn’t know.

  “Not Christmas messages,” she said, smiling at a memory. “But my brother often got birthday messages from someone he’d known at university in Bristol. Or more likely someone who thought they knew him. And the date was always wrong, so whoever it was had thoroughly confused him with someone else. Every year, without fail, on the twenty-eighth of June. It quite tried his patience. But of course there was nothing he could do, he didn’t know anyone at the return address, and as I pointed out, even if he did, and he wrote to this person to inform him of the mistake, very likely his correspondent would take that as acquaintance and begin writing to my brother in earnest. He was quite put out, but I found it rather sad and even amusing.”

  “What did the messages say? Do you know?”

  “Oh, the sort of thing anyone might write. A few lines on the order of ‘Thinking of you on your birthday and hoping it’s a happy occasion.’ It was signed Fred or Frank, we never could decide, and the hand was copperplate and rather florid.”

  “Did you save any of these letters? Or do you remember the postmark on them?”

  “Good heavens, no. They went directly into the dustbin. As I recall, they were posted in Bristol. But still we couldn’t think who it might be.”

  “Lately has anyone stopped at your door looking for employment?”

  “We do our hiring through an agency, like most people. The agency supplies solid references. But I suggest you speak to Mrs. Betterton. She would know.” She rose and went to pull the bell.

  When he put the same question to Mrs. Betterton, she shook her head. “No, sir, no one has come by looking for work. He’s not likely to find it on this street.”

  “A parcel then, or an inquiry about a neighbor?”

  “Well, there was the man with the bundle of clean wash under his arm.” She smiled. “His wife was ill, and he’d been asked to bring the sheets back for her. But he got the wrong street, poor man, and tried to insist they were Miss Tattersall’s. Mixed up the bundles, he had. He’d already delivered three, and he could only pray they went to the correct houses.”

  “When was this? Do you remember what he looked like?”

  “It was a few days before we lost Mr. Tattersall. He was rather ordinary, sir, as I recall. Not the sort you’d take a second look at. Stooped, his hair in need of the barber. He said he’d been too busy helping his wife to see to himself.”

  “And you didn’t think to report him to your employers?”

  “No, I did not,” she said stiffly. “Neither Miss Tattersall nor Mr. Tattersall, God rest his soul, would thank me for disturbing them to gossip about another family’s sheets.”

  And yet it seemed that here and in Kent, the stranger had been affable enough to find out what he wanted to know.

  Assuming of course that the itinerant worker and the washerwoman’s husband with the bundle of clean sheets were one and the same, but Rutledge was ready to wager they were. The descriptions were too close.

  He thanked Mrs. Betterton, and Miss Tattersall said as he walked to the door, “Is this important, Inspector?”

  “I can’t be sure,” he replied. “It’s early to be drawing conclusions. But I have some hope now.”

  From there he went to find the village constable. Hurley hadn’t seen the man with the bundle under his arm.

  “But if it was market day, and if he was minding his own business, I’d have no reason to take particular notice of him.”

  Rutledge thought to himself that the washerwoman’s husband would have taken great care not to encounter Constable Hurley.

  He was tired when he reached London and left his motorcar in the mews. The house was dark when he walked around to the door on the square and let himself in.

  The warm air was stuffy, the August night slipping toward the morning of the fifth. He tried to move qui
etly—after all, he knew the placement of every chair and carpet, every door and stair. He could walk—and had—in nearly pitch darkness from the door to his room without waking anyone, coming in from school late and unexpectedly, sent down for incurring his head’s wrath.

  He smiled at the memory. And froze with the smile pinned to his face as the study door opened, casting a bright shaft of light into the passage, catching him off guard.

  Off stride, he heard his sister’s voice.

  “Ian? Is that you?” She appeared in the opening of the door, a black silhouette, slim and uncertain.

  “Or else it’s a very clumsy housebreaker.”

  “Don’t make light of anything tonight,” she said, moving back into the room.

  He was down the passage in a half a dozen swift strides. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  She turned to face him, and her eyes were bleak.

  “My dear,” he began, uncertain what to say.

  “Charles just came to the door to tell us,” she told him. “The Germans haven’t replied to our ultimatum. They’ve marched into Belgium, and there’s heavy fighting.”

  Charles Talbot was with the Foreign Office, he would know the latest news. It wasn’t a false alarm.

  “Oh, God.” There was the end of hope that cooler heads might prevail.

  It seemed they hadn’t.

  “We’re at war. It’s real,” she whispered, echoing the words she had heard not half an hour earlier.

  He stood there, his gaze holding hers for a moment, then he went past her straight to the drinks cabinet to pour a little whisky into a glass. But he didn’t drink it, he set it down again and simply stared out the window. It occurred to him—he’d had no idea at the time—that he had asked Jean to marry him on the same fine summer’s day that the Archduke and his wife had been murdered.

  Somehow it seemed his life and their deaths had become inextricably linked.

  Frances said, her voice trembling, “You won’t enlist, will you, Ian? I couldn’t bear it if you did. I couldn’t bear it if something happened to you so soon—well, so soon.”

  He cleared his throat, turned and held out his hand. “I’m a policeman,” he said quietly, remembering that he’d said it before, and only recently. “Not a soldier. I don’t kill people. I arrest those who do.”