by Charles Todd
“She wouldn’t leave, Ian. Not after Miss Muir arrived. Kate did her best.”
“Are you all right?” he asked, looking more closely at her.
“It’s just this war. Everyone seems to be so thrilled. So in a hurry to fight. I’ve had what felt like an endless stream of visitors, calling to say good-bye. It’s terribly depressing.”
He said, “Men at the Yard have been resigning, intending to enlist. I expect it’s just the beginning.”
She roused herself. “You’ve been away a great deal of late. Jean has been complaining. I think Lucy was the last straw. Was it just to Tonbridge?”
“Today, yes. Although I think I’ve driven over half of England in the past month.”
He didn’t tell her that it was Fillmore Gilbert who had almost died. He knew it would distress her, as would his encounter with Dobson. He said, “Would you care to dine out? I owe you an evening pleasanter than your afternoon.” He tried not to look in the direction of the envelope.
Shaking her head, she said, “Thank you, but no. We’ll only be told about a dozen more friends who’ve gone mad with war fever. There’s a roast from last night, I think. We will dine well enough here.” And then what was troubling her came out in a rush. “Jean says you’re trying to wind up all your cases so that you’ll be free to fight. Like all the rest. That that’s why you’ve been away so much of late. Is that why Miss Muir brought you that envelope? To hasten the conclusion to whatever it is you’re working on at the moment?”
He laughed, though he didn’t feel like it. “It wouldn’t do for Jean’s fiancé to appear to be less patriotic than her father.” After a moment, he added more seriously, “I’ve found satisfaction in what I do as a policeman. The British Army is made up of men who feel the same way about protecting their country and its interests. Thank God for it. They have their duty as I have mine. I don’t need to prove my courage, Frances. I’ve seen people die, and it’s not pleasant.”
It was the first time he’d let her hear the darker side of his work. She looked away.
And then she went on, as if goaded by her worry. “But what if it’s a longer war than we think it will be. Or we start to lose, Ian? Like Belgium. They can’t possibly stand up to the German Army. What if we can’t? If France can’t?”
“Then I shall have to reconsider. I shouldn’t worry, if I were you. It’s not likely to happen.”
He realized suddenly that her concern might not be only for him. He said in a different voice, “Frances. Is there someone you care for?”
She turned back to face him, saying brightly, “No. No, of course not.”
Just then the housekeeper came to ask when they wished to have their dinner, and he wasn’t able to judge whether his sister was lying or not.
It wasn’t until much later that he was free to go up to his room and look at the contents of the envelope that Lucy Muir had left for him.
He whistled under his breath as he realized just how much work she must have done on his behalf. Unable to obtain copies of the newspaper columns, just as she’d said, she had written it all out in longhand. There was a word here or there that he’d had trouble making out. But the substance of all the pages spread out on his desk was clear. Evan Dobson had been desperate to recoup his losses on the bridle. It was a substantial sum for a poor man, and realizing that he would be out of pocket for the lot, even though he’d delivered the bridle as promised, he’d turned to the father when the son proved to be a scoundrel.
Whether Dobson had killed the greengrocer or simply taken his fists to him in frustrated anger, leaving the son to finish what he’d begun, was hard to say. But the son had sworn that he hadn’t touched his father, and he was believed. Patricide was an unthinkable crime. The jury had heard the evidence and found Dobson guilty. And Atkins’s son had walked away without paying for the bridle, inheriting his father’s property as well.
What had become of the younger Atkins?
He turned to Lucy Muir’s list, but there was no mention of his name there, after the trial.
The names of the jury seemed to leap off the closely written sheets of paper.
Hadley, Stoddard, Clayton, Tattersall. All of whom must have put the trial behind them and moved on. But not so the Dobsons. They’d never really recovered.
And Fillmore Gilbert, who no longer remembered it, who thought someone else must have been given that brief, had acted for the Crown.
Rutledge looked for the name of the judge—and found it. A man named Vernon Abner, who, given his age at the time, must have died long since.
Somehow Lucy Muir had even discovered that bit of information in the obituaries. He silently blessed her again.
Abner had died at age sixty-eight of a digestive disorder. His wife and only son had predeceased him, and he’d been buried beside them in one of the fashionable London cemeteries.
Lucy had ticked off the names of the jurors whose graves had been vandalized, with a footnote to that effect.
Eleven men accounted for. That left one man still in danger. Someone by the name of Chasten. Tomorrow, he’d ask Sergeant Gibson to find him, so that he could be warned.
No, there was one more. The policeman who had come to the Dobson house and taken away Henry Dobson’s father. Taylor. Sergeant Ralph Taylor.
Rutledge sat back. It was all there. Everything he needed to prove his case. One man had done it all. The vandalizing. The murders. The attempted murder of Gilbert.
That was one short week among so many as the years had passed, but it had cast its shadow over the lives of more than a dozen people.
But what was it Dobson had held over the heads of the four men who had willingly drunk their milk, knowing it would kill them? What had his mother told him that he’d remembered and used as an excuse to kill?
Even Lucy Muir hadn’t been able to find an answer to that.
The graves had come first. And then the murders. Appetite whetted? Or had it just taken a little longer to find his victims?
Rutledge was up early the next morning, driving out to the London cemetery where, according to his obituary, Judge Abner had been interred. It wasn’t a necessary visit, but he was curious to see if the black substance had been poured out there as well.
There was a morning fog, lying heavily over the Thames Valley, giving the landscape a featureless sameness that twice nearly made him miss his turn. But he found the cemetery, opened the unlocked gates, and let himself through.
He found himself thinking that it was a good thing he didn’t believe in ghosts. The funeral monuments here were far more ornate that those found in most village churchyards. Tall plinths bearing urns draped in marble shrouds loomed over his head, angels with outspread wings seemed in the murky light about to take flight, and grieving figures reaching toward tombs had about them a Gothic air. Mausoleums designed like miniature houses or Greek temples seemed to shut him into the narrow avenues that led between plots of graves. He made a mental note at each intersection which direction he’d come from, uncertain if he could find his way out again. And the mist was getting heavier.
He had no idea where he might find Abner’s grave, and at this early hour, there was no one else about. The man had died some fifteen years ago, and so Rutledge searched for an older section.
A pair of doves, asleep in the lea of a stone bench, flew up almost at his feet, and he started before he could stop himself, then smiled. What had he thought they were? The spirits of the dead?
Two more turnings, and then at the corner of the next intersection, he saw it.
The monument to the man who had sent Evan Dobson to the gallows.
At first it appeared to be part of the design of the monument. A rough-hewn marble obelisk broken off at a little less than midshaft, as in a life cut off before its time. But as he drew nearer, he could see that it hadn’t been rough-hewn at all. Someone had taken a heavy hammer to it in a frenzy, smartly bringing down what must originally have been quite a tall shaft, then striking it again an
d again until the splintered shards lay like pebbles at its base.
Abner’s name was still visible, as if that was intended. All around it was desolation. The smaller stones for his wife and son, his father and his mother, hadn’t been spared. It appeared that the frenzy hadn’t stopped until the marble had been utterly destroyed.
Whoever had done this wished he could reach into the grave itself and grind the very bones to powder.
17
Rutledge made his way out of the mist-shrouded cemetery, still feeling the shock of what he’d seen.
It was obscene in its way, a glimpse into a fury so violent that whoever had done this must have been spent when he had finished.
The destruction had never been reported to the Yard. Rutledge was fairly certain of that. The groundskeepers must have notified the cemetery authorities, who could well have contacted the family or heirs of the dead man. But nothing had come of it yet. He didn’t even know when this had been done. After the other graves had been vandalized, but before Benjamin Clayton had been killed?
Or was this destruction what had sent Dobson to Moresby, to begin killing anyone from that fateful trial who was still alive?
Rutledge found a caretaker just arriving for his day’s work. Dressed in coveralls and pushing a barrow, he was whistling to himself as he approached the tall cemetery gates. He started when he saw a figure looming out of the gray wall of mist that nearly obscured them.
Setting down the barrow, he waited until Rutledge came closer, a man and not a spirit, then said, “You could age a man fast, coming at him like that out of thin air. Looking for a family grave, are you?”
“There’s a damaged stone in the eastern part of the cemetery. Someone by the name of Abner. How long has it been that way?”
The workman tilted his cap forward and scratched his balding head. “That obelisk pounded into rubble? Seems it was about the first week of July. One of the lads found it. We searched the cemetery, but there wasn’t no other trouble. Whoever he was, he’d gone. One of the sheds was broken into, but nothing was taken.”
“Was there a heavy hammer in the shed?”
“Aye, the big one we use to drive in stakes. But he never took it.”
But he’d used it. Dobson couldn’t have carried a tool like that with him. Not all the way from Somerset.
Rutledge thanked him and went on to where he’d left the motorcar.
He wished he could bring the Chief Superintendent here, to show him what they were dealing with. Not a twisted mind, but a passionate one that could take at least four murders in stride as deaths owed to him.
For a moment he wondered if the polite young man witnesses had described was one and the same as this angry slayer.
There would be no way to answer that until Henry Dobson was brought in for questioning
He drove on into the city and to the Yard.
Chief Superintendent Bowles, he was told by the first person he encountered, was attending a function with the Lord Mayor. The averted eyes of the constable he’d stopped left Rutledge with the feeling that the raised voices from Bowles’s office the day before had raised more than a few eyebrows among those within hearing.
Cummins, however, was in, and Rutledge asked him for a few minutes.
As the Chief Inspector shut the door he grinned. “I gather you have survived the dressing-down, although a little singed around the edges.”
“Unfortunately it was a day premature,” Rutledge answered ruefully. “Last evening I was given more pieces of our puzzle. Today there was another.”
He told Cummins first about what he’d learned about the killer’s way of discovering the information he needed about each victim. “I suspect his mother had intended at some stage to take matters into her own hands, but she’d never been free to carry out whatever she’d had in mind. Or perhaps she expected her son to act for her one day. It’s the only explanation for keeping in touch with the jurors and Gilbert over the years. I have even wondered if perhaps she’d hastened any of the dead to their graves. But we’ll never know the answer to that.”
“Go on.”
Moving on to Fillmore Gilbert and spotting the man on the bicycle from the upstairs window of Swan Walk, Rutledge said, “I wanted to ask the Chief Superintendent to send a description to every police station in Kent to be on the lookout for this man. But he wouldn’t even consider the possibility, much less act on it.” He took a deep breath. “Then last night, I was given this. It’s a handwritten copy of Bristol newspaper accounts of the Dobson case and trial.”
“Very thorough work,” Cummins commented as he read it through.
“All the names are there. Including Gilbert’s. And the judge’s name as well.”
He glanced out the window. The mist was lifting, and in an hour or so, it would be replaced by bright sunlight. “I went to the cemetery this morning to look for him.”
Cummins listened, appalled, as Rutledge described the grave site.
“Gentle God,” he said softly. “I expect we can ask the cemetery authorities for a statement on when the destruction was done and what they think they know about it. I’ll send Gibson or someone out there this afternoon.”
“Not Gibson. I need him. There are two names left on the list of victims. A man named Chasten. And a policeman—most likely retired—by the name of Ralph Taylor. The arresting officer. We must find both of them as soon as possible. Still, it’s just as well to document what happened in the cemetery. I can tell you, in the mist it seemed to take on a horror that it might not have had on a sunny morning.”
“No doubt.” Cummins studied the man across his desk. “This is a damning piece of evidence, Ian. The newspaper cutting. It all hangs together, just as you predicted. The question is, how are we going to find this man and take him into custody? Will he come peacefully, do you think, or will he make us pay dearly for it?”
“I can’t answer that. I can only say, if we don’t find him quickly, we might never put our hands on him. If I were in his shoes, as soon as I’d finished the last name on my list, I’d enlist. Under my own name or another, it wouldn’t matter. I’d be out of reach.”
“I have a feeling you may be right. If so, he’s the only man in England that this war is bringing any good to. We’ve had more resignations tendered. For the duration. Most of them tell me they’ll be back before the year is out. I pray to God they’re right.”
“I must return to Kent as soon as may be. I was ordered to see that inquiry through, and I can interpret that to mean I now have freedom to hunt for Dobson. And I’ve got to make Gilbert talk to me. I know everything now except why these men willingly died.”
“Who defended Evan Dobson?”
“Now that’s one of the interesting discoveries. It appears to be the father of the man who handled Joel Tattersall’s trust. Simmons, the solicitor. Someone broke into his chambers in Wells fairly recently, but nothing was taken. I expect Dobson might have been looking for the file on his own father.”
“How did Mrs. Dobson afford a barrister from Wells?” Cummins asked.
“I don’t know. It will be worth looking into.”
“Leave Taylor and Chasten to me. I’ll see they’re located straightaway and send word to you as soon as I have the information. Your task until then is to locate Dobson. Do you think he’s still hanging about Swan Walk?”
“I doubt it. I’m sure I put the wind up him when I followed him into Leicester Square, there by Penshurst Place. He must know who I am by this time. The village of Swan Walk does. But then I know who he is.”
“Be careful, Ian.”
“What about the Chief Superintendent?”
“He ordered you to Kent. I’d go if I were you.”
Rutledge grinned. “Yes, sir.”
He packed a valise, sent messages to Jean, and left another for Frances, who was attending one of her meetings with volunteers.
Dr. Greening had just left when Rutledge arrived at Gilbert’s house later in the afternoon. The
nurse shook her head when he asked if there had been any change.
“I’m afraid not. I think he’s asleep just now.” She hesitated. “It might be time to summon his family.”
“A day or two more won’t matter.”
He asked Mrs. Thompson if she could prepare a room for him.
“It will be ready when you are, sir. Is there any change in Mr. Gilbert?”
“I’m afraid not,” he said, unconsciously quoting the nurse. “Is there a firearm in the house? A revolver?”
“There is, in the estate office. I haven’t seen it, but I’m told it’s locked in one of the desk drawers.”
“Then if you will, leave the key in my room.”
Soon after that he went back to Penshurst Place. But there was no bicycle propped against the arch. And of course no one in the church. He hadn’t expected there to be.
When he came back to Swan Walk, he drove his motorcar around to the rear of the house and found a space large enough for it in one of the barns, to the dismay of the horses. Coming back around, he collected the constable’s bicycle, still leaning against the house wall by the door, and stowed that in the barn as well.
He took his dinner in his room and waited there until the house was quiet. It was close on ten when he walked down the passage and spoke to the constable on duty. The man yawned. “They’ve made up a bed for me as well,” he said. “I sleep during the day, when the servants are up and moving about, and return to my post in the evening. If that’s all right.”
“Yes. Good man. It’s the night I’m worried about.”
“In what way, sir?”
“It wasn’t suicide. Whoever tried to kill Mr. Gilbert came into this house late at night and found him still awake. I don’t think he’ll risk coming when the staff is going about their duties. But the servants’ rooms are well away from the rest of the house.”
“Understood, sir.” He lifted the heavy truncheon beside his chair. “I’ll be ready.”
Rutledge walked through the rooms of the ground floor, checking to see that the windows and outer doors were well and truly locked. Satisfied, he went back to the study where he’d met Gilbert on his first visit. Without turning on the lamp, he set about his preparations.
