A Casualty of War: A Bess Crawford Mystery (Bess Crawford Mysteries)

by Charles Todd

  “Mr. Ellis got him out of Bury gaol. He persuaded the police that Captain Travis should return to The George,” I said after a moment. “And then Mr. Ellis left him alone here. Was that on purpose, or was it just happenstance that Mrs. Travis was shot then?”

  “We’re back to Ellis,” Simon remarked.

  “Yes. I wish Mr. Spencer had trusted someone. I wish we knew what he’d discovered, if he broke into the firm. If he didn’t break into the firm, if there’s nothing to be found,” I went on, “then the Inspector will have to look among the Agency’s clients in London.”

  “That won’t solve the shooting at The Hall,” my father reminded me.

  “No. I see that. On the other hand, if we could clear the Captain of Mr. Spencer’s death, that might help us convince Inspector Howe that he had no reason to kill Mrs. Travis. At the moment, it appears that she stands between him and a very large inheritance.”

  My father glanced at the sleeping form of the Major. “If,” he said thoughtfully, “this man Spencer broke into the solicitor’s office, why can’t we?”

  I stared at him, astonished. “But you can’t—you’d—we’d be arrested.”

  “Simon and I have done night reconnaissance before this. And in far more dangerous places than Bury. We can get in and out without being seen. Besides, Howe has half his men here in Sinclair.”

  “I’m going with you,” I said.

  “You will not. Your mother would have our heads if we let you try.”

  “But—” I began, determined to argue.

  “Bess. Be reasonable. None of my clothes will fit you, and none of Simon’s. You can’t very well follow us in that uniform. Even with your coat on, it’s bound to be noticed.”

  He was right. I could get all of us arrested.

  “I can’t wait here. I’ll worry myself to death.”

  “You’ll have to learn a little patience, my dear. Simon? We could use some dark clothing.”

  “I’ll see what I can find.”

  He went away, and my father began to unbutton his tunic. “I’ll leave my clothes in Simon’s room. We don’t want to rouse anyone’s curiosity.” He nodded toward the bed, then left as well.

  Ten minutes later I heard Simon’s footsteps on the stairs, treading lightly. His door opened and closed, and after a very few minutes, opened and closed again. Two sets of footsteps went down the stairs.

  I wanted to go down to see them off, but the Colonel Sahib was right, I was conspicuous. Even here in the hotel.

  And so I sat down to wait, my stomach a tight knot of worry.

  Chapter 22

  I finally went to Simon’s room, where I could pace the floor without waking the Major. Their uniforms were hanging tidily in the wardrobe, the door still standing wide. Despite my worry, by three o’clock in the morning I could hardly keep my eyes open. It had already been a long and trying day, and a worse evening, and I was exhausted. I sat in the chair by the hearth, slipping in and out of a doze while the room grew colder. I did what I could with the fire, but the scuttle was nearly empty. I dragged a quilt from Simon’s bed and wrapped it around me. Listening to the church clock tell the hours had become a torment.

  The longer they were gone, the more likely it was that they’d run into trouble. And how was a Colonel of my father’s stature going to talk his way out of being caught breaking and entering the office of a firm of solicitors? Especially if that sharp-eyed Constable was on duty tonight.

  Four o’clock came. Four fifteen. Four thirty. Sunrise was after seven o’clock. But by that time the hotel staff would be awake and preparing to make our breakfast.

  I’d looked in on the Major once or twice, but he was still asleep. How had my father and Simon stayed awake through all these hours?

  The adrenaline of the chase?

  The two of them had once taken a prisoner out from under the nose of a tribal chieftain—it was a story that had made the rounds of the cantonment afterward. I hadn’t known about it, but my mother must have done. My father treated her as an equal, and he would have warned her that he might not come back.

  But they had come back.

  What would I tell her if they didn’t tonight?

  I should have talked them out of it, I thought for the sixteenth time. But even as I chastised myself, I knew I couldn’t have done it. We were at a standstill, and there was no other way to get the information we needed.

  I began to fantasize what it could be. Something that we didn’t know about Captain Travis? Something that was to his disadvantage? Something about James Travis and his reasons for leaving his family’s estate to a stranger? Or something about James’s will that we weren’t aware of?

  I’d been told that Mrs. Travis had been left a life interest in the house. But what if that wasn’t true, and the real reason she was so set against the Captain wasn’t the family history, but the fact that there had been no mention of a life interest? What if she had set that about, and Mr. Ellis, as her solicitor, had looked the other way? Then who shot her? Mr. Ellis was with her when she was shot.

  I heard the clock strike five. And then five thirty.

  Where were they? What had happened to them?

  I could barely keep my eyes open, and watching the flickering of the fire sent me into a light sleep.

  The next thing I knew, the door opened, and Simon said quietly over his shoulder, “She’s in here.”

  And my father’s familiar footsteps crossed the passage and he said, “Good morning, love.”

  From his tone of voice, I knew.

  There was an exhilaration, that feeling of having succeeded in a very difficult task that made men make light of dangers past, whether it was a cricket match won by the narrowest of margins or a military action that had gone off flawlessly.

  As the Colonel Sahib shut the door, I caught the reek of strong drink, and noticed a slight hilarity in their voices.

  I sat up, pushing aside the quilt. “What happened? I was so worried.”

  Simon grinned. “Someone was still there when we looked up at the windows. We could see his shadow moving about. We went away, gave him a good hour, and when we came back, he was still there. We knocked at the door, and he answered it. The Colonel told him we were from London and demanded to see Ellis, that we’d been hired to do something hush-hush for him. Of course he was still at The Hall. We added that we intended to wait, as Ellis still owed us, and much to the clerk’s horror, we sat down and refused to move. He couldn’t very well go for the police, he didn’t know what we might have done. I looked in a cupboard and found the whisky Ellis keeps for clients, and the clerk nearly had an apoplexy when we began to drink it and complained of Ellis being miserly and too fine to do his own dirty work. Before very long, the clerk took a glass, telling us that Ellis was a shadow of his father before him, and not fit to clean Whitman’s boots.”

  My father said, “He had a much harder head than we’d expected, but he finally passed out. We put the whisky away, cleaned the glasses, and set about finding what we needed to know while the poor man snored in a corner. I daresay he’ll be reluctant to mention us to Ellis, and we made certain we left everything as we found it. He’ll see no trace of our being there, and neither will Ellis, even if the clerk does talk. I don’t think he will. We appeared to be ruffians.”

  “If there’s anything incriminating, how will we explain having such information? It won’t be fair to bring the clerk into it.”

  “That will take care of itself,” my father said, divesting himself of an ugly dark coat that looked far too tight on him.

  Simon was taking it from him. He had already removed a brown corduroy coat and was on the point of carrying them back where he’d found them. I didn’t ask where that was.

  My father took the only other chair in the room and pulled it up to the fire. “What Spencer must have learned about Captain Travis was fairly straightforward. Ellis had had to trace Travis to Barbados, then to the Army. That took months. Apparently the Army was relucta
nt at first to tell a civilian his whereabouts. Ellis was finally given an address to write to, but he didn’t do anything about it. Not as far as I could tell. For one thing, Mrs. Travis was against proceeding, and Ellis himself was dragging his feet. Eventually, as the war ended, he was worried enough to discover what had become of Captain Travis. It must have shaken him to learn that Travis was in England, in a clinic—and what sort of clinic it was.”

  I asked, “Wasn’t there anything that might help us now?”

  “Ah, that’s when we came across Ellis’s private files, and those were illuminating. He’d paid several imposters to come to The Hall under various pretenses, to ask for money. But Mrs. Travis is not your usual new widow, easy prey to stories about her son’s love child and the like. On the contrary, he had to persuade her not to turn imposters over to the police. Apparently he convinced her it would only encourage others to try their luck.”

  I was beginning to suspect that my father was saving the best for last, and I felt hope surging. “Why on earth should he have done such a thing?”

  Simon came back and sat down on the bed.

  “Because, my dear,” the Colonel Sahib was saying, “from the time James Travis enlisted in the Army and wasn’t here to keep an eye on matters, Ellis was embezzling funds from the estate. It was there in the private ledgers.”

  I sat back, stunned.

  Ledgers . . .

  That single entry under Ellis’s name in Mr. Spencer’s diary. I’d questioned that, then believed Mrs. Caldwell when she told us the firm was above reproach because she was so certain.

  “He must have encouraged Mrs. Travis to refuse to deal with her son’s heir,” I said. “Because if the Captain had appeared, knowing what questions to ask about the estate—he’s accustomed to managing his own—Ellis would be caught out.”

  “Precisely.” My father grinned in satisfaction.

  “Was it Ellis who killed Mr. Spencer?” I asked.

  “I can only imagine it was,” Simon replied. “Proving it is another matter. How do we suggest to Mrs. Travis that she should demand an instant accounting?”

  That was going to be a challenge.

  “And that,” my father said, “will be your duty.”

  I shook my head. “Mr. Ellis must have known that when James came home from the war, he’d discover what had been done.”

  “It was a gamble,” my father agreed. “A gamble that he’d be killed and never know. You need only look at the casualty rate for officers. The odds were in Ellis’s favor.”

  It was slowly fitting together. “What drove him to embezzle? Was the firm not successful?” I asked.

  My father looked at Simon, then turned back to me. “He’s consumptive. Ellis. He’s been in correspondence with doctors in a clinic in Switzerland. As soon as the war ended, he was going there for treatment. Without it he might well die sooner than later. It’s his best hope.”

  I’d thought in the beginning that he looked like a consumptive. And yet he had also looked like a driven man, trying to keep his most important client satisfied. “Such clinics aren’t cheap. Did he expect to be in Switzerland before the estate was settled?”

  “He was clever enough to keep the money he’d embezzled in a special fund, so that it could be accounted for until the last minute.”

  Clever indeed! And just how were we going to persuade Mr. Ellis to stand up for Captain Travis, if there was no proof of what he’d been doing? Nothing we could show Mrs. Travis. My spirits sank.

  “I wish we could learn more about Lieutenant Bonham,” I said. “He’s not another of Mr. Ellis’s imposters, by any chance?”

  “There was nothing about Bonham in the files we looked through. We kept to the Travis boxes, but I can be fairly sure that there wasn’t one that was labeled Bonham. We did find that Oliver Masters is dead. Shot by a sniper three weeks before the end of the war.”

  “Then there truly is no possible heir—except for Alan Travis,” I said slowly.

  “What will the Captain do, if he’s finally cleared and can inherit?” my father asked. “Has he said anything to you, Bess?”

  “I wondered—I must admit it—if the Captain had shot at Mrs. Travis. It would have cleared his way, if he wanted the estate badly enough. Or the money it would bring him, if he sold it. But I wouldn’t have expected him to miss.”

  Still, it was one thing to fire at an enemy and another to shoot a defenseless woman in her own parlor.

  “You’re going to find that Inspector Howe has already convicted Travis in his own mind—the Captain was back in Sinclair, the revolver was here at The George, and Ellis himself was with Mrs. Travis at the time. Howe still believes Travis killed Spencer.” My father took out his watch. “I need a few hours’ sleep if I’m to drive back to London today. Will you promise to stay out of trouble, Bess, until I can deliver the Major back to his quarters?”

  “There’s a train from the next village. Or from Bury,” Simon told him.

  He rose, stretching tired muscles. “I need to look in at the War Office as well. The French are already clamoring for reparations to rebuild the northern provinces of their country. It’s getting out of hand. Germany is bankrupt, and it will take them a generation to get out of debt. I know a few men who matter, both in the High Command and in the government. Face-to-face over a good bottle of wine sometimes makes a difference.”

  I could tell he was worried about the situation here, never mind in France. He didn’t want to leave so soon. The fact that he’d been able to break away even this long was amazing. I curled up in the chair again, settling the quilt around me.

  “Gentlemen, the bed is all yours.”

  Long after they were breathing deeply—like most soldiers, they’d learned to sleep anywhere—I sat watching the fire burn down to gray ash, wondering what the day would bring.

  It was shortly after a late breakfast that the Colonel Sahib and Major Davison set out for London. I stood in the doorway watching the familiar motorcar disappear around the far bend.

  Behind me, Simon put a hand on my shoulder. “It will be all right, Bess.”

  “Where do we even begin?” I asked as we walked back into The George. “We can’t simply tell Inspector Howe what we know. Or Mrs. Travis.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I think we should begin with Ellis and see what happens.”

  “Good advice,” I said. “I wish I knew if the Captain was waiting at The Swan. Meanwhile, we ought to see what Miss Fredericks can tell us about last night.”

  Constables were still searching for Captain Travis. Two of them were just coming out of St. Mary’s, and I saw others standing outside Mrs. Horner’s tea shop and stepping out the door of the baker’s. On our way to the surgery, I waved to Mrs. Caldwell, taking an armful of greenery into the church for the altar vases. That niggling worry came back. Did she know more than she’d told us?

  It was just a few minutes past nine when we walked into the surgery. I went straight to the room where we’d taken Miss Fredericks last evening, without speaking to Dr. Harrison’s assistant first.

  I found Sister Potter feeding her patient from a bowl of porridge. Lucy Fredericks’s face was ugly, badly swollen with blotches of darkening bruises running from her jaw to her ear on one side, and under her eye on the other. I’d tapped, calling to Sister Potter before opening the door, and she greeted me with some relief. I was about to ask Simon to wait outside, but Sister Potter shook her head.

  “He needs to hear this. Come in, and close the door, please.”

  Her patient was in a dressing gown too large for her, her hair down her back, looking very young. But she said at once, “I’m so glad you warned me not to say too much. My father was wanting blood, he was so angry. And there’s no one at home to see he doesn’t do anything rash.”

  “Are you saying you do remember something?” I asked. “Have you spoken to the police?”

  “I haven’t. Sister Potter forbade it. But I expect Dr. Harrison has. He told me
that Inspector Howe wanted to interview me at a quarter past ten this morning.” She looked at me with dread in her eyes. “What will I tell them? Whatever I say, my father will hear of it.”

  “You must tell me what you saw. Then we’ll decide.”

  She seemed to shrink into the cot. “I never heard a shot being fired,” she said quietly. “I didn’t know there was one until my father said something about it. I’d walked up to the house to help in the kitchen. There were guests for dinner, I’d been told, and I’d be needed for the washing up afterward. Instead of going directly to the kitchen, I decided to see if there were motorcars in the drive. I like looking at them—my father drives for Mrs. Travis when she needs him. I was nearly to the corner of the house when he came at me so fast, out of the dark, there was no time even to scream.”

  She paused, her hands trembling. She clasped them together as Sister Potter reached out to pat them. “Go on,” she said softly. “Tell them.”

  “He struck me twice in the face, knocking me to the ground, then he kicked me. I don’t know how long I lay there unconscious. I didn’t know anything more until I woke up here.”

  My heart sank. She hadn’t recognized her attacker. We were no closer to the truth than we had been last night.

  Lucy Fredericks was saying, “But that isn’t all. Doctor gave me something to help me with the pain, and I expect I just went to sleep after it wore off. Or perhaps it was the drug. I don’t really know. Except that I woke up in the night screaming, and I was so grateful Sister Potter was here, and there was a lamp burning.”

  “Yes, I’m glad she was here as well.”

  Then she added uneasily, “I was afraid to say anything before. He spoke to me in the dream—he must have done as he kicked me, but I don’t remember that. He said, ‘Tell what you saw and I’ll finish this.’ But what had I seen?”

  It was Simon who asked, “Who was it?”

  She looked up at him, tears in her eyes still. “He was a soldier in my dream. An officer. Not as tall as you. I couldn’t see his face. I tried, but I couldn’t. Why should an officer want to hurt me?”