by Todd,Charles
“Grant?” The name was familiar, but he couldn’t place it.
“Yes, sir, Timothy Grant. His wife wanted us to find him. I thought it likely that Grant had had enough and taken off for good.”
He remembered the conversation between the distraught woman and Neville.
They moved away from the marketgoers, Neville looking over his shoulder to be certain no one was near enough to overhear. “The man’s dead, sir. I can’t tell what killed him.”
Rutledge took the narrow turning to Belle Tout. The lighthouse was of the style that had living quarters attached. A wall encircled part of the grounds, high enough to keep the winds from scouring what must be a garden.
Neville was saying, “The lighthouse was built in 1832. I was always told my granddad had worked on the construction. They brought granite for the tower from Maidstone by oxcart. It must have been quite a sight. The keeper’s cottage is local limestone. The problem was not the lighthouse, it was where it’s built. Up here on the cliff? Ships at sea would be hard-pressed to see it in bad weather. It didn’t stop the wrecks.” He gestured to the end of what had been a rough track in. “You can leave the motorcar here, sir.”
They walked to the wall, followed it closer to the house, and opened the gate.
The gardens had gone to seed, brambles and wildflowers crowding out whatever plants had been there before. But Rutledge could see the vague outline of the beds, and thought it must have been a sheltered place to serve tea.
By the far wall were three boys, no more than twelve or thirteen, reminding him of Jem. Pale, shivering, and chastened, they turned as one toward the newcomers, a look of relief on their faces. As Neville cut across the garden, one of them called, “Can we go now? Please?”
Ten feet from them lay the remains of a man, and they were studiously avoiding looking at him again.
“Not until you’ve told the Inspector here what you told me.”
They began to speak all at once, and Rutledge held up a hand. Turning to what appeared to be the elder of the three, he said, “What’s your name?”
“Harry, sir. Harry Dixon.”
“Tell me how you came to find the body.”
He glanced anxiously at his companions but said, “Tom’s brother is drunk, and we took three cigarettes off him as he lay on his bed. We didn’t wish to be caught with them, and Gerald here suggested we come to the lighthouse. There’s no one about to tell on us. So we came through the gate, and I spotted him.” He pointed over his shoulder. “We thought he was drunk and might have a bottle on him still. And so we came over to have a look. What we saw was that.” He stumbled away and was sick against the wall.
Gerald and Tom appeared to be on the verge of joining him.
“Is that what happened? Is Harry telling me the truth?”
They nodded vigorously, eager to be done with the inquisition.
“We didn’t touch him,” Tom said. “Nor go near him. We turned tail and went for Constable Neville. We didn’t know what else to do.”
Rutledge believed him. Shaken as they were, their mothers would have got the truth out of them soon enough. It would have been impossible to hide.
“All right, you may go. But Constable Neville will come around later to take statements from you.”
The three boys nearly collided in their haste to be gone, running for the open gate. Once outside, they were as silent as they’d been while standing guard over the body. This lark had not ended well.
Rutledge watched them out of sight, then turned back.
One could see that it was a man, but the weather and the gulls had been at him. The clothes were working class: heavy shoes, off-the-rack coat and trousers. Cheap cotton shirt. Clothing that might be seen on half a hundred men within a ten-mile radius.
“He’s been here for several days,” Rutledge said. “Can you be sure it’s Grant?”
“That belt buckle. It belonged to his father, and he always wore it. Besides, what I can tell of his hair fits as well. Dark, receding.”
Rutledge could see the buckle. Heavy brass shaped like the head of an elephant.
“His father was a merchant seaman, sailed all over the world. He got that in Ceylon, as I remember. Brought his wife-to-be—this one’s ma—silk from China to be made into her wedding dress. He’d send postcards from ports he stopped in, and his mother put them in an album. Everyone in Gap has seen those at one time or another. Very exotic, some of them were. Ah well, his wife won’t be wondering anymore where this one is off to.”
“Didn’t she claim he’d taken money she’d hidden?”
“So she did.”
They studied the body, but it was nearly impossible to be certain how or why Grant had died. For that matter, even the time of death. But Rutledge felt certain the man had never left Burling Gap.
“Any possibility that his wife tired of him and the trouble he brought her, and killed him?”
Neville frowned. “Her anger seemed genuine enough. It never crossed my mind when she was badgering me that he might be dead, and she the cause of it. She even asked Constable Brewster to search for him.”
Rutledge had heard her.
He cast a glance at the sky. “Not many day-trippers this time of year, nor walkers on the south-coast track. He might have lain here for weeks before he was discovered.” He gestured toward the belt. “If she killed him and left him here, she’d have been clever enough to take that belt buckle with her. That way the police would have no way of identifying him after a few more weeks.”
“We get jumpers here, you know. People who come to throw themselves off the cliffs. If he’d been found on the strand, now, it would have appeared to be another suicide.”
“But he might have been spotted sooner. Whoever left Grant here must have wanted him to disappear.”
“That brings us back to his wife.”
“So it does.” Neville turned away, scanning the ground around the body. “Nothing to show how he came to be here—whether he was killed here, died here of natural causes, or was dragged to this wall after he was dead.”
Rutledge had already scanned the ground. After the storms any tracks would have vanished, washed away in the downpours. “Did he drink?” he asked, remembering Tommy’s brother.
“Not enough to die from it, sir, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“And no known health issues?”
“Not that I ever heard about, but Mrs. Grant or Dr. Hanby can answer that.”
They spent ten more minutes examining the scene, the torn face and scalp. Even the hands had not escaped the birds and small animals. But any information either the ground or the body might have offered before was gone.
They left it where it was and went back to the motorcar, driving to the village to speak to Mrs. Grant and then arrange for the body to be taken to the doctor’s surgery.
Mrs. Grant sat down heavily when Neville broke the news.
“It can’t be him,” she said, pale as the pillow slip she was holding. She had been making up the bed when they came to the door, and her first question had been, “Well? Have you found the bastard?”
“We can’t be sure,” Neville said, avoiding mentioning the state of the body, “but he’s wearing that brass belt buckle. I don’t think he’d have let anyone else have it. Or that anyone could have taken it from him.”
Her face crumpled. “No.” And she began to cry, wrenching sobs that seemed torn from her.
The two men stood there, offering words of comfort, but it did very little good. Neville disappeared for a time and came back with a gray-haired neighbor he introduced as Mrs. Mitchell. She went at once to put an arm around the weeping woman and told them to go away.
“Do what has to be done. By then she’ll be able to talk to you.”
As they left the room, they heard her say in the voice one might use to a child, “There, there. Let me take you back to lie down, and then I’ll fix us both a nice cuppa.”
They found men to handle the stretc
her and walked back up to the light with them. Coming from this direction, Rutledge could see how the cliffs must have eroded since the lighthouse had been built. It was barely fifty feet from the brink now. That would also explain why the lighthouse had not worked as planned, and why Beachy Head, right on the waterline, had been built some seventy years on.
It was not pleasant work, gathering the body up to place it on the stretcher. Rutledge left his motorcar in the hamlet and walked with the stretcher party to Dr. Hanby’s surgery.
The doctor had gone out to one of the farms and would be back, his wife told them, in no more than an hour.
They had covered the body with a blanket so that the crowded market wouldn’t see what they themselves had had to cope with.
Avoiding looking at it herself, Mrs. Hanby said, “Who is it? Do you know? The doctor will ask.”
As the stretcher bearers set their burden down in one of the examining rooms, Rutledge said, “We think it’s Timothy Grant.”
“How sad,” she responded. “His wife was here only yesterday begging the doctor to tell her if there was anything wrong with her husband. But there was nothing to tell.”
They thanked her and were just leaving when Constable Brewster, coming at a run, met them at the surgery door.
“I just heard—a body,” he said, out of breath as he stopped on the path to the door.
“Timothy Grant,” Rutledge answered him.
“Good God. His wife was after me just last night to send out a search party. We had words over it. She couldn’t sleep for worry, she said. It wasn’t the first time she’s come. What happened? Was he a jumper?”
“Early days,” Rutledge said, nodding to the stretcher bearers to go on about their business. “We’ll see what the doctor has to say.”
“Best not to spread the word until we know for certain,” Neville added.
Brewster turned to look at the crowded market in front of the pub. “Yes, best to say nothing.” He turned back to Rutledge. “Perhaps I should have a look at the corpse.”
“He was found on Neville’s turf,” Rutledge answered. “We’ll wait for the doctor to come back.”
Brewster frowned. “Nothing has happened in Gap for years, and now two bodies on Neville’s watch.”
To Rutledge’s ears it sounded petulant, as if Brewster thought it unfair for Neville to be so fortunate.
“Thank you, Constable,” Rutledge said, and ushering Neville ahead of him, he walked back inside to sit in the doctor’s waiting room until his return.
Brewster didn’t follow them.
They waited for more than two hours for Hanby to finish whatever it was that had taken him to one of the farms. Neville nodded off in his chair, chin on chest, his breathing softly sibilant.
Rutledge, sitting in the chair across the room, found himself going back over the conversation he’d had with Emily Stuart.
What had happened to Captain Standish’s hand while he was in Paris? And why had he so abruptly broken off his engagement?
Nothing to do with Wright’s death. And yet he’d learned long ago that anything that was out of the way was ignored at one’s peril. Too many cases hinged on small details that appeared to be extraneous.
It was late afternoon when they heard voices in the passage, and the waiting room door opened.
Dr. Hanby said, “Sorry to keep you waiting. What’s this I hear about Grant being found dead?”
“He’s a patient of yours?” Rutledge asked, rising. Mrs. Grant had already told him as much, but he had his reasons for repeating the question.
“Yes. Healthy as a horse. His only problem is an eye for women other than his wife. I’d not have been surprised if he contracted syphilis, but he seems to have the constitution of an ox.”
Rutledge told him how the body had been discovered and by whom.
“Well, then, give me five minutes to change, and we’ll have a look.”
It was not a pleasant examination. Between the elements and the predators, the body had been heavily damaged.
Hanby said, after a time, “I can’t tell you how he died. He wasn’t shot in the head, there’s no sign of that. And at a guess, not in the torso either. I will have to look at the bones to see if there’s any indication of a knifing or a bullet wound. But there’s some indication that his neck has been broken. Any chance he climbed over the wall up there at the light? No? But there is a gate, isn’t there? Then it was deliberately done.” He straightened. “Naturally I won’t know for certain until I examine his neck more closely. There’s always the possibility that he was strangled first.”
“Will you send word when you are sure about cause of death?”
“Yes, of course.” He looked at the body again. “That belt buckle belongs to Grant. I’ve never had occasion to examine him fully—that is, to remove his clothes—and so I don’t know of any distinguishing marks to look for. Scars, moles, tattoos. You might ask Mrs. Grant.” He pointed to the ravaged face. “It would be best to ask, not to bring her in.”
“No,” Rutledge agreed.
Hanby pulled up a sheet, drawing it over the dead face. “I’ll do what I can this evening.”
They thanked him and left him to wash his hands.
Walking back to Gap, where Rutledge had left his motorcar, Neville asked, “What do you make of this?”
“Too early to say. It might be unrelated to what happened to Wright. But if Grant’s neck was broken, we have to wonder if both men died by the same hand.”
Neville turned to face him. “Are you saying that someone found Wright alive and saw to it that he didn’t survive?”
“It’s possible.”
Neville whistled softly under his breath. “But why kill Grant?”
“Perhaps he saw something that Friday night. Or someone who didn’t wish to be seen.”
“Good God,” he said. “Grant was a canny man. He’d be quick to see an advantage in a bit of knowledge. And a stranger wouldn’t easily catch him off guard or lure him to a quiet, dark place like the lighthouse. Not if Grant intended a little blackmail. That tells me he must have known his killer. Someone right under my nose, so to speak.”
“It could mean the killer was local, yes.”
“Then it’s possible Mrs. Grant did kill her husband.”
Rutledge remembered something. He stopped.
“Walk on, and look in on Mrs. Grant. See if she’s able to give us any information about her husband’s disappearance. There’s something I have to do first.”
He turned back toward the market stalls.
But the woman who had seen Wright out on the Downs arguing with another man had already left. When Rutledge questioned the women in the neighboring stall, they said, “It wasn’t much of a day for her. It’s the weather kept people away.”
“Do you know where I can find her?”
At their expressions, knowing who he was and why he was in East Dedham, he smiled and said, “I bought a tray from her. I wondered if she might have any more pieces with that same violet design.”
Disappointment loomed in their faces. A bit of china was not much in the way of gossip. They had obviously hoped for more.
They didn’t know where she lived, but she did have a shop in Eastbourne, they agreed on that. Only they weren’t certain where the shop was.
“Not having been there,” one explained.
He had hoped they would know. Eastbourne was a good-sized town. He would have to ask the police there to help him locate the shop.
“Where is the next market, do you know?”
But they were local women and they shook their heads.
A dead end. He thanked them, hiding his own disappointment, and went to catch Neville up.
Mrs. Grant had fallen asleep at last, the neighbor informed them.
“Let her sleep, poor lamb. It’s been a rough time, not knowing where he was.”
With a glance at Rutledge, asking permission, Neville said, “It’s best not to ask Mrs. Grant, or take her to
the doctor’s surgery. Do you know if her husband had any scars—tattoos—anything that might help us make certain the dead man is Grant?”
Her eyebrows went up. “What’s wrong with his face?” she asked, keeping her voice low. “Why doesn’t the constable here tell you it’s Grant?”
Rutledge spoke then. “It’s routine, Mrs. Mitchell. The police always ask a member of the family to identify the body.”
“Who identified Mr. Wright, then? Mrs. Saunders isn’t family.”
“It’s a problem, isn’t it?” he asked pleasantly, in response. “We must do the best we can.”
“I don’t know of any marks or scars,” she said then. “Not even a chipped tooth.”
Neville, consternation in his face, glanced at Rutledge, then said hastily, “Thank you, Mrs. Mitchell. We’ll leave you to look after Mrs. Grant, and I’ll call in later.”
Outside, out of hearing, Neville said, “She’s the village busybody, quick to pick up on anything if you aren’t careful what you say in front of her, but she has a way with the sick and bereft.”
“When you go back, ask her in as roundabout way you can think of how well he knew the Rector.”
“Grant was a Chapel man. Like me,” Neville retorted in surprise. “I doubt he ever spoke to Rector, no more than common courtesy if they met in the street.”
Rutledge said only, “It never hurts to give a busybody an opportunity to spread gossip. The Mrs. Mitchells of this world are often a good source of information.”
Unsatisfied, Neville said, “As you say, sir.”
Rutledge left then, intending to speak to Constable Brewster. The woman he was looking for had come to East Dedham for help in putting up her stall. He might know where to find her in Eastbourne.
Instead, he decided as he came into the village that this was a good time to call on Captain Standish. Armed with what Miss Stuart had told him, he knew the man better now than he had done on his first visit.
He was halfway to Four Winds when he saw a child at the side of the road, hunched over as if in pain.
