by Todd,Charles
He grinned at her. “I must learn the names of those other four men. You have connections in France. I’d like to know who the five were who signed the register in the Ritz Hotel in Paris, around this time last year. If your connection can find Roger Standish’s name, he will be able to find the others. And I’d like to know what the French police in Nice put down in their report as the cause of Standish’s accident.”
“Nice is not a problem at all. I have a dear friend, a retired Naval officer, living there at the moment. If George can’t find out about a police report, no one can. As for Paris, Bess is there just now, visiting a friend. The Ritz will be no problem for her.”
Rutledge laughed. “By God, you should have run the Intelligence Service during the war.”
Melinda cocked an eyebrow at him, and said, quite seriously, “I most certainly supplied them with information now and again, but I had no desire to run it. I’ll send wires straightaway. It shouldn’t be a matter of more than a day or two for them to find the information you need. And I’ll telephone you as soon as I hear.”
There was a telephone in one of the hotels in Eastbourne, but none in East Dedham, he told her.
“That does present a problem,” she agreed. “I shall find a way, never fear.”
Rutledge believed her. Melinda Crawford had never faced defeat.
He spent the night. It was a long drive from Kent to London, and he didn’t want to arrive in the small hours, waking Frances. Besides, his head still throbbed, and he’d drunk more whisky and port than was safe.
Fortified with breakfast and promises that Melinda would send him news as soon as she heard, he set out for London.
When he reached the city, he avoided the Yard. What’s more, the street was shut off by workmen. The wood-and-stone cenotaph that had been put up in Whitehall to mark the end of the Great War was being replaced by the same design in Portland stone. The King would unveil it during the ceremony to consecrate the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey.
Rutledge needed no monuments to mark the end of the war. No ceremonies, no wreaths, no parades. He had seen the poppies in the fields of Flanders at first hand. He had seen the wounded, the dead, the blackened ruin of northern France. It was forever seared in his memory.
And yet the gratitude of a nation that had watched the flower of its youth slaughtered for four years was touching. It was just that he couldn’t bear the images it evoked.
Staying as far away from Westminster as he could, he made his way to Leadenhall and left his motorcar nearby, setting out on foot.
It reminded him of the neighborhood canvassing he’d done as a raw constable, assigned to interview anyone who might have seen something that would help solve the crime that was the center of the inquiry. He’d been good at it, smiling for maids and using his authority when speaking to householders or butlers.
There was a cold wind off the Thames whistling up the lanes leading into the City from the river, and he pulled up the collar of his coat as he walked briskly toward Leadenhall. He quickly realized that Elizabeth Wilding had been more generous than she knew when she described her brother-in-law’s chamber as “near” Leadenhall. After a lengthy search, Rutledge found what he was after several streets away: the firm of Montgomery, Applegarth, & Winter.
Lawrence Montgomery was head of chambers and in court for most of the day, he was told by the firm’s chief clerk. Rutledge declined to leave a name or a message, which appeared to annoy the clerk, although he hid it well.
From there, Rutledge went to Hancock Square, but his luck had run out.
It wasn’t a large square, perhaps no more than a dozen houses around a central garden surrounded by a black iron railing, gates at each point of the compass. He considered knocking on every door until someone directed him to the Montgomery dwelling, but he was reluctant to leave a trail of gossip behind.
He waited nearly a quarter of an hour for a constable to appear. The man walked slowly down the south side of the square, taking in the strange motorcar parked where the street turned.
Rutledge got out and went to meet him. Identifying himself, he asked the constable which house belonged to Lawrence Montgomery.
Striving to hide his curiosity—Scotland Yard was seldom to be found in this rarefied part of London—he pointed out number eleven.
Rutledge thanked him and walked on before the constable could ask questions.
Number eleven boasted an elegant black door with an equally elegant brass knocker in the shape of a stag’s head, and a prim maid in black who informed Rutledge that Mrs. Montgomery was presently at Oxford, visiting friends.
“Did she drive, or take the train?” he asked.
“She drove, I believe, sir. Would you care to leave a card or a name?”
“I’m only in town for the day,” he replied, “and I was hoping to surprise her. Is she by any chance visiting the Garlands, in Oxford? I might give them a ring to say hello.” It was the first name he could think of.
“She didn’t say, sir, who she was visiting. I’m sorry.”
And that was that. He thanked her and left.
He toyed briefly with the possibility of driving on to Oxford, but he had been too long away from Sussex as it was, and searching the city for one woman could take days.
But the maid’s news seemed to verify something that Elizabeth Wilding had told him, that her sister looked for excuses to leave London, coming often to Eastbourne.
There was nothing for it but to head south toward Sussex and the coast without surveying her motorcar.
It was late afternoon when he reached Burling Gap. The sun was bright in a cloudless sky, and he drove to an open space close by the village. Getting out, he went to stand at the cliff’s edge, looking down at the flint-strewn strand far below. Then he lifted his head. The sea was the deepest of blues as far as he could see, and the wind ruffled the water, wavelets glittering briefly in the sunlight in a mesmerizing dance. He watched them for a time, then followed the gulls wheeling above a fishing boat halfway to the horizon. To his left was the Belle Tout light, and to his right the Seven Sisters were brilliantly white, their chalk faces topped by an undulating line of green turf. The white cliffs at Dover had nothing on the Seven Sisters.
Just then a bit of the grass not ten feet from where he stood seemed to open without warning, and the yellowing chalk below it, weakened by the sea, peeled away to slide with a roar onto the strand. And the face where the fall had occurred was now blindingly new and white.
Burling Gap, he thought, was surely doomed, and the lighthouse as well. What would the villagers do then? Move inland another fifty yards, or give up their own ways and try to fit into the lives of the inhabitants of East Dedham?
With the sound of the wind blowing off the sea, he didn’t hear footsteps behind him until Hamish said, “’Ware!” in warning.
Rutledge turned to find Constable Neville walking toward him.
“Afternoon, sir,” he said, coming to stand beside Rutledge.
“Good afternoon, Constable. I’ve been in London. Any news?”
“All quiet, as far as I can tell.” He hesitated. “Do you think it’s possible that Mrs. Grant murdered her own husband? There’s the money he took from her, but we didn’t find it on the body.”
“It’s possible,” Rutledge agreed, turning to walk back to the motorcar. “She’s put on quite a show of collapsing in grief, but you know her better than I do. What do you think?”
“It’s the belt buckle, sir,” Neville replied. “It wasn’t taken. And it’s a handsome thing, that buckle. You’d think his killer might have considered selling it somewhere. Not in Eastbourne or Pevensey, where it might be recognized. Surely it’ud bring in a tidy sum in a place like Dover or even Canterbury.” He bent to turn the crank, and then got into the motorcar with Rutledge. “Just a thought, sir.”
“And it would solve one of our problems, with two bodies and suspects thin on the ground,” he agreed, turning toward the Gap police st
ation. “Mrs. Grant wouldn’t take the buckle. If she killed her husband, it’s the last thing she’d want.”
“Exactly, sir.”
“Do you know who Wright was visiting in Eastbourne?”
“I didn’t know that he was, sir. I knew he went there from time to time, when there was no pressing business in the parish. I’d always put it down to getting away from the problems he dealt with every day. About half of my patch goes to St. Simon’s. We aren’t all Chapel folk. And the gossip runs both ways.”
“Surely Wright had someone in East Dedham that he might call a friend. Someone in the Vestry, someone he might talk to when he was troubled, or tired of his own company.” Rutledge had asked before, but he’d found it hard to believe that Wright didn’t. “He must have been a lonely man, if he hadn’t.”
“He’d dine from time to time with his parishioners, but from all I’ve heard, he kept himself to himself. That’s not to say he wasn’t there if you needed him, and kind into the bargain, but he was not one to be knocking at your door unexpectedly, if you get my drift. This was especially true after he came back from the war. Before 1914, he was a bit more outgoing. He’d step into the pub of nights and spend a little time talking with the men. But he was never one to speak of himself.” Neville grinned at him as they drew up in front of the tiny police station. “This didn’t stop the local mothers from matchmaking.”
Rutledge could understand that. His sister’s friends were forever throwing eligible young ladies his way, and he’d learned that invitations to dinners or the theater were often intended to pair him with one or another of them. Marriage was the last thing on his mind, as long as Hamish occupied a corner of it. In spite of the loneliness.
He told Neville about the green paint on Standish’s motorcar being removed while Trotter was away.
The constable shook his head. “There’s our best chance of proving the crash was no accident. I don’t see an end to this business. Not a successful end.”
“There are other avenues, but they’ll take time. I’m not sure the burning of the stable where the Captain kept his motorcar was happenstance. What was there that someone didn’t want us to find?”
“There was no note left for the Captain. And no bicycle belonging to Rector. I was there, I would have seen anything untoward.”
“Then perhaps it’s a warning.” Or an opportunity. Rutledge put a hand up to touch his face, and thought better of it.
Hamish said, “But how did yon fire starter ken ye’d be there?”
My motorcar was in the drive. But he’d already been on the road, and had only smelled smoke by chance. Perhaps the fire had taken a little time to catch hold properly, more time than expected. Whoever it was had had to be circumspect in the way he started the blaze, so as to leave no clues.
But why not the house? Why the stable, if the point was to shock Standish?
Neville thanked him and turned to open the door of his house.
Rutledge watched the door shut behind him and then turned toward East Dedham and Standish’s house.
When Rutledge was shown into the study by the housekeeper, Standish glanced up at his face and said, “You look like hell. I hope you’re bringing me news.”
“Not yet. What did you keep in the stable, besides the motorcar?”
Standish rubbed his eyes. “I haven’t slept very well since that night. My servants are uneasy, and it shows. There have been arguments downstairs, and short tempers. Something of value? Is that what you’re asking? I can’t think of anything in the stable that might be of interest to anyone. Old tack, saddles, my bicycle from when I was ten. I don’t know.” He dropped his hand. “I shan’t be buying a horse. There’s nowhere to keep it now. Not until I rebuild. Thank God it wasn’t the house. Are you quite certain that fire was set?”
“What else could have started it?”
Standish got up, pacing the floor. “I just don’t care to face it. A fortnight ago, if you’d asked me if I had enemies, I’d have laughed at you.”
“How does your will stand? Who inherits, if you die?”
“A cousin. I haven’t seen him in over twenty-five years—we were both in leading strings, and I made him cry. God knows why, I was too young to remember anything about it. But my mother reminded me some years ago. His father and mine were brothers. His father died in the Boer War, and his mother remarried soon after. She and my mother exchanged letters from time to time, and she seemed happy enough. Her son—my cousin—married well, and has a flourishing career in banking. He had a short war—invalided home with a bit of shrapnel too close to his spine to operate.”
“You seem to know more than most about a cousin you haven’t seen in a quarter of a century.”
“I’m not a fool, Rutledge. I hired a firm in London that keeps an eye on him from time to time. After my father died. This house has been in the family for generations. I shouldn’t care to see it go to a ne’er-do-well.”
Sensible—and not unusual—to keep an heir under one’s eye.
“Who rammed your motorcar in the hills above Nice?”
“Surely you don’t believe any of this is connected to Nice?”
“But you’ve wondered, haven’t you, if it was one of your fellow drivers? It changed you, that accident, and not only because of what happened to your hand.”
Standish stopped pacing. “I—you see, that race was intended as an affirmation that we’d survived. I’ve got the scars to show I served my country well. I lost four years in those damned trenches, but I came out whole. I’d not been gassed. I’d not been blinded by shrapnel, I hadn’t lost a limb, I hadn’t been burned. Yes, I have nightmares, I expect you do as well, and every other poor devil who came out alive. And then this.”
He held up his left hand, or where it ought to have been. “I left Nice with this. What sort of affirmation did I have?” His voice and his face were bitter. “It’s as if I’d raced the devil, and he’d had the last laugh. ‘Missed you in the trenches, didn’t I, you poor sod, but I’ve got you now. Never too late, is it?’”
Rutledge understood, better than most. But he still found it odd that what had happened in Nice had seemed so personal. There was no anger against whoever had run Standish off that dark, twisting road. It was as if the war had reached out long bony fingers from the grave, and that had come close to breaking Standish. He’d ended his engagement, he’d lived here almost as a recluse, and he was haunted by self-doubt.
What’s more, Standish didn’t want to give the police the names of the other men racing their own personal devils, because he refused to believe they could be responsible. It was ludicrous, when murder was involved.
“Or,” Hamish added into the silence, “he doesna’ want them to find oot what’s become of ’im.”
Startled, Rutledge turned away, afraid Standish might read something in his face.
He’d never told anyone but Dr. Fleming about Hamish—and then in sudden fear and a blind rage at himself for what he considered breaking a second time, he’d gone for Fleming. In the end, Fleming had fought free, and said, “You’ve faced it, Rutledge. That’s one step toward coping. Good man.”
But he hadn’t felt like a good man. It had taken days to come to terms with what had happened. In the end, he’d seen that it was Fleming’s skill that had brought out the truth, and it had been a turning point.
Standish hadn’t faced his own truth yet.
“How well did you know the men who raced with you?”
Surprised by the question, the Captain answered, “I’ve told you. We met that evening before the Somme. I didn’t cross paths with any of them again until Paris. You know how it was, so many regiments decimated, making up their numbers from the remnants of others that had fared even worse. I wasn’t even sure how many of us would be there in Paris until I walked through the doors of the Ritz and met them in the bar.”
A thought occurred to Rutledge. “Did you recognize all of them? Were they the same five?”
“What an
odd thing to ask. Of course I did. That evening wasn’t something I was likely to forget.”
Rutledge dropped the subject. Until he learned the names of the men who had pledged each other to meet in Paris, and spoke to them, he couldn’t challenge Standish.
He stood up. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I know more. For now, I’d take sensible precautions, if I were you. Stay away from windows in the dark, stay inside after nightfall, don’t open the door to strangers.”
Standish stared at him. “I still can’t understand why I’m in danger. It was you he struck down during the fire. The policeman hunting him. You should take your own advice.”
“It was your motorcar, your stable. That’s twice. I don’t want to hear of a third time.”
Standish blinked. “Good God. But surely I’ve had my three, if you think about it. This hand. The motorcar. The stable. Although it hardly counts, does it, the stable? In the scheme of things.” He realized what he’d just said. “In the scheme of things. All right, I’ll take care.”
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13
Rutledge passed through East Dedham on his way to call on Mrs. Grant, and saw Mr. Barnes in close conversation with Edgecombe, Wright’s solicitor. Standing in a shop doorway, out of their line of sight, Mrs. Saunders clutched her market basket in both hands, watching the two men.
If she knew the contents of the Rector’s will, she was probably wondering if the dead man’s gift to his church would influence the Bishop’s man to stay.
And that brought him around to the possibility that Wright would most likely have changed his will if he was seriously contemplating marrying Miss Wilding. And Rutledge rather thought he was, awkward as that might be, given the social ambitions of her parents. Perhaps that bequest would have given Elizabeth Wilding a sense of independence and free her from her father’s dictates. Wright would have wanted that too. But he hadn’t expected to die so soon.
