The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

An interesting point. He touched the body, but it was cold, already stiffening.

  Back inside, he asked the constable where he could find Mrs. Gravely, and he was told she was in her room at the top of the house.

  He knocked, and a husky voice called, “Come in.”

  It was a small room, but backed up to the kitchen chimney and was warm enough. Castoffs from the main part of the house furnished it: a brass bed, an oak bedside table, two comfortable wing chairs on either side of a square of blue carpet, and a maple table under the half-moon window in the eaves. A narrow bookcase held several novels and at least four cookbooks.

  The woman seated in the far wing chair rose as he crossed the threshold. She had been crying, but she seemed to be over the worst of her shock. He noted the teacup and saucer on the table and thought the constable must have brought it to her, not the doctor.

  “I’m Inspector Rutledge from Scotland Yard. The chief constable has asked me to take over the inquiry into Sir John’s death. Do you feel up to speaking to me?”

  “Yes, sir. But I wasn’t here, you see. If I had been—”

  “If you had been,” he said, cutting across her guilt-ridden anguish, “you might have died with him.”

  She stared at him. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

  He began by asking her about Sir John.

  By her account, Sir John Middleton was a retired military man, having served in the Great War. Rutledge could, of his own knowledge, add that Sir John had served with distinction in an HQ not noted for its brilliance. He at least had been a voice of sanity there and was much admired for it, even though it had not aided his army career. Had he made enemies, then?

  Hamish said, “Aye, it’s possible. He didna fear his killer. Or put up a struggle.”

  And that was a good point.

  “Was he alive when you reached him?”

  “Yes, I could see that he was still breathing, ragged though it was. He cried out, just the one word, when I bent to touch him, as if he knew I was there. As if, looking back on it now, he’d held on, waiting for me. Because he seemed to let go then, but I could tell he wasn’t dead. I was that torn—leaving him to go for the doctor or staying with him. “

  “What did he say? Could you understand him?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Trafalgar, he said. Clear as could be. I ran out then, shouting for help, and I met Sam on the road. He was willing to take a message to Dr. Taylor, and so I came back to sit beside Sir John, but I doubt he knew I was there. Still, it wasn’t until Dr. Taylor was bending over him that I heard the death rattle. I think he tried to speak again, just before.”

  The doctor had said nothing about that.

  “Are you certain Sir John spoke to Dr. Taylor?”

  But Mrs. Gravely was not to be dissuaded. “I was in the doorway, facing Sir John’s desk. He had his back to me, the doctor did, but I could just see Sir John’s mouth, and his lips moved. I’d swear to that.”

  “Did he know that it was the doctor who was with him? Was he aware, do you think, of where he was?”

  “I can’t speak to that, sir. I only know he spoke. And the doctor answered him. “

  “Could you hear what was said?”

  “No, sir. But I thought he was trying to say the old dog’s name. Simba. It means lion, I was told. I can’t say whether he was trying to call to him or was asking where he’d got to.”

  “How did Dr. Taylor respond?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I could see the doctor rock back on his heels, and then came the death rattle. I knew he was gone. Sir John. There was nothing to be done, was there? The doctor said so, afterward.”

  Rutledge could hear the echo of the doctor’s voice in her words, “I couldn’t do anything for him.”

  “And then?”

  “Dr. Taylor turned and saw me in the doorway. He told me to find my coat and go outside to wait for the ambulance. But it wasn’t five minutes before he was at the door calling to me and telling me there was no need for the ambulance now. It might as well be the hearse. Well, I could have told him as much, but then he’s the one to give evidence at the inquest, isn’t he? He had to be certain sure.”

  Rutledge went back to something Mrs. Gravely had said earlier. “Trafalgar. What does that mean to you?”

  The housekeeper frowned. “I don’t know, sir. As I remember from school, it was a battle. At sea. When Lord Nelson was killed.”

  “That’s true,” Rutledge told her. “It was fought off the coast of Spain in 1805. But Sir John was an army man. And his father and grandfather before him.” He had seen the photographs in the study. At least two generations of officers, staring without expression into the lens of the camera. And a watercolor sketch of another officer, wearing a Guards uniform from before the Crimean War.

  “Will you come down with me to the study? There are some photographs I’d like to ask you to identify.”

  “Please, sir,” she answered anxiously. “Not if he’s still there. I couldn’t bear it. But I’ll know the pictures, I’ve dusted them since they were put up there.”

  “Fair enough. The woman, then, with the braid of her hair encircling the frame.”

  “That’s Lady Middleton, sir, his second wife. Elizabeth, she was. She died in childbirth, and the boy with her. I don’t think he ever got over her death. “

  “Second wife?”

  “He was married before that. To Althea Barnes. She died as well, out in India. He’d tried to persuade her that it was no place for a woman, but she insisted on going with him. Two years later she was dead of the cholera.”

  “The young man in the uniform of the Buffs?”

  “His brother Martin. He died in the first gas attack at Ypres.”

  “And the old dog, outside the study window. That, I take it, is Simba? When did he die?”

  “It was the strangest thing!” Mrs. Gravely told him. “He was lying by the fire, as he always did, when I left for the village. And I come home to find him outside there in the cold. He was still warm, he couldn’t have been there very long. I can’t think what happened. I come into the study to tell Sir John that, and there he was, dying. I couldn’t quite take it all in.”

  He thanked her for her help, and left her there mourning the man she’d served so long and no doubt wondering now what was to become of her.

  Sam Hubbard, the farm worker who had gone for Dr. Taylor, had had the foresight to summon the rector as well. Rutledge found him standing in the kitchen talking to Constable Forrest and warming his hands at the cooker, mud on his boots and his face red from the cold.

  He turned and gave Rutledge his name, adding, “I’ve buried the old dog under the apple tree, as Sir John would have wished. They planted that tree together. A pity Sir John can’t be buried there as well.”

  “Did you find anything wrong with the dog? Any signs that he’d been harmed?”

  Sam shook his head. “It was old age, and the cold as well, I expect. He was having trouble with his breathing, Simba was.”

  “Did you work for Sir John?”

  “He sent for me when there was heavy work to be done. Mr. Laurence, who lives just down the road, doesn’t have enough to keep me busy these days. And in my free time, I did what I could for Sir John. He was a good man. There weren’t many like him at HQ. More’s the pity.”

  “In the war, were you?”

  “I was. And I have a splinter of shrapnel in my shoulder to prove it.”

  Rutledge considered him. He’d been coming up the road when Mrs. Gravely had hailed him, but he could just as easily have been going the other way, turning when he heard her and pretending to know nothing about what had happened here in the house. And he’d taken it upon himself to bury the old dog.

  “Where were you this afternoon? Before Mrs. Gravely asked your help?”

  Sam Hubbard’s eyebrows flew up. “Do you think I could have killed Sir John? I’d have died for him, for speaking up during the war and trying to keep as many of us poor bastards alive as he could. T
hey were bloody butchers, save for him. Caring nothing for the men who had to die each time there was a push or a plan. If it was one of the likes of them lying dead in the study, you’d have to wonder if I had had a hand in it. But not Sir John.”

  The passionate denial rang true—but Hubbard had had time to consider the questions the police would be asking. Tell one’s self something often enough, and it soon became easier to believe it. Like the rehearsals of an actor learning his part.

  Mr. Harris, the rector, was in the parlor. He had seen the body before the constable had got there, and he seemed shaken, standing by the parlor windows with a drink in his hand.

  “Dutch courage,” he said ruefully, lifting the glass as Rutledge opened the door. “I don’t see many murder victims in my patch. And I thank God for that. How is Mrs. Gravely faring?”

  “She’s a little better, I think. What can you tell me about Sir John? Have you known him very long?”

  “I’d describe him as a lonely man,” Harris told Rutledge pensively. “I encouraged him to take an interest in village affairs, to see the need for someone of his caliber to serve on the vestry. But he was loath to involve himself here. It’s not his home, you know. He was from Hereford, I believe, but sold up and moved here after the war. He said the house was not the same without his wife, and he couldn’t bear the emptiness—his word. Elizabeth was much younger, you see. Sir John was married twice. Once early on in his career, and then again some months before the fighting began in 1914.”

  “Did he bring Mrs. Gravely with him from Hereford?” He’d noted her accent was not local.

  “Yes, she was taken on by Elizabeth Middleton just before their marriage, and she agreed to stay with him after her mistress died.”

  “I understand his first wife died in India. Of cholera. Is there any proof of that, do you think? Or do we just have Sir John’s word for what happened to her?”

  “That’s rather suspicious of you!”

  “In a murder case, there are few certainties.”

  “Well, I can only tell you that it’s written down in the Middleton family Bible. It’s on the bookshelf behind the desk. I’ve seen the entry.”

  But what was inscribed in the family Bible was not necessarily witnessed by God, whatever the rector wished to believe.

  “Did they get on well?”

  “I have no idea. Except that he described Althea Middleton once as headstrong. Apparently she’d insisted on having her way in all things, including going to India.”

  “Did she also live in Herefordshire?”

  “I believe she came from somewhere along the coast. Near Torquay. I went there once on holiday, and knew the area a little. Sir John mentioned her home in connection with my travels. The second Lady Middleton—he called her Eliza—was a love match, certainly on his part. He wore a black armband throughout the war and told me if it hadn’t been for his duty, he’d not have been able to go on without her.”

  “No children of either marriage?”

  “None that I ever heard of. Which reminds me, speaking of family. You might include poor Simba in that category. I saw his body there under the window.” Harris shook his head. “The dog was devoted to Sir John. I’d see the two of them walking across the fields of an afternoon, when I was on my rounds. I wonder who put him out. It isn’t—wasn’t—like Sir John. Odd, that, I must say.”

  “Odd?”

  “Yes, he would never have shown Simba the door, not at his advanced age. The dog had belonged to Elizabeth, you see. Sir John had been worried about him since before Christmas, when his breathing seemed to worsen. It got better, but it was a warning, you might say, that his end was near. Sir John would have gone outside with him, and brought him in again as soon as he’d done his business.”

  “But they walked the fields together?”

  “Yes. I meant over the years, you know. Not recently, of course.”

  Which, Hamish was pointing out, could explain why the killer came to the house rather than accost Sir John on an outing.

  But the dog had been with him today, Rutledge replied. And the dog was put outside. Had the visitor arrived at the door just as his victim was preparing to walk the dog?

  Hamish said, “He was killed in the study, no’ in the entry.”

  “Does Trafalgar mean anything to you?” Rutledge asked Harris.

  “It was a great sea battle. And of course it’s a cape along the southern Spanish coast. The battle was named for it, I believe.”

  “That’s no’ likely to figure largely in a military man’s death in Cambridgehire,” Hamish commented.

  Rutledge thanked the rector, and Harris went in search of Mrs. Gravely, to offer what comfort he could.

  There was a tap at the door, and Rutledge went to open it himself.

  Dr. Taylor had returned, and nodding over his shoulder to the hearse from Cambridge, he said, “If you’ve finished, I’ll take charge of the body.”

  “Yes, go ahead. When will you have your report?”

  “By tomorrow morning, I should think. It ought to be fairly straightforward. We have a clear idea of when Mrs. Gravely left for market, and when she returned. And the wounds more or less speak for themselves. I don’t expect any surprises.”

  Nor did Rutledge. But he said, “Have a care, all the same.”

  Taylor said sharply, “I always do.”

  Rutledge stepped aside, watching as the men collected Sir John’s body from the study and carried it out the door.

  As he walked with them to the hearse, one of them said to him, “I was in the war. I’ll see he’s taken care of.” Rutledge nodded, standing in the cold wind until the hearse had turned and made its way back onto the road into Mumford.

  As he swung around to go back inside, he saw Mrs. Gravely at an upstairs window, a handkerchief to her mouth, tears running down her cheeks. Behind her stood the rector, a hand on her shoulder for comfort.

  Rutledge was glad to shut the door against the wind, and rubbed his palms smartly together as he stood there thinking. Had the killer knocked, he wondered, and waited until Sir John had answered the summons, or had he come in through the unlocked door and made his way to the study?

  Hamish said, “He knocked.”

  “Why are you so certain?” Rutledge answered the voice in his head. It was always there—had been since July of 1916, when Corporal Hamish MacLeod was executed for refusing to carry out a direct order from a superior officer. The price, Rutledge knew, of MacLeod’s care of his men, shifting the burden of guilt from his own shoulders to Rutledge’s. It had not been easy that day to send weary, sleep-deprived soldiers over the top again and again and again, knowing they would not survive. But orders were orders, and although numbed to the cost, as the battle of the Somme raged on, Rutledge had done what he could to shield them. It hadn’t been enough, he knew that, and Hamish knew it. And Hamish had broken first, willing to die himself rather than watch more men sacrificed. The machine-gun nest was impregnable, and every soldier in the line was all too aware of it. No amount of persuasion had shifted Hamish MacLeod from his determination not to lead another attack, and in the end, an example had had to be made.

  And Rutledge, well aware that the young Scots corporal would not see England again, had delivered the coup de grâce to the dying man. But Hamish MacLeod did come back—in Rutledge’s battered mind: an angry and vengeful voice at first, and then, with time, a relentless companion who yielded no quarter, sharing the days and nights and silent only when Rutledge slept, although dreams often brought him awake again, into Hamish’s grip once more.

  “Because the man was struck from behind. He wouldna have let a stranger get behind him.”

  It was a very good point, and Rutledge agreed. A knock, then, and Sir John opened the door to someone he knew. They walked back into the study, and at some point the old dog was put out. Before or after Sir John had been attacked? There was no way of knowing. Yet.

  He went into the study and began his search.

 
He saw the Bible at once, on the shelf just as the rector had told him. Opening it to the parchment pages between the Old and New Testament, Rutledge scanned the record of family marriages, then turned the page to look through the listing of deaths.

  There was the entry for Middleton’s first marriage, and, in darker ink but the same hand years later, his second. Entries also of his wives’ deaths.

  Althea Margaret Barnes Middleton, of cholera, he read, with the date and Calcutta, India after it.

  And then, in a hand that was shaking with grief, Elizabeth Alice Mowbray Middleton, in childbirth. Under that, John Francis Mowbray Middleton, stillborn.

  Putting the Bible back where he found it, Rutledge began to go through the desk drawers. Two of them held sheets of foolscap. He realized that Sir John had been writing his memoirs of the Great War. Glancing through the sheaf of pages, he saw that Middleton had just reached the Somme, in 1916. The next chapter was headed Bloodbath. He quickly returned the stack to the drawers, then paused to consider the possibility that Sir John had been killed to stop him from finishing the manuscript. But if that was the case, why leave the pages here, to be found—and possibly completed—by someone else?

  Hamish said, “Was it unfinished, or is part missing?”

  “I can’t be sure.” He made a mental note to speak to Harris about the manuscript.

  The rest of the desk held nothing of interest, and the bookshelves appeared to be just that—shelves of books the dead man had collected over a lifetime, with no apparent secrets among them.

  He saw the small box on a reading table next to the bookshelves, and picked it up. It was very old, he thought, and inlaid with what appeared to be ivory and mother of pearl. Opening it, he looked inside. It was lined with worn silk, but otherwise empty.

  As he was putting it back in place, a title in gilt lettering on the shelf by the table caught his eye, and he frowned. A History of the Barnes Family.

  That was the maiden name of Sir John’s first wife. He pulled the volume from the shelf and looked at the title page. There was an inscription on the opposite page: To Althea, with much love, Papa. The frontispiece was a painting of a house standing at the edge of what appeared to be a lake, Georgian and foursquare, with a terrace overlooking a narrow garden that ran down to a small boat landing, jutting out into the water. Rutledge turned the book on its side to read the caption.