Knocking on the surgery door, Rutledge scanned the house down the street. He could just see a small woman wrapped in a coat and headscarf, standing in the back garden, staring at the bare fruit trees and withered beds as if her wishing could bring them into bloom again. The doctor’s wife? That told him what he needed to know.
The nurse who admitted Rutledge was plump and motherly, calling him dearie, asking him to wait in the passage while she spoke with the doctor. “His first patients of the day are already in the front room. It’s better if you come directly back to the office.”
“It’s about his report on the post-mortem of Sir John.”
“He has already mailed it to the Yard,” she said. “I took it to the post myself.”
Rutledge gave her his best smile. “Yes, I’ve been in Dartmouth. It hasn’t caught up with me yet.”
She nodded and bustled off to tell the doctor that Rutledge was waiting.
Dr Taylor received him almost at once, saying, “Mrs Dunne tells me you haven’t seen the post-mortem results.” He sorted through some files on his desk and retrieved a sheet of paper. “My copy,” he added, passing it across the desk to Rutledge. “You’re welcome to read it.”
Rutledge took the sheet, scanning it quickly. “Yes. Everything seems to be in order,” he said, glancing up in time to see the tension around Dr Taylor’s eyes ease a little. “Two blows, one to the back of the head and the second to the face. Weapon possibly a cane.” He handed the report to Taylor. “There’s one minor detail to clear up before the inquest. Mrs Gravely told me that Sir John spoke to her as she was coming into the study. Was that possible, do you think?”
“I doubt if he was coherent,” Taylor said easily. “A grunt. A groan. But not words as such.”
“She also reported that he spoke to you. And that you answered him, just before he died.”
Taylor frowned. “I thought he was asking if the old dog was still alive. I told him it was dead. I wasn’t sure, you understand. But I thought if that was what he was trying to say, I’d ease his mind.”
He had just contradicted himself.
“I don’t think that the dog’s death was something that would comfort him.”
Taylor shrugged. “I wasn’t in a position to consider my answer. As I told you, he wasn’t coherent. I did my best in the circumstances.”
“Actually, I think he was probably asking if you’d use the Middleton Host to save the old dog. And you refused. You had to, because Mrs Gravely was standing there in the doorway.”
Taylor flushed. “What host?”
“He must have told you at one time or another. A medical man? That a king had found it useless and thrown it in a dung heap. But then Eleanor of Castile was probably beyond help by the time the reliquary reached her. She died anyway. King Edward loved his wife. Passionately. Everywhere her body rested the night on the long journey south to London, he built a shrine. The wonder was, he didn’t smash the relic. But I expect he felt that the dung heap was a more fitting end for it. A fake, a sham.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Inspector. And there are patients waiting.”
“It was a story that must have touched Sir John. He hadn’t been able to save either of his wives, had he? The host was, after all, no more than a pretty fraud.”
The doctor’s face changed. “That’s an assumption that neither you nor I can make. Sir John was a soldier, a sceptic; hardly one to take seriously legends about relics and miracles. Where is this taking us?”
“I’m trying,” Rutledge returned blandly, “to establish whether or not Sir John loved Elizabeth Middleton as deeply as – for instance – you must love your wife. Because it was for her you did what you did. Not the patients out there in the waiting room.” It was a guess, but it struck home.
Taylor opened his mouth, then shut it again.
“Why did you put the dog out? Did it attack you? If I asked you to have another doctor look at your ankles or legs, would he find breaks in the skin to indicate you’d been bitten? Even if it has begun to heal, the marks must still be there. Would you agree to such an examination?”
Taylor rose from behind the desk. “Yes, all right, the dog was dying when I got there. Sir John was kneeling on the floor beside it when I opened the door and called to him. He told me he was in the study, and to come quickly. Still, the damned dog growled at me and got to its feet as I struck the first blow. I had to get rid of it because Sir John was still alive and I needed to hit him again. The cold finished it off, I expect. It’s breathing was shallow, laboured.” He moved to the hearth. “My wife has just been diagnosed with colon cancer. I’d already asked Sir John if I could borrow the reliquary. To give her a chance. He told me it had done nothing for his wife, dying of childbed fever. But I didn’t care. I was ready to try anything. I just wanted to try. But he was afraid that, if my wife recovered on her own, Mumford would be swamped with the desperate, the hopeless, believers in miracles. He said it would be wrong. Time was running out, and yet that afternoon he begged me to do something for his dog. It was obscene, I tell you.”
He reached down, his fingers closing over the handle of the fire tongs. Lifting his voice, he shouted, “No, no – you’re wrong! Put them down, for God’s sake.”
And, before Rutledge could stop him, he raised the tongs and brought them down on his own head, the blow carefully calculated to break the skin but not knock him down. And as blood ran down his face, he dropped the tongs and cried out, “Oh, God, someone help me … Mrs Dunne … he’s run mad.”
And in a swift angry voice that only reached Rutledge’s ears, Taylor said, “She’s ill, I tell you. I won’t be taken away when she needs me. Not by you, not by anyone.”
He rushed at Rutledge, grappling with him.
The door burst open, Mrs Dunne flying to the doctor’s aid, pulling at Rutledge’s shoulders, calling out for him to stop.
Rutledge had no choice. He swung her around, and she went down, tripping over the chair he’d been sitting in. He turned towards the hearth, to retrieve the fire tongs as Taylor reeled against the far wall, calling, “Stop him—”
Mrs Dunne, scrambling to her feet, must have thought Rutledge was about to use the tongs again, and she threw herself at him, carrying him backward against the hearth, stumbling over the fire screen.
Her screams had brought patients from the waiting room, pushing their way through the door, faces anxious and frightened as they took in the carnage, drawing the same conclusions that Mrs Dunne had leapt to. A woman in a dark green coat gasped and went to the doctor’s aid, and he leaned heavily against her shoulder. Two men put themselves between Rutledge and his perceived victim, one of them quickly retrieving the fire tongs from where they’d fallen, as if afraid Rutledge could still reach them.
It was all Rutledge could do to catch Mrs Dunne’s pummelling fists and force her arms to her sides, so that he could retrieve the situation before it got completely out of hand. Hamish in the back of his mind was warning him again, and there was no time to answer.
In a voice used to command on a battlefield, he said, “You – the one in the greatcoat – find Constable Forrest and bring him here at once.”
Taylor said, stricken, “He’s trying to arrest me … for murder … I’ve done nothing wrong, don’t let him lie to you. For God’s sake!”
They knew Taylor. Rutledge was a stranger. The man in the greatcoat hesitated.
The doctor swayed on his feet. “I think I’d better sit down.” The woman helped him to a chair, and his knees nearly buckled under him.
She said, “I’ll find your wife.”
He gripped her arm. “No. I don’t want to worry her.” Taylor took out his handkerchief to mop the blood from his face. “Just get him out of my office, if you will.”
Rutledge crossed the room, and the man with the tongs raised them without thinking, as if expecting Rutledge to attack him. But he went to the door and closed it.
“You’ll listen to me, then. I
’m Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard.” He held up his card for all of them to see. “I’ve just charged Dr Taylor with the murder of Sir John Middleton. As for those tongs, he himself wielded them, I never touched them, or him.”
“I think you’d better leave,” Mrs Dunne snapped. “He’s a good man, a doctor.”
“Is he? I intend to order Sir John’s dog exhumed. I expect to find shreds of cloth in his teeth.” Hamish was reminding him that it was only a very slim possibility, but Rutledge ignored him. “What’s more, I intend to ask a doctor from Cambridge to examine Dr Taylor’s limbs for healing bites. And the clothing he was wearing the day of the murder will be examined for mended tears.”
He saw the expression on Mrs Dunne’s face. Shock first, and then uncertainty. “I mended a tear in his trousers just last week. He’d caught them on a nail, he said.”
“Then you’ll know which trousers they were. If the shreds match, he will be tried for murder. We can also look at those tongs, if you will set them carefully on the desk. The only prints on them will be Dr Taylor’s, and yours, sir. Not mine.”
“Can you do that?” the man holding the tongs asked, staring down at them.
“There are people who can.”
He moved to the desk, putting them down quite gently. Dr Taylor reached for them, saying, “He’s bluffing, look, it’s my blood that’s on them.”
Rutledge was across the room before Taylor’s fingers could curl around the handle of the tongs, his grip hard on the doctor’s wrist, stopping him just in time.
The man in the greatcoat said, “I think I ought to fetch Constable Forrest after all, if only to sort out this business.”
He left the office, and they could hear the surgery door shut firmly after him.
The doctor said, “I tell you, it’s not true, none of it is true.” But even as he spoke the words, he could read the faces around him. Uncertainty, then doubt, replacing belief.
The woman in the dark green coat said, “I really must go—” and started towards the door, unwilling to have any further involvement with the police. The other man, without looking at the doctor, followed her in uncomfortable silence.
Taylor called, “No, wait, please!”
Mrs Dunne said, “I’ll just put a sign up on the door, saying the surgery is closed,” and hurried after them.
Rutledge turned to see tears in Taylor’s eyes. “Damn you,” he said hoarsely. “And damn the bloody dog. I love her. I wanted to save her. Do you know what it’s like to realize that your skills aren’t enough?” He turned from Rutledge to the window. “Do you know how it feels when God has deserted you?”
Rutledge knew. In France, when he held his revolver at Hamish’s temple; he knew.
“And what would you have done if the reliquary failed you too?” Rutledge asked.
“It won’t. It can’t. I’m counting on it,” he said defiantly. “You won’t find it, I’ve seen to that. By God, at least she’ll have that!”
But, in the end, they would find it. Rutledge said only, “What did you use as the murder weapon?”
Dr Taylor grimaced. “You’re the policeman. Tell me.”
Hamish said, “He did the post-mortem. Any evidence would ha’ been destroyed.”
And there had been more than enough time for Taylor to have hidden whatever it was, on his way back to Mumford before he was summoned by Sam Hubbard.
When Constable Forrest arrived, Rutledge turned Taylor over to him, and warned him to have a care on their way to Cambridge. “He’s killed once,” he reminded the man.
He watched them leave, and Mrs Dunne, who had come to the door as the doctor was being taken away, bit her lip to hold back tears.
Rutledge walked to the house next but one to speak to Taylor’s wife, and it was a bitter duty. Her face drawn and pale from suffering, she said only, “It’s my fault. My fault.” And nothing would dissuade her. In the end, he had to tell her that her house would have to be searched. She nodded, too numb at that moment to care.
He left her with Mrs Dunne, and went to tell Mrs Gravely that he had found Sir John’s killer.
She frowned. “I’d never have believed the doctor could do such a thing. Not to murder Sir John for a heathen superstition. Poor Mrs Taylor, I can’t think how she’ll manage now.”
He left her, refusing her offer of a cup of tea. Then, just as he was cranking the motorcar, she called to him, and he came back to the steps where she was hugging her arms about her against the cold wind.
“It keeps slipping my mind, Mr Rutledge, sir! And it’s probably not important now. You asked me to keep an eye out for anything that was missing, and I wanted you to know I did.”
“Is there anything? Besides the reliquary?” he asked, surprised.
“Oh, nothing so valuable as that.” She smiled self-consciously, feeling a little foolish, but no less determined to do her duty. “Still, with the old dog dead, and Sir John gone as well, I never noticed it missing until yesterday morning. It’s the iron door-stop, the one shaped like a small dormouse. Sir John used it these past six months or so, whenever Simba needed to go out. To keep the door from slamming shut behind them, you see, while he walked a little way with Simba, or stood here on the step waiting for him. He never cared for the sound of a slamming door. He said it reminded him too much of the war. The sound of the guns and all that.”
Rutledge thanked her and drove to Cambridge to ask for men to search the sides of the road between Sir John’s house and Mumford.
As they braved the cold to dig through ditches, and push aside winter-dead growth, Rutledge could hear the doctor’s voice again.
You’re the policeman. Tell me.
Three hours later, he drove once more to Cambridge to do just that. A few black hairs still clung to the dormouse’s ears, and on the base was what appeared to be a perfect print in Sir John’s blood.
Dead of Winter
Richard A. Lupoff
From the aftermath of the First World War to events leading up to the Second World War. As with the previous story, the following is based on certain characters and events that really happened. It concerns Nazi activities in the United States in preparation for the war effort in Europe.
Richard A. Lupoff is as well known for his science fiction as for his crime and mystery novels. His first book was a study of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Master of Adventure (1965), and Lupoff became something of a master of adventure himself, but never with anything formulaic. Such books as One Million Centuries (1967) and Sacred Locomotive Flies (1971) rang the changes within science fiction, whilst Into the Aether (1974) was one of the early works of steampunk. A number of his books have been pastiches or tributes to some of Lupoff’s favourite authors, such as Lovecraft’s Book (1985), and readers will, of course, recognize the origins of his detective, Caligula Foxx, in the following story. Another Foxx story, “Cinquefoil” will be found in Lupoff’s collection Killer’s Dozen (2010).
Almost anyone would have been embarrassed to answer the doorbell wearing Buck Rogers pyjamas. Andy Winslow, however, felt no shame. His attitude was that anybody who sounded the brass gryphon knocker on the front door of Caligula Foxx’s house on West Adams Place had better be prepared for whatever sight he encountered. Especially if said caller arrived on a Sunday morning and sounded the knocker at the ungodly hour of – Winslow checked his Longines wristwatch and decided – well, it might not be such an ungodly hour at that, but it was Sunday morning.
Foxx was upstairs in his Colonial-era four-poster. The entire house was furnished with antiques, none of them dating from later than 1789 – when James Madison was said to have written the Bill of Rights on the polished maple desk that now served as Foxx’s daily working surface.
Reuter had prepared Foxx’s daily ration of steel-cut Irish oatmeal, moistened with a dab of freshly churned butter and a dash of heavy cream, and sweetened with a touch of maple sugar and cinnamon. A huge mug of Jamaican blue mountain coffee, seasoned with ground chicory root, Lo
uisiana style, rested steaming on the tray beside the bowl of cereal. An array of Sunday newspapers covered the goose-down quilt on Foxx’s bed, the colourful comic pages set neatly in one pile, the rotogravure magazines in another, and so on through the various news sections of the papers.
No one interrupted the great detective while he was at breakfast, nor while he was reading his newspapers.
Hence, Andy Winslow to the front door.
He peered through the small fan-shaped window in the door but the caller, whoever that was, was nowhere to be seen. A light, early-winter snow had dusted West Adams Place during the night, painting the street itself a sparkling white, turning the graceful elm trees that lined the street into illustrations from a Currier and Ives print.
An automobile sped away, headed west, its exhaust rising in the crystal-like air. Winslow caught only a glimpse of it. He was pretty sure it was a LaSalle coupé and that it had a sticker of some sort, possibly an American eagle, in the back window. But it was gone before he could make a definite identification. Its licence plate, in any case, was obscured by snow.
Winslow opened the door.
A uniformed figure slid into the foyer. It was that of a youngster, garbed in military cap, tunic, and boots. As the newcomer collapsed on to the broad-plank floor of the foyer, a narrow streak of blood was drawn the length of the door. Winslow noticed a neat hole in the wood, then turned his attention to the uniformed figure.
He turned the newcomer over, face up. The military cap, knocked askew by the fall, still clung to dark, wavy hair, held there by rubber-tipped bobby pins. Winslow carefully removed the bobby pins and the cap. The hair fell free. The corpse – for there was no doubt in Andy Winslow’s mind that the newcomer was deceased – was that of a young woman, hardly more than a schoolgirl, garbed as a messenger for the Postal Telegraph Company.
A tiny hole, apparently the exit wound of a small-calibre bullet, formed a black circle just above the bridge of her nose. Winslow lifted her head, found a small section of her dark hair stained even darker with blood. Winslow had found the entry wound of the bullet.
The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction Page 49
