Wings of Fire

by Charles Todd

  “Yes, but I still don’t see why you need something like this. It’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of!”

  “You’ll understand. Afterward. It will save days of work. Trust me.”

  “I’ve seen spiders I trust more,” she said tartly, and stepped into the driver’s seat. “If you cause Susannah any pain, any grief—if she has a miscarriage because of you—”

  “She won’t. What I’m about to do will give her peace of mind.”

  “Learning that her half sister was a murderess? Oh, yes, I call that quite soothing for a woman in her condition.” She turned and looked at Rutledge, a long, earnest look that seemed to probe beneath his skin and into his very brain.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Are you quite sure?” she asked quietly, her face sober and very worried.

  He reached out and touched her hand as it rested on the wheel. “I can only tell you that what I’m doing will be for the best. If there was murder done, it ought to be known, and the past put to rest. There ought to be justice, for the dead, if no one else.”

  “The dead are dead. It’s the living I’m worried about now. And—and Nicholas.”

  “No one can touch Nicholas,” he said gently. “Not now. Not ever again. You know that better than I do.”

  “I won’t let you destroy his memory, Inspector Rutledge. I won’t let you. If you do try, I’ll find a way to put it right. Whatever I have to do, I will do. Believe that.”

  He felt cold in the early morning breeze, in spite of his coat.

  “I can’t hurt Nicholas,” he said again. “He’s dead, Rachel. You have to accept it, and what it means. He left you, he chose to die with Olivia, not to live with you.” He could see the flare of pain in her eyes, and ignored it. “That’s what he told you in his last letter. He didn’t want you.”

  Her mouth tightened. “I wanted him,” she said quite simply. “Now start this damned thing or I’ll not go at all, not even for Susannah’s sake!”

  He shut the door, walked around, and bent down to turn the crank. He could sense her watching, he knew what was in her mind. As the engine roared into life again and he stepped back, the crank in his hand, she looked straight at him over the bonnet of the car. “Leave Cormac out of this,” he said, coming around the wing towards her. “Don’t send for him. It’s between Olivia and Nicholas, you and me. He’s not a Trevelyan. Don’t send for him, he’ll just make matters worse.”

  “No one could make them worse. Except you.”

  She took off the brake, let in the gear and the car moved briskly off down the road. She didn’t look back. He watched her handle the car around the curve, his mind on her driving, judging whether he’d made the right decision to send her. But there was no one else who could have persuaded Susannah.

  Hamish, lurking in the shadows, said only, “Play with witchcraft, and you’ll burn yourself.”

  “It isn’t witchcraft,” Rutiedge answered harshly. “It’s the only way I can think of to get at the truth!”

  There was an echo of the engine from the narrow hedgerows, although the car had long since vanished to sight. Rut-ledge started to turn back towards the inn, then looked up to find Mary Otley watching him from the doorway of the cottage.

  “You haven’t put her in harm’s way, have you, sir?” she asked.

  “No. With any luck, I’ve put her out of it,” he answered, and walked back to the inn for his breakfast.

  “The constable’s still at his breakfast, sir,” Mrs. Dawlish said, opening her front door to the Inspector from London.

  “I’ll just come through and have a word with him in the kitchen,” he said, gently pushing the door wider. “If you don’t mind.”

  She did, but was too polite to say so, though he could read her face clearly enough.

  The constable stood up hastily, napkin still stuck under his chin, as Rutledge came down the passage and turned into the kitchen. It was a large room, with windows on two sides and a door into the back passage at the rear, next to the great polished black stove. A table with the remains of breakfast and an unexpectedly bright bowl of zinnias stood in the very middle of the room. A vast Cornish dresser took up most of one wall, the pantry through a door beyond, and against the other wall the smaller, scraped wood top of the cooking table shone in the light from the east. The curtains at the windows, the pattern on the tablecloth, and the walls themselves were all a summer blue, as if somehow to bring the color of the sea into the house.

  “Sir!” he said in alarm.

  “It’s all right, Dawlish. I’ve just come to tell you that you can call off the search on the moors. This morning.”

  The man’s face brightened. “Then you’ve given it up, sir? All this nonsense about the Trevelyan family? You’re going back to London?”

  “There are some loose ends to tie up. Some statements I’ll need, to cover the questions I seem to have raised. You won’t mind helping with those?”

  “No, sir, not in the least,” Dawlish said expansively, willing to do cartwheels if it got rid of the inconvenient man from London and put Inspector Harvey into a pleasanter mood. “Whatever you wish, I’ll be happy to help.”

  Rutledge smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes, and for an instant Dawlish was filled with a new uncertainty. But he brushed it aside as Rutledge said, “I’ll be back in two hours with a list of names. I don’t want you to tell anyone else who is on that list. Do you understand me? You’ll send for these people one at a time, exactly as you’re told to do, and you’ll have them write their statements for me exactly in the order I’ll give you, and in the circumstances I describe. It may seem strange to you, but I think in the end you’ll see what I’m driving at. There will be a specific list of questions for each interview. And I want you to ask them exactly as written. Change them in any way, and I’ll have it all to do over again. It will only take longer. Do you understand me?”

  Dawlish didn’t, and Rutledge knew he didn’t. But Dawlish nodded, and Rutledge turned to go.

  “Two hours. Be here when I come. And don’t forget the men on the moors.”

  “Not bloody likely!” Dawlish answered to himself as Rutledge turned and walked out of the sunny, blue kitchen.

  Working fast and steadily, Rutledge made his lists, his mind tied up with the complexity of details, setting them out with precision. He had always been good at organizing his thoughts, at creating a picture of events from start to finish. And this time the facts were there. No gaps, no guesses. No room for doubt. No room for Hamish to creep in and haunt him. But Hamish was there, still debating the wisdom of what lay ahead, a stir in the silence.

  Trask came up with a telegram for Rutledge, and he opened it reluctantly, knowing it came from London, knowing it was from Bowles.

  It read, “If you aren’t doing your job, you’re needed here. If there’s something happening, I want to know about it.”

  “No answer,” Rutledge told Trask, and went back to what he was writing.

  Explaining to Bowles would be the same as emptying the Sahara with a teacup. There was not enough time for it. Not today. Tomorrow might be different.

  Finally he sat back and looked at the sheets of paper on his desk.

  How weak was the evidence?

  Damned weak at the moment.

  Without statements, without the voices of people and their written words, evidence was always thin.

  And yet, it was there. It was there. Waiting to be culled.

  He felt satisfied.

  Rachel had driven straight to the Hall and left the car there before walking back into the village. She came into the inn as Rutledge ran lightly down the stairs, and he knew the instant he saw her face that he’d got what he wanted.

  “You’ll have to get it out of the car yourself. Susannah says if you damage the frame at all, she’ll have you up before the courts. It took two grooms to load it safely.”

  “Thank you!” he said, smiling, and she felt a deep sense of foreboding as she watched it
light his eyes. He seemed to have lost five years over night, a man who had changed so much that she was afraid.

  And then the smile was gone, and with it the strangeness. He was himself again, the thin face, the lines. The bone-tiredness. But she thought that that might have been a sleepless night, not the weariness he’d seemed to bring from London with him.

  Rachel opened her mouth to say something, then decided against it. “Come on, then,” she said instead. “It shouldn’t be sitting out there in the sun.”

  They walked in silence to the house, and Rutledge was grateful for it, for the lack of questions in spite of the doubts that he knew were seething just below the surface in the woman at his side.

  She was spirited. She’d have made someone a very good wife. But not for Peter, who had valued his peace. In the long run, Rachel would have needed more than a book-filled house in the country and quiet evenings by the fire discussing Roman ruins. And not for Nicholas. Because the Nicholas she’d seen and loved was a figment, a falsehood built on lies that he couldn’t do anything about. The man who cared for Rachel, the man who’d done his best to send her away, was there inside, but for reasons Rachel herself would never willingly grasp.

  Rachel’s tragedy, he thought, as they came out of the woods and turned up the drive towards the house, was that love had seemed so real and so possible because she had wanted it too much.

  Just as he had wanted to believe Jean loved him as deeply as he believed he’d loved her. Jean, who hadn’t had very much courage, who turned from him because she couldn’t accept any other dream but the shiny, perfect one that had been shattered in 1914. Four years of war hadn’t changed her. And it had changed him—their lives—beyond recognition. Had he wanted her so much because he’d thought she could restore what was gone? Or had it really been love? He didn’t know any more.

  “Which may be an answer of sorts,” Hamish reminded him.

  In the back of the car, now sitting below the steps at the front door of the Hall, was a large object wrapped in heavy brown paper.

  It took him fifteen minutes, with Rachel offering unsolicited advice, to gently dislodge it from its cocoon of surrounding blankets and cushions, then lift it out onto the drive. Between them they got the package up the steps and then, unlocking the door, into the hall and across it to the drawing room.

  Another fifteen to find a small ladder and carry it there too. But in the end, stepping back to see the results, he was satisfied.

  Rosamund Trevelyan smiled benignly down from her proper place above the hearth, her face turned slightly, her cheek smooth and creamy against the background of light, her eyes full of life and love and hope.

  An extraordinary woman, mother of another extraordinary woman. As full of goodness and joy and beauty as the Gabriel hound had been full of darkness and destruction.

  23

  Rutledge was just returning from the kitchen, where he’d left the ladder, when the bell rang loudly in the emptiness of the house and brought Rachel, frowning, out of the drawing room.

  “Who is that?” she demanded.

  “Dawlish,” he said, and opened the door to the constable, who had Mrs. Trepol at his heels. The elderly housekeeper was staring over his shoulder, her eyes moving nervously from Rachel to the London policeman.

  Before Rachel could say anything more, Rutledge closed the fingers of his right hand around her arm to silence her, and nodded to Dawlish. “The drawing room. You’ll see the chairs and a table. Use them where they are.”

  Uneasy and uncertain, Dawlish glanced at Rachel, but Rut-ledge cut short any query. “See to it, man!” And he led Rachel towards the stairs, his eyes commanding her to wait. Not here. Not now. Her mouth was tight with suspicion and anger, and she moved ahead of him with the stride of a woman biding her time with a vengeance. Behind them, Mrs. Trepol followed Dawlish into the hall, their steps sounding loud and uncertain as they moved towards the drawing room.

  Once in the back sitting room overlooking the sea, Rachel rounded on him in a fury. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? I won’t have it! This is wrong, this is trickery! Tell me what’s going on, or by God, I’ll find the nearest telephone and call London!”

  “Look,” he said earnestly, “I’m trying to get at the truth. Do you want me to walk away and leave this unfinished? I can’t. What I think has been done here—if I’m right, mind you—has to be settled. Now. It can’t be put off.”

  “What you think has been done!” she repeated. “But you haven’t told anyone what you think, have you? Not me, not the rector, not Inspector Harvey—”

  “I have told you. There have been a series of suspicious deaths starting with Anne—”

  “Yes, yes! Olivia killed them, you say. Or Nicholas. Dead people who can’t answer, can’t defend themselves! Well, let me tell you what I think! While I was at the Beatons, I made a telephone call. To a friend of Peter’s who knew you as well. He tells me that after the Armistice you spent months in a private clinic—a head injury, he said. Quite severe, he said, because you weren’t allowed any visitors. Nurses told him that for a time you didn’t even know who you were. Everyone was surprised when you returned to the Yard—they didn’t think you were well enough, that you’d recovered sufficiently to take on stressful work. He’s right, you aren’t capable of carrying out your duties! That’s why you aren’t in London, looking for that man—that’s why you were sent out to Cornwall, to get you safely out of the way, and why you’re searching out old, imaginary murders. You can’t do any better!”

  Shocked by her vehemence, he turned away towards the windows, looking out at the sea, his back to her, his face hidden from her angry eyes.

  “You sent for Scotland Yard,” he reminded her for a last time. “If I’m mad, if I’m imagining the need for this investigation, then some of the blame must be yours.” It was on the tip of his tongue to say more, and he caught himself in time, and added only, “I’m sorry, Rachel. More than you know.”

  His refusal to defend himself, the odd tone of his voice, brought her up short.

  They were a woman’s weapon, words. She’d deliberately wielded them to wound, to hurt him, to stop him. She’d telephoned Sandy MacArdle because he was a gossip, and she’d known he was a gossip, and she wanted the worst possible interpretation put on anything Ian Rutledge had done, to use that knowledge herself as savagely as she could.

  And suddenly, she felt sick, ashamed. “Oh, Nicholas,” she cried to herself with weary grief, “why did I have to love you so much!”

  Rutledge still had his back to her, the set of his shoulders betraying his own pain, waiting for her to go on.

  She found she couldn’t.

  “Why did you want the portrait?” she asked quietly, after a time.

  He was watching the sea, but his eyes were blind to its beauty. Only the pain within him seemed real. And to his credit, he told her the truth.

  “Because I can’t close this investigation without taking statements from half the people in Borcombe. But you see, if I do that in the normal fashion, by the end of the day I’ll have taken down whatever embroideries they’ve devised between them to shield themselves and Rosamund’s family from scandal, and then we’ll never get at the truth. Because they all know bits of that truth, Rachel, whether they realize it or not. And I need to bring it out cleanly, bare and unvarnished. It occurred to me that sitting in that formal drawing room where each of them will feel desperately ill at ease, and watched by the one woman they all revered both in life and in death, I won’t get lies. I’ll have facts. And before anyone in Borcombe has quite understood where what they’re telling Constable Dawlish might be leading, the whole picture of murder and deception will be down in black and white. They can’t turn around then and deny it. They can’t pretend that they were misled or misinterpreted the questions. They’ll have to accept it themselves. And come to terms with it, however they can. But that’s the grievous cost of murder. We all pay it, along with the victims.”

 
; “What a very cruel thing to do.” Her voice was harsh with disbelief, her brief episode of sympathy washed away. He deserved to be savaged!

  He turned to face her again, his eyes sad. “It probably is cruel. I’d thought long and hard about that myself. I didn’t know what else to do. I could have told Harvey and these people what it is I’m after, but I don’t think they’d have believed me any more than you have. And the wall they’ve all drawn around the Trevelyan family would only go higher.”

  “All this for a dead woman! For Olivia!”

  “No, not for Olivia. For two small children who never lived to grow up. For James Cheney who died in despair, and Brian FitzHugh who trusted the wrong person, to his cost, and for Rosamund, who was driven to taking her own life to make it all stop. For Olivia, who gave up a quite incredible gift because something far more precious was threatened. And for Nicholas, who had spent a lifetime in her service, because he believed he failed her. For all I know, Stephen’s death was a part of it all. He was searching for something just before his fall, and I think I now may know what it was. If he hadn’t been late, if he hadn’t been in such a damned hurry, he might not have gone headfirst down those stairs. He was, in a sense, a victim too.”

  “How very morally upright of you, to set the record straight. And will we have a wax effigy of Olivia in the dock, when you present your evidence to the jury?”

  “No,” he said tiredly. “We’ll have a living person.”

  She stared at him, her mouth moving soundlessly, as if the words were there, but her voice had failed her.

  24

  There was a pounding at the front door, the sound traveling up the stairs like thunder, and Rutledge brushed past Rachel without a word, going out of the door and closing it behind him before crossing the hall to find Inspector Harvey waiting impatiently outside. Rather than ushering him into the house, Rutledge went out to stand in the bright sunlight beside him.