The Black Ascot

by Charles Todd

  Amused, Rutledge left his motorcar down the street and walked back. The knocker on the door was heavy brass and made a satisfyingly substantial sound as it struck the plate beneath.

  A clerk came to the door and admitted him, asking his business as they moved from the entry into a room as elegant as the building. The furnishings were well polished, dark wood gleaming, and the upholstery was a rich dark blue that matched the drapes at the windows. Broadhurst, Broadhurst, and Strange had done well for itself.

  “I’ve come to speak to the member of this firm who handles the Alan Barrington estate.”

  The clerk’s eyebrows rose, but he showed no other sign of surprise. He was, Rutledge thought, well suited to his surroundings.

  “May I ask who is inquiring, sir?”

  Rutledge took out his identification. The clerk examined it for a moment, then asked, “Is there a particular reason why you are inquiring, Inspector?”

  “It’s still an open case, and we review it from time to time,” he replied easily.

  “Mr. Jonathan Strange is in today. I’ll speak to him and see if he is free to receive you.”

  The clerk disappeared through a door at the far end of the room, and Rutledge took a chair. There were interesting pieces placed carefully around the room, and he looked at them. A niche held three shelves of early Chinese porcelain, and there was a box on the table at his elbow that was inlaid black lacquer. On the wall across from him was an early Japanese print, and at the far end of the room, a matching one. Spring and Winter, he thought.

  The clerk reappeared. “Mr. Strange will see you, Inspector.”

  He led the way to a room halfway down the passage, and opened the door. “Mr. Rutledge, Mr. Strange,” he said, then closed the door quietly as soon as Rutledge had stepped inside.

  It was a surprisingly plain room, with nothing that might indicate either the interests or the personality—or the importance—of the man rising from behind a massive desk littered with papers.

  He was in his early forties, broad shouldered, with fair hair, dark blue eyes, and a pleasant smile. It hid whatever curiosity he might have about the Yard’s unexpected appearance.

  “Mr. Rutledge. I understand the Yard is reviewing the Barrington case?”

  “Routine,” Rutledge said, smiling a little to show there was no great concern on his part. In one corner of his mind he pictured two mastiffs eyeing each other for any hint of aggression.

  Strange gestured to a chair, and resumed his seat. “I see.”

  Rutledge said, “I’m sure you’re accustomed to the usual questions—have you heard from your client, have you discovered his whereabouts, is there anything you could tell us that would enable us to find him? But I’m also sure you would have informed the Yard if the answer to any of these had been useful to us.”

  He could see Strange rapidly reassessing the man before him.

  Strange waited, and after a moment Rutledge continued. “I’m curious. Who manages Mr. Barrington’s affairs? He was—is—a wealthy man with several properties, including a town house in London. These must require a good deal of someone’s time.”

  “The senior Mr. Broadhurst handled them until his death in the spring of 1910. That’s to say, before the events of June. I was asked to take them over at that time, and I have represented Mr. Barrington since then.”

  “You see to the running of the estates, his business dealings, and so on?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “Who is the steward for the estate in Melton Rush?”

  Strange was surprised but covered it well. “Arnold Livingston. A good man. During the war, of course, the former steward came out of retirement and saw to matters. When Livingston was demobbed, Hathaway handed over the position once more.”

  “What sort of man is Livingston?”

  “He was raised on a small estate in Derbyshire. When his father died, it was sold up to pay death duties. There was enough left for his mother and sister, but he went in search of work, and Barrington took him on as under steward to Hathaway. As I recall, that was two years after Livingston had come down from university. Young, perhaps, for so much responsibility, but he’d helped manage his father’s estate.”

  “Married?”

  “No.”

  “And he lives alone on the estate?”

  “Yes, that was my suggestion, someone in the house to keep an eye on the staff as well.”

  “How much money did Barrington have at his disposal at the time of his disappearance?”

  Again it was an unexpected shift in direction. Strange moved several of the papers on his desk as he considered his response. “I can’t really tell you that. I had no way of knowing, you see.”

  “Had there been large withdrawals from his accounts, perhaps as early as May or as late as the week before the verdict of the inquest was made known?”

  Strange smiled, but it had no warmth. “If I tell you that he had done, it would indicate premeditation, would it not?”

  “I can speak to his bank manager. On the other hand, he’s already been charged with murder and attempted murder. I don’t see that it makes much difference at this stage.”

  “It might, if it came to trial.”

  “Suggesting that Mr. Barrington is still alive and might possibly be found and tried.”

  Strange surprised him by laughing. “I should not like to play chess with you, Mr. Rutledge.”

  “You haven’t given me a straight answer.”

  “No. I haven’t. The truth of the matter is, Mr. Barrington was planning a journey as early as January of 1910. He has a cousin in Kenya, and he’d considered going out there to visit him. And yes, this cousin is at present Mr. Barrington’s heir.”

  In late June 1910, the Yard had contacted the police in Nairobi, and they had interviewed Ellis Barrington. He hadn’t seen his cousin since 1906 when he’d come to England for his mother’s sixtieth birthday. And Alan Barrington had not arrived in Kenya. The police were to notify London if he crossed a border or arrived by boat in Mombasa.

  It was all in the reports Rutledge had read.

  And Strange was well aware that the information must have been there.

  “Therefore your client had in fact taken out large sums to prepare for that visit to Kenya.”

  “I wouldn’t call them large, no. He would have traveled with letters of credit on his bank. But he would have needed a fair amount of cash if he kept to his plan of stopping off in Egypt and picking up his ship—or another—in Suez. The P. and O. boat tickets would have been purchased here in London ahead of time. He was expecting his cousin to arrange a safari for him. But that would have been dealt with by the bank in Nairobi. He also intended to look into property in the highlands with an eye to growing coffee, if he found that it was a sound investment. That too would have been handled in Nairobi.”

  “I’ve heard that new plantations of coffee can’t be harvested for some years. Seven, is it?”

  Strange shook his head. “I have no idea. However, if he’d written to say he was about to make a purchase, we’d have found experts to advise him.”

  “Still. We’re agreed that at the time he disappeared, he had in his possession sufficient funds to allow him to leave England quickly.”

  “There has been no indication that he left England.”

  “And no sighting to indicate he stayed in the British Isles. For instance, did he own property in Ireland where he might have sought refuge?”

  “Not to my knowledge.” But Strange was looking at the papers on his desk, and Rutledge couldn’t read his eyes.

  “The Hebrides?”

  “No.” After a moment, he looked directly at Rutledge. “Is this line of questioning in aid of any new information you’ve received about my client?”

  “The Yard hasn’t informed me of any recent sighting,” he answered. In point of fact, it was he who’d informed the Yard. “But I can tell you, it wouldn’t hurt my career to be the man who found Alan Barrington an
d brought him in to stand trial.”

  That had been intended to throw Strange off track. An ambitious man rather than one with new information. Instead it had produced a rather unexpected sneer on Strange’s face.

  “Are you quite so certain then that my client is guilty? He hasn’t been tried. There is no direct evidence that he meddled with Fletcher-Munro’s motorcar. Only the word of a mechanic. There was only the acknowledged antagonism between the two men over the death of Mark Thorne.”

  “Inspector Hawkins believed it was a strong enough motive to present to the inquest. And the inquest agreed with him and found Barrington responsible.”

  “I can tell you that Alan Barrington wouldn’t have touched Mrs. Fletcher-Munro. Whatever he might have felt about her husband, he would have found another way to kill the man without harming her. If, of course, that was what was in his mind.”

  “How can you be so certain of that?”

  Strange looked toward the window. “I know what I’m talking about. Alan was in love with her. Had been before Mark Thorne married her. For that matter, so was I. I had as much reason to kill Fletcher-Munro as Alan did.” His gaze came back to Rutledge. “And before you jump to conclusions, I was in Sandwich, in Kent, with my sister and her family that weekend. She’d had a difficult labor, and it was thought she might not survive the fever afterward. I went there on a death watch. It’s the reason I wasn’t at Ascot myself. But thank God, Julia survived. And her daughter.”

  “That’s an odd piece of information to share with a policeman.”

  In the back of Rutledge’s mind, Hamish was saying, “He didna’ need to meddle with the motorcar that day.”

  Strange was saying, “Oh, I’m safe enough. But if you’re looking to find out the truth about Alan, you need to know this about him.”

  “He might have killed her because she married Fletcher-Munro.”

  With a sigh, Strange gazed at Rutledge. “Would you kill the woman you loved for choosing another man over you?”

  But Rutledge had let Jean go. Set her free to do just that, marry someone else. He’d loved her too much to keep her tied to the wreck of a man he’d been at war’s end.

  “No,” Strange went on. “I don’t believe you would. And the truth is, neither of us told Blanche how we felt. I know I didn’t. To what end? It wouldn’t have changed anything. What’s more to the point, we’d rather have Thorne marry her than someone else. Mark was a good man. And—she loved him.”

  “Why hasn’t Barrington been declared dead? It’s been over ten years, after all, since anyone has seen or heard from him. Isn’t his heir interested in seeing his own position clarified?”

  “Ellis is happy out in Kenya. He’s got money of his own. Not as much as Alan has, I grant you, but more than enough to live comfortably. I’ve always thought that when his children are old enough to be settled in life, he might see that inheritance differently.”

  “How old are his children?”

  Strange frowned. “As I remember, Ellis’s elder son will be coming to Oxford in another year.”

  “You’ve kept in touch with him?”

  “Oh, yes.” He smiled grimly. “A matter of form.”

  Rutledge left soon after. As he walked back to his motorcar, Hamish asked, “Do ye believe him?”

  And Rutledge had to bite his tongue to keep from answering that voice aloud.

  “I’m not sure. But now I’m going to look into the death of Mark Thorne. If it wasn’t suicide, I’ve got three very strong suspects in his murder.”

  5

  Gibson was astonished when Rutledge walked in near the end of the day and asked for the file on Mark Thorne’s inquest.

  “I thought you’d been given the Barrington inquiry? Sir?”

  “I have. But as it’s Thorne whose death appears to be the key to what Barrington is accused of doing, I ought to know the details.”

  “We looked into it, sir—that’s to say, Inspector Johnson was called in when Thorne was reported missing, and his motorcar was eventually discovered in Sussex. But it was straightforward enough. Apparently he didn’t want his wife to be the one who found him. He chose instead to go to Beachy Head and threw himself over. Body didn’t wash up for several days. He’d been alive when he went into the water—seawater was found in his lungs, consistent with drowning.”

  Rutledge knew Beachy Head. He’d walked to the very edge himself, in one of his dark moods, and looked down at the heaving sea below.

  “Thank you, Gibson. But I’d still like to read the file.”

  It was clear that Gibson was busy—his desk was piled high with reports and files. “Can it wait, sir?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Grudgingly, Gibson sent for a Constable and gave him the necessary directions. Twenty minutes later, the man returned with the file and handed it to Gibson. He passed it without a word to Rutledge, and went back to his work.

  Rutledge left with it under his arm.

  Gibson’s information was good, Rutledge discovered when he opened the file in his own flat rather than his desk at the Yard. Mark Thorne had died of drowning. And the injuries to his body were consistent with the fall from the high cliff top and the battering of the sea.

  They were also consistent with a physical attack . . .

  But here was a detail that Gibson hadn’t recalled. There was a thick fog along the Sussex coast that evening. No one could be absolutely sure how bad it had been at Beachy Head, but it had caused problems from Hastings all the way to Newhaven, and there was no reason to believe it hadn’t been thick at the headland as well. This brought up the possibility that Thorne hadn’t intended to kill himself but had misjudged the edge.

  The question remained: What had taken him to the headland in the first place? An odd choice of destinations even on a fair day.

  That doubt was introduced by Alan Barrington, who had asked Inspector Johnson to speak to the police all along the coast to determine the extent of the fog. And the doubt would also have removed the stigma of suicide. But Johnson, in the report he’d submitted to the Yard, had had no doubt at all that it had been suicide.

  The inquest had been satisfied as well, because of two facts: Thorne had been moody over his financial situation. And no other reason could be discovered for his being at the headland in a fog, accidental fall or not.

  Rutledge went back to the Yard the next morning to ask Gibson where to find Inspector Johnson, who hadn’t returned to the Yard after the war.

  Gibson, reluctant to give it, said, “You have the file. That should be enough.”

  “It raises several questions. I’d like to clarify them.”

  “What sort of questions?” Sergeant Gibson asked, putting down the papers he’d been reading. He hadn’t raised his voice, but there was a warning in his glare.

  Rutledge didn’t need the cautioning from Hamish to walk carefully.

  “He felt strongly that Thorne was a suicide. Barrington called that into doubt, but in the end the inquest agreed with Johnson. I’d like to understand why Johnson was so certain. It’s not clear in the file.”

  Gibson glanced around to be sure he wasn’t overheard. “You weren’t here, you didn’t know. Inspector Johnson was severely wounded in France in September ’18. He’s in Hampshire. A clinic.” He fished in his desk for a diary and opened it, then wrote down the direction. Handing it to Rutledge, he said, “Chief Superintendent Bowles didn’t want cases like Johnson’s talked about. He put out a statement that Inspector Johnson wouldn’t be returning to the Yard for medical reasons. They weren’t specified.”

  Oh God, Rutledge thought, bracing himself. Shell shock.

  That had been what the doctors diagnosed when he was found wandering and lost behind the German lines after the Armistice. It had been Dr. Fleming, taking over his treatment, who had finally made it possible for Rutledge himself to return to the Yard. What’s more, Fleming had expunged the earlier diagnosis, so that no one would know. Bowles, his superior in 1919, must
have had some suspicion about that, but there was no proof. Still, Bowles had done what he could to end Rutledge’s career at the Yard. If he’d known about the voice in his Inspector’s head, he’d have had him hounded out as the coward shell shock signified. Medals or no medals. Bowles’s reasons had been more personal—he didn’t care for the new breed of men at the Yard, educated and able. He himself had risen from Constable to Chief Superintendent on his own merit.

  But Gibson surprised Rutledge by adding, “Head wound. Comes and goes, good days and bad. I’ll thank you not to speak of it when you return. He was a good man, Johnson. He wouldn’t have wanted pity.”

  “No. I understand.”

  “I don’t think anyone who hadn’t seen him understands. Sir.” Gibson said coldly.

  Rutledge had seen such wounds, but he said nothing of that, thanked Gibson, and after a half hour at his flat to pack his valise, he set out for Hampshire.

  The clinic was a small manor house that had been converted, like so many, into a medical facility to handle the scores of wounded being brought home from France from the moment the Expeditionary Force had set out in 1914. Like some others, it hadn’t been closed at the Armistice. There were men who would never be cleared to go home.

  It was in a pleasant-enough park, surrounded by a high wall, and the gates to the drive were locked. A man stepped out of the small gatehouse and asked Rutledge his business.

  “Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard,” he said, handing him his identification. “Here to look in on Mr. Johnson.”

  “Very good, sir,” the man replied, returning it before walking to the gates and opening them. “We’ll search your motorcar when you leave, sir,” the man went on as Rutledge prepared to pass through the gates. “Some of our patients are canny enough to try to leave that way.”

  “I understand,” Rutledge told him, and drove on.