Charles Todd

by Ian Rutledge 12 - The Red Door (v5)

  She whirled, her hands closing over the heavy whetstone that was used to sharpen knives, and she flung it at Rutledge with deadly aim.

  But he was expecting it, and she narrowly missed him. With a cry of fury, she turned and was on her way out the door, just as her daughter came into the kitchen from the yard.

  Mrs. Blaine burst into tears. “I’m a mother. I had to protect my daughter. I killed her, not Betsy. It was never Betsy.”

  Betsy, barging into her mother, spun her out of the way. “I heard all of it,” she said, her face flushed and her eyes bright with her fury. “I heard what you were saying. Well, I’d do it again. If I had the chance, I’d do it again! You don’t have any idea how much I hated her.”

  Chapter 29

  It took some time to arrange matters. The two women were shut up in the pantry by the kitchen door, where the windows were too small to allow either of them to escape. Satterthwaite was left to guard them while Cobb and Rutledge went back to Thielwald to bring back help.

  On the way, Cobb said, “How did you know?”

  “Betsy wouldn’t throw a handful of earth on the coffin. You left her a rose.”

  “You knew then?” Cobb asked in disbelief.

  “No. But it occurred to me on the way to the Blaine Farm. You said yourself Mrs. Blaine was like a magpie. The gold knob for a rainy day. The letter box in the event a deed was in there as well. Jake, in the event he could name her daughter. If Betsy had been glad someone else had killed Florence Teller, she’d have wished her to rest in peace. And to leave you in peace.”

  “I’d told her I’d kill her if she hurt Florence.”

  “She was in a fury that day. She must have thought you and Mrs. Teller had had words. That you’d come to the front door of the house like a suitor, and Mrs. Teller had taken her husband’s cane to you.”

  “If she’d turned me out, why would Betsy kill her?”

  “For fear, I think, that you’d go on begging Mrs. Teller, and one day she might be lonely enough to relent and let you live with her. Or sleep with her.”

  “My God.” Cobb took a deep breath. “I thought I’d hang. I thought that the evidence was so strong I was going to be convicted. Satterthwaite was damned good in his reasoning. And he would do his best to see me hang as well. I think there was some jealousy there.”

  “I’m sure there was. But he tried to be fair as well.”

  But Cobb was silent, as if he disagreed.

  They were coming down into Thielwald when Cobb spoke again.

  “I’m not sorry to hear Teller is dead. If it was by his own hand, do you think it was because Florence told him to go away and not come back?”

  Rutledge thought no such thing. But he said only, “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.”

  It was late afternoon when Rutledge had finished his last duty in Hobson.

  Satterthwaite bought him a drink in Thielwald and said, “I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.”

  “Neither could I.”

  “What was it about Florence Teller that attracted men like Cobb—and me—to her? And yet she couldn’t keep her own husband. I think you felt a little of it too.”

  “It was her strength, I suppose,” Rutledge said, considering it. “And her loneliness. I wanted her murderer caught. As much as you and Cobb did.”

  Satterthwaite nodded. “Cobb’s going to live with his uncle for now. Did he tell you?”

  “I think they’ll deal well together.”

  Sighing, Satterthwaite said, “Well, I for one could use a night’s sleep.”

  “I’ve to deal with the Teller family. And then there’s a pressing inquiry in London.”

  “Was it accident or suicide? Teller’s death.”

  Rutledge didn’t answer for a time, and then he said quietly, “I wish to God I knew.”

  He should have slept, he knew that, but he circled around after leaving Hobson, and went back to the house with the red door.

  Letting himself in, he walked through the empty rooms. Standing by the chair where Florence Teller had sat so many days and nights, waiting, he wondered if she was at peace now.

  The police from Thielwald had searched the Blaine farmhouse and failed to find the rosewood letter box. Nor had they found either a deed or any other private papers belonging to Mrs. Teller.

  He walked on, looking out at the garden behind the kitchen, at the flowers that had been so important to the lonely woman, and then turned and went up the stairs.

  There was no way to know what the Teller family would do with this house now. Something, surely. He had a feeling Cobb wouldn’t go back to the farm he’d shared with his wife. But he might end here. He had the money to buy Sunrise Cottage if he chose. And keep it as Florence Teller’s shrine. All the small, painfully important memories of a woman’s lifetime would be lost otherwise. Already the house felt as if she was no longer there, even in spirit.

  In the bedrooms there was already a light film of dust collecting on the tops of tables and the windowsills.

  He walked into her room.

  There was Timmy’s photograph where she could see it every night. Waiting for her to come up to bed.

  He crossed to the table and picked it up, looking at it again.

  It shouldn’t stay here to be lost with the rest of Florence Teller’s life. It belonged with the family that had never acknowledged the little boy who would have been their heir, if he’d lived.

  “Shall I?” he asked the silence around him.

  And then after a moment, he put it in his pocket.

  He would take it home himself. A last gift to a woman he’d never seen, except in death.

  And then he left the cottage, shut the red door firmly behind him, and then the gate.

  If he drove through the night, as long as he could count on staying awake, he could be in Essex in the morning.

  As it happened, he stopped at St. Albans out of necessity, for petrol, and he realized that he couldn’t go any farther without endangering himself and anyone who got in his way. There was a room available in the inn inside the cathedral close, the sleepy clerk welcoming him and asking when he wished to have his breakfast.

  Rutledge laughed. “When I’m awake,” he said and went up the stairs like a drugged man, to fall into the bed by the windows overlooking the river, and after that he could remember nothing until he awoke two hours later. It was still dark outside, but he got up, shaved, and dressed, and went to find a telephone in the town.

  Clouds had come in during the night, and now intermittent showers were cropping up. He ran through one on his way to a hotel near the railway station, and dashed in. He was shown to the telephone closet, where he put a call in to the Yard.

  Gibson answered and Rutledge gave him a brief summary of what had transpired in Hobson.

  “I’m going now to Essex. I’ll be back in London as soon as may be.”

  Gibson said, “You were supposed to be on the bridge last night.”

  “Yes, well, a different murder took precedent.” And then he paused. “No one else was killed?”

  “They sent the constables out again in your place. And nothing happened. The Chief Superintendent was not best pleased.”

  “I don’t suppose he was.”

  And then he was driving through the last of the darkness toward Witch Hazel Farm, chased the last five miles by a shower. As he came down the wet drive and his headlamps swept the front of the house, splintering into fragments of light against the mullioned windows, he had a premonition that all was not well.

  He couldn’t have said why, except that Hamish, in the back of his mind, was as moody as the weather, his voice as depressing as the rain.

  As he stepped out of the car, he realized that the rain had brought a chill with it. He splashed to the door as the shower grew heavier.

  He lifted the knocker and let it fall. Even though it had been draped in black crepe to mark a house of mourning, its sound echoed through the silence, startling birds taking shelter in
the greenery below the windows.

  No one came.

  And then the door was flung open and a frantic Walter Teller cried, “Come quickly, for God’s sake—”

  He broke off, staring at Rutledge in bewilderment. “How did you get here so soon? The doctor isn’t even here.” Then looking over Rutledge’s shoulder, he exclaimed, “Here he is now. Let him in, will you? I must go—” And he ran back into the house, leaving the door standing wide.

  The doctor’s motorcar was barreling down the drive, pulling up smartly behind Rutledge’s.

  “This way,” Rutledge said, and Fielding nodded, preceding Rutledge into the house and taking the stairs two at a time.

  Rutledge followed. On the first floor, the passage ran to the right and to the left. The doctor turned right, entered a room two doors down, and disappeared from view. Rutledge could hear someone crying.

  He reached the doorway, and the first thing to meet his eyes was the great four-poster bed from another era, its bedclothes scattered and some falling onto the polished floorboards in a wild tangle.

  Jenny Teller lay on the bed in her nightdress, her fair hair tumbled and uncombed, her feet bare.

  Walter Teller was stepping aside to let the doctor work with her.

  Fielding bent over the bed, his hands quick and sure. But after only a matter of minutes, he straightened and said, “There’s nothing I can do. She’s gone. I’m so sorry, Walter.”

  “But she was alive when you got here!” he exclaimed. “I could tell.”

  “I don’t think she was. And if she had been, it was too late, far too late. The laudanum had done its work. She must have been dying when you found her.”

  “She can’t have been. I won’t believe it.” He leaned over his wife, touching her face, calling her name, begging her to wake up. The doctor watched him for a time, then caught his shoulder and pulled him away. “There’s nothing more you can do, man. Let me make her decent. She shouldn’t be left like this.”

  It took some time to convince Teller to go out of the room. He reached the doorway, his face wet with tears, his mouth open in a silent cry of grief, then stumbled into the passage, going as far as the stairs, where he sat down on the top step, his head in his hands.

  Shutting the door, Rutledge began searching the room from where he stood, his eyes roving from the armoire to the tall dresser, to the smaller chest of drawers on the far side of the bed, a desk by the windows, and a long mirror.

  “There was a glass verra’ like that one in Lancashire,” Hamish said.

  And so there was. Very like it. Even to the carved roses at the top of the oval frame. It must have come from the same manufacturer to be so alike.

  Odd that both women owned the same mirror. He wouldn’t have accused either of them of vanity.

  He brought himself up sharply and continued to search for anything out of the ordinary.

  Finishing his inspection of the room, he waited without speaking.

  “What are you doing here at this hour?” the doctor demanded as he turned to see Rutledge still by the door.

  “I got here not five minutes before you. I was called away before I could finish that business of Captain Teller’s fall.”

  Fielding nodded. “I thought he might have called you. Walter, I mean.” He gestured to the woman on the bed. “Well, since you’re here, help me lay her out. The bed’s in a state. Where’s Mollie?”

  “The maid? I don’t think Teller summoned her.” He crossed the room and helped the doctor with his work, smoothing out the bed-clothes, laying the dead woman back into the center of the bed, and pulling a sheet up to her chin. He worked impersonally, and when the body had been made presentable, he could say with certainty that there was nothing unusual here, no signs of violence.

  He said, when their work was done, “What happened?”

  “An accidental overdose of laudanum at a guess. I prescribed it some time ago. I can’t tell you why she was taking it now. Worry over that business with her husband? Or the boy going away to school? I know she took it very hard when Captain Teller fell here. She said something to me Sunday evening about not knowing how she was to sleep. She kept seeing him lying there at the bottom of the stairs.”

  “And you prescribed nothing then?”

  “No. She wasn’t asking for medical advice. I just asked how she was bearing up. I’d come back because I was worried about her and the Captain’s widow. Susannah Teller. She was quite distraught. She should have been allowed to go back to London straightaway, but she said you refused to hear of it. Then the police from Waddington came back, and they told everyone they were free to go. Edwin Teller and his wife took Susannah back to London. They were concerned about his grandmother and how to break the news to her.”

  “And the sisters? Miss Brittingham and Miss Teller?”

  “They left as well. Miss Brittingham asked the rector to keep Harry for the night, thinking it for the best. Miss Teller was very upset and had words with her brother Walter. Then she left.”

  Rutledge said, “The Tellers didn’t share a room?”

  “The master bedchamber is just through that door. This room is where Jenny stayed for her lying-in with Harry. It was where she always slept when her husband was away.”

  “If Walter Teller had been sleeping in there, would he have heard anything?”

  “I doubt there was anything to hear. Certainly no violent death throes if that’s what you mean.”

  Fielding stood there, looking down at Jenny Teller. “I can tell you, I wouldn’t have been surprised to be summoned because Walter Teller was dead of an overdose. In his case, deliberate.” He shook his head. “He’s been under a terrible strain. They’d warned me at the clinic that this might be a consequence of his illness, and when I was here Sunday to pronounce the Captain dead, I was stunned to see the change in Teller. The attending doctors at the clinic felt that his recovery would depend on finding a solution to his distress.”

  “I thought he’d decided not to return to the field. That he was going to tell them that he had done enough.”

  “Yes, well, he might have been vacillating,” Fielding said. “I didn’t know the senior Teller very well. Walter’s father. But he was a martinet, you know. Planning his children’s lives without a thought to what they might like or might choose to do with themselves. Walter is a stickler for doing what’s right. And it may have been more difficult than he imagined to step away from the path he’d been intended to follow all his life.”

  “How do I view this death?” Rutledge asked.

  “I expect, like the Captain’s, a tragedy that shouldn’t have happened.”

  Rutledge nodded. And yet he wasn’t satisfied. Not yet.

  And he heard Hamish saying in his ear, “She doesna’ look as peaceful as the other lass . . .”

  Fielding turned to the door. “I’ll let Teller come back. Then I’ll see to it that he has something to carry him on. There’s his brother’s funeral. And now this. I understand he’s not delivering the eulogy for his brother. Susannah Teller was adamant that it be the eldest brother. Edwin. Now we must concentrate on the living. The husband. The child. Someone ought to notify the family. I don’t think Teller is up to it.”

  “I’ll see to the family.” Rutledge followed the doctor to the door and then went back into the room to look down on the woman lying on her pillow, her face pale and already losing that quality that made people real.

  There was a glass on the bedside table. Milk, he thought. And a bottle that had come from a doctor’s dispensary. There was no label on it.

  He walked to the only other door in the room and opened it.

  A dressing room, and then on the other side, as Dr. Fielding had said, the door into what must be the master bedroom. He crossed to open it, then looked back into the room where Jenny Teller lay.

  “Why was she sleeping in there tonight?”

  But Hamish had no answer for him.

  Walter Teller’s bedchamber was high-ceilinged a
nd spacious, handsomely furnished, and with a newer bed, more modern in style than the four-poster, and a low bookcase beneath the double windows that faced the front of the house. A part of the original building, it had the wider floorboards and a prie-dieu against one wall that looked very old, a vestige of the Catholic owners before the Reformation. Someone had kept it for its beautiful lines and decorations, and it was well suited to the room.

  Walking back to where Jenny lay, he closed the dressing room door. And at almost the same moment, Fielding returned with Walter Teller.

  Teller crossed the room, looked down at his wife, and collapsed to his knees beside the bed, taking one of her hands in his and burying his face in it.

  Fielding gestured for Rutledge to leave him there, and they walked out into the passage together.

  Rutledge asked, “Did Walter Teller ever tell his wife where he was when he disappeared?”

  “I’m not sure. She brought Harry in to visit the dentist on Thursday, and I was just coming out. I asked her how her husband was, if I should stop in and see him, perhaps keep him under observation for a while. And she told me he had fully recovered. I asked if he’d said anything to her about where he’d been while he was missing. I was curious, and it was important as well to add that to his file in the event it happened again. She replied that he hadn’t confided in her. I could see she was unhappy about that. I suggested that she should give him a little space. That perhaps he himself was in need of time to understand his behavior. Harry had gone to speak to the vicar’s son, who was coming down the street with his mother. Mrs. Teller watched him for a moment and then said that she wondered if her husband’s family knew more about what had happened than she did, that they’d left her and gone in search of him, as if they knew something she didn’t. I tried to make her understand that staying occupied was one of the best ways to weather a worrying time. That if they were at all like their brother, they couldn’t have sat still and just waited, as she had done. That seemed to relieve her mind a little.”

  “Could that explain sleepless nights? Women worry about their families—if they are ill or hungry or frightened or hurt. It’s their nature to care.”