by Charles Todd
“St. Edward’s? As a matter of fact, we do, going back to the early 1800s. I can search for whatever you need to know. But it will take time. In some cases the ink is faded or the writing is illegible. My predecessors were not always thinking about posterity when they made their notations.”
“What I’m after isn’t that old. I’d like to know Ben Willet’s full name. Abigail Barber hasn’t been told yet that he’s dead. And I don’t care to distress her at this stage.”
“Ben’s name? I can answer your question without consulting the records. Edward Benjamin Stephen Willet. He was named for his father, his grandfather, and an uncle. He was called Ben to prevent any confusion.” Morrison smiled ruefully. “I was entering Ned’s death, and looked up Ben while I was about it. He’d have been twenty-eight in September.”
“Edward Willet. Yes, he’d have used that name. Honoring himself and his father,” Rutledge said after a moment.
“You’re releasing the body? Is that why you’re interested? For the-er-forms?”
“Actually I was wondering what name Willet would have used if he’d published a book in France.”
“Willet? Good God, no, you’re mistaken on that score. I heard the story going round about Ned. I’m not sure who started it. Jessup, perhaps, or one of the others. I don’t often hear gossip, but there was talk in one of the shops one day. They were laughing, they had forgot I was there.”
“You don’t have a copy of the book they spoke of?”
“Hardly. It doesn’t exist. Or at least I don’t believe it does.”
“Then how did such a tale start?” When Morrison looked away, as if trying to choose his words, Rutledge added, “You needn’t worry. I know about the smuggling. It’s not what brought me here, and if it has no bearing on murder, I intend to ignore it.”
“Very wise of you,” Morrison agreed. “I shut my eyes as well. One can’t help but notice that Constable Nelson drinks himself into a stupor on brandy one can’t purchase at The Rowing Boat. Poor man, he isn’t cut out to be a policeman. He came here just now, asking if I’d seen a lost horse. I never know whether these forays of his into duty are real or a way of salving his conscience. There was a band of Gypsies said to be camping out in the marshes, and before that a stolen bicycle. Um. Where was I?”
“Smuggling.”
“Yes, I was going to add that the veil Abigail wore at her wedding was French lace, handed down from her mother. And Ned, God rest his soul, Ned used to do the runs to France before the war. He took Ben with him once or twice when the boy was fifteen. While I sat with Ned after he injured his leg, he told me the story. How Ben was seasick when a storm blew up and they had to put into a different French port. He was so ill he was taken in by a French family, didn’t know a word they were saying to him, but he walked about in a daze for weeks afterward, enamored of the daughter of the house. He got over it, of course, at that age boys generally do.”
But had he?
Rutledge remembered the copybook in a box in the Laughtons’ attic, the description of the woman in CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. Was she based on the girl Ben believed he’d fallen in love with as a boy?
“Did the French ever produce the book they talked about? On another run, perhaps?”
“I shouldn’t think so. If they did, no one showed it to me. And Ned would have, he loved a good joke. Why is it so important?”
“Because it’s possible the book does exist. And that the author’s name was Edward Willet. But not the father, of course. The son.”
“I still don’t see why this matters. What could it have to do with young Willet’s death? For all we know it could be an entirely different branch of the family. Ned told me once that there are Willets in Derbyshire and Norfolk.”
“Nor do I see the connection. At the moment.”
Morrison shook his head. “How many books do you think the people of Furnham read in the course of a year? The Bible, perhaps. They’ve always lived hard lives, these villagers. They don’t have the luxury of reading, nor the time or the money to buy books. The children go to school until they’re old enough to help earn their keep. The war was particularly hard, with the sea cut off.”
“I understand.”
“Is there any other matter I can help you with? Other than Ben’s full name?”
Rutledge said, “I have a puzzle on my hands. Three deaths, with seemingly no link between them. Mrs. Russell in 1914, Justin Fowler in 1915, and now Ben Willet’s. You know these people better than I ever shall. Do you see a pattern that I have missed?”
Morrison frowned. “We don’t know what happened to Mrs. Russell, do we? She may well have been in great distress over the coming war, as her family suggested. If that’s true, I bear some of the blame for not seeing her need in time. As for Fowler, why should you think he’s dead? Simply because he has cut his ties with the people who used to be close to him? A troubled man sometimes prefers to turn to strangers, rather than risk the pity of those he cares about. As for Ben, I’m afraid that in the end we’ll discover that his death is more related to London than it is to Furnham.”
“You present a very reasonable case. I wish I could believe in it. When you’ve been a policeman as long as I have, there’s a sixth sense about murder. The locket around Ben Willet’s throat connects him to River’s Edge, if nothing else does.”
“Ah yes, the locket. But that too has a reasonable explanation, doesn’t it? I’m afraid Miss Farraday has left a trail of broken hearts behind her. I shouldn’t be surprised if Ben was one of them. She was kind to him, after all.”
“It explains the photograph. Not the locket itself.”
“Are you so certain that it isn’t the only one of its kind?”
“With Mrs. Russell’s initial engraved on the face?
“There must be thousands of Englishwomen named Elizabeth, Emily, Eleanor, Eugenia-have you considered that?”
“I don’t like coincidence.”
Morrison smiled. “I’m afraid I can’t help you there. My business is to save souls, not to hunt killers.”
As Rutledge rose to take his leave, Morrison added, “If you find that Willet’s book exists, I should like to know about it. In fact, I’d like to read it myself.”
“I’ll be sure to tell you.”
They had walked as far as the door when Rutledge said, “This man Jessup. Is he dangerous, do you think?”
“Timothy? He’s a hard man to know. And he doesn’t care to be thwarted. By Ben going into service instead of to sea, or by an airfield being built in this parish. He nearly killed a man, coming to blows with him, after he discovered he’d come here to weigh the possibility of Furnham becoming a seaside town. I shouldn’t like to cross him.”
An unwitting echo of Constable Nelson’s words. And Morrison’s comment explained why he and Frances had been challenged by the man.
After leaving the Rectory, Rutledge spent three-quarters of an hour looking for any sign of a runaway horse. There was always the chance that Russell had taken it to speed him on his way to Furnham. But he had no more luck that Constable Nelson had. Someone had been along the road with horse and cart, that was clear enough, but a single horse-no.
He continued to London, his mind occupied with the problem of the three victims. While Morrison might believe there was no connection, he had a feeling there must be. It was one of the reasons he’d come looking for Russell.
He expected, when he reached Cynthia Farraday’s house, that she would refuse to receive him. But the maid, Mary, admitted him and led him to the small sitting room, where Miss Farraday was writing a letter.
“If you’ve come to see if I’m well, you’ve wasted a trip,” she said as he walked through the door. “I’m angry now. At Wyatt and at myself for being frightened of him.”
“I’m happy to see you fully recovered,” he countered, then asked, “Do you by chance still have a copy of the book Ben Willet is said to have written?”
“Said?” she asked. “I told you he’d had t
wo volumes published. He was working on a third. I don’t suppose he finished that before he was killed. But there it is.” Rising from the desk, she went to the bookshelf under the window and retrieved two books. “Here. See for yourself.”
He thanked her and took the books. He looked at the name on the cover-Edward Willet. As he’d expected. Then he opened the first of the two books at random, reading a page here and there.
It was a war memoir as she had told him earlier. The title was A Long Road Home.
Beginning when Willet went to enlist, it was filled with stories of the men he’d trained with and then fought with. They were well realized and very human. And it brought the war back all too vividly.
“Have you read this?” he asked, looking up.
“The earlier part. I found the rest too disturbing. How awful it must have been to have these men come into one’s life, to get to know them, and watch as they are shot or blown up or grievously wounded by shrapnel. There was another Corporal he came to know very well, another young man in service in Thetford, and a month before the Armistice, the man was shot and died in his arms.” She shook her head, as if to clear it of the image she’d invoked. “I couldn’t bear it.”
He said, fighting to keep his voice even, “It was what we knew.”
Still skimming, he stopped at the top of a page and read on. I hadn’t heard from home for some weeks, and then I saw an officer I recognized. He lived near my village. His shoulder was in a bad way, and he was being sent to England for further treatment. I asked if he would find out if my father and my sister were all right. I’d heard that one of my brothers had been killed, the one here in France, but there had been no news about the one in the Navy. Captain F- told me he intended to go to Essex as soon as he was well enough, and he promised to send me word. But he never did. I expect he must have died of his wounds, because as far as I know, he never came back to France. I’d asked around, hoping he was all right and they hadn’t had to take off his arm. All of us fear amputation more than death. My sister did write finally, and told me that Joseph was dead as well, and she begged me to come home safe. It was with heavy heart that I went back into the line that day, and I think I killed a good many Germans in Joseph’s name…
Rutledge was about to ask Miss Farraday if she’d read the chapter and if she thought Captain F- was a reference to Justin Fowler. He remembered in time that she had told him she could have loved Fowler. Instead he looked for the date of that passage, and it was in the spring of 1915. And as far as he could judge, reading on into September, there was no other reference to Captain F-. He’d have to read the book from cover to cover, to be sure of that.
“Have you found something of interest?” she said, watching him as he read.
“It brings back memories,” he said, evading her question.
She nodded. “I expect it would.”
He turned to the second book, thicker by far, and this time, fiction. The title was simply, Marianne.
It was set in Paris during the war, and the chief character, Browning Warden, was searching for a woman he’d met before the war while smuggling along the French coast.
Hamish said, “Ye ken, it wouldna’ make his family verra’ happy.”
Which was probably why Willet hadn’t told them about the books. Or perhaps he felt that he wasn’t ready to share this next part of his life, given the trouble he’d had over becoming a footman.
Rutledge said to Cynthia Farraday, “Have you read this one?”
“Yes, I thought it quite good.”
But had she known how much truth had gone into the story?
Skimming again, he looked for a chapter similar to the one he’d read in Thetford, and he found it. The description of the war-torn French village was astonishingly real now, unlike the poorly imagined village in the copybook. The odd thing was, the woman in the earlier version had been dark haired, dark eyed, the girl Willet must have recalled from his boyhood. In this version, she had light brown hair and sounded very much like Cynthia Farraday. Had she recognized herself?
The early pages, describing where Browning Warden lived, evoked Furnham, although Willet had renamed it and the river. The isolation, the marshes, the dark river where he learned to sail, the crossing to France, all spoke of firsthand knowledge. The first meeting with the girl he would seek during the war, her search later for the wounded soldier who had deserted to marry her, shadowed a fulfillment of the promise glimpsed in the Thetford notebooks.
Realizing that he’d been reading for some minutes, he set the book aside. “You’re right. Willet was quite a fine writer. Do you by any chance know what the third book was to be about?”
“Pure evil,” she replied. “That’s what he said once, that it was a study in man’s depravity. But I can’t tell you what story he was telling. I’m sorry. He didn’t want to talk about it very much. He said it was a reflection of what he’d seen in the war and what he knew of heroism and cruelty. Ambitious, that was his word for it. And Gertrude Stein, whoever she may be, thought what she’d read was splendid.”
“These first two books had roots in Willet’s life. His experiences in the war, this love for a girl he could never marry, based on the smuggling he knew so much about. I wonder if the third book did the same.”
“Are you saying that there actually was smuggling going on? In Furnham? That Ben was a part of it?” She shook her head. “You must be mistaken. He liked the way the past shaped the future. Nothing to do with reality.”
And he had lied to her. To protect her? Or to protect the people of Furnham?
There was nothing here, with the possible exception of the reference to Captain F-, to cause a man’s death. Or to support Willet’s claim that Russell had killed Justin Fowler.
With regret he set the books aside.
Cynthia Farraday was saying, “I’m not in a position to judge, not really, I know so little about writing. But I think the second book is much more mature than anything he’d written before the war. He’d seen the world. He understood far better what he was trying to say. The money I gave him was well repaid. Can you imagine what Paris must have been like after Furnham, or even Thetford for that matter?”
“You lived at River’s Edge. Did you feel that the village in the second novel was Furnham?”
“Well, of course it was. I mean to say, he didn’t use real names, but I recognized a few of the residents. Those I knew. There are probably more.”
“Reading these, I keep asking myself why he came to Scotland Yard and posed as Wyatt Russell. Was that the only lie he told me? Or have I been chasing shadows?”
“I don’t know. You haven’t told me if you’d found Wyatt. Are you saving bad news for the last?”
“I can’t find him. I thought he’d be in Essex, there was nowhere else to go. And I was wrong. Why did you tell me you wished to buy River’s Edge, if it were for sale?”
Color rose in her face. “To find the girl I once was, I suppose. Don’t you ever wish you could go back? It’s heartbreaking to see it standing empty. And I have a feeling Wyatt won’t ever live there again. He sees the ghosts that walk. I don’t.”
“Not even the ghost of Justin Fowler?”
“Justin was handsome, he loved sports-we had croquet and lawn tennis and the like, horses to ride, a boat. But he was-there was something about him, a darkness, I thought at the time, having read too many novels. Still, it was there. I thought at first he missed his parents. They were dead, like mine, but he never talked about them. Never, ‘My father and I did this,’ or ‘My mother loved roses.’ I wondered afterward if perhaps he wanted to forget them.”
“Why?”
She looked across at the window. “Perhaps it was too painful to remember. My parents died on holiday. There was a typhoid outbreak in Spain, while they were in Cordoba. They were there-and then they weren’t. Horrible for me, but I’d said good-bye when they went away, and when their luggage was returned, there were presents for me, ribbons and a cut-glass bottle for sc
ent, some lace, and a collection of photographs they’d bought in famous places. I knew they’d been thinking about me, and I found it comforting. I don’t know how his died. Perhaps they were ill and had been suffering for some time. The sort of thing one tries to put behind one.”
It was an interesting possibility.
He thanked her and was preparing to leave when she said, “Wyatt didn’t come back. Not even to apologize. Do you think he ever will?”
For her sake, he lied once more. “I’m sure he will.”
S topping at The Marlborough Hotel, he used their telephone to put in a call to the Yard.
It was some time before Gibson could be found, and he sounded harassed when he finally answered.
“Sir? Where are you?” was his first question, after Rutledge had identified himself.
“What news do you have of the Chief Superintendent?” Rutledge countered.
“In hospital, sir, and the report is not good. Where are you?”
“Traveling,” Rutledge replied. “Have you learned anything about Justin Fowler? Or Benjamin Willet?”
“Nothing about Fowler. As for the other man, he had rooms in Bloomsbury but gave them up to return to France.” There was no real connection then with The Marlborough Hotel. Willet had lied when he claimed he had rooms there.
Gibson was saying, “Constable Burton, who located his lodgings, is very thorough. We also found the doctor who treated this man Willet. ” He gave Rutledge the address in Harley Street. “Dr. Baker.”
“Good work. And keep trying with Fowler, if you will.”
“Sir, I’ll try. We’re at sixes and sevens with the Chief Superintendent in hospital.”
Rutledge noticed that Gibson had used Bowles’s title rather than what he and the rank and file called him: Old Bowels. It was not a good sign. Nor was the fact that it appeared that no one had yet been asked to fill in either temporarily or permanently. Much as he himself disliked the man, it was hard to picture the Yard without him.
“Someone’s been looking for the file on the MacGuire trial. By any chance, do you know where that is?”
