A Lonely Death

by Charles Todd

  It would be obscene to kill himself here, he realized. To add one more body to the thousands upon thousands who littered this land. A desecration to fire a revolver here in this stillness.

  Even France had failed him. After a time, the revolver still in his hand, he turned back toward his motorcar, and then drove back the way he’d come.

  23

  Rutledge landed in Dover and collected his motorcar from the bowels of the ferry. When his turn came to present his identification, he was asked to step aside, and waited impatiently as others behind him were cleared and sent on their way.

  Eventually a uniformed constable from the Dover police came up to him.

  “Mr. Rutledge, sir? Will you come this way?”

  Wary after his last encounter with the Kent Constabulary, Rutledge left his motorcar where it was and followed the man.

  Inside one of the dock buildings stood former Sergeant Bell. He looked at Rutledge and then smiled. “Yes, that’s him, all right,” he told the constable standing to one side. He added for Rutledge’s benefit, “You’d said to watch for certain names on ships’ manifests. When yours showed up, we weren’t precisely sure who was coming in from France. The constable here sent for me because I knew you by sight.”

  “Yes, good work,” he told the two men. It was, in fact, reassuring that someone had taken him at his word. As he and Bell walked toward the motorcar, he added, “How is the Summers’s dog?”

  “Muffin?” Bell made a face. “Silly name for a dog, but he answers to it right enough. Still, he looks for someone every time I take him outside. And he sleeps by the door, as if to be ready if anyone knocks. Sad, really. He’s devoted to someone. We manage well enough, mind you, but I can see where his heart is.”

  “Can I give you a lift?” Rutledge asked.

  “Yes, thank you, sir. Have any luck in France?”

  Rutledge realized Bell believed he’d gone there on police business. “No luck,” he replied simply.

  “And where are you off to now?”

  “Sussex. I’ll look in at Eastfield and at Hastings. Then back to London.” As he ran down the road along the water, he said, “You know this coast, Bell. Where would you come in, if you didn’t wish to attract attention to yourself?”

  “There must be a thousand coves and inlets from the Scots border to the Welsh, rounding this part of England. And none of them requires more than a boat sufficiently sturdy to cross the Channel—the smaller the better—and some knowledge of where one is heading. I doubt your man knows this coast. And so he’d have to ask some Frenchie to bring him over. During the war, we worried about the Germans setting spies ashore in the dark of night, sneaking in, like, where nobody was looking. The coast watch was all very well and good, but there was no way to prevent them if they got past the Navy. A good fog works wonders, if you know your landing.”

  “Our man could be here already.”

  “Very possible, if you ask me.”

  Rutledge left Bell at his door and continued down the coast toward Hastings. Vast stretches of marsh interspersed with habitation and villages that had been part of the old Cinque Ports trusted with the defense of England marked this road. He ran through Winchelsea and tiny Dymchurch, then detoured to St. Mary’s in the Marsh, desolate and isolated, with its scatter of cottages. He went into the church itself and found it empty. At Rye, he turned inland and came eventually to Eastfield.

  Constable Walker greeted him with some relief. “Constable Petty has been withdrawn, sir. I was told Tommy Summers is out of the country.”

  “He took the boat across from Dover to France, it appears. But for how long? He may already be in Sussex again.”

  “Damnation.” Walker shook his head. “I’d never given that lad credit for being smart enough to outwit the police, the way he’s done. I don’t know what to make of it, and that’s the truth.”

  “He’s had a long time to plan his revenge, if that’s what we’re dealing with. He knew it would be a risky business. He must have considered every contingency.”

  “Shall I ask for Constable Petty to come again? An extra pair of eyes won’t come amiss if you’re right and Summers is on the prowl again.”

  “With any luck, we’ll find him first,” Rutledge said grimly.

  But where to look?

  He went to The Fishermen’s Arms and paced his room, thinking.

  “If I were Tommy Summers, what would I do?” he said aloud.

  But Hamish gave him no answer.

  The cottage where the man had lived before as groundskeeper for the Misses Tate School? But surely that would have been given to whoever had taken his place in the position?

  Still, it was worth finding out.

  Rutledge left the hotel and walked to the school. The property ran deep, backing up to pasturage on the outskirts of Eastfield. To one side of the main door was a small wooden gate leading into a tradesman’s passage to the rear of the house. Here were the kitchen gardens, he saw as he rounded a corner of the building. A path led on between the beds to the barnyard and outbuildings. Behind these was a small walled orchard, apple and pear trees heavy with fruit. To the left of the orchard gate was another that opened into a small plot of ground with a smaller cottage set in it. Empty by the look of it, but all the same, Rutledge went up to the door and opened it after knocking.

  There were two rooms and a tiny kitchen with a woodstove. The furnishings were simple and well worn. A table and chairs, a cluster of other chairs, their padded cushions faded with age. He could see the bedroom through an arch without a door. It contained a bed frame with a rolled mattress on it, some chests, another pair of chairs, one of them on rockers, and a cradle.

  A patina of dust lay over everything, and as he walked to the bedroom, his own footsteps left faint impressions in the dust on the floor.

  It was likely that the present groundskeeper lived not on the property but at his own home in Eastfield.

  A wild-goose chase.

  He went out and closed the door behind him and then latched the gate.

  As he crossed the barnyard, he found himself face-to-face with Mrs. Farrell-Smith. She stood there, watching him approach along the path. There was something in the way she held herself that raised alarm bells in his head.

  She said, “Policeman or not, you’re trespassing.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, keeping his voice level. “If I’d known you were in the school today, I’d have asked permission to enter the grounds.”

  “What are you searching for? Something to identify the groundskeeper you believe was Tommy Summers?”

  “I thought he might have come back here,” Rutledge answered. “It’s familiar, and that means safe. But it appears no one has been in the cottage for some time.”

  “The greengrocer’s son has agreed to work for us. He still lives with his parents. Besides, I doubt Summers would even try to slip into the grounds. The staff know him by sight. Well. I suppose you must start somewhere.” She watched a dove circle the barn roof and then perch there, its voice soft on the summer air. “Is it true? Is it this Tom Summers who has done these murders?”

  “As far as we can tell. Yes. The trouble is, we can’t find him. That’s why I came to look in the cottage.”

  “You won’t be arresting Daniel Pierce, then?”

  “Are you in love with him?” he asked.

  She sighed, and to his amazement, appeared to answer the question honestly. “I think I’ve always loved him. Sadly, he didn’t love me. I thought perhaps in time—I was foolish, I know that now. I even thought I could use Anthony to make him jealous. But you can’t make someone jealous who doesn’t love you at all.”

  “You defended him fiercely enough.”

  She flushed. “I had a very good reason.” After a moment she met his gaze and said, “Come with me.”

  He followed her back to the school building and through a side door into a shadowy passage. This led in turn to a staircase, and at the top he found that they were in t
he foyer outside her office. The door was standing wide—it was obvious she’d seen him walk to the school and go through the tradesman’s gate. She had made a point to follow him to find out what it was he was up to.

  Pointing to a chair, she went to her desk, and with a key on a chain around her neck, she opened a bottom drawer.

  Looking up at him again, she asked, “Do I have your word that you haven’t lied to me about Daniel or Tommy Summers?”

  “You have my word,” he replied.

  She reached into the drawer and brought out a thick envelope, then closed the drawer again.

  “You asked me to look into any event here at the school while members of the Eastfield Company were students. I couldn’t tell you that I’d already learned something about one of them. It had been in my aunts’ personal papers, and I stumbled across it in my first year as head mistress. Although it was rather shocking, it had no immediate importance then, you see, except for a personal interest in the child this once belonged to.”

  She upended the envelope, and something fell out onto her blotter. Rutledge looked at the tangle and then felt cold as he recognized what it was.

  A garrote.

  No, not really a garrote. A clumsy, crude imitation of one.

  “Daniel,” she went on, “was apparently very different from his brother. Anthony was a gentleman in every sense. Daniel was—he was more at home with the sons of tradesmen. He fought with them, played with them, felt comfortable in their presence. My aunts referred to him as a little ruffian. He enjoyed the Army as well, I think. I’ve been told that he was very popular with his men.”

  Her fingertip touched the garrote. “According to my aunt Felicity’s note, on the last day before the Pierce brothers were to leave Eastfield and go to the school in Surrey, Daniel brought this in, and during the morning, he threatened his classmates with it. The boys, that is, not the girls. Aunt Felicity was quite shocked when she overheard him swearing he’d slip into their houses in the dead of night and dispatch them, and she took the garrote away from him. She insisted on summoning his father, but Daniel begged her not to. He swore he’d done it to protect someone. It’s all there in the file. The fear of God, he told my aunt, was nothing to the fear of death, and so he’d used the threat. In the end, she was dissuaded, against her better judgment. So she wrote an account of what had transpired, kept the garrote with it, and told Daniel that if he didn’t behave himself in Surrey and become a fine example of the Misses Tate School, like his brother, she would go directly to his father. He gave her his solemn promise.”

  Rutledge reached for the garrote, picked up the length of rope and the two short, carefully whittled sticks tied at each end. Crudely made though it was, it was still too close to the mark for comfort. “Where the devil did a small boy Daniel’s age come to learn about garrote?”

  “Aunt Felicity wrote that Daniel had already made a friend at the new school and had been invited to stay with him one weekend. The friend’s father had served in India and had books on Thuggee, the bandits who preyed on caravans. Quite the sort of thing a boy would read, if he had the chance. Daniel told my aunt that he had tried to make a garrote like the one described in the book, only he didn’t have a man’s head scarf or a handful of rupees to tie at each end. He only had some rope he’d found in a shed at the brewery and two sticks he’d been whittling.”

  Rutledge tested the rope between his hands, snapping it taut, but the threads of hemp were worn and gave under the pressure. “It wouldn’t have worked, of course,” he said.

  “Ah, but the other boys weren’t to know that, were they? No one locked doors—and Daniel’s version of Thuggee would have been appropriately bloodcurdling.”

  “Who was he trying to protect? Which boy?” he asked

  “Daniel refused to say. Of course my aunts weren’t blind. According to Aunt Grace, it had to have been the Summers boy. Daniel defended him sometimes. Still, Aunt Felicity believed Daniel was showing off, just to be bloody-minded. Her word.”

  And in return, Thomas had discovered garrote, learned what it was, and then used one years later to kill his protector’s brother. It was a measure of the feelings that drove him that Summers owed nothing to Daniel Pierce, not even a modicum of gratitude, and had used his name at The White Swans apparently without a qualm.

  “Gentle God,” Rutledge said quietly.

  “Indeed,” Mrs. Farrell-Smith agreed.

  Hamish said, “In France Indian soldiers served.”

  Although the British had crushed Thuggee, these men would have known about it—some said it still existed in dark corners of the country—and very likely could have shown Summers what a proper garrote was, if he hadn’t found sufficient information on his own.

  “If you had learned of this report when first you came to Eastfield, you would have suspected Daniel. It was damning,” Mrs. Farrell-Smith was saying. “I think his father must also have feared this would come to light—he must have been worried sick when Anthony was killed, for fear that in revenge I’d betray Daniel. My aunts would eventually have told him about the garrote. Still, he needed to know that one son hadn’t killed the other. And so he had wanted Scotland Yard, less prejudiced than Inspector Norman, to investigate. Daniel was his favorite, and now he has only one son.”

  “But you weren’t pleased that the Yard was brought in. Why did you think I’d uncover this? Why were you afraid of me and not of Inspector Norman?” He set the garrote back where he’d found it.

  She smiled for the first time. “He has no imagination. You do.”

  Would it have made any difference if Mrs. Farrell-Smith had trusted him sooner?

  Impossible to say. Still, Marshall might still be alive. He’d learned, as a policeman, that people held their secrets close, and the common good often failed to have any bearing on that need to protect them.

  “Must this come out, if Summers is arrested?” she asked after a moment.

  “I’m afraid so.” And then he said, “Mrs. Farrell-Smith, where is Daniel?”

  The shadow of an old grief settled over her face. “I wish I knew. He’s loyal to my husband, you see. They were friends at school. He thinks my husband killed himself because he was jealous of me.”

  “Did he have cause to be?”

  She shook her head impatiently. “You don’t understand. Michael didn’t kill himself because Daniel loved me. He killed himself because Daniel didn’t love him.”

  “And you never told the police this?”

  “I didn’t mind suspicion falling on me. It was Daniel I didn’t want to drag into the inquiry. Besides, it would have crushed any hopes I harbored in that direction.”

  “Did Anthony know you loved his brother?”

  “Not in the beginning. When I did tell him, he warned me that Daniel wasn’t the sort to settle down, and he wished me luck. I think Daniel still has the war on his mind, if you want the truth. But I’ve waited six years. I can wait six more if I must. And I’ll be here, in Eastfield, if he ever decides to come home again.”

  She returned the garrote to the envelope and locked it away again. “Don’t let me down,” she said as she came around the desk to see him out. “Find Summers. I don’t want another scandal keeping Daniel away. I don’t want another cloud over our names.”

  At the door, Rutledge said, “If your aunts knew what was going on, why in God’s name didn’t they protect young Summers? Or punish his tormentors? Why did they allow the bullying to continue for so long?”

  She frowned. “They were old-fashioned. They believed that a boy should be able to take care of himself. Sticks and stones and all that. They felt that it was important for him to develop a backbone, stand up to his tormentors. But when one is so young, one doesn’t have the skills to face down a bully and teach him a lesson, does one?” She considered Rutledge for a moment, then added, “In my opinion there was something else as well. Their father— my great-uncle, the Frenchman who founded the school—would have considered Tommy Summers slovenly
and unfit. He’d have taken him in hand and made a man of him. My aunts weren’t capable of that, and they must have felt that Tommy was a rebuke.”

  And so five men had died.

  He left, then, letting himself out, and as he walked back toward the hotel, Hamish said, “Do ye believe her?”

  “I’ll have the answer to that when I catch Summers. For all I know, she hates Daniel Pierce and sees this as a way to punish him for his rejection of her.”

  At the end of the street, he stopped and looked back at the school, feeling as if he were being watched.

  Mrs. Farrell-Smith was standing at her window, as if to be certain he had left the premises.

  He was about to walk on when out of the corner of his eye he saw a shadow at a window above hers.

  He kept going, showing no sign of having noticed.

  The school was closed for a week. Was it Daniel Pierce waiting for Rutledge to leave, or was it Tommy Summers back in Sussex and using the empty building to hide from the police?

  Out of sight of the school, Rutledge stopped and considered how best to extract Mrs. Farrell-Smith without alerting whoever it was at the window above hers. Surely she would remain in her office a few minutes longer. He had a little time.

  Moving quickly, he went down a list of people he could trust. Constable Walker would arouse suspicion, coming on the heels of Rutledge’s visit. Mr. Ottley, from St. Mary’s? Neither seemed to be the best choice. Summers would be on alert.

  Coming toward him was Mrs. Winslow. She was walking with her head down, eyes on the road, but she carried a marketing basket over one arm.

  He thought there was a good chance that Mrs. Farrell-Smith would let her in. But with what excuse? She had no children in the school. No reason to call.

  Just behind her was Tyrell Pierce’s clerk, Starret, hurrying in the direction of the brewery with an envelope in his hand.

  Rutledge touched his hat to Mrs. Winslow and after she had gone on her way, stopped Starret.

  “Sir?” the man asked, looking up at him.

  “I need a favor, Starret. Will you go to the Misses Tate School and hand a message to Mrs. Farrell-Smith? She’s there at the moment. I’d like it to appear that Mr. Pierce has asked to speak to her.”