by Charles Todd
Was that a turning? Yes, and it was wide enough for him to swing in a loop off the road and come back just behind his tormentor. Without signaling, at the last possible second, he whipped the wheel to his right—and then pulled it hard left, praying that he hadn’t overshot the turn. He flew into the street, listening to the scream of braking behind him, fully intending to turn the wheel again, finishing the circle. And then his danger registered.
Half hidden by the mist was a narrow bridge, low stone walls looming on either side. Too narrow for his motorcar. His brother-in-law’s motorcar, he reminded himself in a panic. The bridge was too close to miss. He was headed straight toward it, and there was nothing he could do.
He gripped the brake, pulling hard, sideslipping on the loose grit, bracing himself for the unavoidable shock of collision. Fast as he’d been going, he was going to wreck Tommy’s motorcar and kill himself.
He never knew what had saved him—bald luck, his own skill, or the excellent brake. The motorcar came to a sudden juddering halt that threw him against the steering wheel so hard he thought he’d broken ribs.
Stunned, pinned there and helpless, he turned his head to look for his tormentor. But the other motorcar had been swallowed up in the mist. Even the rear lamp was only the faintest glow that vanished even as he watched.
He sat there, his hands shaking on the wheel, his chest feeling as if breathing were impossible.
And then he got out, walking to the bonnet to look.
He didn’t think there was a coat of paint’s space between the wing and the stone abutment.
It took him a good ten minutes to collect himself again. The certainty that he was going to die had rattled him—and then cleared his head as it had done in battle. Now it was lost in such a surge of anger that he was shaking with it. Anger that someone had brought back what he had been most ashamed of in France, that courage had not come naturally to him, as it had seemed to do for many other men. Finally an overwhelming relief that he and his brother-in-law’s motorcar were safe.
He left the motorcar there, crossed the narrow bridge on foot, and started up the rutted lane that climbed to the village above. The mists were heavy here, and he had to watch where he was walking. A twisted ankle wouldn’t do—and he had no way of knowing how the land dropped off to either side. At length he found himself passing a house to his right as the lane narrowed into a street with buildings on either side. A church—shops—a turning that led even higher—more shops and houses—and then he was abruptly stopped by a low wall. The mist roiling up from below enveloped him, cool and damp. But for the wall, he’d have gone straight over before he knew the precipice was there.
He swallowed hard.
Surely the damned village had a bar of some sort? He badly needed a drink, and his flask was in the motorcar God knew how far away.
Brothers turned back the way he’d come. And then someone stepped out of a door on his left, and he saw what he wanted—a few tables, chairs, and a wall of bottles. He nodded to the man who had just left, went through the open door, and realized that he wasn’t sure what language these people spoke, whether his French was sufficient.
“Cognac,” he said, and the proprietor, a heavyset man with a beard, answered.
Brothers shook his head, and the man pointed to several bottles. He recognized the label on the second one in line, and nodded.
He had two stiff drinks before paying the man and walking back to the motorcar.
Dutch courage be damned. He was going to have to drive on to Nice, like it or not, and the mists were no better, the road ahead no straighter.
He was startled to see that he’d left the motor running. Getting behind the wheel, he sat there for a full minute, letting the brandy warm him. And then he reached for the brake, let in the clutch, and drove on.
It was a test of endurance, the next few hours. At times he had to feel his way around the bends, judging them as best he could. And always in the back of his mind was the worry that the other motorcar had pulled over somewhere to wait for him.
When he finally came out on the straight stretch of road that ran on toward the city of Nice, he barely noticed the bright lights of the villas and hotels ahead of him. He couldn’t have said just when he’d run out of the mist. Two miles back? Three? Almost as if it had done its worst, failed, and finally had given up without any warning.
He found the Hôtel Negresco without difficulty. It stood on a corner overlooking the Boulevard des Anglais. It had been a French hospital during the war and was only just recovering. A room was waiting for him. He asked the man at the desk to see to his motorcar, walked on to the lift, and went up. He didn’t want to speak to anyone else, no half-drunken postmortems of the drive, no celebration of victory. What he needed was sleep. Being first to reach Nice no longer seemed to matter.
The next evening, Brothers walked into the hotel bar, prepared for the welcome and a riotous night.
What he found were three other drivers sitting around a table, their faces gloomy, their shoulders slumped, as if they’d been in the same chairs for hours.
Brothers crossed to their table without speaking, and they looked up, at first startled and then delighted to see him. Slapping him on the back, calling for another glass. But it was a strained welcome.
“What? What’s the matter?” he asked as champagne was poured into his tall, elegant glass. A far cry from the makeshift cups so long ago on the Somme . . .
“We’d just about given you up,” he was told. “Haven’t you heard? There was a terrible crash up in the hill country last evening. One of the worst stretches. There was fog, you see, and he missed the curve. Someone reported it at first light, and they went up after him. The rescuers. Took hours to reach the site. Motorcar a shambles, of course. He’s alive. That’s all we know. They won’t tell us any more than that.”
Brothers barely heard the rest of it. He wanted to ask if there had been another vehicle involved, but something in their faces held him back.
And he wasn’t certain that he wanted to know. More to the point, he couldn’t bear to relive what had happened to him. Not this soon. What’s more, these men were strangers, really. Nice enough and all that, but he never expected to see any of them again. Better to leave it. He took the chair pushed out for him, downed his champagne, and listened to the jumbled account they had been given of what had happened.
And wondered if he’d been meant to go over the edge as well.
But who the hell could have done such a thing? And in the name of God, why?
He wanted to search their faces, he wanted to know if winning had mattered so much to any of these three men that they would kill to be first. Hard to believe.
Still, just how well did he know any of them?
It wasn’t until much later that another thought came to him.
What if the motorcar that went over the edge had been the one trying to send him into the ravine?
Chapter Two
East Sussex, November 1920
There was a heavy rain that evening, wind-driven into vast curtains. The roads leading to the cliffs were passable—just—if they were negotiated with care, although traction could be nasty where the mud was thick. When it mixed with chalk and whatever rubble had washed down in the storm, it was slick and unpredictable.
Not a night fit for man or beast. Even the sheep had huddled in the lee of the hedgerows, wet and miserable. The long, steep, winding road down into the Gap was particularly treacherous, but it was seldom used, and the locals knew to avoid it in bad weather.
It was nearly midday when a farmer by the name of James, who had a holding near East Dedham, went out to the cliff meadows to see how the sheep had fared. It had rained heavily well into late morning, dark clouds coming in from the east and sweeping on toward Dover. He had stood by the window watching the downpour, anxious to be on his way. By ten, the wind shifted and the rain settled into a cold drizzle that swept over the chalk headlands from the sea. Half an hour later, he set o
ut, worried about the sheep.
Two hours later, James walked into Burling Gap, the closest village, to seek out Constable Neville.
“From the look of it,” James said, describing what he’d found, “he didn’t know the road, and like as not, blinded by the rain, he lost his way. What happened next I can’t say, and there’s no way of telling whether he was heading toward Burling Gap or away. The motorcar rolled, you’ll need horses and ropes to right it. He was thrown clear. I saw him there just beyond the bonnet. Dead, of course. There’s no question.”
“Who is he?” Neville asked, dreading to hear it was one of his neighbors.
“Damned if I know. I didn’t recognize him, and there’s a good deal of blood about. You’ll have to bring him in and see for yourself.”
There was no doctor in Burling Gap. The nearest surgery was in East Dedham, which had expanded after the war, while Burling Gap had been fighting the encroaching sea. High as they were here, the sea cliffs were still low enough to give some access to the narrow strand below, and men of the Gap had made their living from the sea and the shipwrecks along this part of the coast for generations.
Neville found a lad to take a message to Dr. Hanby, and after that collected half a dozen men and four horses. He led them to the long sloping road that came down into the Gap, and even before he reached the motorcar, he could see it, on its side like some wounded beast. It wasn’t until he was some twenty yards from the motorcar that he could see the body lying facedown in the grass, half hidden by the bulk of the vehicle. The man’s hat, sodden with rain, lay just beyond, almost within reach of his hand.
“That’s Captain Standish’s motorcar,” Harry Bainbridge said suddenly.
Neville turned to him. “Are you certain of that?”
“Certain enough.”
It had been a long climb up the headland, but they were used to it. Reaching the scene, they went in silence to stand near the body. Neville kept them back as he stepped forward and leaned over for a closer look.
“Dead,” he confirmed, and behind him there was a shifting of feet as the others accepted the news. Neville knelt then in the wet, bruised grass to study the body.
The motorcar hadn’t rolled over it. He could see that much. A man, wearing a heavy coat, his hair still wet with rain and dew. No indication that he’d been badly injured and had tried to crawl to the shelter of the vehicle. A quick death, then. That, Neville told himself, was one mercy. He wouldn’t have wished to lie out here the rest of the night, life dwindling, waiting for help that never came.
Reaching out, he gently turned the body over so that he could see the face. Behind him there was a sharp indrawing of breath.
The onlookers had glimpsed the clerical collar even before the dead man’s face came into view.
“It’s not Captain Standish,” James said, and watched as Neville brushed the wet hair out of the dead man’s face. “It’s Rector,” he added then, in a stunned voice. “But what’s he doing here in Captain Standish’s motorcar?”
There was a deep gash at the hairline, blood caked across the pale, lifeless face, but Neville knew that James was right. “It’s the Rector,” he confirmed. “Mr. Wright.”
Wright had served at St. Simon’s in East Dedham for some years, except for the four years of the war, when he’d been chaplain to one of the Sussex regiments.
“We can’t leave him here,” someone was saying, and walked back to the horses to fetch the stretcher while Neville went through Wright’s pockets in an effort to confirm his identity. One of his more unpleasant duties, he thought as he did it. Clearing his throat as he opened the dead man’s purse, he said, “There’s money here. And his identification.” He put them away again before getting to his feet and brushing at his wet knees.
Turning to look at the motorcar, he made a note of the crushed wing, the broken windscreen, and the smear of dark green on the dark red boot. The driver’s door was standing wide and at an awkward angle. Neville thought it was likely that as Wright was thrown out of the vehicle, the door swung back and caught him in the head.
He was nearly sure that Wright had been alone in the motorcar—there was no sign of a passenger, and no blood in the interior to indicate that someone else had been injured. As any passenger surely would have been as the motorcar rolled and he was tossed about inside. And if he had survived unhurt, undoubtedly he’d have come for help. It wouldn’t have been the farmer, James, who discovered the wreckage.
Satisfied, Neville nodded to the men with the ropes and horses, and they moved forward to begin the task of righting the vehicle. Harry Bainbridge was already helping another man to lift the Rector’s body onto the stretcher. He was lashed there with the extra lengths of rope, and Bainbridge turned just as the motorcar jerked and swayed and then crashed back on its wheels again, raising a shout from the men guiding the horses.
Neville went to look it over once it had stopped rocking, jotting information into his notebook as he studied the vehicle. He knew very little about motorcars, but he could see the damage done and judged it to be fresh. But then Captain Standish would be able to confirm that.
“What shall we do about it?” one of the men with the horses asked. “Not like it’s flotsam on the beach.”
This raised a chuckle from another man, and the first turned to glare at him.
But Neville was walking up the road some distance, casting about for any reason why the driver had lost control.
What he found instead was a second set of tracks, at one point overlapping those of Standish’s vehicle.
He followed the second tire marks for a distance, realizing that both were often on the grass, not the packed chalk and earth surface of the road. And he didn’t like what he saw.
Keeping his thoughts to himself, he walked back toward the now-upright motorcar.
“Anything?” Harry Bainbridge asked, meeting him partway.
Neville shook his head. “I wonder if he fell asleep at the wheel.”
Bainbridge shook his head. “In that storm? Not very likely.”
“Well.” Neville nodded to the men who were to carry the stretcher. “All right, then, to Dr. Hanby with him.”
James said, “What shall we do with the motorcar?”
“Take it to Trotter’s garage. If anyone can find out what went wrong, he’s our man.”
“I don’t think it will run,” one of the men with the horses said. “Pull it, then?”
“Just be careful of the horses on the hill.”
“Not to worry,” the other man said.
They set off, the stretcher bearers in front, Neville bringing up the rear.
James fell back to walk beside him. “Not the best of starts to the day.”
“No.”
“Will you be handing over the inquiry to Constable Brewster?”
Neville stopped, forcing James to halt as well. “The body was found in my patch. I reckon that means I’m in charge.”
“But Wright’s from East Dedham,” James said.
“Not that it matters,” Neville replied, walking on. “I’m sending a message to the Chief Constable, asking him to bring in Scotland Yard.”
“Is that really needful?” James asked, surprised.
Neville glanced at him. “Do you think Constable Brewster would be any happier than I am, dealing with Captain Standish and the Rector’s Bishop?” Still seeing uncertainty on the farmer’s face, he added, “And we don’t know what it was that made Rector borrow the Captain’s motorcar.”
“Surely he had a sound reason?”
“I’m not eager to pry into the Captain’s affairs. Or the Rector’s. I’d rather hand it on than take it on.”
James shook his head. “To tell the truth, I hadn’t given it any thought.”
“No, I expect you hadn’t,” Neville said, “but I had. It’s my duty.”
James considered him for a moment. “Still. Scotland Yard.”
“Nothing wrong with Scotland Yard,” Neville answered blandly.
“By now they must be accustomed to being caught in the middle. You’ll be required to give evidence at the inquest. I’ll have to do the same.” He nodded toward the men ahead of them, struggling to keep the motorcar on the road. “And so will they.”
James fell silent, considering that prospect. “You must do as you think best,” he said finally, and with a nod walked on to join the stretcher bearers and their sad burden.
Neville watched him go, satisfied. He had no great belief in Constable Brewster’s ability to do more than keep the peace in East Dedham. Better the Yard, indeed. And he himself had seen enough to know that there was more to the Rector’s death than a motorcar losing control in a night of wind and rain.
Walking on to the doctor’s surgery, watching the stretcher make its way toward East Dedham, he could see the rainwater dripping out of Wright’s clothing and through the canvas.
Poor soul. It was not a suitable end for a man of the cloth. But then Wright had been much more than that. And God willing, Scotland Yard would send someone capable of dealing with what very well might be murder.
Dr. Hanby confirmed that the Rector’s neck had been snapped, most likely by the blow from the vehicle’s door as Wright had been thrown from the rolling motorcar. “It was quick,” he said, looking up at Neville. “He wouldn’t have suffered.”
“I’m relieved to hear it. He lay out there all night.”
“I’ll have a look at the rest of him, cursory of course, but necessary. It will have to wait until later in the day. But I expect no surprises.”
“Nor I,” Neville responded.
Hanby gestured to the bruised face. “You’re satisfied with the identification? Or do you want his housekeeper to be sent for?”
“I shouldn’t worry Mrs. Saunders with that. It’s Mr. Wright, no doubt about it. And those are his belongings.” He indicated the ring of keys and the dead man’s wallet. “Trotter has the motorcar for the time being. Do you know of any kin?”
“He never spoke of any family,” Hanby said, covering the body with a clean sheet. “A private man, the Rector. But I expect Mrs. Saunders will know who to send for.”
