by Charles Todd
Around the whole was a folded newspaper, and Sister James gently pulled it out with a cry of delight. Just then the beds shook once more, and we both reached for the jug of honey, bumping heads as we caught it right on the brink of going over.
“Blast them!” she said, and then began to unfold the pages. It was a London newspaper, and in it was the engagement announcement of her middle sister. She read it hungrily, having missed the excitement of the proposal. Sitting back, she said, “Oh, how I wish I could be there for the wedding!”
We munched on stale biscuits that we’d found tucked in the scarf, and speculated on the chances of the marriage taking place in early autumn as planned.
I coughed as the next shell landed, catching me with a mouthful of biscuit crumbs. “If I were her,” I said, clearing my throat, “I’d want to be married as soon as may be. Still, a Christmas wedding would be nice.”
“If Henry can manage leave . . .”
We fell silent. Henry had proposed on his last leave. There might not be another.
Sister James said, “Well. We can hope.” She took the engagement notice out of the newspaper and folded it carefully, stowing it in her trunk. I picked up the rest of the pages to search for the obituaries.
Instead I found myself staring at a pen-and-ink drawing of a woman’s face. Beneath it was the caption: Police Ask for Witnesses— Evanson Murder Still Unsolved.
Startled—for I recognized the face—I read on.
The murder of Mrs. Marjorie Evanson, wife of Lieutenant Meriwether Evanson, presently in hospital in Hampshire, remains a mystery. Police are asking any witnesses who may have seen her to step forward. Mrs. Evanson left her residence shortly after noon on 15 May and was never seen alive again. Tracing her movements that fateful day has proved difficult, and Scotland Yard has now turned to the public for assistance in learning where she might have gone and whom she may have seen . . .
I put the newspaper down. Sister James, shoving her trunk back under her bed, said, “What is it? You look as if someone has walked over your grave.”
It was just an expression, one I’d heard many times, but I said without thinking, “Not mine—but someone I may have seen. Look, read this.”
Sister James took the newspaper from me and scanned the column. “I don’t know her. Do you?”
“Her husband was among that group of wounded I escorted to Hampshire. The badly burned pilot. Remember? He kept his wife’s photograph by him—and that’s his wife. I can’t bear to think how he must have felt when he was told.”
“But, Bess, murdered? That’s awful.”
“Yes, but what’s more important is that I saw her late that very afternoon. She was at the railway station, seeing off an officer in a Wiltshire regiment. She was crying. Terribly upset. I’m afraid I stood there staring. I was so surprised to recognize her.” I winced as the next shell landed. They seemed to be coming closer together now.
“Who was the man with her?”
“I’ve no idea.” I shook my head, trying to come to terms with the fact that she’d been murdered that very same day. “That poor man—her husband—was counting the hours until he saw her again. It was what kept him fighting to live. I wonder who had to break the news to him. I can’t imagine having to do it.”
“Bess, if you saw her that day, you must tell the Yard.”
“But I don’t know who she was with, or where she went after she left the station. Only that she was there for a few minutes, seeing someone off, and that’s not terribly useful. It’s been a week since this request came out in the newspaper—surely someone else has come forward. A waiter in a restaurant, a cabbie, a friend who ran into her somewhere.” But what if they were saying the same thing: someone else will do it.
“If he’s at the Front, this Wiltshire officer hasn’t spoken to the police,” she pointed out. “And just now, what Lieutenant Evanson probably wants more than anything else is for the police to find her killer.”
“Does it say there how she died? I didn’t read the rest of the article.”
She went back to the newspaper, scanning down the column of close print. “Here it is. She was stabbed and then thrown in the river. They say that she was still alive when she went into the water, but was most likely unconscious.”
“How awful.” I tried to bring up the image of the woman I’d seen in London, her face streaked with tears. Yes, it was the same person.
I’d have no problem swearing to that. And the man? Could I remember him as clearly? Dark hair, blue eyes, a rather weak chin . . .
More to the point, would I know him again?
“What if this officer hasn’t seen the newspapers? Or been told yet that she’s dead? If the police find him, it’s possible he could tell them where she was going after she left the station. There’s no way of knowing where that might lead,” Martha James persisted.
“Yes,” I said slowly. “You’re right. I really should report what I saw, and let the Yard decide whether it’s helpful information or not.”
“They don’t mention what time she died or when her body was found. More’s the pity,” she added, finishing the article. “You may have been the last person to see her alive, except for her killer. Now there’s an unsettling thought. If he was looking for a likely victim, he might have followed you home instead. You were a woman alone too.”
“You have a ghoulish imagination,” I told her. “I’ll write the letter now.”
My voice suddenly seemed overloud.
We looked at each other. Silence had fallen, the earth was still. I felt almost dizzy with relief, my ears still ringing, my nerves still jangled, my teeth on edge.
“Oh, dear,” Sister James said. “I have a feeling they’ll be sending for us soon.”
“Very likely. It shouldn’t take long to put down what I saw. Could you make us a cup of tea meanwhile?”
But it proved unexpectedly difficult to compose that letter. I kept seeing Lieutenant Evanson’s eyes peering through his heavy bandages, tenaciously holding on to hope even as time was running out for hope, trusting to his wife’s love for him to help him survive and unaware that she would be dead before morning. And so I weighed each word, to make certain that I reported events accurately, uncolored by my own imagination.
After three tries, I was finally satisfied. I was just on the point of sealing the envelope when we could hear the first of the ambulances rumbling toward the wards, bringing in new casualties. I hastily finished my tea, put on a fresh uniform, and by the time Sister James and I were ready, there was a knock on the door and an orderly’s voice summoning us to duty.
A Lonely Death Excerpt
A Lonely Death
CHARLES TODD
Chapter One
Northern France, Early June 1920
The sod had grown over the graves, turning the torn earth a soft green, and the rows of white crosses gleamed brightly in the morning sun. Except for the fact that a fallen soldier lay beneath each wooden marker, it was pretty there under the blue bowl of the French sky, peaceful finally after four tumultuous years of war. Even the birds had come back, picking at the grass for seeds, insects, and worms.
The man watched them, those birds, and was reminded of a line from Hamlet, that somehow had caught a schoolboy’s imagination and then lingered in a corner of his adult mind—that a worm may feed on a king. Had these fed on lesser dead?
Many had been hastily buried where they fell, others in mass graves. Sorting the dead for proper burial had been gruesome at best. Many had never been identified. Walking down the rows now, looking at names, remembering burial details, broken bodies, bits of them, endless lines of them, he wondered if he was changed by them.
No, on the whole, he thought not. The war had been a part of the fabric of his life, and he had endured it, survived it, and was still steadfast in his purpose.
He stopped, his gaze sweeping the crosses. It was the living who concerned him now. A few had escaped him, but there were still eight left. And
he was ready.
Were they?
Not that the state of their souls troubled him overmuch.
He turned his back on the cemetery, striding toward the Paris taxi that had brought him out here. And as he did, the slanting June sun warmed his shoulders.
Listening to the sound of his footfalls, he realized that he hadn’t bargained for the silence here. He wondered if those lying beneath the crosses savored it after the noise of battle. Or was it unnerving?
There was a train to Calais tonight. Another from Dover to London. But he was in no hurry.
A good dinner first, if he could find one, a bottle of wine, and then a sound night’s sleep.
As the taxi turned and drove back the way it had come, he leaned his head against the cracked leather of the seat and closed his eyes.
Chapter Two
London, July 1920
Chief Inspector Cummins walked into Scotland Yard at half past nine, went directly to his office, and set about finishing packing his books. It was his last day, and he wanted no fanfare. An injury sustained in the line of duty had put an end to his career.
“And not a day too soon,” he said to Inspector Ian Rutledge who had stepped in to wish him well. “I should have left at the end of the war. But I found one excuse after another to stay on. This case pending, that case passing through the courts. And here I still am, well past my time.” He looked up, another stack of books in his hand. “No regrets.”
“I feel responsible—” Rutledge began, but Cummins cut him short.
“Nonsense. I knew what I was doing. I hadn’t reckoned on the toll the years had taken, that’s all. I wasn’t quite fast enough. At fifty-five, one still believes one is thirty until he looks in his mirror as he shaves.”
“Will you be content in Scotland, after the bustle of London?”
“My God, yes. And if I’m not, my wife will tell me that I am.” Cummins reached for the roll of tape to seal that box and then turned to fill another. “When do you intend to marry? Don’t leave it too long. I’ll be a grandfather, next month.”
Rutledge laughed, as he was meant to do. “You’ve left behind a splendid record. We’ll be living up to it for decades to come.”
Cummins set the books down on a corner of his cluttered desk and looked around the office. The shelves were nearly empty, the desk as well, and the photographs had been removed from the walls. He took a deep breath and said pensively, “Yes, well. I enjoyed the hunt, you see. More than I should have done. All the same, there was one case I never solved. I was a little superstitious about it, if you want the truth. I kept the folder on my desk for years, telling myself I’d get to the bottom of it, sooner or later. I even dreamed about it sometimes, when I was tired. What bothered me most was not knowing whether the dead man was a sacrifice or a victim. And if his murderer had ever killed again.”
“A sacrifice?” It was an odd choice of words for a man like Cummins.
Cummins glanced sheepishly at Rutledge. “It was what struck me as soon as I saw the man. That he was left there for a purpose. A warning, if you will. Or a sacrifice of some sort. Not religious, I don’t mean that kind of thing . . .” He broke off, then shrugged, as if to make light of what he’d said. “It was the setting. It made me fanciful, I dare say.”
“When was this?”
“Long before your time. It was Midsummer’s Eve, 1905.” Cummins turned away and walked to the window, where sunlight had just broken through the morning clouds and was turning the wet pavements from a dull gray to bright pewter. “Some fifteen people had come to Stonehenge dressed as Druids. Unbleached muslin, handmade sandals, staffs of peeled oak boughs. Mind you, I doubt they knew much about ancient druidism, but they’d come to watch the sun rise and chant nonsense, and feel something—God knows what. Anyway, they walked to the stones, sang and marched, drank a little homemade mead—honey laced with rum, we were told later—and waited for sunrise.”
Cummins paused, staring not at the view outside his window but back into a past he reluctantly remembered, and Rutledge thought, He’s not going to finish it. It cuts too deep. Still, he waited quietly, ignoring the dull rumble of Hamish’s voice in the back of his mind.
Finally Cummins went on, as if compelled. “They were misguided, playing at something they didn’t understand. But harmless enough, I suppose. At length the sun rose. One of the women told me later that it was magnificent. Her word. She said the dark sky turned to opal and rose, then purest gold. As they watched, the rim of the sun appeared on the eastern horizon. She said that what followed was unbelievable—a shaft of light came spilling across the dark earth and touched her face. She said she could feel it. Just as the schoolmaster had told them. He was the one who talked them into this silliness. But even he was taken by surprise.”
Losing his train of thought, Cummins turned and said, “Where was I? Oh, yes. This young woman—her name was Sarah Harmon— was still staring at what she called the stone of sacrifice. That’s what the schoolmaster had told them it was called. It stands along the eastern avenue between the main section of Stonehenge and the horizon. Do you know it?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Hmm. She was trying to recapture a little of the emotion she’d felt when the sun struck her face, and then she noticed something odd about that stone. It was light enough, by then, you see. When she began screaming, everyone turned toward her, startled. She point to the stone. They could just make out something there and rushed down the avenue to find a man strapped to it. He was dead. Even they could see that, and when they held up their lanterns for a better view, they realized he’d been stabbed.” Cummins cleared his throat. “He was strapped to the dark side. Not toward the light.”
“Hadn’t they seen anything? Anyone?”
“Apparently not. I questioned them for hours. The body could have been out there before ever they arrived. In the dark, they wouldn’t have noticed.”
“They didn’t know the victim?”
“They swore they didn’t.”
“Not even this schoolmaster, who’d lured them out there? It would have been a perfect cover for murder.”
“Terrence Nolan? He was as frightened as the rest of them. And in the end, I believed them. I expect the murderer, whoever he was, had counted on no one finding the victim for days. As for the dead man, he was young—thirty to thirty-five at a guess—and he was wearing only a scrap of cloth, like a loincloth—there was no clothing at all, no marks on the body, nothing through which we could identify him. Even the bit of cloth was a cheap cotton that could be bought anywhere. It took us six weeks to discover his name.”
“Who was he?” Rutledge asked, intrigued.
“One Harvey Wheeler. He came from Orkney. A ne’er-do-well, according to the authorities there. His father had gone to Kirkwall to run the post, and Harvey grew up rather wild and unruly, a truant from school, roaming the island at will and never sorry for his escapades. His parents gave up trying to control him, apparently, and he went missing in 1902 after a brush with the police. It was thought he’d come south into Scotland. At any rate, he reappeared in Edinburgh in late 1903, and then left a step ahead of the police, who were after him for attempting to defraud a woman he’d met there. That was the last anyone had heard of him until he was found dead on Salisbury Plain. Why anyone would wish to kill him is still a mystery. It must have had to do with the missing two years of his life, although it always struck me as odd that someone like Harvey Wheeler should end that way. As murders go, it didn’t fit.”
“Were you certain of the identification?”
“As certain as may be. When Edinburgh took an interest in the description we’d passed around, we sent along a photograph. That was when they recommended we contact Orkney. They in turn felt it was very likely that our corpse was this young man. His father was dead by that time, and his mother too ill to be shown the photograph. But the Kirkwall police had no doubts. And so he was buried in a churchyard on the outskirts of Winchester. No one saw any poin
t in sending the body north. That was the end of it. His murderer was never found.” Cummins paused, looking toward the window, as if it held the answer, before bringing his gaze back to Rutledge. “It was an odd inquiry from start to finish. I never felt comfortable with it. I’d have liked to go to Kirkwall myself, but the Orkney Islands are at the northern tip of Scotland, and the Yard felt it was money wasted to send me there. All the same, I’d have liked to know more about Harvey Wheeler. What brought him into England, for one thing, and where he might have lived on this side of the border.”
“The murder weapon never turned up?”
“We searched the area, every inch of it. We came to the conclusion that the murderer carried it off with him. It could be anywhere— thrown from a bridge, buried in a dustbin, returned to wherever it had come from. There would be no way to know, would there, that it had anything to do with a crime? What was odd was the coroner found a tiny flake of flint in the wound. The feeling was it was on his clothing and driven in by the force of the blow. That led us to believe two facts: that he was dressed when he was killed, although his clothing was never found, and that he must have come from a part of England where flint was readily available. And that covered a good bit of ground.”
“Was he killed there at Stonehenge?”
“Very likely not. There was no sign of a struggle. Unless of course Wheeler was drugged and carried there. Still, the coroner found no evidence of his being either drugged or knocked unconscious prior to his death. And there wasn’t enough blood at the site.” Cummins hesitated. “It was his face, I think, that disturbed me as much as the rest of it. A handsome enough man, fit and well made, more a gentleman than Wheeler appeared to be. Or perhaps that was his charm, and why he nearly succeeded in defrauding that widow. How many more women were there that we never heard of?”
