The Red Door

Chapter 18

Rutledge finished his report and handed it to a constable to be typed for Chief Superintendent Bowles.

And still restless, he considered going to Frances’s house and spending the remainder of the afternoon with his godfather. Then he recalled that today was the grand excursion to Hampton Court by boat.

He stopped to speak to Chief Inspector Cummins, who had just returned from Paris, where he’d been persuading the French to allow him to bring a witness back to England to testify in regard to a killing in Surrey.

Cummins greeted him, then said, “Go away for four days and my desk grows papers like the French grow grapes. What sort of mood is his lordship in?”

Rutledge smiled. “Mercurial.”

“Damn. The French are being pigheaded. He’s not going to like that.”

Rutledge hesitated, and then in spite of himself asked, “Has the Front changed much?”

He had meant the France of the war years. The blackened ruin of a countryside. Cummins had not pretended to misunderstand him.

“Not very. It takes trees a while to grow back, although there’s more grass now. I found myself feeling depressed and turned around. But the French farmers are a hardy lot. They’ll not let good land go to waste for very long.”

“Blood-soaked land . . .”

Rutledge shivered at Hamish’s words.

They talked for several minutes, then Rutledge returned to his office.

A quarter of an hour later, Constable Ellis was at his door, saying quickly, “You’re wanted, sir. Chief Superintendent.”

Hamish said, “ ’Ware!” as Rutledge crossed the threshold, and he guessed that Cummins had been there before him with his own bad news. And Bowles had not taken it well.

He was muttering about the French under his breath, then he looked up and said, “What the hell kept you?” But before Rutledge could frame an answer, Bowles went on testily, “I thought we were finished with these Tellers.”

“Sir?”

The Chief Superintendent barked, “Now we have a request from a village in Lancashire to look into the death of a Mrs. Peter Teller. Seems she was murdered.”

It required a moment for Rutledge to digest the news.

“Sir?” he repeated. “I just saw the Captain’s wife. Yesterday. Surely there’s some mistake?”

“Are you deaf, or is your mind wandering? I’ve just told you, Peter Teller’s wife. Who said anything about Captain Teller? She’s just been found dead by the constable in Hobson. Unusual name, all the same. Might be a relation, though it’s unlikely. Lancashire?” He shook his head. In Bowles’s view, the farther from London, the more benighted the place. “You’ll have to deal with it, I can’t spare anyone else.” He closed the file and looked Rutledge in the face. “I’d counted on you to handle Walter Teller’s disappearance. It would have pleased a number of people to see us successful in that quarter. Instead he came back under his own power. You reported that he slept in a church. Why didn’t someone think to have a constable concealed there? Failure on your part, you know. See that we’re not embarrassed a second time. Do I make myself clear?”

“I understand,” Rutledge replied as Bowles searched his cluttered desk for his pen. And he did understand. Political repercussions were always uppermost in Bowles’s mind. Using them or avoiding them, he had become quite adept at sensing the way the wind would blow. But to clear the record, Rutledge added, “Teller slept in different churches. Not just one. That’s to say, if he was telling the truth. There are dozens of churches in London.”

“He’s a cleric, is he not? Someone should have taken that into account.” He found his pen and uncapped it. “You’re to leave for Hobson straightaway.” He made a final note on the file and passed it to Rutledge.

Rutledge crossed to the door. Bowles said, “And, Rutledge . . .”

He turned.

“I shouldn’t think the family would like seeing this bruited in the newspapers. For all we know, this Teller could be on the wrong side of the blanket. Might explain Hobson, if you take my meaning. The family has had a very trying time of it already.”

As Rutledge walked back to his office to set his desk in order, Hamish said, “Ye willna’ be here to take yon godfather to the station.”

“I’ll leave a note.”

Sergeant Gibson, standing in the doorway, asked, “Sir?”

Rutledge had answered the voice in his head aloud, without thinking. He turned to face Gibson and forced a smile. “A commentary on what’s ahead,” he answered lightly. “Do you know anything about the police in this village of Hobson?”

“The constable—Satterthwaite is his name—gives the impression he’s a sound man, sir. He’ll steer you right.”

“Let us hope. All right, anything else I should know?”

“No witnesses. No sign of robbery. No physical assault. Nothing to go on but the woman’s body found in the front passage of her house.”

“What did the husband have to say about it?”

“It appears he’s dead, sir.”

“Indeed?”

“So the constable informed me, sir. Didn’t come home from the war.”

“I don’t remember Hobson. Is it hard to find?”

“Satterthwaite says, look for the turning after the crossroads. It’s not very well marked from this direction, but it’s off the road to Thielwald.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

Rutledge stopped at his sister’s house and left a note for her explaining his absence, and another of farewell to his godfather. He would have liked to see Trevor and the boy, to say good-bye and wish them a safe journey, but they weren’t planning to return until late that evening, hoping to dine near Hampton Court. And he had a long drive ahead with no time to lose.

Half an hour later he was on the road north, facing little traffic, with Hamish unsettled in the seat just behind him, the voice close enough that sometimes over the soft purr of the motor, he could almost swear he heard Hamish breathing. He was always careful not to look in the rear seat, and he kept the small mirror turned in such a way that he couldn’t see any reflection but his own. He’d made a bargain with himself four years before when he realized that he couldn’t shut the voice out of his head: the day he saw Hamish MacLeod would be the day he sent both of them to the grave.

Even when he stopped for a late dinner this side of Derby, the voice followed him, a counterpoint to his own thoughts.

He had traveled this road before, coming down from Westmorland, although instead of warm breezes sweeping through the motorcar there had been a harsh wind off the winter snow, the aftermath of a blizzard that had shut down roads and cut off families from one another but not from a murderer.

And then the turning he was after appeared around a bend in the road, and he was heading in a different direction, the shadows in his mind receding with distance.

After one last turn, he found crossroads and the fingerboard pointing toward Thielwald. Some three miles beyond that, he saw the side road that bore to the left toward Hobson. He followed that through grassy pastures and a thin stand of trees, before cresting a slight hill and coming down to the first of Hobson’s houses, sturdy and uncompromisingly independent, like the people who lived in them. A milking barn in the distance to his left caught the last long rays of sunlight, and ahead of him, just leaving the muddy lane that led to it, a line of cows made their way down the High Street, heading for their night’s grazing on the other side of the village, their udders flaccid after milking. The bell on the leather strap around the neck of their leader clanked rhythmically as she swayed from side to side, paying no attention to the motorcar in her wake.

Rutledge could see the police station just beyond the herd and waited patiently for the last of the cows to pass. Constable Satterthwaite had just come out the door and was standing there on the point of filling his pipe.

He was a heavyset man of middle years, with an air of knowing his patch well. As Rutledge pulled up, he greeted him. “Inspector Rutledge? You’ve made good time, sir. The light’s still good. Would you like to go on out to the Teller house, or wait until morning?”

Rutledge considered the sky. “Now is best. I’ll drive.”

Constable Satterthwaite shoved his pipe back into his pocket and got in, giving directions to the scene of the crime. Then he settled back and said, “I’m that happy to see you, sir. This is a puzzle I can’t fathom. Florence Teller is the last person I’d have expected to find murdered. We’re a quiet village, not a place where there’s been much in the way of violence over the years. We know one another fairly well, and for the most part, that’s a good thing. If someone is in need, we try to help. No one needs to go stealing from his neighbor.”

“Murder isn’t always to do with need,” Rutledge told him. “There’s passion and greed and anger and jealousy—and sometimes just sheer cruelty.”

“I understand, sir. But I don’t know how any of those things might touch Florence Teller. Why someone would come to her door, and then strike her down and leave her for dead where she fell is beyond me. The doctor says it would have done no good if she’d got help straightaway. The damage was done. But how was her killer to know that? She might have lain there suffering for hours. And no one to help her. That was a cruelty.”

“She lived alone?”

“Yes, sir. The aunt who brought her up when she lost her parents died about fifteen years ago. Maybe more. And her son died some twelve years back. Then her husband didn’t come home from France. That took the heart out of her, though I never heard her complain. And she more or less kept to herself afterward. Gardening was always her joy, you might say, and even that couldn’t make a difference.”

Rutledge glanced his way. “You seem to know her well.”

“I know all my people well,” Satterthwaite said with dignity. “But yes, I kept an eye on her. To be sure she didn’t fall ill or lack for anything.”

He could hear the pain in the other man’s voice as he tried to keep his feelings in check. Not love, precisely, but a protective fondness all the same.

“She would do anything for anyone,” Satterthwaite went on, when Rutledge made no comment. “She stayed up three nights with the Burtons’ little girl when she had typhoid, and the mother was too ill to nurse her. All of us knew what sort of person she was. So where was the need to kill her?”

“What was her maiden name?”

“Marshall. Her parents lived in Cheshire. The father was originally from Cheshire as I recall.”

The village had straggled along the High Street and then, as if tired of trying to grow any larger, it simply stopped. Beyond Hobson, the land spread out in a carpet of early summer green, rising a little to show where plowed fields and pastures intersected, and flocks of shorn sheep cropped the grass.

Save for the sheep and a man on a bicycle passing them, there was no other sign of life. Yet the emptiness was friendly, not like the great haunted barren sweeps of the Highlands. Rutledge could hear Hamish making the comparison in his mind.

“Where is Mrs. Teller’s body?”

“Over to the doctor’s surgery in Thielwald. It was a single blow, he says, delivered with some force from behind. Looking at her face, you’d never guess she’d been killed. I was that surprised to see a peaceful expression, as if she had been put out of her pain, like. That’s an odd thing to say, but it was my feeling.”

“Yes, I understand.”

They made two more turnings and came up a slight rise to meet a hedge that surrounded the front of a two-story white house. The land continued to rise about fifty yards behind it but sloped away from the road at the front, giving a long view across a high stand of grass down toward what to Rutledge appeared to be a distant line of the bay.

“That’s the cottage,” Constable Satterthwaite told Rutledge. “You can see how isolated it is, from the point of view of finding any witnesses. There’s a farm just down this road a bit, but the owner was trying to save a sick ram, and he doesn’t know if anyone passed this way or not. And just over the shoulder of the rise is where the Widow Blaine lives. Mrs. Blaine still keeps the farm but has given up running sheep and planting corn. A small dairy herd is all that’s left. She’s short and square, with a temper to match her red hair. If the killer had gone there, she’d have taken her broom to him. Or her.” He smiled at Rutledge. “Village gossip says she’s twice the man her husband was.”

“And she saw nothing unusual here either.”

“No, sir. She has to milk the cows twice a day, and muck out the milking barn, but she comes into Hobson once a fortnight, for whatever goods she wants. That’s how she came to find the body. She stopped to ask Mrs. Teller if there was anything she needed.”

“There appears to be a good bit of fallow land around the cottage. Did Mrs. Teller farm it?” They had come to a white gate set into the hedge. It led up a grassy walk to a painted door, weathered a soft rose. Rutledge drew up just past the gate.

“She hasn’t since the war years. No help. Not with all the men we lost. And probably no heart for it either. She didn’t need the money.”

They left the motorcar and opened the gate.

Rutledge noted the sign on the front of it, with the name: sunrise cottage. Then he stood there, looking up at the house. It was typical of farmhouses out in this rolling country, tall and square and open to the buffeting of the wind, as if daring it to do its worst. There were no trees to shelter it and no fuss about the architecture. Guessing the age of Sunrise Cottage was nearly impossible, built as it was to withstand whatever the seasons or the years brought. A hundred years old? Fifty?

He followed the constable up the path, taking in the flowers that gave the walk and the door a little touch of color, a softness that belied what had happened here.

“There was no indication of a struggle? Or that Mrs. Teller had tried to run from her killer?”

“Nothing to tell us anything. She was just lying there, face to one side, as if she had decided to have a little nap. There wasn’t much blood. She must have died very quickly.”

“And no sign of the murder weapon?”

“He must have taken it with him. A walking stick? There are enough visitors in the summer on walking holidays. A hammer or tool from a motorcar?”

“If it was a summer visitor, he had his walking stick with him. If the weapon came from a motorcar or a lorry, the killer carried it to the door with him, with the intent of committing murder.”

“That’s very likely,” Satterthwaite agreed.

They had reached the door.

“It’s not locked. We never lock our doors.”

“She might still be alive if she had.”

The constable said, “She opened it to whoever was on the doorstep. She was never afraid out here. I’ve wondered, you know, if he had stopped for a drink of water or the like, and recognized her. But that would mean she had a past, and that’s not in the character of Florence Teller.”

“What did she do before she married?”

“She came here to live with her aunt when she was very young, and later taught school over in Thielwald. She was a good schoolmistress, by all accounts. But not two years after she’d begun teaching, she met and married Peter Teller.”

“What about his family? Is there any? Is he by any chance related to the Teller family in London?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir, but I doubt it. There was never anything said about family in London.”

Rutledge remembered what Bowles had suggested, that this Peter was from the wrong side of the blanket.

He reached out to open the door. It swung back on its hinges quietly, without disturbing the evensong of a robin somewhere on the other side of the hedge.

“Who inherits the house?”

“Now there’s a good question. I don’t know who her solicitor is. We haven’t come across a will.”

The passage was narrow, a second door just beyond where they were standing, opening into the house itself. In this tiny hall, a small shelf of trinkets on one side faced a framed photograph of Morecambe Bay on the other. And only a small stain on the scrubbed wood flooring marked where a woman had died.

Rutledge examined the walls and the floor, even glancing at the ceiling above his head. But there were no scuff marks, nothing to show that a struggle had taken place.

“She must ha’ turned to go into the ither part of the house,” Hamish said.

“Her back to him,” Rutledge said, too late to catch himself from answering Hamish aloud.

“Yes, very likely,” Constable Satterthwaite agreed. “She might have known him, or if not, liked the look of him enough to invite him in. A good many of the university lads come walking hereabout, and some of them couldn’t be much older than her Timmy would have been if he’d lived. She had a soft spot for them. We’re a trusting lot, but not foolish. She wasn’t afraid of him.”

“A priest. A schoolboy on holiday. A woman in distress.”

“I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” Satterthwaite admitted. “But yes.”

“What’s beyond this entry?”

“There are three rooms downstairs, and three bedrooms above. Her aunt lived in one of them, the boy Timmy in another. I don’t think, from the look of them, that she used either room after they died.”

Rutledge crossed the entry and went through the open door beyond. He could see the short passage continued, with the stairs to one side, the kitchen straight ahead, the parlor to his left, and a small dining room or sitting room to the right.

As he walked through the rooms, he found himself thinking that the parlor appeared to be frozen in time, intended for the use of guests of another generation, who never came. A settee and two chairs, a worn but handsome carpet, small tables with little treasures on them. There was another framed photograph, this time from Keswick in the Lake District, surely a souvenir of a visit. A tall blue vase intended for summer flowers took pride of place on one table, beside it a well-thumbed book of verse with no inscription. Just above the table hung a sandalwood fan in a case, spread to show the lacquered painting on parchment and the carved sticks. Handsomely embroidered pillow slips with Chinese scenes of mountains rising about a misty river set off the plainness of the dark furniture.

They were unusual pieces to find here in Hobson.

“What did her husband do before the war? Was he a farmer?”

“A career soldier. He was always sending her gifts from all over the world. I sometimes brought the packages out here, on my rounds. Her face would light up, and she’d smile as if it were her birthday.”

The dining room had been turned into a sitting room cum workroom, with a tabletop easel. On it was a watercolor of a cat curled up on a windowsill. It was only half finished. There was also a book of accounts on the table, a low bookshelf of leather-bound classics by the chair that was obviously her favorite. The cushions were worn, and the padded back had taken on a comfortable shape.

The kitchen was tidy, telling Rutledge that she had not expected guests, for the teapot and the cups and saucers were in their proper places in the cupboard.

“Or ha’ been washed and put away again,” Hamish suggested.

The square, footed dish on the table, covered by a linen handkerchief, held honey, and there was bread in the tin box by the stone sink. Looking out at the kitchen yard, he could see that flowers and herbs grew in profusion, turning the silvery wood of the shed into a backdrop for beauty and using the rough stone foundations of what must have been the ancient barn and other outbuildings as a sheltered place to grow more delicate plants.

Upstairs the two unused rooms yielded nothing of interest. In one there were a boy’s playthings in a wooden chest, an armoire, a coverlet with appliqués of animals—a cat, a dog, a duck, a sheep, and a cow—against a forest green background. The animals were cleverly sewn, with cotton wadding behind the figures to give them a three-dimensional quality. On the wall were shelves with birds’ eggs, a cattail nearly gone to seed, and other small things that might catch a boy’s eye, including a conch shell. In the aunt’s bedroom, the bed was neatly made with a tufted coverlet and flowers embroidered on the pillow slips. The armoire, like the one in the boy’s room, was empty of clothing, as if these had long since been donated where they might do more good.

Florence Teller’s bedroom was equally simple. But the same hand had embroidered a picture on the wall, entitled our happy home, with a house that looked remarkably like this one, save for the black door. On the bedside table was a single photograph of a small boy holding a football, his face tilted toward the photographer with a shy smile just touching his lips. A handsome child, but a frail one.

The tall oval mirror standing in the corner was the only unexpected furnishing. Crossing to look at it more closely, he thought the dark wood was either cherry or rosewood, and it was finely made. At the top of the frame was a small bouquet of roses tied by a ribbon, carved in a piece with the wood of the frame itself.

He could picture Florence Teller standing before it, admiring a new dress, smiling up at the man she’d married, pleased with the gift he’d brought her.

Hamish said, “It’s no’ like the rest of the furniture.”

And that was true. While everything from the dining room table to the high bed frames was of good workmanship, it was from another generation, late Victorian pieces, dark and solid, the polish deep enough to reflect the light. Inherited? He thought they might have been. The sort of pieces a young couple, just at the start of their marriage, might have been offered by an aunt or mother or cousin. Pieces stored in the attic until they were needed again.

There was little of a personal nature here, and he wondered about the sort of life this woman had led. Had her husband written to her, his letters the high marks of her world? Although the constable frowned in disapproval, Rutledge opened drawers but found nothing to indicate that something was missing.

Aside from her gardening, her needlework was clearly her main interest, but as one’s needle clicked in and out of the cloth, even following the most intricate pattern, what did her mind dwell on? Or as she pulled weeds and deadheaded flowers, what occupied her thoughts while her hands were busy?

She must have been a woman of extraordinary patience, he thought all at once. Always waiting, like the faithful Penelope. Why had she accepted such a life? And what in the end had it brought her?

But he thought he had found the answer to her acceptance in one small thing—there must have been a pet here at one time, something to keep her company. A cat, a small dog for safety and for friendship? From the upstairs window he could see a little graveyard with whitewashed headstones, four or five of them, as if over the years she had lost her companions as well as her son, and laid them to rest in a garden of remembrance. For around the stones grew pansies in profusion, and forget-me-nots.

He went back down the stairs, feeling depression settling over him, and walked out to the little graveyard. Three cats, two dogs, judging from the names painted in dark blue script on the whitewash. And one marked only mr. g.

“Do you want to speak to the farmer?” Constable Satterthwaite asked as Rutledge turned back to the house.

“If he was busy with a sick animal, he’s probably right, he saw nothing. What about his family?”

“His wife had gone to visit their daughter. The son is married and helps out at the farm on most days, but he walks over from where he lives.” He gestured toward the distance. “On the far side of his father’s land.”

“Therefore, nobody from his household came this way. All right, let’s speak to Mrs. Blaine. If something is missing here, we have no way of guessing what it is.” But downstairs again he paused long enough to flip the pages of the books by Mrs. Teller’s favorite chair, to see what might have been secreted among them. She had good taste in reading, he thought as he scanned.

Nothing but an occasional starched and embroidered bookmark fell out.

Rutledge stood in the passage for a moment, listening to the sounds of the house around him, trying to feel the presence of the woman who had spent most of her life here, and left so little of herself behind. But she was elusive, and he wished there had been a photograph of her in better times.

Then he followed Satterthwaite outside. The sky was a bright rose fading to shades of gray and lavender as the sun crept over the far horizon, and in the east the lavender deepened to purple. They closed the door on the silent house and walked back to the motorcar.

While the roof of Mrs. Blaine’s farmhouse could just be seen from the Teller house, the way there was not as direct. They turned down a rutted lane and bounced along it to the house nestled in the curve of the hill.

It was very much like the one they’d just left, but the barns and out-buildings were still very much in use, and the yard was muddy with the hoof marks of cattle.

They tapped at the front door, and it opened to a small, compact woman with dark red hair and a grievance.

“There you are!” she said at once to Constable Satterthwaite, ignoring the man from London. Clutching the startled constable’s arm, she dragged him toward her kitchen, all the while complaining over the earsplitting screams of something in great pain somewhere in the house. “You’ve got to rid me of that thing, do you hear? She told me it was thirty years old, and I can’t even cook it, it’ll be stringy as an old shoe. I tried to shove him out the door, but he won’t leave. I can’t sleep for this racket. All day, all night. There’s no peace!”

Rutledge had followed them to the kitchen and saw nothing as he crossed the threshold. But he nearly backed into the passage again to save his ears from whatever was shrieking with such high-pitched horror.

Hamish, silent in the face of what could only be called a cacophony, was as speechless as Rutledge himself.

He’d heard the Irish speak of banshees, but until now he’d never given these harbingers of death much thought. He found himself remembering what old Michael Flaherty, once a jockey, had talked about in his cups. “A sound beyond any other. It tears at the soul, it wails like a lost spirit, and it can’t be seen except by someone in the family.”

And then something moved, and for the first time Rutledge could see the source of the incredible noise. It was a small dove gray parrot with a flash of red on its tail, and it was clinging to a plate on the top of the dresser against the far wall, almost invisible in the last rays of sunset outlining the open kitchen door. Its bright eyes were fixed on the newcomers as if expecting them to attack.

“There, you see,” Mrs. Blaine said, pointing excitedly. “All day, I tell you, and all night. I don’t see how she stood it. I’d shoot it if it weren’t for my best Staffordshire ware. He was always sending her gifts, Lieutenant Teller was, but what possessed him to send her that thing I don’t know. They can live a hundred years, she said.”

Rutledge remembered the little pet graveyard, and the animals resting there. A hundred years—she would never have to weep over a lost love again. A lonely woman given something to talk to.

The parrot shrieked again. Hardly talking, as Hamish was pointing out.

“I couldn’t leave it, could I?” Mrs. Blaine went on, her sense of injustice still strong. “She’d been dead for days, I could see that much, the flies on her face, and it hadn’t been fed nor watered. So I took pity on it for her sake, little knowing quiet as it was, what was in store for me. I surely didn’t bargain for this!”

Rutledge stepped into the room, moving quietly, and went to the overturned cage that was on the floor on the far side of the kitchen table. He picked it up and held it high. Tall as he was, he could bring the cage nearly to the level of the bird. And to his own astonishment, after a long moment, it stopped squawking and hopped into the open door, made for one of the swings, and sat there bobbing back and forth, plucking at the feathers of its breast.

He shut the door carefully, then reached down for the cloth covering Mrs. Blaine’s kitchen table. She hurriedly caught the sugar bowl and the saltcellar before he pulled at the cloth, then lifted it over the cage, shutting the bird into darkness.

Even the frantic creaking of the swing stopped, and a blessed quiet descended over the kitchen.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the constable said into the silence.

Mrs. Blaine stared from the covered cage to the man from London.

And then the bird said in a very human voice, “Good night, Peter. Wherever you may be.”

In a hushed whisper, Mrs. Blaine said, “That’s her voice. For all the world. As if she were still alive.”

“You’d never heard it speak?” Rutledge asked.

“Lord, no. Never in her house and not in mine, either. He was quiet as a lamb there, and here he’s done naught but to scream like a creature in pain.”

“I didn’t know you’d taken anything from the house—this bird,” the constable was saying accusingly. “I asked if you’d touched anything.”

“It’s a live bird, I thought it would be like a canary. I took it out of kindness,” she said, defending herself. “You’re not telling me it could name her murderer!”

“No, it’s just that you said—was there anything else?”

“Did she ever ask you to burn some letters for her, if something happened to her?” Rutledge asked. “Or take a photograph and post it to her late husband’s family? You were her nearest neighbor, she might have confided in you,” he added, though he couldn’t see a strong friendship springing up between two such different women. Still, needs must, and two widows alone on isolated farms could have turned to each other to carry out last wishes.

Incensed, Mrs. Blaine said, “Look here, I never touched a thing in that house. I took pity on this creature, as I would on a stray cat. And look how it’s repaid me, I ask you.”

“It could have been evidence,” Constable Satterthwaite pointed out, trying to keep his own temper.

“A bird’s not evidence,” she retorted. “I’ll wring its neck and be done with it, and bury it up there in her little graveyard. See if I don’t.” She marched around the table toward the cage.

Rutledge said, “Constable—”

“I’ve got a cat,” he said, as if that absolved him of all responsibility. Rutledge stepped forward. He could hear Hamish. It was clear that the voice in his head was trying to tell him something, but he reached for the cage and said, “I’ll take possession of it. The bird may not have seen who killed her, or watched if the killer searched the house. But until we know differently, it’s a ward of the court.”

Constable Satterthwaite turned to him as if he’d taken leave of his mind.

Mrs. Blaine said, “Ward or not, I’ll thank you to remove it from my house.”

“Did she have any enemies? Anyone who had had a falling-out with her, anyone who might have held a grudge against her?” he asked, gingerly lifting the bird—cage, cloth, and all.

“I’ll have my tablecloth back,” she told him. “As for enemies, you might as well ask if I have any. She wasn’t the sort to make people angry. She never asked for much, and it was just as well, she was never given much in this life but great sorrows to bear. She had nothing to steal, though she never lacked for what she needed. It was people who’d failed her. And I can’t think why anyone would have wished to see her dead.”

Rutledge looked around the kitchen and saw nothing he could use to cover the bird. He set the cage down again and took off his coat, wrapping it around the cage in place of the tablecloth. The bird had his head tucked under his wing, and hardly stirred.

“You’re a right fool,” Mrs. Blaine said to Rutledge as he handed her the tablecloth, “but I’ll thank you all the same for ridding my house of this nuisance.”

“What can you tell us about Mrs. Teller’s husband?” he asked.

“Only that he never came back from the war. They said there was a collection being taken up in London for a monument to the men gone missing. I’ve no doubt Lieutenant Teller’s name will be on it. I asked her if she was going to make a contribution, but she said that would be like walking over his grave. As long as she held him to be alive, he was. Though in the last months, I think even she had begun to give up all hope. She painted that door red to welcome him, and she’d set a dress aside for the day. Well, if he’s in heaven, she’s found him now and is at peace.”

She walked with them to the door. “She told me once that she’d read a story about a man who had gone on the crusades, and he lost his memory, and it was years before he came home again. She asked if I thought it was a true story. And I told her I did, because I couldn’t say, could I, that some writer had made it up out of whole cloth to make women readers cry. I was never one for that sort of thing myself.”

“If you can think of anything that would be helpful,” Constable Satterthwaite told her, “you’ll let me know, first thing?”

“I will. And I’m locking my door at night, and bringing in the dog. I don’t want to be found dead like she was. How long do you think she lay there? It was a cruel thing to do, kill her and leave her to the flies.”

They thanked her and left. For a second, Rutledge didn’t know what to do with the bird, standing there looking at the motorcar and unwilling to put it on the floor by what would be Hamish’s feet. But the constable took it from him and set it there, saying, “Here’s a travel rug. Shall I put it around the cage instead of your coat?”

“Oh—yes, thank you.” Rutledge took his coat back and pulled it on as he opened the door of the driver’s side.

As the constable cranked the motorcar, he said to Rutledge, “What will you do with that thing? You can’t be serious about taking it to London.”

“Why not?” Rutledge asked. “For the time being at least. Who knows what else it might say.”

“Aye, and I’d give much to see the judge’s face when you offer a parrot in evidence.”

Rutledge laughed. “What matters is whether or not someone else thinks the bird can talk. That could be interesting.”

The motor caught, and the constable got in. All color had gone from the sky now, and the first stars were growing brighter. “Shall we go and see the body, sir? I think the doctor would like it released as soon as possible for burial.”

“Released to whom?” Rutledge asked. “There’s no family. You said as much yourself.”

“What else are we to do? I’ll be there. And some of the village women, no doubt. She won’t be put in the ground without someone by her.”

They drove through the dark streets of Thielwald, light from house windows making bright patches on the road. Satterthwaite pointed out the doctor’s surgery, and they knocked at the door. Dr. Blake answered the summons himself, nodding to Rutledge and saying to the constable, “Another five minutes and I’d have gone up to my bed. But I’m glad you’ve come. Any word on her killer?” He was a short man, graying at the temples, perhaps fifty-five, with pale, heavy-lidded eyes.

“No, sir. But this is Inspector Rutledge from Scotland Yard. He’ll be looking into her death.”

Dr. Blake took them back to the room where Florence Teller was being kept, and lighted the lamps. He carried one to the sheet-draped figure and held it high so that Rutledge could see her clearly.

In the flickering light, Rutledge studied the body. A slim, trim woman of perhaps forty, he thought, older than the Teller wives he’d just dealt with. The doctor was pointing out the location of the wound, but Rutledge only half heard him, seeing the look of peace that Constable Satterthwaite had spoken of. With the lines that sorrow had put in her face smoothed away, she looked young again.

“Is there anything more you can tell me?” Rutledge asked.

“I’m afraid not. That one blow on the back of the head, near the base of the skull, was enough. I should think the killer was right-handed, considering the direction of the blow, and possibly on a level with her, rather than shorter or taller. And he was either very strong or very angry. No one interfered with her, no one moved the body from where it fell. There were no other wounds.” He shook his head. “A tragedy. I knew her,” he added to Rutledge. “She was seldom ill, but her son was my patient. He had measles when he was very young and never fully recovered. He died of typhoid fever, and I thought she would go mad with grief. There was nothing I could do. There are times when I curse my profession for its ignorance.”

After a few more questions and a promise to release the body for burial, they thanked him and left.

Rutledge drove the constable back to Hobson and asked where he might spend the night. There was no hotel in the little town, and after the long day of driving, the thought of going another ten miles or more to find lodging was daunting.

The constable sent him to the house of a Mrs. Greeley, who sometimes took in summer walkers. The room was at the back of the house, and as she led him there, she said, “I was just putting the kettle on for my tea. There’s bread and butter, creamed eggs, and some slices of ham, if you’d care for it.”

He thanked her and offered to pay for the meal as well as the room. She accepted his offer, and he could tell that she was pleased to have the money.

She insisted on serving him at the small table in her sitting room, though he was perfectly willing to sit in her kitchen. But Mrs. Greeley was agreeable to talking as she laid out his cutlery and brought in a soup that she had made with beans from a tin and bits of bacon.

“Did you know Mrs. Teller very well?” he asked, after complimenting her on the soup.

“None of us knew her really well,” she said. “She was a quiet sort, kept to herself. I remember she met the lieutenant in Morecambe, where she had gone for a few days by the sea after a chest cough lingered beyond the winter. He was on a walking tour, but he came back later in the summer and called on her. Then back again he came before the end of October. I could tell she liked him. And he was very taken with her. They were married two years later. He liked the Army, he said. It gave him the opportunity to travel. But he couldn’t take her with him. Not then, and later, with the boy being sickly, he never wanted to take her to his postings. I always thought she must be very lonely, out there on the West Road, as they called it then. But she seemed to be happy there.”

Over the flan, he asked if she could think of anyone who held a grudge against Mrs. Teller.

“Her? Never. She wasn’t one to attract trouble, if you know what I mean. I don’t know what’s got into folks these days. The war changed everything, didn’t it People could live anywhere and be safe, no one would think of any harm coming to them. I’ve taken in strangers, young men on holiday, and never feared for my life.”

“I understand she painted her door red to welcome her husband back from the war.”

“It was a seven days’ wonder, that red door. Everyone found an excuse to walk out that way, just to see it. Afterward, when he didn’t come home, I thought it must be a daily reminder of her loss. But she wouldn’t hear of having it painted something else. I even offered one of the lads who stayed with me. He’d caught himself a chill, and was at his wits’ end for something to do until he could move on. He would have painted it any color she liked.”

He waited until she had gone to bed before bringing the bird in and settling it in a corner of his room. He gave it some sunflower seeds he’d seen in Mrs. Greeley’s kitchen and filled up its water bowl. And then as he covered it again, it said softly, “Good night, Peter. Wherever you may be.”