G reeley had sent a message to the hotel, enclosing a telegram for Rutledge.
“The baker's boy,” the message read, “brought this with the morning post. And I've also had reports from the police along the coast. The latest known query about the old road to Urskdale was last summer.”
“It closes the door on the man, Taylor,” Hamish pointed out.
“Not necessarily,” Rutledge answered as he opened the telegram. He stood stock-still, staring at the printed words.
CHIEF CONSTABLE UNHAPPY WITH PROGRESS. YOU ARE RELIEVED. MICKELSON WILL BE IN NORTH NEXT TRAIN.
It was signed “Bowles.”
“Aye, and I'd warned you,” Hamish told him bluntly.
Relieved…
It had never happened before, though Bowles had sometimes blustered and threatened as panic overcame reason. Mickelson was one of his cronies. What would the man do?
With Bowles breathing down his neck, Mickelson would wrap the inquiry up quickly, smoothly, ruffling as few feathers as possible in the course of his duty. Josh Robinson would be pronounced the killer. There would be a brief sensation in the press, and Bowles would make sad pronouncements on the state of young people since the war, so many men killed, women left to enforce standards…
It would read well, and there would be further comments at speaking engagements, pointing to the role of the Yard in bringing swift justice to those who broke the Sixth Commandment. One of Bowles's favorite texts.
Nothing would be said about breaking the Ninth Commandment, with regard to bearing false witness.
Elizabeth Fraser, who had handed him the message, asked softly, “It's bad news, isn't it? I'm so sorry. You'll be making an arrest, then.”
He was still lost in thought, but he heard her last words.
“The Yard will, yes,” he answered. Folding the telegram, he shoved it in his pocket, then said briskly, “I have work to do.”
In his room, he sat down at the small writing table under the windows and began to make a list of what he knew-and what he didn't.
On balance, the facts were evenly spread out before him. The spur towards murder was weighted evenly under each name.
Janet Ashton: Jealousy. When her sister had refused to go back to her first husband and leave Gerald free to marry again, had the plot to kill been set in motion?
Paul Elcott: Greed. He'd had no problem with his brother's marriage to a widow with children of her own. But when the twins were conceived, there was the impediment to his inheritance of High Fell. When they were delivered safely and thrived, he must have been desperate, as The Ram's Head fell apart around him.
Josh Robinson: Revenge. The twins had tied his mother more closely to Gerald Elcott, and Josh had run away once, missed school often, and from what the schoolmaster had said, was unhappy in the North, with few friends to make life bearable. And when he'd been told he was too young to live with his father, had he decided that the only way to be free was to murder his family?
There was Bertram Taylor as well, who had carried a grudge against Gerald Elcott. And Hugh Robinson, who had been forced to give up his own family through no fault of his own. And even Harry Cummins, who had been attracted to Grace. But if that were true, why kill her? Or had her happiness embittered him, sending him there in the snow to wipe out a family he envied?
Hamish said, “Hav' ye no' thought of the wife? Jealous of the woman who had caught her own man's eye?”
Far-fetched though it might be, Rutledge added Vera Cummins to the list. For frail as she seemed, there was a tenacity and a force under her drunkenness. She loved Harry, doubted him, was troubled by him-and failed to live up to what he had wanted from her.
He looked in his papers for the reply received from Sergeant Gibson on his earlier query. An unexpected answer, but Vera Cummins had confirmed it.
Elizabeth Fraser had been tried and found not guilty of murder.
The charge was killing the man she was engaged to marry.
A bare-bones report from Sergeant Gibson, with none of the flesh that lent humanity to a case.
The victim, Ronald Herring, had been a conscientious objector. The K.C. had pointed out that perhaps Herring was a moral coward, and the accused had been ashamed of his convictions. When he refused to release her from her engagement, she had taken matters into her own hands. Or in Sergeant Gibson's words, “rid herself of a man who didn't have the backbone to step aside.”
Tried and found not guilty…
But perhaps the jury had been sympathetic.
Conscientious objectors and cowards, even men who had suffered from shell shock, were despised by people who had watched sons and fathers and brothers mown down in France. Women had been particularly hard on those they felt were malingering. Many had handed out white feathers to any man not in uniform, and a special uniform had been designed for those given medical discharges, to protect them from harassment.
He had hoped that it wouldn't be necessary to ask for the details of the case. Elizabeth Fraser was bound to her chair. She couldn't possibly have reached the Elcott farm in the snow.
Yet he had seen her standing. And she herself had told him that the doctors had found no physical reason for her disability.
Mickelson would probe into the case. He had to forestall that.
Rutledge put aside his papers and went to the kitchen, hoping to find her alone. He could hear the voices of Cummins and Robinson from the small parlor, and walked quietly past.
Mrs. Cummins was in the kitchen, trying to find something in one of the drawers of the dresser. She looked up as Rutledge came into the room and said fretfully, “I can't seem to find my scissors-I was sure they were here just this morning!”
“Let me search in the drawer for them.”
He went through the detritus of twenty years, a magpie's nest of things that had no other home. A broken spoon, stubs of pencils, a bit of torn lace, part of a steel hat pin, and lengths of colored thread. In the bottom, tangled in string, was a small pair of embroidery scissors.
She took them as if he'd handed her the Grail, holding them to her breast.
He happened to look up at her face just then, and saw something in her eyes that chilled him. He nearly reached out to take the scissors back again.
It struck Rutledge that she had played a role for years. The drunken, needy wife, who clung to her husband and bound him to her with pity. Terrified he wouldn't come home to her, terrified he might have sent his mistress to live with her for the duration of the war, terrified that his sacrifice for her might have been greater than his love for her, Vera Cummins had become someone Harry couldn't leave because he believed he'd been responsible for who and what she had become.
The tyranny, Rutledge thought, of the weak.
She glanced away, as if fearful that she'd somehow betrayed herself.
“I don't know what we'd do here without you,” she said bleakly. “You don't know how frightened I am sometimes. It's so lonely here, so much empty space beyond my windows…”
Her voice trailed off as she started for the door.
“Mrs. Cummins-”
“Yes, Inspector?” She was poised to hurry on.
“I'd like to speak to Miss Fraser, if you'd ask her to come to the kitchen.”
She tensed. “Is there anything wrong? It was I who burned the toast again this morning-”
He smiled. “No. It's-my hand. I hurt it, and I'd like her opinion about seeing Dr. Jarvis. Unless you'd care to look at it?”
“Oh, no! I'll just call Elizabeth-”
She went hastily out of the room, and he crossed to stand by the window, trying to force his mind to blankness, to seal off what he was feeling and thinking.
By the time Elizabeth Fraser wheeled her chair into the room, he was in control of his emotions.
“Vera tells me your hand is hurting you-”
“That was only an excuse. I know it's cold in the dining room but we can be more private there. Would you mind?”
She searched his face. “What's wrong?”
“Will you come with me?”
Wheeling her chair towards the dining room door, she replied, “I think I know what it is you want to ask.”
He held the door for her and watched her roll the chair to one side of the hearth.
“I told you once that it must be difficult to pry into the secrets of people you suspect. I told you too I thought it was rather horrid.”
“Yes.” It was all he could say.
“Tell me first why you think I could be capable of killing Gerald and his family.”
“I don't suspect you-”
“You suspect all of us. I can see it in your eyes, watchful and giving away very little.” She studied his face. “It troubles you, doesn't it, to hunt people down.”
“I did enough of it in the war.”
“All right. What do you want to know?”
“About your trial.”
“I was acquitted. You can't try me twice for the same offense.”
“I never suggested…”
“No.”
“Look. The Yard is sending someone else to take over this inquiry. He won't be as-kind. I'd rather end the investigation before he arrives. I need to know why you were tried.”
“Someone else? Was that the bad news-” After a moment she went on with such sadness in her face that he wanted to stop her and tell her he was wrong, he didn't need to know.
“Ronald was a man of the utmost integrity. I respected and admired him. We'd known each other for two years when he finally asked me to marry him. But then the war came along. And he refused to serve. He said that killing-for any reason-was wrong. That it was a last resort that governments chose to avoid working out a settlement in which they might lose something. It was horrible-the way he was treated. He got the white feather over and over again, until he was afraid to go out without a uniform on. But he stood by what he believed. And I honored him for that.”
She took a shaky breath. “His parents supported his decision at first. But then something rather odd happened. Have you heard of the Angel of Mons?”
He stared at her. “Yes. Some of the men fighting in Mons in the first days of the war swore they'd seen an angel one night. They were being forced back. The angel seemed to cover their retreat. It meant different things to different men. Many of them refused to talk about it.”
“Yes. Well. Ronald's brother died at Mons. And his parents turned against Ronald, then, telling him that God was surely on our side. That Ronald was going against the will of God. It was nonsense; they were grieving. I'm not sure they realized what their constant barrage of criticism did to him. He took it to heart, and I watched him suffer as he tried to come to terms with what they wanted. And then…”
She faltered, her voice refusing to go on.
Rutledge waited, his back to her, until she could speak again. Finally she said, “I stopped at his flat after a friend's birthday party. Sometime in the evening he'd turned the gas on and killed himself. I'd seen him at tea, and he'd tried to be cheerful for my sake. He hadn't expected me to be the one to find him, but I'd been given a book I thought he might enjoy. I'd hoped it would pick up his spirits, as it had mine.”
Her voice changed. “I was so angry -angry with myself for not seeing his desperation, angry with his father for being so heartless and refusing to understand, angry at his mother for her stupid comparisons with his brother. All I could think of was protecting Ronald from this last indignity. ‘A coward to the end,' his father would have said. ‘Couldn't face the Hun, the way our Willie did. A disgrace to Willie's memory!' And so I took the blame.”
“What do you mean?” He had turned from the window, a dark silhouette against the light. Her knuckles were white on the arms of the chair, her face drained of expression.
“I wrote a note. In it I said that I'd watched Ronald suffer the indignities of others, and I couldn't go on. And so I'd ended it for both of us. But I was afraid if we died together, it would appear to be a double suicide. I went out, shut the door, and let myself be struck by a lorry coming down the road.”
“My God,” he said quietly.
“Melodramatic, wasn't it? Foolishness in the extreme. But I couldn't think of anything but the fact that he was dead and I wanted to die too. Instead, I woke up in hospital with the police by my bed.” She sighed. “My friends at the birthday party-it didn't occur to me that they might be asked-could prove that Ronald was alive earlier when they met me at the flat. The woman who owns the building had seen him on the stairs half an hour after I'd gone. He'd put the cat in the back garden. She swore she hadn't smelled gas then. But of course, she wasn't happy with a murder in her house. The suicide of a coward gave her some standing on the street. And so-his parents learned the truth after all. They were in the gallery at the trial. I could almost see them gloat. And I couldn't walk. They felt God had punished me sufficiently, too.”
“Did you kill him?” he asked her bluntly.
She lifted her face to look at the candlesticks about the hearth, ornate Victorian silver with twining ivy running up the shaft to form the cup for the candle. “I loved him so dearly. I could have done it, I think. But I didn't.” She took a deep breath. “And when Harry asked me to come here, away from London and the gossip, where no one knew-I thought I could forget. But you don't, do you? The past stays with you, like a shadow.”
“And Gerald?”
“Ah, yes, Gerald. He wasn't at all like Ronald, and yet if I watched, sometimes I'd catch a glimpse of Ronald in him. His fairness, the way he walked, that sparkle in his eyes when he was excited about something. I took such pleasure in that! Even, sometimes, Gerald's laughter would catch me unprepared. I would hear it in a shop, and turn quickly- Have you never lost someone, and then looked for them in other people?”
He'd lost Jean, even though he'd come back alive from France. She had been terrified of him, sitting irrational and suicidal in hospital. And he'd seen her only once afterward, in London just before her marriage to someone else. Had he looked for Jean in other women? Or found in other women the traits that he had missed in her? In Aurore-or Olivia Marlowe? Even Fiona…
“I don't know,” he answered simply. “I expect I haven't loved as deeply as you did.”
Elizabeth Fraser smiled, but it was more with sadness than humor. “I never want to love anyone again. It hurts too much. Am I free to go now?”
“Yes-”
But when the door closed behind her, Hamish said, “Did you believe her, then?”
Rutledge found he couldn't answer the voice in his head.
T he screams brought Maggie up out of a deep sleep. For a moment she lay stock-still, disoriented and uncertain. Then she found her shawl and threw it around her shoulders, hurrying to her father's room without stopping to light the lamp.
He was sitting up in bed, on his knees, his eyes wide but unseeing.
She stood there for an instant, then awkwardly put her arm around the boy's heaving shoulders.
But her touch was shocking to him and he whimpered as he curled himself into a ball in among the bedclothes, his screams rising in pitch as if afraid of what she would do to him. Yet she thought he didn't recognize her in the middle of whatever nightmare held him in its grip.
“Sybil!” she called to the dog, but it was already on the floor by the bed, hunched and whining.
She could hear words now, incoherent but terrified.
“What is it?” she asked him, her own voice shaking. “Tell me what's wrong!”
He lifted his face out of the coverlet and stared at her, and she thought this time he was wide awake, no longer in the throes of his dream.
“I killed them,” he whispered. “I watched them die. There was so much noise. And then I ran. I didn't want to hang.”
He pointed his finger as if he held a gun. “Bang! Bang-bang, bang! Bang! Bang-”
She had to reach out and shake him to stop the sound, recognizing it for hysteria.
Afterward he just sat there and cried.
Sybil jumped on the bed then and tried to comfort him.
S itting at the kitchen table in the dark, staring at nothing, Maggie could feel the cold settling in. The stove had been banked for the night, and she didn't have the energy to make herself a cup of tea.
“What am I going to do?” she asked the shadows. “Papa, what am I going to do?”
But her father was dead and buried on the hill.
After a while, when her feet felt half frozen and her head had begun to ache along with her leg, she heard a voice saying aloud, “Nothing has changed. I don't see that anything has changed.”
She was startled to realize that it was her own voice.
Soon after that she got up and went to her bed. But it was hours before she finally fell asleep again.
T he next morning he didn't seem to remember anything about his outburst in the night.
And when he was washing up the dishes, she surreptitiously took out the gallows drawing he'd made and burned it in the stove.