A Lonely Death

6

R utledge had eaten his meal and was finishing his tea when Walker came to take him to meet Dr. Gooding.

The doctor's surgery was within walking distance, a rambling house that had been divided into two halves, one for his practice and the other for his living quarters.

Three women were just leaving the surgery as the two men opened the gate and started up the flagstoned walk leading between borders in which flowers were blooming profusely. They noticed the man with Constable Walker straightaway, and Rutledge could all but hear the speculation racing through their minds. He could also imagine their conversation as soon as they were out of earshot.

Walker said, "The tallest of those women was married to one of the Eastfield Company that marched off together to fight the Kaiser. Mrs. Watson. Her husband was killed in the third week of the fighting after they reached the Front." He opened the surgery door for Rutledge, and added, "The rest led charmed lives for nearly five months before George Hopkins bought it."

"Roper had a bad leg?"

"Machine gun. He could hardly walk when he came home, but you'd not have known it now. Barely a limp. Pierce lost his to gangrene from a foot wound. He wasn't fitted with a new limb until last year. It took that long for the stump to heal. Jeffers was shot in the chest but lived."

The surgery door led into a cramped waiting room, empty now. Dr. Gooding was coming out of his office and looked up as the two men entered.

"Good afternoon, Constable," he said to Walker. "I was just going through to my luncheon. We're running late today." He was a man of slender build, with a receding hairline and a strong jaw.

"This is Inspector Rutledge, sir. From Scotland Yard. He'd like to speak to you about the dead men."

Gooding cast a glance at the clock sitting on the mantelpiece but said, "Yes, of course."

He took them into his office and gestured to the chairs opposite his desk. Sitting down again, he reached for a sheaf of papers set to one side of the blotter, passing them to Rutledge. "These are my reports on the bodies. Constable Walker has copies."

Rutledge glanced through them. "All three men were garroted? And all three had the army discs in their mouths?"

"Yes, that's correct. To tell you the truth, I'd never seen a case of garroting before, but of course I had no difficulty in recognizing at once what had been done when I examined Jeffers. My guess is that something like piano wire must have been used. It was strong, strong enough to cut through the flesh of the throat in each case, causing bleeding. I should think a man wielded it. Jeffers was inebriated, but he would not have been easy to kill. And the same goes for Roper, despite his leg. A woman couldn't have held on to the garrote, given the struggles of the three men. It was well after dark when they were attacked. And each was in a place where his death wasn't likely to be witnessed. Jeffers along the road on the outskirts of Eastfield, Roper in his barn, and of course Pierce in the main brewery."

"Were they stalked, do you think?"

Gooding shook his head. "They weren't prepared. That wire came over their heads, and there was an end to it. If they had believed they were in any danger, they might have got a hand up in time to try to defend themselves. It wouldn't have changed the outcome, they might have lost a finger, or at least their hands would have been noticeably damaged. And this wasn't the case."

It was a very concise report. But then the doctor's luncheon was waiting.

Rutledge said, "Do you know of any particular connection among the victims? Or any trouble they may have had with anyone else in the village?"

"I'd say Roper and Jeffers knew each other better than either of them knew Anthony Pierce. As boys, all three of them attended our village grammar school together, but when the Pierce brothers were sent away to public school, my guess is that they very likely lost touch. As for trouble, Walker here can answer that better than I could. If you're asking if they came here, yes, from time to time, but never anything more than childhood ailments and the occasional scrapes and bruises from climbing trees or a rough game of football."

"After the war, was there any sort of hard feelings amongst the survivors of their company? Something that happened in France, perhaps, and not finished there?"

"If there was, they never came to me to patch them up." He hesitated. "Daniel-Daniel Pierce, that is-may have been the sole exception to that. Two days before he disappeared, I saw him in the street, and there was a bruise on his left cheek. He didn't mention it and neither did I. It didn't appear to be anything serious."

"I've heard he was something of a troublemaker when he was young." It wasn't precisely what Pierce had told Rutledge But he was interested in hearing Gooding's point of view.

"A troublemaker? That's a little harsh. Who told you that?" Gooding asked, frowning. "You don't suspect he has had anything to do with these murders!"

"How well did he know Roper and Jeffers?"

"Probably no better than Anthony did. I always had a feeling that his escapades were nothing more than an attempt to impress his brother and the others. The youngest trying to prove his mettle."

"What sort of escapades?" Rutledge pressed. He could sense that Walker was uncomfortable now, but he ignored him.

"He probably thought it was quite a lark, the things he got up to. One summer three or four boys dressed in sheets and moved about the churchyard one moonless night. They gave the sexton's wife and two young people courting in the church porch one hell of a fright. On Guy Fawkes night, they made their own bonfire-the old mill on the edge of town. It was a shambles anyway, no one lived there. They torched it. Still, it could have caused a general conflagration if the wind had blown the sparks about. There were demands that the ringleaders spend a night in jail. Cooler heads prevailed, and they were marched home under escort."

"These hardly seem to be boyish pranks to me."

Walker said, "I was here then. They weren't intending to do harm. On the other hand, the summer before the mill incident, there was a near drowning. The father of the boy in the witch's chair was asked if he wished to press charges, but his son wouldn't hear of it. He told me they'd drawn lots to see who would play the witch. They'd been reading about the Reformation in school. And the pond wasn't deep enough to drown the boy, but they hadn't accounted for his being tied to a chair and took fright when his head went under."

"Does this boy still live here in Eastfield?"

"Oh, no, sir," Walker answered. "He hasn't for these past fifteen years. His father was a bookkeeper at the furniture maker's, and as I remember, he found another position in Staffordshire, closer to his late wife's family."

Which brought him full circle to Daniel.

"Did Daniel serve with the rest of the Eastfield Company?"

"Like his brother, he qualified as an officer, and he chose to join the sappers."

Remembering what Walker had told him about Daniel's taste for adventure, that made perfect sense to Rutledge. It had been dangerous work, tunneling under German lines to lay charges. The miners were often buried alive when the powder went off prematurely or the tunnel supports failed, or they were killed going back inside to find out why the tunnel hadn't blown on schedule.

"Anything else you can tell me about the three men?" Rutledge asked.

"Jeffers was very drunk. He wasn't an habitual drinker, mind you. It was just his habit to mark the anniversary of his war wound by going to the pub and taking on as much beer as he could hold. He told me once how close he'd come to dying, and he couldn't quite put the fear of that behind him."

"Then all three of the dead men had been wounded in France."

"Yes, I've received copies of their medical records. Nothing suspicious there, if that's what you're asking me. I suspect the anniversary was not as important to the killer as the opportunity to catch Jeffers alone on a dark road."

Rutledge turned to Walker. "Did you ask at the pub, was there a stranger there that night? Or anyone who showed undue interest in Jeffers?"

"Only the regulars, as it happened. And everyone knew it was Jeffers's night to remember. They generally left him to it."

Dr. Gooding pointedly glanced at the clock again, and Rutledge thanked him for his time.

He left Walker at the police station after picking up copies of the statements the constable had taken prior to his arrival, and went back to the hotel to read them.

As he walked into Reception, the man behind the desk said, "Mr. Rutledge? You have a visitor, sir."

Surprised, Rutledge asked who it was.

But the clerk said only, "He's waiting in the room beyond the stairs."

Rutledge thanked him and went on to the door of the room used sometimes as a parlor for hotel guests or as a dining room for small private groups.

The man standing there, looking out a side window toward a small garden, turned as he heard Rutledge come in. He was tall and thin, with a long face and brown hair flecked with gray.

"Inspector Rutledge?" he asked, his eyes scanning Rutledge with intent interest. "I'm Inspector Norman, from Hastings."

They shook hands, and then Rutledge got to the point. "I've been sent here in your place. I hope you have no objections."

"Not really, although I'm not happy to have a murderer loose so close to Hastings. I hope your appearance on the scene doesn't drive him to greener pastures."

Rutledge smiled. "Indeed. Know anything about Eastfield that would be useful to an outsider coming in?"

"Only that it's never been a problem. The usual village troubles-a fight now and again, petty theft, neighbors upset over real or imagined trespass, domestic quarrels where someone is hurt. A lorry accident or two over the years. They're mostly peaceful, and Walker is a good man. He keeps his patch quiet. Still, all three men were in the war. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's your connection."

"There was an entire company from Eastfield. But Anthony Pierce wasn't one of them."

"No, I'd heard he asked not to be given charge of men he knew. Very wise of him, in my opinion. Harder to keep order and discipline if you grew up with your men."

"Or sometimes easier," Rutledge commented.

"There's that as well," Norman answered. "Still, it doesn't mean that this trouble didn't stem from the war. I expect Anthony Pierce kept an eye out for the Eastfield men. If there was something to hide, he'd have known it. Or someone thought he did. Otherwise, why put an ordinary soldier's identity disc in an officer's mouth?"

Which was a very good point.

Norman prepared to take his leave. "Just keep this bottled up in Eastfield," he said. "And if there's anything I can do, let me know."

With a nod, he walked past Rutledge and was gone.

Rutledge found himself thinking that Norman had wasted no time in coming here to look over the competition. He hadn't been in Eastfield more than a few hours. It occurred to him to wonder who had alerted Inspector Norman to his arrival.

Hamish said unexpectedly, "Someone who doesna' like yon Mr. Pierce's intervention." R utledge spent the next hour reading through the statements he'd been given, and they were all consistent with what he'd learned during the morning. Apparently no one had left the pub within half an hour of the time Jeffers walked out of it to his death. And no one in the Roper household had heard anything that would have indicated that someone had been prowling around the barn the night Roper was killed. The old dog on the floor by the bedside of the dead man's father had slept as soundly as his master, his hearing diminished by age.

"Going deaf as a post," the woman who cleaned and cooked for the two men had told Walker. "Both of them." But she herself had heard nothing.

As for the foreman who had discovered Anthony Pierce's body the next morning, he had written that he'd found the outer door shut and hadn't seen Pierce until he had come in and turned toward the stairs.

"Mr. Anthony had gone there to see to a broken gauge, because I found my tools had been moved when finally I went up the stairs to have a look at it again myself."

Which indicated, Rutledge thought, that Pierce had been killed on his way out of the brewery rather than on his way in. No one had been lying in wait for him, but it was likely that someone had followed him there and, finding the door unlocked, stepped inside.

He went out after finishing the statements and walked first to the place on the Hastings Road where the van driver had come upon the body of William Jeffers.

There was nothing to be seen here, but Rutledge had no trouble finding the spot from the description given by the driver.

Standing there on the quiet stretch of road, Rutledge looked around. There was a farmhouse some hundred yards away, but Walker-very thorough in his thinking-had interviewed the family living there. Unfortunately their bedroom windows were on the far side of the farmhouse, and they had not seen or heard anything. Except for tending to a child with a fever who had cried at half past three in the morning, they had slept soundly.

There were shrubs along the side of the road that marched toward the farmhouse lane, and pastures on the far side. The Jeffers house was beyond these, tall, spare, and jutting from the fields like a sore tooth.

"A perfect place for an ambush," Hamish remarked as Rutledge scanned the surrounding landscape.

Next he went to the Roper farm, walking down the lane past the house and to the barn where the murder had taken place. There was no one about, although clothes hung on the line, drying in the warm afternoon sun, and so Rutledge went inside the barn. There were bloodstains on the floor where Jimmy Roper had died, but any footprints that might have been there at the time of the murder had long since been lost as first the maid and then the elder Roper had walked round the body, and then the constable himself, followed by the doctor, not to mention whoever had led away the cow that had been in the now empty stall.

His next stop was the brewery, but before going there Rutledge paused at the hotel to ask where the nearest telephone was to be found.

He was told there was only one telephone in Eastfield, and that was in the office of Tyrell Pierce.

Making his way there again, Rutledge stopped briefly at the door that led into the two-story building where the great wooden kettles were housed, and opened it. The stairs were not ten feet from the door, leading upward into the richly scented heart of the building. Someone had conscientiously swabbed up Anthony Pierce's blood, but the location was marked by the very clean spot on the floorboards where abrasives had been necessary to reach deep into the stained wood.

Standing outside again, Rutledge considered the three murder scenes. All they had in common was their solitude at the time of the killings. But someone had followed each man to his death, and that meant someone had been in Eastfield on each occasion-whether he had been noticed by anyone or not.

Hamish said, "Aye, but he canna' materialize out of thin air. Where does he keep himsel' when he's no' prowling about in the dark?"

It would lead someone to believe that the killer lived in Eastfield…

Rutledge left the thought there and walked briskly toward the door leading to the brewery's office.

It was a busy room, bright and cluttered with paperwork, with some half dozen clerks dealing with orders for Arrow beers or placing orders for everything from hops to bottle labels, and there was no privacy at all.

The senior clerk, a man named Starret, led him to the telephone on his desk, then stepped away to let Rutledge use it.

He put through a call to London, and after a time was connected to the Yard. It was another five minutes before Sergeant Gibson was found.

"Yes, sir?" he answered warily.

"I'd like to find out what became of the following men after the war, and I'd like to know if there was anything particular in their records that might have an impact on the murders here in Sussex. Did their paths cross that of the Eastfield Company or of any individual in that company?"

He had written the three names, their ranks and regiments, in his notebook, taken from the discs that Dr. Gooding had retrieved during his examinations.

Gibson repeated them, and then said, "It will be a day or two. Shall I ring you at this number when I've learned anything?"

Rutledge told Gibson how to reach him, and then was on the point of hanging up when Gibson said, "There's been a complaint to the Chief Constable in regard to the Yard taking over this case."

"Indeed?" Rutledge asked in surprise.

"A Mrs. Farrell-Smith, sir."

He remembered the name. She was the woman Anthony Pierce had been seeing recently. But why would she complain to the Chief Constable? He asked Gibson that, careful to phrase his question in a fashion that half a dozen listening ears couldn't interpret and gossip about.

"I can't say, sir. Except that she appears to feel it was unnecessarily complicating matters."

Rutledge thanked him and hung up.

He thanked the clerk as well, and went out the way he'd come in. There was a private staircase to Pierce's office as well as a door leading into it from the clerks' room, and for a moment Rutledge debated speaking to Pierce. He changed his mind and went out into the street.

Constable Walker was surprised when Rutledge walked into the police station and asked directions to Mrs. Farrell-Smith's house.

"I didn't interview her-" he began in apology, but Rutledge cut him short

"She might know something that Anthony Pierce didn't tell his father. It's a long shot, but worth exploring."

"Shall I go with you, sir?" Walker asked, half rising from his chair.

"No. I don't want this to appear to be an official visit. Merely a matter of being thorough."

"I see," Walker said, but Rutledge thought he didn't.

The Misses Tate Latin School was at the head of Spencer Street. Two houses had been connected by an addition that closed the gap between them, apparently by someone who knew what he was about, because the results were pleasing, rather than haphazard. A central door had been let into the addition, but Walker had said that Mrs. Farrell-Smith had chosen to live in the smaller house to one side of the school, and that she could usually be found there at this hour of the day.

He went up the pair of steps leading to the walk and the door, and was let in by a young girl in a school uniform, her hair hanging down her back and held away from her face by a blue ribbon. She was quite pretty, and meticulously polite, asking him to wait in the hall while she inquired if Mrs. Farrell-Smith would receive him.

She disappeared through a door to the left of the staircase and returned with a smile, asking him to come in. He had wondered if Mrs. Farrell-Smith would speak to him, given her complaint to the Chief Constable.

The girl announced him, then went away, closing the door softly behind her.

The room had been turned into a private office, with bookshelves and chairs set in front of a lovely old desk of well-polished walnut. At the moment, it was cluttered with papers and folders, some of them held in place by a large, chipped glass paperweight, as if she had been recording marks or sorting files before the start of a new term.

The woman behind it rose as he came in. She was tall for a woman, and far prettier than she allowed herself to be. Her hair, pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck, was fair and determined to wave in spite of attempts to keep it straight and tidy. Her eyes were a very dark blue, and her nose was straight above firm lips. He put her age at thirty.

"Inspector Rutledge," she said in acknowledgment of his presence, then waited for him to speak.

"I've come to ask you a few questions about Anthony Pierce," he said, and she seemed to find that surprising, because her eyebrows flew up in spite of her self-control.

"Please, be seated," she replied, and when he had taken one of the two chairs before the desk, she said, "What sort of questions?"

"I expect there were things he wouldn't have discussed with his father. But I was told he'd grown fond of you, and I thought perhaps he might have said something to you that could help the police find his killer."

"I don't think Anthony confided in me anything he couldn't have told his father." After a pause, when he didn't speak, she went on, as if unwilling to allow the silence to go on too long. "Are you saying he had secrets?"

"That's what I've come to ask."

"You believe that he knew where to find his brother. If he did, he never told me."

Rutledge was surprised in his turn. "Daniel?"

"Yes, Daniel. His father is too stubborn to try, but I expect he'd like to know where his other son is."

"I take it you don't care for Daniel."

"Not particularly. He's the sort of person who leaves responsibility to others. I believe in responsibility and self-discipline. I try to make certain that my students understand that these are virtues to cultivate. They will lead happier lives if they do."

It was an interesting perspective on duty.

Hamish interjected, "Aye, but is it the reason she's so set against yon brother?"

Rutledge said only, "How long have you been in charge of the school?"

"Since before the war," she answered, without giving a date. And then she added reluctantly, "It was after my husband died that I came here."

"You must have been very young to take over a school. It would have been a grave undertaking at any age."

She lifted her chin, as if in denial. "I didn't have any choice. And I have made every effort to live up to what my family established. I don't think I've given them any reason to regret their decision to entrust this school to my keeping."

He changed the subject. "Did your husband know Daniel Pierce?" It had been a general question, looking for an explanation for her dislike of the younger Pierce. But much to his surprise, it had struck home.

"I don't see that that's any of your business," she replied curtly.

"Which tells me that he did. Was it before you married him? Or after?"

"He was an older boy at the school where both Anthony and Daniel were sent."

"Then you didn't know them."

"No." Crisp and unconditional.

Rutledge considered her for a moment. She had married a man with a hyphenated name. As a schoolboy would he have despised the upstart-but well-to-do-Pierce brothers? Trade and old money often clashed. Or perhaps there had been very little old money. And the widowed Mrs. Farrell-Smith was now headmistress at a small school in a Sussex village where there was almost nothing that could be termed Society. It would explain why she was willing to accept Anthony Pierce's attentions. Trade or not, there was a comfortable life in store for the brewery heir's wife.

Again, he changed the direction of the conversation. "Did Anthony Pierce have any enemies? From the war, most particularly."

"Why the war years?" she asked, her mind nearly as quick as his to spot anomaly. "Did something happen there that might have had to do with his death?"

In his mind's eye he could see again the identity discs found in the mouths of the dead men. "We have some reason to believe it could have a connection. Yes."

"If there was anything untoward that happened in France, Anthony never confided in me. I don't believe he would have, if you want the truth. He knew I didn't care for unpleasantness." She must have realized how selfish that sounded and added in spite of herself, "We had a number of students over those four years who marched away to war and never came back. There's a list of their names on a board in the school parlor, for all to see and remember. Anthony knew how much this had saddened me."

He thought her self-control remarkable for a woman who had just lost a man she cared for. For that matter, her eyes showed no signs of crying herself to sleep, even though it was only two days ago that Pierce's body had been discovered.

And as if she had read his thought, tears welled in her eyes. "If there's nothing more, Inspector? I find this a very painful subject."

Hamish said, "She's afraid yon brother killed him."

It would explain her very first question to him: not about Anthony's death but in regard to Daniel's whereabouts.

But he left it there. "If anything occurs to you, Mrs. Farrell-Smith, will you speak to Constable Walker? He'll see that the message reaches me."

"Yes, of course." Her voice was husky. "You can find your own way out, I think?"

He thanked her and rose to leave.

The image he took away from the interview that stayed with him as he walked back to the hotel was of her face as he glanced back at her just before closing the door.

Desolation was writ large there. But for herself, he thought, not for the dead. T he long day was drawing to a close when Rutledge went back to the police station, intending to return the sheaf of statements.

Walker was standing by a window, looking out at the last shafts of light that touched the rooftops on the opposite side of the street, and he turned to greet Rutledge as the man from London stepped through the door.

"Any progress?" he asked.

"Not much that's helpful. Tomorrow, I'd like to speak to some of the other men from Eastfield's contingent. Can you arrange it?"

"That's easily done," Walker said, but his mind was clearly on something else.

"What is it?" Rutledge asked, suddenly alert. "What's happened?"

"That's just it. Nothing has happened. So far. But tonight's the third night after Pierce was murdered. I'm wondering if that will change, once darkness falls."

"I see your point. The problem is, our friend out there has the advantage. He has a better knowledge of where and when to strike, because he's obviously laid his plans well. Otherwise you and Inspector Norman would have caught him without my help. All you can expect to do is get in his way and force him to alter those plans. That means patrolling not the village itself but back gardens, barnyards, the brewery precincts, the lanes, anywhere a man might be outside alone. Meanwhile, I'd ask everyone to stay in after dark."

"I don't know if he'll alter his plans, or just wait until we've passed by," Walker said, clearly still worried. "It depends, doesn't it, on what's driving the man?"

"Yes, I grant you that. Garroting is a very physical way to kill. More so even than a knife. Whoever it is may not be able to stop, now that he's started. Unless he only intended to kill those three men. No one else."

"There's that," Walker answered, considering the matter. "Although for the life of me I can't see how they're connected."

"It may only be in the murderer's mind," Rutledge said.

Walker turned to him in surprise. "I hadn't considered that."

"It's possible that whoever it is uses a garrote because the face of the victim isn't important," Rutledge said.

But that would indicate random killings.