Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

There was the entry for Middleton’s first marriage and, in darker ink but the same hand years later, his second. Entries also of his wives’ deaths.

Althea Margaret Barnes Middleton, of cholera, he read, with the date and Calcutta, India after it.

And then, in a hand that was shaking with grief, Elizabeth Alice Mowbray Middleton, in childbirth. Under that, John Francis Mowbray Middleton, stillborn.

Putting the Bible back where he found it, Rutledge began to go through the desk drawers. Two of them held sheets of foolscap. He realized that Sir John had been writing his memoirs of the Great War. Glancing through the sheaf of pages, he saw that Middleton had just reached the Somme, in 1916. The next chapter was headed, Bloodbath . He quickly returned the stack to the drawers, then paused to consider the possibility that Sir John had been killed to stop him from finishing the manuscript. But if that was the case, why leave the pages here, to be found — and possibly completed — by someone else?

Hamish said, “Was it unfinished, or is part missing?”

“I can’t be sure.” He made a mental note to speak to Harris about the manuscript.

The rest of the desk held nothing of interest, and the bookshelves appeared to be just that — shelves of books the dead man had collected over a lifetime, with no apparent secrets among them.

He saw the small box on a reading table next to the bookshelves, and picked it up. It was very old, he thought, and inlaid with what appeared to be ivory and mother of pearl. Opening it, he looked inside. It was lined with worn silk, but otherwise empty.

As he was putting it back in place, a title in gilt lettering on the shelf by the table caught his eye, and he frowned. A History of The Barnes Family.

That was the maiden name of Sir John’s first wife. He pulled the volume from the shelf and looked at the title page. There was an inscription on the opposite page: To Althea, with much love, Papa. The frontispiece was a painting of a house standing at the edge of what appeared to be a lake, Georgian and foursquare, with a terrace overlooking a narrow garden that ran down to a small boat-landing, jutting out into the water. Rutledge turned the book on its side to read the caption.

Trafalgar. Dartmouth, Devon.

He turned to the index, and looked for the name there. There were several references to the house as well as the battle. The house, he discovered on page 75, was built in Dartmouth in 1800, on the site of an earlier dwelling, and rechristened Trafalgar after the head of the family had served on HMS Victory , Nelson’s flagship on that fateful day. The water in front of the house was Dartmouth Harbour.

Going in search of the rector, Rutledge found him having tea with Mrs Gravely. Harris stood as Rutledge came into the kitchen, saying, “What is it?”

“Just a few more questions,” Rutledge said easily. “What do you know about Althea Middleton?”

“Very little,” Harris admitted. “Only what Sir John told me over the years.”

“Her family is from Dartmouth.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I told you she had lived near Torquay. Not surprising. Her father was a Navy man — like his father before him apparently — and probably his father’s father as well, for all I know.” He smiled wryly. “Sir John told me once that her father was appalled that she had fallen in love with an army officer. He had felt that nothing less than a Naval captain would suit.”

“One of her ancestors served aboard Victory .”

“Did he indeed! I don’t think Sir John ever mentioned that fact. Just that hers was a naval family and he’d enjoyed more than a few arguments with her father about sea power and the course of the Empire.”

“Sir John also appears to have been writing a history of the Great War.”

“He always said he was tempted to write about his experiences. I didn’t know he’d actually begun. It would have been worth reading, his view of the war.”

Mrs Gravely said, “A history? He liked to work of an evening, after his dinner. I wasn’t to disturb him then, he said. He was a great reader. I never gave it another thought on mornings when I found the study floor littered with his atlases and notes.”

Rutledge turned back to Harris. “Who lives in the Barnes house in Dartmouth now?”

“There’s a house? I had no idea. Let me see, there was something said once, about Althea Middleton having had a brother. But, as I remember, he was disinherited. And Barnes himself died whilst his daughter was in India.”

“Then it must have been his daughter who inherited the property, and it passed to Sir John at her death.” He would ask Sergeant Gibson at the Yard to look into the matter. “His solicitor is the same as mine,” Harris told him, and gave Rutledge directions to the firm in Mumford.

“Would you care for a cup of tea, Mr Rutledge?” Mrs Gravely asked. “I was just about to make a fresh pot.”

“Thank you, no,” he said. “Has anyone come to call on Sir John in the past few weeks?”

“Not since before Christmas,” she answered him. “And then it was a man who’d lost his foot in the war and had been given a wooden one in its place. I heard him come up the walk, because it made an odd sound. A thump it was, and then a lighter sound, as he put his cane down with the good foot. The old dog growled something fierce, and I had to hold on to his collar when I went to the door.”

A cane. The murder weapon hadn’t been found, the likelihood being that the killer had taken it away with him. A cane could have done the damage to Middleton’s head and face, if wielded with enough force.

“Do you remember his name?”

“He didn’t give it, sir. He said, ‘Tell Sir John it’s an old comrade in arms.’ And I did as he asked. Sir John went to see for himself, while I took the old dog into the kitchen with me.”

Was that why the dog had been put outside? Because he knew — and disliked — the killer?

Rutledge thanked her and went back to his search of the house. There was money in a wallet in the bedside table, but it had not been touched. Nor had the gold cuff-links in a box on the tall chest by the bedroom door. What had the killer been after, if not robbery?

Trafalgar? A property in Dartmouth?

The deed.

Rutledge left to find a telephone, and had to drive into Cambridge before he was successful. He put in a call to Sergeant Gibson at the Yard, and gave him a list of what he needed.

“I’m driving to Dartmouth,” he said. “I’ll find a telephone there as soon as I arrive.”

“To Dartmouth?” Gibson repeated doubtfully. “You know your own business best.”

“Let’s hope I do,” Rutledge replied. He left a message with the Cambridge police, and set out to skirt London to the southwest.

It was early on the third day that he arrived in Dartmouth, having spent two nights on the road after running short of petrol near Slough. Colourful houses spilled down the sides of the high ridge that overlooked the town and the water. Most of them were still dark at this hour. Across the harbour was the town of Kingswear, just as dark. He found a hotel on a quiet side street, a narrow building with three floors, its façade black and white half-timbering. The sleepy clerk, yawning prodigiously, gave him a room at the front of the hotel with a view of the harbour. He stood by the window for some time, looking down towards the quay and the dark water, dotted with boats silently riding the current.

The Dart River opened up here to form the harbour, and castles — ruins now — had once guarded the entrance to this safe haven. It was deep enough for ships, and wide enough for a ferry to convey passengers from one side to the other. Just whereabouts the house called Trafalgar was situated, he didn’t know. He hoped the hotel clerk might.