Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

“Perhaps he thought Sir John might refuse to receive him, if he used his own name.”

Frowning, she shook her head. “I expect that was so. Still …” She left the word hanging, and busied herself taking down cups and saucers, retrieving the sugar bowl from the cupboard, then walking into the pantry for the jug of milk.

“You’ve cleaned for Sir John these many years. Did he have anything in this house worth stealing? I don’t count money. Or gold cuff-links. Something of great value. Something that would make killing him worthwhile?”

Because Dr Barnes hadn’t the money to restore Trafalgar, whatever he might claim about time.

“I can’t think that there was. Some of his books? I don’t know about such things, but someone else might.”

“It didn’t appear that there were books missing.”

“That’s true,” she agreed. “I’m used to dusting them. They’re all there save one.”

Rutledge took the Barnes family history from his pocket. “My doing, that. I needed to show someone the photograph in the front.”

“I’ll see it’s in its rightful place,” she said, moving the book aside and setting down his cup of tea. “There’s a bit of chocolate sponge cake, if you’d like that,” she told Rutledge. “I made it for my dinner.”

He thanked her, but refused. After a moment she sat down across from him. “There are the weapons between the photographs, in the study. But none of them was taken.”

Not even all of them would raise the sum needed to restore Trafalgar. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “If it were robbery, it would be for something worth thousands of pounds. Not a few hundred.”

She nodded. “I worry, sometimes,” she said, looking away as if embarrassed. “If I’d been here that day — or come back from the greengrocers a little sooner — could I have prevented what happened? I know you told me I might well have become a victim too. But it weighs on my mind, you see. I needn’t have gone into Mumford that day. His dinner would have been all right without that onion.”

“I doubt it,” he told her bracingly. “Most killers would wait for their chance. If you hadn’t left that day, you would have left on another.”

Hamish said, “It’s a kind lie.”

He went through the study and the parlour again, looking for something missing — some explanation for why a man had to die — knowing very well that Mrs Gravely would have noticed and brought it to his attention long ago.

It was all as he’d seen it the first time. The tidiness of the soldier, used to Spartan conditions. The collector of books, most of them on warfare, Cambridge, even India. The husband, who loved his second wife and kept her portrait where he could see it, but who bore no grudge against his first wife, headstrong though she may have been. The fastidious man who was always freshly shaven and carefully dressed, judging by the body.

Rutledge went back to the bookshelves, and ran his finger down the line of titles. Nothing out of the ordinary. Several volumes: William the Conqueror, Henry II, Edwards I and III. Soldiers all — in the days when kings led their men into battle. The tactics of the American general Robert E. Lee. The strategies of Napoleon.

He stopped and pulled out one of the books at random. As he opened it, something fell out and drifted lightly to the floor.

Stooping to pick it up, he saw that it was an article cut from a newspaper, yellowed and thin.

It was about the destruction of the Great Mews of Whitehall Palace. The stables of Edward I and his predecessors. This had been done early in the eighteenth century, when the ramshackle mews was more of an eyesore than it was useful. Rutledge glanced at the spine of the book and saw it was a biography of Edward I. The cutting was well before Sir John’s time and, turning to the end covers, he saw that the name inscribed there in an ornate bookplate was that of Sir Robert Middleton. Father? Grandfather? Uncle?

He set the book aside and picked up the Bible. Searching the list of births and deaths, he realized that Sir Robert was a great-grandfather of Sir John’s. Not a contemporary of the destruction of the royal mews, but Sir Robert had been alive in the first part of the nineteenth century when various architects, including the famous Nash, had taken on the task of creating a square that would fit into the overall view of a new and spacious London. The name given to the finished square came from the column bearing the statue of Admiral Nelson: Trafalgar Square. But as Hillier, the Dartmouth bookseller had said, it had been among the last of the memorials to Lord Nelson.

Interesting; but it was, as Hamish was reminding him, decades in the past. Hardly pertinent to a murder in 1920.

Glancing at his watch, Rutledge saw that it was half past one o’clock in the morning. The house was quiet, and he thought perhaps Mrs Gravely had gone up to her bed. Still, he sat down at a table in the parlour and read the faded cutting. It told him very little more. Picking up the book, he thumbed through the pages, looking for any reference to the Royal Mews. There was nothing of interest. He went back to the study, searched for other books on Edward I, and carried them into the parlour. Had it been only coincidence that the cutting was in that particular history?

It was close on five when Mrs Gravely came in with sandwiches and a pot of tea. He ate absently, his mind on the hunt. When she came to take away his plate and cup, she said, looking over his shoulder, “He must have loved that book. I can’t count the times I’d find it on his desk when I was dusting.”

Rutledge turned to see what she was pointing to. A slim volume bound in worn leather, printed a hundred years ago.

It was written by a man called Baker, and it purported to offer an account of the crusade the then Prince Edward Longshanks made to the Holy Land. He had already turned homeward in 1272 when he learned of the death of his father, Henry III, and that he was now King. He was two years in reaching England to be crowned. Legend claimed that with him he brought a small gold reliquary, encrusted with precious stones and containing a piece of the True Cross. It remained with him through the early years of his reign — although it was more common to give such relics to a church in thanksgiving for a safe return. As he’d been sickly as a child, it was thought he kept the relic for his own protection. But when it failed to save his dying Queen, Eleanor of Castile, in a ferocious fit of temper, he ordered it buried in the largest dung pit in the stables.

According to Baker, it had been lost to history from that time forward, until a workman had discovered it during the demolition of the stables in the eighteenth century. The man had shown it to his brother-in-law, a yeoman farmer in Kent, who paid him handsomely for it, and the object had remained in the farmer’s family, passing from father to elder son in each generation. It had become known, Baker went on, as the Middleton Host, although the family had denied any knowledge of it, and with time, the Host and the family itself had been lost to history. The remodelling of the land once occupied by the stables had revived the tale, but Baker had been unable to prove whether the tale was true or not. He had contacted a number of families by the name of Middleton in Kent and elsewhere, but had failed to find any trace of the story.

Rutledge sat back, considering what he’d just read. Then he rose and went back to the study to look at the small wooden box by the bookshelves.

There was no way of knowing what it had contained. Even Mrs Gravely, when questioned, had no idea what had been kept inside — if anything. She had dusted it, but never opened it.

But suppose — just suppose — it had held the Middleton Host.