Charles Todd - A Bitter Truth

“That’s an interesting theory.”

At first I thought Simon was being facetious, but when I glanced up at his face, I saw that he was in fact agreeing with me.

“Since we’re confessing, there’s the marble kitten as well.”

Inspector Rother was expecting us. He said as we walked into the police station, “Thank you for coming so early. I’d like you to tell me again about finding the body of Lieutenant Hughes,” he said. “I know what’s in your statement, but perhaps you’ve forgot a detail.”

I didn’t think I had. But I repeated my account of our search for George, and how I’d come to follow Mrs. Ellis into the church and then down the overgrown path.

He listened, then asked me, “You heard nothing-rooks calling? Birds flying up?-to indicate that someone else was nearby, while you were searching for the Lieutenant?”

“No, the wood around us was quiet. Besides, I touched the Lieutenant’s hand. He had been killed some time before we found his body. Even accounting for the cold morning and the cold water in the stream.”

“You weren’t aware that there’s a shortcut from St. Mary’s Church to Vixen Hill?”

Surprised, I said, “No. I didn’t know that.”

“It isn’t suitable for motorcars, of course. But anyone from Vixen Hill could walk to Wych Gate and back again inside half an hour. Less, on horseback.” He drew a rough map on the sheet of paper in front of him, and I could see that he was right. The house was set to connect with the track from Hartfield, but if one knew the way, from the knot garden there was another, smaller track that cut cross-country. Had George taken it? Had his killer?

“We can turn it another way,” the Inspector went on, holding up his hand, ticking off the points on his fingers.

“Mrs. Roger Ellis is struck by someone, and has already run away once to London-the stationmaster and the woman who gave her a lift there have confirmed this. She returns home with a friend, and shortly afterward, her husband has words with the victim about a child he fathered while in France, and early the next morning, Mrs. Roger Ellis goes into Hartfield to speak to Davis Merrit. Afterward she packs her cases and prepares to leave again. According to the driver of the station carriage, she was very anxious not to miss that train. So much so that she was short with her mother-in-law. And with you. Was she expecting to meet Lieutenant Merrit at the station? After he’d killed George Hughes? Why didn’t she want you to go down that narrow path to the stream? Did she already know that a dead man lay at the end of it?”

“If she had intended to run away with Lieutenant Merrit, why had she asked me to accompany her to London?”

“For the sake of propriety, I should think,” he countered.

“I can’t think why Lydia Ellis would wish to kill George Hughes.”

“In the expectation that her husband would be blamed, and she would be free to remarry.”

“Yes, well, Davis Merrit should have thought of that before he handed Lieutenant Hughes’s watch to that man Willy.”

“I expect our friend Willy was supposed to tell the police that Roger Ellis had given him the watch.”

That was an interesting supposition. It was clear that the police had put the last five days to good use, coming up with the ramifications of finding Davis Merrit’s body.

Simon had put two and two together as well. “Are you saying that Merrit killed himself when everything went wrong?”

Distracted, I was thinking of the message in the umbrella. Meet me…

Perhaps I’d been wrong. Perhaps it had been a last desperate attempt by the Lieutenant to reach Lydia. Only I found it instead, and then the Inspector was waiting in the churchyard when services ended. And Merrit had to leave quickly.

I nearly shook my head, answering my own question. I hadn’t been wrong. But who had sent it?

Inspector Rother was already replying to Simon. “It’s likely.”

All his conclusions had a ring of truth-but I knew Mrs. Ellis and Lydia and even Davis Merrit better than the Inspector could do. Why would Mrs. Ellis put her own son in jeopardy by killing George Hughes less than twelve hours from the time he’d confronted Roger in the drawing room? Wouldn’t she have been glad of the child, rather than angry? And Lydia was too impulsive to be included in any convoluted plot to make the police believe her husband had killed his friend. Even the little I’d seen and heard about Davis Merrit didn’t match the picture of an obsessed lover who killed himself when his plans went awry. But that left Roger himself, didn’t it?

I was trying to order my thoughts, to make certain that what I was about to say made sense.

“Inspector, I don’t think you’ve brought me here to speculate about the Ellis family’s motives for murder. I think what you really want to know is if you can clear them, and open the inquiry in an entirely different direction. For instance, in the direction of William Pryor-Willy.”

“There’s still Roger Ellis. Who could have killed both men, to rid himself of the erstwhile friend who knew too much about his affair in France and the blind man his wife had been seeing too much of in his absence.”

“But George had already told everyone about the affair. Captain Ellis had no right to be jealous, did he?”

He gave me a sour smile. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

“Was the body of Davis Merrit too decomposed for you to be completely satisfied that he’d killed himself?” Simon asked.

He looked up at Simon. “You have a most inconvenient mind,” he said. “I have a dead man with a spent bullet under his remains, his service revolver in what is left of his hand, but no marks on the skeleton to tell me where the bullet entered, and where it came out. I can find no one who has heard a single gunshot out on the heath. And there is some small indication that the man was throttled, but we can’t be certain of that because foxes and rooks were at the body.”

“And no way of knowing precisely when the Lieutenant died,” I added to the list.

“You and Captain Ellis left the Forest on the same day. Merrit must have been dead by then.”

And Mrs. Ellis was already on her way to the station to meet her returning son.

“So it isn’t Willy you’re looking at, but Roger Ellis,” I said. “You used us.”

He could hear the disgust in my voice, and answered coldly, “I have a murder case to solve, Sister Crawford, and my best suspect is dead. If he killed himself, all well and good, but if he did not, then our murderer has two deaths on his conscience.”

“If he has a conscience,” I replied. “Have you finished with me? Am I allowed to return to France? I’m needed there.”

“You are needed here as well. Would you be willing to return to Vixen Hill?”

“No,” Simon answered for me. “The Colonel would be furious if you put his daughter in harm’s way.”

“Besides which,” I added, “Roger Ellis may not want me there.” In spite of the time we had spent together in that little bistro in Rouen, he wouldn’t want me to tell Lydia he was also searching for Sophie.

“I think,” Inspector Rother said dryly, “the person who would most dislike having you there is the senior Mrs. Ellis.”

“Gran?” I repeated.

“Quite,” he answered. “She has been throwing sand in my eyes since the moment I arrived at Vixen Hill, busily protecting her grandson. And you see far too clearly for her comfort. I have just verified that myself.”

I remembered Lydia’s letter to me in France. Everyone had sent me Christmas wishes-except for Gran.

I had no intention of returning to Vixen Hill. I didn’t want to spy for the police. What’s more, on our way back to Hartfield, I had all but promised Simon that I wouldn’t consider it.