Charles Todd - A Bitter Truth

Roger turned to me and said, “I told you!” Then he said to his mother, “Where? Where did they find him? Not here, not in the Forest. You wrote that the police had searched the Forest from one end to the other.”

“In The Pitch,” I said before I could stop myself. “I think that’s where.”

“Good God.”

Mrs. Ellis turned to me. “I don’t think you’ve been there. It’s a low saucer of land that has become quite boggy over the years, particularly in winter, with the rains. I remember Roger’s grandfather showing it to me and telling me that when the King was too old to ride, he and his men would stand in that dip of ground and wait for the deer to be driven past them.”

“Perhaps half a mile from the church. From St. Mary’s,” Roger said. “Only it’s rough going there. Still, I don’t see how-do they know how he died?”

“They never admitted he was dead. I told you,” his mother answered.

Lydia had walked into the hall. She must have seen or heard the motorcar arrive and had come down to meet me.

She stopped. “Who is dead?”

“We think it’s Davis Merrit, my dear,” Mrs. Ellis told her. “We think they’ve found him at last.”

Her face lost its color. “Oh, I’m so sorry. He had handled his blindness so well. It was amazing to me how he got about. I never believed he killed George.” She turned to Roger. “Is this why they’ve reopened the inquiry?”

Roger Ellis had been watching his wife closely. “You must ask the police that.” He turned away, his mouth tight, and went up the stairs.

Lydia closed her eyes for a moment, then said to me with a forced smile. “I’m so glad you could come. Mama Ellis was closeted with the Inspector, and Roger volunteered to go to Hartfield in her place.”

Because he needed to be sure he could count on my silence about Rouen. But I said, “That was kind of him.”

“Yes, I told you he’d changed. Well. Let me take you up to your room. It’s the same one.”

She caught up my valise and was holding the door as I thanked Mrs. Ellis for letting me stay.

She said, a sadness in her eyes, “We’re all in this together, aren’t we? I can’t help but wonder where it will end.”

With the arrest of her son? Or was she fearful for herself?

I followed Lydia up the stairs. On the landing, we encountered Gran. She looked at me with surprise and displeasure. I could guess that no one had told her I was coming back to Vixen Hill.

“Mrs. Ellis,” I said, smiling politely, and walked on.

“I can’t think why Gran is so cold to me,” I said, when we were in my room and the door had shut behind us. “What have I done to upset her?”

“I expect she feels you’ve let down your sex and your class by taking up nursing. She’s very old-fashioned, is Gran.”

“Many of the nursing sisters in Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service are women of the middle and upper classes. We’re said to look down on the Australian nurses, who sometimes aren’t. Although I haven’t seen any of that. We’re far too grateful for help to quibble. Australian, American, English, we all save lives.”

“Yes, well, Gran gave Inspector Rother an earful this morning.” Lydia grinned, remembering. “He was asking her how well she knew Davis, and she told him he could take his suspicious mind elsewhere, that she had not known Davis either in the biblical sense or the literal sense of the word.”

I had to laugh, picturing their faces as the Inspector and the indomitable Gran squared off.

“What was his reply?”

“He turned as red as a sugar beet and stalked off.” Her smile faded. “But he came to see me after that and wanted to know what my relationship with Davis had been. I told him I counted myself a friend, which is exactly what I’d said before.”

Daisy summoned us to our luncheon soon after that, and we were all, I was surprised to see, gathered at the table. But we ate our meal in silence, and afterward I was taken up to the room above the hall to meet Bluebell, Davis Merrit’s cat.

Bluebell was wary of me-I think she still missed her former life, and I was another stranger in her eyes, bent on taking her away from where she belonged. But Lydia had thought to bring the cat’s favorite cushion, and soon Bluebell curled up on that and ignored us.

Lydia said, “I can’t believe Davis is dead. I wish the police would tell us-did he take his own life because of his eyes, or did he really murder George? Will they clear his name? If they’ve been wrong about him?”

“To clear his name, they must arrest someone else.”

“Oh.”

An hour later Margaret arrived, her face drawn with worry. “I haven’t heard from Henry in three weeks,” she said as she greeted her mother and grandmother. “And there were two soldiers from his sector who came through London last night in the train of wounded. One of the women bringing the men coffee and fresh bandages told me. They couldn’t ask either man for news of Henry. They were too heavily sedated. I should have stayed at home, where I can be reached. Has anyone contacted you, Mama?”

“Henry is all right, my dear,” Mrs. Ellis answered her. “I’m sure of it. Now come in and have some tea. I’m so glad you’re here with us.”

For the next three days Inspector Rother was in and out of the house, taking one or the other of us aside and either going over and over old ground or asking new questions based on whatever he had learned. Sparing no one, not even the distraught Margaret.

I had my share of the Inspector’s attention. I was asked if I knew where everyone in the house was that morning when Mrs. Ellis and I set out to search for George Hughes.

I thought I had seen everyone. But after another round of questioning, probing, trying to trick me, I began to doubt my own memory.

Gran took to her room, angry and refusing to have anything more to do with the police. Daisy took to leaving trays of food outside her door. Sometimes they remained untouched.

And I had another worry on my mind. Simon hadn’t returned, although he’d told me he would be a day, two at the most. I wondered where he was and what was keeping him. I’d have liked to know too what if anything he’d been able to discover about William Pryor.

Tensions were running high in the house. Roger Ellis lost his temper twice to my knowledge, sending Lydia to her room over the hall in tears the first time, and upsetting his mother the second time. Word from the Front, what we were able to hear of it, was not good, and Roger chafed at being here when he was sorely needed in France. To his credit, he did make some telephone calls from Hartfield to see what he could discover about Henry, but there was no news at all.

“Which is reassuring,” Mrs. Ellis told her daughter. “Take it as a good thing, my dear.”

But Margaret shook her head and went to her room “for a lie down” she said, but it was to cry. At dinner that night her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, her voice husky.

The morning of the fourth day, Inspector Rother arrived at Vixen Hill and after an hour’s discussion with Roger’s mother, took her away to Wych Gate. Roger was livid when he came home and heard what had transpired in his absence. He set out for Wych Gate straightaway, and when I asked if I could go with him, he was curt.

“No.”

Neither of them had returned in time for lunch, and there was still no news when our tea was brought in at four o’clock. It was already dark as pitch outside when there was a knock at the hall door. We could hear it from the sitting room, as if whoever it was had used his fist.

Lydia went with Molly to answer it, and then came back to where we all waited in anxious silence.

“The hotel clerk from The King’s Head,” she said to me. “There’s a telephone message from your mother. You’re to call her back at once.”