Charles Todd - The Confession

“Dear God.” Fowler seemed to fold into himself, hunched over, almost as if he were in physical pain.

“Why didn’t you tell the police what you suspected when Mrs. Russell vanished?”

Fowler roused himself to stare at Rutledge. “I told you. I hoped it was all my imagination. Besides, the Tilbury police didn’t know about my past. I was afraid that if I told them, they’d think I’d run mad. The Colchester police were suspicious enough. In the beginning, if they could have shown that I’d killed my parents, they would have been very pleased. I was young, but not so young that I didn’t understand where their questions were leading. If I’d reported a body at River’s Edge, what do you think would have happened? I’d have been the chief suspect. I decided to let the fishermen report him for me. Four people dead, Rutledge, and I was present each time. What’s more, I don’t think Tilbury would have any better luck finding the killer than Colchester had done.”

“But they never reported a body.”

“Are you sure? Did you ask that man Nelson? The constable? They should have found him in the shallows. I’d emptied my pockets and put everything in his. I was in such a funk I forgot and left the pounds he was carrying and my own in the wallet.”

“How much money was there?”

“I don’t know. I had almost fifty pounds with me because I was expecting to stay in a hotel in London for a few days. He could have had twenty or so. I cursed myself, I can tell you. That money would have made my disappearance a lot smoother. I dared not touch my inheritance.”

Had Jessup found the corpse-and just as his ancestor had done aboard The Dragonfly, had he taken the pounds and left the body in the water?

Jessup had much to answer for.

“You gave no thought to Finley’s family?”

“He had none. That’s why he went into service. But he was a decent chap, and I thought long and hard about what I was doing. He was still serving us, in a way. And if after the war, Wyatt reopened the house, he’d be all right. Safe.”

Rutledge remembered the man he’d seen at the landing. Looking. Waiting.

After a time he said, “Is there anyone-anyone at all-who could have been stalking your family before they were killed? Anyone you felt the slightest suspicion of?”

“I was eleven.”

“Sometimes children see more clearly.”

“Do you think he would have taken that risk? That he’d be among the people the police interviewed?”

“I’ll have to look through the statements the Colchester police took at the time. Meanwhile, what will you do? Where will you go? Is there a way to contact you?”

“I’ve made a life of sorts for myself. Perhaps not what I’d have wanted, if none of this had happened. But I was content. You can imagine what I felt when I read about Wyatt in the Times. My God, that was a shock, I can tell you. I had to make a choice then. I had to come forward.”

Hamish spoke suddenly in the stillness of the motorcar. “Do ye trust him?”

And Rutledge, weighing all the evidence, wasn’t sure.

“I shall go to Colchester tomorrow and look for the statements. Meanwhile, there’s something you should know.”

He told Fowler about Willet’s visit to the Yard, the accusation he’d made, and his subsequent death.

“He said Wyatt had killed me? But how did he even know I was dead? You said my-the body was never found.”

“A good question.” Had Willet heard something, believed it, and later tried to do the right thing without involving his family? A fisherman’s son, he had a strong connection to the men who lived by the water. He could have heard whispers.

“What are you going to do about me?” Fowler asked after a silence.

“If I ask you to testify, the Army will take you into custody.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Give me a way of reaching you. If I find something, I may need to contact you.”

“If you sent a letter to the Pipes Tobacco shop in Chester, addressed to Finley, it will eventually reach me.”

“Fair enough. It’s late. I’ll take you to a train if you like.”

“Thanks. I’d rather walk.” He got out, thanked Rutledge again, and then said, “I’ve never dealt with such hatred as this. Such evil. You must find him. You know that.”

Rutledge said, thinking about a burning church and the screaming victims inside, “Evil is always there. If we look for it.”

With a nod Fowler walked on. Rutledge watched him go, wondering if he’d done the right thing. Or if he’d made the worst mistake of his career.

In the end, as he started the motorcar, preparing to drive to his sister’s house, he rather thought that he had done the only thing possible in the circumstances.

If he could ignore small-scale smuggling, he could ignore a case of desertion.

But he was still not certain about Fowler, even when he let himself into his sister’s house and climbed the stairs to the room that had once been his.

Hamish said, “Ye didna’ face murder when ye were eleven.”

Rutledge, hanging his clothes in the wardrobe and preparing for bed, tried to put himself in Fowler’s shoes. How would he have felt if he’d been awakened in the night by a murderer, and then barely surviving himself, learned the next morning that his parents had already been killed with the same knife?

It didn’t bear thinking about.

When Rutledge walked into the police station in Colchester, he found that Inspector Robinson was elsewhere investigating a housebreaking. The constable who had been summoned in the inspector’s place didn’t remember the Fowler case-he had come from Suffolk-and spent over an hour searching for it in the cellar archives.

“And you’re quite certain, sir, that the Inspector is willing to allow you to read the file in his absence?”

“He’s knows of Scotland Yard’s interest in these murders.”

He directed Rutledge to a small interview room and ten minutes later reluctantly turned over the box containing the statements taken when Fowler’s parents were killed.

It took Rutledge two hours to sort through the statements. Everyone had been interviewed. The staff in the house, Fowler’s partner, the neighbors, Mr. Harrison, who represented the family, anyone who made deliveries to the house, from the milk van driver to the man who brought the post. Anyone who had worked on the grounds or in the house, from gardeners to painters to the chimney sweep and the coal man.

No one had seen or heard anything. No one knew of any trouble touching the family. The killer had come quietly, finished his work, and left, taking nothing, leaving nothing but death behind.

Hamish said, “If the wife had screamed, and one of the servants had come running, there would ha’ been another murder.”

“Very likely. But I don’t think the killer wanted that.”

He replaced the statements in the box and sorted quickly through the other pieces of evidence in the file. The postmortem report that graphically described the number and placement of the knife wounds in the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Fowler, indicating the savagery of the attack and commenting that Mrs. Fowler’s survival for even a few hours after it had been nothing short of miraculous, although she hadn’t regained consciousness. That was followed by a statement from the doctor who had treated Justin Fowler, describing the severity of his wounds and expressing concern about telling the boy that his parents were dead, suggesting that the police wait until he was out of danger.

A sergeant had meticulously made a list of all the personal correspondence found in Fowler’s desk in the six months before the murders, and another had been compiled of clients he’d dealt with in the past six months. The police had been meticulous, even to keeping a list of those who had called at the hospital in the first few days after Justin had been rushed to Casualty.