Charles Todd - A matter of Justice

"But he's going to confess to protect her?"

"He's confused, worried about his wife, worried about his daughter, and in the end, to protect both of them, he's willing to step forward."

"Is it a smoke screen, though?" she asked, twisting her long slim fingers into knots. "Is he hoping you'll refuse to hear his confession and leave him in the clear after all?"

"There's that. I've told him to go home and talk to his wife. She may tell him his daughter is here, and she may not. I want you to be prepared."

"It will be a tearful reunion." She sighed. "All right, I'll do my best to keep them from foolishness, if they come here first. But look at this, Mr. Rutledge. He never swore to you that he didn't see that letter. If it were kept in her apron pocket, it could have fallen out. He could have seen it. He wouldn't tell her if he had."

"True."

She looked at him thoughtfully. "You don't want the killer to be one of the Jones family, do you?"

"If the fates are kind…" He smiled.

"Did you think he might be afraid that Gwynnie killed Quarles?"

"She couldn't have put him in that harness."

"But if she had killed him, her mother, whatever the qualms on her own account, might have gone back to the scene and tried to hide the body. She might have thought of the cage. She might have reasoned that if Quarles could just go missing for a day or two, she could smooth over her family's anguish regarding Gwyneth's whereabouts and make it all come out right."

"Mrs. Jones might have tried to hide the body, but she'd have been in a great hurry to get back to Gwyneth, for fear she'd do something foolish. The rig would have taken too long. No. I saw her after she'd got the letter, and she was frantic, she didn't know where her daughter was. Besides, the girl reached Cambury after Quarles had been found."

Miss O'Hara said, "Yes, that's true. Look, you've got me spinning motives in my head. I don't know what to believe."

"Do you want me to take the girl away? Is she too much for you?"

"Here she's safe from talk. Let her stay."

He thanked her and left. He was almost on the point of going on to the Jones house to tell Mrs. Jones how her husband had reacted to the news of his daughter's return but decided against it. Let the man and his wife work out their own problems first, and the girl's next. After that it was more likely that the truth would come out. One way or another.

Padgett. Jones. Brunswick. Stephenson. Mrs. Quarles.

What was it about this case that he couldn't put his finger on? Why didn't he have that instinctive sense of where an inquiry was going?

It all came back to that damned cage. Who knew about it? And why would someone want to put a dead man in it, and leave him to hang among the shadowy beams of a medieval tithe barn?

What was the truth behind not the murder but the hatred that launched it?

In the event, Hugh Jones sent for Rutledge almost a quarter of an hour after he'd closed the bakery and come home. Rutledge had spent some time talking to the War Office on the telephone, asking for the military record of one Thomas Stephenson. After several delays as he was sent to one desk after another, Stephen- son's description of his son's death was confirmed. The officer reading it was cold, unsympathetic, and Rutledge wondered if he had ever served in France or merely kept the accounts of those who had and considered himself an expert on trench warfare.

He wasn't ready to confront the tangle of Hugh Jones and his family. But he walked there, and when no one answered his knock, he let himself in.

"I couldn't wait," Jones said as Rutledge came though the parlor door. "I shut the bakery early. My wife's not here, there's a neighbor caring for my girls, and nobody knows where Gwynnie is. I asked her sisters. They haven't seen her."

"She's with Miss O'Hara. I expect your wife has gone there against my advice. Your daughter slept most of the day. This will be the first opportunity her mother has had to speak to her."

Jones heaved himself from the horsehair sofa. "Then we'll go to the Irish woman's cottage."

Rutledge walked a little ahead of him, and when they reached the house, he could hear raised voices inside. Miss O'Hara opened her door, and it was plain that she'd had enough.

Like parents everywhere, Mrs. Jones's fright and worry had dissolved into anger, and as her daughter stood before her, hangdog and crying, she was berating her for causing the family such grief.

Gwyneth looked up to see her father coming into the room, and she stood poised for flight, like a startled animal knowing it was cornered and had nowhere to go. Mrs. Jones, whirling, gasped and fell silent.

Jones stood where he was, taking in the situation at a glance.

"You did a bad thing," he scolded his daughter. "You caused us much grief and your mother's tears." His voice was stern.

"But you wouldn't let me come home. You did nothing," the girl cried.

"And whose fault is that, and now the man is dead, and we're being looked at by the police. Because you couldn't mind your father or listen to your mother. Girl, you're going to be the death of me"

His voice broke on the last words, and he stood there, his mouth open, nothing coming out, and his face was filled with all the things he wanted to say and couldn't.

Gwyneth turned and ran back through the house, to the room where she'd been sleeping. Her mother, with a swift glance at Jones, started after her. But Rutledge stopped her.

"No. She's better off out of this. Mrs. Jones, I've come to take your husband into custody. I'd promised that he could see his daughter first."

"You'll do no such thing," she said, fighting through her emotional turmoil. "I killed that man."

"Don't be a fool, woman-" Jones began, but she turned on him next.

"And what have you done but thunder and threaten to kill the devil yourself, and fumed with frustration that your daughter had to be sent away while he still lorded it over the village? I heard you a thousand times and, yes, so have your children and, for all I know, your neighbors. Where there's the power of words, you are a murderer. And God help me, so am I, because in my heart I wanted to see him dead."

They stared at each other.

Out of the corner of his eye, Rutledge saw Miss O'Hara step out her own door and move into her garden, her hands clasping her elbows and hugging her arms to her chest.

Jones had turned to Rutledge and was repeating what he'd claimed earlier. "I killed the man. Let it be done with."

"You're a stubborn Welshman, Hugh Ioan Jones. Do you hear that? " his wife accused.

He said, for the first time showing gentleness, "What would you have me do, love, let you hang in my place?"

She began to cry. "I just want things to be the way they were. I want to go back to when we were safe and the only worry was how to feed the next mouth."

He crossed the room and gathered her in his arms. "I'd do anything for you, love. Die for you, even."

She was not a woman of beauty. Time and childbearing had worn her down, and worry had added lines to her face and drawn the color from it.

"There were times I wondered," she said, then pushed him away. "Go to your daughter, Hugh Jones, and then come home to your dinner. I doubt it's edible now. But we'll eat it anyway."

He held her for a moment, then without a word went down the passage to find Gwyneth.

Mrs. Jones looked up at Rutledge. "We're a sorry lot, bragging of being murderers. And you still aren't sure, are you?"

Rutledge asked wryly, "Are you? "

She said simply, "If he'd killed Harold Quarles, he wouldn't have touched me. He'd have gone directly to Gwynnie, for fear he'd break down."

It was a woman's reasoning, but Rutledge nodded. Whether or not it cleared Hugh Jones was another matter.