Charles Todd - A long shadow

After the door had closed, he wished he'd asked her for the name of her school friend in Paris. As he walked through Dudlington, trying to clear up the mounting pile of evidence that went nowhere, contradicting itself at every turn, Rutledge saw Grace Letteridge coming out of the butcher's shop.

She hesitated when she looked up and found he was striding toward her, then straightened her shoulders and stood there waiting for him.

As if I were the guillotine, he thought, and Hamish added, "She doesna' want to talk about the past."

When he came up to her, she said, "I'd like to hear that Constable Hensley has died of infection."

He made himself smile. "It wouldn't help, would it? He's not the source of your anger."

"What do you mean?"

"It's cold, and the street isn't the proper place to talk about private matters. Will you come to the police station, or shall I accompany you to your house? Either way, there's no tea to be found in either of them."

She laughed ruefully. "I do have tea. Come on, then, and I'll make us both a cup."

They walked back to her house in silence. She'd refused to let him carry her purchases, and he didn't press.

She took his hat and coat and pointed him toward the parlor. He stood there, studying the watercolors done by Beatrice Mason. They were good, he couldn't fault them technically. But he wondered if she would have made the essential leap to London tastes, a quality that would have made her first-rate. As Catherine Tarrant and others had done in oils. It would depend, he decided, on her dedication and how quickly her skill matured.

"She had a husband and a child," Hamish reminded him. "They would ha' dragged her down."

What if her dreams had faded, and she realized that a little talent could be more heartbreaking than none? It might explain her decision to marry her first husband and then her second. Security, while she played at being an artist. Security while she went to parties or showed her portfolios, and talked about her work. Hardly the glory she might have hoped for, but talented wives were given a very different reception from young women struggling alone in rooming houses with no entree into society.

He turned as Grace Letteridge came back with a tray of tea things. "You'll have to make do without cakes or sandwiches. But at least it's warm."

Rutledge took the cup she handed him, adding sugar and milk from the tray.

"You like her work, I think?" Grace said, glancing up at the paintings.

"She has a wonderful sense of light," he told her.

"Yes, that's what struck me. Harder to achieve in water- colors, I should think, than in oils."

She took a chair on the far side of the room and said, "All right, what is it? You're bursting to ask questions, aren't you?"

"I've been trying to piece together some of the things I've learned as I asked questions about Hensley and Emma Mason-and lately, asking questions about her mother as well. Is Beatrice Ellison Mason living comfortably in Liege, do you think? Or did she die in the German attack in 1914?"

"Liege? I'd never heard that Beatrice had moved to Liege. Why are you asking me? You know we never kept in touch, or I'd have known where to search for Emma. What does Mary Ellison have to say about that?"

"She believes her daughter went to Paris, married there, and shortly afterward, moved to Belgium."

"Well, then, what's the matter with that?"

"I think Mrs. Ellison has been covering up the truth, that Beatrice was dead." It was what he himself had begun to accept. "Did Emma ever suspect that?"

"Of course not. She believed her mother was living in London. It's what the whole world-well, what the Dudlington world believed, anyway." She set her teacup down and considered the policeman in her parlor. "Are you suggesting that Beatrice killed herself? That she couldn't face living without her husband, and after seeing to Emma's future, she did something awful?"

Mary Ellison would never admit that her daughter was a suicide-it was not something that happened in respectable families, and her pride would prefer that people believed any plausible tale rather than stumble on the truth.

"My friend in Paris writes…"

"It needna' be suicide," Hamish said. "There's prostitution."

Social suicide, by anyone's standards.

"Perhaps that's why Mrs. Ellison paid the debt at the rooming house, when Mrs. Greer wrote to demand her money. It could have been quiet blackmail."

"What debt?" Grace Letteridge asked him. "And who was blackmailing whom?"

He'd answered Hamish aloud. Cursing himself, he said, "No one. I was just speculating on something that Inspector Cain discovered in the records Inspector Abbot had left. An address for Beatrice Mason in 1904. But it was useless by the time Mrs. Ellison learned of it two years later." He quickly shifted the subject. "Do you remember Abbot?"

"Of course. We saw him about as often as we see Inspector Cain. He would pay brief visits to Dudlington from time to time, looking in on the shopkeepers and the rector and the doctor. Keeping his ear to the ground, he'd called it."

"What sort of policeman was he?"

"He was disastrous when it came to something serious like Emma's disappearance. He couldn't fathom why she'd left a loving and comfortable home to run off to London. He was close to retirement, old-fashioned in his thinking about women, and unwilling to believe that a Harkness could do anything approaching the scandalous. He left most of the questioning to Constable Hensley. Mrs. Ellison was distraught, and it didn't help when Inspector Abbot badgered her, practically tearing poor Emma's room apart in an effort to learn how she'd hoped to make her way to London. The fact is, no one came forward and admitted to helping Emma leave, and in the end the inquest returned a verdict of foul play by person or persons unknown. That upset Mrs. Ellison even more, and I lost my temper with Constable Hensley, calling him incompetent and stupid. And that's when I began to suspect him. I couldn't believe a London-trained policeman was so inept. He had to be covering up something, and the only thing that made sense was his part in Emma's murder."

"Murder is hardly more socially acceptable than suicide."

"Yes, well, even the fact that Mary Ellison is related to the Harkness family isn't much comfort to her now." The words were bitter, spoken with anger.

"I'm told that someone saw Emma somewhere behind the church one day, rolling in the grass, as he put it, with a young man."

She stared at him. "So that's-" And then she broke off.

"That's what?" Rutledge asked when she failed to go on.

Grace Letteridge shook her head vehemently, but her mouth had tightened.

"Who was the young man?" he persisted.

But she was already collecting the tea things and carrying them out to the kitchen, effectively closing the subject.

He followed her through the house.

"I even know the name," he told her as she set the tray on the kitchen table, her back to him. "It was Robert Baylor-"

She whirled so quickly he wasn't prepared, couldn't even defend himself. Her right hand slapped him so hard across the face that he saw pinpoints of light dancing in front of his eyes.

"Don't ever say his name to me, do you hear? Don't you ever dare!"

And before he could prevent it, she was out of the room and going up the stairs where he couldn't follow her.

Rutledge stood there in the kitchen, his face stinging and his own anger mounting.

"You shouldna' ha' pressed her sae hard. No' if the young man was hers."

"If it was Robert Baylor who seduced Emma Mason, why does she feel so strongly that it was Hensley who killed the girl?"

But then there was no proof that Emma had been seduced. She could just as easily have fought Baylor off. Especially if the attack had been a trial balloon, as it were. A test to see whether this very pretty girl was willing or not. Hensley, on the other hand, hearing about what appeared to be a successful seduction, might well have tried his own luck, and when Emma threatened to tell her grandmother, rid himself of the girl and the problem.