Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

“I’ll let you step in out of the wind, then, Mrs. Parker. Kind of you to talk to us, I appreciate it.” Grimes tipped his hat again.

She looked from him to Dowling, then to Rutledge. “I’ve seen him before,” she said, indicating the inspector from Marling. “But not him. ”

“Mr. Rutledge has come down from London,” Grimes informed her.

She gave Rutledge a toothless grin, her bright blue eyes suddenly dancing. “From London, is it? Mr. Parker was from London. I always fancied London men!”

With that she shut her door firmly, and left them standing on the street.

“Do you believe her?” Rutledge asked Grimes.

“I think I do. She’s not well, but her eyesight is keen enough, and so is her mind.”

Dowling said, “Her windows are near enough to the street for a clear look at the man.”

They considered the story for a moment longer before walking on.

“If her testimony was the only one we had, I’d be more chary of taking it seriously,” Grimes said. “The next woman in a way corroborates what Mrs. Parker saw. But before we walk on, notice the direction of the church from here.”

Rutledge and Dowling turned to observe that the church was closer into town.

“Now, look down there, the house set back from the road in the trees.”

It was on the outskirts of Seelyham, a good fifty yards away, and rather finer than the cottages. Rutledge thought it might have been at one time a Dower House, judging by the low brick wall in front and a handsome portico.

Grimes set off with determination, explaining as he went.

“Miss Judson and her father live in that house. It’s called The Swallows, and it’s too far off the road to see who’s coming and going. But that same Tuesday night, Miss Judson went out to fetch the rector to her father. He isn’t well, and sometimes he takes a bad turn and wants to make his peace with God. She does what she can to keep his spirits up.”

Rutledge said, “They live together, then.”

“Oh, yes. Miss Judson is what you might describe as a mature lady. I’d guess Mr. Judson is well past his three score years and ten.”

They had reached the property and were walking up the drive when a woman with a dog came out of the house, went down the stone steps, and stopped to stare at them with interest before moving in their direction.

“Inspector Grimes,” she said, nodding to Dowling and Rutledge. A tall, angular woman in her forties, with clear gray eyes and a no-nonsense manner, she waited with composure for Grimes to explain himself.

“I’ve brought Inspector Dowling from Marling to speak with you, and Inspector Rutledge, from London. I’d like them to hear what you told me.”

Frowning, Miss Judson said, “You attach more importance to it than I do.”

“I daresay we do,” Grimes agreed affably. “But in police work, it’s the small things that sometimes loom large in the end.”

She faced the other two men and explained in her abrupt fashion, “I had gone to fetch the rector to my father. As I walked down the drive and turned toward the rectory, I passed a man coming out of Seelyham. It was late, and I didn’t expect to find anyone else on the road. I nodded as I passed him, and went on to knock on Mr. Sawyers’s door. When the two of us walked back, the man was nowhere to be seen.”

“Did you recognize him?” Rutledge asked.

“Indeed not.”

“How was he dressed?”

“Well enough to be a gentleman. Certainly not shabby enough to be a beggar, even though he was on foot. We’re the last house, you see, and I thought perhaps he might have been staying at The Arms and couldn’t sleep. I suggested as much to Inspector Grimes, here.”

“Could you see his face or judge his coloring?”

She smiled. “There was no moon, Inspector-Rutledge, is it? I wouldn’t know him again if he came to tea. Except that he had a good bearing. I thought perhaps he’d been in the war.”

They thanked her and took their leave. As Grimes walked back to the main road he told them, “I asked at The Arms. There was no one who might have taken it in his head to try the air well after midnight. Two ladies visiting a cousin, and a pair of travelers too drunk after their dinner to have made it down the stairs again without breaking their necks.”

“Then we have a man walking out of Seelyham on a Tuesday night. No one was murdered on a Tuesday,” Rutledge pointed out.

“But there was on a Saturday,” Grimes reminded him. “And here’s the other bit of the puzzle. Another woman was walking through the churchyard around nine o’clock Saturday evening. She was coming home from sitting up with a child with croup. Rounding the corner by the church she walked straight into a man coming out of the bushes. He was living rough, she thought, and she didn’t care for that. She walked on, and came to find me. But by the time I reached the churchyard, he’d taken the hint and moved on.”

“She spoke to him?”

Grimes laughed. “Miss Whelkin would ask the devil who he was roasting over the fires of hell. If we’d sent her to fight the Kaiser, the war would have been over in two years.”

Rutledge smiled. Such women were the bane of ordinary villagers, and the delight of policemen.

“She stopped stock-still and wanted to know if he was waiting for someone. There’s a young girl here in Seelyham who is no better than she ought to be, and Miss Whelkin was of the opinion the man was loitering for a chance to meet her. She asked him outright, and he answered that he’d come a long way and was tired. He’d fallen asleep when he went into the church to pray. She was fairly certain he was from Cornwall.”

“Has she visited Cornwall?”

“My guess is that she hasn’t,” Grimes replied sourly. “But she swore he could pass for Tristan. Whoever he might be when he’s at home.”

Rutledge, who had been studying the churchyard, turned to look sharply at Grimes.

Tristan…

His first thought was the opera. But he doubted Miss Whelkin had ever set foot in a London theater. She was not likely, from Grimes’s description, to be a lover of foreign works.

“How old is she, this Miss Whelkin?”

“Fifty-five if she’s a day,” Grimes declared. “Her father was schoolmaster here for most of her life.”

“Then she’d have known the Idylls of the King- ” Tennyson’s romantic series of poems about Arthur and his Court. They had brought the Round Table knights back into fashion, and all things Gothic. Tristan…

Grimes’s face cleared. “Tennyson,” he nodded, recalling his school days. “I had to learn a good bit of his poems by heart.”

Dowling was talking to Grimes, and Rutledge shut out their voices as he dredged his memory. There had been a painting just before the war, very popular with Londoners. C. Tarrant’s portrait of a young, fair man on a narrow, grubby back street of a Midlands town, staring up at an aeroplane overhead. Ignoring the signs of poverty all around him, the young man’s eyes were fixed in wonder on the miracle of flying. Earthbound, he longed for the skies. Like a Grail Knight blind to the misery of the world in his vainglorious search for the miraculous Cup. And the artist had called it Tristan.

There had been two schools of thought on the intent of the portrait, and much had been written about it. The show had been a triumph. Much later, Rutledge had met the man who might have posed for that knightly figure…

Miss Whelkin would probably have agreed with the artist about the depiction of Tristan. There had been reproductions of the painting in bookshops, and she might even have seen one of them. But why had she connected that Tristan with a stranger from Cornwall?

Hamish said, “You canna’ be sure she did!”