Charles Todd - Watchers of Time

Hamish said, “A jury would believe this man…”

It was true. But it wasn’t a jury that Rutledge wanted to reach just now.

“The only wrong assumption that Baker made in this affair,” Rutledge told Arthur, “was believing that your wife was the instigator of these arrangements. You’d been planning her death since the November before, hadn’t you? And quite cleverly. When Virginia Sedgwick vanished, Baker was hamstrung. His own wife was still in the sanitarium, and he refused to put her at risk by asking questions. After that one bout of drunkenness, he lived an exemplary life until he died of natural causes.”

“Yes, we went to the services,” Sedgwick put in. Noblesse oblige. ..

“Which brings me to the services for Virginia, Mrs. Sedgwick. I can order the exhumation of her coffin, you see. To discover if there’s a corpse inside. But I rather think it’s empty. When Titanic went down, it provided the most unexpected windfall-a marvelous explanation for the disappearance of your wife. You’re right, money has its uses, including bribing London clerks and Irish gravediggers. No one would ask a grief-stricken family for proof! And if a coffin silenced Father James and Herbert Baker, who meant well but were persistent in asking for news, then it must have been worth every penny. The scandal of a possible runaway wife allowed you to use great discretion in suppressing the whole story.”

Lord Sedgwick started to speak, but Arthur waved him to silence. He said in a strained voice, “It’s bad enough to lose my wife the way I did, Inspector. I don’t understand why you’re tormenting us!”

Rutledge coldly replied, “My guess is that somewhere on that long drive, Baker simply walked away from the motorcar for half an hour. What did you promise Virginia to entice her to come with you? A surprise? A new pony? A trip on a boat you’d borrowed from your brother? If we search the marshes, will we find her rotted bones?”

Edwin and his father had listened to the account with tight faces expressing anger and disbelief. But they’d support Arthur, whatever he’d done. Guilty or not, he was their flesh and blood. Surprisingly, they didn’t defend him Hamish said, “If it was a lie, you’d ha’ been booted out ten minutes ago. But Arthur canna’ afford to have that coffin exhumed!”

A flush had risen in Arthur’s face. “Perhaps if Baker had met her at the hotel at the hour he’d promised, she wouldn’t have taken it in her head to show she could fend for herself! And as for Titanic, you don’t know what you’re talking about!” He got up from his chair and moved about the room, rigidly at first, and then with more ease as the muscles in his back stretched. He was plausible, his voice and his manner carrying indignation and a sense of injustice nicely blended. But was it real? Rutledge couldn’t tell. Just as he refused to submit to the pain in his back, Arthur Sedgwick refused to be intimidated.

Hamish said, “He canna’ be shaken.”

Arthur walked to the rain-wet window, peering out at the dark gardens, his back to the room. His father and brother waited for him to speak again. And Rutledge remembered something that Sedgwick had told him about his elder son-the Watchers of Time had given the boy nightmares…

When Arthur said nothing else, Sedgwick cleared his throat. “Inspector, I think you ought to leave. Miss Trent, we apologize for this distressful business, you shouldn’t have been subjected to it.”

Hamish spoke swiftly, and Rutledge shifted in his chair to look at Edwin.

Edwin’s eyes were still on his brother. As Rutledge had noted once before on the quay in Osterley, they were as cold as the winter sea. Edwin was the physically stronger now, and harder. He had made no effort to come to his brother’s defense, and it had become a telling silence.

His intuition alive and working, Rutledge suddenly realized why. A jealousy lay like acid under the skin of the second son. It had nothing to do with Virginia Sedgwick’s death. The title would go to Arthur, not Edwin.

Rutledge was on the point of continuing when May Trent spoke for the first time. “But it isn’t true,” she said with conviction to the room at large, “that the Inspector doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And it isn’t true that your wife was on board Titanic, Mr. Sedgwick. Because I was, you see, and I’d have met her. Father James made a study of the ship. That’s how he found me.”

The logs on the hearth crackled and sent sparks flying, but no one noticed. A gust of rain rattled against the windows. May Trent waited.

Rutledge forced himself not to look at her. But Lord Sedgwick and Edwin were staring at her with an almost malevolent expression, as if she had called them liars. And she had.

“My dear lady,” Sedgwick said. “Virginia was a wretched sailor-it’s very doubtful that she ever left her stateroom!”

May Trent answered, “But I’d have known that, too. Women gossip on shipboard, Lord Sedgwick, just as they do at a garden party. We knew who was assigned to our table, to our lifeboat stations. Who was available for bridge, who had been confined to bed. Her name wasn’t there.” She looked at Arthur and her face wisted with disgust. “How could you callously use that tragedy for your own ends? I find it appalling!”

Arthur’s mouth tensed, but he said nothing. His reflection in the dark glass of the French doors was a study in control. Yet his hands, locked behind his back, clenched until the knuckles were white.

Rutledge turned to Lord Sedgwick. “And as Herbert Baker lay dying, he couldn’t face the prospect that he was taking with him the one bit of knowledge that might clear up the mystery of what really happened to your daughter-in-law. Trying to set his soul in order, he sent for Father James, not because he was a priest, but because this man cared as much about Virginia Sedgwick’s fate as Baker had. The one man in Osterley who could be counted on to use the information wisely! And that’s why Father James had to die-there was no way of knowing whether what Baker confided to the priest was under the seal of Confession or had been told man to man, with a simple promise binding the priest.”

There was the shock of truth in Lord Sedgwick’s face now. Arthur and Edwin swung around to look at their father. And he gave them no sign.

Rutledge frowned at Arthur. “I was convinced you killed Father James. I was coming here to break the news to your father. Until today, when I discovered two witnesses who placed not you but your father at the rectory that night. And I realized then that he’d been the killer.” Facing Sedgwick, he said, intent on angering the man, “It was quite clever to empty the tin box, to leave a false trail. Certainly Inspector Blevins was convinced by it. You have a flair for planning murder.”

Lord Sedgwick met Rutledge’s eyes with arrogance. “It doesn’t matter if you have a dozen witnesses. I think it’s time you left this house.”

There was an uneasy moment in the room. Edwin, leaning over the back of a chair, his hands lightly gripping the wood frame, was watching the fire. Arthur started toward a chair and then changed his mind, toying with the photographs on the table.

Hamish said, “Watch your back!”

Indeed, there was an odd intensity in their postures. These three men had spent a lifetime with no leavening to counteract the ferocious ambition that had driven them since the day they were born. It was what their character was all about: the paramount importance of a goal set in the first generation.

Rutledge rose, as if preparing to leave. He wasn’t comfortable sitting any longer. He said to Sedgwick, “When Walsh escaped, you sent your sons to search for him, and then borrowed old Tom Randal’s mare, and went after him yourself. You found him because you know the land around here better than anyone else-you’d grown up on it, with an old sheepman training your eye. And you killed Walsh-with a hammer-or the shoe Honey had cast. Using it with a polo swing and the full weight of the galloping horse behind your arm. And the Sedgwick luck held-you caught him just right. The police inquiry into the death of a priest was closed.”