Charles Todd - A False Mirror

But would she give him sanctuary?

Rutledge spoke into the silence, his voice reaching her across the room, forcing her to listen.

“I don’t believe that the fact that you’re blind entered into his friendship with you. He has named two houses that I know of for you-Casa Miranda in Malta and again here in England. There may have been others. It was a reminder to him that he’d known you and it tells me as well that if you had turned to him for help, he wouldn’t have refused you. We had hoped he might trust you to safeguard him.”

“He wouldn’t refuse anyone coming to him in trouble. It’s his nature to be kind. And I have not needed his help through the years. If you are interested in why his house should bear my name, you must ask him. As for our friendship, you know nothing at all about that.”

“I can’t ask him. He was attacked and badly beaten by someone who left him to die alone, in great pain. I’m charged with finding that person.”

“I thought you said he was missing.”

“He is. He left his bed in the doctor’s surgery sometime during the night. We don’t know how, or why. Whether he had help or walked out under his own power. But in the morning we found his room empty, and the body of the doctor’s wife lying in the next room, murdered.”

She stirred again, this time her attention riveted on his face. “Murdered, you say? But that’s-that’s appalling. Mr. Rutledge, are you trying to frighten me?”

“Not at all. I’ve come to warn you.” His voice was earnest. “If Matthew Hamilton reached you under his own power, we need to know what he remembers about the attack on him. And why he left the surgery. And why Mrs. Granville was killed. It’s possible that he attacked her in the dark, not knowing who she was until it was too late. If that’s the case, you may also be in danger.”

He wanted to add that she was defenseless and her house isolated, but he thought she was clever enough to understand that for herself.

“Nonsense. And it doesn’t signify anyway. I’ve told you that he’s not here.”

“His wife is being held prisoner against her will. If Hamilton had nothing to hide, why didn’t he go to her and try to help her escape? If he loved her, why didn’t he move heaven and earth to free her? Even at risk to himself.”

She put up a hand to stop him. “You are a very pitiless man, Mr. Rutledge. You have frightened me for your own ends. I won’t hear any more of this.”

Without appearing to be using her hands, she let her fingers lightly touch pieces of furniture in her path, walking toward the door from memory. Before he could stop her she had gone through it and called to her maid.

He didn’t try to follow her. Hamish was already telling him that he had overstepped his bounds.

And what would Frances or Melinda Crawford have to say about his conduct here?

But a policeman was charged with sifting facts and probing truths. Even those secrets innocent people tried to hide from him. If Hamilton had remembered his relationship with her for twenty years, Rutledge found it hard to believe that Miranda Cole cared so little for him. Unless their romance had been one-sided from the start.

Unrequited love? Or what might have been?

He turned and walked back the way he had come, through the door and out to the motorcar. Someone slammed the heavy door behind him. He thought perhaps it was the maid. After a few minutes, Constable Mercer came hurrying around the corner of the house, murmuring “Sorry, sir!” as he stepped into the motorcar.

For a moment Rutledge ignored him, standing there looking up at the house. It was impossible for Hamilton to have come this far, in his condition. And it would be impossible for a blind woman to go to Hampton Regis and bring him here. Neither her maid nor the elderly aunt he hadn’t met would have been able to lift a man of that height and weight.

A wild-goose chase. But he thought, if it wasn’t Miranda Cole, and it wasn’t Miss Esterley who had spirited Matthew Hamilton to safety, who was responsible for what had happened to the man?

And the question brought him again to George Reston. Or Robert Stratton.

Rutledge took Constable Mercer back to Exeter and then faced the long drive back to Hampton Regis.

“Circles within circles,” he found himself saying to Hamish as they shared the darkness behind the powerful glow of the headlamps.

“She called you a liar.”

And a man without pity.

But why would a man like Hamilton name his home for a woman he’d not seen for many years? Sentiment was unlikely. Guilt, then, a reminder of what he’d done when he was young and felt ashamed of, in later life? Guilt was a strong emotion, it drove people into paths that they hadn’t intended to take. He understood it, in his own case, though Dr. Fleming had first pointed it out to him.

“You survived the war and can’t forgive yourself for surviving, when others died or were maimed. Until you do learn to forgive yourself, you’ll never be completely whole.”

“I don’t need to be whole,” he’d responded. “Only to function to the best of my ability. I want to return to the Yard.” May of last year, he’d said those words to the man who’d brought him so far, and could take him no further on his journey back to sanity. He still had an appallingly long way to go.

“Yes, well, it could be a good thing or a bad thing, Ian, to go back. Only you can know which.”

“It isn’t a question of good or bad, it’s a matter of working twelve hours in a day until I’m too tired to think. Here, in hospital, I do nothing but think.”

“Are you trying to leave here to escape me and look for your own way out?” Fleming had asked bluntly.

“Self-slaughter? I can kill myself here just as easily. Well, not as easily as pulling a trigger, but it can be done. You know that.”

“Yes.” Fleming had sat there, watching him. “All right then, let’s see what happens. Your people at the Yard want you back. Let’s give it a month and find out whether you are healed sufficiently to face what’s in your head.”

And it had been a terrifying month, that June. A month without mercy. But he’d survived that and nine more. It was March of 1920, and he was still alive.

Whether the struggle had been worth it, he didn’t know. He couldn’t stand aside and be objective. Not where Hamish was concerned.

By the time Rutledge reached Hampton Regis, he was too stiff and too drained to seek his bed.

Instead he stopped the car some distance past the Mole and for an hour walked along the strand, pacing back and forth, listening to the roar of the waves coming in, feeling the crunch of his heels on the wet shingle, and remembering how he’d nearly been sucked into the mud of the landslip. Was it only just that morning?

And what the bloody hell was he to do about Matthew Hamilton?

By the time he had turned for the Mole, he startled a fisherman coming down to the boats tied up there.

The man swerved, then swore. It was Perkins, who’d taken him out to the landslip. “Damned if you didn’t turn my heart over in my chest, Mr. Rutledge! I thought for certain the sea had given up Matthew Hamilton.”

Rutledge was up early, waiting at the police station when the extra men came in from outlying towns, arriving on their bicycles.

He set four of them to work on the west road, knocking on the doors of farmers and householders on either side of the Reston cottage. Two more finished canvassing the shops and businesses along the Mole for anyone who had seen Matthew Hamilton walk down to the strand on the morning he was attacked. And one of Bennett’s men was to finish the last of the names on a list of Dr. Granville’s neighbors.