Charles Todd - A False Mirror

“I understand. It’s the least I could do, after the debacle with her husband. There’s still no news of him?”

“None.”

“He’s dead, then. In that cottage. There aren’t that many places for a man to hide in Hampton Regis, when everyone is on the lookout for him.”

“I still find it difficult to believe he could have walked away under his own power. What’s your opinion?”

Granville gave his question serious consideration. “Anything is possible, medically speaking. But that means he must have killed Margaret. And I refuse to believe it. Someone took him away, and that someone had already done his best once before to see Hamilton into his grave.”

“You know the people here. Can you tell me who might have started this by attacking Hamilton in the first place?”

Granville shrugged. “Your best suspect is Stephen Mallory. But then someone else could have decided to finish his work for him. Get him to confess to what happened out there by the water, and clear that up. Then you can begin to think about Margaret’s death. And Nan’s.”

“I’ve asked myself again and again why these two women needed to die. There’s no clear answer.”

“Nan worked for a number of people over the years, Rutledge. You can’t be sure what secrets she took with her when she was killed.”

“But the house was locked.”

Granville raised his eyebrows. “What difference does that make? Hamilton isn’t the only person to have lived in Casa Miranda, you know. And I doubt he thought to change the locks. There must be other keys floating about. For that matter, you could probably collect half a hundred from other houses of the same age, and find that some of them fit. Ask the rector to test his.”

When Granville had gone and before Mallory had presented himself again, Rutledge tapped lightly on the door to Mrs. Hamilton’s room.

“Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Putnam. I should like to borrow your keys for a little while. Do you mind?”

Putnam, his eyes on Rutledge’s face, said, “Ah, I haven’t given Dr. Granville one, have I? My mistake. Thank you, Inspector.” He brought them to the door. “It’s rather an unconventional collection, I’m afraid. I never think to take off one when I add another. Those to this side of the longest one are to the church. The others are the rectory keys. I can’t tell you where one or two of them came from. My predecessor, very likely.”

He passed them to Rutledge.

“You aren’t leaving, are you, Inspector?” Felicity asked anxiously.

“Not for a while,” he reassured her.

And then he set about trying the rector’s keys on the locks of Casa Miranda.

The trouble, he thought, was that there were too many doors. The main entrance facing the drive possessed a newer lock, and none of Putnam’s fit it. There was a door to the back garden, another down a short passage where Mrs. Hamilton or her predecessors had cut and potted plants for the house, several ways into the kitchen area, and a door leading directly into the servants’ quarters, where they could come and go without walking through the kitchen. The cellar door boasted a padlock.

He found, working methodically through the handful of keys, that while several of them raised his hopes at first, only two of them actually fit into a lock well enough to reach the tumblers. Both turned stiffly at first, but after a little effort on his part, he heard the tumblers fall into place.

He now had two keys that unlocked two house doors: one that led to the servants’ belowstairs quarters and the other to the door where tradesmen brought their goods and supplies. Holding them up to the light, edge to edge, he could see that they were identical.

Dr. Granville had been right. It wasn’t only Matthew Hamilton who could enter the house at will but anyone in Hampton Regis who possessed a key of the same shape.

Rutledge returned the keys to Putnam, told Mallory that he would be back within the hour, and left the property, walking quickly in the direction of the police station.

His watchers had left their reports on the table that served as his desk.

Rutledge thumbed through them quickly and found that the man in the church tower had seen very little. “The way the trees were tossing about,” he’d scrawled in pencil, “it was nearly impossible to be sure what was shadow, what was dog, and what was not. I saw the constable on watch a time or two, and that was all I could identify with any certainty.”

There had been no trees to speak of between the man in the Cornelius attic and the Mole. He reported no activity until two fishermen went down to look at the sea and walked back again ten minutes later. Mr. Reston was not seen leaving his house.

Nor had Constable Coxe.

The constable in Rutledge’s room at the inn swore he’d seen someone moving about in the shadows, “But not clear enough to be sure who it was. He didn’t walk up the drive to the door, I made certain of that. But where he went I can’t say. The constable paced about a bit, and he might have had a clearer look.”

The constable declared he’d seen no one.

Hamish said, “It could ha’ been Stratton, poking about.”

“Yes, I think it very likely was.”

No one had made an attempt to climb up from the sea, and no one had gone to the other cliff, where Mallory had watched the lights of the Hamilton house from his motorcar.

“A night’s sleep lost for verra’ little.”

Rutledge could feel the tiredness across his own shoulders. “I wonder if Stratton made free with the hotel keys.”

“It doesna’ signify. They do na’ look the same.”

It was a good point. The key to his own room was newer in style and shape. But what about those to the kitchens and the ser vice entrance? He made a mental note to look.

He tossed the reports aside. No one had come to Casa Miranda after all. In all likelihood the branch had driven itself through the fragile old glass of the dining room windows.

And his men were sleeping now after a long cold night.

He got up and walked to the door of the police station. The wind had dropped with the dawn, leaving twigs and bits of straw, scraps of paper and any other debris not nailed down scattered on lawns and pavement. The lid from a dustbin had been wedged tightly into a clump of bare-limbed lilac, and someone’s hat was caught on a branch of a tree by the nearest house.

Hamish was telling him that a good officer could have put that wind to use last night, infiltrating half a dozen men through enemy lines. “Crawling on their bellies, they’d no’ make a silhouette against the sky.”

“But Hamilton wasn’t in the army,” he said. “And so he didn’t come. Or whoever it is, with a fierce design on everyone around Hamilton.”

He went for a walk, climbing the headland across the sea from the house. It wasn’t terribly high, but it gave a good view of Casa Miranda. He could see the marks left in the damp soil by a motorcar’s tires. Mallory, then, and his obsession with Felicity Hamilton.

Out to sea, Rutledge could just pick out a steamer passing on the horizon, black smoke marking its progress along the rim of the sky. Nearer in, a fishing boat bobbed, for the current was running fast.

His thoughts kept returning to the events of the night.

We were prepared for a frontal assault, he reminded himself. And too many people knew that. So the killer never came. The bough through the windowpane notwithstanding.

“If I had it to do over again,” he told Hamish, unaware that he was speaking aloud, “I’d spread my forces better. I’d see that the lure was more enticing. And I’d watch the lamppost.”

“There willna’ be anither time. Have ye no’ thought it was the man’s defense of the Germans that unsettled someone who lost a son or brother or lover in the war? Ye ken, the Kaiser is in Holland and untouchable, but his advocate is here in Hampton Regis. But two wrongly dead is a verra’ high price for revenge. It’s over, and ye’re no closer to the killer than before.”