Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

Olivia Marlowe had been buried. It was O. A. Manning who was still alive-and possibly had no right to be.

And when he, Rutledge, found out the whole truth, what in hell would he do about it? Deliberately destroy the author of Wings of Fire? Bring down the beauty and the genius along with the cruelty and the lies?

“You’ve been executioner once.” Hamish warned him. “And you no’ have forgotten it. Will ye choose to do it again, then?”

Rutledge turned and walked back towards the house and the path to the village.

“If I have to,” he said bitterly.

The next morning Rutledge sent a carefully worded message to London.

“Background material sparse but enlightening. No determination of crime possible at this time. Will take several more days, if presence not required in City.”

Nothing to alarm Bowies, nothing to prevent Rutledge from coming to any conclusion he chose. And he had a feeling his superior would not be anxious to see him in London straight away.

The Monday papers had been awash with news of another killing in the City. Bowles had been interviewed in depth about the Yard’s pursuit of the murderer, and talked ful-somely of modern forensic science and its role in tracking down the guilty party. Bowles leaned towards cold fact rather than intuition and a careful analysis of the killer’s reasons for acting now, against this particular victim, and in this particular place. Rutledge had found that scientists were not always the best witnesses in the box, and as often as not a good man for the defense could walk rings around them.

He looked at his own cold facts. That Corrmac had seen Olivia shove her sister out of an apple tree. That Olivia hadn’t had the heart to dispose of her trophies of the dead, even in the face of her own death. That they were an admission of guilt in six possible murders, not just the two that Cormac laid at Olivia’s door-indicating, perhaps, a cooler, more cunning skill as the child grew older.

But these facts, alone or together, were not sufficient proof of guilt in a courtroom. Cormac was young at the time, his own memory might have been at fault. A good barrister might point out that Olivia could have had those small articles in her possession for any number of reasons: she’d been given them, she’d taken them as a childhood prank, she’d won them in a wager. In themselves, without more evidence to lay out beside them, they couldn’t be viewed as the fruits of sin.

Her papers might hold a confession. However convoluted or concealed in verse. But poets and writers were allowed literary license. That too could prove to be more circumstantial than conclusive.

Who then among the living might give him the proof he needed? Who would make a dependable, incontrovertible witness in the box?

He set out to look for one.

Constable Dawlish, finishing his breakfast in his wife’s sunny kitchen, came out to the parlor to listen and found Rutledge’s line of questioning hard to follow.

So did Hamish, who was still contending that they’d both live to regret staying on in Cornwall, and was muttering ominously about Rutledge’s own stubbornness.

“You’re asking about Mr. Nicholas’ father?” Dawlish asked. “And Mr. Stephen’s father? That was well before my time in uniform, sir! But James Cheney shot himself in his own gun room, and everyone knew he’d been blaming himself for what happened to his son. He took it hard, and who’s to say whether the revolver went off by accident or of a purpose? Death by misadventure was the coroner’s verdict, and Mrs. Cheney, sick with grief, thanked him for it. Are you thinking that she or one of the children might have shot him?” Dawlish shook his head. “I’d as soon believe my own wife would take a gun to my head, as Mrs. Cheney! You didn’t know her, sir! And as for the children, they weren’t old enough, any of them, to do such mischief. Besides, no man in his right mind would have let a child so young handle a gun, much less play about with a loaded one.”

“And Brian FitzHugh’s death?”

“His horse threw him down by the sea, and he hit his head, drowned in the surf before anyone back at the house knew what had happened, They had to put the horse down as well, caught his leg in the rocks and damaged it badly. Mr. Cormac cried over it like a baby, holding it in his arms until Wilkins could fetch a pistol and do the job. Miss Olivia stood there watching, staring at Mr. Cormac as if he’d run mad. But Mr. Cormac, he’d trained that horse himself, and it was the best three-year-old the stables had had in twelve years.”

“How do you know what Cormac and Olivia were doing?”

The constable’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Why, my father was a carpenter, sir, he was working in the stables at the time, rebuilding the stalls where they kept the mares waiting to foal. Mrs. Cheney had another wing put on for that.”

“Is your father still alive?”

“No, sir, he died in the first year of the war.”

A dead end. “Well, then, what was the story behind young Richard ‘s disappearance?”

“There’s a dozen ways a boy could die out on the moors. He wouldn’t be the first lad to come to grief there. Nor the last.”

“If he died on the moors, why was there no body found?”

“They looked, sir. They combed the rocks and the pools and the old mine shafts, they probed the quicksand, they put up flyers in all the towns around, they talked to the folk who live by the moors and to the gypsies who’d been camping near there in the month before. My father was in one of the search parties, and I went along with him. It was thorough.”

“I want you to send men out again. To search the same ground, to draw me a map of where you’ve looked and what you’ve seen. Anything-a button, a scrap of cloth, a bone. I want it all brought in, and the spot marked on the map. Then I’ll check it again myself.”

“Sir!” Dawlish protested, aghast. “These are farmers and fishermen hereabouts, with a livelihood to earn! Have you any idea how many men it’ll take? And what a waste of time and energy that’ll be?”

“Time and energy don’t matter. Finding that boy’s body does.”

“And if after all our work, there’s none found?” “Then I’ll know for a certainty that it can’t be found.” Dawlish stared at the gaunt face, the intelligent, angry eyes. Humor the man from Scotland Yard, he’d been told. What he wants, let him have. As long as he returns to London as soon as possible, and with no cause to give a black eye to the local police in the matter of doing their duty.

With a sigh, he glanced at the napkin in his hand, then back to Rutledge. “I’ll see that it’s done, sir. You can leave it to me.” But privately he was thinking that Scotland Yard would have been better served by putting their man onto finding that bloody killer in London, instead of raising a stir in far off Cornwall, where there was no connection to any murders.

The morning sun quickly gave way to clouds and rain, slow and steady, that drove the inn’s keel players indoors to pass their time with skittles and long, rambling stories that seemed to lead nowhere except to wrangling over trifling details. For half an hour, Rutledge listened to them argue about which horse won the Derby in 1874 because someone swore old Mickelson had named his favorite dog after it. Even the innkeeper, Mr. Trask, couldn’t tell Rutledge who Mickelson was.

“Could be he were that actor. A troop played in Truro one winter, and my father spoke highly of them. One had a little dog’d do tricks. I doubt half of them remember, either, who Mickelson might be, though you could hang and quarter them before they’d admit to it. Waiting for someone, are you, sir?”