Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

‘‘Precious little. His lordship didn’t deign to send us more than this.”

He passed over several sheets. Copies of death certificates for Olivia Alison Marlowe, spinster. Nicholas Michael Cheney, bachelor. Both dead by their own hands. The dates were the same. This spring. And for Stephen Russell FitzHugh, bachelor, death by misadventure. A fall. Three weeks ago. While he, Rutledge, was still in Warwickshire.

“Seems ordinary enough. In both cases.”

“It is. But as far as we’re concerned, the Home Office, like God, is never wrong!”

It was four o’clock in the afternoon before Rutledge was ready to leave for Cornwall. But the days are still long in July, and the warmth of the sun was soothing. In the trenches during the Great War he’d hated the hot days of summer, when the smells of urine and corpses and unwashed bodies overwhelmed the senses and sickened the mind. You cursed the Germans for making you stand in your own stink, never mind that they were standing in the lines smelling their own. One sergeant, who swore he’d never bathed at home in Wales, laughed at the raw replacements who gagged and puked, calling them sodding poufs for their sensitive noses. Blankets, coats, shirts, trousers, socks, they all were unspeakable in summer, and worse in winter when the wool never dried. Hamish chuckled. “Missing it, are ye?” “No,” Rutledge said tiredly, “unable to forget.” “Aye,” Hamish answered with relish from the dark corners of his mind, “that’s the game, man, you can’t run from it.”

The doctors at the clinic had told him that it was natural for him to hear the voice of Corporal MacLeod, shot by a firing squad just before the shelling that buried the salient, smothering men and mud and corpses alike with such force that that it had taken hours to dig out the barely living- Rutledge among them. He’d suffered several wounds, shell-shock, and severe claustrophobia, but the doctors at the aid station had pronounced it fatigue, given him twenty-four hours to sleep it off, patched him up, and sent him back to the lines. Experienced officers were in short supply. He couldn’t remember much about the year after that, only Ham-ish’s voice keeping him at his post-harrying, tormenting, haunting him until he was sure that others must have heard it too. He’d lived in agony at the thought of seeing the owner of that voice in the dark of the night or a star shell burst or among the rotting corpses that sometimes twitched from the maggots inside them. Somehow he must have carried out his duties well enough-no one reported him, and his men left him alone, too exhausted and worried and frightened themselves to care about anything except survival, and the dreaded next offensive. A long war…

The road to Salisbury was not busy. And in the air flowing through the motorcar, sweet scents of wildflowers and ripening corn and the early haying followed him through the countryside. It would have been faster by train but he hated the small compartments, crammed cheek by jowl with other people while his heart pounded with fear and the palms of his hands were damp with the sweat of being hemmed in and unable to fight his way out.

Finding an inn twenty miles beyond Salisbury, he stopped for the night, ate a dinner of baked mutton and potatoes, with green beans on the side, and slept ill in the small, airless, low-ceilinged room he’d been given. The next day he picked up a line of squalls along the Devon border, riding the winds over the coast and disputing with the sunshine for dominance. Twice he nearly missed his turning as the rains poured down, and half an hour later the roadsides steamed as the sun broke through again. Hamish kept up a running commentary as they drove through villages that brimmed with life, waysides still thick with late wildflowers, and tiny, isolated cottages with thatched roofs or rampantly blooming gardens. So different, so different from the devastation in France. Sometimes small herds of dairy cows being driven down the road from one field to another blocked his path, or fat gray geese waddling between rain puddles and village ponds, or carts pulled by patient horses, in no hurry to be anywhere, the drivers turning to stare with intent interest at his motorcar. Between the deep hedgerows he was often the only human being in sight, although birds darted in and out and butterflies danced across the bonnet. The peace spread through him, soothing.

It was late in the evening when he reached Borcombe, tucked into a deep valley that ran down to the sea below a long headland. The rain had stopped, but heavy clouds still obscured the sky, and lights from houses and a busy pub already glistened across the wet pavements though the time was only a little after nine. It was a smallish village, and he quickly found the house he was looking for on the corner of Butcher’s Lane, home of Constable Dawlish. Pulling up before the white picket gate, he opened the door and got out stiffly, taking a moment to stretch his tired legs and massage aching shoulders. Then the door was opening at the top of the stone steps and a man in shirtsleeves was staring out.

“Inspector Rutledge?”

“Yes.” He opened the gate and went up the short, flagstone walk. “Constable Dawlish?”

They shook hands on the threshold and Dawlish ushered him into a small, warm room off the entry hall. “Let me take your coat, sir. A bit cool for July, isn’t it? It’s the rain, I expect. Have you had any dinner?”

“Yes, thank you. But I could do with some tea.”

“Kettle’s on the boil now, sir.” Dawlish gestured to the dark red horsehair sofa. “You’ll be comfortable over there. And I’ve got all the papers about the case in the folder on the table beside you. Inspector Harvey is sorry he can’t be here, but he had to go along to Plymouth. There’s a man there, fits the description of one we’ve been looking for. Talked three widows out of their savings.”

“We’ll manage well enough without Harvey at this stage,” Rutledge replied, taking Dawlish’s measure. He was tall and thin, a young man with old eyes. “On the Somme, were you?” he asked, hazarding a guess.

“Part of the time. I was over there three years. Felt like thirty.”

“Yes. It did.”

Mrs. Dawlish, small and plump, came in with a tray of tea, thick sandwiches, and dainty cakes. She smiled shyly at Rutledge as she set the tray on a second table by the hearth but well within reach of the sofa, and said, “Help yourself, Inspector. There’s plenty more in the kitchen.” And then she whisked herself out of the room, the perfect policeman’s wife.

“I’ll read these reports tonight,” Rutledge said as he took the cup Dawlish poured. “First, I’d rather hear your own point of view.”

Dawlish sat down and frowned earnestly at the cup in his hands. “Well, to tell the truth, I don’t see murder anywhere in this affair. Two suicides and an accident. That’s how it seemed to me. And to Inspector Harvey as well. There was no note with the suicides, but I was there, I saw the bodies, and you’d have a hard time, Inspector, setting up a murder to appear a suicide so fine as that. The bodies, the room, their faces. We don’t know why they decided to kill themselves, that’s right enough. But Miss Olivia Marlowe, she’d been a cripple and must have suffered something fierce from it. The housekeeper said she had many a bad night. And Mr. Nicholas Cheney, he’d done naught else but care for her all his life. Except for the war, of course-he was gassed at Ypres, and sent home. I suppose he felt there was nothing left to him if she went first. Too late, to his way of thinking, to start again. With his damaged lungs. Or maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to. Some people are like that, they’re content with what they know, however bad it is, and fear what they don’t know, however good it might turn out. He was young, younger than she was by four years, he could have married, had a family of his own. But I’m wandering from the facts-”