Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

Hamish, interrupting, wanted to know what being a gentleman had to do with fighting in France. Rutledge ignored him.

“-and in my opinion had long ago put to rest the question of his brother’s death. Never spoke of it to me in the past fifteen years. And never spoke to my predecessor about it either, or it’d have been in the record. Which leaves us with Miss Olivia, and I don’t know that I’d put much past her!”

It was so different from any other comments he’d heard about Olivia that Rutledge was surprised.

Harvey smiled with sour satisfaction. ‘‘We’re not all clods here in the wilds of Cornwall, whatever London may have led you to believe.”

“No one has suggested that you might be,” Rutledge said, moving with great care now. “Tell me what reasons you have to back up your opinion.”

“Read her books, man! My wife is a decent woman, she’d never so much as feel or think what Miss Marlowe thought fit to put down baldly in print! It’s unwomanly and disturbing. A mind capable of such immodesty is in my estimation capable of the worst in human degradation.”

He’d spoken with such venom that Rutledge found himself wondering what Olivia had done to raise Harvey’s hackles. He thought he knew. She’d been Miss Marlowe of the Hall, quiet and unassuming, someone he could patronize, the cripple who was content to be seldom seen and not often heard. A tidy round peg in her tidy round hole, like Mrs. Harvey. And then the truth about O. A. Manning had come out, and Harvey had been made to look or feel a fool for misjudging her. That would be unforgivable, and he’d judge her with a vengeance now. Rutledge quelled the urge to rise to Olivia’s defense, his own temper held on a tight rein.

Harvey had already moved on to his next grievance. “Now tell me what this new evidence you spoke of might be. Those rags they found out on the moors? You’ll never prove they belonged to the boy. Could have been put there any time in the years before or since. Don’t they teach you your business in London?”

“Quite well,” Rutledge said through his teeth. “And I intend to continue going about it until I’m satisfied.”

Harvey was furious, but something about the other man’s voice, the steel in it, the natural air of command that came with years in France, made him stop short and reexamine his opponent. His first impression had been of an ill, weary man with no stamina for the course. Someone who could be bullied and sent back to London with his tail between his legs. Stake your ground, wield your temper like a club, and he’d soon apologize and be off.

Instead he’d come up against hard core, and more experience than he’d expected. Harvey tried to think if he’d heard the name Rutledge before in connection with any of the major cases the Yard had handled. It rattled him more that he couldn’t. Knowing what Rutledge might be capable of gave him more range to push. Not knowing left him in pitch dark on a steep cliff.

Rutledge, meanwhile, was making his own assessment. Of a man who did his job thoroughly and properly, but lacked imagination to do it cleverly. That was going to matter a great deal.

After a swift, appraising silence, both men moved to chairs and sat down, as if the confrontation was finished and the conference begun.

As a form of peace offering, Rutledge said, “Apart from your natural disinclination to see a case opened again for no sound reason-and I understand that, I’d dislike it myself- were you quite serious when you said that Miss Marlowe was capable of anything? Any degradation. Would you for instance include murder in that list?”

And then Harvey surprised him a second time by vacillating. “Yes and no.”

“If you discount her poetry, and her reputation there, what gave you the feeling that she was different?” Or was it all hindsight, the willingness to believe that Olivia hadn’t hoodwinked him completely.. .

Mulling it over, Harvey said, “It was not something I could put my finger on, mind you. It was more her interest in the subject of crime that made me uneasy. People, most especially women, don’t think to ask the questions she asked, unless there’s worry in the mind, or fear. Or even depravity. Now in a pub talking to a man about my work, I’ll be asked a hundred questions, from how I know I’ve got the right miscreant to whether I’ve watched a hanging. That’s different, it’s curiosity, the same as he’d ask an undertaker or even a glassblower about his trade. Idle conversation. You can tell the man knows naught about it, and you could give him lies and he’d be just as satisfied.”

Rutledge nodded. The farmers and tradesmen and lorry drivers he’d fought with had often found it odd to be in the same trench as a policeman. As if he viewed all mankind with innate suspicion. Expecting the worst.

“So it was different when Miss Olivia asked me what made a man take another man’s life. What goaded him, whether he was evil by birth and nature or only caught up in a web of happenstance he couldn’t fight his way clear of. Whether murdering ran in families or wasn’t inheritable.” He paused. Rutledge realized that Harvey had kept this conversation buried deep inside himself for a very long time. And was only reluctantly revealing it now. Because he was a fair man, whatever he lacked in cleverness. “Whether a murderer could truly repent and change. And her as fair and innocent looking as the day she were bom! I didn’t know about the poetry, not then, but I can tell you it gave me the willies, because she was that intense I knew it wasn’t idle talk, meeting the new man in charge and making polite noises about his job. She wanted-she wanted something more. And I couldn’t have told you on peril of my life what it was.”

“Knowing about murder isn’t the same as killing. A victim’s family may understand it better than the murderer himself.” If Nicholas had been the killer, Olivia would have felt it deep in her very bones.

“Aye, that’s true. But once I read some of her verse, now, I knew it was inside that woman, and not something she’d happened to think of, meeting me on the road, like. That last book has one poem in it that kept me sleepless of nights for nearly a week. The sheer cruelty of it. I don’t recollect what it’s called, but I’m not likely to forget how it started:

‘Murderer I am, of little things, small griefs, Treasures of the heart.

Of bodies and of souls I have takenAll that is there to give, Life’s blood, the spirit’s wealth. And these secrets I keep locked away, For my own joy and your pain.’

Not what Mrs. Browning might write, or even that Rossetti woman.”

“No,” Rutledge said quietly, considering possible treasures of the heart. Those small golden trophies of a death.

“Are you thinking she killed that boy? Good God! She was hardly more than a child herself!”

“You said you believed she was capable of murder.”

Harvey looked at him, mind working, mind sorting, but not coming up with anything he could put into words.

“Aye, that’s true enough, in the heat of the moment I felt it could be so. But it’s different when you have a face to put to someone she may’ve killed…” He shook his head. “We don’t get many child murderers in these parts. I wasn’t that fond of the woman, but it’s another matter saying she was one. She was different. That was her problem. She was… different.” There was something in his eyes that pleaded for Rutledge to understand what he was trying to say. That whatever Olivia Marlowe was, by its very extraordinariness she was outside the realm of his comprehension, and therefore suspect, even if he couldn’t condemn her for a specific crime. Capable of anything.

“When did this discussion with Olivia take place?”