Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

“No one could make them worse. Except you.”

She took off the brake, let in the gear and the car moved briskly off down the road. She didn’t look back. He watched her handle the car around the curve, his mind on her driving, judging whether he’d made the right decision to send her. But there was no one else who could have persuaded Susannah.

Hamish, lurking in the shadows, said only, “Play with witchcraft, and you’ll burn yourself.”

“It isn’t witchcraft,” Rutiedge answered harshly. “It’s the only way I can think of to get at the truth!”

There was an echo of the engine from the narrow hedgerows, although the car had long since vanished to sight. Rut-ledge started to turn back towards the inn, then looked up to find Mary Otley watching him from the doorway of the cottage.

“You haven’t put her in harm’s way, have you, sir?” she asked.

“No. With any luck, I’ve put her out of it,” he answered, and walked back to the inn for his breakfast.

“The constable’s still at his breakfast, sir,” Mrs. Dawlish said, opening her front door to the Inspector from London.

“I’ll just come through and have a word with him in the kitchen,” he said, gently pushing the door wider. “If you don’t mind.”

She did, but was too polite to say so, though he could read her face clearly enough.

The constable stood up hastily, napkin still stuck under his chin, as Rutledge came down the passage and turned into the kitchen. It was a large room, with windows on two sides and a door into the back passage at the rear, next to the great polished black stove. A table with the remains of breakfast and an unexpectedly bright bowl of zinnias stood in the very middle of the room. A vast Cornish dresser took up most of one wall, the pantry through a door beyond, and against the other wall the smaller, scraped wood top of the cooking table shone in the light from the east. The curtains at the windows, the pattern on the tablecloth, and the walls themselves were all a summer blue, as if somehow to bring the color of the sea into the house.

“Sir!” he said in alarm.

“It’s all right, Dawlish. I’ve just come to tell you that you can call off the search on the moors. This morning.”

The man’s face brightened. “Then you’ve given it up, sir? All this nonsense about the Trevelyan family? You’re going back to London?”

“There are some loose ends to tie up. Some statements I’ll need, to cover the questions I seem to have raised. You won’t mind helping with those?”

“No, sir, not in the least,” Dawlish said expansively, willing to do cartwheels if it got rid of the inconvenient man from London and put Inspector Harvey into a pleasanter mood. “Whatever you wish, I’ll be happy to help.”

Rutledge smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes, and for an instant Dawlish was filled with a new uncertainty. But he brushed it aside as Rutledge said, “I’ll be back in two hours with a list of names. I don’t want you to tell anyone else who is on that list. Do you understand me? You’ll send for these people one at a time, exactly as you’re told to do, and you’ll have them write their statements for me exactly in the order I’ll give you, and in the circumstances I describe. It may seem strange to you, but I think in the end you’ll see what I’m driving at. There will be a specific list of questions for each interview. And I want you to ask them exactly as written. Change them in any way, and I’ll have it all to do over again. It will only take longer. Do you understand me?”

Dawlish didn’t, and Rutledge knew he didn’t. But Dawlish nodded, and Rutledge turned to go.

“Two hours. Be here when I come. And don’t forget the men on the moors.”

“Not bloody likely!” Dawlish answered to himself as Rutledge turned and walked out of the sunny, blue kitchen.

Working fast and steadily, Rutledge made his lists, his mind tied up with the complexity of details, setting them out with precision. He had always been good at organizing his thoughts, at creating a picture of events from start to finish. And this time the facts were there. No gaps, no guesses. No room for doubt. No room for Hamish to creep in and haunt him. But Hamish was there, still debating the wisdom of what lay ahead, a stir in the silence.

Trask came up with a telegram for Rutledge, and he opened it reluctantly, knowing it came from London, knowing it was from Bowles.

It read, “If you aren’t doing your job, you’re needed here. If there’s something happening, I want to know about it.”

“No answer,” Rutledge told Trask, and went back to what he was writing.

Explaining to Bowles would be the same as emptying the Sahara with a teacup. There was not enough time for it. Not today. Tomorrow might be different.

Finally he sat back and looked at the sheets of paper on his desk.

How weak was the evidence?

Damned weak at the moment.

Without statements, without the voices of people and their written words, evidence was always thin.

And yet, it was there. It was there. Waiting to be culled.

He felt satisfied.

Rachel had driven straight to the Hall and left the car there before walking back into the village. She came into the inn as Rutledge ran lightly down the stairs, and he knew the instant he saw her face that he’d got what he wanted.

“You’ll have to get it out of the car yourself. Susannah says if you damage the frame at all, she’ll have you up before the courts. It took two grooms to load it safely.”

“Thank you!” he said, smiling, and she felt a deep sense of foreboding as she watched it light his eyes. He seemed to have lost five years over night, a man who had changed so much that she was afraid.

And then the smile was gone, and with it the strangeness. He was himself again, the thin face, the lines. The bone-tiredness. But she thought that that might have been a sleepless night, not the weariness he’d seemed to bring from London with him.

Rachel opened her mouth to say something, then decided against it. “Come on, then,” she said instead. “It shouldn’t be sitting out there in the sun.”

They walked in silence to the house, and Rutledge was grateful for it, for the lack of questions in spite of the doubts that he knew were seething just below the surface in the woman at his side.

She was spirited. She’d have made someone a very good wife. But not for Peter, who had valued his peace. In the long run, Rachel would have needed more than a book-filled house in the country and quiet evenings by the fire discussing Roman ruins. And not for Nicholas. Because the Nicholas she’d seen and loved was a figment, a falsehood built on lies that he couldn’t do anything about. The man who cared for Rachel, the man who’d done his best to send her away, was there inside, but for reasons Rachel herself would never willingly grasp.

Rachel’s tragedy, he thought, as they came out of the woods and turned up the drive towards the house, was that love had seemed so real and so possible because she had wanted it too much.

Just as he had wanted to believe Jean loved him as deeply as he believed he’d loved her. Jean, who hadn’t had very much courage, who turned from him because she couldn’t accept any other dream but the shiny, perfect one that had been shattered in 1914. Four years of war hadn’t changed her. And it had changed him-their lives-beyond recognition. Had he wanted her so much because he’d thought she could restore what was gone? Or had it really been love? He didn’t know any more.

“Which may be an answer of sorts,” Hamish reminded him.

In the back of the car, now sitting below the steps at the front door of the Hall, was a large object wrapped in heavy brown paper.

It took him fifteen minutes, with Rachel offering unsolicited advice, to gently dislodge it from its cocoon of surrounding blankets and cushions, then lift it out onto the drive. Between them they got the package up the steps and then, unlocking the door, into the hall and across it to the drawing room.