Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

Another fifteen to find a small ladder and carry it there too. But in the end, stepping back to see the results, he was satisfied.

Rosamund Trevelyan smiled benignly down from her proper place above the hearth, her face turned slightly, her cheek smooth and creamy against the background of light, her eyes full of life and love and hope.

An extraordinary woman, mother of another extraordinary woman. As full of goodness and joy and beauty as the Gabriel hound had been full of darkness and destruction.

Rutledge was just returning from the kitchen, where he’d left the ladder, when the bell rang loudly in the emptiness of the house and brought Rachel, frowning, out of the drawing room.

“Who is that?” she demanded.

“Dawlish,” he said, and opened the door to the constable, who had Mrs. Trepol at his heels. The elderly housekeeper was staring over his shoulder, her eyes moving nervously from Rachel to the London policeman.

Before Rachel could say anything more, Rutledge closed the fingers of his right hand around her arm to silence her, and nodded to Dawlish. “The drawing room. You’ll see the chairs and a table. Use them where they are.”

Uneasy and uncertain, Dawlish glanced at Rachel, but Rut-ledge cut short any query. “See to it, man!” And he led Rachel towards the stairs, his eyes commanding her to wait. Not here. Not now. Her mouth was tight with suspicion and anger, and she moved ahead of him with the stride of a woman biding her time with a vengeance. Behind them, Mrs. Trepol followed Dawlish into the hall, their steps sounding loud and uncertain as they moved towards the drawing room.

Once in the back sitting room overlooking the sea, Rachel rounded on him in a fury. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? I won’t have it! This is wrong, this is trickery! Tell me what’s going on, or by God, I’ll find the nearest telephone and call London!”

“Look,” he said earnestly, “I’m trying to get at the truth. Do you want me to walk away and leave this unfinished? I can’t. What I think has been done here-if I’m right, mind you-has to be settled. Now. It can’t be put off.”

“What you think has been done!” she repeated. “But you haven’t told anyone what you think, have you? Not me, not the rector, not Inspector Harvey-”

“I have told you. There have been a series of suspicious deaths starting with Anne-”

“Yes, yes! Olivia killed them, you say. Or Nicholas. Dead people who can’t answer, can’t defend themselves! Well, let me tell you what I think! While I was at the Beatons, I made a telephone call. To a friend of Peter’s who knew you as well. He tells me that after the Armistice you spent months in a private clinic-a head injury, he said. Quite severe, he said, because you weren’t allowed any visitors. Nurses told him that for a time you didn’t even know who you were. Everyone was surprised when you returned to the Yard-they didn’t think you were well enough, that you’d recovered sufficiently to take on stressful work. He’s right, you aren’t capable of carrying out your duties! That’s why you aren’t in London, looking for that man-that’s why you were sent out to Cornwall, to get you safely out of the way, and why you’re searching out old, imaginary murders. You can’t do any better!”

Shocked by her vehemence, he turned away towards the windows, looking out at the sea, his back to her, his face hidden from her angry eyes.

“You sent for Scotland Yard,” he reminded her for a last time. “If I’m mad, if I’m imagining the need for this investigation, then some of the blame must be yours.” It was on the tip of his tongue to say more, and he caught himself in time, and added only, “I’m sorry, Rachel. More than you know.”

His refusal to defend himself, the odd tone of his voice, brought her up short.

They were a woman’s weapon, words. She’d deliberately wielded them to wound, to hurt him, to stop him. She’d telephoned Sandy MacArdle because he was a gossip, and she’d known he was a gossip, and she wanted the worst possible interpretation put on anything Ian Rutledge had done, to use that knowledge herself as savagely as she could.

And suddenly, she felt sick, ashamed. “Oh, Nicholas,” she cried to herself with weary grief, “why did I have to love you so much!”

Rutledge still had his back to her, the set of his shoulders betraying his own pain, waiting for her to go on.

She found she couldn’t.

“Why did you want the portrait?” she asked quietly, after a time.

He was watching the sea, but his eyes were blind to its beauty. Only the pain within him seemed real. And to his credit, he told her the truth.

“Because I can’t close this investigation without taking statements from half the people in Borcombe. But you see, if I do that in the normal fashion, by the end of the day I’ll have taken down whatever embroideries they’ve devised between them to shield themselves and Rosamund’s family from scandal, and then we’ll never get at the truth. Because they all know bits of that truth, Rachel, whether they realize it or not. And I need to bring it out cleanly, bare and unvarnished. It occurred to me that sitting in that formal drawing room where each of them will feel desperately ill at ease, and watched by the one woman they all revered both in life and in death, I won’t get lies. I’ll have facts. And before anyone in Borcombe has quite understood where what they’re telling Constable Dawlish might be leading, the whole picture of murder and deception will be down in black and white. They can’t turn around then and deny it. They can’t pretend that they were misled or misinterpreted the questions. They’ll have to accept it themselves. And come to terms with it, however they can. But that’s the grievous cost of murder. We all pay it, along with the victims.”

“What a very cruel thing to do.” Her voice was harsh with disbelief, her brief episode of sympathy washed away. He deserved to be savaged!

He turned to face her again, his eyes sad. “It probably is cruel. I’d thought long and hard about that myself. I didn’t know what else to do. I could have told Harvey and these people what it is I’m after, but I don’t think they’d have believed me any more than you have. And the wall they’ve all drawn around the Trevelyan family would only go higher.”

“All this for a dead woman! For Olivia!”

“No, not for Olivia. For two small children who never lived to grow up. For James Cheney who died in despair, and Brian FitzHugh who trusted the wrong person, to his cost, and for Rosamund, who was driven to taking her own life to make it all stop. For Olivia, who gave up a quite incredible gift because something far more precious was threatened. And for Nicholas, who had spent a lifetime in her service, because he believed he failed her. For all I know, Stephen’s death was a part of it all. He was searching for something just before his fall, and I think I now may know what it was. If he hadn’t been late, if he hadn’t been in such a damned hurry, he might not have gone headfirst down those stairs. He was, in a sense, a victim too.”

“How very morally upright of you, to set the record straight. And will we have a wax effigy of Olivia in the dock, when you present your evidence to the jury?”

“No,” he said tiredly. “We’ll have a living person.”

She stared at him, her mouth moving soundlessly, as if the words were there, but her voice had failed her.

There was a pounding at the front door, the sound traveling up the stairs like thunder, and Rutledge brushed past Rachel without a word, going out of the door and closing it behind him before crossing the hall to find Inspector Harvey waiting impatiently outside. Rather than ushering him into the house, Rutledge went out to stand in the bright sunlight beside him.