Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

“I’m told my constable is here. That you ordered him to call off the search on the moors this morning. And that you’ve got him taking statements from witnesses in the Trevelyan Hall drawing room, rather than his office.”

“Yes, I left a message for you, explaining. I’m returning to London-”

“So you said! And what use, pray, are these statements you’ve gone to such lengths to obtain?”

“To clear the record. It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

Not mollified at all, Harvey retorted, “Indeed. But I shouldn’t have thought that interviewing the good citizens of Borcombe would serve any better purpose now than it did at the time of the suicides.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Rutledge agreed, watching gulls wheeling over the shoreline. He chose his words with great care. He needed Harvey’s support, but not his suspicions. “They probably can’t shed any further light on the deaths of Miss Marlowe and Nicholas Cheney. What I’m hoping they might do is give me sufficient understanding of Miss Marlowe’s state of mind over the last few years. Family affairs were worrying her-at least I have reason to believe that may be true. It could explain why, in spite of her literary success, she felt she couldn’t face living. Would you mind very much giving Dawlish an account of your discussion with her, about what makes a murderer?”

“I’d feel a fool! That was a private conversation between you and me, what I told you!”

‘‘So it was. But if Miss Marlowe’s mind was already dwelling on such matters when you came here as a police officer, such evidence might provide additional weight. I feel she carried… a sense of guilt, for want of a better word, about the misfortunes in her family. I found some confirmation of that in her poetry as well. Gifted imaginations are often sensitive and very impressionable. They sometimes see what we overlook.”

Harvey looked searchingly at him.

“Are you having me on?” he demanded.

Rutledge’s eyes came back from the sea to Harvey’s face. Something in them made the other man wary. “I’ve never been more serious. Olivia Marlowe believed that there was a murderer loose in her family. She believed she knew the identity of the killer, and that she had proof of a sort. Of a sort, mind you. Not the kind of proof you and I might use to ask for an arrest warrant, perhaps, or that a good barrister couldn’t make laughable in a courtroom. But she believed it. And she tried to document it as carefully as she could.”

“That’s-that’s preposterous!” Harvey blustered, his neck brick red and the color rising fast. “I’ve never heard a more ridiculous fiction in all my years as a policeman! This is my country, I’d have known if there was murder done here. My predecessor would have known!”

“Precisely why,” Rutledge responded, “I need these statements. I see no point in taking unsubstantiated rumors back to London. In my opinion we should set Olivia Marlowe’s fears to rest once and for all. She was famous, and there will be biographers. They shouldn’t be left to draw conclusions that might reflect badly on the police.” He shrugged. “What may come of it is the truth. I can’t think of anything fairer than that.”

“That damned woman was a bother when she was alive, and worse now that she’s dead,” Harvey fumed, thinking over what Rutledge had said. And from the sound of it, Olivia Marlowe wasn’t going to stay quietly dead. He hadn’t reckoned on biographers trampling about his turf and prying into village business. Asking questions, raising doubts, stirring up people. He’d thought that was finished when the reporters had come to find out about O. A. Manning. The specter of an endless parade of troublemakers still to arrive was decidedly unsettling at best.

Rutledge watched the slow, careful progress of Harvey’s mind as he considered the situation facing him. And then came to his decision.

Harvey had been told the truth. Not all of it, but the cold, hard kernel of truth that was the center of what Rutledge was doing. The rest would come when the facts were down on paper and irrefutable. When the warrant was required.

“Yes, well, I can understand what you’re saying, that there’ll be no peace for any of us. If the Home Office wanted this case reopened, we’ve already had the first round. Some newspaperman may get wind of it next, God forgive us, and we’ll be on the front pages! And the academics will be the worst of the lot, reading whatever they damned well please into her verse, and turning Borcombe upside down to show they’re right.” He sighed. “Oh, very well. Do what you have to do. Just make what haste you can.”

Harvey turned and walked off down the drive. Rutledge felt the tension in his shoulders begin to loosen and absently rubbed the back of his neck.

There was something more he wanted to do in the house, but Rachel was still there, and it was more important to avoid her now. The other matter could wait.

The day wore on, a long straggle of people coming to the house, the rector among them, giving their statements to Daw-lish and then leaving again, strangely subdued. For a time Rutledge watched them from the headland, and he saw too that Harvey made his appearance in due course, then left shaking his head. Rutledge wondered whether Dawlish had told him more than he should have about the questions asked-and answers received. Reporting to his superior, that’s how he’d have viewed it. Rutledge hoped he had not. Harvey’s stubborn, straight mind might just make the right leap. Good policemen, clever or not, had a sense about some things. It didn’t take imagination to learn from experience. The problem was, where would Harvey turn if he learned the truth? How would he use it? Hasty decisions had a way of wrecking a clean, tight investigation. And Harvey wanted to be seen as running his own territory, not following the lead of strangers from London.

By dinnertime Rutledge had collected the statements from the weary constable eager to get home to his wife. Then he went up the stairs two at a time, and carefully collected the small gold articles from Olivia’s closet. For a moment he held them in the palm of his hand, where they shone with soft beauty, as if innocent of blood and death.

As they were, in themselves, he thought sadly.

Downstairs he took one last long look at Rosamund’s portrait, silently apologizing for what he’d caused to be done in her drawing room that day. She stared back at him in silence, a faraway look in her eyes.

He walked back towards the village alone, his mind busy.

Sadie hadn’t come, Dawlish reported, though Dr. Penrith, walking slowly on his daughter’s arm, had arrived at the Hall at the time set for him. And Wilkins, and Mary Otley. Later someone would have to interview Susannah and her husband, and Tom Chambers, the solicitor. Rutledge himself had questioned Dawlish at the end of the day, writing down his answers without looking up at the man’s accusing eyes.

The constable was an intelligent man, he could think through what he had spent the long day doing. But how far had he gotten in putting the pieces of the puzzle together? Far enough to wonder, Rutledge thought, but not quite far enough to know the whole…

Passing through the woods, Rutledge considered the problem of Sadie. Did she know what a sworn statement was?

He would have to go to her, then, and hope her mind was clear.

As he passed the Otley cottage he could see someone standing in the shadow by the door. Rachel, watching him. He could feel her eyes, the intensity of emotions, the uncertainty. But she stayed where she was, and he wondered what was going through her mind. What she would do now. Or if she would wait. Women often thought along different lines. Where a man saw duty, women were more concerned with emotions, feelings. He’d learned early on that a policeman ignored such differences at his peril.