Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

She pressed her fingers to her eyes, as if they still hurt from crying. Or to hide them from him. “I’ve asked myself that a hundred-a thousand-times since then. They were very close, Olivia and Nicholas. I’d have said, if anyone had ever thought to ask me, that she would have jumped into the sea in the night, rather that let him die with her. It doesn’t mean that perhaps in the first shock he might not have wished to follow, but Nicholas had a cool head, a clear mind, he wasn’t the dramatic, overly emotional sort of man who could leap into the sea himself the next morning. When she was already dead.” Dropping her hands, she said painfully, “If you understand what I’m saying?”

He did, though Hamish was grumbling that it made no sense. “Yet they died together.”

“Yes, and that’s what put me off in the very beginning. I didn’t say much to the others; they wouldn’t have wanted to hear me worrying over what couldn’t be changed. Or making it worse by starting a fuss over it. But the more I thought about the circumstances, the more I was convinced that something was very wrong, very-unusual.”

“Do you think one of your cousins-including Stephen- could be capable of murdering Olivia and Nicholas? For whatever reasons?”

She stared at him, stunned. “Oh, God, no! Susannah and Stephen couldn’t have killed either of them. And Daniel, what on earth for?”

Rutledge smiled. “Where there’s murder, there’s usually a murderer.”

“But not one of us!” she cried, alarmed.

How often had he heard the same cry when he’d begun an investigation into suspicious death. Murder, possibly. But not one of us. A stranger. A madman. An envious neighbor or colleague. The woman down the road. But not one of us. Then the finger-pointing began, as suspicion and fear and uncertainty and old memories came to the surface.

“Who, then?” he asked gently.

“That’s why I called Henry and begged him to ask the Yard to come down here and look into the deaths. Someone who could be objective, someone with the experience to judge what had really happened. Not a village policeman who preferred the safest answer to embarrassing the family any more than it already was. I mean, suicide is unacceptable enough- murder would be, well, a family calamity.” She looked at him, seeing him for the first time. The thin face. The haunted eyes. Intelligence, too, but something more. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

“There were no photographs upstairs. Do you have any of the family that I could borrow for a time?” He was mainly interested in Olivia Marlowe, the woman behind the poems. But it helped, often, to see the faces of the dead if you were late at the murder scene.

“We’d taken them all. The house will be put up for sale soon, and we didn’t want to leave-I’ve just come to fetch the ships,” she said, flustered. “I-I haven’t had the courage yet to go in there. Where they-where it happened. There are photographs in my things, I’ll find them. Where are you staying?”

“The Three Bells,” he said, curious about her reaction. “What can you tell me about Stephen FitzHugh’s death?”

She shivered, not looking over his shoulder at the stairs, though her head had turned that way. “It was awful. He was lying at the foot of the steps, his eyes wide, a little blood- I couldn’t tell if it was from his ear or his mouth-smeared across his cheek. Cormac said he died as we watched, but I saw nothing change, didn’t hear a sigh or-or anything. And I was kneeling there, beside him, my hand on his chest, calling his name. It was-I’ve seen men die before. I was in London when the Zeppelins came over, I was there when they pulled people out of one of the buildings. But this was Stephen.” She collected herself with an effort and turned towards the open door. “I’d better leave now,” she said ruefully. “Men don’t like it when women start to cry, and I’ve found it hard sometimes…”

He let her go, watching her slim figure hurry down the drive and turn towards the sea.

So that was Lady Ashford, born Rachel Marlowe, and cousin to the people who lived here. Peter’s wife. Widow. He remembered Peter, tall and fast at games, level-headed and very good at whatever he did. He’d had a gift for languages, he could pick them up with apparently no effort, and speak them like a native. All that wasted in an obscure action on the flanks of a mountain whose one claim to fame was that Queen Victoria had had two mountains in East Africa, and had given Kilimanjaro to the Kaiser, next door in Tanganyika, who’d had none. Bloody silly thing to do in the first place. And Englishmen had died trying to retake it from the Germans under that master strategist, Von Lettow-Vorbeck, who knew how to pin down men who would otherwise have been fighting in France.

Rutledge turned and went back up the stairs to the sitting room, standing there with his eyes roving the furnishings, the books, the wooden ships that Nicholas Cheney carved. He had left more of himself here than the poet, after all…

Two people who died together for no apparent reason. No expression of regret, no apologies to the living. No explanation of the deed, no excuses, no last confessions, no lines of bitterness meant to hurt the survivors. Just… silence.

Hamish, uneasy and sensitive to the unsettled atmosphere of Rutledge’s mind, called to him to leave, to wash his hands of this case and go back to London.

Rutledge gave up trying to hear the stillness, and walked out into the gallery again on his way to Olivia’s bedroom.

A voice down in the hall said harshly, “What the hell- who the hell are you?”

Rutledge looked down, not seeing anyone at first, then finding the tall man who stood just in the shadows of a doorway.

“Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard,’’ he said. “I’ve a key from Constable Dawlish, and I’m here on official business. Who are you?”

“Official-what’s happened?” the other man demanded sharply.

“The inquiry into the deaths of Miss Marlowe, Mr. Cheney, and Mr. FitzHugh is being reconsidered by the Yard,” Rutledge said, and started down the stairs.

The man in the doorway was handsome in a way that few men are, reminding Rutledge of Greek statues, that same mix of perfect body and face and mind that the Golden Age admired most. And yet there was something about him that was pure Irish. Was this Daniel Hargrove, the husband of Susannah FitzHugh?

Before he could test that, the man said, “I’m Cormac FitzHugh. A member of the family. No one has told me of any renewed inquiry! Neither the local police nor the family’s solicitors. What are you doing here?”

“Surveying the scenes of death,” Rutledge responded, coming to the last step and staying where he was. He’d dealt with officers of this man’s ilk, accustomed to giving orders and expecting instant, unquestioning obedience to them. He’d never liked such men.

Hamish growled, “Bloody, arrogant bastards, the lot!”

“I’m putting a stop to this right now! You’ll hand over your keys, if you please, and leave the grounds at once. There will be no reopening of any affairs to do with my family.”

“I’m afraid, Mr. FitzHugh, that you have no say in this business. It’s a police matter, at the request of the Home Office. You have no option but to cooperate.” He paused. “Unless, of course, you have something to hide in any of these three deaths?”

FitzHugh looked as if Rutledge had struck him. “I wield considerable power in the City-”

“That’s as may be,” Rutledge answered him. “It doesn’t count here, I’m afraid.”

“Yes, I’ve something to hide,” FitzHugh said shortly, changing directions so quickly that Rutledge was nearly caught off guard. “My stepbrother and my stepsister killed themselves. It isn’t something I’m happy about, but it was a choice they both made. The reasons behind their deaths were extremely personal, and since there’s no question that suicide was the cause of death, laudanum to be precise, self-administered, I see no reason on earth why their unhappiness must be dragged through the newspapers. It serves no purpose, and it will hurt my cousin, my half sister, her husband, and me. For the delectation of a public who couldn’t care less about my family but who thrive on titillation. My God, look at what they’re already doing with these knifings, raising the spectre of the Ripper as if it was something to be proud of, not buried and forgotten!”